It had been raining for days. All I wanted was to escape the constant downpour and camp someplace dry, so I pressed south from Fairbanks, shadowing the Tanana River until the clouds finally broke and the moon rose over the Hayes Range in the distance. In that part of Alaska and that time of year—barely 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle, late July—it never really gets dark, so I took advantage of the dusky half-light, driving until almost two in the morning. In my battered Milepost guide, I’d found a campground at a state recreation site listed just outside the remote highway crossroads of Delta Junction. The town wasn’t much, just a line of roadhouses and cafĂ©s at the northern terminus of the Alcan Highway. During the summertime, when locals head to their fish camps and hunting lodges, it’s virtually abandoned. That was fine with me; all I needed was a dry spot to pitch a tent among the birches and black spruce. Around a final bend, I eased off the gas, coasting down the slope, scanning the left side of the road for the turnoff.

That’s when it happened. A full-grown cow moose vaulted from the brush on the right shoulder and into the road. For a moment, she was frozen there, flat and depthless in my headlights. Without thinking, I slammed on the horn as I pressed the brakes almost to the floor, but the car didn’t seem to slow. “I braked,” I wrote in my journal the next day, “the clump of limbs against the grill and then the hood, then a whine—almost wheeze—from the moose as she went through the windshield. She passed so far through the glass that I actually felt her fur against my face.” As the car skidded to a stop, the roof collapsed under her weight, then the rear window shattered as she lifted herself and leaped back into the tall weeds.

Hours later, after a young couple picked me up and delivered me to a bar in Delta Junction, after state troopers called a local auto wrecker who took me to an abandoned off-season apartment complex for the night, I stood before a mirror in the bathroom and studied the raw spot on my forehead, what looked like a rug burn, where the moose’s fur had scraped away the top layer of my skin. Only then would I realize that I’d come inches from death.

But for now I was still trapped in the car. The roof was caved in so close on my right side that the rearview mirror dangled near my ankles. I tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. It was wedged tight by the impact, so I twisted in my seat and kicked and kicked—I don’t remember how many times—until the door inched open. And then I was out, into the open night air.

I remember looking straight up at the faint stars overhead, then down at my navy blue sweater, sparkling with tiny shards. I was covered with moose fur—the thick, dark bristles of her guard hairs and tufts of soft brown undercoat. With all the broken glass, I didn’t dare brush it away.

This was 1996, in those last years before cellphones, so I couldn’t call for help, couldn’t tell anyone what had just happened. I had to wait for the next passing car, which didn’t come for a long time. I stood there, just breathing in the blue light of the Alaskan dusk, looking up at stars through the cloud of my breath, alive and unhurt but stranded.

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President Obama on February 24 vetoed the Keystone pipeline proposal, a move which doesn’t close the book on the pipeline but concludes a six-year chapter of political posturing.

Debate over the $7 billion, 1,700-mile proposed project, which stretches from the tar sands mines of northern Alberta south through the Great Plains to refineries on the Gulf Coast, has raged for six years now. Along the way, it has become a line in the sand for environmentalists who staunchly oppose the pipeline and a nonnegotiable demand for supporters who claim it will finally end our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. As the proposal has crept through multiple State Department review processes, Native American land and treaty rights’ disputes, and major court battles in Texas and Nebraska, the petroleum industry has complained that Keystone is now the most debated pipeline in history. They say it’s time to build.

Republicans in CongressÌęargue that Keystone XL is a much-needed infrastructure project that will provide tens of thousands of jobs and keep gas prices low. Obama that he disagrees and has ridiculed Republicans for citing the State Department’s assessment that Keystone XL would create roughly 42,000 jobs, pointing out that TransCanada, the company that would oversee the project, projected those jobs would last less than a year. After that, just 35 permanent jobs would remain. As for claims about gas prices or the larger economy, the president has been blunt. “It’s good for the Canadian oil industry,” he , “but it’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to U.S. consumers.”

Despite Obama’s veto threat, the House of Representatives on January 9, with 29 Democrats voting in favor. OnÌęJanuary 29, the legislation passed the Senate on a 62-36 vote—still five shy of the 67 needed to override a presidential veto.

Now we can expect intense horse-trading in the effort to muster the remaining votes. But New York Senator Chuck Schumer that the Democratic caucus can sustain Obama's veto.ÌęIf they do, it will be up to Obama alone to decide whether to reject Keystone XL outright or to approve it as part of a larger energy package. For those hoping for a definitive statement about which way he’s leaning, Obama was frustratingly vague during his January 20 . He touted the fact that the United States is now the top producer of wind energy, but he also praised our place as the leading producer of oil and gas. Economic growth in the new century will require wholesale rebuilding of our infrastructure, he said. “So let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline. Let’s pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year and make this country stronger for decades to come.”

What shape such a plan might take—and what part Keystone XL will play—will be the subject of furious debate in the coming months.

Ted Genoways () is the author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, as well as a contributing writer for Mother Jones and editor-at-large of onEarth Magazine. He wrote about Alberta's tar sands in the December 2014 issue of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

The post What to Expect From the Debate in 2015 appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Less than a year after the end of World War II, when Celina Harpe was just seven, she sat beside her grandfather on the steps of his cabin, overlooking the Athabasca River in the northern reaches of Alberta.

“It was spring,” she told me recently—the time of breakup, when the ground is still packed with pearlescent snow but the sun weakens the river ice until it cracks and starts to move. The force of the current pushed giant floes onto the banks and up the ridge.

“Look at the beautiful river, the way it looks now,” her grandfather said.

Adam Boucher was an elder of the , descended directly from the hereditary leaders of the Chipewyan people, who in the 19th century had intermarried with French and Scottish voyageurs as they established traplines for the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company. Boucher was a child when his uncle, as headman of the Chipewyan band, added his X to Treaty 8 with Queen Victoria, surrendering their ancestral land around Moose Lake to Canada and Great Britain in return for a reserve along the Athabasca. Aside from land used for logging, mining, or white settlements, the people of Fort McKay were promised unfettered rights to hunt and fish in perpetuity. “As long as the sun shines and the river flows and the hills don’t move,” Boucher later recalled.

In the 50 years that followed, Boucher saw his people’s access to hunting grounds and traplines fenced off as logging interests moved in. And in 1946, after suffering through wartime shortages of oil and gas, Alberta’s provincial government unveiled a joint project with an Edmonton-based company called . They made plans to build a test facility at Bitumount, barely 15 miles downriver, to prove the viability of an experimental hot-water process developed by Karl Clark of the , a provincial R&D corporation. The goal was to separate heavy-grade bitumen—a black, gooey form of petroleum, also known as tar sands—from the deposits underlying the ground all around Fort McKay. By the time of the ice breakup that year, the site had been cleared and crew quarters erected, and a power plant was swiftly being built.

Seeing all this, Boucher feared losing access to the spruce bogs around McClelland Lake, not far from the Bitumount site, where First Nations people gathered blueberries, cranberries, and kinnikinnick. He worried that mining would inevitably harm the river.

“You know the water is sacred?” he asked his granddaughter. “You know we need the trees?”

Celina nodded. “Yeah, I understand that.”

“I see it, what’s going to happen in the future,” Boucher said. “All the trees will be gone. They’re going to dig big holes, and they’re going to dig up all that black stuff. You know that tar? That’s what they’re after.”

They sat quietly on his steps, watching the river move.

“I won’t see it. I’m too old,” Boucher told her. “But if you have children, you’re going to have to tell them not to drink this river water.”

Taking Canadian Highway 63 straight north from Fort McMurray, during the half-lit hours of the morning commute, I moved past the old downtown, with its bars and weekly-rate hotels, past the sprawling suburbs and high-speed ring road, into expanses of peat-rich muskeg and forests of tamarack and spruce. As the sun climbed, cars became scarce and the road seemed to stretch endlessly toward the horizon. Traveling from McMurray to McKay doesn’t take long—it’s less than 40 miles—but the transformation you see in that short distance is astounding.

At first there were few signs of the massive development I’d been told to expect, but the farther I drove, the more industrial the scene became. There were 18-wheelers barreling up to unmarked interchanges and thundering into merge lanes, along with passenger coaches and repurposed school buses ferrying workers from camp barracks to a place that locals euphemistically call “the site.”

The trucks and miners are headed not toward a single site but to a patchwork of them. If you were viewing this region from the air, you’d see a crazy quilt of open-pit mines flanking the Athabasca River for more than ten miles. There, at the bottom of cavernous quarries roughly 150 feet down, dragline conveyers scrape away at a dense layer of sandstone suffused with tar. The method of mining and refining this resource, the latest development in our desperate effort to extend the fossil-fuel era by a few more decades, is one of the most labor-intensive extraction processes ever undertaken. It requires grand-scale removal just to make the narrow profit margins work. More than 250 square miles of former boreal forest have already been stripped away, and by 2030 the industry hopes to extract all the mineable tar sands from the 1,853 square miles of deposits, an area larger than Rhode Island.

Tar sands have been mined here on a smaller scale since the 1920s, but the U.S. government gave the industry a huge boost when it invaded Iraq in 2003, sending global oil prices sky-high. Since then two new pit mines have opened north of Fort McMurray, another three are under development, and still more extraction is on the way, by means of a process called SAG-D. That stands for steam-assisted gravity drainage, which involves using high-pressure steam to make the tar sands less viscous and easier to move through pipes.

How you view these developments is something of a Rorschach test. For people who see the oil industry as an all-consuming beast, tar-sands mining looks like the stark, apocalyptic endgame of extreme fossil-fuel extraction. Environmentalists point out that all this massive machinery burns almost two barrels of oil for every three taken out; that the steam-separation process is one of the most water-intensive in the world; and that the resulting fuel, , emits about ‹17 percent more greenhouse gas when burned than standard light-grade crude (a number that watchdogs like the insist is a lowball guess).

