A famous Aesopian fable tells of the astronomer Thales, who was too enamoured with the workings of the cosmos to pay attention to the ground under his feet, and ended up tumbling head first down a well. It is a parable with a painfully clear moral—to resist becoming so entirely enthralled by abstracta as to neglect the tangible world around us. While it is my wont to focus on eternal questions and great metaphysical quandaries, I must often restrain myself, as in the present case, to fairly appraise a more impending threat.

The particular threat I reference is a well of an entirely different sort than that into which Thales fell. No, the well in question doesn’t tap into underground aquifers to bring drinking water to the surface, but penetrates the subterranean depths to strike black gold. Indeed, the present conflict is over a particularly volatile oil well which now threatens a devastating blow-out: the budding secessionist movement in the province of Alberta, Canada.

Now, again unlike my wont, what follows is less a thorough and polished essay, and more a hastily assembled statement of my beliefs—albeit, beliefs which have been formed and developed after years of reading through the history of Western Canada, studying Canadian politics, and working in the Alberta oil patch. I hope, then, my thoughts may offer some more guidance or edification to the reader than an impassioned and ill-informed polemic, of which there are many.

Now, my thoughts and sentiments are deeply conflicted on the matter. Given that I proudly call this province home, it is a topic with deep personal import. Given the radical nature of the prospect of an independent Alberta, the stakes appear to be tremendously high. It is, moreover, a matter which incites the utmost ardour both in Westerners and Canadians all across the country. As such, the subject must be approached delicately, if it is to be understood and adequately addressed.

Now, I will structure the present account in four segments: why I am deeply sympathetic with the Alberta separatism movement, why I think there ought to be a formal referendum on Albertan independence, why I ultimately think that Alberta should remain in Canada, and where we go from here.

1: The Case for Separatism

I am a Westerner, born in Manitoba and now living in Alberta. My Mennonite Opa was a Diefenbaker man through and through, and so prairie populism runs deep in my blood. Years ago, I sought out a job in the Alberta oilfield, where I continue to work today, and I am greatly appreciative of the incredible opportunities which this province has afforded me. This province is my home, and I love its captivating natural landscapes and industrious ethos.

It is plain to see that this province gets a bad deal within Confederation, lacks adequate representation in the federal government in proportion to its economic contributions to the country, and has its economy perennially hampered by policies decided upon in Eastern Canada.

Foremost among the economic complaints raised by Albertans is the intolerable regiment of constitutionally entrenched equalization payments in Canada, whereby wealth is transferred annually from the have- to the have-not provinces. Currently, the have-not provinces include Manitoba, Ontario, Québec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador, who receive great sums of money every year. The sole provinces who pay in to the programme are British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, with Alberta foremost among the three. Every year, approximately $20 billion in provincial funds are transferred away from Alberta, which amounts to $4,167 per person.

Among the biggest per capita recipients of equalization are Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, for whom equalization payments, chiefly from Alberta, constitute 18%, 20%, and 22% of their respective provincial budgets. This is a staggering amount of money to receive simply by existing. The biggest recipient of equalization payments in sum is Québec, who receives over $13 billion annually from the programme.

Now, the argument commonly presented for this system of wealth transfer is that resources are unevenly distributed across the country. Why should one province be punished for a dearth of resources, while another reaps the rewards of what sits under their feet? The only problem is that the system itself inherently discourages the development of resources on the part of the have-not provinces, for the same reason that someone might not want to jump into a higher tax bracket. To develop one’s own resources would entail investing money to create revenues which are already assured through the system of equalization, and so they get paid either way. To illustrate, I will take a contemporary case study from my home province.

Manitoba sits atop vast reserves of high grade silica sand which can be used in specialized glass and solar panels—which the province has known about for years. Sio Silica, an upstart critical minerals firm, is chomping at the bit to access these resources, with full plans in place to commence extraction. For reference, Manitoba is estimated to have four times as much silica sand as Saskatchewan has potash, and the former resource sells on global markets for over twice as much per volume as the latter. If potash was enough to inaugurate a great economic boom in Saskatchewan, silica sand can doubtless do the same for Manitoba. However, inexplicably, Premier Wab Kinew abruptly halted the proposed silica sand mining project dead in its tracks without any plans to resurrect it.

Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome. By pursuing silica sand, Manitoba would only create revenues which it already receives through the equalization programme. And so, Manitoba lets a great opportunity slip between its fingers and remains a beleaguered have-not province. It’s rather shameful how my home province elects to coast on Albertan wealth instead of building up its own.

This same pattern can be observed throughout all the provinces which receive equalization payments. There are no incentives to pursue resource development, and so they leave their plentiful resources untouched. Québec and Ontario have vast and unexploited critical minerals. Nova Scotia has offshore oil. Instead, Alberta is made to foot the bill of their provincial expenditures, and thereby disincentivize economic development across Canada.

But that is not the only way in which Alberta contributes disproportionately to the country. Though many don’t know it, Canada is the world’s fourth largest producer of crude oil, and crude oil is our single biggest export, utterly dwarfing agriculture, lumber, steel, and automobiles. Crude oil exports amount to $147 billion dollars annually, or approximately 20% of Canada’s total export revenue, and between 85 and 90% of this oil comes from Alberta alone. When you factor in natural gas, coal, and refined petroleum products, the total export revenue jumps to $170 billion, or about 25% of Canada’s total exports.

And yet, despite the federal government and other provincial governments profiting so immensely from Alberta’s industries, there is a strong effort to simultaneously curtail these industries. Federal environmental legislation passed in the last decade has severely limited the Ability to build new pipelines to get Albertan oil to market. The result of a dearth of pipelines is lower export capacity and an American monopoly over cheap American oil. Currently, approximately 80% of Albertan oil travels south to American refiners.

Because we have failed to diversify the export markets for our oil, the price of a barrel of Western Canadian Select is now heavily discounted on world markets as compared to industry standard grades such as WTI and Brent. WCS currently sits at $75.36 per barrel as compared to $84.94 for WTI. In times of glut, the gulf can widen to an absurd degree, such as during the 2020 pandemic, in which the price of WCS went negative, such that Canadian producers were literally paying American refiners to take the oil off their hands, given that Canada’s capacity to ship oil overseas is severely limited. The WCS discount entails that Canada essentially subsidizes American fuel prices to the tune of billions of dollars annually—a major source of lost revenue to Canada and Alberta.

The prohibitive regulatory environment of which I speak, which prevents the diversification of export markets, has been detailed in another essay of mine on pipelines:

As a start, certain key pieces of legislation need to be revoked at the federal level. Bill C-48, the tanker moratorium on the B.C. coast, must go, so that Albertan oil can reach energy-hungry east Asian markets. Bill C-69, requiring multiple stages of environmental impact review on major projects, is far too onerous on infrastructure which is in the national interests, and so it must go also. The 2015 Pipeline Safety Act, which imposes prohibitive costs on polluters, and recent amendments to the 1985 Fisheries Act (contained in Bill C-68), which restrict the possibility of tanker traffic, must be revoked also.

All of the quoted pieces of legislation are cited as impediments to new pipelines and new oil and new natural resource developments, not limited to the oil and gas industry, which hampers Alberta’s development, as well as the whole country.

In essence, Canada is pursuing a self-defeating course by simultaneously trying to siphon wealth from the Alberta oil and gas industry and attempting to curtail the industry altogether.

Indeed, this speaks to a larger and perennial problem in the Canadian federation, which is that the economic contribution of the Western provinces is not matched by commensurate political representation. Indeed, within the confines of the Canadian electoral system, there is no guarantee of equal representation across provinces, as in the United States, which guarantees two senate seats to each of the fifty states. On the contrary, Canada solely elects members at the legislative level, in which seats are allocated according to population, rather than geographical region. As such, the most populous provinces of Ontario and Québec dictate policy for the eight smaller provinces. This lack of regional representation is a sore spot for separatists, among whom the concept of a Triple-E Senate (elected, equal, and effective) has long been a rallying cry.

Indeed, the relationship between the west and east has always been one between the centre and the margins of civilization—a relationship marked by paternalism. The three prairie provinces were denied natural resource rights and revenues within their own domain until 1930. Western alienation was spurred with the many political battles over the control of the oil sands, culminating in the most outrageous political conflict in modern Canadian memory, over the 1980 National Energy Program—an attempt to nationalize the Canadian oil and gas industry in all but name. The ire between Alberta and Ottawa subsided briefly, until it was resurrected with unmatched furor with the rise of Justin Trudeau to power. The eternally recurring strife between the West and East makes me suspect that something fundamental is awry in the relationship, which will not go away until the status quo is dramatically altered on a constitutional level.

This, of course, is not to mention a host of other social and political malaises which are afflicting Canada at the moment, and from which Alberta, the most socially conservative province, wants out. This is a reasonable impulse, but as social and cultural factors are more a matter of tradeoffs, I will refrain from making any objective arguments on this front.

This is all to say that Albertan separatism is not new, and it is not merely rooted in ephemeral cultural battles, but is the longstanding product of policy dating back to the province’s entry into Confederation in 1905. The discontentment many Albertans have with the status quo is reasonable, and it demands a solution. At present, around 30% of Albertans desire independence, which is no small number. Regardless of whether the reader is for or against this prospect, such a high rate of dissatisfaction must denote some real issue which must be confronted.

Every single day, I drive past a dozen signs and displays advocating independence in the Albertan countryside. The subject arises all but daily on the job site. Attitudes towards the rest of Canada, and Canada as a whole, are plummeting day by day. This may be a wave, yes, which will wane eventually, but the cessation of a wave does not indicate that the tide has been eternally banished. No, unless the water is dammed once and for all, it will only return with vengeance.

2: The Need for a Referendum

The topic of Alberta separatism is deeply divisive, inciting myriad polemics which daily adorn the headlines of Canadian newspapers. Unsurprisingly, the discourse has soured, with bitter invective replacing sober analysis, traded insults instead of reasonable discourse. The vitriol I see from both sides towards the other on this matter is rather disheartening. In this impassioned climate, what the country and province need is to clear the air and know definitively where people stand.

The province, thus, needs to hold a formal democratic referendum on independence.

However, at present, the path towards such a referendum remains unclear. A recent legal decision has challenged the possibility of a fall referendum on independence on the basis of the possible infringement of constitutionally validated indigenous treaty rights. The decision came to the applause of opponents of independence. However, this ruling dangerously dodges the fundamental issue at hand and threatens to only incite separatist sentiment further. And so, we are left with the comical absurdity of our premier promising to hold an informal referendum on the prospect of a formal referendum at an indeterminate later date.

It is, without a doubt the same people who chastise Americans for forfeiting their democracy with the election of Donald Trump who also lobby against the very possibility of an Albertan referendum. These are the people who celebrate democracy, but only when it suits them—and democracy which doesn’t suit them is spitefully labelled populism and dismissed out of hand. However, extra-democratic judicial activism is just as much an attack on democracy as any aspiring tyrant.

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If you believe that a people ought to possess the right of democratic self-determination, then you must concede the necessity of a referendum to decide the future of Alberta as a Canadian province. Any attempt to subvert this end constitutes a gross affront to democracy.

On a more concrete level, blocking a referendum through the courts only amounts to kicking the can down the road and drawing us into a legal and political quagmire. What the nation and province needs is clarity, above all else—a clarity which can only be achieved through a public mandate in one direction or the other.

In the wake of the 1995 Québec independence referendum, the “yes” side being finally defeated, the Québec nationalist movement was held at bay, and instead of pursuing provincial independence, the province and federal government began to iron out various reforms aimed at addressing the concerns of the separatist movement. During the campaign leading up to the vote, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had made promises to the “no” side, such that, should it win, various concessions would be granted to address the province’s concerns. And indeed, many of those concerns were addressed, with 1995 yet remaining the high water mark for nationalist sentiment in Québec.

A similar course should be pursued in Alberta, with a referendum used as leverage to attain the province’s goals, and with a formal mandate achieved one way or another. Only by such a definitive verdict by the public can the cacophonous din of inane editorials be stopped, and can Alberta and Ottawa chart a sensible course forward.

3: The Case Against Separatism

I believe that the Alberta separatist movement is born of reasonable concerns which ought to be addressed and that a referendum ought to be held on the matter of Albertan independence. However, despite that, I believe that Alberta should remain a part of Canada and that reform should be sought within that context.

The first and most important point to be made on this subject is that the very notion of Albertan “independence” of any kind is a delusion which ignores geopolitical reality. An independent Alberta would be a landlocked nation, dependent upon either Canada or the United States for the import and export of all goods. Either country, and most likely the United States, would have ample leverage to strongarm the budding nation into compliance on a number of fronts. At the very most, an Alberta outside of Canada would constitute a satellite state, and in all likelihood, would simply become an American state. A nation of a mere five million would have no practical power to resist the encroachment of the global hegemon next door. Secession would offer Albertans no more means of meaningful self-determination than they already possess.

It is already well documented that there is collusion between the Alberta Prosperity Project—the main organization spearheading the prospective fall referendum—and the U.S. State Department. America has an obvious interest in bringing Alberta firmly into its sphere of influence, thereby assuring itself of a cheap and secure supply of oil and weakening the bargaining position of Canada in any future trade discussions. Donald Trump has repeatedly invited Alberta to join the American federation, and one would be foolish to consider these remarks flippantly.

But one may argue that even the prospect of American statehood is preferable to remaining a Canadian province. Obviously, there is no clear answer here, as it is a matter of tradeoffs, and so I will avoid commenting on the potential social or cultural benefits, but I will make the case that Alberta and its industries would not enjoy improved economic prospects as the fifty-first state. We must think why American politicians would fall over themselves over obtaining Alberta if this didn’t mean some tangible benefit for them—and how, then, Alberta would profit from such an arrangement.

Within the American sphere of influence, Alberta would not have more markets for its oil. In fact, it would have fewer. A brief digression on crude oil prices is relevant here.

The price of a particular grade of crude oil is determined by two relevant factors here—the possible competition for the oil in question and the ease of refinement for that particular grade. The price of Brent crude oil is high because it is a versatile, light, and sweet oil, as opposed to WCS, which is sour and heavy. However, Brent also rides high because it comes from the North Sea, and there is a large fleet of oil tankers ready to ship it across the world. WCS, on the other hand, comes from inland Alberta, and so without pipelines and tankers to transport it overseas, export is almost entirely restricted to the United States.

Now, the price of WCS currently sits at a discount because of the lack of possible markets besides the United States and a dearth of domestic refineries. To push up the price of this grade would require infrastructure to more easily transport it to diverse markets—and this is a condition which we have no indication would be met in the case of Albertan statehood. Indeed, a marginal amount of crude oil from Alberta is exported abroad via pipelines through British Columbia, and this route would be quite clearly cut off or restricted entirely in the occasion of independence. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, American corporations are already undertaking a massive campaign to attack any prospective east-west pipelines through Canada to maintain their suzerainty over our oil. Separation would only shore up the monopoly control which America already has over Albertan oil.

Even if there is a desperate and unmet need for east-west pipelines at present in Canada, there is at least a possibility of future pipeline development; defecting would preclude this possibility altogether.

Additionally, though it may not feel like it, the fact that Albertan oil now crosses an international boundary gives it a competitive advantage in trade negotiations, for the province has the weight of the federal government behind it in securing a good deal for its oil. Oil and gas have been at the forefront of every trade deal signed between America and Canada since free trade in 1989. And this is an area in which the federal government’s interests overlap entirely with that of Alberta—getting the best deal possible benefits both parties equally. This leverage would be entirely lost in the case of statehood.

Another benefit of this international boundary is that Alberta is paid for its resource in American dollars. Currently, one USD is roughly equivalent to 1.4 CAD, meaning that American currency has far more purchasing power in the Canadian market, and that Canadian exporters benefit more than if the two currencies were at parity. This is a deliberate policy choice from which Canada, as an exporter of myriad natural resources, benefits greatly. As a state, on the other hand, dealing in USD, Alberta would lose this comparative advantage, and the relative economic boon of its most valuable industry would be lessened.

Of course, given the uncertainty surrounding such a tumultuous event as Albertan independence, there would also be the matter of fleeing investment, both within and without the oil and gas industry. Capital would take a long time to return to the region, if ever, and sectors such as tourism would be especially hard-hit.

Finally, I will note the telling fact that Alberta is proportionately wealthier as compared to the Canadian average than the oil-rich American states are as compared with the American Average. Alberta boasts a GDP per capita (in USD) of $71,708, as compared with the national average of $58,350. Texas, on the other hand, achieves a GDP per capita of $86,587, which beats Alberta, but only just surpasses the national average of $84,534. This is to say that Alberta is wealthier than the rest of Canada, and proportionately more so than Texas is to the rest of America. Wealth, after all, ought to be considered in relative terms, and so while Texas might be wealthier overall, Alberta is wealthier in relative terms. Not to mention, the scale and diversification of the Texan and American economies lessen the relative prominence of oil wealth at the state and federal level.

From speaking to ordinary people on the matter of Albertan independence, one would get the impression that their income and purchasing power would skyrocket overnight, with prices dropping in direct proportion, but this is not so. The situation is far more complex than that.

Of course, there are many points I can concede on this front. Within Canada, Alberta and Albertans are beholden to a gamut of regulations and a prohibitive taxation regime which function as serious impediments to economic growth. However, there are so many other variables at play that it makes the economic case for independence far muddier than would first appear.

Alberta is caught between two masters, and I am inclined to think that the devil we know is preferable to the devil we don’t know. I am even so optimistic as to think that the devil we know might not be a pure incarnation of evil, but may be capable of a change of heart.

4: Where to Go from Here

Reform, I maintain, it desperately needed if the spectre of Alberta separatism is to be abated. The reform I have in mind, however, is rather difficult to achieve. However, there are a range of steps which can be taken at various levels of government.

First and foremost, as I contest in my essay on Canadian pipelines, there are a number of legislative roadblocks to Albertan economic development and integration into the rest of the Canadian economy which must be removed. They include Bill C-48, C-68, C-69, and the 2015 Pipeline Safety Act. After these are out of the way, a number of new pipelines are in order, which will have the dual effect of broadening the possible export markets for Alberta oil and ensuring common interests between the provinces of Canada and thereby cultivating national unity.

There is hope on this front. Recently, Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a Memorandum of Understanding which proposes a route for a new pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbian coast. If the two parties can follow through on this agreement, a turning point will have been reached in federal-provincial relations. If not, the fires of separatism will be stoked.

But now the difficult part: many of the complaints Albertans have with the status quo in Canada pertain to features of our polity which are enshrined in the 1982 Constitution. These include the equalization programme, the matter of political representation, and the degree of provincial autonomy.

I argue first that the regime of equalization must be abolished, if not reduced significantly, so that the have-not provinces are forced to stand on their own two feet, rather than depend on Alberta’s industriousness.

Secondly, there ought to be some kind of geographical representation in Canadian Parliament more than the status quo, which allocates seats in a Senate which, as everyone knows, has no real power at all in Ottawa. I admit, I am a bit hazy on what such reforms could look like. I have reservations about the Triple-E Senate, but it may very well prove to be the foremost contender for a meaningful change.

Thirdly, more constitutionally-granted provincial autonomy is in order. In particular, I think two domains which are now the sole concern of the federal government ought to be delegated to the provinces: environmental and immigration policy. Whereas a major gripe of the western provinces is that the federal government imposes changes within these two fields which the West wholeheartedly rejects, making these two domains a provincial concern would address this complaint. Or, an alternative is the imposition of asymmetrical federalism, in which some provinces administer these domains themselves, while others leave them to the federal government.

Now, I am not oblivious to the fact that such reforms will be monumentally difficult to achieve, given the onerous process for amendments stipulated in our constitution. However, I am hopeful that the provinces can be brought on board if only because of the added provincial autonomy that they can assume. Many more concessions might need to be granted, of course, but as long as a serious and good-faith effort is made, I believe much can be accomplished. Moreover, the new generations are not afflicted by the trauma of the past failed attempts at constitutional rounds at Meech Lake and Charlottetown. Indeed, a new attempt is overdue.

But aside from these practical political solutions, I think the most important step is for all Canadians to realize that this is not an ephemeral battle over culture, but a perennial struggle over concrete policies, in which Alberta has a number of reasonable concerns. The prospect of Alberta separatism seems to be fanciful for most outside of the West, but I caution Canadians from adopting this aloof attitude. I see dozens of pro-independence signs and displays every day. Pretty well everyone I work with is at least sympathetic to independence, if not an outspoken supporter of it. Ignoring these concerns is the most surefire way of letting them fester and spread.

If you still obstinately turn your gaze skyward, refusing to confront this matter directly, you may very well find yourself tumbling into a well like dear Thales—not merely bobbing atop a reservoir of groundwater, but sinking into a viscous oily cauldron.

“If you can’t follow orders, I’ll fucking find someone who can! You are replaceable. I will fucking replace you!” he screamed in my face.

These were the words of my foreman. I’ll call him Frank. I was an apprentice industrial sandblaster and coater, still learning the ropes of the trade. I had missed a spot of concrete while blasting the intermediate casing on a producing oil well.

He continued to spew base and demeaning insults in my face. Every interjection I attempted was overpowered, and so I stopped my weak protests. Ultimately, he was right—I had missed a spot. I saw saliva dribble from his mouth as he called me an idiot in what seemed like an infinite number of permutations. I waited for his rage to subside, trudged back to the well, and resumed my work.

The great irony was that I was the replacement. The three guys before me who had been assigned to Frank’s crew had quit. The first quit in a huff after an explosive argument; the second last was handing out resumes on the worksite within the first week; the last was a quiet guy my age who quit with only a couple days notice, citing “personal reasons”—namely, I suspect, that he personally couldn’t stand the foreman. To take his place, I travelled straight north from another job, through Fort McMurray, to the heart of the Alberta oil sands. It was there that I would face my greatest trial—not the remote land, the variable climate, or the laborious work itself, but the roughshod tutelage of a disgruntled foreman.

But I wouldn’t quit. I wasn’t a pussy.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

Some years ago, I sought out work in the oil patch for a number of reasons. I needed money, and the oil patch was one of the few places left where any unqualified idiot could arrive and earn an enviable wage, if only he was willing to work like a dog in adverse conditions.

I needed an escape from the turgid and enervating halls of academia, and the enlivening aspect of manual labour provided a much needed salve. I had always held a fond and rosy impression of the Canadian frontier, and I had sought it out at every turn in my life—or as Ishmael in Moby Dick eloquently puts it, “As for me, I am tormented by an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

However, perhaps the greatest allure was of a challenge to test my mettle and make me strong.

There is a certain element in modern society—though exactly what, no one can quite lay a finger on—which encourages apathy, weakness, and vice. One would be hard-pressed to argue that the new generation, among which I count myself, possesses the same vigour and vivacity of those who came before. What seems certain to me is that, with the ease and comfort brought about by technology and material wealth, young men, lack a pivotal trial which marks the transition from boyhood to manhood.

Such trials are a nearly universal feature of the human experience across time and place, but they are conspicuously absent in the modern West. This, I wager, has contributed to the so-called “crisis of masculinity,” with young men confused about their manhood, and often choosing to either deny the very possibility or permissibility of masculinity as such, or to embrace a performative hyper-masculinity sold to them by men of dubious moral standing in the comfort of their homes.

Though as a young man I wouldn’t say I fell into either of these extreme camps, I did distinctly feel that something was missing from my life. I felt that, in my academic existence, I had allowed the comfort and complacency of routine and familiar surroundings to prevent me from growing into what I was supposed to be. In many ways, I felt something fundamentally missing from my life, and that my manhood was not yet my own. It is difficult to put into words such inchoate feelings of inadequacy, but I intuited strongly that I needed a radical change, that I needed to be broken apart and reformed stronger, and that I needed to deliberately abandon comfort. I needed a trial.

This was merely one instantiation of the eternally recurring “call to adventure” which spurs the hero on a noble quest in the archetypal Hero’s Journey.

It was, naturally, the oil patch that drew my attention—a strange and beautiful land where the strong alone survive and the weak perish. The oil patch is an increasingly rare place where pure masculine vitality is lauded, no matter the attendant vices. Civilized pretense breaks down under the weight of labour, and only essence remains. It’s a land where working men press themselves up against deprivation daily, where the hours are long and the toil is hard. In the blazing summer heat or the frigid chill of winter, the work must get done.

And so I packed up my life, left my home, and headed west to become an oil man.

I did not immediately find the trials I sought out, however. I worked a number of jobs upon arriving in Alberta, from oilfield vegetation management, to hauling light freight, to wellhead maintenance—all of which were difficult in many respects, but none of which pushed me to my utmost limits. It wasn’t until I got on as an industrial sandblaster and coater that I found my long-awaited trial.

Sandblasting is an inherently difficult and dangerous job. It entails wearing bulky protective gear akin to a spacesuit and shooting abrasive sand at high speed out of a blast hose at metal surfaces to shave off rust, coating, or millscale, so that the surface is reduced to white metal, at which point the surface may be coated with protective paint. Given that the stream of sand is used to plane metal surfaces, it could easily shave off skin and muscle in seconds if it were aimed at one’s person—an occurrence which was all too common in our trade. The protective gear we wear can only defend against sand ricochet; it is all but ineffectual against a direct blast.

What is more, inhaling sand is a perennial and unavoidable hazard of the job, not to mention inhalation of the toxic fumes from the various coatings and solvents we use. That, combined with other dangers inherent in the oil and gas industry, including noxious gas, large mechanized equipment, and pressurized lines and vessels, presents a gamut of dangers.

The dangers only compound the strain of the work itself. Being behind a blast hose is roughly equivalent to holding a fire hose, which we regularly do for hours at a time. When in tanks or vessels, we often have to do so crouched over, on our side, or bent in awkward contortions. The sheer scale of some of the projects we undertake can entail doing so for twelve hours a day and for weeks on end. What is more, we regularly work away from home in distant corners of northern Alberta for up to a month at a time, only returning home when the work is through.

In the context of the oil and gas industry, sandblasting is typically used for the maintenance, integrity testing, and preventative treatment of tanks, pipelines, oil wells, boilers, and various other objects. I say all this merely to supply context for the story.

I threw myself into mastering the trade, soaking up information and perfecting my technique. I was determined to learn the different grades of blast, how to work with different coatings, and the steps involved in taking apart and reconstructing a well for ultrasonic testing. The many facets of the job were daunting, but I was determined to persist.

Still wet behind the ears and with a green hard hat, I was progressing steadily in the trade, but was undeniably a novice. It was at this formative juncture that I met the foreman whose very presence would challenge me more than any aspect of sandblasting—a man who would lay me low like no other had, and would trace the contours of my spirit. He would imbue in me a deep yet pre-verbal self-knowledge by pushing my soul to its utmost limits. That foreman, in this account, will be called Frank.

Now, I had heard about Frank before being placed on his crew. Many called him “old school,” which was a charming euphemism. What was meant was that he was a hard-ass who barked orders, suffered no setbacks, and expected perfection. He was older, from an age when speech attained to rugged accuracy, rather than inoffensive mildness—an age when you called a spade a spade—or, when a worker was being a dumb cunt, you called him a dumb cunt.

In all my recollection, I don’t think I have met a man more disagreeable than Frank. When things were going well for him, he was utterly laconic. When something was amiss—even the most inconsequential inconvenience, he would rant and roar, complain and bemoan his lot in life. There was always a sardonic bite in his speech and an intimidating intensity in his eye. When he spoke of others, there was seldom a kind word, only invective and accusation. One got the sense, the more one listened to him, that there was a cosmic conspiracy against him in which every man he met was implicated. He seemed to suspect the worst of others, and whenever something was awry, it was malice alone which made it so.

When I first began to travel up north on jobs with Frank, it was often just him and I alongside other subcontractors who minded their own business. The first couple jobs I did with him were short and mild stints around Conklin, Alberta. His crew was primarily tasked with near-surface casing inspections, in which oil wells were dug around, and the surface casing was sandblasted and then ultrasonically tested for integrity. If the surface casing failed inspection, it would be cut off, and we would blast and coat the intermediate casing below it, after which point our welder would attach new surface casing, and that would be blasted and coated in turn. Though simple in theory, the task was grueling and complex, with a myriad of changing variables, requiring fine technique and expertise.

With so many steps and moving parts in the process, at the outset I committed many idiotic errors. Whenever I did, Frank would briskly correct me, or step in to do the job himself. He was impatient and demanding, certainly, but the jobs we worked on never lasted long enough for me to see a different side of him.

Those first few stints, I was only filling in on his crew, and was not yet a mainstay. As such, he seemed indifferent to my conduct, expecting that once our work was through his experienced blasters would be returned to him and he would be absolved of his responsibility to teach me his craft. And so I muddled along, committing a host of foolish blunders. But my first impression of Frank was that he was a relatively laid-back foreman.

How mistaken was I.

A few months went by, and then I was back on a job with Frank. This time up north, Fort McMurray. One of the major oil companies had dozens of wells for us to tear apart, test, and rebuild—work which would take us almost to the end of the year on and off. A number of stints would be in order, two to three weeks apiece, and I was Frank’s guy for all of them.

The blistering July heat drowned us in sweat and the sun refused to descend from its loft except for a few meagre hours in the night. The McMurray country was alive with flora and fauna, the boreal forest full of buzzing insects, curious bears, and ravens eager to uncover the bounty buried in our trash bags. The massive industrial complexes loomed in the horizon, and their smokestacks poured forth acrid fumes into the air. The work camps were all full and each site was brimming with activity, a host of different breeds of oil men drilling, servicing, maintaining, and building. Amid this busy season, Frank and I, some welders, a pump truck, and a UT crew set about our task.

At first, Frank seemed in fine spirits. On our way to and from site, he would regale me with stories of grave accidents and wild parties from his many years as an oil man or discuss his immanent wealth from whatever cryptocurrency he was currently invested in. On one occasion on a ride to site, he marked that the moon was absent from the sky.

“That’s so fucked up,” he said.

“Hm?” I responded, having only rolled out of bed twenty minutes prior.

