Tar Sands in Language and Images

Some more Tar Sands / Oil sands learning materials from  Davidson / Gismondi collaboration

See our chapter on power and discourses in the oil sands from Samuelson and Antony, Power and Resistance in Canada. "Ecology, Climate Change and the Politics of Sustainability: The Case of the Alberta Tar Sands." Debra Davidson & Mike Gismondi


Go to Fernwood Publishing





Check out the Special Issue on Petrocultures -   Sighting Oil

 
Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies

Lots of great articles here dealing with imagining the global oil culture, including our more historical appreciation of the Alberta tar sands:

Imagining the Tar Sands 1880 -1967 and Beyond

By Mike Gismondi and Debra J. Davidson

 


And finally, a Utube video where we talk about historical Images of Tar Sands
Visualizing the Tar Sands

Nicaraguan Research

Keeping your research interests alive in a remote rural university requires flexibility. As the only faculty member at AU writing about Latin America for many years, I talked to myself alot.

But over the years a good sum of my time remained dedicated to continued research into Nicaraguan social history. I was able to maintain a few long distance research networks. And to cultivate opportunities. For example, as a graduate student researcher, I thought I could capture the popular religious forces at play in the Nicaraguan Revolution. I delved into university, National and Sandinista archives ( later the IHCA), as well as hemerotecas in Nicaragua. I also interviewed local religious folks  about religion and revolutionary politics. 

Quite incidentally, I started to keep track of empirical materials about North Americans in Nicaragua in the 1890s to 1970s time periods, including many Canadians. That material quickly filled my filing cabinets and hard drives. Back in Canada, in casual discussion with my friend, Jeremy Mouat, a gold mining historian, I mentioned the La Luz y Los Angeles gold mine. Sandino had destroyed the mine in Siuna, Nicaragua in the late 1920s.

A week later Jeremy dropped by my office with a large folder of engineering reports about the mine,  correspondence, descriptions about transport challenges to reach the region, labour force issues, local and national politics, observations on ecology, opinions on the scale of the ore body, its worth, and potential to attract London financiers. 

Basically, Jeremy introduced me to a whole new world of  sources for the study of global financial and industrial imperialism in LA related to mining history, that could be read obliquely to grasp international relations between US, Britain and Nicaragua, attitudes of foreigners towards local political elites, and social and political controversies surrounding foreign ownership of natural resource concessions, especially on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.

We began to work together. We combined Spanish language materials about foreigners and foreign concessions in Nicaragua that I gathered from my visits to archives in Managua, Granada, Bluefields, and Bilwi, and triangulating that work with Jeremy's work in archival collections in North America and Britain that held mining sources. Together we then worked the US State Department Archives and varios collections in Washington. D.C. as well as the Library of Congress and Presidential papers.  

The first paper that we wrote together was Merchants, Mining, and Concessions on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast: Reassessing the American Presence, 1893–1912, in Journal of Latin American Studies. Here we used a great run of U.S. State Department papers on Nicaragua, materials that we recovered at the old State Department Archives in downtown Washington D.C..


And then a second paper The Emery Claim in Nicaragua and American Foreign Policy, c. 1880-1910 in which we offer a nuanced theoretical and empirically detailed investigation  into imperialism and internal Nicaraguan politics.

In both papers we engage the dominant North American and European historiography of Nicaragua and Central America, offering a counter-reading of area studies.

So serendipity can be important, alongside thorough, investigative research work.

Energy Calamity and the Tar Sands - Reviews

Reviewer Comments
 
“Drs. Debra J. Davidson (Associate Professor, University of Alberta) and Michael Gismondi (Professor, Athabasca University) newest book, Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity, is one of the few social scientific analyses of the Alberta tar sands-an enterprise warranting much closer scrutiny from academe than it has received to date. The authors do two things in this book. First, they take a good hard look at the tar sands from the broader context of peak oil and climate change, and conclude without much trouble that this form of development just doesn’t add up. Second, they analyze the frames, images and narratives that are used to legitimize this enterprise and the potential sources of weakness in those frames, and also the frames and narratives that are used to oppose it, and their potential to unseat legitimacy. They conclude that the legitimacy of the tar sands (and its state and industrial proponents) is fragile, but concerned citizens and organizations making up the resistance may not be capitalizing on those sources of fragility as well as they might. They situate this political moment in a complex systems framework, drawing on contemporary theory and critical perspectives on complexity/mobility, political ecology, human geography, legitimacy, citizenship, environmental sociology and discourse analysis.” (University of Alberta: Augustana Campus News)

“The book stands to make an important contribution not only to our understanding of tar sands development in Alberta politics ( a topic increasingly of global significance, as the authors note) but also to broader more “theoretical” issues of state legitimacy and contestation …The authors bring theoretically sophisticated tools to bear…” Springer Press Reviewer

“The Canadian tar sands are becoming globally known and debated as an energy, natural resource, mining and climate issue. It is no longer just a local or regional or even a national issue but is part of global debates on how to sustainably manage the earth resources, defended and offended in different way by different groups. It has become an example…for many other major challenges of the present time…. In the way the issue is approached and dealt with, I can see interests coming from scholars in sociology, environmental studies, geography, economics, political sciences, anthropology, energy studies. Professionals in the field of energy, climate change, various mining business, governmental sectors, NGOs would be interested.” Springer Press Reviewer

To learn more, visit http://www.springer.com/environment/book/978-1-4614-0286-2

Researchers and students can order an ebook copy from SpringerLink.  