The greatest concern is what happens if this development is allowed to continue. The oil industry itself estimates that less than ‹10 percent of tar-sands deposits in Alberta have been extracted. , the former director of the and one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change in the 1980s, estimates that the remaining reserves of tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the entire global oil industry—in all of human history. Hansen has been unequivocal about the consequences if such resources are exploited. “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing,” he , “it will be game over for the climate.”

All of which might have escaped the attention of the American public if not for the Keystone XL pipeline. The proposed $7 billion project, intended to carry bitumen and a soup of chemical diluents from northern Alberta to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast—for further processing and shipment around the world—has turned into a six-year battle between environmentalists and industry supporters. As the proposal has made its way through State Department reviews and court fights, other pipelines carrying similar heavy-grade Alberta crude have ruptured in various parts of the U.S. The most notable are Enbridge’s Line 6B, which , and ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline, which in 2013 . These accidents have forced people to ask just how safe it is to extract, transport, refine, and burn tar-sands crude.

This has been a major controversy for years in the U.S., where the Obama administration is simultaneously attempting to placate environmentalists and encourage a fossil-fuels industry that has created more new jobs than most other sectors since the 2007 recession. It’s also a hot topic in Canada. Enbridge’s , which would carry tar sands to the Pacific Coast of British Columbia for shipment to China and other parts of Asia on oil tankers, have met with nearly a decade of heated opposition from Canadians—including more than 130 First Nations. Last year, to draw more attention to tar-sands development, Ontario native Neil Young traveled to the mining region to see things up close. “Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima,” . “Fort McMurray is a wasteland.”

Industry backers and mine employees were outraged, and many took to Twitter, posting photos of their backyards or favorite hiking spots with the hashtag . To them, tar sands represent an economic lifeline and the gateway to North American energy independence. Many Albertans enjoy thumbing their noses at environmentalists, who they dismiss as whiney doomsayers.

They also complain that critics have obsessed too much over the boomtown ugliness on view at Fort McMurray. The there has featured 40,000 young itinerant workers who have flocked to the region hoping to get rich quick, bars and gambling parlors lining the highway, rampant prostitution, Hell’s Angels competing with a Somali gang for control of the cocaine trade, and more than 100 traffic deaths in a span of only eight years.

Two years ago, after yet another journalist wrote about the booze, drugs, and hookers, the town fathers of Fort McMurray, population 75,000, decided to clean up their image. They shuttered Teasers Strip Bar, the Oil Can Tavern, Diggers Variety Club, and the Oil Sands Hotel. Soon after, the whole sin district was razed and turned into a parking lot. Mine workers now do their drinking inside the locked-down confines of the residential camps, which sit roughly 20 miles north of Fort McMurray and are closed off with chain-link fencing and barbed wire to thwart nosy reporters, including this one. Officials at both of the main companies operating in the area— and —declined to let me view mining operations or the camps when I was in Alberta.

Meanwhile, though the short-term social ills of the extraction boom may have been tamed a bit, there’s been surprisingly little discussion of the long-term environmental consequences for the string of First Nations villages along the Athabasca River, downstream from the interconnected tailings ponds of chemical by-products produced by the tar-sands refining process. Neil Young’s Hiroshima comparison grabbed headlines, but his more explosive claim focused on research presented by provincial doctors working in those communities. “The native peoples are dying,” Young in Washington, D.C. “People are sick. People are dying because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened.”

When I called Celina Harpe, now age 75 and an elder in the Dene band of the Fort McKay First Nation, she said it was true. People were dying young and unexpectedly, of rare and aggressive forms of cancer.

“By the time they find out, they’re on stage four,” she said. “Too late. They’re gone.” She urged me to come see for myself but discouraged the idea of staying overnight. The lights of the 24-hour mining operations just over the ridge meant that her village was never dark anymore, and the echoes of nearby air cannons all through the night made it impossible to sleep. “You go to bed, it’s like you’re in a war zone.”

Worst of all, everything her grandfather predicted had come to pass. The trees were being clear-cut, the moose and beavers were disappearing. All the native villages along the Athabasca River were fearful of contamination. And just as her grandfather had warned, it wasn’t safe to drink the water.

The headwaters of the Athabasca pool up under the Columbia Icefield in Alberta’s before running north, carrying snowmelt for more than 800 miles. In the 19th century, when Scottish fur traders hit impassible rapids during their explorations, they put out and founded Fort McMurray. Eventually they pushed farther north, establishing traplines, searching out navigable routes to the Arctic, and founding Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan, where the river widens and empties into Lake Athabasca.

Fort McKay, with just over 400 permanent residents, has traditionally been the least developed and discussed of these settlements—neither as big and hurly-burly as Fort Mac nor as remote and idyllic as Fort Chip. Instead, McKay has been significant as the contact point, the place where the ambitions of white traders (and, later, white loggers and oil speculators) meet the traditional interests of northern bands dependent on wild game for food and fur-bearing animals for warmth and shelter.

McKay was never accessible enough to be subsumed by the arrival of white culture, but it was too close not to feel its impact—especially after the arrival of Highway 63 in 1964, and then the logging road that connected the boreal forests north of McKay to the highway that leads back to McMurray.

In the late sixties, the Alberta government partnered with Sunoco to form the Great Canadian Oil Sands consortium—today known as Suncor. Soon after, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo sent oil prices soaring, and provincial regulators ushered through a second project, known as Syncrude. This was the beginning of a decades-long struggle that pitted the people of Fort McKay against the collective clout of Canada’s largest petroleum companies, with the government—a party that had a vested financial interest—serving as sole adjudicator.

Seemingly unchecked by regulations, the mines expanded into giant black caverns, where massive shovel loaders now scoop the coal-like rock, 70 tons at a time, into dump trucks three stories tall. Heavy haulers deliver mined material into a double-roll crusher, then a conveyor system carries the ground-up rock into a cyclofeeder.

In sprawling coking and refining facilities, hot water melts the tar sands into a slurry, sending clouds of thick smoke and steam across the landscape. What remains is chemically separated to produce a thin top layer of bitumen froth, but everything else—the heavy sand, the toxic wastewater, and the leftover chemicals—is by-product, and it’s emptied into tailings ponds the size of enormous lakes.

As I drove along the highway, piles of discarded sand, held for eventual reclamation, swirled up into a lashing white dust storm, mixing with the smoke and fly ash billowing from the stacks of an on-site refinery at Syncrude. The embankment dam along the road, the main containment wall for the Mildred Lake Settling Basin, is more than 11 miles long, one of the largest earthen dams on the planet. At the time, the rainbow-sheened ponds bracketing the highway spread across more than 50 square miles of former wetlands, and they are expanding at a rate of nearly half a billion gallons each day.

Lakes this large and foul have an impact. In April 2008, Robert Colson, a heavy-equipment operator with Syncrude, spotted what he could only describe as lumps floating on the company’s nearby Aurora tailings pond. He had been puzzling over the scene for a few minutes when a group of ducks came flapping in and landed. “And that’s when I realized what was going on,” he said later. More than 1,600 migrating waterfowl were killed on that day alone.

When I pulled off onto a sandy turnout to get a better look at the Mildred Lake Basin, I could see a parade of empty yellow hazmat suits propped up on the banks and set bobbing on tethered oil drums in the lakes. Their arms stretched wide in a pantomime of panic, they served as makeshift scarecrows, nicknamed “bitu-men.” I could hear the constant fire of 100-decibel air cannons, installed on the shoreline and timed to go off intermittently to frighten away waterfowl and other birds.

All of this was in place at the time of the waterfowl deaths in 2008, but none of it had been switched on. Still, Syncrude officials denied that they bore responsibility, saying the deaths were “an act of God.” The government eventually levied only a nominal fine—roughly eight hours’ worth of corporate revenues—and even then Syncrude complained that these environmental strictures were unworkable, warning that the company would be breaking the law every hour of every day.

I turned west from the highway, toward Fort McKay, and drove past construction crews who were widening the old road. I could see the signs of recent expansion everywhere—heavy equipment parked in newly laid gravel yards, surges of black smoke rising from diesel engines in the distance. When I finally reached the edge of the village, I wasn’t sure I’d actually arrived. A looping mud road crisscrossed the tree-stripped hillside, where haphazard clapboard houses were scattered. Trucks and four-wheelers stood parked in gravel driveways and on patchy front lawns.

Fort McKay has no restaurant and just one market, which was shuttered when I was there. Many of the residents, most of them registered First Nations members, get by on some form of subsistence hunting or trapping, as allowed for in . Tepee smokehouses rose from behind backyard privacy fences. As I moved along the river, a potent ammonia smell hung in the air, but it was a sunny day and people were packing tackle and rods onto their motorboats.

But the river is no longer the central sustaining force in the community. After the start of the latest tar-sands boom, fishermen began to report rising numbers of deformities: whitefish and walleye with tumors and skin lesions, burbot with misshapen spines, northern pike with bulging eyes.

In 2007, the Fort Chipewyan health board asked Kevin Timoney, a scientist who had done extensive work in the Peace-Athabasca Delta area, to study the water and soil quality in the region. His findings were distressing: elevated levels of arsenic and mercury in fish, the water supply, even the river sediment. Timoney estimated that tar-sands mines were exposing deposits of heavy metals, especially arsenic, which were then running into the water. Alberta Health and Wellness, the provincial health ministry, conceded that arsenic exposure was widespread but countered that it was impossible to control “due to its presence in the earth’s crust.”

Soon after, a report by the Pembina Institute, an environmental-impact assessment firm, estimated that Tar Island Pond One, owned by Suncor, was producing a steady daily leak of more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic chemicals and heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, and lead. By Suncor’s own admission, the pond released 400,000 gallons of sludge into the river every day, almost enough to fill a river barge. And that was just one pond. , a Canadian environmental-action group, estimated the combined daily leakage from all the tailings ponds into the Athabasca River to be nearly three million gallons. But still the government refused to intercede.

