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June 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: A river to ruin Feature: Brothers in biology Feature: Scar sands Feature: Simply Superior The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

“HARD TO BELIEVE, HEY?” says Scott Kinnee, the helicopter pilot flying me over the Athabasca oil sands north of Fort McMurray, Alta. “You don’t really get a sense of the scale of things unless you come up top.” Up top being 500 metres above ground level, high enough to see 70 to 80 kilometres in any direction; that is, until the sky closes over as we near the dozens upon dozens of emissions towers and flare stacks of the Suncor, Syncrude and Albian Sands plants. The limpid winter sunshine we’d had at the airport hangar 30 kilometres to the south is gone, and the sun is now a dull white bulb wobbling unsteadily behind a motionless sooty haze. “Yeah,” says Kinnee, nodding as I remark upon the sun’s enervation. “These plants are so huge, they basically create their own weather system.”

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The beauty of the boreal forest that surrounds Fort McMurray and covers most of northern Alberta lies in its magnitude, but once you arrive at oil-sands central, what you see is a landscape erased, a terrain stretching in a radius of many hundreds of square kilometres that is not so much negatively impacted as forcibly stripped bare and excavated. Dominating this landscape are half a dozen giant extraction and refining plants with their stacks and smoke and fire, disorientingly wide and deep mines, and tailings ponds held in check by some of the world’s largest dams. As a panoramic vision, it’s all rather heartbreaking but, if one is forced to be honest, also awe-inspiring, such is the energy and the damage produced by human ambition.

Yet despite how important, and how environmentally divisive, the oil sands have become in today’s politically charged energy domain, the early and even fairly recent days of this resource were decidedly humble. In fact, although it’s been a century or so since people first began trying to exploit the resource, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the Athabasca oil sands were launched on today’s bitumen mega-arc, bitumen being the thick, tarlike hydrocarbon extracted from the sands and refined into synthetic crude oil.

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