Explore Alberta, Lovely Land of Forests, Mountains ... and Toxic Ponds?

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  02.23.09 | 4:21 PM ET

Canada’s western province of Alberta—so lovely with a diverse landscape of boreal forest, shortgrass prairie, badlands, dairy farms and the Rocky Mountains—is also home to more than 54,000 square miles of tar sands containing large concentrations of bitumen, or “heavy oil.” The bitumen accounts for many of the oil reserves in North America and has left besotted oil companies re-imagining Alberta as the next Saudi Arabia. Too bad the exploitation of the tar sands is turning out to be the one of the greatest environmental disasters ever seen, according to Climate Progress.

Turning bitumen into usable oil is extremely expensive and also very, very bad for the environment. To extract it, energy companies are moving more earth in the northern Alberta’s Athabasca Valley than anywhere else on the planet. Processing bitumen requires giant amounts of water, releases giant amounts of greenhouse gases, and leaves toxic ponds so dangerous that oil companies use cannons and scarecrows to keep ducks and birds away. (The toxic waste may even be linked to cancer.)

In his recent book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, Calgary journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposed how corporate greed and regulatory loopholes are devastating large stretches of Alberta for the sake of extracting an expensive, polluting fossil fuel that’s no long-term solution to North America’s energy needs. (Check out his recent Q&A in The New York Times.) National Geographic also explores the tar sands controversy in its latest issue. In a nuanced and moving story, award-winning science writer Robert Kunzig shows how northern Alberta is struggling to balance the needs of an economically distressed present with an environmentally sound future. “Its answer has been to forget about tomorrow,” Kunzig writes. “Tomorrow is not its job.”

Of course, Fort McMurray, the boomtown around the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, has its own, upbeat narrative on bitumen. The community offers “experience the energy” tours of the oil sands and also directs visitors to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, where you can meet an 850-ton bucketwheel excavator named Cyrus and watch the movie “Quest for Energy.”

Meanwhile, the greenvolutionaries are fighting back with effective travel-brochure parody at www.travelingalberta.com. Comparing vast stretches of the highly toxic artificial lakes created from bitumen processing to “manmade wonders” such as the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu, the breathless promos offer sailing on oil-slicked ponds devoid of wildlife, open-pit paragliding where you can “ride the coal bed methane and sour gas updrafts,” gritty-oil treatments for mom and a propane cannon wake-up call.

There’s also this video, which made me laugh and fume and wonder what’s going to happen to all the woodland caribou and boreal songbirds.

Tags: Eco Travel, Outdoors, Politics, North America, Canada, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


3 Comments for Explore Alberta, Lovely Land of Forests, Mountains ... and Toxic Ponds?

Eva Holland 02.23.09 | 5:43 PM ET

I have some friends who’ve worked on the tar sands. They’ve said alternately that it looks like a moonscape, a WW1 battlefield, or a post-apocalyptic movie scene.

Jennifer 02.24.09 | 8:44 AM ET

When will we all realize that traditional energy consumption is a dead end?  Even if North America were able to find enough traditional energy sources within it’s own land to abandon the Middle East, it would still be a finite amount.  Doesn’t it seem prudent (understatement of the year) to leave what little is still there (for a rainy day - whatever that may be) and move on to sustainable, renewable, environmentally sound energy resources?  The technology is there, when will the decision makers grow a brain and jump on board?  It will be too late when we’ve raped and pillaged the earth beyond recognition, and sucked it dry of all traditional energy sources!

Jessica Wilson 02.24.09 | 8:12 PM ET

Thanks for the great article! That video and website was created by us at Greenpeace. We continue to battle what we know to be the greatest environmental disaster ever to hit Canada. Most recently we hung two large banners in Ottawa during President Obama’s visit, telling him that “Climate Leaders Don’t Buy Tar Sands.”

We need our comrades in the US to lay down the climate law and say NO to the dirtiest oil on the planet! More information can be found here:

http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/recent/greenpeace-welcomes-president-obama

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