“The moon was just there yesterday and now it’s gone. It’s shit like this that makes me doubt this whole ‘earth is a globe’ crap.”

I smiled and nodded as he proceeded to explain in muddled fashion the minutiae of the flat-earth cosmology, including the Bedford level experiment, the firmament, the ice wall which holds the world’s oceans, and the nefarious secrets lying in Antarctica which the global elites don’t want us to know about. I knew better than to raise any objections.

And another thing: whenever Frank opened his mouth, regardless of mood or subject matter, at least every third word was the F-bomb.

As the work pressed on into the second week, I noticed changes in Frank’s demeanour. He was more reserved in speech, more easily provoked, and far more impatient with every passing day. He would curse the welders for small mistakes, rant about our wellsite supervisor, and snap at me over things I thought inconsequential. Many say that there are no stupid questions, but to Frank, every question seemed a monument to stupidity. A vampiric aura of negativity surrounded him, as he complained and ranted without end. Everyone sensed it implicitly, as it slowly but surely drained the lifeforce of each and every individual on the jobsite.

I took solace in the deafening scream of the stream of sand coming out of my hose and the roar of the air compressor, which drowned out the constant litany of complaint. In my cumbersome pear green blast hood, I felt insulated from the world around me, and the small visual opening focused my attention solely on the task at hand: shooting sand particles at metal surfaces.

However, even in these moments, I was not safe. In a pit, sandblasting, I suddenly felt three sharp raps on my head, which plucked me from my focused state. I immediately shut down my stream of sand and removed my blast hood, turning around to see the towering figure of Frank above me with an unrepentant scowl.

“What the fuck is taking so long? You gotta pick up the fucking pace, man. What are you even doing?” He took off his glasses and leaned down. “What the fuck are you even blasting?” As he examined further, he became angrier and angrier. “This looks like fucking shit. If you keep wasting time and sand you’re gonna be out of here so fast you won’t know what fucking hit you.”

An attempt to interrupt him added fuel to the fire. A stream of bitter words flowed forth. It’s difficult to recall the precise order of them all, but I was called a dumb cunt, a fucking moron, and an asshole, in various configurations. I do distinctly remember the concluding lines, steeped in contempt and condescension: “If you’re gonna work like a fucking retard then I’m gonna treat you like a retard. Your blasting needs to get a thousand times better if you’re gonna keep this job.”

I was stunned, and I could only stare with mouth agape as he sauntered back to his truck and climbed back in.

When I write the words, it hardly carries the impact of that first invective. There was something so terrifying about his temper which flew from stationary to top gear in a matter of seconds. There was something about his scowl and towering figure which heightened the sting of the words.

Later, after I had finished sandblasting, Frank attached an addendum to his rant. Far from an admission of any wrongdoing, he maintained that he was just trying to make me a better blaster, and told me that if any of the other foremen had seen my work, they would have sent me home on the spot. I had no idea whether this was true, but it was a curious attempt to sketch himself as the hero of the story—a tendency which I would observe in Frank time and time again.

That was the first impression I had of my foreman’s capacity for rage, which seemed to come and go with the wind. His impetuosity would only grow with the coming weeks. The longer we spent away, the more irate Frank become. He would rush me constantly to blast faster, coat faster, move faster. It seemed that he assumed everyone around him possessed the ability to telepathically read his mind and interpret his orders without him needing to even speak a word.

The inconstancy and uncertainty of it all was what I dreaded most. I could never anticipate his reactions to anything. On one occasion, I was parked in my truck behind him, or so I thought. Unaware, I reached over to grab my gear while the truck slowly inched forward, before colliding into Frank’s truck with a great thud. I got out and looked at the damage while apologizing profusely. He took one look at the dent in my bumper and only said “We’ll just say that was there when we got the truck,” before chuckling to himself.

On another occasion, I asked him if he would help spot me while backing up and hooking onto a trailer—what I thought was a reasonable request. He lit up at once: “What, do I have to babysit you this entire fucking time? Do you want me to hold your hand too?”

I could only stare, dumbfounded.

Towards the end of our shift, his irascibility was at its zenith and the pace of our work reached a fever pitch. We would work without break the whole day to get the job done—at least, I would while he watched austerely from his truck—so he could return home at long last. He would cut corners, make up numbers on his quality control reports, and most of all, refuse to tolerate any single force conspiring to keep him up north longer than he had to be. I came to understand in those last few days that, in his view, the foremost factor which threatened to delay his return was my unfailing incompetence—and he never failed to tell me so.

The pressure to perform became all but unbearable. He watched my every motion like a hawk, swooping in to lay me low whenever my work didn’t meet his impossible expectations. The air was full of his foul language and caustic retorts, alongside the particles of abrasive sand hovering in a miasma around us. Coating fumes assailed our nostrils, but protective equipment was a waste of time which Frank thought we could do without. He ridiculed me when I tried to put in ear plugs prior to blasting, despite the hearing loss endemic to our trade.

The pace of our work was utterly exhausting to the body, while his capricious temper was doubly so to my mind. His rage, capricious and unpredictable, roved over the land like a thunderstorm. One may have had premonitions of its arrival, but more frequently, it would swirl into existence without warning. As it clouded over, it would assail the terrain in torrents, and any mortal in its way would be foolhardy to stand up to its raving malice. This cloud of rage hovered over the land, striking whatever target was closest and most conspicuous—in a barren field, a lone tree was a lightning rod to which every bolt would be directed. And then, as quickly as the tempest arrived, it would pass, leaving only bewilderment in its wake.

Such were the final days of every job with Frank.

The gist of every embittered rant was the same. I was a lazy cunt, a retard, I was slowing down the pace of work, wasting material, never going to make it in this industry, he was going to send me home if this continued, and so on. After one such tirade of his, I attempted to explain myself on the ride back from site.

“You know, it’s not like I don’t give a fuck about this, man,” I said. “It’s not like that. I’m trying my fucking best to get better at this—and sure, I missed a spot and that was my bad, but I want to be here. I want to be a sandblaster.”

“Yeah, thinking back on it, that was a little harsh,” he responded. “I wasn’t even really mad at you, it’s just our fucking consultant who’s always on my fucking ass about everything, rushing the work, and all this bullshit. I was fucking fed up and needed to yell at someone. And fuck did it ever feel good to get that out.”

And he laughed.

Not sure what to make of this, I laughed too.

When the work was finished, we would make the long drive back south on a straight shot through the boreal forest. It was typically a long and boring route, but with Frank, the drives were never quite so long, and never quite so boring.

There was one stop, and one stop only, before we hit the highway: the liquor store in Fort Mac, at which Frank picked up a six pack of tall boys for the road. Once we left McMurray down Highway 63, Frank drove at 150km/hr the whole way back, even reaching 160 every once in a while, tossing back beers like they were nothing.

“I’m thirsty,” he said, and laughed, as he cracked open his first can.

The relief on his face was palpable on the ride back, and his many annoyances seemed to fade away. Conversation was actually quite pleasant. I was in no position to complain about his inebriation. I reasoned that, pacified after a six pack of Bud Light, he was actually less of a danger to himself and other drivers than he would be in his usual fits of road rage. That was, at least, what I told myself.

Suddenly, we saw police lights behind us, alighting the dark and empty highway. Before I knew what was happening, he thrust his half-full beer can into my lap, screaming “Throw it out! Throw it out!” as it spilled all over me.

I rolled down my window and launched it into the darkness. We braced for the worst, but were relieved to see the police pull over the vehicle behind us. Frank would have without a doubt lost his license.

As soon as the red and blue lights were out of view, he reached over and cracked a fresh can.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about working with Frank was the denial of recognition. No matter how hard I tried, it seemed my efforts were never good enough for him. There would always be something more I could do, a way I could better my technique, a way I could anticipate Frank’s capricious will. His words of praise were few and far between—whereas I was once shocked by his bitter invectives, once I had accustomed myself to those, it was more surprising whenever he had good things to say to me. To placate him felt like a game of shifting goalposts.

But those incredibly rare moments of praise did arrive. On one occasion, he confided that I was the only worker he had had in a while whom he trusted to coat wells for him. On another occasion, upon inspecting the interior of an eight-story tank that I had spent ten straight days blasting all alone, he was unable to even find so much as a speck I had missed, and told me that my job was “immaculate.”

Those rare moments filled me with pride.

It was the pride of rightful recognition—a recognition which is so deeply fundamental to man’s existence. It is not enough to esteem yourself and the work you do, but there is always an insatiable drive to see the work valued by some tangible metric, in the product of one’s labour and especially the estimation of others. Where this recognition is denied, and where there is a gulf between your own view of yourself and the view of others, there is a sense of deep frustration. Where recognition is denied, as Hegel argues, there is a sense of stunted growth or incompleteness.

The drive to attain Frank’s recognition was a task of paramount importance for me, especially given the character of my task in the patch. I was there to prove to myself and others that I could endure the hardships and succeed in that world through sheer force of will. And so, when Frank intimated that I was not cut out to be a sandblaster, my efforts to prove that I was took on a frenzied and desperate character. To fail in this task would amount to the triumph of evil over good in my own Hero’s Journey.

It was absurd, as I considered it, that I was so determined to secure the approval of this foreman who was, by anyone else’s judgement, a vengeful asshole. But if I relented or complained, I was hardly better than those who had quit before me under the pressure. I determined that I would be stronger than them. I would persist. If attaining recognition proved to be an impossible task, I would pursue it anyway.

My relationship to Frank was akin to that of the mythological hero and, to use Joseph Campbell’s phrase, his “second father,” a mentor figure whose confrontation with the hero is hardly that of a benevolent and warm paternalistic shield, but rather a hostile dialectic that demands the death of the ego. A father by birth gives his love freely, but a second father’s respect must be earned through blood and sweat. The second father’s task is not to protect the hero from the harsh realities of the world, but to hold his face against them and make a man of him.

One can think of countless transpositions of this theme across time and space, in reality, myth, and fiction. Figures from the centaur Chiron in ancient myth to something as banal as Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid films are instantiations of this eternal archetype.

So was it that in the far north, amid the scarred industrial landscape of the oil sands, I appeared to meet my second father and be brought under his abrasive tutelage.

It is the tendency of modern man to shy away from such figures, as evinced by my predecessors—indeed, it is the tendency of modern man to shy away from the call to adventure itself and curtail the Hero’s Journey before it ever begins. For a mentor to inflict pain and duress upon his student would be cast as abuse according to our liberal sensibilities. But such impulses should be resisted, lest we forget the important self-transformation which occurs in such a relationship. Such an encounter with a second father may very well be the crucial trial needed to turn a boy into a man. The absence of, and credulity towards, such encounters in the modern world, is a crucial reason that so many boys fail to attain maturity. It may be the lack of genuinely masculine mentors—and not mere performers—that has drawn us into a crisis of masculinity.

Masculinity is hardly something innate among males, but it is something which must be won through trial. It has been found that the existence of some sort of trial which transforms a boy into a man is a universal and cross-cultural feature of human life, from Amazonian tribes to industrialized civilizations. Even in the modern West, there are vague impressions of this fact, even if in our obsession with the blank-slate theory of human nature, we try to erase this at every turn.

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And yet, the drive of men towards masculinity, in all its heroics and ugliness, persists. Where they are denied this pursuit, or where they fail to attain this goal which their very body screams at them to chase, there results a deep and shattering crisis of identity. Bereft of the necessary trials, a boy remains a boy forever, trapped in his fairytale Neverland. Indeed, the attainment of masculinity is one of the most common themes of the Hero’s Journey, as described by Campbell.

This mentor cannot simply be a distant figure, but one with whom the hero is brought into direct contact, and whose relationship becomes inherently dialectical. It is a back and forth dynamic, with the mentor assigning greater and greater trials to the student, with the student pushing back against the stern impositions of his superior. This creates a virtuous cycle and a foundation for the continuous improvement of a man’s body and soul.

Upon the completion of the journey, in whatever form it takes, a man should look back on how he has improved, on the strength he has attained, and appreciate the pedagogical success of his mentor. It is thus that the two are reconciled. As much as I came to understand this, it seemed impossible that I should ever be reconciled with Frank, for his unquenchable anger seemed only to increase as the year progressed.

The blazing heat of summer gave way to the crisp air of fall. The trees turned a vibrant yellow in northern Alberta, with the coniferous larches even joining the seasonal display. The northern winds proclaimed the cold season which approached, but Frank and I still had a dozen wells to complete before year’s end. Light flurries of snow began to fall on the drive up, and a pervasive silence fell over the land. The days rapidly became shorter and shorter. While the very land prepared to hunker down and rest for the winter, the pace of our work only increased, as we desperately tried to complete our contract before the ground was laden with snow.

I still remember vividly how, each morning, the cream would tumble out of the dispenser into my coffee mug in a strangely satisfying manner, falling in thick droplets which danced upon the surface of the black coffee and then dispersed into its murky depths in a ravishing interplay of light and darkness. It was a rare moment of solace, on those five A.M. starts, before facing the dismal autumn winds. I carried the memory of that moment with me throughout the day, eagerly anticipating the following morning if only to see the cream tumble out of the dispenser once more.

Frank had warned me himself that, when the cold began to set in, his temper flared ever more readily. I thought I was prepared, accustomed to his rage during the summer months, but I most certainly was not. The near-surface casing inspection campaign, as it waned into October, proved to be entirely miserable. I hesitate to even mention any of Frank’s outbursts at me, as it is rather embarrassing to recall the torrents of abuse I endured without resistance.

Looking back, I was certainly progressing in my mastery of the blasting and coating trade. My job title now read “level one tradesman”—no longer a mere labourer—and I was able to do the job well without committing any grave mistakes. However, it certainly did not feel like it when each day a new outflow of abuse was thrown my way. I am ashamed to admit, but at the hands of another man, I was made to feel worthless and small. Though there were others working around us, on a two-man crew with me and Frank, I felt deeply isolated in the northland.

To convince myself of the merits of persisting in this craft I became enamoured with my suffering, in a kind of perverse algophilia. In this abyss of darkness and self-doubt, my ego surely perished and I wandered through each day shivering and zombified. The only way out was through—to finish the remaining wells, and to manage in this task, I could not but see my suffering as purification.

This entailed two things: that the suffering was endured so that I would be made better, but also that it was inflicted to the same end. If Frank was to play the role of the second father in my own journey, it entailed that his treatment of me was undertaken with the aim to prepare me for the vicissitudes of monsters and demons lurking in the wilds, training me for some fiery ordeal.

To love my suffering and to see meaning within it forced me to re-evaluate the relative virtues of the man inflicting the suffering upon me.

Frank, was known to seldom utter a flattering word. He was always criticizing me, impelling me to improve, and doing so with stinging tone, burning the memory of my errors into my brain. It was far easier to recall an error if the memory of being called a retard and faggot is attendant with it. Whenever Frank berated me for doing something foolish, the shame of that moment was salient in my memory ever after, and I would make every effort not to repeat the same mistake. If he had merely told me that I was doing a good job, I would have never set to self-improvement with such animation. As I considered this, I began to understand the merits of Frank’s leadership.

My initial impulse had been to view him as the villain in my journey, but I slowly came to reconceptualize him as the wise mentor whose every word contained some concealed kernel of wisdom. The true villain was mediocrity, immaturity, my former self. It was good that I was berated and humiliated, if only it vanquished this foe.

In the frozen cauldron of Fort MacMurray, I rationalized my suffering by viewing it as purification, by viewing Frank as a wise yet wrathful teacher who hoped to shape me into a great man, and by reading every impulse of self-doubt and misery as a step along my own Hero’s Journey. Perhaps it was merely an attempt to cope by mythologizing my masochistic plight. Nonetheless, I endured where others did not, and saw the task through.

Just as suddenly as the leaves had turned rust red and caustic yellow, the first snowfall arrived, and with it, the season of tank work. Sandblasting and coating requires heat so that the abrasive sand doesn’t spark, the metal surface doesn’t flash rust, and the coating we apply can cure. Tanks, being self-contained, are far easier to heat up, only requiring a single heater, run day and night, whose ducts are fed into a manway.

There are pros and cons about such work. It is pleasant to be warm inside a tank amid the chill of winter. But simultaneously, when entering a tank at the crack of dawn and exiting only with the onset of dusk, one lives in perpetual darkness, forgetting the very sensation of sunlight on one’s skin.

Frank’s crew, on which I was a mainstay, mobilized to sandblast and coat the inside of a sulfur recovery unit near Cold Lake, Alberta. As the temperature dropped day by day outside the tank, Frank’s appearances became few and far between. When I left the tank for breaks, I would rarely see him milling around. Instead, he was in his truck, idling nearby. Most often, he was passed out cold with mouth agape. The feeling was nothing short of contempt when, after working my ass off all day, fitting myself into tight spaces and awkward contortions to reach every contour of the tank’s interior, I exited the tank to find my foreman swallowing flies.

He was not a light sleeper, either. Whenever I needed something from him, I would have to bang on his window like a madman to awaken him from his slumber. Heavy metal was always blaring inside his truck, and so my attempts to rouse him were often futile.

This alone would not have bothered me, but in spite of his slumberous routine, Frank still had the gall to pester us about the pace of our work. In fact, the times where he violently impelled us to work faster were essentially the only times he left his truck. Frank maintained that the client was “up his ass” about the pace of work, but we saw no evidence of client representatives on site. I supposed that he was using anything he could find as a pretense to dictate the pace of work and assert his will. And then, as soon as he had finished reproving us, he would immediately retreat back to the warmth of his truck and fall soundly asleep.

It was hilarious—the hypocrisy of it all. It was almost as if he acted to maximize our outrage at the absurdity of his orders. We were to work harder and faster while he dozed in a warm truck. This oppositional relationship between worker and foreman was solidified by such interactions. Whether cultivated intentionally or not, the wide gulf between us created a brick wall for us to rail against. It provided a source of frustration, and out of this frustration was born an enduring vivacity which permeated the job and banished any sense of comfort.

What is crucial here is that this sustained conflict made the job an irresolvable problem for me. There was no opportunity to rest in a complacent routine and find myself at home in the task. Once a worker attains this comfort and confidence in his job, his capacity for internal development is stifled, as there is no conflict urging him on and forcing him to transform in a fundamental way. This source of strife which demands internal transformation is the guiding impetus of any Hero’s Journey, without which there is no journey at all.

When the work itself is not enough to effect this transformation, some other force must appear to artificially sustain this conflict. This artificial force was Frank.

While the work was difficult, I was achieving mastery over it, slowly but surely. Whereas the task before me itself once seemed daunting and insurmountable, it had long since ceased to appear so. Just as I was beginning to feel at home in my task, Frank’s impositions reappeared, perpetuating the sense of discomfort and frustration. If he had never done so, sandblasting might have become easy and natural for me. I credit Frank that it was never so.

Indeed, without Frank, the reflections born of my work and contained in this essay might never have come about. I may never have been pushed to my utmost limits, experienced the paroxysm of frustration, and faced a trial such as I sought when I first ventured to the oil patch. I can say without doubt that the daily strife of Frank’s crew made me stronger and better.

“This blast needs to be done by noon. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. It has to be done,” Frank said to me, sternly.

That was a sanguine deadline. I knew that it was impossible to finish the work I had ahead of me before then. I tried to explain why, but he didn’t allow me to get a word in.

“Noon. It’ll be done,” he repeated.

I put on my blast hood and entered the oil tank.

After a few hours, I emerged to fill up my blast pot with sand and to give Frank a progress report. It was not to his liking and his rage was kindled.

“I’m working as fast as I can,” I insisted.

“Work faster,” he curtly demanded.

The profundity of such a statement was lost on me in the moment, but I later realized its significance. He had issued me an impossible task.

It could not be done, and in my case it wasn’t. For reasons I tried to explain to him, the job was taking longer than he thought it would. When Frank actually stuck his head in the tank, he finally understood what I had been trying to explain to him, and he relented.

The impossible task is not merely an insult or a product of hyperbole. Though it was born of Frank’s ignorance in the moment, it was much more than that. It was an unrealizable ideal, a carrot on a stick, a guiding impetus for me. The impossible task, which Frank frequently assigned, was a brick wall for me to run up against so as to teach me discipline amid frustration.

The impossible task is an essential component of education, for education as such ought to have no end goal. There ought to be, and indeed can be, no end to self-improvement and human perfectibility. Wherever there is a tangible goal to be achieved, after which one’s journey is finished, there lie the seeds of eventual stagnation. Only where there is an unreachable goal is there an eternal ideal to guide one’s journey.

Indeed, the impossible task is an indispensable pedagogical tool in any field of instruction. Only by the invocation of some ephemeral and final goal of “freedom of thought” can philosophy inspire men to learn. Only by the vision of a technological utopia can material progress attain greater and greater heights. Only by the uncertain status of “greatness” does one strive evermore for fame and accolades. Only according to the light of the eternal Good is one able to consider the moral course for his life, imperfectly imitating this transcendent and perfect ideal.

Similarly, the impossible task, frequently imposed, drew me to greater and greater heights.

When I consider my time with Frank, I can only conclude that he was a mentor to me, a second father, and a teacher in the purest sense. A teacher is not someone who stands at a lectern and conveys information, but one who cultivates knowledge and virtue in a student. The relationship between them is not austere, but involved, and the student is not a passive recipient of information, but is drawn passionately into the learning process itself.

It is not enough to convey information, as this is ultimately a facade under which the fundamental substratum of education shines forth. The true locus of education is the formative character development of the student. The teacher must imbue in him the ability to excel in the field of expertise being taught through exercise in the necessary virtues and skills. It is this most crucial element of education which the modern West sorely neglects.

A teacher, then, is known by his effects. Where he places in the heart of a student the unfailing passion to complete the task before him, he has succeeded. Where the student attains a strength previously foreign to him and virtues which laid buried in the recesses of his soul, the teacher has succeeded.

When a man has completed his journey, and looks back upon it to see that he has become a man only though the journey, he is able to view the hardships imposed upon him by the second father in a new light. He understands the necessity of the trials. In the moment, he might regard them as arbitrary or punitive, but in the end, he looks in himself to see the fruit that they bear. He appreciates all that the teacher has done for him. Reconciliation, not as a kindly sentiment, but a mature appreciation and respect, occurs only at this concluding reflection.

A later encounter proved to me that Frank’s persistent reproval did not merely move according to his whim, but that there was method in it.

After blasting the inside of a tank, which I had made every effort to achieve without a single blemish, Frank accompanied me for the inspection. He pointed vaguely at a number of places on the tank surface, saying there were spots I had missed and instructing me on technique to avoid such mistakes. With my naked eye, I could not for the life of me see what he was pointing at. I dismissed his comments, supposing that he was only bitter that he no longer had an excuse to belittle me. A subsequent third-party inspection approved the blast without as much as a comment.

After the job was complete, I was loitering in the company office and speaking to some of the higher-ups. One congratulated me on the recent job and said,

“Yeah, Frank was really impressed with your work. He said the tank was literally spotless—something even he hasn’t done. He told me that he had to pretend you missed a couple of spots just so your ego didn’t get out of control.”

And in that moment, everything seemed to make sense.

Is Frank a good man? It’s difficult to say. In some ways he is, and in some ways he isn’t. But morality was entirely separate from what he was trying to accomplish.

Of course, on a concrete level, Frank taught me the art of sandblasting and coating. He taught me how to loosen a packoff stuck on a well, he taught me how to wire deadman cable. He showed me how to run and maintain a picker truck, air compressor, and various other implements of our trade. And when I got an five-tonne truck stuck in the mud, his gruff voice coached me through getting it unstuck.

But, on a more profound level, while working under Frank, I was acclimated to the uncertainty of a world in flux. I stopped seeking any rhyme or reason in his moods, and began to find a home in perpetual discomfort. I quickly forgot any sense of entitlement to dignified treatment, and I became accustomed to a non-stop stream of acrid belittlement. Under the pressure of immense and unreasonable expectations, I was made to steel my nerves, calm my tachycardiac pulse, and continue on. I simply put my head down and did the work—achieving ego death behind a blast hose.

Frank all but taught me how to live without breath. After working with him, it feels like nothing can touch me, that I have attained a protective shell, that I am almost invincible. I have encountered my fair share of rough and tumble men in my years in the oil patch, but their wanton ways bounce right off me. I am immune to their choleric furor.

My journey is hardly over, and there has been no formal reconciliation with my erstwhile foreman, but looking back on my time working for him, I am deeply grateful for his insults and for his rage. They made me strong, and it is a strength which I carry with me to the present day.

I have had many teachers in my life who merely purveyed information, but none of them imparted more upon me than that grizzled foreman who barked orders and called me a dumb cunt.

Everything until this point had been written around a year ago. After the passage of time, some reflection on the matter, and a number of new encounters, I find it fitting to write an epilogue of sorts.

While I once was green and inexperienced, I am now a hardened and skilled tradesman. Whereas my hard hat was once green, it is now worn, weathered, and most importantly, adorned with dozens of stickers. I well understand the nuances of my job, and I say confidently that I am at home in my task. It is as such that, after a long hiatus, I found myself on Frank’s crew once more, at the outset of a new near-surface casing inspection campaign in the province’s far north. I was not eager for the task, and so I demanded that my employer hire a swamper for me to assist in the onerous toil ahead. This demand was, thankfully met. Green as grass, a young Newfie lad was brought into our company. He was eager and hardworking, which made up for a complete dearth of knowledge in the ways of our trade. In him I saw a window to my own green self of a few years ago.

I found Frank in the same state as I had left him. From the very first day of the job, he was all but foaming at the mouth over anything and everything which didn’t go his way. Only now, I saw through him. Having a complete understanding of the job, I could recognize how trivial the subject of his concern often was. When his wrath reached a fever pitch and he started to yell, I would simply watch him rant and roar, and then move along. I was keenly aware of the hypocrisy when he would chastise us for something he did himself. When he threatened to send me home, I coolly called his bluff.

He no longer scared me. I no longer needed his approval. I no longer saw any merit in his guidance. Whereas once he had scolded me for my sandblasting technique, for my coating skills, and for my knowledge of various specialized tools, he would now rage over how many wood boards I had on my trailer and the manner in which I had cordoned off an area with caution tape.

The latter incident was curious. He shouted violently at me from his truck: “Don’t fucking put it up like that! Fucking listen to me!”

In disbelief, I shook my head, dropped the roll of tape on the ground, and walked away. From behind me, I heard him continue: “Don’t you fucking disrespect me like that! If you shake your head at me one more time, you’re going home tonight!”

The line “don’t you disrespect me like that” became a running joke among the welder, my swamper, and me. Whenever one made a jab at the other, they would respond with “don’t you disrespect me like that” to raucous laughter. Frank’s words had lost their sting, being repurposed as a farcical retort. I saw them less as the somber teachings of a wise guru, and more as the ravings of a crochety old fool.

My impression of Frank only plummeted as the job went on. Every new day was filled with empty threats of sending us home, bitter insult, and hypocrisy—all while he sat in his truck, usually watching movies or scrolling on his phone. Perhaps the apogee was an incident that occurred when my swamper and I were in a muddy and oily pit, with waterlogged boots, on a particularly cold summer day, drilling holes in a conductor barrel and attempting to flush noxious gas out of the well. Frank appeared to question what we are doing, and accused us of not drilling enough holes. It was an accusation born solely of his inability to spot the holes we had already drilled.

He swore at me like a sailor, and seemed to find any way he could to insult me, “You’re a level two tradesman, I shouldn’t have to fucking babysit you! How many wells have you done?” He repeated: “How many wells have you done?” as I simply looked at him with dead eyes. “How long have you done this job?”

“Oh, relax,” I responded, waving him off, which only aggravated him further.

After the tirade, he climbed out of the pit and immediately went back to his truck. We all watched him change his coveralls and climb back inside. His brief incursion into the pit was too muddy for his liking. Meanwhile, I was soaked from head to toe. We slogged through the rest of the miserable day and didn’t see our fearless leader leave the truck again until the late afternoon.

Later that day, I was staggered to learn from my swamper of words exchanged between Frank and him. “Don’t worry,” Frank confided in him, “next shift we’ll get a real blaster up here.” I would have liked to say that his estimation meant nothing to me any more, but those words did sting. After my years of effort, to him I was still inadequate. Despite throwing my utmost effort into the task before us, I was not yet a real tradesman.

Those words hung over me like the Sword of Damocles until the end of the shift.

However, something very strange happened on the final day of the job. On day twenty three of the shift, while waiting for the coating to cure on the very last oil well we had assigned to us, Frank approached me—not with an order or a jeremiad, but a personal question about my future plans. The ensuing conversation was actually rather pleasant, and after I had told him of my eventual intentions to leave the oil patch, he shared his plans for retirement, which entailed opening up a food truck in our small town.

After a lull in the conversation, he stared off into the distance and said, “I know I can be a hothead,” and laughed. “I don’t like being a foreman. I just sit in my truck and think, and get worked up into a bad mood. I come out and yell, and then go back in my truck and feel bad. And I know yelling doesn’t make guys work better or faster. I would rather be out here blasting than be in there. It’s just paperwork and dealing with the higher-ups.”

I neglected to note that there was nothing stopping him from helping the crew.

He trailed off for a second, and then continued, “And I threaten to send guys home, even though I know—I know—I’m not gonna do it.” And he laughed again. “I mean, that’s just how I am. At home people think I’m being an asshole. My wife says ‘why are you always such an asshole?’ but I don’t think I’m being an asshole. I mean, I think I’m just happy and laughing and enjoying myself. But that’s how my dad is too. I mean you should see when we talk—every second word is an F-bomb. And he’s bad, f-ing this, f-ing that. He thinks everyone’s out to get him.”

“Well, I’ve worked with you long enough not to take it personally anymore,” I responded, though I well knew that this was not true. After all, I am here, writing of how deeply my encounters with him have affected me.

I knew this man. I had spent many long shifts in the north with him, and I could read between the lines. I knew that these words were the closest thing to an apology I was ever going to get. But I didn’t need an apology. It was enough to know that he was capable of experiencing remorse—and in this light alone did I again become capable of seeing him not as a transcendent teacher or a climactic villain, but as a fellow human being.

