Bitumen, Bit of Me, Bit of You: Climate Change, National Literatures, Peak Oil, and Canada’s Tar Sands

How does Canadian literature, a national literature that loves the landscape novel, possibly more than any other national literature does, continue to avoid its most defining landscape—the Alberta tar sands?1 As detailed throughout, the contentious tar sands have had scant manifestation in some Canadian fringe theatre but lack attention in fiction, the country’s most popular literary genre. Canadian fiction is shockingly perhaps collusively silent on the tar sands, while celebrated Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky rose to international renown partly through his images of them (Burtynsky “CV”). Far worse than a blind spot in Canada’s national literature, this absence of any meaningful treatment in Canadian fiction of what Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk conclude is “the dirtiest oil on the planet” (160) risks contributing to the “cultural genocide” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, as well as scholars and First Nations members and stakeholders, decry as synonymous with Canadian history and governance (“Truth” 1; Bolen). The disproportionately high incidence of cancer found in contemporary First Nations downriver from the effluents of the tar sands detailed below denotes a chillingly physical manifestation of the Canadian First Nations genocide alternately described as both cultural and physical (Mako 191; Woolford & Benvenuto, 374; Bolen). With the tar sands constituting one of Canada’s major contributions, and a conscious one, to global warming, the genocidal aspects of Canada’s tar sands, which may well be the least sustainable project on the planet, are not only domestic but also international. Canada’s sustained government and social support for a tar-sands industry with intense expenditures of carbon, energy, water, public subsidy and First Nations health risks contributing to the global genocides of climate change inflicted on youth, the globally coastal, the climate vulnerable and what the Pentagon, not simply bloggers, regard as impending “climate refugees” (Hartmann 239). Like Our Sands, my tar-sands novel-in-progress, Canadian First-Nation Anishinabe author Winona LaDuke calls the Alberta tar-sands industry “the ecological equivalent of Auschwitz” (Hanson 7). Two billboards greeted me in quick succession in June 2017 as I drove, as a guilt-ridden Canadian and a researching novelist, into Fort McMurray, Alberta, the epicenter of Canada’s globally notorious tar-sands industry (what CNN.com calls “extreme energy”) (Sutter). Those two billboards, and the danger of the road I was on, reminded me of a third roadside sign, recently removed—the former municipal welcome sign I’d seen photographed in various articles and blogs as well as referenced in books. Until just a few years before my 2017 research trip to the capital of Canada’s contentious petroleum industry, the official sign of the recently fire-ravaged and once-booming, not-yet-busting municipality used to read “Welcome to Fort McMurray: We Have the Energy” (Nikiforuk 57). With nationally high rates of narcotics use by sands workers (“Boomtown”) and Chatelaine magazine declaring Fort McMurray the most lucrative prostitution market in Canada (Preville 118), the city’s semi-retired, palimpsestic slogan “We Have the Energy” is multiply ironic for a coked-up workforce (“Boomtown”) of mostly displaced men that finds Chatelaine quoting sex-trade workers who describe Christmas as one of their busiest days (Preville 118). Given those social pollutants for what is described in The Economist as Canada’s “boomtown on a bender,” the commercial ads on those two billboards knew their market. “Looking for Resources” asked the first, with the headshot of a fictitious “resource”-brokering female employee at left made to look like a schoolgirl with her white shirt, glasses and, yes, a bow in her blonde hair. The first billboard had a bright background, presumably to emphasize the youthful female face of the “resource” receptionist. On the next, with a background so dark it was practically hammered out of cast iron, at far right a whiskered young man with buff arms stressfully gripped his forehead while the caption asked, “Feeling Overwhelmed?” to advertise a help line. Given the overwhelming local, provincial, national, and international threats the Alberta tar sands pose as Canada’s major contribution to global warming, and a genocidal one, the Alberta tar sands provide a horrifying illustration of peak oil, the petroleum industry’s political influence, field work for literary environmental criticism, and a massive if not propagandistic blind spot in Canadian literature. The freakishly high rates of cancer found in the First Nations around Fort Chipewyan, Alberta detailed below are the most vivid manifestations of Canada’s tar sands contributing to a genocide both physical and cultural. The threats of this industry include, but are not limited to, narcotics, a sex trade servicing migrant workers, pollution, and a lethal environmental racism that poisons First Nations. American literature addresses slavery and German literature reckons with the Holocaust. English-language Canadian fiction (aka CanLit; see Douglas Coupland’s definition below) is paradoxically obsessed with landscape stories yet silent on the horrifying landscape of Alberta’s tar sands (and their reverberations in our political, economic, racial, and social landscapes). To complete research on my tar-sands novel-in-progress, Our Sands, I travelled the tar-sands trail in Alberta from a downtown Calgary full of the bright, sky-scraping headquarters of Husky Energy, Cenovus Energy, Enbridge, Encana, Gibson Energy, etc., up to the north-eastern corner of the province and beyond. I here present some interview highlights and field-work from that trip through the southern urban, financial and political landscapes of Calgary and Edmonton up to petroleum-epicenter Fort McMurray (complete with a carbon-expensive helicopter flight over the enormous open-pit mines; see Fig.1). My sands research tour continued and included interviews with First Nations elders and community stakeholders in cancer-ravaged Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, and Fort Smith, North West Territories, two communities downriver on the Athabasca River, the watery ‘lifeline’ (and cancer conduit) that has enabled so much of the notorious tar sands production (Nikiforuk 97–98). This essay expands my field notes from that trip with relevant readings on the sands and from environmental criticism to consider national literatures, climate change, and the possible cultural engagement for writers, artists, and their teachers provided by peak oil, climate change, and environmental degradation (if not environmental genocide). Haul Trucks at Work in a Tar-Sands Pit Mine Outside Fort McMurray, Canada (Photo by the Author) Fittingly for Canada’s national oil capital, Alberta’s Provincial Highway 63 drives directly into the city of Fort McMurray. Highways in other major Canadian cities, like those where I studied and/or taught Creative Writing (e.g., Halifax, Nova Scotia; Fredericton, New Brunswick; as well as Kingston and Windsor in Ontario) route past a municipal downtown core, requiring one to exit highway for city. In “Fort Mac,” the four lanes of Highway 63, aka “the Highway of Death,” run directly through the city (Grescoe). Due to geographic constraints important to my novel-in-progress and which received international media attention when a massive forest fire forced a complete evacuation of Fort Mac (Kassam), Highway 63 is, as my novel’s characters think, like a drawbridge into the castle of the city (and the tar-sands industry). As the Guardian describes, the Spring 2016 evacuation of nearly 90,000 residents found most of them driving south on what is essentially the only road out of the city (Kassam). As Google Maps shows, Highway 63 is one side of Fort McMurray’s rectangular downtown, though the only one made of asphalt, not water. Fort McMurray sits on the confluence of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers, and a nearly perpendicular turn in the latter has it constitute two sides of that rectangular downtown. Even the Fort McMurray International Airport feeds directly into Highway 63. Expansions in the oil industry after 2000 made that airport so busy it was not expanded so much as rebuilt, leaving the old airport to service just northern flights, like mine up to Fort Smith, a few hundred meters beside a sleek new airport (“Fort”). The northern-flowing Athabasca River, over which the highway climbs on busy bridges, is the fourth side of Fort Mac’s rectangular downtown and basically the kitchen sink, albeit a historically significant one, of the water-intensive and genocidal tar-sands industry (Nikiforuk 97–99). In a lethal poetic justice, the only highway into the oil city of Fort Mac has a disproportionately high number of traffic accidents and speeding tickets. For decades, the swampy Canadian terrain known as muskeg made the highway harder to expand, yet most of the sands equipment and workers have always arrived from Canada’s more heavily populated south2 (with its lower First Nations populations), not from the less industrial north, with its lower general population but higher concentration of First Nations.3 (In every Canadian province, the population density of First Nations rises the more north one travels.) Before Highway 63 was twinned to four lanes in 2016, the narrow, two-lane predecessor was nicknamed “Hell’s Highway, Suicide 63, or the Highway of Death. The police call it McMurray 500” (Nikiforuk 38). Andrew Nikiforuk’s book-length examination of the sands claims, “According to Syncrude Canada [one of the largest oil producers in Alberta] Highway 63 probably ferries the highest tonnage per mile of any road in Canada” (39). Canada’s magazine The Walrus simply sums up the Fort Mac traffic as “murderous” (Grescoe). More than just heavy machinery and more fuel than just gasoline contributed to the “1000 collisions” on this highway between 2001 and 2005 (Nikiforuk 39). The Economist claims “about 40% of the [oil] workers test positive for cocaine or marijuana in or Fort Mac does the though the are not just the Highway 63 accidents on and when of workers to their and in are are on or to the (39). In my when a young north to the Fort Mac cocaine to as “the white fuel for the and marijuana as as well as for the as and in the Fort Mac to a like the is from to and it with a at mile per Even like that the run and have which are the of man and to by Alberta’s the by have and are 40% than a my trip had me in the peak oil I to I’d a Canadian I’d with just four and my was a for that on the Highway 63, I Alberta from the of my his one into a around