The situation has grown so grim that the United Nations in May 2014 for the Canadian government to launch a special inquiry into the treatment of First Nations people, specifically citing, among other concerns, that more than half of all native people on government reserves face health risks due to contaminated drinking water. Government officials have failed to act, the report said, because they see the interests of native people as counter to the best interests of Canadians. James Anaya, then the U.N.’s special rapporteur on indigenous rights, warned that lawsuits and government claims over treaty violations have languished so long that many First Nations have “all but given up.”

Officials at Suncor declined to discuss the environmental impact of tar-sands mining with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. Will Gibson, Syncrude’s media relations adviser, said in a phone interview: “Human activity is going to have an impact. Industrial activity is going to have an impact. For us, it’s important to mitigate that impact.” He pointed to Syncrude’s large expenditures on R&D for new processes aimed at reducing emissions and minimizing the negative effects of mining. As for health risks, he said that the company’s extraction techniques, past or present, “would never have any impact in terms of causing cancer.”

Celina Harpe's home, a tiny fifties-era house with slate blue clapboard siding, sits below the roadbed, perched on a bend in the Athabasca. Harpe greeted me there but didn’t want to talk inside, because it was cramped and drafty. Instead we walked across the road to the elder-care section of the community center.

Harpe is small and unsteady, but her short curly hair is still dark and her eyes are bright behind her square, tinted glasses. Seated inside, looking out through a broad bank of picture windows, she remembered again how her grandfather had warned her about the river’s future. Soon, she said, she would have no choice but to move to Fort McMurray. She turned her hands over to show me lesions on her knuckles and between her fingers. “My hands get all these sores. Do you see?” she said. “We can’t drink that tap water because it’s no good
. It’s got too much chemicals. If it can do this to your hands, what do you think it’s doing to our insides, you know?”

Harpe said it hadn’t always been this way. Her sister, Dorothy McDonald, became chief in the eighties, after their father, Phillip McDonald, was killed in a crash on the logging road in 1976. Before Dorothy took over, the encroachment of tar-sands development had already left many people concerned about their health, so Celina’s father had arranged for pump stations to be installed, dispensing water trucked in from Fort McMurray. But one pump tower burned in late 1981, and another froze during the bitter winter of 1982. People went down to the river and drew their drinking water straight from the Athabasca.

After several weeks of getting by this way, Dorothy, as the newly elected chief, received a message from Suncor: there had been a spill. One of Suncor’s tailings ponds had been releasing oil, grease, and other contaminants into the river for days—up to 17 times more than the legally permitted limit. McDonald demanded action from officials at Alberta Environment—the province’s main environmental protection agency—but they declined to do anything.

“So she took Suncor and Syncrude to court,” Harpe said. “She charged them for polluting the water.” A provincial judge eventually found Suncor guilty of violating the Fisheries Act—not of poisoning the community—and ordered the company to pay just $8,000.

About the same time, Harpe, who had gotten a job as a community-health nurse because she could translate for English-speaking provincial doctors and tribal people who spoke Cree and Dene, started to notice a rash of illnesses that had never affected Fort McKay before. Later, when she became the first native liaison coordinator at the Fort McMurray hospital, she heard similar complaints coming from the residents of Fort Chipewyan. When doctors came back with diagnoses, she had trouble translating. “We never heard of asthma,” Harpe told me. “We didn’t know there was such thing as cancer. We had no name for it.” Before long it seemed as if everyone in the community was sick or had a family member who was seriously ill.

“I lost one son first with sickness before I lost my husband,” Harpe said. The main room of the community center was ringed with black-and-white portraits of band members. “That’s me there,” she said. Harpe couldn’t remember exactly when the photos were taken, but her portrait looked to be about a decade old.

“Beside me there, that lady, she died,” she said, pointing to the next photograph. “My cousin Stella, she’s gone. She just died in January.” She began moving down the line. “Her, my auntie, there in that corner by the flowers, she’s gone. He died last year, that gentleman. That guy is still alive. He died, this other one that’s next to Johnny.” Many of the people didn’t appear old, 50 at most. “That couple there, they’re gone. He’s still alive. She’s still alive. She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone. He’s gone. She’s gone. That lady’s gone.” I asked at what age people were being diagnosed with cancer. “People are dying at 35, 40,” she said. She shook her head.

“It’s pretty sad, because my father was a good chief. My sister was such a good chief. My sister Dorothy’s right there,” she said, pointing to a portrait. “Dorothy passed away.”

Dayle Hyde turned into the dirt parking lot of the Fort McKay community school. She wanted to show me another side of the village, starting with the place where her own education began—and where her father was the teacher, and later principal, for more than three decades. Hyde, in her early thirties, is worldly compared with a lot of the younger people in Fort McKay. She wears cat-eye glasses and has a nose ring. She went away to high school in Fort McMurray and later graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in native studies and a minor in art and design. Now she’s the communications director for the Fort McKay First Nation. She’s also the middle child of Dorothy McDonald.

Hyde said her mother’s court case had energized Fort McKay and sparked further protest. Most notably, in 1983, McDonald had organized a blockade of the logging road, the one where Dorothy’s father had died. “They allowed one logging truck to go through the community,” Hyde said, “and then they erected a roadblock and wouldn’t allow any others to go through.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were sent to end the standoff, but McDonald refused to back down. Though the January dark sent temperatures plummeting to minus 20, band members kept vigil around the clock. Finally, on the sixth day, three cabinet ministers agreed to hear out Fort McKay’s concerns about logging and tar sands.

To honor McDonald and her stand, the band later erected an enormous community center on the same road as the old blockade site. But Hyde balked at the notion, pushed by elders like her aunt, Celina Harpe, that the roadblock was the kind of opposition the community needed now.

“Let me make something clear,” Hyde said. “When my mom was being very aggressive, we didn’t get anywhere.” Yes, the government arranged for meetings, but nothing changed. Officials commissioned studies that were never completed and made empty promises that were designed only to defuse tension.

The real turning point, Hyde said, was when her mother began to focus on what she called “parallel development”—the concept that if industry was benefiting, then the community should benefit in a proportionate manner. Pollution should be offset by jobs and contracts for native-owned companies.

Tribal leaders started by getting a single janitorial contract, for cleaning offices at Suncor’s headquarters. McDonald also pushed the company to give something back to McKay. She convinced executives to make a small donation toward the construction of a playground at the local school—the first project sponsored by one of the tar-sands developers—and the school’s principal (her husband, Rod Hyde) got matching funds from Suncor. This was the end of vocal opposition, Hyde said, and the beginning of negotiation and partnership.

In 1987, McDonald filed a claim with the Canadian government, charging that 23,000 acres of property surrounding Fort McKay—which were being developed under private lease—were part of the land deeded to the band under Treaty 8. Instead of claiming that the community had been harmed by development, she contended that it was owed compensation for treaty violations. In 2006, two decades after McDonald filed the original claim and a year after her death due to complications from lupus, the paid the band $41.5 million in compensation for land that belonged to them under the treaty—and, more important, agreed that they were titleholders to 8,200 acres of land under exploration for tar-sands development.

Hyde drove me up the ridge to where construction crews were building new modern homes and laying cobblestone driveways. It could have been an affluent suburb to any midsize city in America—all aluminum siding and fake stone facades. People down by the river have derisively dubbed this new development Beverly Hills. They accuse Jim Boucher, the chief for 24 of the past 28 years—and a man who originally opposed oil-sands projects but now supports them—of putting profits over health. Celina Harpe was blunt. “He’s selling us out,” she said. “He doesn’t care as long as it puts money in his pocket.”

Boucher declined to speak with me, but in interviews with local media he has bristled at such characterizations. “We were antidevelopment for a long time,” he told one reporter. “But at the end of the day, it came down to the point where government would approve the projects and our rights were diminished by virtue of what they were doing. Gradually, we came to recognize we had no other option but to develop an economy of our own.”

Hyde said the big houses were part of the mixed bag created by the tar-sands boom. Companies netting hundreds of millions of dollars per year are reaping huge profits, but they’re also paying excellent wages: in Fort McKay, entry-level skilled workers can expect to pull down six-figure salaries.

“It’s not been accepted per se, but it’s a realization that if we’re going to stay here, this is one of the things that we have to deal with,” she said. “We’re never going to stop the oil-sands development. It’s never going to go away until the oil is gone. The best that we can do is to try to mitigate some of those negative impacts.”

Trying to lessen the impact of tar-sands development seems a nearly impossible task. Everything about the work sites is sprawling, and it stretches ever closer to the edges of Fort McKay. The tree line across the river is now denuded in places where new digging is set to begin. Fences and barricades have been erected along newly constructed mine roads, blocking band members—often without warning—from reaching traditional hunting grounds. And new projects bring more and more mine workers.

The residential camps where those workers live house thousands of people, almost all of them men from Canada and the U.S., in row after row of modular multi-story buildings. At Suncor, the barracks—square roofed and vinyl sided, like overgrown trailer homes—stand close to the highway but are ensconced behind tall chain-link fences. At Syncrude, the buildings are painted with black and white stripes, practically daring those who live inside to compare them to cell blocks. And many do. Though photography is forbidden and workers are instructed not to write publicly about life in camp, there are many YouTube videos, Twitter pictures, Facebook updates, and blog entries complaining about the drab institutional architecture and lockdown conditions. One especially poetic employee wrote online that Wing 39 of Imperial Oil’s Wapasu Camp East, where he lived, stood “austere in the Arctic night,” bringing to mind “prison camps of the Soviet Gulag.”

Inside, hundreds of identical eight-by-ten rooms stretch down long corridors, each furnished only with a bed, a nightstand, and maybe a TV. There are game rooms and large cafeterias, but workers aren’t afforded much downtime. Most are pulling 12-to-14-hour shifts for three weeks straight. Every morning they are loaded onto buses, swiping site badges and passing through metal detectors. And they work nonstop, even through the subzero cold and the round-the-clock darkness of deep winter, until they are returned to the camps for sleep.

