Northern Alberta’s Boreal Forest: A Contentious Field of Competing Interests

Abstract

The Canadian oil sands project is one of the largest privatized resource extraction projects in the world today. In a time of wide spread belief of global warming and the end of cheap unconventional oil this project became the centre of attention of the international community. Followed by the media as a vehicle to communicate these concerns to the global stage this became a polarized debate between ethical oil and dirty oil. This resulted in a culture which I call, a contentious field of competing interests.

Capitalist forms, like the oil sands project, and processes are continually made and unmade. This is often overlooked in theory of globalization. I demonstrate the successes and ruptures in in the remaking of places, in this case the Athabasca oil sands region in Northern Alberta by taking my reader to a public hearing for the approval of oil sands leases. I trace the coming into being of one particular project to demonstrate how the Boreal Forest is shaped through an “awkward engagement” of people across the globe. I’ll give a rough outlining of their interests and aspirations of the involved parties and show how some reap the rewards of this new power arrangement that sprung from this coalition of people, and other don’t – collateral damage. This is an anthropological masterthesis about the lives of people who live side by side with oil sands development and globalization processes that reshaped the environment and therefore their culture and lives of these people over roughly the past century.