Energy Calamity and the Tar Sands - Teaching Videos

These video clips provide useful teaching points developed by  Debra J. Davidson (Associate Professor, University of Alberta) and Michael Gismondi (Professor, Athabasca University) who explain aspects of  their newest book, Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity, one of the few social scientific analyses of the Alberta tar sands.

• Deb - Introduction
  Talks about what motivated us to write the book. Short term corporate profits and jobs or long term visions.
   
• Deb - Lift Our heads Up Out of the Sands
  Questions why tar sands and what else?

• Deb - Legitimacy
  Alberta tar sands expansions are at the epicenter of a larger global debate about energy, peak oil, and climate change issues.
  
  
• Mike - Rescuing Voices
  Why are so many good ideas about alternative directions and futures heard, but not publicly deliberated or acted upon?
  
  
•  Deb- Hearings: A Question of Democracy
  The limitations of public hearings.
  
   
•  Mike – History
  Discusses the long history of public financing and state support for the tar sands industry from early 1900s to Suncor in 1967, and how pride in emergence of industry in 1960s is now an obstacle to contemporary change.
  
  
•  Deb – Bitumen
  Struggle over the words tar sands and oil sands. They have become politicized and used to label and reject critics.
  
   
• Deb – Discourses
  How do pro tar sands narratives and storylines work on belief systems.
  
  
   
• Mike - Language and Power
  Language can erase or language can frame and guide our understanding of tar sands issues. Discusses claim by government that tar sands is a knowledge economy.
  
  

• Mike- Visualizing the Tar Sands
  How photographs and images of tar sands landscapes and tar sands industry become part of civic history and a civic virtue.
  
  

• Deb – EROI
  Discusses falling Energy Return on Investment in the energy industry in general, and as it applies to tar sands extraction.
  
  

• Deb – Keystone
  Situated Keystone pipeline as both material and symbolic issue, used to legitimate the global flows of capital, oil and power.
  
  

•  Deb- Jobs
  Discusses pros and cons of jobs created by a boom – bust industry.
  

•  Deb - Imagining Other Futures
  Advances the idea of an alternative to the industry.
  

• Mike - Entrenched Ideas
  Talks about how hard it is to change the directions of the oil economy.
  

• Deb- No Place for Denial
  Argues that trends in climate change and uncertainty of declining energy supply are happening, whether we like it or not. Calls for alternatives.

Athabasca River Basin Research Institute (ARBRI) - My View

For the last few years we have been collecting the ARBRI bibliography, thousands of references to research conducted in the Athabasca River Basin, by thousands of researchers from many, many fields of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Important works, but works that will only be helpful going forward if we change our methodological and theoretical approach to a more holistic understanding of the river basin watershed as a dynamic complex ecological and social system.

This will require us to engage in a new kind of scholarship, a collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research program, with an emphasis upon synthesis and integration of the social and the ecological.

Such a future will not be without challenges. From within the university, one of the challenges we face, ironically, is something that we value as a strength, that is, the specialized research of disciplines themselves. Basarab Nicolescu, a physicist, tells us that as recently as the 1950s, there were 54 disciplines; yet by the year 2000 that number exploded to over 8000 (and no doubt even more today). As he says “over 8000 ways to look at reality.”

The implications are clear that specialization, whatever its merits for careers, publishing, and data collection, brings with it a huge problem of communication across disciplines and among researchers, and frankly this causes fragmentation of our understanding of complexity.

Fortunately there are some good examples, of clusters of researchers across the natural sciences and social sciences and the humanities, doing the kind of work that we need going forward. I am thinking of Elinor Ostrom and the many researchers inspired by her who are examining commons issues; or the groups at the Stockholm Centre for Resilience examining governance of social and ecological systems.

Resilience is an old ecological concept. But it has emerged as a symbol for using multiple methods and interdisciplinary work to overcome the divides in “cultures” and methodological practices and helps us imagine ways to integrate a wide range of research into fuller understandings of governing complex social ecological systems.

In part, this also requires more thinking about how to integrate other ways of valuing nature, different ethical systems, different notions of justice, and different ideas about managing our intergenerational obligations to the future, as we discuss river basin research and governance.

Questions arising include: How to balance and integrate those sometimes competing values into Basin management design and decision-making in a transparent way: how to integrate the uses of our knowledge in public life in ways that are just and fair.

The good news is that river basin management is an international field, and we are not alone in grappling with complexity. No doubt some good examples have also come up in the other talks here today.

One special area that Athabasca University might contribute to in a unique way, and I am not even sure if they know it yet, is research into modeling. But here I am not simply meaning the modeling of ecosystems and user impacts, but more importantly, the modeling around complex decision-making concerning rules and governance about uses of the basin.

I am talking about how to integrate the data from field research and building outcome scenarios; the kind of scenario building that projects the future implications of our decisions.

This modeling, sometimes called agent based modeling, can be designed to help the public envisage, imagine and deliberate on alternative futures.

Despite the complexity of the computer modeling, some researchers have been talking about democratizing of modeling itself, that means exploiting the democratic opening made available by the Internet and user friendly web technologies, to allow citizens to use and contribute to the models.

My dream for ARBRI is a place where people can come in person or via the web to facilitate that democratic process of the co-construction of a research agenda, to construct collaborative visions of possible alternative futures, in order to assist public deliberation and decision-making into our future prospects and that of the Athabasca River Basin.

Works Cited

Basarab Nicolescu. “ Transdisciplinarity: Basarab Nicolescu Talks with Russ Volckmann.” 2007. http://basarab.nicolescu.perso.sfr.fr/Basarab/Docs_articles/VolckmannReview2007.pdf

Amy Poteete, Marco Jansen, Elinor Ostrom, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons and Multiple Methods in Practice. 2010.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/