The workers endure these conditions for a simple reason: most can earn salaries between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. If a man works and puts away his money for two or three years, it’s possible to leave with a nest egg of half a million dollars. And once they’ve done that, these men will leave northern Alberta and never look back.

It’s not so simple for the First Nations mine workers of Fort McKay. Most of the major tar-sands developers reserve positions for native applicants—and now, employing more than 1,600 full-time First Nations workers, they are virtually the only game in town. Even the people who don’t work directly in the mines are often employed by subcontractors. The Fort McKay Group of Companies, which began with that single janitorial contract, has an earthworks division to remove mud from tailings ponds and reinforce containment dykes, but it also builds access roads and installs guardrails. The companies have joint ventures offering catering and lodging services for mine workers. They provide office help and logistical assistance. No matter how far removed, the jobs in Fort McKay exist because of the tar-sands developers, so even those who hate the mines now depend on them, whatever the risks.

Celina Harpe’s husband worked as a crane operator at one of the mine sites. One night, riding the transport boat home, he fell into the Athabasca River. He struggled to keep himself afloat, but his rubber work boots filled with water and pulled him under. Such sudden deaths are a fact of life in the mines; there have been six on-site fatalities so far in 2014. But for most people in Fort McKay, it’s not the threat of workplace injury that worries them. Instead they fear that on-site exposure to chemicals and fumes, followed by exposure from drinking water and wild game and breathing toxic emissions every night, means that they never get any relief from the effects of the development. In the eighties, Dorothy McDonald commissioned an air-quality study by epidemiologists at the University of British Columbia, who tested hair samples and found that four of McKay’s 44 children had above-normal levels of lead. Long before residents of Fort McKay have a chance to set foot on a work site or earn a single paycheck, they are at elevated risk of exposure to heavy metals. One known outcome of such exposure is autoimmune disorders—particularly lupus, which is what shortened the life of Dorothy McDonald.

So while their white counterparts get rich working in the mines and then head back south to Fort McMurray or Edmonton or the U.S., the native residents of Fort McKay stay and face the uncertain consequences.

When I told Dr. John O’Connor what Dayle Hyde had told me, that band leaders of Fort McKay were looking for ways to work with developers to minimize impact, his face tightened with worry. Officially, O’Connor is the director of Health and Human Services at Fort McKay First Nation, but in practice he’s a country doctor, shuttling from one village to the next along the Athabasca to provide primary health care. White bearded, with a stethoscope always around his neck, he moves slowly, taking his time with each patient. But when we discussed tar-sands developers and the Alberta government, O’Connor couldn’t hide his misgivings. Together, he said, industry and government have forced communities like Fort McKay to join in their own destruction.

“It’s almost a choice of, ‘Do I die by starvation, or do I die by poisoning?’ ” he said, his voice soft and resigned. O’Connor, 57, grew up in the working-class section of Limerick City, Ireland, and retains a gentle accent. “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. What decision can you make?”

O’Connor questions the very notion of parallel development. Certainly, the profits are not shared equally—and neither are the risks. In 2003, not long after O’Connor began making weekly visits to Fort Chipewyan in his capacity as an Alberta provincial doctor, the local school-bus driver came in to schedule an appointment. He had lost a lot of weight and couldn’t figure out why. Blood tests revealed that he was suffering from cholangiocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer that attacks the bile ducts. O’Connor had never seen a single patient with it. “Never in my practice did I expect to see a case,” he told me.

But O’Connor knew a great deal about the illness because his father had been diagnosed with it a decade before—and died, as did O’Connor’s patient in Fort Chip, within a matter of weeks. He knew the illness was exceedingly rare, affecting just one in 100,000 people, but soon there were more cases: one in 2005 and another in 2006. Two more people died before he could do blood work. And it wasn’t just cancer of the bile ducts. Within five years, O’Connor diagnosed five cases of leukemia and four cases of lymphoma. Six residents of Fort Chip died of colon cancer.

In March 2006, Alberta Health and Wellness announced that it would conduct a thorough review of death and cancer statistics. They would track people through their treaty and federal ID numbers to include tribal members who had left Fort Chipewyan and became sick elsewhere. They would also study the related communities in other parts of the Athabasca River Valley. But then, just a few weeks later, Health Canada and Alberta Health and Wellness announced that the cancer rates in Fort Chip “.” Case closed.

O’Connor claims that government officials admitted to him that they were missing data from several months in 2004 and 2005, the most recent years available, but only alerted him to this after the study was completed. Worse, a review conducted by the National Review of Medicine, a prominent medical newspaper in Canada, alleged that the government had fudged the average by using a population parameter of 30,000 instead of the village’s actual population of fewer than 1,000. Multiple subsequent tests concluded that the cases ruled into the government study actually represented about a 30 percent higher rate of cancer than expected for a community the size of Fort Chip.

Around the same time, Suncor commissioned an independent study to evaluate the human-health risk leading up to a proposed expansion project that has since been scrapped. Normally, authorities would consider more than one extra case of cancer in a population of 100,000 people to represent an unacceptable public-health hazard. The Suncor report—undertaken by Golder Associates, a firm that routinely performs environmental-impact assessments for the province—found that elevated rates of arsenic in Fort Chipewyan’s drinking water had raised the community’s cancer risk by the ‹equivalent of 450 extra cases per 100,000.

Alberta Health and Wellness quickly rejected the findings and announced that the agency would do its own study. In the meantime, Canada’s health minister went before the Legislative Assembly of Alberta to assure lawmakers, “We’re satisfied that arsenic levels in the area are actually lower than in other areas.”

After O’Connor , he received a letter from the registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta saying that Health Canada believed he’d made false allegations of elevated cancer rates, raised undue alarm in the community, obstructed efforts to investigate his claims, and engendered mistrust in Health Canada. If the review committee upheld the claims, O’Connor’s attorney warned him, it would be “career ending.” He told me that when he heard this news, he ran to the bathroom and vomited.

But as the review of O’Connor slowly progressed, other researchers began to collect data and uncover trends supporting his theories. In February 2009, the Alberta Cancer Board of the cancer data collected by Health Canada and Alberta Health and Wellness—this time including the full data.

The language of the report was clear. “The number of cancer cases observed in Fort Chipewyan was higher than expected for all cancers combined and for specific types of cancer, such as biliary-tract cancer and cancers in the blood and lymphatic system,” the authors concluded. They also acknowledged that cancer rates in the community had climbed in recent years.

In November 2009, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta —though it insisted that he could have been more cooperative with government efforts to investigate. By then O’Connor was the director of Health and Human Services at Fort McKay. He promised to be as helpful as possible if the government would perform a health study of the Fort McKay community. The village shared so many family connections with Fort Chip, he argued, it only made sense to study them together. Initially, provincial authorities promised to do just that—and even said they would appoint O’Connor to the investigatory team. But years have passed and nothing has happened.

“Fort Chip, walked away from,” O’Connor told me. “And now McKay’s been walked away from.”

When I arrived at Mel Grandjamb’s house, set on the fringe of all the new construction, he was waiting in his driveway next to a motor home. Behind him stood his three four-wheelers, his motorboat, his sixties-era muscle car, and his Hummer. Inside, the hallway of his house was covered in furs from one end to the other.

Grandjamb, a chief of Fort McKay First Nation in the early nineties and the former CEO of the , is one of the last trapper holdouts in the community, maintaining his traplines to this day. Wolves, wolverines, martins, fishers, foxes, coyotes, lynx, beavers, rabbits: they hung on evenly spaced hooks, their metal provincial tags still intact. Grandjamb traps now as a way of staying connected to a traditional lifestyle he learned from his father in the backwoods around Moose Lake.

“My first couple of years, we actually used dog teams to the trapline,” he said. “No one uses dog teams anymore. That part of the culture is gone.”

But Grandjamb shrugged off the changeover to gas-powered engines, and he doesn’t fault the petroleum interests developing the tar sands. “Industry is industry,” he said. It exists for one purpose—profit—and pushes relentlessly toward that goal. If people want to control industry, they should elect government officials committed to strict regulation. “If there wasn’t a license to operate funded by the provincial government, these plants wouldn’t be operating,” he said.

As sanguine as Grandjamb seemed, the fact is that Fort McKay First Nation had , near Moose Lake, more vocally than it had at any time since Dorothy McDonald was chief. The spot, which is the ancestral home of both the Cree and the Dene, is sacred to band members. Around Moose Lake, he said, “you get out to your cabin, you hear the fire going and the wolves howling, and it’s life.”

But then, in 2010, , a subsidiary of , applied to start steam-assisted extraction of tar sands near Moose Lake. Band leaders, including Chief Jim Boucher, argued that the Brion project violated the buffer zone around Fort McKay, as established by their legal victory in 2006. Leaders in other villages rallied to their defense, hoping to set a firm precedent forcing developers to consult native communities before beginning new projects.

At that time, members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation—south of Fort McMurray, in Lac La Biche—, in which they argued that tar sands have so harmed fish and wildlife populations that mining operations constitute a violation of their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and trap. And the Fort Chipewyan First Nation was of the Jackpine mine and the company’s Pierre River tar-sands project. “If Fort McKay can set precedents for what’s necessary to preserve their cultural rights,” Eriel Deranger, spokeswoman for Fort Chip, , “it strengthens our arguments.”

But in February 2014, Fort McKay withdrew its complaint. A confidential deal with Brion promised that the Fort McKay reserve would receive environmental protections, construction contracts at the new site, and an undisclosed amount of cash—which the city expects to be in the millions. “We didn’t get a no-development zone,” Fort McKay’s lead negotiator, Alvaro Pinto, acknowledged.

