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"Canadian Oil at a Crossroads"
Natural resources have long figured at the heart of Canada’s national imaginary and political economy. For the past half-century, Canadian resources [or oil? petroleum?] have played a crucial political and economic role in fueling the expansion of US capitalism. But catastrophic climate change, Canada’s promises of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and growing cross-border movements for Indigenous rights and climate justice, have thrown the assumed expansion of the North American oil industry into question. The papers in this panel place the current conjuncture in context, examining the history, politics, and ideologies underpinning Canada’s oil economy. Together they highlight this powerful industry’s conditions of possibility and ask what the current moment means for the future—and perhaps the end—of Canadian oil.
Please register here: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErcuysqDoiGdFNTfJFvv41lkhLB-P...
Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground: The Future of Climate Policy?
Angela Carter, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science & Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo
National restrictions on fossil fuel extraction are emerging as an important “supply side” policy approach to avoid worst-case climate crises. In rapid succession since 2017, multiple countries have proposed moratoria on fossil fuel extraction as part of the global effort to reduce emissions dramatically. These bans are historic, ambitious policies that are opening a new avenue for confronting the climate crisis—and signalling the beginning of a global fossil fuel phaseout. How and why are these bans unfolding, and what do they mean for Canada and its “petro-provinces”?
“They just work, and they seem to do it well”: Mobile work and social identities in the Alberta oil industry
Katie Mazer, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
Extreme labor mobility is a longstanding feature of Canadian resource development. Workers have often travelled out of peripheral, high unemployment areas of Canada in search of work in resource industries thousands of miles from home. Employers in these crises-ridden industries benefit from these workers’ willingness to travel, tolerate periodic layoffs, and work for relatively low wages. Examining mobility between high unemployment areas of
Atlantic Canada and Alberta, this paper interrogates the economic imaginaries that underpin these unlikely and grueling labor pathways. While workers from this region have long been characterized as state-dependent and averse to work, today employers, employment counsellors, and workers themselves describe east coast men are a “natural fit” for mobile work in resource extraction. I argue that, despite the distance and volatility of mobile resource work, the interplay of stories that pathologize and celebrate these workers has encouraged their attachment to resource extraction as the only viable pathway to a better life. These findings speak to debates about energy transitions by highlighting how social identities—in this case, white, rural, working-class masculinities—constrain how people imagine their futures, tethering them to fossil fuels. Alongside economies and cultures, that is, identities must also shift in the transition to a post-carbon economy.
Ecology in Service of Extraction: Surface-Mined Land Reclamation in Alberta
Christina Shivers, PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Oil extraction in Alberta has immense ramifications, negatively affecting the environment from the local scale to the global. While anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists have analyzed the relationship of recent increases in tar sands oil production to the dispossession of Indigenous communities, wildlife habitat loss, pollution and increased carbon emissions, mining in the Athabasca joins a longer history of settler-colonial practices inherently based on mineral extraction of all types. This paper discusses the history of private programs focused on surface-mined land reclamation in Alberta and western Canada beginning in the 1960s. These programs were developed by coal and oil mining companies in the wake of a large, trans-continental citizen protest movement against coal and oil extraction that aimed to achieve full strip-mining abolition. Recognizing the existential threat abolition posed to their industry, coal and oil mining companies organized land-reclamation research programs to restore mined landscapes to a state equal to or better than the landscape that existed prior to extraction. Through an analysis of the private reclamation programs that emerged in Alberta in the 1970s, this paper argues that mining and energy companies seized upon popular environmental concerns and crafted their reclamation programs to not only continue, but expand extraction, altering state priorities in the process. Using ecological research and scientific planning methods, reclamation programs like Syncrude Canada worked to convince the public of the mining industry’s vital contribution to conserving the environment in the province. In the process, reclamation professionals partnered with provincial authorities to create new – and profitable – land uses like agricultural lands, rangelands, and working forests. This history reveals the longer influence of energy and mining companies on the state’s environmental priorities from the outset.
The Road to the Keystone XL Campaign, 1992–2015
Troy Vettese, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
Michael Marx, the director of the Keystone XL campaign, has remained a surprisingly obscure figure despite his influence in shaping the contemporary environmental movement. One has to remember that it was only recently that pipelines became an intensely politicized infrastructure. To understand the tactics he employed against the Keystone XL pipeline, it is necessary to examine his previous campaigns. Marx’s career as an environmentalist began in the early 1990s when he led Rainforest Action Network’s fight against Mitsubishi for its role in tropical logging. He then led campaigns to create a park in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest and against Wal-Mart in the US to push it to green its operations. Insights gleaned from these earlier campaigns coalesced in 2008 when he initiated the struggle against the Keystone XL pipeline. Marx’s innovations in environmental activism include: directly targeting and negotiating with a corporation, using building permits as leverage, working closely with First Nations, and bringing in the government to oversee the implementation of an NGO-corporate truce.
Chair: Elke Winter, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Harvard University and Professor of Sociology, University of Ottawa
Biographies
Dr. Carter’s research has focused on environmental policy and politics surrounding oil extraction in Canada’s major oil producing provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland & Labrador). She has analyzed how environmental policy is developed and contested, emphasizing tensions between environmental/community impacts and economic imperatives. Carter is now extending this work in an international comparative project on supply-side climate policy, focused on political conditions necessary to wind down fossil fuel extraction in developed-world states. She is particularly intrigued by the rise of “keep it in the ground” movements and legislation.
Katie Mazer is a William Lyon McKenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canada Program at Harvard University. Trained as a human geographer, her research examines how the state regulation of work and poverty serves resource development and settler colonial expansion in Canada.
Christina Shivers is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Urban and Landscape Studies researching the politics of environmental planning. Her dissertation investigates the rise of market-based environmental policies since the 1970s through researching the influence of ecology and economics on resource extraction in both Canada and the United States. Her work looks to mined-land reclamation programs established in North American and the manner in which scientific and spatial research associated with these programs influenced environmental policy at the national and global scales.
Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a William Lyon Mackenzie King postdoctoral research fellow at the Weatherhead Center. His book (co-authored with Drew Pendergrass) is titled Half-Earth Socialism, and it will be published by Verso in the spring of 2022.