I from the other side of the planet, from I to that my work as the of the first Creative Writing in has me and cultural may have to that the of expenditures have In one of the I had with First Nations elders in Fort Chipewyan, Fort and Fort Smith, me out on this and/or before I that I was a on the tar sands and had in his to Fort Smith, North West over the of northern Alberta and downriver on the Athabasca and vulnerable to tar sands asked me two relevant We both knew that I had arrived by fuel and Even more the First Nations communities that downriver from the sands have had with the lucrative tar-sands In Fort Chipewyan, when I the at the up Fort as a and The in Fort that in the tar Like my trip to Alberta, Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky the of and and of and in his international industrial landscape oil and around the Fort McMurray The have in Canada, the the and (Burtynsky “CV”). Burtynsky the and of I first industry it was out of a of at what as a up The that I to not only but also much more I to oil as both the of that and as a of for its of our With I them to of and this from The of the has like other that a of is its to Even those the to see if one of landscape claims, the or but not Canada’s tar sands are and their be but Alberta’s and was used by its First Nations to and and before their and and their to The the Alberta tar sands a mile of heavy oil, possibly of for the health of Canada’s its and global most of that oil is, in a not a the Canadian tar-sands industry is to of look a like the much of it into the oil the planet, the In The of when a is by his for environmental is In north-eastern Alberta, that oil a not a The Walrus as a of the to as as any (Grescoe). For Canada to at its oil, first have to not so much as them and As seen in The first of tar-sands oil the of forest the that are also in Canadian claims, that more than a per in Canada, the more than any other have the and what the sands industry calls which be the landscape is, in chillingly In Canadian tar sands stakeholders when the “Fort McMurray like Fort McMurray is a The up and the are The fuel is it when to up in my out I the most I have in my nearly years of up in the enormous northern the and my More a to the Alberta tar sands on is more days than in the Athabasca To of oil from a the industry first the of two of and that the oil sands two of the the forest and its and for this have or equipment in to what to most look like in some of the largest meters not that this work is, as our or As detailed those on in this industry, the the while the sex and narcotics the tar-sands oil directly to the planet, and it more than other oil to to of the of in the tar oil, the just from that tar be of what American at nearly from Alberta the is into oil in one of two both of which use of and water, while In the more is out of and for in are as as see that run every with equivalent in to a to American the known as more than the a in petroleum that the industry on a fuel to a this of to the of the tar-sands industry Alberta out that this on every to four To the the Alberta tar sands yet have a of Canadian political for the past and Canada’s tar sands as my “the on the national but Canada’s genocide its First to “the oil sands industry has than New and on industry who and tar sands oil in more than the oil used in the and that tar sands have and by As detailed of this of the petroleum industry globally and not just in the of those of For is a of yet more than years of support by various and for Canada’s tar-sands industry is both and of Canadian political My one of the Canadian to How out of a them to and not for the tar to the national of who to regard as global and the and of the tar sands to the of a both and Those Canada has directly to lethal into the if not the of our First Nations north of Fort McMurray. of the for of my Our not from a novel, genocide from its as I in the that see that it has in one of the or and in and on nearly every of is are it is of as it is, of of the two for the from The The in for more than a hundred years and that had more on their than any other With the to the in and the to change as it is also the to Given their known of First Canada’s tar sands is a contemporary of its genocide of First high cancer First Nations the of the Athabasca of the tar sands who my novel’s of the Alberta as genocide in and around Fort Alberta, downriver on the Athabasca River, of a cancer that in only one in a hundred First-Nation residents (Nikiforuk 97–98). my to and this by Alberta health in the province of in the Canadian and of First Nations and (Nikiforuk before the of Canada’s on and on June that in his as a in Fort Chipewyan, Canada of to to of in the In had the to the Alberta and in Fort McMurray that was asked any health of tar sands To in Alberta, if not Canada, is more important than First Nations In that a Alberta that finds higher of cancer and, in some and to the public attention to this disproportionately high cancer of in the by the of and in With his of high of cancer in general and in downriver from the tar sands, the relevant the of the Athabasca River, for oil sands and in Fort McMurray had to the that in Fort what the (Nikiforuk the northern of the Athabasca River, but Canada’s racism it First Nations the known of into First Nations in north-eastern Alberta and up to Fort Smith, and beyond. Canadian in First Nations genocide is far in various