Tribal members like Celina Harpe complained that Boucher didn’t press hard enough to protect the community. “They didn’t even ask for a 20-kilometer buffer zone,” she told me. “The chief sold us out without our consultation, without our advice.”

When Brion representatives came out to pitch the benefits of the deal in a meeting at the community center, they met with anger. According to Harpe, a Brion spokesperson told the crowd, “Native people are complaining, and they never had it so good.” Harpe said she leaped to her feet and began banging the table. “You white trash!” she shouted. “You don’t know how many people we buried, how much sorrow. You don’t know what the oil companies have done to us people.”

Dayle Hyde confessed to understanding how Harpe felt. “Moose Lake is sacred to the people of Fort McKay,” she told me. That’s where Dorothy McDonald had felt most at home and where her family had scattered her ashes. “That was our place to go, and now that’s going to be changed as well. It’s another thing we have to deal with and live with.”

But Hyde insisted that fighting Brion was unrealistic. To show me why, she spread out a large map of the area—and pointed out a provincial park to the west of Moose Lake, then the land specifically set aside for the Fort McKay reservation. All around, millions of acres were depicted in jagged squares of different colors, representing all the land already leased by dozens of oil companies. “This whole area,” Hyde said, “at some point or another, people are going to be trying to figure out how to develop it.” , a private consulting firm specializing in energy resources, argued that Fort McKay’s request for a buffer zone should be denied because it would result “in sterilization of a significant bitumen resource.”

The Alberta government, despite Fort McKay’s legal foundation, sided with Brion. “When you have an industry that’s the economic driver of the whole province,” Hyde told me, “there doesn’t seem to be a neutral party. I was left with the impression that the Alberta government is more interested in the well-being of Alberta as a whole rather than the people in a small community. They wouldn’t be—what’s the word they used?—‘sterilizing’ the resources at Moose Lake for the betterment of a small number of people.”

She let out a quick, defensive laugh, then wavered nervously into tears. “I find this map really depressing.”

Mel Grandjamb understands the feeling, but he steadfastly refused to blame the oil companies. He had grown tired of environmentalists questioning the compromises of the leaders of Fort McKay—flying in on airplanes and arriving in cars to criticize the fossil-fuel industry.

“It’s good to say, Everything stops,” he said. “But does that mean I walk to town tonight? Does that mean I get in the canoe and I paddle upstream for three days?” He shook his head dismissively at the very idea. “They’ll never stop this. Never.”

Grandjamb's words seemed to follow me on my drive back across the toxic tailings ponds encircling Suncor and Syncrude, back down Highway 63 to the brand-new airport, where I dropped off my rental SUV and wandered through the terminal’s sole gift shop, selling piles of T-shirts that read FORT MCMURRAY and PROPERTY OF OIL SANDS.

Grandjamb was right: there’s no stopping this—not unless we collectively demand something different. And there are few signs of that happening.

Just days later, I got word that Alberta’s provincial government had approved another project. Originally explored by , then sold to for development, the site is slated for the extraction of tar sands from more land around Moose Lake, one more piece in the lease-map jigsaw puzzle. Leaders in Fort McKay complained to the Alberta government that they had not been “adequately consulted” about this new site and its potential health impacts on the reservation. The government agreed with Prosper that the community had failed to precisely define “adequately.”

Ted Genoways () is the author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, published by Harper in October.

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The originally appeared on .

“You’re entering at your own risk,” Don Mann said, then laughed. We were climbing a passage chain-sawed through downed trees and splintered timbers ringing the broken and slanted wreckage of his home. We balanced on blocks of blue Styrofoam insulation and awkwardly perched palettes, then scrambled onto the corrugated roof of his porch—a perfect vantage back upriver.

On May 4, 2009, broke thick surface ice into massive floes, pushing Don’s house off its foundation—along with most other homes in Eagle, Alaska—and carrying everything nearly 100 yards into the trees. Even by the time I was there three weeks later, giant blocks of ice—two and three times the size of the cars and trucks they had flattened in their path—stretched from where we stood all the way to the riverbank. At the corner of the roof, Don had set up a camouflage camp chair. He sat there sometimes, he said, and looked out at the devastation. Most times, though, he was inside, salvaging what he could.

Don and his wife Judy were relative newcomers to Eagle, but they had been dreaming of returning to the state for close to four decades. “I come to Alaska in ’67,” Don told me. “We drove the Alcan. That was 1,158 miles of gravel road at that time.” He worked on Cook Inlet as a crane superintendent on offshore platform Bruce. After 26 months, he moved to the newly begun oil drilling operation on Prudhoe Bay. He slept for two weeks on a cot in the Arctic Inn in a nook next to the bathrooms when he first arrived, working 12 on, 12 off, drilling piling holes to build the pads to put the new rigs on. Don is a high plains good old boy through and through, but he took to life in Alaska—the hard work and high pay, the can-do spirit and anything-goes attitude.

And, as the summer of 1969 arrived, the work seemed like it would last forever. More than 800 miles of 48-inch pipe was arriving from Japan for the proposed Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, called “TAPS.” The 11 mammoth pumps to propel the crude were on order. The heavy equipment to dig a trench and accompanying road all the way from Prudhoe to Valdez was being moved into place. Only at the very last minute was an application filed with the Interior Department for a permit. Max C. Brewer, with the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Barrow, who the Fairbanks News-Miner called “probably America’s ranking authority on the Arctic,” objected to the plan, arguing that the heated oil passing through the pipeline would melt the underlying permafrost—causing damage to the surrounding tundra and, in all likelihood, causing ruptures in places where the ground shifted. He proposed an above-ground plan and called for more study.

But, even before the Interior Department could rule, several environmental groups filed suit under the newly implemented National Environmental Policy Act, demanding a study of alternative routes and an objective environmental impact statement. The project was tied up in legal difficulties for years—and served as a blueprint for future generations of environmentalists seeking to slow down efforts to ram through drilling and pipeline-building projects. (Anti-pipeline Nebraskans, for example, have successfully staved off Keystone XL for a year, using these exact NEPA requirements.) “They had the pipe in Valdez to build the pipeline, but they wouldn’t let them build it,” Don said, “so they shut down the drilling.” He and Judy went back to Oklahoma and raised their three children and two more, always with an eye toward returning. But years turned into decades, and it wasn’t until Don retired from a career spent in construction and oil drilling in Oklahoma that they finally made the move. “I always wanted to come back to Alaska,” he told me.

I UNDERSTAND THE ATTRACTION Don felt.

When I was still in my early twenties—at loose ends but with a little money saved up—I loaded up my SUV and headed north with the simple objective of not stopping until I reached the Arctic Ocean. I visited fishing villages still dependent on the Yukon River for subsistence, mining camps where men still scrabbled in sand for flecks of gold, and I saw the Porcupine caribou herd on its great migration to its calving ground in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As I started a deep descent on the “haul road,” the gravel track constructed to provide access for repairing leaks on the pipeline and trucking heavy equipment to the drilling platforms at Prudhoe Bay, I blew both rear tires on my truck. I fishtailed side to side all the way down the scree slope, managing somehow not to roll over, and then limped the car off the road to the edge of the tundra—my tires in shreds, 200 miles short of the ocean. But I jacked the truck up, unchained the two spares I’d kept in reserve on the overhead rack, and tightened the lugs while big rigs spit gravel and dust as they passed. And, then, in the spirit of the place, I drove on.

By the time I reached Deadhorse, the drilling village of prefab trailers skidded onto gravel pads, I felt like I’d earned my stripes. But two miles short of the ocean, I discovered that access to Prudhoe Bay is restricted to oilfield workers; the only public access was through specially permitted tour groups. So my adventure concluded by being ushered into a long passenger van and shuttled to a patch of beach, where we could all dip our toes into the icy water in the shadow of BP’s towering oil rig. As we drove back toward the guard booth, an Arctic fox loped across the road and slid under the chain-link fence. I was riding shotgun, so I had a much better view than the neck-craning Germans in the back, struggling to get off a few shutter clicks through the tinted windows. I watched the fox hop over a pile of narrow gauge pipe and disappear. The driver told me I should count myself lucky. They hardly ever saw Arctic foxes in the area anymore.

That was my first inkling of just what had been lost when Congress finally gave in to public outcry over fuel prices after OPEC announced its embargo in October 1973, touching off the oil crisis. Then, as now, pressure for the project was wrapped up in politics. Nixon was weeks from protesting that he wasn’t a crook, and Congress didn’t want to lose the political upper hand. On November 12, 1973, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act giving the go-ahead for construction of the pipeline and haul road—environmental impact be damned—sailed through Congress. (Out of 535 members of both houses, fewer than 20 had the guts to vote against it.) By January, construction on the Dalton Highway was underway, and the first pipe was laid by March 1974.

For the next three years, tens of thousands of workers flocked to Alaska—lured by top-dollar jobs in the midst of a recession—and the region experienced the greatest economic boom (and moral backslide) since the Klondike and Nome gold strikes. By the time the pipeline was opened on June 20, 1977—35 years ago—more than $8 billion had been spent, 32 lives lost, and the damage to the environment was left intentionally ambiguous. But so long as gas prices remained low and American incomes were bolstered, the costs were deemed acceptable.

Barely a year later, thousands of workers at the nationalized oil refineries in Iran went on strike, setting the wheels in motion for what would become the next energy crisis.

RECENTLY, TO MARK THE 35th anniversary of TAPS, the Juneau Empire —a U.S. Senator from Alaska since 2002 who took over the post from her father, Frank, who had held the seat since 1981, shortly after the pipeline’s completion. Not surprisingly, Murkowski defended the pipeline era in Alaska. “TAPS has delivered more than 16.6 billion barrels of oil,” she writes. “For Alaskans, that translates into more than $171 billion in revenues to the state treasury.” But the pipeline has provided more than just tax dollars. She cites numbers from the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, which found that “three out of every 10 jobs in Alaska can ultimately be attributed to TAPS.” Alaska’s personal income tax rate went from 14.5 percent before the pipeline to zero since 1980, while the state’s gross product and earned personal income both have increased five-fold.

