Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

Alberta will let you go in and take the oil out. They’re interested in profits.”

The late northern dusk had finally descended. The living room was getting dark.

“Do you think you’re raping the planet?” I asked.

Don exhaled. “In terms of pollution, no, we’re not,” he said. “There’s people downstream who say they’re getting cancer from the oil sands operations, but we’re not even putting anything in the water.” But although he didn’t buy claims of carcinogens in the Athabasca River, Don was no climate change skeptic. A huge amount of fuel was being burned to mine oil sands, and to extract and upgrade the bitumen—which meant a huge amount of carbon emissions. And those carbon emissions worried him.

“I once saw a map of CO₂ emissions in North America,” he said. “There was a big fuzz up around Fort McMurray. The CO₂ from Fort McMurray is probably the same as from all of Los Angeles.”

It seemed impossible. Could Fort McMurray really have carbon emissions similar to those of a city literally a hundred times its size?

Don had a way of saying things I might expect from an environmental activist—yet he was a man who spent his days helping the pit get wider. He embodied, far more than I did, Canada’s contradictory feelings toward the oil sands and the consequences of their extraction.

But we all share in the paradox. Anyone does who both takes part in civilization and cares about the environment. Civilization sustains and protects us as individuals and communities, but it is more than a mere system for shelter and sustenance and order. It is what we are. The unit of the human organism is not the individual but the society. For better or worse, isolated individuals cannot sustain or further the human race. Only in society does it survive.

Today that society is an industrial one, resource-hungry and planet-spanning, growing so inefficiently large, we believe, that it is disrupting its own host. It is not strange, then, that some individuals of that society should question its integrity. They wonder whether the very thing that allows them to exist—the thing that they are—is not somehow rotten at its core.

This is the love-hate relationship in which we are all now engaged, and it is the basis for the entire spectrum of our individual decisions as they relate to the environment. Whether we’re talking about recycling, or voting, or consumer choices, or political agitation, or radical efforts to live off the grid, these are all attempts to square the circle, to mitigate—or, more often, to atone for—our individual role in the disquietingly unsustainable system that keeps us alive. It’s not just about living sustainably. It’s about being able to live with ourselves.

As for Los Angeles, Don had his numbers wrong. Fort McMurray does not emit the same amount of carbon as LA. It emits twice as much.

With the bus tour such a bust, I turned to finding a scenic overlook. I headed for Crane Lake, a Suncor reclamation site that seemed like a good starting point for some creative sneaking.

The word reclamation gets tossed around a lot in these parts, and not only in Don’s living room. It is an important concept for anyone who doesn’t want to feel too bad about strip-mining. Reclamation requirements use the vague guideline of “equivalent land capability,” which means, according to the Alberta government, that reclaimed land has to be “able to support a range of activities similar to its previous use.”

And that’s the key here—its previous use. What, previously, was the use of an undisturbed boreal forest? What if its main use was to remain undisturbed?

I drove. I was in my little rental car, underneath a thick sunshine that was pushing back the afternoon’s storm clouds. The highway was slick with rain and heavy with traffic. It was the beginning of the evening shift change. Work in the mines is divided into two shifts per day, and every twelve hours fresh battalions of truck drivers, shovel operators, plant workers, and engineers come hurtling up Highway 63. The road is long and straight, and the waves of pickup trucks and red and white buses had worked up to an insistent, humming speed. It was at that moment—as I approached the turnoff for Crane Lake, followed by a speeding phalanx of cars and buses—that I saw the ducks.

They came waddling onto the highway from the right shoulder, from the direction of Crane Lake. A mother and six ducklings.

A black sports car had just zipped past me and slotted back into the right lane. I was certain it was going to tear right through them, leaving them in twisted pieces; and that I, unable to stop, would mow through the survivors; and that if by a miracle there were still survivors after that, they would surely be obliterated by the wall of chartered coaches breathing down my neck. After so much talk of ducks and duck deterrents, of duck death and duck lawsuits, I was now about to help write the next chapter of Syncrude’s environmental record, and that chapter was going to be written in blood, the blood of ducks, here on Highway 63, during the shift change.

It was over in seconds. The driver of the sports car braked and veered left, clearing the ducks by a few feet. Spooked, they turned and waddled back the other way, directly into my path. I found my moral sense neatly congruent, if only for a moment, with the needs of Syncrude PR. I swerved onto the shoulder, also missing the ducks, but spooking them again as I blew by and sending them back into the middle of the highway in disarray.

In the rearview mirror, I saw ducklings turning in every direction as their doom approached at seventy-five miles an hour in the form of a looming passenger bus—possibly driven by a man named Mohammed—riding abreast with a big white pickup truck and followed by more traffic behind. There was no leeway, no room for them to swerve. With horror, I imagined the bus careening into the ditch, rolling onto its side.

And then, somehow—it didn’t happen.

The bus leaned forward, lumbering to its knee as it slowed. The pickup truck made a languid weave halfway out of its lane. And the rest of the oncoming column seized up and stopped. As the scene dwindled in my mirror, I saw the mechanized army of the Syncrude evening shift pause, like Godzilla offering Bambi a bouquet of daisies. And there they waited, patiently, as the ducks reformed their little rank and waddled off the highway back into the woods.

Crane Lake is a nice spot, enclosed by a belt of young forest, with reeds clustering along its swampy shores and a nature trail running a mile circuit around the lake, through tall grass and wildflowers. The only footnote to the idyll is that the entire place stinks of oil sand, the same heady aroma that you would smell at a restaurant if the waiter set a bowl of bubbling tar on your table. The trick to experiencing Crane Lake, then, is to appreciate this smell as part of the environment, to remember that it’s coming off of oil sand that God himself put in the ground— even if it’s humankind that decided to rip it open and expose it to the air. As for the constant, popping reports of nearby bird-deterrent cannons, if they weren’t enough to bother the birds that had come to take the waters at Crane Lake, then why should they bother me?

Forget that Crane Lake is called Crane Lake, though. It should be called Duck Lake—or maybe something punchier, like Suncor Ducktasia Lake. It is nothing less than Suncor’s duck showcase. No nature area has ever been so completely tricked out with signs calling attention to what a lovely little nature area it is. There are duck blinds, and a duck-identification chart from an organization called Ducks Unlimited, and a good number of actual ducks present on the lake, possibly including several I had recently failed to murder.

So ducktastic was it that I began to wonder whether Suncor was trying to stick it to poor old Syncrude, with all its duck problems, just up the road. Surely some Suncor PR rep had hoped for a newspaper headline proclaiming, “Suncor, Neighbor to Duck-Destroyer Syncrude, Offers Clean Water, Reeds, at Waterfowl Haven.”

I set out on my hike, keeping the lake on my right, ambling through a spray of purple wildflowers. There were dragonflies, again, and mosquitoes, too—snarling, clannish mosquitoes of the Albertan variety, with thick forearms and tribal tattoos. But I was ready. Don had lent me a bug jacket—a nylon shirt with a small tent for your head and face—and I had armed myself with enough spray-on DEET to poison a whole village. That is to say, I was happy, and ready to bypass all this man-made nature and find my scenic mine-overlook.

Making my way over a small wooden footbridge that spanned a swampy inlet, I was steered southward along the east shore of the lake by a thick forest of young trees on the left. A wooden bench, with grass growing up between the boards of its seat, faced the water. Silence reigned, except for the gentle rustle of the breeze and the constant sound of cannons. I had the place to myself.

But the farther I went down the path, the more the Crane Lake experience started to chafe. All this had been put here on purpose—sculpted, as Don had said. It was too neat. Too self-contained.