The Compulsive Explainer

This National Geographic documentary is a shocker. Click on the thumbnails, the first two especially: a before and after aerial view of the area.

One summer, when I was still a college student, I worked in a gold mining camp outside Nome, Alaska. I saw the same thing happening there: natural tundra, some of the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen, turned into heaps of rocks, where nothing will grow — all to get some gold, something people were crazy to get.

Now they are even crazier to get some oil. The US imports more oil from Canada than from any other nation, about 19 percent of its foreign supply, and around half of that now comes from the oil sands.