Money has flowed so freely that the state established the Alaska Permanent Fund and the Alaska Resource Rebate, paying every resident an annual dividend on state-invested funds ceded by oil interests. (This year the payout is expected to top $2,000.) Three years ago, when I visited Eagle after the devastating breakup of the Yukon River that spring, I wrote: “Even households in the remotest areas, places where people think of themselves as outside state rule, receive state assistance and pay into an economy built on the very industry that is destroying the natural world they love and depend upon. For a generation, Alaskans have argued that their numbers are too small, the wilderness too wide for their drilling to have a lasting effect. But the real threat comes from the people they supply, people who may never see Alaska but whose carbon emissions are wreaking havoc at the poles.” Yet, in the years since, our national obsession with drilling and building pipelines (in the form of TransCanada’s and the ) has only grown—and Murkowski wants to see that expansion in Alaska as well.

“TAPS once carried nearly two million barrels of oil a day from the North Slope to the port of Valdez,” she writes, “but is now down to almost a quarter of that. Today, Alaska is no longer America’s second-largest producer of oil, having been surpassed by North Dakota. And North Slope production continues to decline by seven percent annually. Without new oil production, throughput in the pipeline could fall enough to threaten its future viability. Shutting down the pipeline would mean closing up shop on the North Slope. Alaska’s oil—like its massive natural gas reserves today—would be stranded with no way to market, leaving the state scrambling to replace the 85 percent of its annual revenue that today comes from oil.”

Murkowski sees the future in the “federally owned lands and waters to the east, west and north of Prudhoe Bay” but opines that “access has been slowed by an administration more interested in designating new wilderness than shoring up Alaska’s economy.” But the numbers suggest just the opposite. A recent Department of Energy report showed that crude oil production in the United States has reached 5.88 million barrels per day, the most since 1998. Importation of foreign oil is in such steep decline that last year U.S. refiners exported 117 million gallons of petroleum products per day—nearly triple what they sold a decade ago. In fact, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel are now America’s three top exports. By some estimates, growth in fossil fuel production has produced 20 percent of jobs created since the start of the recession. But it’s not enough, Murkowski insists. “We must finally gain access to our resources in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. And we must continue our battle to win approval for production from the coastal plain of ANWR.”

But her view doesn’t account for the hidden costs of our dependency on oil.

ON THAT NIGHT IN May 2009, as the floodwaters rose around his home—and his phone went dead and the electricity cut out—Don Mann and his son Quincy set to knocking the pins out of the hinges of all the interior doors, stacking them up and trying to figure out a way they could be rigged into a raft. They gathered gallon jugs and emptied tubs—anything that might help buoy them when the water came in. This is the Alaska way: a fierce defiance in the face of impossible odds. But as Don stood at the window, watching the cab of his truck disappear under water, and the giant floes came pushing through the dense spruce, there was no denying the unstoppable power of the river. “I watched the trees crush and pop and snap and bend over and break,” Don told me. Some of the floes were so big and flat that he wondered if they might be able to ride one to safety.

, the Yukon Department of Environment has noted a trend toward earlier and earlier spring breakups on the Yukon near Dawson City in Canada, more than 100 miles upriver but south of Eagle. Spring breakups, on average, are six days earlier—and fall freeze-ups six days later—than they were just 100 years ago. Erratic temperatures in the autumn can thaw and re-freeze river ice, sometimes multiple times, before final freeze-up; this makes for thicker river ice. (I heard from many Alaskans that they could remember a time when you could ride snow machines up and down the Yukon, but now the frozen river is usually too rough to traverse.) And when warm temperatures arrive in the spring, carrying swift runoff from mountain snows, the results can sometimes be violent—as they were during the historic flooding three years ago.

When Don Mann stepped out onto the porch of his home to get a better look at the encroaching ice floes, he found his son Travis on his knees.

“What are you doing?” Don asked.

“I thought this was the time to get down and pray,” Travis said.

“But why are you on your knees?” Don demanded.

Travis had left his wife and four children back home in Oklahoma. “I want to be sure I’m heard,” he said.

Travis’s prayers were answered. Two of Don’s neighbors soon came through the woods in a pair of canoes. They paddled up to the roof of the porch and everyone climbed in—everyone but Don. Don is a big, barrel-bodied man, and when he tried to get in, the canoe wobbled and threatened to capsize. He hopped back onto the roof and ordered his family to safety; he would wait until one of the canoes could return for him. He climbed upstairs to look out the window to watch the ice piling up, pale and ghostly in the half-moon light.

Eventually, a canoe returned for him—and Don rebuilt his dream home and is back again living in Eagle along the banks of the Yukon River. But I fear that if we don’t change our habits as consumers of fossil fuels (and I’m well aware that I traveled first to Alaska in a gas-powered SUV and have since returned in a wide-bodied plane burning barrels of jet fuel) and if Alaska’s leadership does not seek other economic models for sustaining their state and begin investing in clean energy, then the Yukon River breakup of 2009 might just be the first of many violent, deadly, and costly floods. As the Trans-Alaska Pipeline turns 35, I hope it might serve as an occasion not only to celebrate the riches oil has brought to Alaskans but also as an opportunity to commit to investing some of that prosperity into the future health and happiness of Alaskans—and all Americans, all people of the world—who might wish to partake of the state’s unmatched beauty and biodiversity.

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Near dusk on our first night in the Surinamese capital of Paramaribo, my dad stood outside out hotel watching the sky fill with bats. I took this as a sign that they were generally thriving, even amid the throng and crush of the city. Dad shook his head.

Suriname Map

Suriname Map

Bat

The author and his father in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve

Bat

A field-mounted specimen of Artibeus obscurus

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“Look around,” he said. “What do you see?”

This is our familiar dynamic the dim but diligent seeker and the beleaguered but bemused scientist.

I studied the scene hard. I saw the whitewashed cinder-block buildings of our hotel lined up like boxcars. I saw a rum distillery, a bike-rental stand, half-collapsed homes held together by plywood and scavenged fencing. “What am I looking for?”

He pointed across the street to a tall palm spreading over a trash-strewn lot, holding his finger steadily, waiting. Then I saw: like drips from a leaky faucet, bats trickling from a hole in the trunk.

“Molossus molossus,” Dad said. Pallas's mastiff bat. A junk species.

“They're lousy fliers,” he explained. “Very fast but not very agile. They need wide-open spaces to hunt in, because they're not nimble enough to navigate tight spots. So for them to be this abundant means that an area has been extremely disturbed.”

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We were after something more elusive: Lophostoma schulzi, Schulz's round-eared bat, a species discovered by my father deep in the Amazon in 1979. Like many bats of the old forest, schulzi is a nimble flier that has the ability to thread dense undergrowth. Whenever timber is cleared, faster competitors take over, so our only hope of catching one was to go out among the tall trees, far from human development. We would confine ourselves to the areas where Dad had collected schulzi before jungle outposts inside Brownsberg Nature Park and at the base of the uncharted Tafelberg Plateau, in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve (CSNR). In Dad's heyday, he led teams of well-trained, well-equipped researchers, but this time it would be just the two of us, using a few ten-foot-tall nets. Dad didn't equivocate: He didn't like our chances.

“It's like casting out a net in the middle of the ocean and hoping to catch a specific fish,” he said.

The night had deepened and cooled, and the streetlights and neon signs of Paramaribo blazed in the twilight. A bass-heavy club beat struck up in the distance. Dad scratched his grizzled beard with mock seriousness, as if contemplating the half-moon climbing over the rooftops.

“But we came all this way,” he said. “So, what the fuck, let's go get one.”

EVEN AS A KID, I knew my dad wasn't like other dads. Most boys' fathers in the North Hills of Pittsburgh were mechanics, welders, steelworkers many of them Vietnam vets, laid off from the mills and scraping by. But my dad was Dr. Hugh H. Genoways, curator of mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He started the job in 1976 and soon after undertook a multi-year project, sponsored by Alcoa, the Pittsburgh aluminum giant, to study mammals in the isolated central highlands of Suriname. Those expeditions became the foundation of his career, but they also made him to my young eyes larger than life. He had been held at gunpoint in Mexico, housed his crew in a whorehouse in Jamaica, smuggled weapons into Guatemala. But Suriname represented a higher order of adventure: He was surmounting a remote plateau, hacking through dark jungle, returning with unknown species. The newspapers compared him to Indiana Jones. They called him Batman.

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And the bat he discovered was as exotic as the place in which it originated. It had a hairless face and a band of wartlike bumps that came to a point on its brow. Every visible inch of it was covered with these bumps its ears, its nose leaf, its arms, even the long digits that formed its wings. It was a ghastly little creature, but Dad's jesting affection for all bats became my genuine love for schulzi. It was Dad's bat and so somehow felt like my bat, my inheritance. Since its discovery nearly 30 years ago, however, only ten specimens of schulzi have been caught. The International Union for Conservation of Nature placed it on the Red List of Threatened and Endangered Species more than a decade ago, due to “ongoing human-induced habitat loss” a fact that, I long ago assumed, doomed it to imminent extinction.

Then, in 2007, a Conservation International expedition co-funded by Alcoa announced the discovery of 24 new species fish, snakes, toads, insects in two weeks of collecting on the Lely and Nassau plateaus of eastern Suriname. What caught my eye was the rediscovery of an armored catfish introduced to science 50 years ago but since given up on as extinct when runoff from illegal gold mines poisoned the only creek where it was known to exist. Its reappearance raised hopeful questions: Are species like schulzi really critically endangered or simply understudied? Was it possible they hadn't been seen in years only because no one had gone out to look?

