Inevitable Extraction, Colonial Security, and the Making Recoverable of Unconventional Oil Anna Pringle a Thesis in the Depar
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Inevitable Extraction, Colonial Security, and the Making Recoverable of Unconventional Oil Anna Pringle A Thesis in The Department Of Communication Studies Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Media Studies) at Concordia University Tiotia:ke/Montréal, Québec, Canada January 2016 © Anna Pringle 2016 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Anna Pringle Entitled: Inevitable Extraction, Colonial Security, and the Making Recoverable of Unconventional Oil and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Media Studies) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final Examining Committee: ___________________________Chair Dr. Owen Chapman _________________________Examiner Dr. Monika Gagnon _________________________Examiner Dr. Krista Geneviève Lynes ________________________Supervisor Dr. Peter C. van Wyck Approved by: _________________________________________ Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director _________________________________________ Dean of Faculty Date: _________________________________________ iii Abstract Inevitable Extraction, Colonial Security, and the Making Recoverable of Unconventional Oil Anna Pringle In 2002, the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta were re-classified as recoverable. This recovery required, and requires, a vision of the region that is long in the making; a vision that emerges within a history of colonialism. I begin by tracing out how post-Cold War imaginaries of the tar sands presented the resource as crucial to the future viability of North American ‘democratic’ states. These envisionings of energy security, I argue, build, and tap into, prior colonial imaginaries of the region as wild and empty. In my first chapter, I look at how the Boreal forests of Athabasca had to be emptied out of certain dissenting interrelations and populations in order for oil to appear, although, this emptying out was never completely successful. Subsequently, in my second chapter, I build on this argument by contemplating how shifting discourses of wildness, legality, order, safety, and violence, allowed land to become frontier while granting legitimacy to colonial regimes of violence. I conclude by examining how prior visions of abundance acted as the extractive scaffolding for the 2002 recovery. What I hope to emphasize is that the visions of abundance in 2002 are interwoven with long-held colonial anxieties surrounding security. Further, the recovering of resources in Alberta was never inevitable, rather, it occurred through a multiplicity of encounters, between both human and nonhuman communities, all brimming with contingency. I close by posing the question, how can we radically re-imagine the land, each other, and deeply ingrained notions of security, violence, and belonging? iv Acknowledgements Thanks to all whose labour allowed for the writing of this work. To those laboring fields and to those manufacturing computers. To those who cleaned up the library after I went to bed. To the trees that allow for breath and the greens I ate for dinner. To those who are the traditional guardians of the land. This thesis was written on traditional Haudenoshaunee territory, the island known as Montreal, called Tiotia:ke in the language of the Kanien'kehá:ka. An island that has been a meeting place for other Indigenous nations, including the Algonquin. Thank you as well to those who spoke with me during my time in the Athabascan region, especially members of the Fort Chip community. To Sasha, Farah, Gilberto, Camille, Arwen, Momoko, and Hubert for creating spaces of mutual support within a university atmosphere that is unfortunately permeated with neoliberal austerity measures. Thank you to my wonderful cohort for thinking and feeling through difficult, confusing, and hopeful worlds with me. To Peter whose guidance was vital to the speculations of my thesis and whose writing reminds me of what writing can do. To Krista whose support and tip that ‘maybe you could do something with that New York Times article discussing the Shell scenarios team’ helped craft this piece of writing. To Darin whose kindness was ever-present and Monika for reminding me of the importance of dreaming. To the administrative staff who help made possible the completion of this work; a special thanks to Eve and Mircea. To my sisters who I adore more than anything. To my aunt for encouraging words and my grandmother for knowing that when a Mountain Ash has lots of berries, there is a hard winter ahead. To Matt for indulging my temporal schemes and reading over these words with kindness. To Kama whose fierce love is a continual source of inspiration and whose editing reminded me that a reader may get lost if one refuses to conclude. To Aim for encouraging me in the final moments of writing with jokes about feminist