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somehow actually in the environmental business. Instead of straight talk from a man with a
pipe wrench, we have to tolerate oil company logos that look like sunflowers, and websites
invaded by butterflies and ivy. (As of this writing, www.suncor.com presents the image of
an evergreen sapling bursting through a lush tangle of grass.) Who are they trying to con-
vince? Themselves?
On the way back to the upgrading plant, I noticed some activity next to the hopper, on
the high rampart above the extraction facility. There were a pair of haulers backing toward
the chute, each piled high with oil sand.
I clambered over Sri Ganapathi, straining for a clear view through the far side of the
bus, snapping pictures as one of the dump trucks began to raise its bed to drop its cargo
into the chute. But as it did, we passed behind a building and the scene disappeared. Mindy
was going for the green jugular, telling us how Suncor had planted so much vegetation on
its land that deer came to live there.
“There's no hunting allowed,” she said. “So they're pretty happy.” Suncor, you see, is
not a multibillion-dollar petroleum company, but a haven in which deer and toads can live
in peace. I wanted to spit.
The view came clear and I saw the second truck. Four hundred tons of sticky, black
earth—a solid mass as large as a two-story building, and enough to make two hundred
barrels of oil—slid smoothly off its upturned bed and down the maw of the hopper. I had
the sensation of having seen an actual physical organ of the animal otherwise known as
our voracious appetite for fossil fuels. The appetite belongs to a body—a body with many
mouths, some of them built into the sides of open pits in Alberta.
The trucks lowered their beds, heading out for the next load, and the next. I had seen the
human race take a tiny bite out of the world. The bus drove on. Nobody was watching.
“So, are we raping the planet?” asked Don.
We were sitting in the living room.
Based on the morning's utter bust of an oil sands bus tour, I said it was hard to declare
with any certainty whether he and Amy were in fact raping the planet. I did hint, though,
that there was room for competition in the oil sands bus tour niche.
After so much mealymouthed blather on the tour and at the OSDC, it was refreshing to
talk to Don. But even he seemed fundamentally ambivalent. Don was an oil sands engineer,
but he also had a degree in environmental science. He had begun his career on the reclam-
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