Another lull in the conversation. I mentioned that I didn’t see my name on the schedule for the next shift with him.

“Oh yeah? Who’s coming up?”

“Joe,” I responded.

“That short fucker? No fucking way he’s coming up here. I can’t work with that lazy fuck. And he’s like sixty years old! He’s gonna quit on the first day. And he takes a fuckin’ smoke break every fifteen goddamn minutes.”

I laughed. I liked Joe, but the assessment was not wrong. Frank, continuing his train of thought, spewed harsh words about pretty well every sandblaster at our company. When I suggested another worker who might be a good fit for the near-surface casing work, he shot the idea down, citing some fault or other. I was rather confused at who the “real blaster” he had in mind actually was.

“I need a young guy who’s willing to work and who knows the trade,” he said. “I can’t deal with some of these absolute mongoloids they keep sending up here. I’ve blown through so many guys up here. And it’s not good, but there’s just no other guys that can do this job. This work is hard and I need someone who can take it. And I can’t have another hothead, cause I’m one myself. The last thing I need is a trigger to set me off.”

The reader may forgive my presumption, as it is difficult to discern from the letter of his speech, but my acquaintance with this man convinced me of the true intention lurking behind Frank’s words. He was implicitly asking me to stay—at least, as much as his pride would allow. His “real blaster” comment still rang in my head. However, he had dismissed pretty well all of the other sandblasters in our company at first mention. I knew from the higher-ups at our company that he had asked for me specifically for this job, and despite his constant protestations, I was the one for the job. I also knew he would never admit this to my face.

One heartfelt conversation would never be enough to make up for the impossible standards, tachycardiac pace, and demanding expectations that he had imposed, and would continue to impose, upon me and every member of the crew—not to mention the bitter insults. The tempestuous character of the work no longer interested me, as I had already become proficient in it—and despite that, I continued to face the rage of my foreman. Our green hat, after merely three weeks in the north, was already telling me he didn’t want to be on the crew anymore. Frankly, I didn’t want to be either. I had already told the office I wouldn’t be coming back up here, leaving them scrambling to find a replacement.

And, moreover, that conversation left me with the perfect resolution to my time with Frank: an implicit shimmer of the ephemeral recognition which I had long vainly sought. It felt like a fitting end, and so that is where I will end the present account.

Real life, grafted upon the template of the Hero’s Journey, is far messier and more convoluted than the discrete and linear stages of that paradigm. The dramatic elements often overlap and intersect, recur and skip. And so I find that the second father, the great ordeal, the inner transformation, and the resolution, were all contained in my varied encounters with the self-same man. In the final stage of the Hero’s Journey, the hero returns to his people with the newfound insight gained from his journey, and I consider the present account to be the fruit of these trials, offered to you, the reader, for your edification.

Frank was a mentor, but he was also the greatest challenge I had to overcome—more difficult than any physical task which could present itself. I can think of no other man, in my years in the oilfield, who impacted me in such a profound way as Frank. That final, strange, heartfelt conversation was a resonant and perplexing resolution—if you can call it that—to this saga.

While on his crew, my impression of Frank had oscillated wildly between viewing him as a sage instructor and a loathsome wretch. Finally, while on the sombre and solitary drive back from the north, with my swamper snoring all the way after our long boreal travail, I settled on a middle ground—that Frank was a flawed and sometime (but perhaps not often) good-intentioned man who, in a perverse manner, left an indelible mark upon my soul. But now, the callouses left upon my mind from his stinging words have finally hardened, and his words may bite and gnaw no longer.

Though oil is a ubiquitous feature of our everyday lives (even where we do not realize it), we seldom gaze upon it in its naturally occurring form. We see the pungent but otherwise unassuming fluid we use to fuel our cars and the brightly coloured plastics which inhabit our homes, but these bear next to no resemblance to oil as it occurs in the earth—in its primordiality.

Perhaps there is good reason for this. Crude oil immediately summoned from the earth is most often an unsettling shade of black—the colour which contains and devours all other colours. One senses, true to form, that this substance too contains unknown depths beneath its benighted sheen. It oozes up from the depths with a sickly languor, or shoots up in gushers with unbridled vitality. To the touch, it is at once sticky and viscous, but also glossy and slippery—waxy and abrasive, cumbersome and elusive. Oil’s odour is affronting and unmistakable, but with time it becomes endearing and natural, as if we have known it our whole life. As for taste… One need know nothing about petroleum to sense that it would offend the palate, and doubly so the stomach.

Whence could such a perplexing substance originate, and what purpose could it possibly serve in its subterranean depths? We could never hope to answer such questions in light of oil as it exists for us on the surface, for in our use of oil, oil is present only functionally, as a passive participant in our designs. To actually examine oil, it must be divorced from this instrumental context in which we use it.

Nor can we simply trace oil’s sensible properties to a direct understanding of this substance in a facile phenomenology, as such an approach would suppose not only that essence appears, but that all which appears is essential. This would constitute a game of philosophical pin the tail on the donkey which, as I explain elsewhere, is fatally flawed.

But then where must we go to uncover oil as ultimately present and unconcealed? If our present experience of oil is one in which oil is ultimately hidden by our use of it and by the connotative baggage this substance has accrued in our exposure to it, then an earnest inquiry must be retrospective, to inspect oil at the moment of its emergence and study it in its genesis.

Oil, defined provisionally as a liquid hydrocarbon found in underground geological formations, derives largely from the Mesozoic era, between 252 and 66 million years ago. A warming earth led to the proliferation of diverse lifeforms, from variegated flora inhabiting tropical climes, to microscopic life on the bottom of the sea floor, to titanic reptiles romping over the earth. The sheer number of lifeforms the earth could suddenly support was the necessary condition for the creation of vast fossil fuel reserves, for when vast swaths of organisms (primarily zooplankton, algae, and bacteria on the seafloor) died, and were buried under sediment in a low-oxygen environment to prevent decay, the story of oil began.

It was then over millennia that these biological remains under the seafloor were subjected to intense heat and pressure that a range of chemical reactions occurred to transform the lifeforms into oil. It is an intuitive explanation when we think about this process chemically, given that hydrocarbons form the building blocks of life, just as they are the key component in fossil fuels such as oil. Furthermore, such a transformation is confirmed by the fact that biological compounds such as hopanes, steranes, and porphyrins are detected in petroleum to the present day.

Indeed, the world’s largest oil and gas fields today are found where ancient seabeds once lay, including the Western Interior Seaway across North America, the Ghawar oil field in the Saudi Arabian desert, and the oilfields of the Caucasus—once part of a titanic rendition of the now-diminutive Caspian Sea.

This sea life was trapped in porous rock, and when baked in the geothermal oven of the Earth’s crust and pressurized from the overburden of rock and earth weighing down upon them, liquid hydrocarbons—literal encapsulations of death and time—were formed.

Oil, born in the crucible of the earth, is therefore of the earth in an essential way, and to this fact owes the universal impression that oil represents something underworldly—something uncanny and markedly other to the kinds of life and materials found on the earth’s surface. It is no coincidence that the home of oil, in the human imagination, is identified with the place of eternal darkness and torment which lay far below the ground.

The scarred and infernal landscape in the wake of the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, the eerie and derelict infrastructure of the abandoned Baku oilfields, the raging wildfires which consumed the Canadian oil capital of Fort McMurray—the comparison of these scenes to hell itself is sublimely accurate.

But perhaps this origin story does not go far back enough. We can trace this lineage back even further than the zooplankton adorning the ancient seabeds to an even more primordial origin: the sun itself. For, the energy contained in these ancient organisms only accrued because they could photosynthesize the sun’s rays. As such, it is presumptive to suppose that oil is entirely of the earth; it is equally of the sun—a big ball of hellfire that, far from the place of eternal damnation, is the source of all life as we know it. Oil, as it happens, is merely stored sunlight.

The perversity of this origin is difficult to ignore. A substance seemingly characterized by darkness and death is actually a transfiguration of pure light and life. Oil is an eternally perplexing substance because it effortlessly contains these opposed aspects. It beggars our logical systems and their cornerstone, the law of non-contradiction, that oil can exist in such a conflicted state. It’s as if oil is a kind of cosmic double agent, dispatched by Helios and courted by Hades.

We may speculate as to what can be drawn from this origin. Oil, derived from life itself, must contain life as an essential component. But it is simultaneously formed from the sudden mass death of a host of lifeforms. It is created over long timespans, but condenses those timespans into the volatile outbursts of combustion and eruption. A single litre of gasoline is the product of twenty-five metric tons of ancient sea life. In the amount of fossil fuels burned today in a single year are contained all the ancient flora and fauna produced on earth in four hundred years.2 It is no hyperbole, nor is it mere metaphor, to state that oil literally is condensed time and life.

But more so, we may examine oil, once formed, as it acts in time throughout the earth. Oil infiltrates and skulks. It migrates through the earth’s pores at its own behest—navigating narrow channels that other substances cannot and bubbling up or sinking down with a ghostly transience. Upon examining petroleum prior to its confrontation with man, it is difficult not to attribute to this substance some kind of chthonic agency and autonomy.

For it to contain energy, this means that oil, even as an isolated substance, has the ability to do work independent of man’s use of it. We see this amply in its subterranean activity. Possessing energy and autonomy, we are all but forced to admit that the existence of oil alone shatters our conception of natural phenomena as inanimate and passive objects. It is with man’s help that this energy density is unleashed on a bewildering scale.

And yet our analysis here is incomplete, for it might be contested that our origin story of oil is not adequately primordial. One may argue that the oil in question, produced by biogenic processes, is still oil for-us. But there is a rival theory to the biogenic account that traces the genesis of oil further back yet, and oil in quantities and reserves beyond our reach and outside our ken.

Intuitively, it strains the belief to posit that oil, this black and viscous void, seemingly representing unlife itself—and indeed portending certain apocalypse to the modern imagination—could be derived from life. If oil—this fount of entropy, this chaotic messy fluid—could be entirely derived from life itself, this would force us to entirely reconceptualize our view of objects, the source of their properties, and their capacity to contain contradictory attributes.

It has puzzled scientists as to how life could come from unlife, and their speculation has caused outcry among the masses who yet posit transcendent and divine origins for life on earth. It is, then, no surprise that it would be equally confounding that unlife could be derived from life in like fashion. Many scientists have resisted the biogenic theory of oil on this intuitive basis for long, and indeed there are still many holdouts.

In place of the biogenic theory of oil’s origins, there is a vast body of literature arguing for oil’s abiogenic origins—grounded in the inkling that oil simply could not be derived from life itself, and that its origins are far older, far more chthonic, and not only underworldly, but otherworldly—that oil itself issues from the same unfathomed depths where Leviathan sordidly swims.

Abiotic oil theory found proponents as diverse as Dmitry Mendeleev, who wrote

The capital fact to note is that petroleum was born in the depths of the Earth, and it is only there that we must seek its origin.3

and sir Robert Robinson, once president of the Royal Society:

Actually it cannot be too strongly emphasized that petroleum does not present the composition picture expected from modified biogenic products, and all the arguments from the constituents of ancient oils fit equally well, or better, with the conception of a primordial hydrocarbon mixture to which bio-products have been added.4

The former Soviet Union was a hotbed of speculation on abiotic oil, with the senior petroleum geologist for the USSR, Vladimir B. Porfir’ev, declaiming,

The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.5

But no more ardent advocate of the theory has arisen than Thomas Gold, whose work on the “deep hot biosphere” provides the foundation of abiogenic oil theory in the Anglosphere. The primary supposition in his account is that oil has its origins in the hydrocarbons in the planetesimals from the cosmos which gravitated towards an infant earth before the core was hot enough to combust them.

It is, after all, indubitably true that hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, propane, and butane exist in large quantities elsewhere in the universe, in meteorites and most notably on Saturn’s moon Titan.

The theory argues that methane accrued deep within the earth from meteorites constitutes the basis of all major liquid hydrocarbon deposits near the surface of the earth, with methane undergoing chemical reactions in the earth to form the crude oil and natural gas which bubble up to the surface along major cracks and pores in the mantle and crust.

While there are many reasons to doubt Gold’s totalizing hypothesis, a weak form of the theory is widely accepted within the scientific community, given that abiotic oil reserves do actually occur in places as varied as the Panhandle-Hugoton gas field in the United States, the Lost City Hydrothermal Field on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,6 the Songliao Basin in China,7 and, somewhat dubiously, deep boreholes in central Sweden.8 However, such oil composes a negligible proportion of global reserves. After all, if abiotic oil were the dominant source of our global petroleum reserves, they would be located along major fault lines in the earth, rather than in ancient sea basins.

Hypotheses about oil’s abiotic origins speak volumes about oil, albeit in an oblique way. Indeed, they reveal our deep intuitions about oil—that it is patently chthonic, and that it simply could not be an earthly phenomenon, given its strange and seemingly contradictory properties. The existence of oil itself is confounding, and thus arises the impulse to categorize it as something utterly alien. Abiogenic oil theorists do reveal that oil, in a different form, is indeed much older, much more otherworldly, than the orthodox geological paradigm states, and that it defies our ready-made scientific and ontological explanations. A study of the oil at the surface of the earth, or even the oil concealed in the crust, is not sufficient to exhaust its depths.

Whereas, even according to the orthodox account, oil is a confused entity with conflicting loyalties, the presence of abiotic oil paints an even more confounding image of this substance, being beholden both to the earth and the sun, but also to other ancient forces which precede both cosmic entities. This theory suggests a different story than the biogenic account: that oil is not an agent of Helios, but comes to the realm of Hades as a wayward traveller from the empty void of Tartaros.

As we saw, oil is crystallized time. But what if this was not merely so because it was formed of time, but because time issues forth from oil itself? Oil preceded the existence of the luminaries according to which we divide time into comprehensible parcels. Time might not be so much of a horizon of oil, but a product of it.

Oil might be formed in time, but to portray time as a steady and passive container is no longer plausible, as this view has been thoroughly thrashed by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Time and space no longer contain objects, but emanate from them in the cosmic order. Space itself is warped by the gravitational pull of massive entities. Time is dilated by objects travelling at high speed. Oil, then, might not be so much a product of time, but an architect of time and our terrestrial conceptions of it. In the modern world, it lubricates the machinations of our societies and intensifies the pace of life itself. It seems that, above other minerals, life forms, and resources that compose our material reality, oil has a particular affinity with time itself, and a particular ability, which is revealed most obviously in the modern age, to alter the very flow of time itself.

However, such conclusions are far too speculative, given the little we can discern from oil’s origins. This strange substance fundamentally conceals itself from us in its depths. To attempt to soundly trace any particular effect back to oil is a most difficult task. Its concealdness appears to match its otherworldliness in direct proportion. As H.D Hedberg observed,

It is remarkable that in spite of its widespread occurrence, its great economic importance, and the immense amount of fine research devoted to it, there perhaps still remain more uncertainties concerning the origin of petroleum than that of any other commonly occurring natural substance.9

This points to oil’s fundamentally mysterious and elusive character. It is inherently difficult to pin down and explicate, just as it slips through our fingers and evades our attempts to harness it. It seems to retreat from our investigations into its own hidden core.

But oil’s various origin stories do give us some room to speculate as to its inherent character. Regardless of which celestial entity first dispatched it, we can ascertain that, dwelling in the realm of Hades or in its activity on the surface, oil is possessed by a kind of vitality that seems particularly absent from other entities—though exactly how much agency it possesses on a cosmic scale is left unanswered. Oil seems to hold contradictory qualities together in unstable harmony, causing our logical systems to groan and creak under the stress. And, even as we are firmly in the age of oil, the inherent uncanniness and strangeness of oil suggest some deep otherness in this entity—though whether we trace this to our solar luminary or to a realm of eternal darkness, are questions beyond my reach.

“The medium is the message.”

This quintessential insight is the key to unlocking the corpus of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), philosopher and theorist of media, communications, and technology. It is not possible to extract one single simplistic meaning from this phrase, but rather, it must be viewed as a prism through which the thought of McLuhan, and indeed the whole of human civilization, becomes intelligible. It is the guiding clue by which McLuhan investigates the wide ranging effects of forms of communication have shaped man’s psychological and social life.

In a word, what McLuhan means is that the form in which information is conveyed is more impactful than the content of that communication. Or, in his own words, “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium–that is, of any extension of ourselves–result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”1 The form in which information is conveyed shapes the horizon of possibilities for a user of a medium—the culture of medieval manuscripts conduced to long compendia and treatises, while the printing press encouraged the proliferation of periodicals and brisk manifestos. The medium alters the content of the message, and determines how receptive and engaged the audience/recipient is to the message.

On a trivial level, this is obviously true. The same message conveyed by epistle and by text message have have markedly different effects. A classroom of rambunctious kids may be more enthralled by a movie than by a dull textbook; a monk might prefer his religious text as a printed tome—there for him to read again and again in contemplation—over an ephemeral radio address which comes and goes, leaving no trace.

The message, then, for McLuhan is more akin to the effect of that communication than as the precise information conveyed. He writes,

For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.2

Ignoring the form new media take and assuming that new technologies can be used equally for good or bad would be the height of folly for McLuhan. It is often thought that a new technological medium may simply be used for the same purpose as previous media but in a heightened way—for instance, that the computer would be used as a form of encyclopedia, democratizing knowledge and disseminating learning far and wide. Needless to say, such sanguine predictions were disappointed. The computer had its own agenda.

Underestimating the power of the form leads to a type of technological somnambulism, which clouds our vision and impairs our ability to understand how novel forms of media effectually upend the given social order. Or, as McLuhan tersely declaims, “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”3

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But what exactly counts as a medium in the thought of McLuhan? His answer is simple and clear, but becomes murkier as one considers the consequences; a medium is an “extension of man.”

It is evident that McLuhan is primarily concerned with communications media—books, radio, television, photography, etc. These are “extensions of man” by virtue of them extending his senses. The book accentuates the eye, as it is a visual store of information. The photograph is also an extension of the eye, as well as the memory. Radio is an extension of the voice. But this definition of medium is rather inclusive. Clothing, too, is touched upon by McLuhan, as an extension of the skin. The automobile is an extension of man’s legs, taking him to further lengths than he could ever travel by himself. McLuhan even argues that electronic technologies function primarily as extensions of man’s central nervous system.

However, we can drive this definition further yet to include even the most banal fixtures. A sink is an extension of man’s water gathering faculties, as a can opener, a carpet, concrete, and a plastic action figure can all be reasoned to fit within the confines of McLuhan’s definition. Even more abstract and conceptual items can be listed as media. McLuhan argues that games are extensions of man’s social life, and for the same reason, restaurants, monetary systems, and democracy can too be said to be media. McLuhan is certainly not oblivious to the wide shadow cast by the umbrella of this definition.

It is this definition of media that I take issue with on the present essay. I do not take issue with it on the grounds that it is too inclusive, as some have, when the focus of McLuhan’s thought is really technological and communication media. On the contrary, I do not think McLuhan takes his definition far enough to reveal the dramatic ontological consequences of his studies of media. He is prevented from venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules only by himself, by understanding media merely in relation to man. I argue that it is a latent anthropocentrism in his thought that handicaps McLuhan and prevents him from drawing out the truly radical consequences of his work.

Anthropocentrism here is not a moral but an epistemological error which McLuhan commits when he affirms that objects only exist qua media (or sometimes only exist) in relation to man and their effect on him. I will argue that this is an error not only from an outside vantage point, but also from within the confines of McLuhan’s own thought. In order to argue this, McLuhan’s analysis of the effects of media must first be brought into greater relief.

For McLuhan, the crux of understanding media is to examine at how they impact the senses and ratios between the senses. Since media are extensions of our senses and faculties, it is only logical that the effects of media are also most salient in this domain. He writes, “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance.”4

Sense ratios are a crucial aspect of McLuhan’s thought. Certain technologies accentuate or diminish the dominance of any given sense over the others. For instance, in The Gutenburg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, McLuhan’s primary argument is that the arrival of the phonetic alphabet led to the dominance of the eye in Western Civilization, a trend which was enhanced by the arrival of the printing press. He argues, “Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp visual division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship.”5

This reign of the eye led to a vast array of social consequences which radically and inalterably changed the course of society: “Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education. For print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies.”6 Though this claim sounds perhaps farfetched and speculative, it is defended with a bewildering and exhaustive array of evidence.

The modern age, McLuhan prophesized, would disrupt the dominance of the eye and restore the role of the ear. Both tribal societies and electronic societies are primarily aural, in the former because print has either not yet been introduced or remains the domain of a privileged class, and in the latter because new media such as movies, radio, and the phonograph enhance the role of the ear and diminish the eye. The dominance of the aural sense, for McLuhan leads to tribalism, holistic views of life and society, and a departure from the lineal and compartmentalized mind of literate man.

Now, the effects of media cannot be fully understood without the introduction of another key concept: hot and cool media. A hot medium, for McLuhan, is one that extends a single sense in “high definition,” by which he means it is saturated with data. Because the sense in question is provided with ample data, it does not need to “complete the picture,” so to speak. This means that in a hot medium, the participation required by the recipient is limited, resulting in an increased passivity. McLuhan places books, radio, and photographs in this category.

A cool medium, on the other hand, is one which no one sense is overwhelmed with data and given priority. This kind of medium encourages audience participation because of the low definition of the message. Telephone is a cool medium, given the required active participation of one on the phone call, and the low definition of the message being relayed. In the twenty-first century, little has changed on this front. McLuhan also places cartoons, manuscripts, and the newspaper in this category.

Through our continued use of them, media create unique psychological states in us, and effect social trends on a wider scale. The newspaper, being a cool medium, spurs men to participation in public affairs, and so the notion that the press undergirds democratic government is true in a nontrivial sense. Such varied effects transpire without our awareness or assent:

For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.7

It is here where I start to suspect that McLuhan is shying away from something.

Repeatedly, McLuhan imputes upon media sweeping powers to alter our psychological and social lives, attesting that we are mere somnambulists in a Narcissus trance, unaware of how our deepest cognitive tendencies are products of external forces. And yet, simultaneously, these external forces are mere extensions of us—a view which would suppose that man still sits firmly in the driver’s seat.

The crucial question this presents is whether media are fundamentally passive, active, or a mix of the two. The pre-McLuhan view would of course suppose that media are merely passive vessels which carry information, which is the same regardless of its mode of delivery, to a recipient. This view is, of course, not completely abolished by McLuhan.

However, he adds the crucial insight that the form of media inalterably changes the content of the message and its effects. His language constantly anthropomorphizes these media, attributing agency to them in passages such as the following:

The classic curse of Midas, his power of translating all he touched into gold, is in some degree the character of any medium, including language. This myth draws attention to a magic aspect of all extensions of human sense and body; that is, to all technology whatever. All technology has the Midas touch. When a community develops some extension of itself, it tends to allow all other functions to be altered to accommodate that form.8

Is it that technologies only have the Midas touch because we imbue them with it? Do we merely “allow” it such a wide range of effects, or do these media impose them upon us forcefully? Who is subject and who is object in this chaotic interplay? One wonders if there is not merely an empirical claim about communication media here, but also an ontological claim lurking beneath.

The question of man’s relation with technology is even further complicated by the complex interaction described by the following:

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man’s sex relation to the motorcar.9

While man is denigrated as merely the means of technological reproduction, he is simultaneously the reference point for all media, in relation to which their effects are reified. Once this paradoxical posture is interpreted metaphysically, the problems only multiply. Something has to give.

The crucial philosophical question here is where the locus of agency lies. It is only sensible to refer to media as “extensions of man” if man remains the active subject against a passive external world. And indeed, this view of man’s agency is the fundamental cornerstone of any anthropocentric worldview with man at the centre. And yet, I argue that McLuhan’s own work renders this stance untenable.

Anthropocentrism as a philosophical view has long been under siege in the Western tradition. Darwin showed that man’s physical and cognitive forms were shaped by the force of natural selection, and that we owe our lineage to the same single-celled organisms as any other species on the planet. Freud displayed to all the uncanny and perverse contents of the subconscious mind, demonstrating that we are beholden to forces far beyond our rational ken. And if this dead horse has not already been dealt enough blows, contemporary Artificial Intelligence renders our own minds puny in comparison to its able to sift through a sea of data in a microsecond.

However, in my view, the aforementioned thinkers are not enough to displace anthropocentrism from our worldview because agency, not intelligence or psychological soundness, is the mortar upon which the anthropocentric view is founded. That we appear to be the active agents yet in our day to day lives trumps the insights of Darwin and Freud, and the sense that, despite their intelligence, AI systems are merely passive tools with which we engage, bolster the view that man is still at the centre.

I suggest that the final few threads bolstering this view may be dislodged by Marshall McLuhan, and him alone. By drawing out the ontological implications of his work, we may complete the Copernican Revolution started, but left unfinished, by other thinkers.

But to draw this out, we must not only read McLuhan, but interrogate him. And this interrogation begins with his understanding of media. We must seek greater clarity on this front, or else push this concept until it breaks.

When we ask what differentiates McLuhan’s understanding of media from the classical understanding of media, one of the other key distinctions is his conception of the content of a medium. Whereas one might tacitly assume that the content of a medium is information, McLuhan would disagree. Instead, he writes in a rather puzzling passage that the content of a medium is always another medium.

To me, this is doubtless the weakest aspect of McLuhan’s media theory. Aside from the obvious infinite regress if we take this formulation at face value, this is obviously not true. What medium does a photograph of a flower contain? Or a recording of Beethoven’s Seventh? It seems obvious to me that these media convey sense data and information in stored and altered forms. McLuhan may try to distance himself from the conventional understanding of media, but I don’t think he gets very far.

Of course, the point McLuhan is trying to make here, when interpreted charitably, is that media interact with and appropriate one another in diverse configurations. He writes elsewhere:

. . . [M]edia as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel.10

However, if this is what he means by his statement that the content of a medium is always another medium, then McLuhan is here being imprecise.

But one then must ask, if media can interact with one another—if they have an independent world apart from the direct human experience with them—then why does McLuhan continue to place man at centre stage?

Because, of course, he insists that media are fundamentally extensions of man. However, McLuhan clearly has a difficult time maintaining these two conflicting positions in balance. He writes,

Perhaps the most obvious ‘closure’ or psychic consequence of any new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar till there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.11

Why this power of technology to create its own demand is not independent of its role as an extension of man is never explained. If technology has such a deep impact on us, altering our psychic states radically, this would seem to suggest the opposite—that technologies constitute something radically other to us.

The TV enthralls us, drawing us into a mindless stupor, monopolizing our attention and subliminally altering our very perception. It compels us to watch on and on in a way that few other media do. McLuhan explains this as follows: “The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the “content” of public programs or of the private sense life, being testimony to the fact that technology is part of our bodies.”12 However, this clearly is a non-sequitur. That technologies enthrall us in variable ways seems to be, if anything, testimony to the contrary—that they are foreign entities acting upon us. Our own hands and feet do not transfix our attention in any comparable manner.

However, proposing such a view would present two immediate problems. First, since media are human creations, would we not be hard pressed to assert their ontological independence? And would we not also need to assert the existence of media environments and technological systems independent of man?

To the first point—an object’s origins do not necessarily alter its ontological status. The Pyramids of Giza are a human creation, and yet they will outlive all of us. Regardless of their status as a human creations, they bore immense spiritual significance to the ancient Egyptians, and bear cultural import to us in the present. They act upon us, in that they create psychosocial effects in us.

Objects, no matter whether human creations or natural occurrences, exist and are real in the same way. I am here reminded of the most sublime scene in English literature—when Victor Frankenstein encounters his monstrous creation in the Swiss Alps, where the monster declares, “You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!”13

This haunting incantation is surely the theme of the past century, as it will be doubly so for the one to come.

And to the second point—regarding independent technological systems—happily, McLuhan himself lends a hand to answer this in the final chapter of Understanding Media, whose subject is automation. In it, McLuhan appraises the consequences of the introduction of “feedback” into contemporary mechanical and electronic systems. We must keep in mind that, at the time of this book (1964), Cybernetics was all the rage, and would deeply influence the course of technological development, as it doubtless provided McLuhan with food for thought.

Feedback allows for a mechanical or electronic system to self-correct, and to maintain its inner unity against incursions from the outside world, or defects that arise from within, much like a living organism. McLuhan writes,

Feedback is the end of lineality that came into the Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms of Euclidean space. Feedback or dialogue between the mechanism and its environment brings a further weaving of individual machines into a galaxy of such machines throughout the entire planet. There follows a still further weaving of individual plants and factories into the entire industrial matrix of materials and services of a culture.14

Whereas prior to the advent of self-correcting cybernetic systems, it was easy to draw a hard line between living organisms and static machines, afterwards, the waters became increasingly murky. Autopoiesis was no longer the sole domain of carbon-based lifeforms. Machine began to resemble man—while man began to resemble machine in turn.

McLuhan helps make the comparison even clearer:

Viewed from the old perspectives of the machine age, this electric network of plants and processes seems brittle and tight. In fact, it is not mechanical, and it does begin to develop the sensitivity and pliability of the human organism. But it also demands the same varied nutriment and nursing as the animal organism.15

At this point, it becomes arbitrary to differentiate living from non-living entities in any meaningful ontological sense. Both kinds of entities are, of course, remarkably different, but they equally exist as real objects, regardless of their coming into existence artificially or organically. Mechanical and electronic systems are able to maintain themselves in a similar way as living organisms. Of course, they need inputs—whether lubrication, energy, or data. But we need inputs to maintain ourselves also.

And if machines, without our aid, have these remarkable powers to maintain their milieu intérieure, as if through homeostasis, then that forces us to impute upon them as much agency—if not in degree, then in kind—as man.

If the existence of such technological systems were solely dependent on man, we might be able to maintain that they are mere extensions of us. However, McLuhan himself hesitantly admits that the advent of independent technological systems are upon us. We, then, are forced to admit that media, far from being mere extensions of man, have an existence independent of him.

