Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing their knuckles and waiting for that moment when the human, undone by panic and
claustrophobia, tears off his bug jacket.
Finally, I saw the muddy rise I had sunk my foot into on the way over—a single land-
mark in a leafy wasteland—and staggered back toward it. About to cross over it again, I
stopped short.
I could see my footprint from before, right in the center of the mound. It was swarming
and alive. The small ridge was actually a great anthill. I bent over and looked into my foot-
print. Ants poured through it in chaos, frenetic in their attention to the fat, wriggling grubs,
tumbling over them, picking them up, extricating them from the crater, the giant breach in
their city wall. Sorry, guys.
Crane Lake was pleasant in its way, but it was the merest green speck on a huge landscape
of unreclaimed and active mine sites. Nor was it even a true test case. I later talked to Mike
Hudema, of Greenpeace Canada, and he scoffed at the very notion of reclamation.
“When we destroy an area, we can't put it back,” he told me over the phone. “We don't
know how to do it. We can create something…but it's not what was there. It's not the same,
and the way that life in the area reacts to it is also not the same.”
That a guy from Greenpeace would be skeptical of mine reclamation was no surprise.
More interesting was his contention that Crane Lake was never a mine site in the first place.
“It's basically reclaiming the area where they piled the dirt,” Hudema said. “So it's not
actually reclaiming a mine site. It's not reclaiming a tailings lake.”
Hudema was that rare person who had been camping in the oil sands mines. One sunny
autumn day, not long after my visit, Hudema and several of his colleagues had gone for a
walk through Albian Sands, an oil sands mine owned by Shell.
Of course, no group of Greenpeace activists can go strolling through a mine without
chaining themselves to something. In this case, they attached themselves to an excavator
and a pair of sand haulers and rolled out a large banner reading
TAR SANDS—CLIMATE CRIME
.
The entire mine was shut down for the better part of a shift, and Hudema and company
spent thirty-some hours camping out on the machinery before agreeing to leave. (Later
Greenpeace oil sands protesters met with arrests and prosecution.) The protesters' pur-
pose—what other could there be—was to make the news, to raise awareness, to convince
the world that there was something at stake worth getting arrested for. In them, Canada's
love-hate relationship with the oil sands had most fully flowered into hatred.