government the tar-sands and in Canada and Alberta the tar-sands industry are directly through support or through which are if not is the former of at the Canadian of Writing in The and the on some a of heavily oil and enormous from Canadian oil producers to American the subsidy is by not who see the Canadian when up at the The Guardian Canada’s subsidy of its at in government to oil and producers in the a which to on climate In that Alberta its oil rates the rates in the (Nikiforuk The rates so that in the Alberta government made more from than the tar sands (Nikiforuk Alberta’s lack of public of oil is essentially the of for the [oil] to for every in the out to per in the The oil industry’s in Alberta The Edmonton of a found the of the in the at the Alberta in the The Canadian tar sands are of a global where to The and in public to and up a industry In a the use of public of Canada also public in its of First not just public the racism of Canadian and Alberta, the financial of Canada’s tar sands, recently its a of the capital of Alberta, a on its municipal to The Edmonton included a contentious which for left Nations by the of The up but by as a positive for a First Nations to by a some of the First Nations members by the has as its of a First Nations into what is known as Canada’s of the and In as a of the “cultural genocide” so by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation “We in them a for the so that be when reminded of their from out the have their Alberta’s claims, in asked the government to help continue by continued to his to industrial and the of his The of our is of public and in the of its two the Calgary and the Edmonton the massive Fort Mac forest fire in the Spring of 2016, The Guardian that the tar-sands Canada are in have a and in their at the are the that turn the forest into a The that have to in The by their with for the ecological and my Canada’s tar-sands industry is its and while also to a environmental and/or genocide continue to of for of the while genocide” in the of known like in the and around Fort Chipewyan, downriver in Fort Smith, North West Territories, contributed to First June 2017 to me government as well just at least In of in American by one the Athabasca of oil every four years or so its more than only when to the in the Canada’s tar sands constitute a and national genocide while contributing to a genocide the coastal, the globally and the Writing for Canada’s largest The is Canada is of the genocide in Canada’s by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation the for the of Canada’s past and its in the of First are (and and in the fringe the has not Canadian on the sands, but his are a from and a of his from Even to the tar sands, notes the at the Edmonton of Alberta not the sands (and is not for the has this in Canada’s national yet international as (and as in a Guardian of a global by “the of the and of its and by “the of Canada’s forest into a of tar-sands of most the Alberta tar sands as a global of in one of the most yet my in and I of Canadian that this most landscape in a literary landscape with landscapes is a national and so the tar-sands is both and more First and its population Canada is not the popular it Canada notes a most national population of and yet so of the In How to a of fiction on the national media the to the from years of the largest and for and the years of the for to 2005 to that of those two as by in a Canadian or in the Canadian while various and and/or her have the if not the of its from Canada’s national to Canada’s national in landscape Canadian and Douglas is far when defining in New but not is when the Canadian government to in and/or the the is in is but only from a that is the literary equivalent of landscape with into and is not a does it to are and are to a has the and of is a of in a of and most in Canada are with are at least to the of the from the and not have to is, the absence of tar-sands fiction in our not The of is a multiply with that the on to decry as with has a on Canadian literary The various of the are also when like the Canada (with its and social media The landscape of is also at the official of where the of the claims, on is a the of landscape and As a and a genocidal and one at the Alberta tar sands are a yet not in are a equivalent of fuel but are a of energy, as from those and To and of to in of energy, does not from their but from their to in any and to on with the work of to continue to as that and the be used up here is a between the in which the and the and Canada’s oil its its lack of community with our First and our with a a that is both more and more not tar sands to a in the country’s largest The is out of per of in or their not just our cultural that is from The is out of with who are and The most of on environmental criticism of or (e.g., the of the for the of the far North for first The Canadian media (if not so landscape that the magazine Canadian and to Canadian in province & yet one of that a of stories of a and this for the province with the highest population and, for or the city of the of for the Alberta north is not only but also from the as the of is with a landscape is and it is in the northern forest around the Canadian tar sands, with genocides of and of West and globally coastal, with a displaced workforce in narcotics and the with national and for a at this

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.