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  • Oil, Democracy, and Political Ecology in Alberta’s Tar Sands
  • Emily Eaton (bio)
First World Petro-Politics: The Political Ecology and Governance of Alberta. Edited by Laurie E. Adkin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 696 pp. $110 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-44264-419-9. $49.95 (paper) ISBN 978-1-44261-258-7.
Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy in Canada. Edited by Meenal Shrivastava and Lorna Stefanick. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015. 440 pp. $37.95 (paper) ISBN 978-1-77199-029-5.
Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions. By Jon Gordon. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2015. 288 pp. $45.00 (paper) ISBN 978-1-77212-036-3.

One of the greatest and most divisive issues in contemporary Canadian politics concerns the future of Alberta’s tar sands. A period of high oil prices, a federal ally in Stephen Harper, and the long reign of the Progressive Conservative Party in Alberta produced a rapid expansion of bitumen projects amid curtailed environmental protections. The bitumen boom increased the political power of Western Canada and, as the authors of the reviewed books claim, resulted in declining democracy in both Alberta and Canada. Oil prices then crashed in the fall of 2014 and remained low. Two general elections in 2015 brought Rachel Notley’s New Democratic Party (NDP) to power in Alberta and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to power at the federal level. The stable environment for bitumen expansion was suddenly weakened: carbon pricing was introduced, and new pipeline projects received mixed federal approval and intense opposition in British Columbia and Eastern Canada. It is into this highly charged arena of debate that the three books reviewed here intervene. With the industry claiming that Alberta oil is ethical, and that remediation can restore northern Alberta nature to its pre-extraction functions; environmental movements likening extraction sites to Mordor and Hiroshima; workers [End Page 756] reeling from lost jobs and uncertain futures; and Indigenous groups sounding the alarm about the contamination of their bodies and livelihoods, these books fill an important gap. Together, they show what is both lost and gained by Alberta’s reliance on fossil fuel extraction, they cut through the corporate public relations efforts of industry, and they propose alternative ways of understanding our present and conceptualizing a future after oil.

Covering New Ground

Government and industry discourses have painted the future of Alberta and the entirety of its population as fundamentally linked to oil, and dissenters as being anti-Alberta and/or eco-terrorists. Rarely in this polarized debate does one hear about the differential effects of the oil economy on women and on racialized and temporary foreign workers, nor has there been much written about the way that oil shapes the practice of art or the way that Alberta municipalities deal with homelessness. The three books reviewed here widen the debate and provide important nuance that has been missing from academic and popular coverage of Alberta’s oil. The authors are to be commended for beginning to fill important gaps.

In First World Petro-Politics, Laurie Adkin advocates for a political ecology perspective as a fruitful lens through which to understand oil in Alberta. As Adkin points out, political ecology allows for attention to multiple scales of analysis, investigates both structures of power and the agency of individual actors, and insists on the mutual constitution of nature and society. Indeed, the approach is a welcome addition to a literature about oil that has been dominated by political science methods that treat governance as largely divorced from the specificities of local environments and histories. While not every chapter delivers a balanced socio-ecological approach, the book as a whole provides a compelling picture, with attention paid not just to the bitumous sands but also to the sour gas industry, the (largely) coal-based electricity system, and the network of infrastructure including highways and pipelines that deliver megaloads of equipment to the sands and carry away vast amounts of bitumen. Alongside important critiques of neo-liberal environmental regulation, corporate power, and the failure of government to properly consult Indigenous peoples about development in their territories, First World Petro-Politics, sheds light on issues less often covered such as...

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