油砂的诱惑 The Canadian Oil Boom
加拿大石油热潮竭泽而渔
Scraping Bottom: The Canadian Oil Boom
1963年， 吉姆．鲍彻七岁的时候，有一天他跟祖父在加拿大埃布尔达省北部的亚大帕斯卡尔河畔、麦凯堡第一民族保留区以南数公里处，沿着布设陷阱的路线处理陷阱。那一带十分潮湿，沼泽地形起起伏伏，湖泊星罗棋布，溪流蜿蜒过大地，还有一大片瘦小的林木——它是遍布加拿大的北寒林的一部分。1963年时，这片森林大部分仍未遭到破坏。由于加拿大政府尚未兴建进入麦凯堡的石子路，所以若要进入这一带的话，必须坐船，在冬天则必须靠着狗橇才到得了。这里的奇佩维安族和克里族印第安人几乎过着与世隔绝的生活；鲍彻就是奇佩维安人。他们猎食麋鹿和美洲野牛，在亚大帕斯卡尔河捕捉玻璃梭鲈和白鲑，摘集蔓越桔与蓝莓，设置陷阱捕水狸和美洲水貂来赚钱。麦凯堡是一座小型的毛皮交易站，并没有瓦斯、电力、电话或自来水。这一类的生活基本设施一直要到1970年代与1980年代才陆续出现。
One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the trapline with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay First Nation reserve on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. The country there is wet, rolling fen, dotted with lakes, dissected by streams, and draped in a cover of skinny, stunted trees—it's part of the boreal forest that sweeps right across Canada, covering more than a third of the country. In 1963 that forest was still mostly untouched. The government had not yet built a gravel road into Fort McKay; you got there by boat or in the winter by dogsled. The Chipewyan and Cree Indians there—Boucher is a Chipewyan—were largely cut off from the outside world. For food they hunted moose and bison; they fished the Athabasca for walleye and whitefish; they gathered cranberries and blueberries. For income they trapped beaver and mink. Fort McKay was a small fur trading post. It had no gas, electricity, telephone, or running water. Those didn't come until the 1970s and 1980s.
但是在鲍彻的记忆里，1963年的那一天才是改变的开始，地点就在他祖父设陷阱的漫长小径上，靠近密尔德勒湖附近；鲍彻的祖先世世代代都沿着那条路线设置捕兽陷阱。去年夏季的某一天，鲍彻说：「那些小径已经存在了好几千年。」他坐在位于麦凯堡街角、宽敞雅致的办公室里，高尔夫推杆就放在办公室的角落，立体音响轻柔地播放着莫扎特的音乐。「那一天我们在林间走着走着，突然碰到一片空地，而且是占地很广的空地。事前，完全没有接获任何通知。在1970年代，他们直接把我祖父的小木屋拆掉，没有给予任何通知，也没经过讨论。」那是鲍彻第一次接触油砂业。后来这个产业以惊人的速度发展，在过去短短几年间就彻底改变了埃布尔达省的东北部。现在鲍彻四周都是这个产业的纵迹，他本人也投入其中。
In Boucher's memory, though, the change begins that day in 1963, on the long trail his grandfather used to set his traps, near a place called Mildred Lake. Generations of his ancestors had worked that trapline. "These trails had been here thousands of years," Boucher said one day last summer, sitting in his spacious and tasteful corner office in Fort McKay. His golf putter stood in one corner; Mozart played softly on the stereo. "And that day, all of a sudden, we came upon this clearing. A huge clearing. There had been no notice. In the 1970s they went in and tore down my grandfather's cabin—with no notice or discussion." That was Boucher's first encounter with the oil sands industry. It's an industry that has utterly transformed this part of northeastern Alberta in just the past few years, with astonishing speed. Boucher is surrounded by it now and immersed in it himself.
以前设陷阱的路线、小木屋和森林所在地，现在已经成为露天开采的大型矿场。加拿大最大的石油制造商合成原油公司，用五层楼高的电动铲土机挖出地底的沥青砂，然后以热水、有时是用苛性钠洗出沥青。在矿场旁边，燃烧着熊熊火焰的「改质厂」会裂解含焦油的沥青，把它们转换为合成原油公司低硫混合原油，再经由输油管线把这些合成原油送到埃布尔达省的埃德蒙吞市、安大略省与美国的炼油厂。跟隔壁占地十平方公里、充满毒矿渣的密尔德勒湖尾矿池相比，现在密尔德勒湖相形见绌。就容积而言，现在环绕这座尾矿池的砂坝，已经成为全世界最大的坝堤之一。
Where the trapline and the cabin once were, and the forest, there is now a large open-pit mine. Here Syncrude, Canada's largest oil producer, digs bitumen-laced sand from the ground with electric shovels five stories high, then washes the bitumen off the sand with hot water and sometimes caustic soda. Next to the mine, flames flare from the stacks of an "upgrader," which cracks the tarry bitumen and converts it into Syncrude Sweet Blend, a synthetic crude that travels down a pipeline to refineries in Edmonton, Alberta; Ontario, and the United States. Mildred Lake, meanwhile, is now dwarfed by its neighbor, the Mildred Lake Settling Basin, a four-square-mile lake of toxic mine tailings. The sand dike that contains it is by volume one of the largest dams in the world. |
发表于 2009-3-19 13:30
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