The town of Fort Chipewyan sits where the Peace and Athabasca rivers empty into Lake Athabasca, about 90 miles north of the closest mine, and the land here offers a glimpse of what existed before. The noise and the display are meant to scare off the millions of migratory birds that arrive in northern Alberta every year. Industrial iron scarecrows are dressed with safety vests and helmets. Air cannons ring the pond and blast several times every minute, creating a constant explosive din. Next to one pond, a coal-black mountain of debris towers over the water. While companies are required by law to eventually reclaim them, only a fraction have been reclaimed so far. Regulatory filings show that the ponds are expected to continue to expand well into the 2030s. Oil companies have been collecting the “tailings” in waste ponds, which have grown exponentially in size and now cover more than 100 square miles. Much of that ends up as toxic liquid waste laced with hydrocarbons, naphthenic acids and carcinogenic heavy metals. The mines guzzle vast quantities of water, with nearly 58 billion gallons drawn from the region’s rivers, lakes and aquifers in 2019, according to government figures. The operations also pump out nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, traces of which have been detected by scientists in soils and snowpack dozens of miles away. The deeper deposits cover a much larger area than the mines, more than 50,000 square miles. In other parts of Alberta, where the sands are too deep to mine, the bitumen is melted in place and extracted through wells by pumping high-pressure steam underground. To extract bitumen from the sand, oil companies heat it and then treat it in a slurry of water and solvents. “It’s just the most completely ludicrous approach to industrial and energy development that is possible, given everything we know about the impact on ecosystems, the impact on climate,” said Dale Marshall, the national program manager for Environmental Defence, a Canadian advocacy group. As the plane nears its descent, the cabin fills with a tarry stench. From the air, the dump trucks and the shovels look like toys, hauling mounds of bitumen from newly dug pits.
The forest’s green is replaced by vast black holes pockmarked with giant puddles. While the campaign for a new international law is likely to last years, with no assurance that it will succeed, it has drawn attention to the inability of countries’ laws to contain industrial development like the tar sands, which will pollute the land for decades or centuries. Some lawyers and advocates have pointed to the tar sands as a prime example of the widespread environmental destruction they call “ecocide.” They are pushing the International Criminal Court to outlaw ecocide as a crime, on par with genocide or war crimes. Even a new proposal by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to cap emissions in the oil sector does not include any plan to lower production. Yet oil companies and the government expect output will climb well into the 2030s.
The largest oil sands companies have pledged to reduce their emissions, saying they will rely largely on government-subsidized carbon capture projects. But the companies’ energy-hungry extraction has also made the oil and gas sector Canada’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a government report. The sands pump out more than 3 million barrels of oil per day, helping make Canada the world’s fourth-largest oil producer and the top exporter of crude to the U.S. The economic benefits of the development are immense: Oil is Canada’s top export, and the mining and energy sector as a whole accounts for nearly a quarter of Alberta’s provincial economy. People in this region have long suspected that the tar sands mines were poisoning the land and everything it feeds. The mines’ ecological impacts are so vast and so deep that L’Hommecourt and other Indigenous people here - mostly from the Dene and Cree First Nations - say the industry has challenged their very existence, even as it has provided jobs and revenue to Native businesses and communities.