Fort McMurray dwindled behind us. The sun was low, behind a curtain of haze, the earth dusky. Sliding toward us were the sulfur pyramids of Syncrude, their full dimensions even more impressive from the air, a footprint five city blocks to a side.
“I have one flying student who’s a Suncor engineer,” came Terris’s voice over the headset. “He was complaining about how people give the oil sand companies a hard time about polluting the Clearwater River. He said, ‘The Clearwater River is one of the most
We all have our ways of feeling like part of the natural order, I guess.
I could now see a low mountain of dry tailings that Don had told me to look out for, a huge heap of sandy mine waste that, like everything else around here, was one of the largest man-made objects in the world. It was so large that it was hard to tell where the tailings ended and the non-tailings landscape began. Beside it was a graphite-colored tailings pond, a mile and a half long, with a single boat floating motionless on its surface.
“People have really different reactions to seeing the mines,” Terris said. “One group I had said it was the most horrible thing they had ever seen. And then you’ll get engineers up here, and they just say it looks like a mine.”
As we considered circling back for another look, the radio crackled to life.
It was Syncrude security. The company had its own aircraft control. Terris grimaced. “I was hoping nobody would be home.” But it didn’t matter. Already we could see Suncor.
It loomed in the distance. Rather, it did the thing that is like looming but is actually its opposite. It did the thing the Grand Canyon does when you first catch sight of it from the window of a passenger jet. It’s not like a mountain, or a mountain range. Even the Rockies only modulate the landscape—they don’t interrupt it.
Now we saw that interruption, where the flat of the world fell away from the horizon. Where a crater had been punched through the face of the earth.
Terris swung us toward it. He circled, he rolled to one side, and we looked straight down onto the mine, onto its dozens of tiny yellow dump trucks. They drove along a curving network of dirt roads, through a mosaic of craters. Here they sped back to the hoppers, fully loaded and surprisingly fast, kicking up trails of dirt and dust. There, in the intimate cataclysm of a smaller pit, they waited in a group of two or three for their turn to approach a shovel, workers to their queen. And then away again, urgently, to deliver the next load.
The window pressed against my forehead. To the east and the south, I saw forest. But to the north, there was only the mine.
I wasn’t horrified. But I had a funny feeling. Some kind of problem with scale. The trucks and the shovels looked so tiny—such toys and yet so huge. I had spent all week thinking about bigness, about weight, running through the synonyms for
“They look like ants!” Terris was shouting over the headset.
But they did not look like ants. They were too big to be ants. And somehow their very failure to be mere specks made them grow ever larger, and part of this growing was how much they seemed to shrink.
Vertigo rushed into the eye that tried to see it. And with the horizon circling around us, I knew that the mine itself, the panorama-swallowing mine, was barely a pinprick on the spinning body of the globe, and the globe itself a mote in the void, and the void itself a mote in another void, and I sat with my head pressed against the window— and felt, just a little, like puking.
Three
REFINERYVILLE
Tell folks that you’re making a grand tour of polluted places, and they tend to get excited. A surprising number of people say they want to come along, and, although this turns out to be mostly talk, it’s gratifying to know the market is there.
Most of all, people want to know about the list. How am I choosing my destinations? Based on what? And they have suggestions. Everyone has a favorite: a city that struck them as horrifically smoggy, a developing-world landfill they read about. Some make an easy leap from Chernobyl to Bhopal, taking up the theme of industrial disaster. But that doesn’t seem quite right. And what if I want to check out a place that is the perfect embodiment of an environmental problem but that isn’t particularly gross? Should I abandon it, just because I’m worried it won’t count as “most polluted”? The criteria flood in: kinds of pollution, areas of the world, recreational possibilities…
“I’m trying to get a nice spread,” I tell them.
From Alberta, a powerful suction pulls south. And so they would like to build a pipeline. Another pipeline, that is—longer and better than what’s already there. Leaving Canada, it would pass underneath the Alberta-Montana border and run clear through the heart of the United States to the Gulf Coast, ending at a clutch of refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, as it is called, argue that it would pose unacceptable environmental risks, even leaving aside the issue of how dirty oil sands oil is. The pipeline, three feet in diameter and buried underground, would transport diluted bitumen through such ecologically invaluable regions as the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides nearly a third of all groundwater used for irrigation in the United States, and is also a major drinking water supply. The threat to the Ogallala, the argument goes, is too great a risk to take. And then there’s the question of whether the project would even be economically viable.
Pipeline supporters, on the other hand, claim that Keystone XL would be reliable and safe, and they contend that it would double the amount of oil sands oil that can be imported to the United States.
What Keystone XL definitely has going for it, though, is irresistible
They called it folly. To most people, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that there was oil waiting underneath the low hill known as Spindletop, near Beaumont, in Southeast Texas. But Patillo Higgins had been obsessed with it for nearly a decade. A local businessman and self-taught geologist, he had led multiple failed attempts to find oil under the hill, and still he persisted. The quintessential example of an entrepreneur driven beyond sound judgment, Higgins spent year after year chasing oil with nothing to show for it. He pursued his goal with a faith matched only by his own religious dogmatism, and even ceded ownership of his own company to attract new investors—all in an age when oil was used only for lamp fuel and lubricants. As a business plan, it was idiotic.
On the morning of January 10, 1901, Higgins wasn’t even on Spindletop. Neither was his drilling contractor, a similarly obsessed, Croatian-born engineer called Anthony Lucas. They had no idea what was about to happen. Not even the drilling crew, as they ground the well deeper, past 1,100 feet, knew what they were about to unleash on Texas and the world. No idea that by lunchtime their well would be producing more oil than every other oil well in the country—combined.
It was the first
