Four years ago, in Fire Management in the American West, I suggested that behind the question of who (if anyone) might be held responsible for the big fires hitting the western United States were conflicts over who and what forests are for. At its heart, the battle was over who has the power to determine how human communities reorganize and transform nature. Since then, I’ve moved back to my native Canada and watched in sympathy with my friends in the western United States as their towns filled with wildfire smoke this season. Here in Canada, I’ve recently moved into researching a natural resource issue that, although it unfolds in a landscape hundreds of miles away and has a different history behind it, is connected nonetheless to the wildfires in California, Idaho, Colorado, and Arizona. These days I am researching the politics of bitumen development in Alberta, in what are variously known as the oil sands (that’s the official version developed by the Province of Alberta and the oil industry) or the tar sands (that’s what everyone used to call it, before the term’s glaringly apparent negative connotations became ammunition for environmental groups).
The imagery of the tar sands echoes the media portrayal of wildfire: spectacularly ruined landscapes and massively scaled destruction. In the case of wildfire, this imagery obscures a lot, like the potential for rejuvenation and the interconnectedness of forest and fire. In the case of the tar sands, the imagery understates extraction’s profound reorganization of the environment. While mining bitumen leaves massive scars in the form of deforestation, open pits, and tailings ponds, much of the damage appears not in the pages of the Calgary Herald or the Edmonton Journal but in the Denver Post and the Los Angeles Times. Wildfires are one of several forms of “climate disaster” that are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity as the effects of climate change kick in. The more Canada doubles down on its intent to dig up and burn what lies beneath Alberta’s boreal forest, the more westerners are likely to enjoy those smoky, blood-red sunsets. While Environment Canada projects a (pitiful) 0.4 percent drop in national greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 to 2020, oil and gas sector emissions are projected to rise by 23 percent. Within that sector, conventional oil and natural gas are projected to remain stable or fall, while bitumen-related emissions are slated to rise by a whopping 197 percent.
The same questions that lie behind wildland fire’s history are emerging as crucial to bitumen’s present. Whose voices are heard in the contest over whether—or even at what speed and under what conditions—the tar sands, a public resource, are dug up and the bitumen burned? Once again, the picture that’s emerging is one of an exclusive club of property holders, developers, and a compliant state calling the shots. At least the US Forest Service pushed (unsuccessfully) for greater public control over the nation’s forests in the early twentieth century. So far, neither the federal nor the provincial government in Alberta has dared suggest such radicalism in the case of the tar sands; instead, the government is working busily to draw tight lines around who is—and who isn’t—a legitimate participant in resource decisions. While Canada is relatively small-time compared to the United States and China in the greenhouse gas count, scientists are telling us that conservatively, about one-third of oil reserves have to stay in the ground to avoid tipping us over the "safe" two-degree warming limit, and that bitumen, because it has a higher GHG intensity, should be a "fuel of last resort."
So, westerners, turn one eye northward when you look for the culprit as your fires get bigger, faster, and more frequent. It turns out that your fire problem is rooted at least partly in our oil problem, and both are rooted in the nondemocratic nature of resource extraction.
Mark Hudson is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology; coordinator of the Global Political Economy Program at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg; and author of Fire Management in the American West.
