“My eyes are burning and my head’s spinning and I’m nauseated,” said Timothy Innes, councillor of the Gitxaala Nation on Porcher Island south of Prince Rupert, after three days of touring the oilsands north of Fort McMurray. The tour was organized by Nikki Skuce of ForestEthics, whose job as senior energy campaigner is to stop the Enbridge pipeline project.

BC First Nations Chiefs shocked by oil sands.

The Gitxaala Nation is one of several First Nations whose traditional territory would be affected by Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. The $5.5-billion, 1,172-kilometre pipeline would stretch from Bruderheim outside Edmonton to Kitimat on B.C.’s northwest coast, from where tankers would take the product to Asian markets.

Innes has been opposed to the project from the beginning, but wanted to see where the oil carried in the pipeline would come from, so he joined Marilyn Slett, chief of the Heiltsuk First Nation in Bella Bella, and John Ridsdale, Chief Na’Moks of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation near Burns Lake, to explore the oilsands developments.

The visitors were surprised by the size of the operations.

“You can read as much as you want, listen to as much as you want, but until you see it, you won’t believe it,” said Ridsdale, whose title means head chief of the First Nation.

“You can smell it, you can taste it when you’re out there,” Slett added. “I was actually quite shocked by it.”

Enbridge has said they are engaging indigenous communities in designing the proposed pipeline, and have signed protocol agreements with some First Nations, including the Paul First Nation west of Edmonton.

But opposition from other indigenous groups has been staunch, and not everyone believes the pipeline will bring prosperity to the First Nations along its route.

“There’s lots of money coming out of there, but the people there, they’re common people. They’ve got nothing. They’ve been left out,” Innes said. “And money is not going to bring back what’s going to be lost.”

Seeing the effects oil operations have had on the traditional lands of the Fort McKay First Nation north of Fort McMurray was devastating for Slett.

“They don’t have their cultural way of life anymore,” she said. “To hear from an elder in Fort McKay that they can’t eat the fish there, they can’t hunt, berries don’t grow – it really hit home for me.”

First Nations people get their power from the land and the sea, Ridsdale said, and changing the landscape for a pipeline would destroy that special bond.

“What you’re doing is allowing them to commit cultural genocide,” Ridsdale said. “Without your culture, you have nothing.”

Ridsdale said Fort McKay elders warned him that allowing Northern Gateway to go ahead would open a Pandora’s box his community would never be able to close because the operations would continue to expand indefinitely and pipeline failures could occur.

L a s t we ek, E nbr id ge acknowledged safety concerns about the Northern Gateway pipeline, and pledged to invest $500 million in additional measures for the controversial project, including thicker pipeline walls at water crossings and more inspections.

“We have often been asked if we could guarantee that we would never have a significant pipeline failure over the years on Northern Gateway. These initiatives will put the project closer than any pipeline system in the world to providing that guarantee,” Enbridge vicepresident Janet Holder said in a statement.

The changes don’t change Slett’s opinion because spills could still happen.

“They don’t mitigate our concerns,” she said. “An oil spill would be catastrophic for our community.”

Last week, B.C. Premier Christy Clark also expressed doubts about the project, telling Postmedia News the pipeline poses a very large risk to her province with few benefits.

“The statements by Enbridge have overstated the benefits for British Columbians,” Slett said.

But the B.C. government has been too quiet for too long when it comes to the pipeline, she said, leaving environmental groups and First Nations to fill the gap.

Innes, Ridsdale and Slett say their voices will only get louder after visiting the oilsands.

“Coming here made us stronger in our resolve,” Ridsdale said. “We’ve always spoken the truth and now we have a little bit of sugar to put on, too.”

“We’re going to fight harder, going to keep saying no, until they understand what no means,” Innes said.

Published Sunday, Jul. 29 2012, 10:11 PM EDT Last updated Monday, Jul. 30 2012, 8:17 AM EDT

The signs of drought were everywhere, from shrivelled rivers and lakes in the American West to brittle brown lawns and parched farm crops in the Canadian Prairies.

Even the hardy, drought-tolerant pinyon pine forests of New Mexico turned grey as they withered and died, starved of water for far too long.

Scientists estimate 2000 - 2004 drought worst in 800 years

Anyone who weathered the stubborn dry spell that enveloped western North America from 2000 to 2004 knows it was harsh, but now a group of researchers has concluded it was the most severe drought in 800 years – bone-dry conditions that the scientists believe could become the “new norm” in this vital agricultural region.

“Projections indicate that drought events of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the 21st century,” the group of 10 scientists from several American universities and the University of British Columbia wrote in a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“Even worse, projections suggest that this drought will become the wet end of a drier hydroclimate period.”

If so, a “megadrought” that severely cuts crop production could be on the horizon, the scientists warn. Many farmers now in the throes of an extreme drought in the U.S. Midwest that is devastating corn and soybean crops and threatening to send food prices soaring might concur, although it’s not yet clear whether this dry spell is part of the broader trend, noted Beverly Law, a professor of global change biology at Oregon State University and a co-author of the study.

For their research, the scientists examined historical drought-severity data based on tree-ring analysis. While there have been many bouts of hot, dry weather in the West, they found the drought that accompanied the start of this century was unlike any since 1146 to 1151.

The 2000-04 drought severely affected soil moisture, river levels, crops, forests and grasslands. Runoff in the upper Colorado River basin was cut in half and crop productivity in 2,383 counties in the western United States declined 5 per cent. The drought also reduced the land’s ability to sequester carbon dioxide, by 51 per cent on average in the western U.S., Canada and Mexico, the scientists found. As trees, plants and crops withered, more carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere.

Although the drought was not as long or as severe in Canada, it still caused widespread economic damage.

An analysis by the Drought Research Initiative, a temporary program that pulled together Canadian university and government scientists, found that agricultural production dropped an estimated $3.6-billion in 2001 and 2002, while net farm income was zero in Alberta and negative in Saskatchewan in 2002. Facing widespread scarcity of feed and water, many livestock producers had to sell off some or all of their herd. And in parts of the Prairies, the soil was so dry it swirled up into a storm of dust, obscuring the sky and even contributing to some traffic crashes.

Long-time Saskatchewan farmer Don Connick counts himself lucky during that drought. He has a small herd of Hereford cattle and grows a variety of crops, including wheat, barley and alfalfa, on 1,600 acres in the Cypress Hills, near the boundary with Alberta.

His hay and barley crop yields were poor those years and farming was a struggle, but he had more water than others. The Cypress Hills sit at a higher elevation and generally get more precipitation and cooler temperatures than the surrounding area.

“We’re in a micro-climate, I guess you can say,” Mr. Connick said.

But he is worried about what lies ahead if droughts become more common and more widespread. He has his eye on the parched conditions ravaging the U.S. Midwest.

“The concern I have is that drought seems to be heading north,” he said. “We’ve had some pretty significantly wet years in these last five or six years but we’re not immune to drought here.”

You don’t have to remind Saskatchewan farmer Paul Heglund of that.

Mr. Heglund farms on 3,600 acres near Consul, southwest of the Cypress Hills. It’s the same land his grandfather homesteaded 100 years ago and the region has always been drought-prone, so much so the blistering dry spell a decade ago doesn’t even stick out in his mind.

Food producers here long ago adapted to farming with scant water, a reality more might soon have to confront. Mr. Heglund only seeds half his land each year to allow moisture to build in the soil.

“It’s kind of second nature,” he said of coping with drought conditions. “We don’t even notice it as something particular.”