Half a century ago, scientists seriously considered using nuclear bombs to extract petroleum from the Alberta oil sands. As it began, so it continues, argues William Marsden's Stupid to the Last Drop; the means are less violent, but the environmental toll is still devastating. Excerpts:

Manley L. Natland was sitting alone in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia when an extraordinary idea popped into his head.

It was the end of a long day, and Natland was watching the sun set. Wrapped in thought and a Bedouin turban, the American geologist contemplated the climax to nature's magic hour. "It looked like a huge orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth," Natland later wrote in his diary. His mind wandered, and the display of the sun's explosion of light caused his thoughts to take a sinister and disturbing turn along the following lines: sun, heat, 15 million degrees Celsius, energy, thermonuclear weapons. And then the idea struck.

Why not nuke Alberta?

It was an odd, disjointed thought process. Yet there was an unmistakable logic to it. Natland at that moment was sitting on the biggest oil reserves on the planet. It was 1956 and the world was in fact swimming in oil. In Saudi Arabia alone, Natland's employer, the Richfield Oil Company of California, had all the oil they could ever dream of. Yet Natland had become obsessed with a scientific challenge central to a place more than 7,000 km away: Alberta's vast oil sands in the Athabasca basin. This was a place where you didn't even have to look for the oil -- you just reached down and picked up a handful of dirt and it was right there, black and tar-like, clinging to the grains of sand. But it was a treasure chest for which nobody had the key. For half a century, scientists had tried to find a method of extracting the oil at a cheap price. Now Natland joined in. His solution was by far the most creative -- and the most radical.

Some might dismiss Natland's atomic revelation as that of a mad scientist. Yet his oil sands solution became a serious enterprise undertaken by otherwise sane men. To be prepared to blow up a geological structure of such magnitude simply to extract oil requires breathtaking single-mindedness. Some might even call it psychopathic. But the point is that, in a sort of manic determination to exploit its resources, Alberta showed that it was ready to sacrifice itself.

As is still the case today.

In the Athabasca basin, oil companies have destroyed thousands of acres of boreal forest wetlands, including rare fens. The boreal forest represents three to four thousand years' accumulation of peat, with pine trees surrounded by wetlands, natural canals and shallow lakes. Many of the wetlands have been plowed up and drained in order to get at the oil sands beneath.

"We just have a habit of stripping the defences of our ecosystem," David Schindler says. "We're setting ourselves up both for floods and for droughts." Schindler is a stocky, muscular man with powerful arms and hands, a broad mouth and facial features that remind you of Raymond Massey. He holds the Killam Memorial Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, and he speaks in a disarmingly clinical manner that leaves you wondering if he really said what you thought he just said.

I describe a doomsday scenario, thinking he will say I'm going too far: "By the end of this century the southern half of the province will be a desert. The northern half will be dug up for oil sands. The entire province will simply be a network of coal bed methane and in situ mining operations, most of which will have been abandoned; the forests will be destroyed by the pine beetle, forest fires and clear-cutting; and there won't be any water for anybody. So at the end of the day you will have a pot of gold with no place to live, except maybe the odd oasis."

Without flinching, Schindler nods his agreement.

The oil extraction process uses enough water in a day to supply the needs of the cities of Calgary(population one million), Lethbridge(79,000)and Red Deer(82,900). As of December 2006, oil sands mining operations were withdrawing 215.2 million cubic metres of water each year. This figure will more than double as the new projects come on stream by 2010. In other words, the industry could soon be withdrawing more water from the Athabasca River than is used by the entire urban population of Alberta.

Most of the water has to be disposed of as waste material, referred to as "tailings." The ultimate disposal of these toxic tailings remains an unsolved problem. Every minute of the day, thousands of litres of grey-textured tailings gush out of 36-inch pipes into ever-expanding settling ponds. The mixture contains highly toxic hydrocarbons such as naphthenic acids, which are deadly to marine life, plus a host of other chemicals, including arsenic. Over the last four decades these tailings have developed into huge toxic lakes that are now the largest bodies of water in the region. Propane cannons scare away birds and other wildlife. To stop the deadly water from draining into the Athabasca River, the oil sands companies have used oil sand itself to construct a system of dams around the lakes, mixing the sand with gypsum to stabilize the structures. By the end of 2006, Syncrude's dams alone contained about 600 million cubic metres of mine tailings, making this the second-largest dam system in the world after China's Three Gorges, which is still under construction.

Those same sands are being used to restore the land. Nobody at Syncrude claims that they can restore it to what it used to be. They can't replace the ecosystems, the vast networks of peat bogs, fens, rivers and wetlands. Those are gone, probably forever, along with the unique flora and fauna that once inhabited this region. Only nature will decide to what extent the land is ever restored.

The mines are already so big that you can see the craters from the moon. Yet 10 years down the road, this area will be unrecognizable. That's because it will have grown tenfold, dwarfing the present projects. There will be further expansion by the existing players plus the addition of at least six major new projects, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, France's Total, Imperial Oil, Husky and Canadian Natural Resources. They are projected to spend $110 billion. With that kind of money on the table, the beast will be unstoppable. "Obviously you can stop anything," Syncrude president Jim Carter says of his company's oil sands operations, "but it's not very elegant to stop one of these things."

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