Displacing man as the centre of our ontological worldview as we have done has radical consequences—it is for good reason that I term it a “Copernican Revolution” of sorts. However, we must push the concept of “media” even further to fully unearth them.

The use of the term “medium” to describe things, as opposed to broader terms like “entity” or “object,” implies the existence of a special class of objects with a common special property. In McLuhan’s thought, the criterion by which he designated a class of objects as “media” was a special relationship to man. It is this very relationship, however, that I hope to have shown is invariably severed. What are media, then?

Having dealt a mortal blow to McLuhan’s conception of media, I see no recourse but to return to the simplistic definition of media as forms of transmission or storage of information and sense data. Radio is not a medium because it extends a man’s voice, but because it transmits information, both as propositional knowledge, as well as through qualia and sense data. So, too with a book, a television, or even an automobile.

At a cursory glance, this suffices, but closer scrutiny brings this definition also into doubt, for it too casts a wide net. It is not merely conventional forms of media that act as vessels of information, but everyday objects too. A metal girder presents us with the quantifiable measurements with which it was designed, thrusts upon us a host of qualia and tactile qualities testament to its formation. Its form implies the purpose it serve—as a support. A great deal of information is carried by this innocuous object—the chemical makeup of each individual particle, the combination of elements which compose this particular alloy, the particular structure of molecules held in place in a crystalline lattice. Any spot of rust is evidence of what foreign incursions air and moisture have made into this entity.

We can say the same of a living being, such as a tree. The shape of its leaf informs us of its species. Whether it is replete with shimmering leaves or barren informs us as to the season. The number of rings on a given log inform us of the tree’s age. A cancerous growth on the bough, a sickly shade, or an irregular pattern might inform us that this particular tree is not long for this world.

Man, too, can be understood as a medium in the selfsame way. He presents information, of course, in his efforts to communicate, but this information is not necessarily his own. His views, biases, habits, and idiosyncrasies bear traces of his location, his heritage, his experiences, his inmost biological drives, most often without his conscious awareness. Man himself is a medium of his time and place. To paint man as a maximally agentic creature becomes difficult the more we understand that he is a mere host to a world of forces beyond his ken. In the same way that a radio broadcast is a medium for information transmission, objects, organisms, and man himself are all media in the same way.

Moreover, to even further displace man from the picture, these varied “media” interact with one another, transmitting information to and fro, without the intervention of man, let alone his awareness. This fundamental aspect of the world should be the last word to preclude us from any further discussion of media as “extensions of man.”

Based upon this line of thought, it seems unlikely that we can safely use the word “medium” to designate any special class of objects, but must reappropriate this term to designate a special attribute of all objects—that they are vessels through which information flows.

All objects, then, are media. Therefore, all objects, not only the radio and the book, are liable to be investigated with the same rigor with which McLuhan treated modes of communication. I therefore propose to speak from here on of objects, and not media, and I argue that, far from defying McLuhan, this merely takes his thinking to its logical conclusion, and demonstrates that his insights penetrate far deeper into the heart of reality than anyone has yet acknowledged—even McLuhan himself—for he gives us the tools to investigate the far ranging effects of every single entity, including man himself.

The task then becomes to investigate the world with piercing insight, looking deep into the subterranean depths of a world rich in ontological import. We might reveal in a single blade of grass, a street, or a country, as much intrigue as McLuhan saw in the advent of the phonetic alphabet.

As it turns out, then, McLuhan’s insights actually range far wider than he supposed, for by referring only to “media” and not “objects” in general, he obscured the dramatic consequences of his thought—one of which is a radical burgeoning ontological worldview, in which man is merely one object among many, and in which he is both subject and object like any other entity. Man is not a purely agentic being who interacts with a passive external world, but is often a passive medium through which a host of other objects act. It is a world in which media are anything but extensions of man, and indeed, in which man is as much a medium as a book or a radio.

McLuhan fearfully shied away from the radically new paradigm that his thought opened up, instead opting to lamely operate within the existing human-centred paradigm.

I can only offer a preliminary sketch of what this new worldview actually entails. It is a world in which, freed from our anthropocentric view of man, we can more readily investigate objects themselves and their far reaching effects as purveyors of information. This is a world freed from imported taxonomies or hierarchies of existence. No object exists in a different way or on a different plane than any other in the world, but all are placed equally in the same gladiatorial arena to do battle.

Man, trees, and radios exist on the same ontological plane, and therefore act upon and are acted upon by one another in direct and varied ways. McLuhan helps us to understand exactly how these processes occur.

Moreover, we begin to understand that this process of transmitting information is the fundamental means by which entities act upon one another. Showing man to be a vessel for information helps us understand the exact mechanism by which different media imbue in him unique psychosocial states. Causality, fundamentally, is the act of transmitting information.

And if transmitting information constitutes causality, then we must also accord ordinary objects with a degree of agency. Contrary to how they appear, trees and roads, strontium and cumulonimbuses, barber shops and blankets, are utterly rippling with causality. For, as I insist, what we must come to grips with is that agency is not the sole domain of man. Rather, if we acknowledge the passivity of man, we must contrariwise admit the agency of objects, acting upon us as much as we upon them.

We can, therefore, see the forces acting upon us by tracing the information we hold that is not our own. In a world where man is a medium, he becomes a microcosm of the world, allowing us a better, yet roundabout means accessing the world. One can only imagine the consequences—an avenue for a radically new kind of phenomenology, or an oblique angle to pursue a renewed philosophical realism. For, if knowledge of objects and the world is no longer a matter of us piercing into a foreign realm, but interpreting the ways in which objects impress themselves upon us through the transmission of information, we must radically rethink our anthropocentric epistemological impulses.

And just as we can understand what television is by looking to the ways that it forms and alters the information that passes through the screen, we can also understand what man is by how he shapes and moulds the information that passes through him.

Far from a mere media theorist, Marshall McLuhan proves to be a philosopher—and undoubtedly one of the greatest, whose insights plant the seeds for myriad new avenues in philosophy. His ideas have extensive implications for metaphysics, ontology, and phenomenology—but regretfully, these are implications that he hid from himself. If only he could have crossed the final threshold—overcoming the anthropocentrism latent in his thought—he might have been remembered not only as the greatest theorist of media, but also as the greatest metaphysician of our generation.

-PotOS

Cold Lake, Alberta

I am at the museum in Cold Lake, in the exhibit dedicated to the oil and gas industry. There are intricate maps, displaying the tangled web of pipelines streaking across the prairies and indicating the major oil and gas deposits in the province. Plaques with detailed descriptions of how oil is separated from bituminous sand drone on and on. A few amateur paintings of pumpjacks punctuate the informative displays. And then I come to the section dedicated to the 1980 National Energy Program, which tells a story of dashed hopes and betrayal, of the strife between central planning and free enterprise, between the oil and gas industry and the federal government under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, with one of the epicentres of this struggle being the burgeoning city of Cold Lake, Alberta—it is a fiery political drama in which I find kernels of hidden insight. I can sense, even though it is buried in the dusty corners of this empty small-town museum, that this even carries a mythological weight in the Albertan consciousness.

I will now relay this story to the reader.

The National Energy Program

Throughout the 1970s, the world price of oil skyrocketed because of a concerted embargo on oil by Middle Eastern oil producing countries—known as the OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) cartel—to punish Western nations for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Additionally, instability sweeping the Middle East left access to the region’s oil limited to Western markets. This led to mass panic among oil-importing countries, many of whom launched uncontroversial energy policies to respond to the problem. However, strangely enough, in mild-mannered Canada, the oil crises of the 1970s led to one of the most divisive political battles in our entire history, whose shockwaves reverberate to the present day, leaving Albertans deeply alienated from the federal government and the Eastern provinces to this day,1 sowing an insurmountable rift into the Dominion and creating a new pair of solitudes. That battle was the 1980 National Energy Program.

The case of Canada’s oil and gas industry was, and still is, curious by international standards. We have long been an exporter of crude oil, natural gas, and refined petroleum products, primarily to American markets. This would ordinarily indicate that we have enough oil and gas to supply our own needs completely, and because our needs are satisfied by domestic supply, we can export the remainder. But this is not so. For, despite exporting great quantities of oil, we also import it. The reason is almost purely geographical—almost. A vast majority of oil production in Canada comes from Alberta, whereas most of our refineries line the St. Lawrence watershed, for whom the price of bringing oil from Alberta has always been higher than to buy cheaper oil from abroad. Prior to the price shocks, most oil in Eastern Canadian refineries was from OAPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Algeria. Meanwhile, Alberta found it most profitable to send its crude oil to the United States, the “natural market,” via pipeline for refinement.

Alberta’s oil is heavier than most because much of it is found in sludgy and bituminous oil sands. It took great strides in technological innovation to separate usable crude oil from the bituminous sand, and even though that technology has been perfected, it remains highly expensive; extraction is more complex and multiple stages of refinement are necessary. Heavy oil upgraders are needed to make the oil thin enough to travel by pipeline. And because there is not at present nearly enough infrastructure to refine oil into petroleum products in Alberta—just as there was not in 1980—most Albertan oil is sent south via pipeline to refineries along the Gulf Coast. This is actually a shorter and more cost-efficient route than to ship Albertan oil east to domestic refineries in Sarnia and Saint John. And so, Albertan oil goes to the U.S., and not to Eastern Canada.

This is the case despite a pipeline network which since the 1960s has been able to transport oil from Alberta to Ontario. Though it does transport some oil to refineries in Ontario, which uses a mix of domestic and foreign crude oil, refineries in Québec and the Maritimes solely use imported foreign crude oil and the scant supply from offshore oil rigs in Newfoundland. The result is that we have a dual market in Canada for refineries, and despite having enough refineries to process all our own crude oil, and enough crude oil to supply our own energy needs, we still both export and import crude oil at the same time. This seemingly paradoxical circumstance, combined with the oil crises of the 1970s, set the stage for the introduction of the National Energy Program.

With the oil price shocks of the 1970s, the Canadian federal government under Pierre Trudeau was compelled to act. The world rise in oil prices meant that Eastern Canadians had to import crude oil at far higher prices, making home heating more expensive and leading to shortages of gas. In Western Canada, however, the price increase led to a massive oil boom and prosperity for all of Alberta. That Alberta should prosper and Eastern Canada should suffer, all while Canada had ample oil reserves to meet our domestic energy needs, seemed terribly irrational to Trudeau.

Trudeau’s motto in life was “Reason before passion,” and this certainly shone forth in his policies, which were often born of abstract theories of justice, instead of being pragmatic and evidence-informed solutions to problems Canada faced. He was a rare instance of an activist and idealist prime minister, not merely responding to the demands of the people, but shaping the country in his own image. This is reflected in his many reforms as justice minister, his infamous White Paper on Indigenous Peoples, the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, and even the official replacement of the imperial measurement system with the metric system in 1975, which was surely a more rational system, but one which was widely opposed and implemented by force.

To his credit, Trudeau’s seemingly unlimited imagination and immense force of will allowed him to shape the country in a more impactful way than any other prime minister besides John A. MacDonald. However, his imagination was often far too lofty for the still conservative Canadian nation, and would lead to a rude awakening. The clearest example we have of this is in the 1980 National Energy Program (NEP).

The NEP had three primary goals. The first was to “Canadianize” the domestic oil and gas industry. This entailed discouraging foreign investment in and ownership of the industry and creating Petro-Canada, a crown corporation which would hold stake in major Canadian oil and gas projects. The second goal was to ensure stable and equal oil and gas prices across the country, forcing Alberta to accept lower prices for their crude oil, sending it east instead of south, so that Eastern Canadians could continue to enjoy cheap and stable fuel supplies. The third goal was to insulate Canada’s oil and gas supply from the vicissitudes of the world market by creating a self-contained oil and gas supply chain in Canada and eliminating imports of foreign oil (under the assumption that global oil and gas prices would be unstable or continue to rise exponentially).

It is never explained in the NEP why foreign ownership of the Canadian oil and gas industry was a problem. Indeed, foreign investment is a sign of an industry and nation’s strength, not weakness. Limiting foreign investment means limiting investment in general, which means less capital and fewer incentives for expansion and development of an industry. To “Canadianize” the industry, according to the NEP meaning merely for more Canadians to be in senior positions in the Canadian oil and gas industry and for more Canadian companies to operate oil and gas projects on Canadian soil, has no discernible benefit, since the new ownership restrictions only added more hurdles to be overcome for any oil and gas project to begin or continue operations.

Regardless of who owns the companies, revenues and jobs from oil and gas projects still benefit Canadians and the Canadian government. To “Canadianize” the industry—as the NEP states explicitly—entails more government control. The federal government knew well that, for projects with such high upfront and overhead costs, either large foreign (primarily American) firms or the weight of the Canadian federal government were needed. Without the former, the latter was left as the only option to continue large-scale oil extraction projects in Canada. As such, there is much credence in the claim that the NEP was an inherently socialistic program, seeking to divest the industry of private ownership and encourage public ownership of Canadian oil and gas.

Not to mention the fact that American, British, and East Asian firms have had a historic role in providing the necessary capital for the development of the Canadian oil and gas industry, down to the present day.

With respect to the second goal of stabilizing oil prices across Canada, it is never explained why Eastern Canada deserved lower oil and gas prices if it was a simple accident of geography which led to their predicament. Indeed, if Eastern Canada was willing to pay higher prices for Albertan oil and to establish infrastructure to supply their refineries with Albertan oil, then the Canadian oil and gas supply could be insulated from world price shocks. One must therefore ask why it was Western Canada, and not Eastern Canada, that was responsible for securing Canada’s oil supply chains. Indeed, in the clamour over the “Great Pipeline Debate” a few decades prior, it was Eastern refiners who rejected the development of east-west crude pipelines, fearing it would lead to higher costs if they were compelled to utilize Albertan oil instead of foreign imports.

The NEP uses the language of “fairness” and “justice,” but one must look to the past, and not only the present, for a perspective on fairness. Indeed, for most of their history, the prairie provinces’ geography had been a detriment to them. Western producers had to pay more to ship their goods to markets because of their remote position on the continent. Natural resource rights were withheld from the provinces until 1930, more than 25 years after Alberta and Saskatchewan entered the Dominion (Manitoba had been waiting even longer—since 1870)—and until that time, natural resource revenues went to the federal government. Whereas Ontario and Québec benefitted from their central location and access to markets, the Western provinces had always been disadvantaged. Now that the roles were reversed, and the geography of the Eastern provinces were to their detriment, it was not they who suffered, but again, the West. If we are using the language of fairness, then fairness ought to dictate that the oil boom compensated the Western provinces for past struggle.

Thirdly, with respect to the goal of insulating the oil and gas industry against future price fluctuations; global oil prices faced sharp decline almost immediately after 1980, which showed the NEP to be based upon another faulty premise—that oil prices would increase indefinitely. They did not.

Aside from the three primary goals of the NEP, there were a number of subsidiary aims. One was that the federal government profit more from Alberta’s oil and gas industry with a slew of new taxes. As the NEP states, “the Government of Canada . . . has a national claim, on behalf of all Canadians, to a share of the [oil and gas] industry’s revenues.”2 Why the federal government had such a claim is never explained. New taxes included a Petroleum Compensation Charge and a natural gas liquids tax which would steadily increase. An oil export charge would also be put in place, as would a tax at the wellhead for existing oil and gas projects—meanwhile, major projects such as Syncrude’s new plant in the Athabasca oil sands had just barely begun to turn a profit, and they surely wouldn’t again for quite some time.

Another dimension of the NEP was to provide subsidies to incentivize new oil and gas exploration to offset the taxes which would otherwise disincentivize oil and gas extraction. Reading between the lines, it becomes clear that this clause was not so benevolent as it may seem. The new taxes, obviously, affected Alberta most, as it was the home of a vast majority of crude oil extraction in Canada. The problem was that most of the major oil and gas reserves in Alberta had already been discovered. The oil fields in and around Turner Valley had been all but exhausted; the major oil fields of Leduc, Pembina, and Redwater were producing in full swing; and the three major oil sand deposits—the Peace River, Athabasca, and Cold Lake oil sands—were already well-known. The NEP even explicitly provides more generous allowances for oil and gas exploration on Canada (federal) Lands, such as the northern territories, in Hudson’s Bay, and off the east coast. To tax existing oil and gas reserves while incentivizing the discovery of new reserves was to use federal power to displace Alberta as the center of the Canadian oil and gas industry.

What is more, the NEP also set a long-term goal of diversifying Canadian energy through promoting coal, wind, and solar energy so that Canada was not so reliant upon oil—a resource whose supply they considered unstable in the long term and ultimately non-renewable. On this note, the government proposed ways to reduce domestic demand for oil by promoting research into propane-powered cars, more energy efficient homes, and other such means. Additionally, they offered magnanimous incentives to transition to alternate energy sources. This was not born out of environmental concern—for part of this plan was to encourage the use of coal. Rather, in their judgement, oil was simply a politically volatile resource controlled on the international stage by sometimes-hostile nations.

It was logical, all too logical. The NEP phrases the problem as such:

“Canada does have one serious energy problem—a growing dependence on oil imports. This situation is analogous to an individual who worries because of an overdraft in one bank account, while maintaining a surplus of an even larger amount in another account. The sensible course of action for that individual is obvious: move some resources from the surplus account into the other account.”3

This framing of the question is obviously an abstraction—where an abstraction is hardly necessary. For, this understanding of the problem neglects that those two bank accounts are two different regions in Canada—regions between whom there had been lukewarm relations at best, and which, prior to 1980 more than ever, threatened to boil over into a full-blown conflict.

What is more, the NEP states that this policy will be good for the West. It reads,

The National Energy Program is beneficial to the West. It provides an oil pricing schedule that yields substantial and growing revenues to provincial governments and the industry from existing production, and establishes certain and attractive prices for the risky and costly sources that will form the basis for a sustained prosperity. The oil sands and heavy oils will make a major and enduring contribution to the economy of the West, while enhancing national energy security.4

Even if this were true, it would be a hard sell. To convince the oil-producing regions of Canada that more taxes and central control were a good thing would reek of the same power grabs attempted time and time again through the country’s history. This should be eerily reminiscent to contemporary Albertans, who were told by Liberal leader Stéphane Dion in 2008 that a carbon tax would be “good for them.”5

While reason perhaps should be above passion, in practice, it hardly ever triumphs. The NEP was bound to arouse ardour, and regardless of the merits of such a project, the federal government should have anticipated a contest.

But the NEP was not good for Albertans. By all measures, the NEP was a bad economic policy. Rather than stimulating growth in the oil and gas industry, it significantly curbed production and exploration. The exploration that did happen as a result of the NEP was not in Alberta. Oil sands projects in development were stalled or delayed, and all this just as the world oil price began to decline, meaning most of those projects were abandoned altogether. On top of leading to losses for major oil companies, the NEP failed to generate the government revenue it was supposed to.

And this is where we return to Cold Lake. In 1980, just as the NEP was being drafted, Imperial Oil was planning a massive expansion to their Cold Lake operations. They had only just applied for “Alberta’s permission to build a $7 billion, 135,000-barrels-per-day in situ plant and upgrader to convert the 296 bitumen into light, synthetic oil.”6 The city of Cold Lake was predicted to experience a larger oil boom than even Fort McMurray—the contemporary epicentre of the Canadian oil and gas industry. Indeed, if those plans had proceeded, it is estimated that Cold Lake would be a larger city today than Fort McMurray, instead of being approximately a quarter the size.

But then the National Energy Program was announced. Cold Lake never had its oil boom; Imperial revised its plans for expansion, scrapping the massive project, and only later beginning to gradually expand its Cold Lake operations piecemeal. The burgeoning oil town’s dreams were shattered.

The impact of the NEP was not limited to Cold Lake. All over Alberta, oil and gas projects were stopped or delayed. The Alsands mega-project in Fort McMurray was also abandoned. The number of active drilling rigs in Canada fell by 22% in the first year after the policy was introduced and industry cash flow fell by 34% according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. According to a CIA report, the number of drilling rigs fell by 40% from 1980 levels by 1983.7 Domestic oil consumption fell, and as a result, Canada became a net exporter of oil for the first time. While Canadian ownership of the oil and gas industry grew, this combined with lower government revenues and industry returns, and so the “Canadianization” of the oil and gas industry proved to be a purely symbolic and hardly beneficial endeavour.

As historian Earle Grey recounts,

Estimates of what the NEP cost Alberta range from $50 billion to $134 billion, which Robert Mansell, University of Calgary dean of economics, calculates as the net withdrawal from the province to the federal treasury and petroleum consumers from 1978 to 1985, as measured in 1990 dollars.8

But what is more, the economic impacts of the NEP were accompanied by domestic outrage, primarily in Alberta. The NEP is often rightfully cited as the catalyst for the rise in Western Alienation. The West had many historical grievances, but it was only in 1980 that tensions finally boiled over into virulent anger and talk of secession. Albertans had long fought for natural resource rights, and just when they were finally reaping the benefits thereof, the federal government had stepped in once again to meddle in an area under their jurisdiction. Such a blatant attempt to steal resource wealth from Alberta and to move that wealth eastward did not go unnoticed by either Albertans or their representatives. Thus spawned a new set of solitudes within the Dominion: Ottawa and the West

Peter Lougheed, premier of Alberta in at the time of the NEP, all but declared war. To fight back, Lougheed announced that Alberta would cut its crude oil production by 60,000 barrels over the next nine months to strain the Eastern provinces’ access to energy and significantly reduce the federal revenues from oil and gas. He also fought many provisions of the NEP through the courts. Ralph Klein, then the bombastic mayor of Calgary, suggested halting all shipments of crude oil to the Eastern provinces, first uttering the infamous phrase, “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” which was to appear on bumper stickers. Indeed, there was also a boycott of Petro-Canada, the crown corporation championed by Trudeau as a key part of the NEP. Bumper stickers proliferated reading, “I’d rather push this thing a mile than buy gas from Petro-Canada.”

The NEP was abolished under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1985. Though the program was short-lived, the damage was done. The relationship between Alberta and the federal government had been permanently marred. Now, regardless of party affiliation, it is a mainstay of Alberta-federal relations for both governments to snub one another, symbolically and politically. The rise of the western-based Reform Party of Canada and the increase in separatist sentiment in Western Canada were both born out of the fallout from the NEP.

Now, Western Alienation is on the rise again, with Trudeau junior, who is as hostile to the Albertan oil sands, if not more, than his father. To paraphrase current Albertan Premier Danielle Smith, Trudeau senior merely wanted to steal Alberta’s resource wealth; Trudeau junior wishes to destroy it altogether.

The Cold Lake museum is empty. The oil and gas exhibit attracts few visitors and the plaque describing the National Energy Program sits collecting dust. Few people today could name the NEP, let alone describe its core tenets. However, its legacy lives on. The spirit of Lougheed declaring war on Ottawa, the spirit of vulgar bumper stickers, of Preston Manning’s Reform Party, of the Western separatist movement, lives on today in the spirit of Albertans. Every “F*ck Trudeau” flag I see, of which there are many (even a full year after his resignation), is a fruit of the very same vine. I am convinced of this.

A Window into Civilizational Progression

But why do I relate this story? I see something in this confrontation which runs deeper than a mere squabble over natural resources. If it truly were about resources and revenues alone, these two solitudes could be easily reconciled. If this conflict over the NEP were born out merely by regionalism, then why the West versus East particularly? And why only Alberta and not British Columbia—since the 1950s also a major oil producer? Why are Manitoba and Saskatchewan, who were unscathed by the NEP, still grouped in with the dissident “West”? We can allude vaguely to a different “spirit” or “essence” between Western and Eastern Canada, but this hardly illuminates why the struggle took the form that it did. While it was a divergence of interests, certainly, beyond that it seems that there was an even more fundamental divergence in modes of thinking and ways of conceptualizing the problem.

Similarly, historical accounts of the strife between Ottawa and Alberta are able to demonstrate that this struggle is based out of a longstanding history of Western discontent, but as with all purely historical accounts, this would fail to explain why this struggle happened. History is not an answer to the question of why, since there must always be some initial motivation that underlies historical events. Why, then, did this struggle take place between Western and Eastern Canada? I am concerned here with this why.

My thesis in the present essay is that the confrontation between Ottawa and Alberta which reached its apogee in the uproar over the NEP runs deeper than most explanations offered heretofore. I contend that this confrontation is not simply between two different approaches to natural resource policy or two different regions, but between two entirely different modes of thought embodied in two different conceptions of wisdom. What I mean exactly by this will be demonstrated. There are three thinkers whose insights can help elucidate this conflict: Giambattista Vico, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan—an Italian and two Canadians. In short, I am here attempting an unlikely marriage of Vico, Innis, and McLuhan to show how their insights contribute to an understanding of the National Energy Program as born out of a confrontation between two types of wisdom.

As strange as the reader might find this claim at the outset, I beg him to bear with me.

Giambattista Vico and the Ideal Eternal History

Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) is an overlooked masterpiece of the Western tradition, and it is unfortunate that, due to the confines of my inquiry, I can only appropriate a small part of his work. The New Science is as revolutionary as the title suggests—it proposes an entirely new method by which to approach the study of the prehistorical origins of civil society as well as the “ideal eternal history upon which the histories of all the nations run their temporal course in their emergence, progress, maturity, decadence, and end.”9

The starting place in the New Science is an inquiry into the origins of civil society. However, prior to beginning, some prejudices on the matter must be dispelled. It is often supposed by philosophers that what brings humans from a state of nature into civil society is some kind of rational understanding, implying that philosophy alone may civilize men. For Hobbes, it is an understanding that human life is “nasty, brutish and short,” which leads men to consent to a social contract and submit to a Leviathan. For Locke, humans consent to a social contract because of a rational understanding that within civil society, their life, liberty, and property are safeguarded. Vico disputes these arguments, because they are, in fact, quite absurd. To suppose that humans can only enter into civil society through rational agreement upon universal principles would be to suppose that rude and barbaric humans should suddenly have a great moment of philosophical insight. But philosophy as a formal method of inquiry, we may observe, is seldom present at the founding of a regime. For Vico, the entry into civil society is not rational, and it is not sudden like Hobbes and Locke imply.

Rather, it is only after barbaric men have been tamed through a shared fear of divinity that civil society can begin, for the existence of civil society hinges upon men’s adherence to a binding law between them. Fear of something greater than them can alone compel irrational and brutish men to obey law. While the earliest societal laws are informed by divinity, Vico observes a universal fact: that the first sages and historians in civil society are always poets, emerging as stewards of their religious traditions. This is, for Vico, both an empirical observation (we can use Homer and Virgil, the Vedic epics, the legend of Gilgamesh, or perhaps even the English poem Beowulf as easy illustrations as this point) and a logical necessity. Vico’s argument is that history and law, before the written word, can only be conveyed as poetry. Homer, being the oldest Greek poet, conveyed Greek law and history as poetry. That Solon, the Greek legislator, was also a poet supports this claim. The prejudices of philosophers would lead them to assert that there is philosophical understanding inherent in ancient poetry, but Vico finds no evidence that this is so.

For Vico, poetry is sublime only if it is vivid and scintillating. Homer is the most sublime poet because his work forms a complete and evocative image of Greek life. The Odyssey and Iliad may serve as compendia of Greek law, history, and customs. The merit of a poet is not then determined by his philosophical insight. Rather, it is tied to a poet’s knowledge of particulars, which he may then use to construct a sublime picture in words. Beautiful imagery may not be abstract; it must be concrete, for abstractions do not entice the senses. The poets, then, must possess an intimate knowledge of particulars for their work to be sublime. If the poets were the greatest wise men of antiquity, then it follows that early civil societies must also have valued and sought knowledge of particulars—what is true in a given time and place. This knowledge is what Vico calls “commonplace wisdom.”

Philosophers, on the other hand, seek what is universal; they seek knowledge of justice, the soul, love, and divinity. These are not concrete, but abstract entities. And so, philosophers are less concerned with the experience of the senses and more with the activity of pure reason. This knowledge of universals is what Vico calls “recondite wisdom.” Because philosophers are concerned with reason, and poets with the senses, poets cannot be philosophers, nor can philosophers become poets. Vico writes, “as the poets first had sensed concerning commonplace wisdom, the philosophers later understood concerning recondite wisdom. As a result, the former can be said to be the sense, and the latter the intellect of humankind.”10

What Vico observes is that poetry is most sublime in a civilization’s infancy, whereas it declines in quality as that civilization advances. Conversely, philosophy is all but absent in early civilizations, whereas it originates and begins to flourish once a civil society is in its late stages, near decadence and decline. A late civil society, therefore, seeks and values knowledge of universals. Poetry precedes philosophy because poetry is a necessary medium to express ideas before the advent of writing. Philosophy succeeds poetry because only after one has amassed a wealth of particular knowledge, especially over a long timescale, can one extract what is universal in that knowledge. Therefore, commonplace wisdom is proper to a society in its dawn, whereas recondite wisdom is proper to a society in its dusk.

A further clarification of wisdom may be needed. Vico writes that “Wisdom is the faculty that commands all the disciplines; by these, all the sciences and arts that complete our humanity are apprehended.” Shortly thereafter, he writes that that “true wisdom must teach knowledge of the divine things so as to conduct the human things toward the highest good.”11

Vico is not speaking of exclusively religious knowledge when referencing the divine, but is rather arguing that wisdom is a disposition towards a knowledge of the highest things—such as a conception of justice, a metaphysical worldview, or a particular religion. Commonplace and recondite wisdom are two different dispositions, each of which attempt to understand the world in different ways. For a man to possess commonplace wisdom is for him to understand the world through his senses. For a man to possess recondite wisdom is for him to understand the world through his intellect. In this essay, I will use the term wisdom in Vico’s understanding of it, which is of a disposition towards understanding the world. Men with different dispositions use different tools to understand the world, be it their senses or pure reason. It is, therefore, not necessary that every man possessing commonplace wisdom be a poet, nor every man possessing recondite wisdom be a philosopher—only poets and philosophers are the ideal men who embody these kinds of wisdom.