But what drew me to South America wasn't just the adventure of netting bats. I also wanted a chance to take fuller measure of my father. Every summer, for most of my childhood, we rode around the country in our Chevy camper, my dad and his team setting traps and stringing the delicate lace-work webs known as mist nets. But when night fell and they started for the woods, I stayed at my mom's side, drawing pictures and writing stories while she cooked over the hiss of the propane stove. My dad never expressed anything like disappointment that I didn't take an early interest, but how could he not have felt a twinge?

A friend of his once confided, “I think it would be hard to be Hugh Genoways's son.” I knew what he meant. My dad is a gruff, barrel-chested giant a former college football player who approaches science and life with gridiron resolve. Experience tells him he's not only the smartest person in the room but the most tenacious. The refrain of my boyhood was this: “Nobody ever said it'd be fair.” But that didn't mean you gave up; it meant the only way to succeed was to outwork everybody else. To this day, our every phone conversation begins with him asking, “What are you working on?” and ends with him saying, “Get back to work.” But his grit is more than just runaway midwestern rearing. My father sees himself in an unwinnable race against the rest of humanity.

Twenty-five years ago, Dad told an international gathering of scientists that it was his goal to “preserve as much of the native habitat of South America as possible in an unaltered state for future generations.” But his pursuit of this legacy was interrupted. In 1982, at the height of his research, Suriname's military dictator, Desi Bouterse, ordered the so-called December murders, in which opposition leaders journalists, university professors, lawyers were rounded up and hanged. The ensuing chaos cut short Dad's work. He spent the rest of his career studying neotropical bats, but he never returned to Suriname.

When he retired last year, in his late sixties and slowed by diabetes, he vowed to go into the field only a few more times, just enough to wrap up unfinished business. So when I called him to say I'd booked tickets to Suriname, he seemed more resigned than enthusiastic. After so many years, I don't think he ever expected to go back. Nor, fearing what he might find, did he really want to.

NESTLED ON THE NORTH coast of South America, just above Brazil, Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) was colonized by successive waves of English and Dutch traders more than three centuries ago, but three-quarters of it remains unexplored. Some 80 percent of the nation's half-million people are strung along the Atlantic coast or crowded on the muddy banks of the Suriname River in Paramaribo, cut off from the interior by the verdant wall of the Amazon.

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Our first morning out, we headed toward Brownsberg Nature Park the country's first national nature reserve, three hours south of Paramaribo. As our Toyota pickup sped past the clapboard houses rotting in the blanketing humidity and blistering sun, it was hard not to feel that centuries of human effort have amounted to little more than a temporary stay against the encroaching jungle. On the outskirts of town, clouds broke into rain, forcing us to roll up our windows partway, until they whistled. The howl was so shrill that Dad had to tap me on the shoulder to get my attention.

“There it is,” he shouted.

In the distance rose the great, rusting bulk of a refinery, its even rows of smokestacks belching into the air. In 1941, Alcoa opened the Paranam processing plant to support cavernous bauxite mines along the Para and Suriname rivers. The mines were productive, but the cost to power them and process ore skyrocketed during World War II. When Holland granted Suriname limited self-rule in 1954, Alcoa saw an opening. The company negotiated an agreement with the new government for permission to dam the Suriname River and harness hydroelectric energy for a new smelter, aluminum oxide plant, and power station. The dam would bring electricity to a nation lit by kerosene. Alcoa called the dam Afobaka “back to African ways,” a return to ancestral glory for the Maroons, former slaves who inhabit the region.

But progress carried its own price. The lake created by the dam flooded at least seven Maroon villages and decimated the Suriname River they depended on. According to one long-term study, there were 172 species of fish just before the damming in 1964; within four years, that number was down to 62. The Maroons dubbed the lake Brokopondo literally “the canoe is broken,” a way of life scuttled.

In 1969, to counterbalance this disaster, the government created the Foundation for Nature Conservation in Suriname (STINASU), and Alcoa started underwriting expeditions from the Carnegie Museum, headed by my father. Their charge was to survey Brownsberg and other subsequently created provincial nature reserves while training a generation of Surinamese scientists under STINASU's first director, Johan Schulz, for whom my dad eventually named his bat.

As we neared the town of Brownsweg, the blacktop gave way to the greasy red clay typical of bauxite-rich soil. We fishtailed through puddles and throbbed over washboard. Dad snored contentedly in the backseat, but I was edgy, eager to get to work and away from the despoiled highway corridor. As we began our slow ascent up the plateau, out of the midday heat, I began to breathe easier. At a fork in the road, a park sign painted with a smiling, brown-faced monkey pointed the way through the trees.

BY MID-AFTERNOON, we'd set up in an abandoned World Wildlife Fund education center at the far end of the park headquarters. We threw open the windows and started unpacking gear nets, machetes for chopping poles, and an assortment of muslin bags to hold live bats. A clearing nearby served as the trailhead to several paths into the forest and provided a good spot to string our nets. “Bats are as lazy as people,” Dad explained. “If they find a trail, they use it.”

After setting nets and returning for dinner at a makeshift restaurant known as Rocky's, we met up with our guide, a young man from Brownsweg named Ramond Finisie. Known to everyone as Melkie (Dutch for “Milky”), he was only days from 20 but looked baby-faced, with wide, searching eyes. Wearing a traditional wrap around his neck and brandishing his machete, he had a mock swashbuckling air.

The night was cooling. The pale trunks of distant trees turned ghostly in the setting sun, then faded as fog rolled in. Before long, the socked-in plateau was cast in a hazy half-moon glow until, unexpectedly, the park lights buzzed to life. Their klieg-light brilliance the product of Alcoa's hydroelectric dam flattened everything into depthless overexposure. As we rounded a corner, we could see a bulb high overhead, its blinding fluorescent glare clearly illuminating our first net. Dad cursed under his breath.

We walked deeper into the foggy darkness but found the other nets empty, so Dad sat down under a palm-topped picnic shelter and waited. There's something maddeningly stubborn yet Buddha-like about him at moments like this not insistent, just unyielding, as if prepared to wait until the world comes to him. Melkie, too, seemed contented by the calm, circling the shelter, swinging his machete idly, crooning some unrecognizable snippet of song. I checked the nets obsessively, until I found one twitching with life, an irate bat that twisted in the nylon threads as it tried to bite its way out.

To remove a captured bat, you clasp it with a leather-gloved hand to keep it still. As it bites the glove's thumb, you work its rubbery wings free from the netting with your other hand. I'm no good at it and harbor the dual fear of being bitten and of dislocating their shoulders. Not Dad. He handled the bats with ease, talking to them all the while. “You're having a really bad night, aren't you?” Or: “Easy, now, don't be like that.”

Bit by bit, he educated me on what we were seeing. “OK, this little guy is a Saccopteryx bilineata,” he said, adjusting his headlamp to give me a better look. “See these sacs on his wings? He spends all day filling those with saliva and fluid from his glands, then he grooms that into his fur all over his body to attract females. Like Old Spice for bats. And see the two white racing stripes down the middle of his back? Also very distinctive. Sac-winged, double-lined Saccopteryx bilineata.” After each lecture, he took a muslin bag and dropped the bat in, then slipped the knotted drawstring under his belt like a scalp. That night we caught several bats, but no schulzi.

I could have slept the next day away, but Dad was up with the sun, skinning bats for scientific use. It's a process I learned as a small child. “You find the V in the rib cage,” he said back then, tapping my sternum, “then lift and push until the heart stops, the lungs collapse.” In seconds, the bats go from fierce animals to limp specimens. He slits them open and turns them inside out, working the pelts free, then stuffs the empty skin with cotton and wire, pinning it to a foam-core board until the hide dries.

While Dad skinned, I decided to hike down from the rim of the plateau to Witi Creek to scout the spot where the last two specimens of schulzi were collected, in 2002. Harry Hunfeld, STINASU's bluff, white-haired grounds manager, had warned that we might not be able to net in the area, because it had become a target= for illegal gold miners known as “pork knockers” a term coined in the fifties when the miners lived in the bush on a diet of salt pork and worked with pickaxes and shovels. Today the operations are huge, using bulldozers to level trees, backhoes and hydro cannons to trench the soil, and a mercury-separation-and-sluicing process that poisons the water.

Melkie and I descended the steep, rocky incline, weaving around fallen trees and hacking through undergrowth. We zigzagged from one bank to the other until the path leveled a bit and Melkie hopped into a bright patch of sunlight. Stepping out behind him, I saw that we were on the edge of a mud superhighway punched through the forest. Sun-hardened ruts left by heavy machinery stood two feet deep, pooled with standing rainwater and teeming with mosquito larvae. We followed the road up a short embankment into a stadium-size hole that pork knockers had slashed in the forest. The temperature must have climbed 15 degrees when we stepped into the sun. The area was devastated and, now, abandoned. There was no chance that forest-dwelling schulzi could thrive in an environment like this.

“Had the miners been down here for years?” I asked Melkie.

“Eight months.”

“Months?”

“Before that,” he said with a sweep of his machete, “all trees.”

BACK IN PARAMARIBO, we took off from the Zorg en Hoop airstrip and flew deep into the interior nothing but forest canopy below us, the coffee-brown Saramacca River snaking through. Our co-pilot was Henk Gummels, the owner of Gum Air, the same airline that flew Dad's crews to the foot of Tafelberg decades ago. Over the roar of the twin engines, I asked whether the Saramacca's muddy current was caused by tidal surge.

“Nee,” Henk said. “Pork knockers.”

As we flew deeper into the mountains, we saw their camps piles of slash, bulldozed gravel, and bright-yellow gashes of dirt carved from the lush green. Henk's wife, Jennifer, chatted in Dutch with her brother, Anton Brandon, the second in command at Suralco, the Surinamese subsidiary of Alcoa.

