In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

55 “Acceptable Levels of Risk”: Mining and Offshore Oil 3 | The ishing industry, like the two other staple industries with which the history of Atlantic Canada is associated (farming and lumbering) readily lends itself to the kind of Folk iconography that Ian McKay and James Overton, among others, have highlighted and critiqued, especially because of the capitalist and class relations that such iconography tends to suppress. Another resource industry that has been central to the economic history of the region, however, particularly in Nova Scotia, is less amenable to the idealization of an open-air life on the sea, in the ields, or in the woods. The mining industry was central to the early twentieth-century prosperity of the Maritimes (and to a lesser degree in Newfoundland), but its history of labour turbulence, its much more palpable capitalist relations, and its much more obvious physical rigours present greater obstacles to the celebration of the igure of the independent petty producer of Folk mythology. What the history of mining in the region illustrates—as relected in the work of early twentieth-century poets like Dawn Fraser and Joe Wallace, and more recently in the iction of Sheldon Currie—is how the provision of the energy needs of the wider society, and the proit requirements of international capital , rely on the physical, social, and economic sacriices of labour. These tensions are in many ways being replicated a century later as the offshore oil and gas industry offers the potential of a similar industrial boom. With coal mining near the end of a long decline, the new frontier of offshore oil and gas has raised optimism about the future economic prospects of the region. For many decades, Maritimers and Newfoundlanders have migrated to the Alberta oil patch, lured by the promise of far higher wages than are attainable at home, a long-standing pattern that has had substantial social and economic implications for Atlantic Canada—not least of which is the 56 Section 1: I’se the B’y That Leaves the Boats consolidation of Atlantic Canada as a pool of reserve labour for other parts of the country.1 In contrast, the growth of the offshore oil and gas industry on the East Coast not only offers the promise of economic revival for the region but also the prospect of greater economic autonomy and, especially for Newfoundland, the way out of being a have-not province. In the promotion of the prospect of autonomy, however, the impression is often given that offshore oil and gas are a kind of natural “windfall,” obscuring not just the cost of exploration and extraction but their dangers as well. As with mining, for those engaged in the extraction of those resources, these dangers are considerable, and a growing number of Atlantic-Canadian writers are drawing attention to those perils and, more importantly, highlighting the larger economic and social circumstances that deine such perilous work. “I wende to be clad in clay”: Alistair MacLeod Without question, the most powerful images of mining in Atlantic-Canadian literature are to be found in the work of Alistair MacLeod. With its consistent focus on Cape Breton, on characters of Highland Scottish descent who live close to the elements, on Gaelic cultural and linguistic heritage, and on a quasi-mystical sense of collective tribal belonging, MacLeod’s work certainly has afinities with the kind of elemental, ahistorical essentialism promoted in Folk discourse. But MacLeod in many ways challenges the central underlying assumptions of Folk ideology. Interviewed for the documentary Reading Alistair MacLeod, Lisa Moore rightly stresses of MacLeod’s work that “he’s documenting this very dynamic, dramatic, powerful change.… It’s a very contemporary experience. These stories are sort of about globalization .” MacLeod’s workers, Moore points out, are “creating the capital that the people in New York are trading futures and options on. This is the work that makes that kind of life possible” (MacGillivray 2005). As Moore’s comments suggest, far from being insulated from the presence of capitalism and industrialism, the occupational lives of MacLeod’s characters are very much marked by time, by history, and by capital. Where the world of the Folk, in other words, is idyllic and halcyon, MacLeod’s world is very much a historicized and fallen one. MacLeod’s iction—the two short story collections The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986),2 and his novel No Great Mischief (1999)—is pervaded by what...

Share