Trudeau, Roughnecks, and Two Types of Wisdom

Vico’s argument is certainly persuasive, drawing from extensive study of ancient civilizations. It is easy to apply the dichotomy of commonplace and recondite wisdom to many historical episodes. And, returning to the particular, I venture to understand the strife over the NEP as an encounter between recondite and commonplace wisdom. The absolute failure of Pierre Trudeau to understand the state of the Albertan oil and gas industry and the wholehearted refusal of Albertans to accept the NEP may best be explained not by regional differences or mere disagreements over resource policy, but because the NEP and the reaction were born out of entirely different modes of understanding—different types of wisdom.

Pierre Trudeau, on one hand, is doubtless the closest thing Canada has had to a philosopher king. He was well educated, first at Harvard, then the Institute d’Études Politiques de Paris, and finally at the London School of Economics. At the time of his ascension to the position of prime minister, he had spent more time as a student than as an employed professional. His Memoirs attest that his worldview was developed while studying at Harvard and in France. Trudeau came to adhere to the political philosophy of Personalism, which attempts to reconcile the individual and society, dictating that individual freedom is the primary good of society, but that this individual freedom must be qualified by the knowledge that the individual is enriched with a social consciousness which must be integrated into the society around him.12

Trudeau’s motto, “reason over passion,” was at the heart of his politics. Trudeau believed that politics could and ought to rise above the capricious passions of men. As a statesman he attempted to elevate people and politics in general to an uncharacteristic standard of rationality. He believed, indeed, that with enough explanation and persuasion, anyone could come to accept a perfectly logical course of action.

Trudeau saw the National Energy Program as one such rational program which rational Albertans ought to have accepted. As I quoted earlier, the NEP states that it would be good for Albertans and likened the policy to a matter of taking money from a surplus bank account and putting it into an account with a deficit. The NEP was based upon a particular conception of justice. in his Memoirs, Trudeau writes that “If one province is very rich and another very poor, my view is that there should be some redistribution of resources, with the federal government in charge of making sure that the distribution is done fairly.”13

Upon Albertan outrage pouring forth, Trudeau attempted to further explain why the policy was good for both Canada and Alberta, but these arguments fell upon deaf ears. He states in his Memoirs, however, that he had no regrets about the program, for it was born out of his lifelong principles of justice and fairness, and it was entirely within the rights of the federal government to impose an energy policy upon the country.14 Trudeau understood well why such a policy was just, but did not understand that it wouldn’t work. This is to say, he possessed recondite wisdom, as did the Eastern Canadians who supported him.

Albertans, on the other hand—especially rural Alberta, and even more so, parts of Alberta in the oil patch—possessed commonplace wisdom: a knowledge of particulars but not universals. There may be an element to the divide between the West and East that is regional, but it was mostly a matter of urban versus rural. However, the urban and rural divide can only be politicized as such when it also passes a provincial barrier. The predominately rural nature of the Canadian prairies, contrasted with the predominately urban nature of Eastern Canada explains why the discrepancy in wisdom took the form it did as a regional conflict. The prairie provinces grouped together not because of a shared resource, but because of a shared commonplace wisdom brought into conflict with a foreign recondite wisdom.

Upon first reading Vico, I found it difficult to disagree with his thesis that a civilization in its early stages is concerned with particulars, and only as that civilization progresses does it become concerned with universals; however, working in the oil patch only convinces me further. I have seen the souls of oilfield labourers up close and find that they are enamoured with particulars. Their way of talking and the subjects they discuss belie a vast knowledge of things but an inability to say what is eternally true about these things, or to discuss the common laws governing them. Knowledge is considered as mere fact collection. I have observed that if you can speak at length about the right subjects, you are accepted into their fold. You are greeted with suspicion if you show intellectual curiosity.

The phrase recurs: “it ain’t that deep.” Trading stories from work or youth—interesting encounters or wild escapades—is commonplace, as is discussing the score of the latest hockey game. Discussing the relative merits of particular women or trucks also occupies them. This attitude is exemplified by their stoic phrase: “it is what it is.” It is the law of identity concealed in unassuming language but also the ultimate expression of apathy to any question of why the world works as it does, instead providing the mere comfort that it works as such.

Additionally, it is telling that in small communities, the height of intellectual achievement is history—a collection of particulars—and local history at that. Rural areas also produce literature to some degree. However, I think it is indicative that no philosopher, to the best of my knowledge, has ever come from the oil patch. Oilfield labourers, possessing commonplace but not recondite wisdom, are inherently unsuited to be philosophers.

It is hardly an oversimplification to read the relationship of commonplace versus recondite wisdom into the encounter between Trudeau and Alberta. Trudeau’s stance was based upon rational arguments and universal principles of justice and fairness. The stance of Albertans generally and those in the oil and gas industry was far more simple: the policy was bad for the oil and gas industry, bad for Alberta, and, therefore, bad altogether. More fundamentally, the confrontation revealed a different mode of reasoning between commonplace and recondite wisdom. It revealed that commonplace wisdom lends itself to a knowledge that. Commonplace wisdom recognizes that the oil and gas industry is good, that it provides jobs and economic growth, that Alberta’s wealth was being taken by the federal government. On the contrary, recondite wisdom lends itself to a knowledge why. Trudeau did not see that the oil and gas industry was good for Canada as a whole. Instead, he knew why the NEP was necessary, why it was fair and just, why power and wealth had to be transferred from Alberta.

In a sense, he was the modern Thales, so transfixed at the stars that he fell in a well of political uproar.

Barbarism of Sense, Barbarism of Reflection

Another of Vico’s ideas may help us understand these two extremes which are exemplified in the confrontation over the NEP. For Vico, just as there are two types of wisdom, there are, conversely, two types of barbarism proper to civil society—one of which is common in its early phase, while the other common in its late phase.

The first is the barbarism of sense, and the second is the barbarism of reflection. The barbarism of sense is simpler to understand. Originally proper to savage man, it recurs through history in modified form. This barbarism is pure experience devoid of reflection. Such a state precedes the capacity to understand universal principles, and it lingers even when society has taken its start; materialism, which follows necessarily from skepticism; and tribalism, which follows necessarily from materialism. If we cannot know anything universal, then there is nothing except matter. If there is nothing except matter, devoid of moral law, then might is right. Therefore, the only reasonable course is to band together with a tribe to secure material benefits at the expense of rival tribes. We may think of Hobbes’ war of all against all.

The barbarism of reflection, on the other hand, is a mirror image of the barbarism of sense. The barbarism of reflection arises late in a regime when a society’s rational faculties have been thoroughly cultivated through a longstanding intellectual tradition, but when that society has begun to become unfettered from the constellation of common knowledge and values which held it together. Reason, then, is wantonly used to justify any purpose whatsoever. The breakdown of common values leads to intense factionalism without regard for the common good. The intellectuals of each faction ultimately weaponize reason, attempting to entrench themselves as an elite class, and to remake society according to their own conceptual scheme. Both types of barbarism, though different in structure, are selfish and contrary to the good of the community. However, the barbarism of reflection, as Vico notes, often proves to be more noxious.

It is not difficult to see barbarism within the NEP and in the reaction to it. While there are noble and just goals expounded in the NEP’s preamble, there are insidious intentions in many clauses, such as the plot to transfer oil wealth from Alberta to Ottawa concealed in oil exploration incentives. Reason was rendered servile, employed as a tool to achieve the factious ends of a Liberal government. However, the Albertan reaction was certainly not faultless. I am concerned that many did not have an understanding of the NEP when it was announced, and so perceived it merely as a threat to their ingroup from an outgroup, opposing it solely on this tribal basis. In the response to the NEP, reason certainly did not prevail over passion.

While I believe there are entirely justifiable ground to oppose the NEP, it is more likely that its opponents were correct only by accident and not because their position was more rational. For, recall, Albertans were at the fore of opposition to national bilingualism (and often still are), falsely claiming that the federal government, also under Trudeau, was trying to force French down their throats. In practice, this was not true, and bilingualism only served to make government services accessible to speakers of both English and French. In this episode, misbegotten tribalism is detected, suggesting that there is, in fact, an element of barbarism present, then as now.

We may dispute whether the NEP brought out the best or worst in either side. It may be that the federal government was acting upon reasonable principles of justice and fairness; or it may be that they were using reason as a cloak to disguise their ill intent. It may be that Albertan resistance to the NEP was an earnest and commonsense rejection of a disastrous plan conceived by out-of-touch bureaucrats; or, perhaps, it was merely a public display of tribal loyalty. Whether born out of wisdom or barbarism, through Vico’s insights, I hope to have shown that the misunderstanding was fundamentally between two different segments of civil society, each at a different stage in their development, and therefore, exemplifying different modes of reasoning altogether.

It must, however, be noted that commonplace and recondite wisdom are not discrete categories, nor are they mutually exclusive. For this reason, I think that two types of wisdom are not enough to describe the full range of modes of understanding. In Vico’s thought there is a wisdom of dawn and a wisdom of dusk. What is the wisdom of a civilization in its apogee? If commonplace and recondite wisdom are not mutually exclusive, then there can, perhaps in rare cases, be a right knowledge of the relationship between universals and particulars. If this is so, I contend there must be a third type of wisdom which is this kind of knowledge—somewhere between commonplace and recondite wisdom. This type of wisdom is, as I will demonstrate, the wisdom proper to true philosophy. Knowledge that and knowledge why must be combined if one is to attain a genuine understanding of the world.

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There is another reason why I think Vico’s account of the ideal eternal history of civil society is incomplete. For, Vico’s argument about the progression of civil society rests upon his philological argument that language is a fundamental driver of progress, which both shapes and expresses the way men think. While I do not deny that language is the storehouse of thinking, in a country which shares the same language it is difficult to explain why different regions possess vastly different modes of understanding. Vico also contends that changes in social structures, law, and governance effect civilizational progression. However, in Canada, these are essentially shared by every province with only minor alteration. Nonetheless, rural Alberta and the West generally have not progressed from commonplace wisdom to recondite wisdom. This suggests that there is another factor which contributes to this transition of which Vico was unaware.

To fill in this gap in our understanding and to help explain the rift in wisdom between Alberta and the federal government, I turn to Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, both philosophers and media theorists of the Toronto School of Communication Theory. This was a group of intellectuals based out of the University of Toronto who sought to understand the way communications and media shaped society and the minds of men. Their insights were guided by the insight that the form of a medium alters its content. Technology, as such, is not merely a tool to be used by humans, but rather, different technologies bring about different kinds of civilizations and instill entirely unique mental states in their users. Technology does, in fact, impress upon man the ways it ought to be used.

Harold Innis and the (Western) Canadian Staples Trap

The two men at the fore of the Toronto School were Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. We will begin with the former. Harold Innis (1894-1952) was loath to universalize. He devoted his early career to understanding the unexplored ways that the material landscape and economic trends of Canada shaped the Canadian spirit and destiny. Only in Innis’ later work, such as The Bias of Communication and Empire and Communication, did he explicate the ways communication affects the development of civil societies generally. His earlier work comprises three exhaustively rigorous Canadian economic histories: of the Canadian fur trade, the east coast cod fisheries, and the Canadian Pacific Railway. It takes a careful reader alone to follow these histories and a truly dedicated reader to extrapolate the universal from these works, but it is entirely possible to draw eternal insights from them about the role that the resources and material circumstances of a place play in shaping the nation that arises there—insights of which Innis was acutely aware. However, to the careless reader, these books can seem like mere compendia. And in fairness, it is only a few brief sentences now and then in these early economic histories in which Innis does explicitly draw universal conclusions. I thus find Innis to be one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, not merely for Canadians.

Innis makes a number of striking theses in his history of the Canadian fur trade, among which is his claim that the fur trade is the fundamental reason why Canada remained loyal to Great Britain, while America revolted to form its own polity. Canada, then as now, was a nation replete with natural resources, but with a population too small and sparse, and a climate too punishing, to develop a manufacturing sector to process those raw materials. And so, the plentiful furs were exported to the advanced manufacturing economy of Great Britain to be turned into clothing and then sold on foreign and domestic markets.

The tie of economic dependence which Canada thus had upon the mother country was a stark contrast to our neighbours to the south. In the Thirteen Colonies, populations were concentrated in cities on the east coast, and an amenable climate enabled the upstart Americans to quickly develop manufacturing sectors with enough scale to produce for the expanding markets in its vicinity. Whereas Britain’s mercantilist controls suited the natural resource economies of the soon-to-be Canadian provinces, they actively hampered the burgeoning manufacturing sector of the Thirteen Colonies. As a result, the latter defected, while the former remained loyal. The product was a Conservative Canadian nation which contrasted a liberal American republic which embodied progress.

What is striking about this example, and which will be referenced throughout this essay, is how resources and geography form the basis for economic trends, which then dictate the pace and direction of civilizational progress.

Innis is, perhaps, most famously remembered for his “staples thesis,” (also formulated by W.A. Mackintosh) which is that Canada’s destiny is essentially shaped by our exploitation of primary resources, such as furs, minerals, timber, or now, oil and gas. Because we export primary goods to more advanced economies, such as Great Britain and the United States, we are stuck in what Innis called a “staples trap,” wherein, since we do not have ample markets within our own borders for our goods, we send them abroad, and are therefore unable to develop a domestic manufacturing capacity. Without developing our own manufactures, we instead prioritize the expansion our primary resource sector and are thus relegated to remain a resource hinterland. Mackintosh was optimistic about the possibility of escaping a staples trap, whereas Innis was not.

For Innis, countries or regions specializing in natural resource production become beholden to advanced manufacturing heartlands, for the former are dependent on the latter to sell and process their materials. This can happen from country to country, or even between regions within national borders. However, a nation’s resources alone do not doom it to fall into a staples trap. Its geography and economic history also determine whether it becomes a hinterland or heartland.

It should not be difficult now to see why this discussion is relevant. Western Canada, for Innis, was destined to fall into a staples trap domestically, as was Canada internationally, excepting the manufacturing heartland along the St. Lawrence watershed. In his The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Economic History, Innis describes in detail how punishing geography, sparse population, distance from markets, and price fluctuations made it difficult for private enterprise to arise in Western Canada to exploit its resources. Rather, the many upfront and overhead costs initially conduced to large-scale government efforts to exploit resources, as the fur trade was only possible by the full support of New France and subsequently by the chartered monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

After the days of direct government oversight, the firms involved in resource extraction projects were large and well-established, often foreign, and based in major metropolises far from the resources themselves, which meant that the Canadian West was, from the beginning, in a state of economic dependence upon established manufacturing centres and major markets, whether Great Britain, Eastern Canada, or the United States.

Indeed, though the 1947 Leduc No. 1 oil strike happened near the end of Innis’ life, and the discovery of the oil sands after his death, this pattern of foreign capital and control was reproduced with the immense initial costs of oil sands exploration and exploitation, notable in the Syncrude operation and cancelled Alsands project, both of which were directly supervised and heavily subsidized by the federal government. The necessity of government subsidizing early oil sands projects is perhaps ironic, given the modern Albertan spirit of self-reliance and rejection of the federal government. It is a sobering reminder that it was only through federal investment, research, and development that major oil sands projects were possible in the first place.

The foregoing reasons all help explain why so little oil is refined in Alberta; at present, approximately 80% of oil from Alberta is sent to the United States for refinement. It was not economical to refine oil in-province at the time of the major mid-century oil discoveries because of distance to markets and inadequate infrastructure, and so a network of pipelines began to sprawl out over the continent, carrying Albertan oil south. long-established Eastern Canadian refineries wanted nothing to do with Albertan oil. The path dependency established by the initial choice to export crude oil south bears upon the present. Foreign interests became accustomed to the status quo and a lack of existing infrastructure further prevents Alberta from establishing more refineries. Innis’ model of a staples trap applies to the oil and gas industry just as well as to the resources he studied and saw evolve within his lifetime.

In a sense, Innis’ insights show that the resources available to a nation shape that nation’s very identity. But more than that, the geography, the climate, and the modes of transportation available to a nation determine the course that it takes, and indeed, whether it becomes a manufacturing heartland or a resource hinterland. Canada, and especially Western Canada, has fallen into the staples trap.

Innis’ conclusions in his economic histories were macroscopic, not microscopic; he focused on the course of nations, rather than the minds of men, and so we cannot quite yet use his work to illuminate the kinds of wisdom in a society. Marshall McLuhan, however, picked up where Innis left off, by taking his insights about society and applying them more specifically to the individual.

Marshall McLuhan and the Effects of Media

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), alongside Innis, was deeply concerned with the role of media and communication, not only on society, but on the individual also. His body of work is often summarized by his key insight that “the medium is the message.” By this it is meant that the medium being used to communicate is at least as important as the content of that communication in creating psychological and social states in its user or audience. For instance, whether a message is transmitted by print, telephone, or radio, indelibly colours the effect that message has.

As a simple example, in The Gutenburg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, McLuhan argues that the Phonetic alphabet inaugurated a shift in Western Civilization from an audible to a visual culture, which was further cemented by the printing press. The printing press brought about a “tyranny of the visual,” where the visual sense, via reading text, began to dominate. What resulted from this was a drive toward nationalism, rationalism, and standardization, because only with single viewpoints that were mass-produced and standardized could there be formed a common spirit of a nation, rational methods of inquiry, or standard weights and measures.

However, McLuhan’s insights extend far beyond modes of communication alone. Rather, as McLuhan defines them, media are “extensions of man.” Accordingly, most things are media. A shoe is a medium, for it is an extension of the foot. And just as with communications media, the shoe is not neutral. It is not merely a tool, and it does not merely allow one to do what they would with a foot, but better. Rather, the shoe opens up new possibilities and activities for man. Tools, weapons, technologies, and inventions are all media. Indeed, McLuhan writes, in Understanding Media, that in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates in America, John F. Kennedy suited the medium of television, whereas Richard Nixon was amenable to radio, and because of the dominance of television, Kennedy won. The prevalent forms of media facilitated certain psycho-social states in the audience members, and altered the course of the nation. This conclusion opens up entirely new lines of inquiry concerning hitherto neglected factors have shaped man and society.

However, I wish to extrapolate from the thought of McLuhan, claiming even further that the range of effects he attributed to media can be attributed even more broadly to objects, social systems, environments, and a host of other forces and entities which inhabit our world. I object to his restrictive definition of media, given that almost anything can be considered to convey information, and therefore shape the content and reception of that information in the process. A tree conveys information to us, and does so in a certain way—as such, does it not have the possible range of effects which McLuhan might attribute solely to communications media? The rings on a tree stump tell us its age. The contours of its leaves inform us of its species. The texture of its bark informs us of its health. Does democracy not convey information in a similar way? Don’t people and environments do the very same?

Innis demonstrated the ways that geography, history, and resources shaped the Canadian economic landscape. McLuhan offers us the clue in his analyses that seemingly passive conveyors of information shape society and the minds of men therein. More specifically, these thinkers help us understand that the material circumstances of a land cultivate specific thought patterns—specific types of wisdom, even—in the men who live there.

But also, the significance of Innis and McLuhan in the scope of this essay is to explain the mechanisms at play in facilitating civilizational change. For Vico, the common laws concerning nations were ordained by Providence itself. Innis and McLuhan, however, help us pinpoint the exact mechanisms at play which undergird this progress.

For Innis, it was the fur trade and the Canadian economy’s basis in natural resource trade that ensured it would remain a loyal and Conservative part of the British Empire, whereas it was a budding manufacturing sector in the Thirteen Colonies which enabled the upstart Americans to quickly rise and assert themselves as an independent nation. For McLuhan, it was innovations like the Phonetic alphabet and technologies like the printing press which enabled Western Civilization to advance from an aural to a visual culture, and to facilitate the rise of democracy, standardization, and immense strides in science and learning.

This shows that factors as diverse as climate, geography, economics, technology, and modes of communication all act as triggers for societies to progress in a certain way, not only the hand of divine Providence. With the insights of McLuhan and Innis as our guiding clue, we may supplement the account of civilizational progress in Vico and then reinterpret the strife over the National Energy Program in light of this.

Now, I will note, that these are not entirely new ideas. We are indebted to a longstanding tradition of prescient men who noted the impact of economic and political conditions on the minds of men, one of whom was Karl Marx. Though Marx unduly totalized his conclusion, he was correct in asserting that the economic modes of production in a society have a great influence on psychology and even the ideas expressed by the intelligentsia. He writes, in the Communist Manifesto, “What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”15

However, such ideas can be traced back further to Plato. For, in the Republic, books XII-XIII, when discussing each kind of imperfect regime, Socrates argues that each kind of regime has a corresponding soul belonging to its inhabitants. The regime is not a neutral entity, but rather forms (and is formed by) the very souls of its citizens. The five regimes he enumerates, aristocracy, timiarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny, each have a corresponding character, whose existence allows for that type of regime to succeed, but also facilitates decline into the next and more deficient type of regime. For instance, the democratic soul is mild, freedom loving, and hedonistic, whereas the tyrannical soul is characterized by servility.

Time alone does not effect the development of civil society and the unfolding of divine providence. Rather, it is the actions of men, primarily in working and finding more efficient ways to work. The first means exploitation of natural resources as well as making those resources into other things, whereas the second entails technological progress and innovation. Work is the most fundamental human activity, and so it is obvious that economic conditions—an aggregate of the work that is done in a society—underly any societal or economic change, and are the very reason for it.

While great thinkers do contribute to societal advancement, it is society which must be ready to accept their ideas. Wise men who arrive too soon, among a people who are not yet ready for them, cannot be immediately influential. So, it is not intellectual development alone, either in philosophers or poets, who can spur the development of civil society, but it must proceed in lockstep with the economic and social conditions of that society. A more primitive Greek society would not have accepted Homer, a more barbaric England would have rejected Locke, but also, a more decadent America would ridicule the sincerity of Emerson. Ideas only spread because society is ready for them. As such, Vico is vindicated in his understanding that certain modes of wisdom are only possible in certain stages in a civilization’s progression.

The Three-Sector Model

With this interplay of economy and wisdom, we may here allow ourselves to be guided by Innis and McLuhan. The economy, not only the state of the economy generally or the poverty or wealth of a populace, but also the basis for and type of that economy must impact the dispositions of men within. The types of work done on a microscopic scale form the basis of the type of economy on a macroscopic scale. It is not too abstract to say that an economy shapes the souls of men within. Socrates notes this in the Apology—that poets, politicians, and artisans each have a type of wisdom particular to them. Yet the parts form the whole; a city of bricklayers will have an economy based upon bricklaying and the wisdom proper to the bricklaying art.

There are, according to the Three-Sector Model, three distinct sectors of economic activity and three corresponding kinds of economies wherein one sector dominates: the primary sector, which consists of the extraction of natural resources, such as agriculture, mining, furs, oil and gas, and so on; the secondary sector, which consists of manufacturing goods; and the tertiary sector, which consists of providing services, such as barbers or mechanics, to consumers. When an society’s economy is dominated by the primary sector, that is a pre-industrial civilization. When it is dominated by the secondary sector, it is categorized as industrial, and when dominated by the tertiary sector, it is post-industrial.

According to the founders of this model, Fisher, Clark, and Fourasité, societies naturally progress from pre-industrial to industrial and finally to post-industrial. A society’s development overall is linked with the composition of its economy from among the three sectors. A less advanced economy will depend upon primary resources, with most employment and GDP comprised in that sector, whereas a more advanced economy will be composed mostly of service jobs. This model more or less fits the actual development of societies and economies. The reliance of an economy upon its agriculture sector is inversely correlated with that country’s gross domestic product and quality of life—while low reliance on agriculture indicates high quality of life. The transition from a primary sector to a tertiary sector economy is generally considered natural and desirable.

I contend that there is a wisdom proper to each economic sector.

Extractive Wisdom

The mental state which results from living in an economy dominated by the primary sector I will term “Extractive Wisdom,” for this is the wisdom cultivated from extracting resources from the earth. The man who embodies this is “Extractive Man.” A nation passes through this stage in its youth, before specializing in manufacturing goods with its resources. First and foremost, we can observe that this phase brings men into an intimate and mutually dependent relationship with the land. Primary resources are mostly, if not all, located in or upon the earth, whether agriculture, livestock, minerals, lumber, oil and gas, or fish (in which case the relationship is with the sea, as evinced by maritime cultures). Attachment to the land lends itself to patriotism and nationalism while lack of development and smaller settlements leads to strong familial attachments. The importance of land and family for Extractive Man inclines him towards tribalism—towards blood and soil; a people and a fatherland.

This is a near universal feature of small towns today—and small towns by and large exist to support nearby agricultural activity or as frontier resource towns. Patriotism and xenophobia are far more common in small towns—this point should be self-evident to anyone who has driven through rural communities in North America and has counted the flags. This contrasts with urbanites, who are more often cosmopolitan and multicultural. Extractive Wisdom, however, is anathema to cosmopolitanism, which is why multiculturalism is still rejected to varying degrees in the Canadian frontier, despite multiculturalism being formally institutionalized in our laws and constitution. It is not merely that time must elapse before these small towns advance to a new type of wisdom—rather, it is that the economic modes of production featured in small towns necessarily conduce to patriotism and familial attachment. Small towns in Alberta are bastions of regional pride and Western Alienation, whereas small towns in Québec are the strongest supporters of Québec nationalism. These are two tokens of the same type.

Another feature of Extractive Wisdom is that it inclines minds and worldviews towards simplicity. There is truth to the notion that life is simpler in the country or on the frontier. While the techniques used to harvest resources may be complex, and while there may be much practical and particular knowledge required, the task is repetitive. Despite whatever technology is used, the lifestyle is simple. A lack of amenities and amusements in small towns leads to people seeking simple pleasures. And, furthermore, the justification for the task is self-evident. People need food to eat, oil for heat and fuel, furs for clothing. Therefore, there is no need to seek explanation. The question of why is presupposed for Extractive Man, and so he is ultimately uncurious. This, therefore, disinclines him to engage in intellectual inquiry.

We see expressions of this in many different places. One will find that country music—proper to Extractive Man—features more stoic lyrics than genres proper to urbanites—which are generally more nihilistic or pensive. Urbanites ask the question why, whereas Extractive Man is disinclined to do so. For him, meaning is cultivated by his Sisyphean climb. His work is his own, and for this reason alone, it is meaningful. Therefore, the question of meaning is solved by Extractive Wisdom in the phrase: “it is what it is.”

What is more, something I have witnessed personally, and observed generally, is that worldviews are simpler in small towns and in the Canadian frontier. Extractive Wisdom takes the evidence of the senses as the criterion of truth. The evidence of their eyes tells them that man and woman are essentially different, that oil and gas are good because they fuel cars and heat homes (and because oil companies build magnificent hockey arenas in small towns), that prices have risen under Justin Trudeau, etc. Extractive Wisdom is aphoristic, reliant on catchy slogans and simple phrases to capture glimpses of the universal. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in political attitudes—whether “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” or “F*ck Trudeau,” their outlook is simple. Much appeal is made to “common sense,” and little care is given to things outside one’s immediate field of experience. Extractive Man has limited horizons, and is often content to remain in his small town—again, he finds this meaningful because the town is his.

However, just as Socrates acknowledges a certain wisdom among the artisans, there is a great merit of Extractive Man, which is his knowledge of particulars—in other words, Vico’s commonplace wisdom. In specific, he possesses a great deal of practical knowhow. He is able to fix things, build things, and operate tools and vehicles far better than urban man. His technique may be rudimentary, but through a sheerly vast repository of knowledge, Extractive Man is self-reliant, and this is his pride. Extractive man can change his own tires.

Extractive Wisdom, then, remains at the level of particular knowledge. The why is not problematized—it is self-evident. This is confirmed by experience. Men in the primary sector are intoxicated by particulars, but dismissive of universals. They universalize their particular experience and graft their environment upon the world to form their worldview. They often believe, rather shallowly, that the world conforms to the laws which govern their particular time and place. They believe that the solutions to their problems are the solution to society’s problems. Extractive Wisdom is, then, empirical in a sense, but it is not scientific. For, it trusts the senses absolutely, without scrutiny. As such, Extractive Wisdom often does direct one to true beliefs—more so that pure reason, which, bereft of particulars, may deal excessively in abstraction. However, Extractive Wisdom leads to error because it is unable to question its own methods—for method remains rudimentary and haphazard in this state.

And because Extractive Man is empirical, he is fundamentally sensuous. This is demonstrated in that individuals in small town seek experiences which scintillate the senses, rather than experiences which engage the mind. And, moreover, they are active in doing so, for the process of extracting resources from the land is one which necessitates an active and dominating personality. And because familial and social ties are tighter in extractive regions, these activities are often if not always social. Therefore, extractive man seeks active and sensuous experience for enjoyment. In small towns, people go hunting and fishing, ride offroad vehicles, engage in woodworking or repairs, or play sports as leisure activities. It is rare that they read or make artworks—for these are activities that are more intellectual, unsocial, passive, and are therefore unsuited for Extractive Man.

Manufacturing Wisdom

The transition from a primary sector economy to a secondary sector economy occurs when technique is so developed within a society as to allow it to use resources to make products, and amply big markets exist to ensure ample demand for such products. In a technological society, this is understood as manufacturing. Contrary to how Fourasité himself described this phase, industrialism and automation are not necessary, for it is a fact that agricultural societies and natural resource hubs eventually begin to take their resources and make them into usable goods.16 In fact, it is only through globalization that a primary sector economy can supply its necessary goods without developing a manufacturing sector, and so this is a necessary stage in a civilization’s progression. For the present purposes, I will use the term “manufacturing” to denote even pre-industrial forms of making things.

Manufacturing fundamentally depends upon the emergence of specialization in a society, and the development of technique to make things. Thus, we see in history examples of urban centres with secondary sectors based upon technique, and not necessarily automation. Before industrialism, India and the Levant were renowned for their textiles, Venice renowned for its shipbuilding industry in the 16^th century, England and Holland renowned for their clockmakers, and Flanders for its linen. Indeed, the secondary sector, though more developed now, has always been a feature of great civilizations, for it is a result of technique, not technology.