Before long, the distinctive flattop silhouette of Tafelberg appeared on the horizon, shrouded in clouds, its dark profile jutting some 3,000 feet above the forest floor. No one knows exactly when Tafelberg, or “Table Mountain,” was discovered it may have been during a Dutch voyage up the Coppename River in 1901 or an expedition on the Saramacca a year later. Either way, it remained imposing but remote, seemingly unreachable, marooned and embowered by the limitless forest, until in 1944 the New York Botanical Garden undertook a thorough probe of the forested mountaintop. Bassett Maguire, the garden's longtime curator, spent 54 days exploring the mountaintop and naming the Edenic places he encountered. But in nearly two months of collecting botanical specimens, his team didn't record a single word about the animal populations.

My dad set out to correct that in the fall of 1981, when two of Henk's planes carried his 13-person crew to the Rudi Kappel airstrip, where a pilot named Foster Ford ferried their gear on five round-trips to a sandy clearing on the edge of the plateau.

This mountain occupied such a large place in my childhood imagination that it seemed nearly unreal as we banked by the caprock. But there would be no trip to the top this time; Henk assured me that there was only one helicopter charter company in all of Suriname and that climbing was out of the question. I would have to settle for this flyby view, the plateau's square black shoulders already disappearing into the afternoon clouds. The engines revved, then smoothed to a hum as we swooped down toward the airstrip.

On the ground, we were greeted by the guide Henk had hired, Atinjoe Panekke. A TiriyÓ Indian, Atinjoe had a pro wrestler's physique, a shaved head, a goatee, and facial tattoos, but he wore Air Jordan shorts and flashed a quick smile whenever we managed to get something across in our mishmash of English, Spanish, and Dutch. He cut 12 perfect poles for our mist nets, wielding his machete with unnerving force and accuracy, then heaved them casually over one shoulder.

The first night we set up near a handmade wooden bridge spanning a creek. Over the next six hours we caught only four bats all rare and diverse, from Trachops cirrhosus, which uses echolocation to pluck piping tree frogs from the lower canopy, to Artibeus obscurus, which thrives on guava and soursop. But Dad couldn't understand why we weren't catching more. He had expected 10, 15; if we got lucky, 20. Four seemed like a bad sign. Bats are bellwethers, he reminded me. Without bats, the whole forest is in trouble.

But Dad wasn't about to give up that easy, so the next night we got ambitious, spending hours setting up six nets, including some that were nearly 60 feet long, at spots that effectively cut off three major trails. We caught just two bats again, uncommon species, but only two, and no schulzi. The night passed with so little action that Atinjoe dozed in the tall grass, snoring until he woke himself.

Well after midnight, we sat on the porch of the airstrip lodge, drinking warm Parbo beers while Dad reviewed the field notes from his old expeditions, tallying the incredible numbers of bats 40 and 50 each night caught at these very sites. To boost our spirits, I checked to see whether the rain barrel had caught enough water to allow for a much-needed shower. But when I twisted the spigot, only a miserable trickle bubbled out. Dad laughed at my stricken expression. “Come on, rookie,” he said, and, by the dim light of our perched flashlights, he hopped breathlessly under the icy dribble, before handing the soap off to me.

“Sorry,” he said with a toothy grin. “I think I used up all the hot water.” I laughed in spite of myself, a gallows laugh. Whether or not we caught that goddamned bat the next day, our last at Tafelberg, I knew the moment would stand alongside tales of past misadventures that my dad and his friends told over howls of laughter. This was my initiation.

So I commended myself to the frigid water the sound of my hollering rattling the rafters and echoing out into the starless night.

FOR OUR FINAL NIGHT in the CSNR, Dad decided to move deeper into the forest. All through the cloudy afternoon, he scouted the canopy on the other side of the airstrip for bulging termite nests, explaining that two of schulzi's closest relatives Lophostoma silvicolum and Lophostoma carrikeri are known to day-roost in cracks in arboreal mounds. Spotting several along a trail, Dad selected net placements on either side of a grove of tall palms. Of the few schulzi ever taken, several have been netted in palm-dominated forest, leading some to speculate that the bats may use them for hunting roosts at night. As Dad explained all this, I felt an irrational surge of optimism. The conditions were perfect; of course we'd catch one there.

Maybe Dad was feeling optimistic too, because he decided to string only one more net, the largest we had. We'd set it up across a stream at the top of a spectacular waterfall. The water there was thick froth so suffused with leaf tannin that it had turned the color of port wine. Both banks were blanketed with razor grass, but Atinjoe mowed the way clear with a few swift machete strokes. Dad decided to make the most of the dwindling daylight, so we unfurled the net, the low sun dappling the orange water. No sooner had we tied off the poles and switched on our headlamps than a light rain started to fall. Then it got heavy. Then heavier. By the time we returned to the first net, it sagged with rain, glistening in the beams of our lamps. The trees were piping with frogs.

“Will bats fly in the rain?” I asked.

“Not rain like this,” Dad said. “Not many, anyway.”

We tramped to the shelter of a deck overhanging the newer, larger lodge where Henk's family was staying. They stretched out in their hammocks drinking cabernet and enjoying the downpour. After a few drinks of our own, I asked Anton about Suralco's plans for Nassau and Lely plateaus, east of Brownsberg. Now that so many endangered species had been found, would Alcoa still mine?

“You must understand,” he said. “The Paranam mines, when they were opened, were estimated to contain 60 years of bauxite. It has now been 65. The ore cannot last.”

He acknowledged that the research team had found many rare species, but they'd also found evidence of illegal hunting by Maroons and illegal gold mining, most of it by French Guianese and Brazilians. “Saying these lands are off-limits to development,” he said, “would change nothing.” Averting the sort of wholesale devastation that has occurred at Brownsberg requires research and enforcement. Both require money. And the only money in Suriname comes from bauxite.

The rain continued to fall as Dad and I zipped our jackets and headed back out. “He's right, you know,” Dad said. “We can't expect the Surinamese to sit on their natural resources. You look around here, you see the rainforest, but people like Henk or Anton see their country. This is where they live.”

“But he's as much as admitted they're going to mine there,” I said. “That doesn't shock you?”

Dad was quiet as we walked. “Alcoa is going to do what's in its best interest,” he said finally. “That doesn't shock me. Suriname will do what's in its best interest. That doesn't shock me. And everybody in Suriname sees Alcoa mines in their best interest, so, no, I'm not shocked. Besides, what's the alternative? Mine iron instead? What does that solve?”

This is my father no pundit, no poet, no profiteer. He makes no value judgments, argues for no outcome. He is a thoroughgoing scientist and professor, intent only on the twin purposes of mapping the rich complexities of the world and teaching others to do the same. He had no stake, no investment, in whether we found his schulzi or not. So when the final bat of the night, twisted and rain-sopped in the net, turned out to be Lophostoma silvicolum, it didn't bother him in the least. “So close,” I groaned. Dad shook his head. It's not about one species, he reminded me no matter how rare, no matter what sentimental attachment you may feel to it. It's about observing and learning, rather than consuming and destroying.

Surrounded by perfect darkness, rain soaking through my coat, I finally understood. Lophostoma schulzi isn't Dad's bat at all; it's Schulz's bat. My father didn't name his discovery for himself but for those who stayed in Suriname. And those who continue to fight for the forest are its true inheritors. In that expanse, more than anywhere, his simple lessons applied: “Nobody ever said it'd be fair. Now get back to work.”

I pulled on my glove. “It's OK, Dad,” I said. “I got this one.”

ON OUR LAST MORNING, as we scanned the skies wondering if the rain would clear enough to fly, we heard chopping rotor blades. Suddenly a helicopter hove into view and landed at the airstrip. I sprinted down and started talking begging, bargaining, bribing our way to the top of Tafelberg. The pilot, Jerome, worked for Hi-Jet, the company that runs the Surinamese medical-emergency service, but he'd flown out that morning to pick up some tourists from an illegal lodge under construction atop the plateau. We were shocked to hear such a place existed, but there was no time to consider. We agreed to Jerome's offer: For $600, he would take us up on his way back to Zorg en Hoop.

We'd be allowed only a few minutes on top, but that didn't matter. If we hadn't been able to net even one of Dad's bats, to assure ourselves of its survival, at least there was this unexpected gift. And in the months after our return, we would learn that a team of Canadian scientists, working in far-western Suriname, had netted several specimens of schulzi, dramatically increasing its range and likely population. Their expedition was so encouraging that in October the IUCN took schulzi off its list of endangered species. But, at that moment, all we knew was that we'd chanced upon this small, personal redemption before we were gone from Tafelberg. So we squeezed into the heli­copter and zoomed up the escarpment and over the lip of the plateau, a dizzy-making sensation of falling even as you felt your body rise. Jerome laughed over the intercom. “It feels like a roller-coaster, huh?” He took us over the Arrowhead Basin, then around the southwestern edge to a tiny clearing barely big enough for the chopper's whirling blades. We touched down and hopped out, stumbling as we went. “Five minutes,” Jerome yelled. “I'm not even going to power down. Five minutes.”

We wouldn't need more. I couldn't believe that I was standing atop Tafelberg but especially with my dad. And as he looked over the edge of a cascading waterfall, then turned back into the chopper's rotor wash, I had a flash of a photograph I've carried in my mind all these years. When Foster Ford's helicopter lifted off in 1981, leaving my dad and his crew isolated for 11 days, someone thought to lean out of the passenger seat and snap a single black-and-white frame. It's my dad, a camera slung around his neck, wearing a T-shirt with the distinctive seventies logo of the Carnegie Museum. All around him, the vegetation swirls, but he stands with feet planted, hands on his hips.

But it was Dad's expression that brought the image back to me. His face had drawn and slackened, his stance grown less certain; still, his gaze was set now, as it was then, in a tight squint probably nothing more than a wince and a square-jawed grimace against the blast of the departing chopper, but it looked for all the world like defiance.

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