I found “The Ponds” to be by far the most poignant and pointed. It deals with the huge ponds of toxic waste that have resulted from the water-intensive process of producing bitumen from the sands. Every passing day brings enough new toxic tailings to fill 720 Olympic pools. So far, oil companies’ answer to containing these tailings has been to build massive aboveground ponds using dirt excavated during the mountaintop removal phase of bitumen production. A dozen ponds now stretch along either side of the Athabasca River, towering 270 feet above the forest floor, easily visible from space and looking like some kind of weird pyramids, to borrow Nikiforuk’s simile.
The ponds, which Nikiforuk calls “Canada’s greatest, most cancerous liability,” reek like filling stations, freeze only in the bitterest cold and swarm with carcinogens. The toxins are known to leak into groundwater and the Athabasca River, and toxic wetlands surround most ponds. A physician in one downstream community noted an inexplicable surge in health problems—including an extremely rare, painful cancer that he’s since diagnosed several times—in his patients. When he dared to ask the government to undertake a full study into these ailments, he found himself the victim of a vicious career assassination.
Thousands of geese, ducks and shorebirds die in the ponds every year, as do many deer, beaver and moose. It’s been estimated that the ponds could be toxic for another thousand years; and Nikiforuk notes that long before then an earthquake or torrential rainstorm could easily breech their walls, making for an environmental catastrophe that would beggar description. And, as if all these horrors weren’t enough, Nikiforuk points out that if tar sands development continues unabated, the number of square miles that the ponds occupy will increase by more than three and a half times, to 85 square miles, over the next decade.
This chapter is, I believe, Nikiforuk at his most enterprising, scintillating and rightly caustic and outraged. However, the subsequent chapters exposing urban-China levels of air pollution, gross governmental neglect and secretiveness, the “fiction” of toxic wetlands reclamation, the unproven nature of carbon burial, the scandal of missing tar sands royalties and Canada’s rising status as a leading carbon dioxide emitter are only slightly less compelling.
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