I use the word technique very deliberately to outline the most salient feature of manufacturing economies, which is that it is not focused on a thing (i.e., a natural resource), but a process—that being the technique of taking that resource and making something with it. The intellectual counterpart of technique is method. For this reason, what I call “Manufacturing Wisdom” is oriented around method. It is not a knowledge of particulars, like Extractive Wisdom, but a knowledge of method—a knowledge of what to do with the particulars, how to assemble them. Manufacturing Wisdom is a knowledge how. The man who knows-how is Manufacturing Man.

A feature of a secondary sector economy, as opposed to a primary sector economy, is that the focus of industry shifts to prioritize quality, as opposed to quantity. While, in resource extraction, the quality of resources does matter, the quality of those resources is seldom (except perhaps in the case of agriculture) dependent upon the technique of harvesting them; the focus is on output. Rather, for manufactures, quality constitutes the merit of a product, and the quality of the product is dependent upon the technique of the manufacturers. American trucks, renowned for their durability, gain repute, and this corresponds to increased sales. As such, companies such as Ford and GM pride themselves on their technique most of all. It is, then, no surprise that manufacturers advertise their craftsmanship as what sets them apart.

The focus on technique as opposed to output effects a different mental state in the individuals involved in the manufacturing process, and when an entire economy is based on manufactures, this mindset pervades a society. It is a happy coincidence that the term “refinement” has a dual meaning. In a cultural sense, it means the development of intellectual capabilities, the improvement of one’s manners, and the quality of goods they possess. In the case of natural resources, refining means to remove the impurities of a resource so as to make it more suitable for manufacturing.

In a technological society, however, manufactures focus on method not only with respect to the quality of the good produced, but also with regard to achieving efficiency and scale.

The focus on method is the bridge from sense experience to universal knowledge, and so Manufacturing Wisdom facilitates the development of intellectual pastimes. Method, combined with the empiricism of Extractive Wisdom, is what differentiates sense perception from science. It is, then, no wonder that manufacturing centres have proven more fertile ground for the development of science, philosophy, and even great literature.17 Indeed, the industrial revolution (roughly 1760-1840) coincided with some of the greatest achievements in letters and learning. Antoine Lavoisier’s discovery of modern chemistry was brough about by a revolution in method, as was Isaac Newton’s revolution in physics and Charles Darwin’s revolution in biology. Kant, Hegel, and the great German philosophers came from industrial towns in the midst of development. Indeed, what has been called the “golden age” of English literature coincided exactly with industrialism, with Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, and Eliot writing during or shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

It is perhaps too great a claim to make here, but I suspect that Manufacturing Wisdom is the most fertile ground for developments in the arts and sciences, and that a secondary sector economy effects the cultural zenith of a civil society. What I can say with certainty is that it is method which connects the particular to the universal. Because of this fact, when the minds of men are concerned with method, they are best suited for philosophy, which is, as I have argued, the activity of deriving universals from particulars.

However, Manufacturing Man is still knowledgeable about particulars, and specifically, about the resources he uses to manufacture—not as intimately knowledgeable as extractive man—for this knowledge is essential for him to know what to do with those resources. Innovation and technological development are essential features of Manufacturing Wisdom, and these in turn bring about wealth and high quality of life.

All this is to say that Manufacturing Wisdom, which is a knowledge how—a knowledge how primary goods may be made into secondary goods, and therefore, a knowledge of method—conduces to more coherent worldviews—in science, philosophy, art, and literature—and that manufacturing disposes men to connect the particular with the universal.

However, there is a potential drawback to this phase, which is that Manufacturing Man may be overly disposed to pragmatism. A knowledge how is still not a knowledge why, and a knowledge why alone pertains to the Good. As such, Manufacturing Wisdom, though helping to accurately describe the world, does not conduce to answering questions of right and wrong. It is no coincidence, then, that manufacturing man does not often engage in moral consideration. Elizabeth Barret Browning or Charles Dickens lamenting the conditions of the working class fall on deaf ears when capitalists such as J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford unhesitatingly pursue the expansion of their industrial empires. There is no consideration of morals, for these men know how to do business, but not why they do it. However, the intellectuals of the period—who are by nature ahead of their time—begin to question why, for knowledge how necessarily transitions to knowledge why.

Service Wisdom

Knowledge why is proper to the third stage of civil society, when the service sector primarily comprises an economy. As with manufacturing, the service sector is as old as time, though it becomes larger and more developed with industrialism and specialization. The service sector entails providing services, not products, to consumers; as such, a service job can be anything from a cook to a prostitute (being the world’s oldest profession, and thus proving that the existence of the service sector is a transhistorical fact). Though it is difficult to observe a clear-cut service sector or a tertiary sector economy in antiquity, certain great civilizations well ahead of their time, such as the Athenians, displayed highly sophisticated societies with complex service sectors, featuring employment in education, priesthood, and even the merchant class—the dominant industry of Piraeus. We see tertiary sector economies more today, in countries such as the United Kingdom, where primary and secondary industry have declined and now comprise a small percentage of that country’s economic activity.

Whereas, for Extractive Wisdom, the why is presupposed, and for Manufacturing Wisdom, the why is yet to be drawn out completely, for Service Wisdom, the why is inherently problematized. It is obvious why primary resources are necessary; it is usually clear why manufactured products are necessary for people; however, it is often more confusing why certain services are provided. Indeed, services seldom are necessary, but are abstracted from the process of working with things.

Material goods satisfy material human needs, whereas services often appeal to man’s emotional, intellectual, and spiritual faculties. As such, service breeds contemplation about man, and specifically, about why he seeks these services out. Man has material needs simply because he has material needs. But man does not have spiritual, intellectual, or emotional needs—rather, he has desires. And desire is inextricably linked to meaning, for a man’s life cannot have a sense of meaning if he does not have desires. The questions then arise of why he seeks to satisfy these desires and where these desires come from. Service Wisdom originates as an attempt to answer these questions and thereby understand meaning in the context of a tertiary sector economy.

Service Wisdom forces man to question why. Accordingly, the twentieth century, being the post-industrial age in Europe, was when the question of why arose most pressingly for mankind. Nietzsche and Spengler observed this with striking clarity, diagnosing Western civilization with the condition of nihilism—nihilism being the inability to justify why anything is the case. Answers to nihilism were sought by the Existential tradition of philosophy and literature, with figures such as Camus, Sartre, or Frankl. In popular philosophy, the question of the meaning of life arose from this tradition, and though the question itself is superficial and dealt with in such a manner, it is significant that this question arose so prominently for the common man and arose specifically in the 20^th century. The “meaning” of life was not presupposed for Service Man as it was for Extractive Man and Manufacturing Man, but rather, it was problematized, and so followed Existentialism as a prime example of Service Wisdom—a knowledge why.

It is important to note that, while the knowledge attained through these three phases of civil society may be cumulative, it is often not Therefore, when a country has a tertiary sector economy, the intimate knowledge of particulars may be retained, in part, but it may also be lost. This is not necessary, perhaps, but it is natural. Moreover, to recall Vico’s definition of wisdom, a type of wisdom is a disposition towards answering the most fundamental questions. Service wisdom, therefore, is a disposition in which man idealistically uses pure reason to explain the world, the more so if he has lost the particular knowledge attained in earlier ages—and indeed, if one observes the contemporary urbanite in the West, it appears that a great deal of practical knowledge has been lost.

A tertiary sector economy is only possible with great populations of people in urban centres, and urban centres are rarely close to the epicentres of natural resource extraction. As such, Service Man is quite distant from the source of the goods he consumes. This often leads him to be ignorant of the modes of production within his society. Since Service Man is so far removed from primary sector, and even secondary sector industries, this can lead Service Wisdom into a common error of neglecting knowledge of particulars. Rather than extract universals from particulars, too often does civilized man arrogantly think pure reason alone can provide him with universal knowledge.

A knowledge why, which is bereft of a knowledge that, produces abstract and metaphysical arguments which, though logically self-consistent, often do not conform to how man experiences the world. As such, a knowledge why proves to often be an empty why if it is not based upon particulars. Whereas Extractive Wisdom may fall into the error of universalizing the particular, Service Wisdom may fall into the error of particularizing the universal—meaning imposing upon particular circumstances what are taken to be universally true laws and principles without forming those laws and principles on the basis of empirical observation. This shows how Service Wisdom may fail to address its primary concern—to provide reasons why—for if its reason why is empty, and people can sense this, then nihilism will only be perpetuated.

To support this claim, I reiterate that country music carries Stoic messages (where the why is presupposed), whereas indie and punk music (proper to urbanites in tertiary sector economies) carry themes of nihilism and existential angst.

It may seem strange to consider nihilism as, at least in part, an economic issue, but that is exactly what I am suggesting. Tertiary sector economies tend towards nihilism because the question why is no longer presupposed. It is no longer presupposed because employments serve to satisfy desires, rather than provide necessities.

Service Wisdom conduces to master theories, grand metaphysical systems, and logically coherent worldviews—to say nothing of the truth or falsity of these worldviews—and then imposing these on the world. This is what I mean by particularizing the universal. Marx did not arise to question the “capitalist” world order because industrialism was, in fact, so terrible. Rather, he arose to question this world order because his disposition, being that of Service Wisdom, was so advanced as to be able to ask the question of why. To replace the irrational and unjust world order, Marx suggested a political ideology which was purely rational and just, though it proved a total failure when tested in practice.

Questioning the world order becomes a key feature of Service Wisdom, and Service Man interrogates everything around him, demanding an answer to the question of why? This pattern, taken to an unhealthy degree, is a clear cause of angst and melancholy, and not only contributes to nihilism, but also to madness. It would be difficult to disagree that madness is also a characteristic of the 20^th century post-industrial world.

So, Service Man is theoretical, interrogative, and often confused. Obviously, Service Man has corresponding merits also—reason is highly sophisticated in this stage of civil society, being developed earlier in secondary sector economies and perfected by the time an economy becomes reliant on the tertiary sector. Service Man is highly inclined to intellectual and solitary endeavours, such as books and artwork. His reasoning faculty is developed by these means. Being able to question why provides grounds for wonderful works of philosophy, literature, and art. However, he is also a passive consumer of these means, and turns into a passive man. It is an unavoidable fact that too much contemplation breeds passivity, whereas action is engendered by decisiveness. Furthermore, reason, being more sophisticated than ever, may turn into a tool to justify anything. It is unsurprising that reason, being more developed than ever, has been able to justify Communism—a system which has never functioned and never can—and the abolition of age of consent laws—by Derrida, Foucault, and Sartre, the greatest French intellectuals of the previous century.

What is more, Service Wisdom has a tendency to return to tribalism. Whereas Extractive Wisdom can lead one to prioritize family and nation—blood and soil—Service Wisdom tends to sort men from one another by what they believe—given the primacy of reason and worldviews—and Service Man is insecure about his worldview, for it is his key to meaning. Therefore, a man who questions his worldview threatens the validity of his worldview, and therefore, the meaningfulness of his life. And so, Service Man must respond to crush dissent and reassure himself. His constellation of meaning is sacred to him—disagreement constitutes existential violence.

Contemporary politics is an example of this very mode of reasoning, wherein men twist and turn to justify the evils of their own political faction, while mercilessly berating any opponent for their faults. In an age where brazen partisanship is increasing and political factions are losing common ground, where men and women refuse to marry a member of the opposing tribe, it is hardly a controversial claim that we live in an age of heightened barbarism. Vico is yet again vindicated.

In sum, there is Extractive Wisdom, which is a knowledge that; Manufacturing Wisdom, which is a knowledge how; and Service Wisdom, which is a knowledge why. Each is proper to a particular type of economy: first a primary sector economy, dealing with resource extraction; then a secondary sector economy, dealing with manufactures; and a tertiary sector economy, dealing in services. When it is understood that a type of economy only reflects the activities which people engage in to make a living, and that the activities engaged in shape a man’s soul, it is not absurd to assert that each type of economy tends to produce and be rooted in a distinct type of wisdom.

Grafting the Model upon the Case Study

But I should add some caveats to this account. What I have said describes a tendency which is logically consistent and observable, but it is a generalization. The three types of wisdom I have described tend to result from the types of economies which underly them, but do not occur of necessity. The whole does not solely determine the parts, but both part and whole shape one another in turn. Furthermore, the categories and kinds I have described are not mutually exclusive and are not discrete.

My account of the economic factors contributing to the development of civil society parallels and complements Vico’s. Extractive Wisdom disposing men to knowledge of particulars and Service Wisdom disposing men to knowledge of universals corresponds to Vico’s categories of commonplace and recondite wisdom, though showing the economic underpinnings of them, while also arguing for the existence of a middle wisdom, which I call Manufacturing Wisdom. Instead of knowledge of particulars or universals, Manufacturing Wisdom is a knowledge of method, or a knowledge of the right relations between particulars and universals. Furthermore, my account provides added explanation for Vico’s two types of barbarism. There is simple barbarism and the barbarism of reflection. This corresponds to the tendency in Extractive Wisdom to particularize the universal, and the tendency towards tribalism drawn from familial and nationalistic attachment; and also to the tendency of Service Wisdom to weaponize reason to defend one’s tribe of meaning.

Moreover, my account fills in two important gaps: explaining, for one, why and how civil society develops as it does in economic terms, and using this argument to explain why, within nations, different regions can and do progress at vastly different rates; the answer is not information, but resources and development.

If this is true, it explains very well how a political gulf in North America, as the world over, has formed between rural and urban men. Rural areas tend to be more politically conservative whereas urbanites are more liberal. It is futile to try understanding how this divide coalesced as it did in terms of contingent policies, for then this would not be such a universal mainstay of democracies. Instead, I suggest that the mode of thinking engendered by economic activity is a primary influence on voting patterns. Rural areas possess Extractive Wisdom, whereas urban areas possess Service Wisdom. I think it is hardly necessary to elucidate how Extractive Wisdom tends right and Service Wisdom tends left. This explains why the gulf between the Canadian West and East formed, as between one dominantly rural and one dominantly urban area, which was then politicized because it crosses provincial boundaries.

A similar phenomenon results in the United States, with the rural South and plains states favouring Republicans, while predominately urban coastal and Great Lakes states favour Democrats. It is indicative of a third type of wisdom that the current so-called “swing states” in the United States, which oscillate between voting for the Democratic and Republican parties, are the nation’s most important manufacturing centres: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Such states are suspended between primitivism and decadence.

Obviously, the applications of this argument are numerous. But let us return to Alberta in the year 1980, when the National Energy Program was announced. I previously used Vico’s model for the development of civil society to explain the different kinds of wisdom witnessed in the NEP and the response from Albertans. However, I was unable to explain, using Vico’s model, how Alberta seemed to possess commonplace wisdom, whereas Trudeau and the federal government exemplified recondite wisdom. Rather, I think this dispute is better understood by my concepts of Extractive and Service Wisdom, as the underlying reason for this dispute was that one people were habituated to the activity of extracting natural resources from the earth, while the other were suited to participation in the service sector, especially including managerial bureaucracies. This is how two regions within the very same country had diverged so greatly in their modes of thinking: they were in different stages of civilizational development.

In Praise of Manufacturing

In the 1980s, the St. Lawrence watershed, first a great manufacturing centre, was in the midst of a transition to becoming a service-based economy, while the West, due to large overhead costs of its natural resource industries and failure to develop manufactures, remained a resource hinterland. As manufacturing has declined in Québec and Southern Ontario in the latter half of the 20^th century, it is now primarily a tertiary sector economy. The downfall began with the cancellation of the Avro Arrow (based upon incorrect military intelligence maliciously presented to the Canadian Government by the U.S. Military), which was a blow to the aerospace manufacturing industry. Later, over 300,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in Southern Ontario in the first five years after the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and a similar number of jobs were lost between 2004 and 2015 due to globalization and Stephen Harper aggressively championing free trade. Increasingly, free trade has led to manufacturers fleeing Canada to the point where currently the Government of Ontario must pay Volkswagen $500 million for them to even consider opening a new car factory in southern Ontario.

On the other hand, a federal government hostile to any activity in the oil and gas industry, combined with American interests, has prevented the development of refineries in Alberta. Both of these are lost economic prospects. But, moreover, they lead to increasing division in Canada, for Alberta and the federal government can understand one another less and less. And moreover, neither Extractive Wisdom nor Service Wisdom alone are inclined toward correct understanding. Manufacturing Wisdom, however, is so inclined. The difference in wisdom is, even more fundamentally, an economic problem, and one which is being exacerbated given current trends.

One can debate whether these societal trends are parts of a necessary progression or not. Innis considered it an indisputable fact that Canada’s geography relegated it to being a resource hinterland; Fourasité described his model as natural; Vico considered the laws governing the progress of civil societies to be enforced by Providence itself. While Vico may be correct that all empires fall eventually, this does not mean that a civilization’s apogee cannot be lengthened by wise policies. Furthermore, certain regions’ economies remaining dominated by the primary sector shows that the seemingly natural pattern of economic and societal change can be altered or suspended. If the reader is disposed to believe in historical determinism, and that all societies follow a natural and unchanging course towards decadence and demise, then he very well may reject the propositions in the remainder of this essay. However, if one hesitates to sound the Spenglerian death knell of inevitable decline, then I ask the reader to entertain the following suggestion.

In understanding change and development within civil society, I do accept that all must come crashing down eventually. However, between dawn and dusk, I view a great deal of contingency. I prefer Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of civil society as home to a series of contingent struggles which are won or lost over time, and I view the transition to a tertiary sector economy in Canada as one of these struggles. If not for the cancellation of the Avro Arrow, we may have had a world-class aerospace industry instead of a modest one at present. If an unpopular Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, which had been rejected by leading intellectuals and economists, had not been signed by Mulroney in 1988, Canada’s manufacturing industry could very well have continued to prosper, instead of shrinking to the dire state it is in. These were by no means necessary events, but contingent ones which resulted from debate, policymaking, and political struggles. I find it very easy to imagine a Canada today which is unashamed to place selective tariffs on foreign products to protect robust domestic manufacturing industries.

And, moreover, though Alberta’s oil and gas industry faces inevitable challenges from geography, transportation, and large overhead costs, there is little in the way of developing more refineries in Alberta, or even making it more affordable for refineries in Eastern Canada to use Canadian, rather than imported oil. With a cooperative federal government, it would be possible to stimulate the refinement of petroleum products. For, even now, crude oil exports bring in $147 billion a year, whereas refined petroleum products only net $20 billion. Indeed, refined products net a higher price, and so with improvements in transportation infrastructure, Alberta could benefit significantly from refining more of its own oil. This would also insulate Canada’s oil and gas industry from price fluctuations and the discount on Western Canadian Select—Alberta’s grade of crude oil. Of course there are sunk costs in establishing a network of pipelines to transport crude oil, but to use this as an argument against refinement is to let past decisions overrule the present needs of our country.

Rather than worrying about free trade hampering manufacturing in southern Ontario but helping Alberta; or protectionism benefiting the former and damaging the latter, for both regions to prioritize manufacturing would lead to more national unity and simplicity in trade policy. To protect both manufactures in Ontario and Alberta would require only one nation-wide policy: the rejection of free trade. Surmounting American opposition to this measure may be close to impossible, I must admit. It has always been difficult for a Canadian leader to upset the United States and get away with it—Diefenbaker did not survive when the weight of the American establishment came crashing down upon him. I can think of only one Canadian prime minister in the 20^th century who was successful at being an anti-American, and that was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. For all his flaws, he was an economic nationalist, and stands only beside John A. MacDonald as a prime minister who successfully implemented economically nationalistic policies. While the NEP was not the answer to Canada’s oil quandary, the baby of economic nationalism should not be thrown out with the bathwater.

And what is more, maintaining domestic manufacturing capabilities is absolutely necessary in wartime. Otherwise, a nation will be left dependent upon others to meet its basic needs. A nation with domestic manufacturing capacity is strong and self-reliant. We see signs that the Pax Americana has ended, and we would do well to prepare ourselves for the fallout.

The policy step which needs to be taken to protect Canadian industry—both automotive factories in southern Ontario and refineries in Alberta—is the repudiation of free trade and the imposition of selective tariffs on manufactured goods.

Now, there are certain well-known problems with tariffs, and the very word has been widely besmirched due to recent events. Tariffs raise the prices of protected goods, limit industry competition, and can spark trade wars with other countries. There are also warranted claims that tariffs increase industry concentration, reduce efficiency of firms in protected industries, and even conduce to foreign ownership and control of industries. Now, a rigorous economic analysis of tariffs is outside my purview, though I concede that the criticisms above are all generally true. I contest that these criticisms are either not problematic, or where problematic, are worthwhile even still. As noted with the NEP, foreign ownership is not a bad thing outright, for foreign investment is an indicator of an economy’s strength. Moreover, tariffs allowing domestic firms to operate at less than minimum efficient scale encourages the proliferation of small firms, bringing into doubt the claims that tariffs solely increase concentration and foreign ownership. Tariffs do undoubtedly increase the cost of certain goods, but is this not an acceptable price to pay for a nation’s autonomy? Taxpayers foot the bill of a military—without any direct economic benefit—so that a nation can defend its sovereignty. I argue that tariffs serve the same ends, and do so with lower overall cost to individuals.

The measurable benefits of developing oil and gas refineries in Alberta and rejecting free trade in Ontario are best determined by economists. The immeasurable benefits alone, however, are worth it. Most Canadians would agree that national unity is important, and the achievement of this goal is worth many sacrifices. As I have argued, a great point of national disunity—the 1980 NEP—arose out of economic circumstances. It is reasonable to assert, then, that the problem has an economic solution. I argue that two entirely different kinds of wisdom arose in the West and the East, and if not over the NEP, they would have clashed eventually. With two entirely different modes of thought, these two new solitudes will only grow further apart. Between two entirely unique patterns of thought, there will be no common ground. However, an economic policy which unifies these regions through the increase of manufactures is possible so long as we understand the problem as economic.

We may defend ourselves against two types of barbarism only if our modes of thinking are suspended between extraction and service. Manufacturing Wisdom—the knowledge of the right relations between particulars and universals—on its own produces correct patterns of thought. When two regions possess this common mode of thought, they can be unified in one spirit as under one policy objective. Self-centred tribalism results when we universalize the particular or particularize the universal. Mutual understanding results when we keep the two in the balance. There is certainly no reason why wise policies and incentives cannot build up or rebuild a manufacturing industry. If public opinion favours protectionism, then policymakers must eventually listen. We must remember that the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was a notoriously unpopular policy even well after its ratification.

The modes of production do impress themselves upon the minds of men, but minds often shift even slower than economies. I do, however, believe that immediate steps toward this goal are tangible and, in the name of economic nationalism, the goal justifiable. Though Canadians are often too mild to openly declare their national allegiance, they perennially lose this moderate temperament—whether over a railroad, a world war, or a diplomatic squabble over turbot. Whether George Grant was correct in his prediction that Canadian nationalism was forever doomed, of course, is yet to be seen. But we can certainly make an effort, and with a newfound understanding of our internal conflicts, why would we not?

16

, in a wonderful essay, describes the fundamental aim of Western Civilization as turning stuff into things—namely, manufacturing:

Same Difference

The Trojan Spork

The first “fork, knife, and spoon” combo was patented in 1864 by Nathan Ames. But it wasn’t until 1909 that “spork” first appeared in the lexicon. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that sporks upended America’s dynamic cutlery market, still reeling from the twin shocks of disposables and stainless steel. Sporks quickly became “popular” among captive eaters …

Read more

8 months ago · 33 likes · 9 comments · Misha Valdman

As I look down upon the scarred industrial landscape, I consider my role in this barren land. What is it I am trying to do here? What is there for philosophy to do with this brimming manifold? What am I trying to accomplish in writing about all that I see before me?

The answer I inevitably return to is that I am trying to show this world to others, in all its perverse grandeur. The hydrocarbon cokers that reach to the heavens, the thick industrial smog which fills my lungs, the aching pain in my bones after a long day of work, and the biting cold that renders my extremities stiff and useless—I want to show this to you.

In this way, I consider my task to be partly as an intermediary, a portal for others to peer into the strange and foreign world of the northern Albertan oil sands. Through my descriptions and stories, I hope that others may experience even a semblance of the sublime scenes with which I am daily confronted. Through my writings, I hope to share the idiosyncrasies and inner workings of a parallel reality hidden behind the cutbanks of the mighty Athabasca River, and I hope that others may be that much more edified by having received them.

But the questions persist of how this is to edify, why it is good to catch a glimpse of a different world in this way, and what philosophy has to do with any of this?

On a trivial level, the experience of a different and strange world begets new knowledge. The knowledge that Canada is a major oil producing nation is already foreign to many, let alone the facts that it is the fourth largest oil producing nation on earth, that the province of Alberta alone has the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserves, that the Athabasca oil sands comprise the largest industrial project in the world, visible from space and home the the world’s largest dam in terms of volume of construction material—used for the sole purpose of containing a lake of noxious waste material.

These are pieces of propositional knowledge, yes, and these alone may be interesting, if not edifying. Describing this world, however, and showing it to the reader entails not merely relating facts and data about it. No, I contend there is something deeper which my writing aims at capturing—an ethos of this land, or even deeper, some inchoate and unfathomable essence which pervades it.

Such an essence can only be gestured towards by propositional knowledge, but may be conveyed adequately in prose, poetry, metaphor, and philosophy. This is a distinctly “western” land, marked by the self-reliant ethos that characterizes America far more than Canada. It is a land of prairie populism, country music and rodeos; a land of rough and tumble oil men toiling amid the frostbitten winters and enervating summer heat; a land unashamed of its industry, capable of constructing monstrous edifices as monuments to progress; a land shaped in every way by that most ancient and chthonic force beneath the ground: oil.

It must be said that by a “world” I don’t merely mean a territorially-delineated area, nor merely a temporally-delineated period. A world includes both a territorial and temporal component, but I understand the world not to be identified by either of these indicators, but rather that an area and period are isolated on the basis of some deeper and irreducible spirit, which can be gestured towards, but not captured in objective metrics.1

Exposure to a foreign world, not merely as a change of scenery, but as the introduction to and appreciation of a radically different ethos and character than that which pervades our own particular world, helps us in many ways. It exposes the many local influences which shape our thoughts and worldview and forces us to reckon with a worldview that may be radically different than our own. This experience plants the seeds of openness and understanding.

But why this emphasis on a particular “world” if what I purport to do is philosophy? Hasn’t philosophy been understood historically not as a means of describing a time and a place, but on the contrary, as a means of transcending them? Is it not the search for universal and transhistorical truth?

I answer yes, but with a reservation. Philosophy is not merely the search for truth, but it is a man’s search for truth in a world. Philosophy is an activity undertaken by a man, and he never transcends his humanness in this philosophy. Rather, it is he who does philosophy, and the truth discovered in this activity is truth for him. And philosophy is done in a world, and as such the world is present in this activity and shapes the very horizon of philosophy.

Given this conception of philosophy, man himself becomes the interface between a particular world and the truth contained therein. It is his task to observe the world in its minutiae and to draw out what is of universal import. The philosopher becomes a conduit.

The self and the world are inextricably present in philosophy. Now, this is not to be taken as a shallow expression of subjectivism, relativism, or determinism. That philosophy is undertaken by a man does not entail that he is trapped in his own experience. Nor does it entail that, because philosophy is undertaken in a world, the world determines the course that philosophy takes.

This view serves to clarify that reasoning does not take place in a vacuum, but in a world. In the moment that a man contemplates, there is a host of forces acting upon him. His thinking may be swayed one way or another by his environment, his climate, his mode of communication, his history, the ethos of his time, his cognitive biases, and by the biological impulses which colour his thought. The present view of man as a conduit instills epistemological humility in the practitioners of philosopher, and orients us towards attaining awareness of these forces, drawing them out into relief and making them conspicuous. Clearing these impediments away is a necessary prerequisite to the pure reasoning which many a philosophical novice naively wishes to pursue straightaway.

Now, one may object that it hardly matters who says something so long as it is true. I don’t dispute this point. I only contend that knowing who says it helps us understand it all the more—specifically, it helps us understand how that conclusion was reached. The question of who does not alter the truth value of a proposition—as is the error of relativism or subjectivism.

Rather, it helps one understand that a conclusion is something that is reached personally, and to conceptualize this is a gateway into more fairly evaluating the structure of the argument that subtends that conclusion. In other words, emphasizing the personality of philosophy cultivates empathy, which is a portal towards proper dialectic, as opposed to hostile confrontation.

On the contrary, a discussion in which two contrary propositions are at loggerheads, without the element of personality being salient, lacks the conditions needed to retrace the steps of how those conclusions were reached, so that the pair might set out together from the same starting point and find common ground. Understanding an interlocutor as a mere collection of disembodied beliefs prevents any kind of earnest discussion, whereas understanding him as a thinking, feeling, and embodied man, whose beliefs—whether false or true—derive from something real, is a prerequisite to dialogue. Only when the human element is removed from philosophy is it possible for good faith disagreements to devolve into bitter invectives.

A man doing philosophy seeks universal and transhistorical truth, yes. But this truth is truth about reality, and reality is accessible only in a world. And if philosophy seeks truth in the world and of the world, then one must conclude that this goal must be sought through the world. Namely, the world is the portal through which particular knowledge leads to knowledge of universals. Any land, any place, can become a microcosm of the whole, through the words of a philosopher.2

As such, philosophy, far from a disembodied and inhuman discipline, ought to be better conceived as a deeply personal pursuit, intimately concerned with the self and the world, and understanding these to be the portal through which truth is sought, rather than as impediments to be transcended and neglected.

The self and the world, then, are undeniably present in philosophy. Far from a weakness, this is the discipline’s greatest strength. Showing how philosophy is an understanding of the interplay between the particular and universal, rather than as merely abstraction for abstraction’s sake (perhaps the most common prejudice against the discipline), firmly grounds it.

In this sense, it is coherent to say simultaneously that the dialogues of Plato express universal and transhistorical truths about love, goodness, beauty, and divinity; and also that these dialogues are a portal into the world of Classical Athens—into the personalities of the men who pursued philosophy and the distinct character of their time and place. I contend that understanding the latter helps us understand the former, which is why the Platonic dialogues retain such undeniable potency to the philosophical novice, even today.

