Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ation side, and he talked eagerly about what was possible with a former mine site—even if
his own company had only begun to reclaim the areas it had dug up.
“You can put overburden back in the mine at the end,” he said.
Overburden
is the word
used to describe the earth that is stripped off to reveal the resources underneath. (It's tempt-
ing to draw conclusions based on this word—that strip-miners see the landscape and forests
only as “burdens.”) In the reclamation process, the overburden, now free of vegetation, can
be tossed back in the hole to help patch it up.
“Then you do replanting,” Don continued. “Get the hill made, get it sculpted, build
little lakes and marshes.” He described the sequence of plantings that would follow, slowly
restoring the land to something like what had been there before. And just like that, as if
icing a cake, you could have your environment back.
But Don said he was better as a geologist than as an environmental scientist. So now
his job was to build Syncrude's geological model, based on test data from areas to be
mined in the coming years and decades. Bitumen richness, water content, grain size, rock
types—there were dozens of measurements. Don integrated it all into a database that would
allow the company to decide exactly where to mine, where to set its pits and its benches,
where to put the shovels.
“I'm in awe of that,” he said. He was in charge of the mining database of one of
Canada's most profitable companies.
But there was an undercurrent to his enthusiasm. “I'm part of the mining process instead
of part of the solution to fix it up afterwards,” he said. “The budget for reclamation is so
small compared with the profits they make.” He shook his head. “They should be dishing
out more.” And indeed, only a microscopic portion of oil sands land has ever been certified
by the government as reclaimed.
The answer, he thought, was stronger environmental regulation. But the Alberta govern-
ment would never make it happen.
“They're getting zillions of dollars of royalties,” he said of the province. “If you've got
land, the government of 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 down-
stream 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
