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Beyond the Salish Sea: Crude Truth
Once vibrant and untouched, the Salish Sea now hosts a growing convoy of oil tankers transporting some of the dirtiest oil on earth — with no adequate plan for a spill.
For decades, the Salish Sea has been regarded as one of North America’s ecological treasures — a place where orcas breach, salmon spawn, and shorelines stretch out wild and storied. But beneath this beauty lies a growing danger: an expanding artery of fossil fuel transport with few safeguards in place.
Every day, oil tankers navigate through these inland waters, carrying heavy crude from Alberta’s tar sands to Washington State refineries — with no proven plan in place to respond to a catastrophic spill. And unlike other spills, this oil sinks. It’s almost impossible to clean up. And few in the public even know it’s happening.
This documentary is a wake-up call.
Filmed over multiple seasons and guided by Indigenous knowledge keepers, marine scientists, and coastal communities, Beyond the Salish Sea: Crude Truth reveals the hidden risks we’re taking in one of the world’s most beloved ecosystems. At its heart, it asks: How did a place we claim to protect become a global fossil fuel freeway — and why aren’t we talking about it?
Through cinematic exploration and hard-hitting inquiry, this film is about connection, contradiction, and confronting uncomfortable truths. It’s about the cost of inaction. And it’s about choosing a different future — while we still can.
But there is hope
Join the movement
After working in video production for over two decades, I decided to shift my focus to creating documentary films that have a more profound impact than my previous work. This is my second feature-length documentary, following the completion of Hopped Up, which took five years to produce and is now available on various streaming services. My goal is to complete this new project in a significantly shorter timeframe. Beyond the Salish Sea is about the challenges and efforts to preserve this precious gem in the Pacific Northwest, and I hope that our work will make a difference in protecting other waterways worldwide.
Daniel A. Cardenas
Producer | Director
