Our World of Normalized Industry Disasters
Have you seen the size of our waste industries today?
Human behaviour hasn’t changed much over time. Our ancient ancestors also left mounds of waste, which are called “middens” and highly useful for anthropological study. Shell middens in particular have helped us to uncover the fuller terrain of early human populations in places where other signs of their cultures were all but lost.
But thanks to technological advances in the last few centuries, human dump sites now tend to contain much more challenging and dangerous materials. We continue to make huge monuments to our existence on this Earth—not all of them great.
Do you know what the largest earthworks structures in the world are?
Not the rammed earth sections of the Great Wall of China, built around 700 BCE.
Not Pre-Columbian structures like Monks Mound in Illinois, built around 900 CE.
And not even the Walls of Benin, an elaborate network of defensive structures built between 800 and 1460 CE.
No, some of our largest imprints now are tailings dams. One in particular, in Alberta, Canada, holds an artificial lake for the mining byproducts of Syncrude Canada Ltd., and also held the “honour” of being the world’s largest earth structure by volume of construction material in 2001 (at least, according to some Swedish Mining Association conference documents since lost to the internet).
Syncrude mines the Athabasca tar sands, which contain massive deposits of an unconventional form of petroleum called bitumen. In recent years, Canada has been increasing production from these oil sands, even though there are concerns that 2024 might be a year of economic plateau. Recent expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline grants further growth to this region’s industry, and is considered critical for Canada’s future energy independence, because the pipeline goes straight to the West Coast for direct export, instead of through the US.
Bitumen is extracted from the surrounding sands using a “hot water process” that separates out the clay, sand, silt, and soil—and which leaves massive amounts of a sludge that also contains toxic and process chemicals. Tailings can be stored in solid, semi-solid, and liquid forms, but the liquid forms require a great deal more monitoring to ensure that their storage structures hold.
Running along the Athabasca River, Syncrude’s collection of tailing ponds is massive and growing—and so toxic that the region needs to implement deterrents to keep birds away. The attendant acid rain was also found by one massive 2018 study to be on track to damage an area across Alberta and Saskatchewan the size of Germany. The scale of devastation is difficult to grasp, but an aerial documentary from 2010, called Petropolis, helps to visualize just how much land is consumed by these operations.
In other words, even if the industry does peak this year, or soon after—or even if the country pivots hard from energy futures so intensely tied up in petroleum—we’re still going to be dealing with existing waste products for decades to come.
These are our middens. These are the places on Earth that will tell future generations complex and damning stories of just what kind of people we were, for a while.
But long before future anthropologists (or aliens dropping by) can study the refuse we’ve left behind, we also have to live in this world of extraction-driven waste.
And in the mad scramble of many industries involved in our energy economy, “living” with our middens is often easier said than done.
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