Updated with new material
throughout, and winner of the prestigious Rachel Carson Environment
Book Award.
Andrew Nikiforuk''s Tar Sands
is a critical exposé of the World''s largest energy project-the
Alberta oil sands-that has made Canada one of the worst
environmental offenders on earth.
The United States imports the majority
of its oil, not from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, but from its
neighbour to the north, Canada. Canada has one third of the
world''s oil source; it comes from the bitumen in the oil sands of
Alberta. Advancements in technology and frenzied development have
created the world''s largest energy project in Fort McMurray where,
rather than shooting up like a fountain in the deserts of Saudi
Arabia, the sticky bitumen is extracted from the earth. Providing
almost 20 percent of America''s fuel, much of this dirty oil is
being processed in refineries in the Midwest. This out-of-control
megaproject is polluting the air, poisoning the water, and
destroying boreal forest at a rate almost too rapid to be
imagined.
In Tar Sands, journalist
Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and
political costs of the tar sands and argues forcefully for change.
Combining extensive scientific research and compelling writing,
Nikiforuk takes the reader to Fort McMurray, home to some of the
world''s largest open-pit mines, and explores this
twenty-first-century pioneer town from the exorbitant cost of
housing to its more serious social ills. He uncovers a global
Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine
dealers, aimless bush workers, American evangelicals, and the
largest population of homeless people in northern Canada. He also
explains that this micro-economy supplies gasoline for 50 percent
of Canadian vehicles and 16 percent of U.S. demand. Readers will
learn that oil sands:
- burn more carbon than conventional oil,
- destroy forests and displace woodland caribou
- poison the water supply and communities downstream
- drain the Athabasca, the river that feeds Canada''s largest
watershed
- contribute to climate change
The book does provide hope, however,
and ends with an exploration of possible solutions to the problem.
And this update edition Nikiforuk adds a new afterword, a new
appendix on the hidden costs of steam extraction, and a response to
the criticism he received for the first edition.
Published in partnership with the
David Suzuki Foundation.
Co-published by the David Suzuki Foundation.
