Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene

Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene is a collection of essays about the natural environment in a province rich in natural resources and aggressive in development goals. This is a casebook on Alberta from which emerges a far wider set of implications for North America and for the biosphere in general. The writers come from an array of disciplinary backgrounds within the environmental humanities.

The essays examine the oil/tar sands, climate change, provincial government policy, food production, industry practices, legal frameworks, wilderness spaces, hunting, Indigenous perspectives, and nuclear power. Contributions from an ecocritical perspective provide insight into environmentally themed poetry, photography, and biography.

Since the actions of Alberta’s industries and government are currently at the heart of a global environmental debate, this collection is valuable to those wishing to understand the natural and commercial forces in play. The editors present an introductory argument that frames these interests inside a call for a rethinking of our assumptions about the natural world and our place within it.

1. Reengineering the Contours of Civilization: Alberta Land Trusts and the Neoliberalization of Nature

Lorelei Hanson 

Hanson shows how a certain view of nature shapes laws associated with private property and conservation lands. She explains how capitalist and commercial thinking has begun to affect conservation agendas, limiting the number of strategies needed to protect the environment.

2. Bum Steer: Adulterant E. coli and the Nature-Culture Dichotomy

Robert Boschman

Boschman investigates the dangerous social perception that nature and culture are separate rather than ecologically connected. He demonstrates how such errors in thought resulted in the near deaths of his daughters from E. coli  poisoning caused by flawed beef processing methods in Alberta’s “feedlot alley.” 

3. “There is no such place as away”: Reconciling the Abject in Ecology and Poetry

HarryVandervlist 

Vandervlist considers work by an Albertan poet whose poems present the idea that “there is no such place as away.” Revealed in both the poetry and Vandervlist’s explanation is the understanding that waste, toxic or otherwise, can never be thrown away without a return of it in the form of unintended environmental consequences.

4. Visualizing Alberta: Dueling Documentaries and Bituminous Sands

Geo Takach

Takach examines the communications battle to brand or represent Alberta’s resources and their commercial development. He compares visual, promotional branding by the Alberta government with dissenting versions by documentary filmmakers, and extends his analysis to photographs, postcards, signs, and maps.

5. Critical Literacy and Discursive Governance Control(s) in Canada’s Oil/Tar Sands

Conny Davidsen

Davidsen advocates for reform in terms of policy, educative, legal, and governance literacy related to the environment. She argues that a socially inclusive and deliberative democracy is needed for deep changes in environmental thinking and action to develop in issues surrounding the oil/tar sands and in fossil fuel-dependent societies.

6. Are the Oil Sands Sublime?: Edward Burtynsky and the Vicissitudes of the Sublime 

T. R. Kover

Kover critiques the famous industrially themed image art of photographer Edward Burtynsky to ask an important and unsettling question: If evocative images of wild nature can be used to persuade people to conserve the natural world, can images of commercial, environmental exploitation be used to celebrate and exoticize destruction? 

7. From Railway to Pipeline: The Great Divide as Landscape and Rhetoric

Sean Atkins

Atkins explains how images of the Great Divide (the height of land that traverses the north-south axis of North America) were historically manipulated to suggest that nature and culture are separate and that human development of nature, from railways to pipelines by companies such as Enbridge, is legitimate and destined.

8. Fostering Environmental Citizenship

Mishka Lysack, Ben Thibault, and Greg Powell

Lysack, Thibault, and Powell present an account of recent environmental consultation and education in Alberta. They argue that environmental education must trigger transformational shifts in citizens’ environmental perspectives to motivate the general public to transition from a carbon-intensive economy to a sustainable one based on renewable forms of energy. 

9. Environmental Divide: The Nuclear Power Debate in Alberta and Saskatchewan

Duane Bratt

Bratt outlines the nuclear power debate in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He explains how even in the aftermath of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, environmental concerns about carbon emissions have shaped a new framework for seriously considering nuclear power generation on the prairies.

10. Do Corporations Have to Consider Sustainability? 

Jeffrey Bone 

Bone takes as his subject the corporate trend towards making sustainability pledges. His analysis of the legal implications surrounding use of the term sustainability by large energy companies equates to greenwashing, which is a public relations exercise that sees a company market itself as environmentally friendly to camouflage environmentally questionable practices.

11. Defending the Wild: Time to Think Beyond Legislated Wilderness

Shaun Fluker

Fluker provides a legal analysis of statutory wilderness in Alberta and overviews use of the term ‘wilderness’ in key contexts. He shows that the Alberta government has designated no legislated wilderness areas since the 1960s and that its official plan for provincial parks makes no reference to wilderness preservation.   

12. Place, Desire, and Maps: Representing Wilderness at the Columbia Icefield

Benedict Fullalove

Fullalove breaks down how human beings unproductively conceive of themselves and the natural world in fixed, static terms. He emphasizes instead various notions of process and fluidity—notions that fit with how natural systems actually work—as he recounts his use of maps to navigate the Columbia Icefield.

13. Radical Albertans? Hunting as the Subversion of Heroic Enlightenment

Nathan Kowalsky

Kowalsky inspects Alberta’s legal statutes regarding hunting and argues that mainstream attitudes towards the activity are deeply unsustainable, based as they are on the idea that the natural world is separate from human experience and should remain at a distance from us. 

14. Indigenous Environmental Ethics and the Limits of Cultural Evolutionary Thinking 

Sam McKegney

McKegney considers the prison writing of Inuit Anthony Thrasher to demonstrate how Aboriginal thinking emphasizes relational connections between people and environment. McKegney decries the oppositions of ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’ he says characterize much anti-Aboriginal writing and affirms the view that dereliction of kinship duties to lands contributes to environmental crisis.

15. Bioaesthetics and the American West 

Curt Whitaker

Whitaker outlines environmental design problems in the western U.S., problems Alberta shares. He examines sustainable design solutions and argues that environmentally destructive practices and rootless human communities are not an inevitable by-product of modern life but a design flaw that can be corrected. 

16. Cultivating Longitudinal Knowledge: Alternate Stories for an Alternative Chronopolitics of Climate Change 

Anita Girvan

Girvan takes a long view of environmental issues to show how time is imagined in the alarming graphs accompanying many climate change arguments, graphs that pre-empt visions of sustainable futures. She suggests consideration of longitudinal knowledge, inspired by the worldviews of Athapaskan and Tlingit elders who live alongside glaciers.