It is not only necessary to acknowledge the personality and worldliness of philosophy, but this fact should be emphasized by her practitioners. For philosophy to be honest, it must display not only the truth a man finds, but the man who finds this truth; it must display not only the truth found in the world, but the world in which such truth is found. The reasons for this are threefold.

Firstly, in the spirit of truth as aletheia—as uncovering—philosophy’s fundamental activity and aim should be made clear first to ward off prejudices against the discipline, which are myriad. Accusations of navel gazing, needless abstraction, having one’s head in the clouds, or being a leech on the belly of society, are commonplace for those who call themselves philosophers. It would help to ward off such views less by telling, and more by showing how true philosophy differs from these preconceptions.

Secondly, and more crucially, philosophy becomes protreptic—it may be instructive by example. The beauty and profundity of the Platonic dialogues is not merely in the wise things said by Socrates and his interlocutors. Rather, it is that these dialogues show philosophical dialectic in action, and serve as an example for those living, or attempting to live, the philosophical life. While the dialogue form has been preserved in the history of philosophy, we have strayed from it. Resultantly, philosophy, as presented in the treatise form, is interpreted as merely a dry compendium of arcane propositions, rather than as a living and ongoing activity.

Thirdly, displaying the personal and worldly nature of our thought is an antidote to the Postmodern attacks which have been leveled at the possibility of a sincere and honest philosophy. It has been argued by many that the supposed earnest search for wisdom is actually an expression of a will to power, an instance of an ugly logo-centrism used to solidify embedded hierarchies, that philosophy is a mere matter of semantics and word games, and that a pure will to truth is impossible. In their pure form, such claims are irrefutable only because they are unfalsifiable. However, they can be combatted by the display of philosophy as an earnest and sincere enterprise based in the self and the world, rather than as dispassionate and disembodied reasoning.

It is based upon the three considerations above that the title of the present blog is “Philosopher of the Oil Sands.” While it is an evocative title, albeit pretentious, there is good reason behind the choice. The “of” is perhaps the most crucial word, as it suggests a connection between two things, philosophy and the oil sands, which at a glance (and not unreasonably) might seem totally disparate.

The “of” suggests that the two bracketing terms are connected in an essential way in the context of this project. It is not merely philosophy “in” the oil sands, nor philosophy “and” the oil sands. Rather, the ideas contained in my writing are distinctly “of” the oil sands, for it is here that they were born, and it is these surroundings—putrid tailings ponds and swarms of pumpjacks which spread over the landscape like mosquitoes on a swelling host—that shape them.

My words are soaked in oil. There is bitumen on my breath. My thoughts are powered by Tim Horton’s coffee, diesel fuel, arctic gales, and prairie skies. My reflections are born among the smokestacks of oil sands production facilities, in podunk oilfield towns and work camps in remote lands, and in the rugged landscape of northern Alberta. Ideas are birthed by activity, as in late-night long hauls across empty and remote highways, bone-wearying toil amid a frigid cold snap, and observation of the dazzlingly sublime scenes before me.

But far from being shallow and parochial, I contend that there is something of the universal in this land which my writing aims to express. By constant reference to my surroundings, by noting where these reflections take place, and by showing my thought process from my experience, through my reflections, and to the truth that I claim to have found, I attempt to demonstrate the activity of philosophy as it is lived—to show you a philosophy born of life itself.

To do so necessarily entails that I show you, the reader, the world I inhabit, in its minutiae and idiosyncrasies. It entails that I be a conduit of the oil sands, displaying them to you as faithfully as I can, without distortion or pretense, in order that I may show you what is Good, Beautiful, and True in them.

And in my survey of my surroundings, my gaze falls upon the pumpjack as the most potent of metaphors. It plumbs the depths of the earth slowly and dutifully, bobbing up and down in military uniformity, bearing forth the bounty of black gold from the ground. In the most unassuming of places, the pumpjack sits, producing great treasure. The pumpjack is the universal image of oil, that which is universally sought after, and yet the pumpjack is unceremonious in its activity. No matter where in the world it is found—whether the desert or the far north, it sits and bobs its head, extracting.

Is this not an analogue for the task of philosophy, as I have outlined it? To extract the universal from the particular, and to do so in a place? To plumb the depths of the land and reveal the wisdom buried beneath the earth? To be a conduit for the world—to let it flow through a you and show it in all its hidden profundity? The dutiful pumpjack, rightfully considered, is the image of the philosopher. Any novice aspiring to the philosophical life would do well to marvel at the pumpjack as at the wisdom of Socrates—for both are equally paradigmatic practitioners of this most ancient and venerable discipline.

The pumpjack is me and I am the pumpjack.

And I recognize, as I survey the land once more, filled with pipeline networks and process facilities, that these are my materials.

I arrive from the west on the slick Trans-Canada Highway, freshly laden with snow, in my beaten up pickup truck. No one is driving particularly fast—whether due to the prudence demanded by icy Canadian highways or simply because no one has anywhere in particular to be, I am unsure.

The city skyline, visible for miles and miles, lurches towards me. Any other major city might confound the viewer, emerging as a behemoth from out of its smoggy miasma. But Winnipeg presents itself unceremoniously as a few unremarkable highrises amid boundless urban sprawl, like a copse of wheat stalks missed by the combine in harvest, left alone to wither on a flat and empty prairie. Any other city might conceal itself behind hills and mountains or hide in a river valley, emerging finally in a dramatic flourish. But Winnipeg lumbers lethargically forth over the flatlands to meet me.

For some strange reason, I always expect the city to have radically changed in my absence. But upon arrival, I find that the biggest news is that Portage and Main, the coldest intersection in Canada, is now open to pedestrians. As if they would want to cross there.

The same hobos inhabit the same bus shelters to stave off the selfsame arctic chill. The same Golden boy looks ever northward from his perch atop the Legislature, his vision of development and settlement still unfulfilled. The same Christmas lights adorn the boulevards on Main Street, like they always do, year after year. The same politicians with different faces pass the same political footballs back and forth—crime, health care, the fact that the province’s existence is essentially subsidized by Alberta1—without any sign of resolution. But also, the same familiar faces greet me upon my return, like the prodigal son, returned from the distant frontier.

Yes, this city is the same as I left it. It has not budged one inch.

Winnipeg is obdurate to the core. Early settlers remarked on the mire and muskeg which rendered farming an abortive task until a network of ditches was painstakingly dug to drain the swampy prairie. Before the streets of Winnipeg were paved, a viscous and sticky clay mud composed every thoroughfare, dogging down travellers on a good day, and on a bad day making the streets literally impassable. Though the Red River gumbo underneath the city has been paved over, it still sticks to the heart of Winnipeggers, creating a deeply held obstinance and resistance to change.

This city is stuck in the past, pathologically averse to progress.

For a brief period after its inception, Winnipeg experienced a flurry of land speculation and trading with the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Plots traded hands so swiftly as to produce a superpositional zoetrope—at once, everyone owned land and no one did. Land prices rose beyond compare, with prime real estate beside the railway being among the most valuable on the entire continent.

As it was to be the “Gateway to the West” and the hub to all rail transportation between eastern and western Canada, Winnipeg was in a strategic economic position. The city’s boom seemed to have no end, and the sanguine predictions of disreputable land speculators held that the Winnipeg was bound to become the biggest city in Canada, if not the continent. This optimism was infectious, causing banks to establish magnificent neoclassical branches in downtown Winnipeg and the province to construct a grand edifice in the Beaux-Arts style for its legislature which almost bankrupted the provincial government.

But then, just as swiftly as the boom had arrived, the high spirits of Winnipeg were laid low by the construction of the Panama canal which rerouted continental traffic away from the Canadian Pacific Railway and instead to the shipping route opened up through Latin America. Winnipeg’s fortunes fled, its growth ground to a halt, and the result was a city frozen in time, like a sudden ice age that preserved a pristine woolly mammoth. The opening of the Panama Canal was a cataclysmic event which inflicted a deep trauma on the city, stunting its development thereafter in an entirely Freudian sense.

Winnipeg is stuck in the past. Not because there is some glorious past to return to, but simply because time ceased to progress in a meaningful sense after 1914. To even utter the word “progress” in this city is laughable.

And when I step out of my truck, I am met with the bittern northern wind which aids in explaining the city’s obduracy. For, that icy breeze which rips down through Manitoba from the Hudson’s Bay, and which intersects with the westerlies precisely in the downtown centre of Winnipeg, has no other effect but to stultify and paralyze whomever it should touch, turning breath to cloud and skin to ice. During the winter months, when snowfall renders our vehicles impotent and our flesh stiff, the only reasonable option is to hibernate.

So it is that I find myself holed up in Winnipeg, my erstwhile home—what has been called the loneliest city on the continent—for Christmas.

Years ago I left Winnipeg for Alberta—impelled perhaps equally by the opportunities in the oil patch as by my need to leave this city before it was too late. Winnipeg felt like a black hole drawing me further and further into its orbit, and if I spent even one more year here I may very well have crossed the event horizon, remaining forever—to invoke that cacophonous demonym—a Winnipegger.

Indeed, Winnipeg’s distance from anything noteworthy on the barren Canadian prairies only strengthens its gravitational pull. To escape from its orbit is a herculean feat only achieved by travelling great distances over the plains—and even so, it is far too easy to get bogged down en route and be forced to turn back. The city’s obduracy is infectious, whispering base bromides into your ear and convincing you to tough it out for a few more years, which turn into decades and then a lifetime. If I was to escape, I had to venture far afield.

And yet, it’s impossible to ever escape the gravity of Winnipeg for good. I still find myself returning here year after year, if only for a visit. I suppose it’s only natural for one’s home to have this effect on someone, no matter where in the world they find themselves. After all, I fear the man who can callously detach himself from any parochial affinity. And yet it feels as if Winnipeg has some exceptional draw.

It has historically been a meeting place for the native peoples who haunted this land before settlement, as Winnipeg occupies the intersection of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, major thoroughfares before the advent of rail. And while, before the coming of rail, an insurmountable gulf separated western from eastern Canada, upon the completion of the CPR, Winnipeg acted as the intersection for the two, through which all transnational travel had to pass—a middle man between East and West, held tenuously together by a thread, defying Kipling’s dictum. Even still, the Trans-Canada Highway passes through the city, necessitating that any ground traveler catch a glimpse of Winnipeg’s dismal skyline.

It seems like, perhaps due to the internal logic of this place, because of its geographical position, or because of some chthonic forces lurking in its alleys and avenues, Winnipeg exerts a far greater gravity over men than most cities.

And on my third day back in the city, my Alberta license plate is stolen. Perhaps a bum walking through the back lane lifted it for a stolen car of his own. Or, perhaps it’s a friendly reminder from the city that I will always be a Winnipegger at heart. The former is far more likely, of course—but I suppose that both can be true at once.

What few charms the city offer upon my return soon wear off as the memories from years in these streets all came back. Being punched out while waiting for the bus. People shooting up crack in the open air near the university. Homeless tent cities adorning the river banks well into suburbia—all typical scenes from the murder capital of Canada. It does not take long to recall why I left.

Most people have answers as to why it is this way. In other decadent cities, people often scratch their heads and frantically investigate the causes of social malaise, but not Winnipeg. It’s not because people don’t understand the problems that they don’t get fixed—it’s through the city’s sheer unfailing obduracy.

Perhaps it is the lonely and dismal surroundings of this prairie city, the inescapable grey that pervades the streets, or the painfully slow pace of life here. No matter what reason, all can agree that there is something in this city which can madden any sane man, and all can agree that there is no point trying to fix it. You either put up with it and live here, or you move far away. There is, after all, little much else to do in this province.

It is a running joke of mine that there are three types of Manitobans: those who move to B.C., those who move to Ontario, and those who move to Alberta. And yet, upon closer inspection, this seems far too flattering an image—it supposes that the Manitoban is capable of moving at all. No, he is stubbornly stuck in place, trapped by the indomitable gumbo.

But then, I go for a walk over the Esplande Riel on a mild winter night, and I see the Forks alight with colours of every hue. I see skaters braving the cold to glide and stumble down the frozen Red River. I see the skyline lit up, those short and grey excuses for skyscrapers suddenly turned bold and bright beacons who banish the darkness. A bus passes and the faces inside look weary and yet unbroken by this city’s wanton ways.

In a moment, misanthropy turns to pure and unbridled goodwill towards mankind. In the sorry and downtrodden Winnipegger there suddenly appears a valiant spirit that staves off the cold and resists the harsh elements to carve out a life in this misbegotten place. Though they slog to their destination unceremoniously, though they complain the whole way, and though they face the indignities of urban life with only weak protest, there seems to be a molten core of ferocity beneath the sullen exterior.

And though I may be loath to say it, in that moment all the ugliness falls away like Autumn leaves, the contempt vanishes from my mind, the grey turns to a palette of neon, and—if only for an infinitesimally short moment—the utterly ravishing beauty of Winnipeg shines forth and staggers my soul. In an instant, my love for this city overflows and I am brought to tears. This is my home and I love it dearly. It is good because it is mine.

And then I notice a bum tweaking out under the bridge. Just like that, I am brought back to my senses.

This account may seem derisive and spiteful—and without doubt it is. But in equal proportion to my distain for this place, my heart brims with love for this sleepy and backward city—for its murderous and stubborn populace, its dysfunctional and dangerous public transportation, for the magnificent but dilapidated architecture from its glory days and grey brutalist cubes interspersed with striking irregularity. I may denigrate this place to my heart’s content, and yet the second an outsider says a bad word about Winnipeg, I rush to defend its honour.

No one is permitted to call Winnipeg a shithole except for those who earned their stripes in her frostbitten trenches.

Such reveals a paradoxical relation to place that most people doubtless experience. The place one grows up inevitably captures the heart of all but the most callous. It’s impossible not to develop affinity for one’s home, given that these formative experiences shape one’s taste—the very criteria according to which we judge the world around us. And yet, because we are so deeply integrated with such a place, we are also most acutely aware of its failings.

I’m inclined to believe that loyalty, and loyalty to place, is a virtue and an inextricable part of the good life. It may be ironic for me to say so, given that I have wilfully abandoned my home, but I do observe pieces of myself in this city. In all these familiar places, I see something of a mirror which reflects my own soul. And indeed, no matter where I am in the world, upon introspection, there is some part of Winnipeg attached to me.

This place is my home, and it is part of me. Accordingly, it is Good. To deny such an equation is to deny the self.

We are all likely to have this fraught relationship with a place, to view it as exceptional in some way or as uniquely formative. I am not special of unique in my simultaneous impulses to defend and denigrate this place. No, I imagine such to be the norm.

I can find any amount of good or ill in Winnipeg. But even still, a couple weeks is enough in this place. Once more, I long for the frontier. I can sense that the city feels the same about me—that I have overstayed my welcome. If I wait for something interesting or consequential to happen here, I will be left waiting until Gog and Magog collide in apocalyptic union. And so, as my temporary license plate is about to expire, I hit the road heading west, Alberta bound once more.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

-Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road.”

Bonnyville, Alberta1

My first vehicle was a used 2011 Ram pickup truck, single cab, Hemi engine, with rust lining the edges and without four-wheel drive. All the weight was in the front of the truck, but it was rear-wheel drive, so the icy Canadian winters always made it nearly impossible to get traction. On one occasion, I needed a tow rope to get out of a friend’s sloped driveway. The truck guzzled fuel with an avaricious appetite—with each trip to the gas station I had to convince myself anew that the purchase was still worth it. And, the heat barely worked in the truck, so the windshield would often be engulfed in frost on the highway and I would have to drive hunched over in the cold to see through the tiny slit upon which the vents blew a meagre stream of heat.

Despite its many imperfections, I dearly loved that truck. Whereas I had before depended entirely on public transportation or the goodwill of my parents to help me reach my destination, I suddenly became the master of my own travel. I could go wheresoever I wished, how I wished, and when I wished. A first car, like a first job or a first kiss, is a coming of age moment for every North American, at which point he leaves the comfortable nest of his childhood and ventures bravely forth into the world as a man. With his newfound freedom, he becomes his own person, with all the attendant autonomy and responsibility.

I argue here that the personal freedom one experiences with the purchase of a first car is mirrored on a societal scale by the invention of the automobile, and that the act of driving signifies, both for an individual and a society: autonomy, agency, freedom, individualism, and risk. The age of the automobile signifies the apogee of human autonomy. A pivot away from the automobile, towards public transportation or self driving cars, in my view, marks the abnegation of such values towards passivity and dependence.

Man and the Automobile

The best angle to advance this inquiry is not survey data, historical analyses, or physiological analysis, though these things may have their place in such an account. No, since the individual is the unit that interacts with a vehicle directly, and this individual is a microcosm of society at large, our attention must turn to man himself in the act of driving. Man is the interface between a tool and the society which it upends, and so an interrogation of the automobile’s effects must be, first and foremost, a matter of self-reflection. Let me, then, recount what it means for me to drive.

My first truck represented freedom. It opened up myriad new possibilities of travel. I could go wherever I wished on my own terms on a whim. It was autonomy—to forge my own path and chart my own course. The world became smaller, as a journey across the country became an imminent possibility, without the need to ask someone to ferry me around, nor to be at the mercy of public transportation. And with this autonomy came a certain dignity—that the means of transportation were held firmly by me.

I was no longer a passive participant in motion, but was now the master of it. I was suddenly agentic, I was active. With the possibilities afforded to me by my truck, I felt my reach expanded, the extent of my agency permanently augmented. No longer was I bound to my parochial attachments, but could elect to drive away to a new place, and if I chose, to start a new life there. I could devour yellow lines at breakneck pace, burning up the asphalt in a tailwind behind me, chasing the elusive lights of far away cities, and then overcoming them and chasing the next.

The world shrunk. Whereas the distance from city to city may have erstwhile been measured in days or weeks, it was now measured in fill-ups, piss breaks, and Tim’s runs. The far-flung continent was no longer so wide, now that it stood open before me, interwoven with interstates and backroads. It was suddenly under my purview. I could survey its varied ecosystems, its variable geography, and its diverse towns all in the span of a single road trip.

Or, as Walt Whitman boldly declares in his ode to the open road,

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

And when I looked out on the land from behind my windshield, I was separate from it. I was above it. Whereas I may once have been subjected to the grueling torrent of the elements, the threat of feral fauna, and the ravages of the land, I was suddenly free from that, insulated within the comfortable cab of my truck. Winter’s bite no longer gnawed at my skin, nor did summer’s dread heat drown me. In traversing the country, I was no longer part of nature, I am above it, protected from it, other to it, and it to me. On those long drives, I sensed something entirely unique about my humanness, and my thoughts turned inwards to meditate upon this revelation.

And in the confines of my truck, I was insular—I became an individual. The contours of my vehicle drew a discrete and metaphysical boundary between me and the world around me. No longer was I alongside my fellow man on the crowded metros, packed like sardines into a budget airline, nor travelling cross country with him on a train over the prairies. Instead, I was alone, one with myself, severed from others by a rigid boundary.

But, it is true, in my gasoline-fueled elation, I began to take risks, drive recklessly, and at times suffered the consequences for my actions. Indeed, what grounds this freedom is the recognition that there is an attendant responsibility, lest I leave a mangled mess of metal and blood in my wake. The agency is intoxicating, but the comeuppance is deeply sobering.

The risks one faces on the open road are innumerable. At high speeds, a single spasmodic motion, a single error in judgement, or a single defect in your vehicle, may render myself and others dead or impaired beyond belief. On a long-haul in blizzard conditions, I have counted vehicles in the ditch into the double digits. I have seen wreckage whose sordid confetti churns the stomach and tragedy befallen the relations of innocent victims taken by the road. Driving is the riskiest thing I do, without a doubt.

I daily heard of car crashes, wreckage, and misery inflicted by the open highway. And yet I was not dismayed. I put pedal to metal with unflinching determination and hit the open road running. There was something invigorating in the activity which overpowers my fear of death.

Maybe, in this experience, there is something transcendent. That I may be acutely and unavoidably aware of the risks of driving, the ferocious disaster that may greet me at any moment and through no fault of my own, and yet continue to put petal to medal and roam these raucous roads—might this not demonstrate something important? About the intoxicating autonomy a man experiences behind the wheel? That there are certain things we privilege even above life itself?

On the open road, I felt so.

Society and the Automobile

I deeply suspect that what the automobile meant for me on an individual level mirrors what the automobile signifies for man as a whole. Here, as always, my analysis is guided by Marshall McLuhan, whose extensive corpus is dedicated to probing the depths of the human mind to find the tendrils of technology. McLuhan explored how media—which he defined as “extensions of man,” therefor including anything from the shoe to the toaster oven, as extending man’s capabilities to perform tasks—orchestrated social and psychological change through the ages. He argued, much to the dismay of more conservative social critics, that the Phonetic alphabet was concomitant with the ability to abstractly reason in Western civilization, that the printing press was the catalyst for the rise of individualism and democracy, and that electronic media such as radio portend a renewed rise of tribalism and holism.2

While McLuhan’s insights might perplex the outside observer at first glance, his arguments are persuasive and exhaustive. However, perhaps the greatest impediments his work faces in finding acceptance are its unfalsifiability and the difficulty in concretely quantifying his hypotheses. How can we quantify democratic sentiment, especially in ages before modern methods of survey data collection? How do we quantify attitudes, mental tendencies, and habituated ideas, when these dwell in the inmost recesses of our minds? And how do we perform a scientific experiment, with controlled variables and a closed system, when his theories encompass the whole of human civilization?

And yet when we think about it, it seems so intuitive that the objects, technologies, and tools we use in everyday life do shape our understanding of the world and ourselves. It seems absurd to think that we are simply minds detached from our corporeal form, disinterestedly observing the machinations of our limbs and the locutions of our mouths from an impenetrable Cartesian ivory tower.

No, our minds are deeply affected by our experiences, which are shaped entirely by the things, animate and inanimate, which populate our world. From this guiding insight, we may trace the automobile from our own impressions, through its history, to its effects on society as a whole—both on a concrete and psycho-social level—to argue that the automobile revolutionized the course of Western civilization and the minds of men within. Let us, then, start at the automobile’s genesis and proceed from there.

Karl Benz, as is widely acknowledged, invented the first automobile, his Patent-Motorwagen, in 1885. It was the first motorcar which used the internal combustion engine, fueled by gasoline, and which achieved commercial success. However, at first this invention was reserved for the upper classes, as it was costly to purchase and operate. In addition, there was a dearth of such infrastructure to produce, and to drive, the automobile, and so it was a good while before Benz’s Motorwagen found currency among the masses.

However, in that age and across the sea, there was another young tinkerer who was deeply inspired by Benz’s work and by the possibilities opened up by the automobile. While repairing engines during the day, he invented new ones at night, dramatically improving upon the existing technology and devising an innovative new engine. The fruit of this labour was the first car for the common man, which would spawn an automotive empire in its wake. The man was Henry Ford and the vehicle was the Model T, first sold in 1908, and which quickly swept the continent.

The Model T was a paradigm of efficiency and reliability. However, its popularity was equally a testament to its particular virtues as to the technology which arose in the same time period. The assembly line, an invention of Ransom Olds, found an early adopter in Henry Ford, who perfected the concept and was able to manufacture the Model T at such scale and efficiency as make the vehicle affordable to middle income Americans.

The Model T, in its inaugural year, was already so inexpensive at $825 (or around $29,000 today) that it was affordable for the average American. Prices dropped as the efficiency of the assembly line increased, making it ever more affordable. By 1920, half the cars on American roads were Model Ts, and through Ford’s efforts at streamlining and refining the manufacturing process, automobiles were disseminated through the entire country.

What this represented was a revolution in transportation. With the proliferation of the automobile came the breakneck construction of roads, gas stations, and other infrastructure which connected the disparate reaches of the North American continent in a web of asphalt arteries, and made it readily traversable. Suddenly, a trip to a far-away city no longer required one to abide by the schedules offered by train, but could be made at one’s own whim, on one’s own itinerary, and along any route one desired.

But this was not only a revolution in transportation, but a revolution in the minds of men. The tools and technologies we employ are never neutral, but shape our thought patterns in indelible ways. As men traversed farther and farther distances with the creation and development of the automobile, the open road conditioned them to certain ways of thinking.

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Of course, one can readily see how the ideas and attitudes I enumerated in my own driving experience are encapsulated in the ethos of the open road, which made its impression most strongly upon the budding American nation. It is America which undoubtedly prizes freedom above any other nation of earth, written into its constitution and embedded into the heart of every true-blooded Yankee.

And does the automobile not exemplify freedom on a fundamental level? A man on the open road has a complete image of his freedom. It is a negative freedom—namely, a freedom from external constraint. One is no longer bound to his provincial attachments, nor subordinate to others in his mode of transport, but may escape them on the highway. But it is also an image of his positive freedom—namely, a freedom to do what he pleases. As an extension of his faculties, the automobile expands the possibilities of what he may accomplish, where he may go, and how fast he can travel.

Whereas a man’s place in the social order was previously determined by a his birth, his locale, and his relations, the automobile disrupted this and allowed him to forge his own identity. The automobile signified a revolution in mobility—not only mobility from one locale to another, but mobility across social strata also.

The individualism inculcated in the driver—the insular existence and the discrete cutoff between his interests and those of his fellow man—does this not hearken to the rugged individualism which characterizes the prototypical American? The nuclear family, the secluded suburbs, the white picket fence—are these not born of the same sundering sentiment that the automobile displays?

A man riding the bus is among his fellow countrymen. His destination is their destination—his interests are their interests. The same goes for the train, plane, or ship. Public transportation facilitates communalistic and holistic views of oneself and one’s nation. However, the revolution of the automobile severed this relation of man to fellow man, instead dividing their interests and aims, and making each one into an indivisible atomic unit.

Does the agency not represent the American’s fearless entrepreneurial spirit? His seemingly boundless drive to remake the world in his own image? To carve his face into the mountains and plant his flag in the cosmos? There is perhaps no race more obsessed with taming and subordinating the natural world, nor one more adventurous, daring, and progress-oriented as the American—to his credit and detriment.

And the risks portended by the open road—these are the very risks that the American faces head-on. The entrepreneurial spirit—where a man may stand alone, pulling himself up by his bootstraps—entails that he sustains a serious risk in whatever undertaking he seeks. If it is wildcat drilling rigs in faraway lands or audacious feats of engineering, forays into air and space or high stakes trading on Wall Street, the American is obsessed with risking it all to win big. That risk is such an endemic aspect of life on this continent, despite abundance and prosperity, signifies that this is a crucial aspect of the American identity. It is surely no coincidence that this is also an irrevocable feature of driving.

It is, then, no surprise that the automobile dovetails with the American national identity. Though the car was a German invention, it became an American icon, used as a flagship to display the nation’s engineering prowess, an metaphor in music and film for man’s enhanced freedom in the technological age, and as a means of connecting the far-flung nodes of the nation. While the automobile was not native to this land, it washed up on those rocky shores in the country’s infancy; it came of age with the automobile and integrated it into its very psyche, while the nation that invented it was already in old age, no longer flexible enough to engage symbiotically with its creation.3

The automobile and the open road are emblematic of the core American values: liberty, autonomy, agency, individualism, progress, and risk.

But can we posit a causal connection between the mental state attendant with the automobile and the American ethos we see today? Again, here we run into the problems of unfalsifiability and quantifiability. What metrics would we even use to verify such a hypothesis? Of course, if we are to make a chronological argument, the institutional framework that supports these values in America—democracy, human rights, etc.—predate the invention of the automobile, as do the theoretical foundations of the regime as found in Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Locke. Must the car be, then, a symptom and not a cause?

It would be hasty to conclude so. For, it does not follow to suppose that, simply because democracy and human rights predate the invention of the automobile, the automobile had no effect in spreading and reinforcing those values. Indeed, when the automobile came on the scene, American society, despite its democratic pretension, was still stratified, segregated, and without universal enfranchisement at the federal stage.

It’s hardly radical to suppose that the automobile, which empowered every man equally, accentuated his sense of freedom, and elevated him to a place of equality with other men, had a deep effect in ushering in democratic reforms, recognitions of rights, and the expansion of civil liberties.

We do have concrete data on car ownership and can explore how it rose in proportion to the development of American democracy. By 1940, a majority of families in the United States owned a car. In the 1960s, car ownership surged once more, with more than 70% of families owning a car. These milestones coincide with the unfurling of American democracy, the expansion of the franchise, the civil rights era, and the rise of America as a world superpower, and so my speculation as to the relationship between the automobile and American values is not unwarranted.

For example, whereas in the automobile’s infancy, female drivers were few and far between, with strong pushes to even ban women from hitting the tarmac, by the early 1950s, approximately 39% of drivers were women, and about 50% of women held a driver’s license. If what I have argued is true, the automobile was instrumental in women recognizing their own autonomy and achieving political equality. The automobile empowered everyone indiscriminately, regardless of sex or race, and so I argue it facilitated the advent of political equality. In such a relationship, the automobile cannot be attributed as the sole cause, but it cannot be merely an effect either. The automobile functions both as a cause and effect of such developments in a complex causal matrix.

Moreover, on a very practical level, the automobile rectified a fatal flaw which Alexis de Tocqueville saw in democracies, which is that great distances made democratic participation unfeasible. While isolated rural communities previously lacked the means to fully participate in democratic life, with the seemingly insurmountable distance between them and the ballot box, the automobile tied the polity together and facilitated democratic activity among urbanites and ruralites alike.

As I argue here, the automobile is deeply impressed upon the cultural consciousness of America, appearing in music as an image of freedom and a shorthand for the Amercian dream, a microcosm of the nation’s experience. This suggests a far more spiritual condition imbued in the nation by the automobile than a mere improvement in transportation.

However, my account thus far has been limited to the American experience, whereas my argument becomes stronger when we explore the proliferation of the automobile across the globe and the cultural import American values had worldwide in the twentieth century.

