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Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions by Jon Gordon (review)

Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions by Jon Gordon (review) Book Reviews Jon Gordon, Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2015. 290 pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $36.99. An immense wildfire consumed Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the spring of 2016 and interrupted industrial activity in the Athabasca oil sands. Images of the conflagration suggested apocalypse; the effect on the provincial economy was cataclysmic. The oil sands themselves are utterly distant from Ottawa and Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but their importance to Canada was expressed powerfully in the televised scenes of the evacuation of Fort Mac: the disaster was a national crisis, one that exacerbated the perpetual controversy that attends bitumen mining in Alberta. “Bitumen is central to the current narratives of Alberta and Canada,” Jon Gordon writes in Unsustainable Oil, an examination of the political, economic, and cultural assumptions that sustain industries of extraction (1). Undoubtedly he is correct. He seeks to demonstrate that the phenomenon of the oil sands is not merely the result of technological capability or economic necessity but instead a consequence of ideology: “The industrialization of the bituminous region of Northern Alberta is a manifestation of a cultural belief in limitless progress and endless expansion” (xxxiv). To analyze the rhetoric http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Western American Literature The Western Literature Association

Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions by Jon Gordon (review)

Bradley, Nicholas
Western American Literature , Volume 52 (2) – Aug 16, 2017
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Publisher
The Western Literature Association
Copyright
Copyright © The Western Literature Association
ISSN
1948-7142
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Abstract

Book Reviews Jon Gordon, Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2015. 290 pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $36.99. An immense wildfire consumed Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the spring of 2016 and interrupted industrial activity in the Athabasca oil sands. Images of the conflagration suggested apocalypse; the effect on the provincial economy was cataclysmic. The oil sands themselves are utterly distant from Ottawa and Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but their importance to Canada was expressed powerfully in the televised scenes of the evacuation of Fort Mac: the disaster was a national crisis, one that exacerbated the perpetual controversy that attends bitumen mining in Alberta. “Bitumen is central to the current narratives of Alberta and Canada,” Jon Gordon writes in Unsustainable Oil, an examination of the political, economic, and cultural assumptions that sustain industries of extraction (1). Undoubtedly he is correct. He seeks to demonstrate that the phenomenon of the oil sands is not merely the result of technological capability or economic necessity but instead a consequence of ideology: “The industrialization of the bituminous region of Northern Alberta is a manifestation of a cultural belief in limitless progress and endless expansion” (xxxiv). To analyze the rhetoric

Journal

Western American Literature – The Western Literature Association

Published: Aug 16, 2017

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