Alberta

Water, Land, and Energy in Alberta

Alberta is known for many things: Rocky Mountains, flat prairies, and one of the world’s largest sites of unconventional oil extraction, the oilsands or tarsands. Over the past 15 years, this project has examined the intersections of water, energy and empire in Alberta. It is a place where the circulation of ideas and policies about globalization, colonialism, economics, and technology have been applied and reworked, experimented with and abandoned.

In Alberta, the intersections of water and energy meet from several directions, such as from its large irrigation economy in the south and policies designed to encourage western settlers to take up farming, to a burgeoning energy sector in the north that requires large water inputs in very different enviroments. Over time, Alberta has incorporated many global ideas (often with a certain kind of gusto) in ways that attempt to keep state claims to legitimacy separate from the fact that state-building entails dispossession of Indigenous peoples, both First Nations and Métis.

This project uses archival work, policy analysis, and field research to examine how water, land, and energy have been configured in Alberta through a global transit of ideas and practices. It also includes analysis of one of the province’s response the largest in situ oil spills, which required damming and draining a 1/3 of a lake when bitumen seeped up from underground for over a year. The image to the right is the makeshift dam put in place across the lake. I have published some research on Alberta below, and some of it is reworked into a new book I have written (but without the focus on the disciplinary debates typical of journal articles). These are below.

Outcomes

Several articles from this work are freely available (see below). They cover the Alberta case from various angles. In addition to these literature specific articles.