Significance of Alberta

Alberta is where Ken Ilgunas begins his hike. It is the starting point of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and it is also a province that contributes significantly to the extraction of fossil fuels and the oil economy. In Alberta, Ken goes to Fort McMurray, where he visits the infamous tar sands where much oil is extracted every day. His experience flying over the tar sands in Alberta prompts Ken to write the following: "At worst, the scene was a war zone, the ground zero of some horrific city-destroying bomb. At best, it was a futuristic moon colony where imported laborers operated giant machinery, worked slave hours, and remorselessly plundered a place to which they have no emotional connection. How could this be here—in Canada? This seemed like the work of some deranged Third World tyrant bent on industrializing his nation at any cost, not the willful desecration of a whole ecozone carried out by an enlightened world power" (46).