Neil vs. the Tar Sands

The great Neil Young kicking off a highly unusual four-concert benefit tour this week in his native Canada, with proceeds going to the aboriginal Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation's legal fight against the expansion of the Athabasca oilsands.   Read the whole piece and the controversy, especially in Alberta, whose economy now centers on potential billions from the project.  And, given my decades of writing on the atomic bomb, see the role that Hiroshima plays in this.  Huh?  Well, Neil unfortunately compared the likely effect on own town to what happened in that Japanese city in 1945.  He said there was the "smell of death" in the air.  Town folk not to pleased with that.