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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 CO 2 emissions in North America,” he said. “There was a big fuzz
up around Fort McMurray. The CO 2 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 extrac-
tion.
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 com-
munities, 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 rad-
ical 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.
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