vengeance (as well as serious schemes for), and careful edits. To the anti-racist soccer comrades for fun and endorphins, Gwen, Nizar B., AJ, Marwen, and Olivier. I also could not have done this without the love and support given to me by Marie, Kaity, Anniessa, Portia, Theo, Ren, Zoe, James, Kat, Owen, and the House of the Flying Fish. To Nizar for taking care. To my community and all those I love deeply. To my dad who really tried to do the right thing even when he told me, “One day, you will need to buy a car to drive your kids to school.” v Table of Contents I. Preface: Why Oil? 1 II. Introduction: Abundance, Inevitable Extraction, and the Making Recoverable 9 Theories: Frontiers, Dangerous Peripheries, and Energy Security 23 Methods: “What lies under the bridge is of little consequence to those above” 38 III. Emptiness and Discovery History: “It will be like a log that has started from the middle of the lake” 43 Myths of Discovery 51 “A white man goes off to the frontier…” 56 On Locality: “do not you white men know everything in the world?” 61 IV. Order and the Wild Violence and Colonial security 66 The Orderings of an Extractive Nature 74 Hauntings 81 V. On Abundance The Abundant was not Inevitable 94 Producing the Abundant 106 The Abundant 116 VI. Conclusion: Radical Imaginations 127 Bibliography 137 1 Preface Why Oil? I begin with oil because we, citizens of the West,1 are utterly entangled with it. In many ways, we are oil. Or, as Reza Negarestani puts it, we are “complicit” with oil.2 To be complicit. A verb that entangles us in the violences of colonial and capitalist systems: land grabs, militarized interventions, occupations, climate changes, mass displacements and extinctions. Think about the oil consumed by hot showers and heated (or air conditioned) homes, our modes of transportation, communication, and entertainment, what we eat, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products, plastics and textiles, as well as, the oil consumed by armies fighting to ensure our possession of the resource in the first place. Violence is interwoven with these daily comforts, these energy-intensive privileges of empire. 3 Oil is a crucial aspect of how life is lived and organized in the West, and subsequently, our “structures of feeling” are intricately entangled with the material violence of oil economies.4 If, following Negarestani, we think of “war as a machine,” we are left with the understanding that oil is what allows these machines to run.5 But, 1 Following Harsha Walia, “I use the term West not only to denote the geographic site of the global North (that is, Europe, Australia, and North America) but also to reference the dominance of Western political, economic, and social formations and ideologies that have led to the foundation of other settler-colonial states such as Israel, and that are increasingly adopted by neoliberal states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Though political and economic governance are not uniform across these states, as Japanese scholar Naoko Sakai comments about the West as an ideology, ‘Unlike all the other names associated with geographic particularities, it also implies the refusal of its self- delimitation or particularistic determination… In short, the West must represent the moment of the universal, which subsumes the particular.’” Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press, 2013), 39. 2 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 7. 3 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 17. 4 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 5 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. 2 how is oil assembled for these machines? How is it found, seen, perceived, or made extractable? In what follows, I turn to oil, and the question of how oil is assembled for war machines, out of the belief that oil is vital to the continued operations of Western colonialism and empire. In particular, I look at the Athabasca oil sands of the area known to some as Alberta, in an effort to show how this resource is procured for North American based war machines. My mode of inquiry is inspired by Anna Tsing’s consideration of resource extraction in the Kalimantan forests of Indonesia. In her work, Friction, Tsing describes meeting with her Meratus Dayak mentor Uma Adang. Tsing presents Uma Adang a gift, only to be told, “Better you had brought me a bomb, so I could blow this place up.”6 After witnessing the forests transform from a landscape buzzing with life to a dire political realm where a bomb seems to be the only solution, Tsing asks: “How does nature at the frontier become a set of resources? How are landscapes made empty and wild so that anyone can come to use and claim them?”7 Tsing devotes her work to articulating how resources are assembled. She finds a partial answer to her inquiry with what she terms the “magical vision of frontier regionality”---an act of conjuring, which “asks participants to see a landscape that doesn't exist, at least not yet”.