I first heard about the Alberta tar sands in Becky's Farm School blog. Becky actually writes primarily about homeschooling and I have found a ton of reading recommendations for my son at her site. But she is also from Alberta and feels very strongly about the tar sands. Here's an entry from last spring on the subject:

I’m writing about the duck deaths at the Syncrude tailings pit earlier this week not because I’ve dug out any news of my own, or have any noteworth comments, but because I’d like to help spread the news of this incident in particular and the tar sands in general beyond Alberta’s borders, especially to the U.S. The New York Times ran the story yesterday. And for the sake of my own province, I’d like to see some leadership that includes the generous use of courage, brains, and heart.

Yesterday I wrote about the sad and worrisome incident of several hundred migratory ducks killed when they landed Monday on one of Syncrude’s tailing pits in northern Alberta; the number of ducks hasn’t been confirmed because Syncrude isn’t allowing reporters near the site, and Alberta Environment hasn’t seen fit to release any photographs, video, or other reports from the site. In fact, Alberta’s government is now facing accusations of a cover-up for refusing to release photos of the dead ducks. In that post, I mentioned the conservative provincial government’s new $25 million PR campaign to convince the rest of the world in general, and the US in particular, that Alberta’s tar sands are clean and the province looks after the environment well.

Because of my small knowledge on the subject gathered from Becky's posts and following her links, I recognized just how important Andrew Nikiforuk's new book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, must be when I saw it in the Greystone catalog. My reaction to this subject has been like the first time I read about mountaintop mining and began to realize how much of the world I had been missing. (For a recent article on that topic from West Virginia see Smithsonian's "Mining the Mountains".) To bring some attention to the tar sans and the book, Greystone is releasing the entire thing - all 208 pages of it - for free on pdf today. Here's a bit of the book's description:

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.

So here's the deal. I get emails from publishers all the time asking me to publicize some event they are doing for a certain book ranging from giveaways to parties to general brouhaha. Most of them I ignore because general PR is just not the sort of thing I do here. (Writing about Alaska, haunted houses and lately Edgar Allen Poe is what I do.) However, and in this case it is a very big however, this subject is something I feel very strongly about and any way I can let more people know about it is, I think, a very good use of my time (and blog space).

This kind of all out scorch the earth mentality mining just....it bothers me. Ever since I read Erik Reece's book Lost Mountain about the heavy price being paid in Kentucky for mountaintop removal coal mining I've been angry about how oblivious the rest of us are to that price.(See my Bookslut review.) We think our electric bills are low and that's all there is to it but bad things are happening because of how we mine the earth. I won't even make the environmental argument; just read this from that Smithsonian article I linked to above:

Scientists and community groups are concerned about the possible effects of coal-removal byproducts and waste. Ben Stout, the biologist, says he has found barium and arsenic in slurry from sites in southwestern West Virginia at concentrations that nearly qualify as hazardous waste. U.S. Forest Service biologist A. Dennis Lemly found deformed fish larvae in southern West Virginia's Mud River—some specimens with two eyes on one side of their head. He blames the deformities on high concentrations of selenium from the nearby Hobet 21 mountaintop project. "The Mud River ecosystem is on the brink of a major toxic event," he wrote in a report filed in a court case against the mining site, which remains active.

If that isn't disturbing enough, National Geographic has an article up this month on the tar sands themselves. Here's a bit of that:

"The thing that angers me," says David Schindler, "is that there's been no concerted effort to find out where the truth lies."

Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was talking about whether people in Fort Chipewyan have already been killed by pollution from the oil sands. In 2006 John O'Connor, a family physician who flew in weekly to treat patients at the health clinic in Fort Chip, told a radio interviewer that he had in recent years seen five cases of cholangiocarcinoma—a cancer of the bile duct that normally strikes one in 100,000 people. Fort Chip has a population of around 1,000; statistically it was unlikely to have even one case. O'Connor hadn't managed to interest health authorities in the cancer cluster, but the radio interview drew wide attention to the story. "Suddenly it was everywhere," he says. "It just exploded."

There are so many things we have to worry about in the world today; we have to pick and choose our battles. If we don't pick and choose, quite frankly, I think we would all go a little bit mad. Mountaintop removal, the poor maintenance of slurry ponds and the mining of tar sands are all things that mystify and disturb me. I choose therefore to let you all know about them and how you can learn more about them, whenever I can. The free download for Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent is good for five days. Take Greystone up on this offer and then you too will know more of the dirty truth of the price we pay for energy. And then you will know more of what you want to say to your Congressmen & women and Senators when these issues come up.

[Post pics of the Alberta tar sands. Top pic from The Globe & Mail, bottom from Nat Geo. I don't believe the mining company either when they say they will be beautiful boreal forests again someday.]