In many different domains and various places the world over, the twentieth century saw a rise of individualism, democracy, and equality in direct proportion as the automobile revolutionized transportation and swept the globe.

Everywhere on earth, roads were constructed to link disparate communities and offer an opportunity to leave the region one’s family had inhabited for generations. The automobile allowed for migration within nations and across international boundaries, acting as a universal solvent for familial and geographical ties which had previously imparted upon man his essential identity. Suddenly, man was an individual, able to determine his own aims.

American values and ideas spread via the highway. In regions as diverse as South America, Europe, and South-east Asia, the United States held great cultural currency and wielded great influence as the global hegemon. We see, post-WWII, a rise in pro-American sentiment and values (individualism, democracy, equality, etc.) in nations like Japan and South Korea in proportion with rises in car ownership and increases in personal income.

It is, furthermore, highly suggestive that regimes that wished to stem the tide of American values also restricted private automobile ownership. In the Soviet Union, it was notoriously difficult to procure a car, given chronic shortages, high costs, long wait times, and the prioritization of military, rather than personal, vehicles. This was a deliberate product of the nation’s centrally planned economy. Even more restrictive was Maoist China, wherein all automotive companies were state owned, supply rigorously restricted, and automobile ownership even briefly banned. These regimes well knew that a man who drives the open road will never be trod upon by a tyrant.

Though difficult to pin down, it is evident that the rise of the personal automobile had the effect on a societal scale that it does on a personal scale also, and it is hardly fanciful to suggest a causal link.

And even so, the argument is simply intuitive. Regardless of how we may or may not be able to measure the automobile’s concrete impact, when one is driving, it is easy to believe that the automobile had this effect. Such an impression might be denigrated by a “rationalist” who abides strictly by Popper’s criterion of unfalsifiability, who requires exhaustive empirical proof for any assertion, and for whom truth claims gain a sheen of authenticity when accompanied by a spreadsheet of data. Such individuals may denigrate the present claims (as they have before) as “vibes-based reasoning.”

I cannot deny such a categorization except on the grounds that it’s inherently pejorative. My qualm is the following: do “vibes,” for lack of a better term, or common sentiments, not signify something real and true? To dismiss them as motivated reasoning or superstition is to confine our window of rationality and reality to a hopelessly shallow plane. I wager that a common sentiment in grounded in something real, even if it cannot be taken at face value. If, across time and space, the automobile and the open road signify freedom and autonomy—in art, song, and other media—that must indicate that those things do inherently carry such connotations.

While reason and data may struggle to explain such sentiments or the exact causal mechanism at play here, that is no objection to them. Rather, one must reflect upon the self while in the driver’s seat, for a man on the open road is a microcosm of the car-oriented society around him.

Self-Driving Cars and the Abnegation of Autonomy

However, I confess that the present account might not prove as persuasive as it once might have, given that we are in the midst of a transition away from a car-oriented society. Car ownership per capita in North America may begin to plateau or even decline soon, with young people increasingly averse to driving and dense urban centres privileging public over private transportation. But that is not the only reason to predict a reduction in car ownership, as the spectre of self-driven cars sweeps the continent.

Already in some major American cities, automated cars ferry passengers around, powered by companies such as Waymo and Zoox. Such companies have had great success wherever they can get their foot in the door, with their automated vehicles shown to be far safer than human drivers. With 40,000 lives lost annually in the United States to car crashes, the prospect of implementing safer self-driving cars seems to be the height of humanity. And not only that: there is a major push by software companies in the transportation industry to automate passenger buses and freight trucks to smooth out the inefficiencies of human operators. We would be foolish to think it’s not a matter of time before such efforts are successful.

I oppose such efforts to automate driving not because they are unsafe. On the contrary, machines are proving to be much better drivers than humans. I don’t oppose them because of the threat of unemployment or because of the possibility of such vehicles being hacked. Such concerns may be more or less reasonable, but I am not an expert in the field, and so I suspend my judgement.

No, my primary source of opposition to self-driving vehicles is that it marks an insult to human dignity and a threat to our sense of autonomy. If it is true that driving instills in man a recognition of his own freedom, as I argue, it would follow that this sense of freedom dissipates as man abandons the open road in favour of a machine-driven vehicle.

Whereas, behind a steering wheel, man is active and agentic, possessing the means of his own transportation, as a passenger in an automated vehicle, he is fundamentally a passive participant in his journey, and subordinate to the machine which carries him to his destination. The condition of physical passivity is concomitant with mental passivity—and these are both anathema to liberty itself, which requires a constant, dutiful, and attentive effort to maintain, for man and society.

One would be hard pressed to argue that the leap from human to machine drivers is no radical departure. There is a wealth of embodied skills, knowledge, and technique man must possess in order to drive safely and successfully. One must know how to control a vehicle on icy winter roads or in other adverse conditions; one must make quick decisions to navigate crowded urban traffic; one must know which routes to take to get to their destination amid changing traffic flow and road closures; one must be aware of the contours of the vehicle and be in tune with its idiosyncrasies to fit in tight places or avoid collision. Driving is an art, and while many can subsist on the bare minimum knowledge required to obtain a license and get from point A to B, those who drive for a living well understand that to pilot a vehicle is a craft at which one never stops improving.

This is all foregone when man takes a backseat to the process of driving.

One would be right to note that this is perhaps part of a gradual shift that has been happening, both in driving and generally, as of late. Automatic lane assist, Google maps’ automated directions, and even the automatic transmission are all changes that have made driving a less onerous and mentally intensive activity. But even if we are gradually moving towards a more sedated version of driving, the ultimate and discrete point at which driving becomes a thoroughly passive activity, with man’s autonomy rendered moot—is when man no longer sits in the driver’s seat. This ought to be avoided at all costs.

It seems to me a natural progression from the implementation of AI-powered self-driving cars to the eventual replacement (and perhaps outlawing) of all human drivers. One of the main reasons automated vehicles are so safe is that they can communicate with one another so as to coordinate motion. Human drivers, which cannot so communicate, then prove a hazard on the road. I imagine there will be immense pressure, once automated vehicles on the road reach a critical threshold, reducing the number of human drivers to make way for the Waymo hive mind. With a manufactured stigma surrounding human drivers, young people will be less likely to seek out driver’s licenses, slowly phasing out human drivers until a point is reached when humans can be banned from the road without outcry.

The quietism, inactivity, lethargy, and enervation that come from such a shift will be, I suggest, immense. And where man loses sight of his own autonomy and the volcanic agency that lies within him, he will succumb to a rather pitiful state. Such a man is easy to lord over.

I am not naive, however, and I see this gradual humiliation of man not solely as a product of self-driving cars, but of technology generally, and as part of nigh-unavoidable tectonic societal shifts. Is it, then, arbitrary to draw the line where I do? Perhaps. Is this only one of many technological changes which advance us towards the same future? Yes. But if this is a dire future, then it is right to reject it, and if it means fighting against an unstoppable current, then I will do so. It is arbitrary to draw the line anywhere, but a line must be drawn.

To the rationalists, under whose utilitarian calculus the preservation of human welfare is the ultimate moral goal, the protection of the 40,000 lives annually lost in car crashes seems to warrant the ultimate and hasty automation of the automobile. But the preservation of life alone as a sole moral aim, if not the preservation of good and dignified lives, seems questionable.

Whitman, in the same poem I have quoted, writes what may be repurposed as a dig against such thinking:

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

In the very same nation full of men who once proudly declaimed that they would die for liberty, it seems shocking that many now so plainly admit the merits of trading liberty for life.

To make such an exchange, however, ushers in a world of anodyne stupor, which privileges safety above freedom, material desire satisfaction above risk and reward, passivity above vitality, and the cold logic of spreadsheets above human particularities. It’s a world in which we offload our travel, our thinking, our working, to machines—and thereby render us utterly servile to and dependent upon them.

It is true, driving is an immense risk which imperils lives. But is it truly good to root out risk from our lives entirely? Does risk not imbue human life with meaning? Without a potential downfall to our actions, would they not be entirely pointless? Risk, I wager, is essential to our human experience, without which we would be rendered impotent husks.

In Conclusion

Perhaps self-driving vehicles are inevitable, and perhaps the future marches ever onwards towards a universal and homogeneous state, in which the last man lazes about, humiliated and rendered obsolete by his own creation. If this be so, allow me to wax poetic, long for a bygone age, and rage against the dying of the light. But if such a future be avoidable, then let us resist it with all our might.

There is something deeply beautiful and human about driving an automobile. There is something inherently dignified about being behind the steering wheel, chasing white lines on the open road. My argument, in sum, is little more than this assertion. Let it ring true for those who sympathise, and fall flat for those who do not.

To conclude, here are the words of Whitman once more:

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!

[. . .]

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Suppose one day you wake to find yourself transformed into a cockroach. What then?

Do you weep and mourn? Do you curse your sorry lot? Or execrate the day you were born? Do you stand in awe at the monstrous wretch you have become? Do you list about aimlessly? Do you succumb to apathy and nihilism? Do you pray to a divinity of your choice to reverse your grotesque metamorphoses? Do you simply kill yourself to be done with it all. Or, perhaps you merely contemplate the logistics of leaving your bed and catching your train.

Such reactions are, of course, the first that come to mind. But let us take a closer look at this creature—the cockroach. Is he truly to be loathed? Is his existence a sordid and dreadful one? Is one right to lament for such a creature? Must we be horrified by the possibility of such a transformation? We would be hasty to answer in the affirmative.

The cockroach is a more peculiar and interesting creature than one would first suspect, gazing upon his unassuming form scurrying over the floorboards. He is too often dismissed without understanding, squashed without sympathy. But let us look closer.

Far from a loathsome pest, I counter that the cockroach is an ancient and venerable creature. The cockroach evolved to its current general form over 300 million years ago. Since then, little change has occurred except minor specifications and adaptations. Despite the billions upon billions of cockroaches who have existed in the interim, his aspect has stayed largely the same since his formula for survivability was discovered so many millennia ago.

Indeed, the evolutionary recipe of the cockroach was perfected to maximize the persistence and vitality of his race. Once natural selection had devised a creature able to survive in any climate, under any duress, and with any degree of deprivation, the work was complete. There was no evolution possible beyond that point, for evolution implies a deficiency.

The cockroach has developed a reputation for survivability, and rightfully so. This little creature can survive in tropical climates or subarctic regions, existing comfortably in the arid heat or the winter chill. As such, cockroaches have become utterly cosmopolitan, flocking across the world in droves with the waves of globalization and settling in far corners of the earth. The cockroach—the generalist species par excellence—is a true citizen of the world, tied down by no parochial attachments. There is no niche for this creature. He defies the pull of geography that suspends most every being on earth.

Cockroaches are omnivorous creatures, indiscriminately devouring human foodstuffs, clothing, vegetation, or even the starch in book bindings. What is more, even with their diverse diet, they can survive without food for up to a month. In extreme cases, they have even been known to feast upon their deceased compatriots. To starve a cockroach is nigh impossible, for when he is deprived of nourishment, he begins to chew at his very own.

The cockroach has a thick exoskeleton formed of calcium carbonate, making him resistant to the torrents of abuse he faces from the rest of the animal kingdom. He endures the scorn of many, infiltrating the abodes of others, carrying disease and putrid odour, spreading his seed far and wide amid squalor and hardship, and paying little mind to his adversaries. He wears his shield on his back and effortlessly resists their attempts to destroy him.

The cockroach can survive decapitation—indeed, function remains both in the head and the body long after the two have been severed. He may live without breath for up to 50 minutes, and can survive long-term in low-oxygen environments (in which we humans would surely perish).

The forces of evolution, which often produce weak and maladaptive specimens, created a product of renowned genius in the indestructible cockroach.

Nor is the cockroach only protected against tangible threats, for he is exceptionally well-protected against radiation also. While inherently more resistant to bursts of radiation than we vertebrates, the cockroach is also protected given that its molting cycle occurs less frequently than most other insects, and this molting cycle, when cells are dividing, is when a creature is most susceptible to the vicissitudes of radiation. Given that cockroaches do not molt concurrently, the majority of the population would survive a short burst of radiation unscathed. In the case that we humans immolate ourselves on the levers of nuclear weapons, the cockroaches beneath our floorboards would inherit the earth.

It is not only in life that he is adamantine, but in reproduction also for his reproductive prowess is unparalleled. Given favourable conditions, a single pair of cockroaches may, within a few years, produce millions of progeny. Should you fail to vanquish them from your abode, their descendants in your home shall be as numerous as the sands of the earth. Few other creatures fester and propagate as successfully as the cockroach.

But that is not all. It is not enough to simply limit the population to a sole survivor to extricate their race. For, a single female cockroach is capable of reproducing by herself through pathenogenesis. Whereas a virgin birth may be a miracle to our race, to the cockroach it would hardly raise an eyebrow. Females may fertilize their own eggs through automixis, through which they give birth to females who may do the very same, causa sui.

In the search for a self-generating being, humans have long gazed up into the cosmos and speculated on the nature of divinity, contemplating an abstract unmoved mover or first cause. Perhaps they would have been better off peering into the dark corners of their home.

Far from a loathsome wretch, the cockroach is a rather impressive specimen. By acclimating to every environment, the cockroach is at home nowhere. He roves from place to place, being shoed away from whatever cranny he temporarily inhabits. The cockroach is utterly nomadic, but for that very reason, he is all but invincible—he is not dependent upon the land. The cockroach travels light, for he requires little.

If there is a single virtue which the cockroach embodies, it is humility (what is often called the prince of the virtues), for his unassuming form, free from ostentation or extravagance, harbours a bellicose will to survive which far outpaces his rivals. You may step on him without fear of retribution, mock him and scorn him, but he shall still thrive. Conversely, pride (what is chief of the vices) is conspicuously absent from the cockroach’s behaviour.

You may deprive him of light, oxygen, warmth, nourishment, and yet he exists. He may dwell in the most filthy and crepuscular of abodes—those too inhospitable for any other creeping things that creep upon the earth—and yet he exists. You may deprive him of all but the most foul of foodstuffs, and yet he exists. You may subject him to the biting cold or the acrid desert, and yet he exists. You may stomp on him, swat him, but his outer shell absorbs the blow, and so he exists. Drown him, beat him, poison him, starve him—and yet he will continue to exist.

The cockroach has achieved unconditional existence—a metaphysical condition previously ascribed to divinity alone. While, on one hand, this hardly bodes well for our sanitary conditions, on the other, this proves that the height of survivability is possible for mortal creatures such as us. The cockroach provides an example for us of near-invincibility.

Contrasting the world of cockroaches, our human societies are so very fragile. One rupture in our supply chains, and an entire city may be without food or fuel. One burst bubble in our financial world, and millions are reeling in poverty. One variable may change, and an entire sector may be deprived of employment overnight. A burst water line or a ruptured pipeline may render great swaths of people without water or heat.

On an individual level, this is equally true. Without a certain tool or technology, without the safety and comfort of a routine, without the familiar faces of loved ones, or without the reliable patterns of our parochial surroundings, many would simply cease to function.

Here the cockroach may provide a lesson for us. Many speak of the benefits of routine, of friends, of familiar surroundings, of specialization, of globalization... But perhaps these things hinder more than help. Perhaps it is wrong to recede into a dependence upon so many variables subject to change. Perhaps it is wrong for us to fall back upon a specialized niche, for when that Goldilocks zone vanishes in a blink, we are utterly devastated.

In such a condition, one’s existence is utterly contingent, dependent upon a multitude of factors which are hardly set in stone. On the contrary, they are ever in flux. The society around us whispers soothing bromides into our ears, attempting to convince us of the benefits of specialization and the division of labour, ever distracting us from the unavoidable fact of flux. The division of labour may be an enormous economic boon for a society, but from a metaphysical standpoint, it is utterly enervating.

Our unhealthy focus on specialization—on finding our perfect job, our perfect home, perfect spouse—in other words, a perfect little ecosystem in which we may exist—makes us weak. It makes our existence dependent upon all the variables working towards our pleasure, taking those variables as given.

Indeed, in the game of natural selection, it is the specialist species—the dodo bird, the woolly mammoth—who sooner perish when their habitat is ravaged. The generalists, such as rats, crows, and our noble cockroach, can survive these continual changes. Why, then, do we strive to imitate the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth, reeling in fear at the pesky cockroach? Would we not do better to imitate the being which has survived for 300 million years instead of those creatures which compose the graveyard of evolution?

I speak of specialization not only in an economic or general sense, but in a deeply personal sense also. If one’s happiness is contingent upon the obtainment of a particular set of circumstances, then such happiness was ephemeral from the very beginning.

It is far better that we break ourselves and be continually reshaped, rather then settle in a comfortable niche. We must expose ourselves to the vicissitudes of foreign and hostile environments, lest we become complacent in our provincial dependence. We must intentionally dwell in the depths of despair and discomfort, so that when these vales of darkness inevitably greet us, we are ready for them. We must make our flesh malleable, lest we become brittle and easily broken in two. We must learn to live without our comforts—only so may the concrete floor feel like a luxury mattress, and breadcrumbs taste like a sublime French pastry. Just as muscle reforms stronger only when it is broken under stress, so too do we become strong only when subjected to deprivation.

This is the path to unconditional existence.

The cockroach has undergone every trial imaginable, and it is these trials which have made him invincible. The dodo bird, on the other hand, living in blithe ease on the isle of Mauritius, free from any natural predators, was destroyed by a slight change in his surroundings. The modern man more closely resembles the dodo bird than the cockroach—and more nearly approximates the dodo’s evolutionary prowess also.

To those who fear the cockroach, I say to you: become one. To those who recoil at the very thought of his compact form, I say that you can only overcome such a phobia when you integrate the creature’s aspect into your very self.

Might we not look upon the cockroach as a virtuous and regal creature, rather than those great beasts who descend swiftly into extinction? The lion, once honoured as the symbol of the British Empire, today is considered a vulnerable species with a declining population and shrinking domain. Might we view the cockroach not as a pest, but an ideal for us humans? A repository of virtues? A shining example of unconditional existence, a state towards which every man ought to strive?

There is something deeply beautiful and inspiring about the cockroach’s plight, which it takes a rare mind to glimpse. For, as evolution teaches, the majority are liable to take the path of least resistance, falling into a specialist stupor when fortuitous circumstances arise, and then perishing swiftly when robbed of that Edenic paradise. The only way to avert such a fate is to categorically reject comfort.

And so I ask: to wake up and become a cockroach… Might this be not a grotesque metamorphosis, but rather a glorious transfiguration?

It has always seemed a difficult, if not impossible, task to sustain a sovereign nation on the northern half of this continent, with the harsh and punishing geography, the difficulty of east-west infrastructure through the Rocky Mountains and over the Canadian Shield, regional hostilities which yet threaten to boil over, and the irresistible draw of our southern neighbour—what is still the most dynamic and powerful empire on earth. It is an impressive feat that we have attained any degree of nationhood at all, and yet this is not an achievement that we may take for granted, for the continued existence of Canada is contingent upon whether we have the strength to resist balkanization, dissolution, or subsumption into the American Empire—all of which have felt inevitable at one time or another in our history.

The most salient threat to Canada’s existence is, in my view, the breakup of our federation. There is, of course, the perennial problem of Québec nationalism, over which enough ink has been spilled, and about which I am not equipped to speak. However, there is an equally potent separatist movement on the other side of the country, which is too often dismissed. Alberta, and increasingly Saskatchewan, are home to prominent secessionist movements, whose support appears to be steadily increasing. The prairie provinces have a longstanding feud with Central Canada over topics such as natural resource rights, provincial autonomy, and environmental policy, described by the umbrella term “Western Alienation.” I will not discuss the veracity of the West’s historical grievances, but such claims are hardly unsubstantial.

In any case, there is a political divide between the West and the East which shows no sign of letting up. Support in Alberta for separation from Canada is steadily hovering at around 30%, which is not an insignificant number—indeed, it is a historic high for the province. One may agree or disagree with the purported reasons for Western Alienation, but to dismiss the phenomenon altogether is only to let it fester and grow. I contend that, whether justified or not, close to a third of a province’s population wishing to separate from Canada altogether is a problem which demands to be addressed.

The present essay is an attempt to understand this problem and propose a solution. I entreat all Canadians to read it with an open mind.

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Setting the Scene

The crux of the Western grievances is oil. Alberta constitutes Canada’s economic powerhouse, contributing disproportionately to the federation through its massive oil and gas industry. Alberta alone contains the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserve in its unconventional oil sands to the north, as well as many conventional oil fields in south and central Alberta. 84% of Canada’s total oil production comes from Alberta, and crude oil is Canada’s single most valuable export, netting $147 billion annually for the country.

But despite the overall prosperity of the Canadian oil and gas industry, there are many absurdities which abound upon a closer glance. Landlocked Alberta has always had a problem getting its oil to market. A dearth of provincial refineries means that Alberta has had to look far and wide for destinations for its crude oil. Despite an abundance of refineries in Eastern Canada—in southern Ontario, Montreal, and New Brunswick—a very small portion of Albertan oil travels east. A similarly small proportion travels west through the mountains to refineries and ports on the British Columbian coast. Instead, 80% of Albertan crude oil goes south to American refineries via pipeline.1

Absurdly, Eastern Canadian refineries typically source their crude oil from abroad. The reasons for this will be explained later, but the gist of it is that there is a lack of pipeline infrastructure to transport oil eastward from Alberta, and the eastern refineries themselves are equipped to process light and sweet conventional crude oil, whereas Albertan oil is heavy and sour.2 American refineries in the Midwest and along the Gulf Coast are better able to handle Albertan Crude, given that they process a similar grade of oil from Venezuela and California, and so that region appears to be the natural market for Albertan oil.

This, however, is hardly a tolerable status quo for Alberta. Due to the lower quality of Albertan oil—whose grade is formally called Western Canadian Select (WCS) on world markets—and the lack of viable alternative markets, Alberta is forced to sell its oil to the United States at a heavy discount. At the time of writing, the cost of a barrel of Western Canadian Select is $48.13 against $61.08 per barrel of West Texas Intermediate (an industry benchmark).3 However, in times of poor industry performance, the discrepancy can widen to obscene proportions. In 2018, the price of WCS crashed to around $13 per barrel, while WTI was sustained at $56, causing massive losses for Canadian oil producers. Indeed, in 2020, the unthinkable happened. When the Covid pandemic hit and world oil prices crashed, the price of WCS went negative. Canada was literally paying the United States to take its oil.

The problem of the WCS discount is related to a bigger problem facing the Canadian oil industry, which is an inability to build new pipelines to open up new markets for Albertan oil. Indeed, in the last decade alone, three major proposed pipelines were cancelled. The Energy East pipeline, proposed by Trans Canada Energy, was a $15.7 billion project which would have connected Alberta to New Brunswick via an all-Canadian route. It was cancelled in 2017 because of onerous environmental regulations and opposition from activists, primarily in Québec.

The Northern Gateway pipeline, undertaken by Enbridge, intended to connect Alberta with the British Columbian coast, so that oil could be transported intercontinentally via tanker. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revoked the project’s permit abruptly in 2016. So, too, was the Keystone XL pipeline—which would have connected Alberta to a major crude oil storage hub in Oklahoma and more refineries along the Gulf Coast—cancelled by Joe Biden in 2021.

Indeed, the only major Canadian pipeline constructed in recent memory, the Trans-Mountain Expansion, which was only a line running parallel to an existing pipeline from Alberta to Burnaby, BC, was on the ropes also, when Kinder Morgan backed out of the project in 2018, again citing the abortive regulatory environment. The Government of Canada was forced to buy the project at its own expense to see it through.

Opposition from activists and prohibitive regulatory hurdles are the two key reasons why all of these pipelines fell through. There are a number of parliamentary bills passed in the past decade which have turned pipelines into pipe dreams—perhaps none so much as Bill C-69, which includes the Impact Assessment Act and Canadian Energy Regulator Act. Together, these require any industrial project to undergo multiple stages of review before approval, and they must meet exceptionally high standards to minimize effects on biodiversity, waterways, and surrounding communities. Additionally, the bill introduced new guidelines and a new regulatory body to oversee pipelines and other major energy infrastructure. It is not an exaggeration to say that this bill on its own stands in the way of any major pipeline development.

Other legislative roadblocks include recent amendments to the 1985 Fisheries Act, which have made it nearly impossible to transport “deleterious substances” such as crude oil over major waterways (i.e., via oil tanker), the 2015 Pipeline Safety Act, and Bill C-48, the moratorium on oil tankers on the west coast. Taken together, they paint a picture of a nation in paralysis, unable to construct major arteries for one of its most important resources, instead condemning Alberta to perpetual dependence on American markets for oil, and making the WCS discount a mainstay of North American trade.

These barriers to Alberta’s oil industry have provoked deep frustration with the federal government, adding fuel to the fire that is the latent Western Alienation—a perennial disposition which has waxed and waned through the province’s history. This frustration fuels separatist sentiment, inspiring the (in my mind erroneous) view that Alberta would have a better trade deal and improved access to markets as an American state than as a Canadian province.

Alberta has always had an affinity for America, being more culturally similar to its southern neighbour in many ways than to its fellow provinces. Its trade reliance on the United States exacerbates the cultural exchange between the two, and facilitates the rise of a pro-American faction in Albertan politics. Indeed, the latest force on the provincial political scene is the Republican Party of Alberta, which all but explicitly advocates American statehood.

I suggest that Alberta slowly falling out of Canada’s sphere of influence and into America’s is not merely cultural affinity or grievance politics, but is born of the historical trade network linking Alberta primarily to the United States, rather than to its fellow Canadian provinces. An over-reliance on north-south trade has facilitated north-south political affinity and cultural import.

Moreover, there is a vested American interest in holding a monopoly on Albertan oil, given the WCS discount. Indeed, there exist all the hallmarks of a conspiracy to landlock Alberta’s oil and gas industry in perpetuity, as well as to draw the beleaguered prairie province into strife with the rest of Canada. Divide and conquer—the oldest trick in the book.

Finally, I argue that to abate the spectre of separatism, Canada must offer Alberta something better than America can: a networks of pipelines affording Alberta a diversity of markets for its oil, including Eastern Canada and other nations, and a way out of the heavy discount on Albertan oil.

In short, to remain a unified country, we must cultivate east-west trade, rather than north-south trade. Just as in Canada’s inception, when a trans-continental railway was seen as an essential nation building project to connect the far away corners of the budding Canada, today we must understand a network of east-west pipelines to be of equal importance.

Harold Innis on the Importance of Trade Networks

It has often been remarked that the existence of Canada is a geographical accident, and that there are more apparent cultural and economic ties running north-south than east-west. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Harold Innis, in his seminal history of The Fur Trade in Canada, argues with exhaustive rigour,

The present Dominion [of Canada] emerged not in spite of geography but because of it. The significance of the fur trade consisted in its determination of the geographic framework. Later economic developments in Canada were profoundly influenced by this background.4

The current border between Canada and the United States is not merely arbitrary, but is rather a product of the trade routes established during the fur trade.

The fur trade is also the reason that the British colonies now comprising Canada did not join the Thirteen Colonies in revolting. The fur trade linked the resource-dependent Canadian economy with the advanced manufacturing economy of Great Britain, which it depended upon as a market for its goods. Additionally, Canada, lacking a self-sufficient manufacturing sector, relied upon Britain to produce the advanced manufactures which the frontier nation needed. Canada’s economy, far from being hindered by Britain—as was America’s—was utterly dependent upon the motherland, and this tie of dependence largely prevented the dissidence seen to our south. Britain’s mercantilist controls impeded the budding manufacturing centres in the Thirteen Colonies, whereas they suited the natural resource-based Canadian economy just fine.

The trade networks established by the fur trade largely ran east-west. The Canadian fur trade, which pushed ever westward and northward over the frontier, was connected by the land’s many arterial tributaries—including the Ottawa, Saskatchewan, and the Athabasca—on which voyageurs and Hudson’s Bay men travelled by canoe and later York boat. Furs were transported back northeast to ports on the Hudson’s Bay and eastward to Montreal, whence the vast majority were shipped to Great Britain and smaller quantities to continental Europe. Canada’s trade largely ran latitudinally, drawing Canada away from economic integration with its dynamic southern neighbour.

Canada’s existence as a provider of staple goods (or primary materials) to a more advanced manufacturing economy in Great Britain also established an economic pattern which Canada would replicate throughout its history. As a frontier nation, abundant with natural resources but largely devoid of a domestic manufacturing base, Canada exported most of its staples to Britain in exchange for manufactured goods. This codependency tied Canada to the mother country in a way which the Thirteen Colonies were not. Innis writes, “Canada remained British in spite of free trade and chiefly because she continued as an exporter of staples to a progressively industrialized mother country.”5

Additionally, Canada, having a rugged and sparse landscape, with harsh terrain and harsher winters, was not easily amenable to industry. Great initial costs were required for any commercial endeavour and high overhead costs were sustained throughout. This fact conduced to the control of the nation by a large and advanced mother country—being Great Britain—and later led to high industry concentration. Large sums of capital, often from foreign firms, were the impetus to many major industrial undertakings, and this led to high rates of foreign ownership of Canadian resources which we see in the present even still. At first, the capital flowing into the country was almost exclusively British. These barriers to industry prevented Canada from experiencing the same entrepreneurial and self-reliant spirit which seized the upstart Americans. And so, Canada remained thoroughly British.

Whereas it is common to bifurcate culture from economics, for Innis, the two are deeply connected. Canada’s trade network, featuring a heavy dependence on Great Britain, led to strong loyalist sentiment. America’s economic independence, on the other hand, led to their revolt. Similar cases can be viewed throughout history—the Silk Road established not only a relationship of trade in goods, but a transmission of culture between east and west; renewed trade between the Occident and Levant in the wake of the Crusades led to the restoration of classical learning; in the modern day, we see America’s attempt to liberalize other nations through trade. Even China’s Belt and Road Initiative is another example of the same. This reveals a fundamental understanding that culture is often downstream of trade.

The combination in Canada of foreign capital and abundant domestic resources led to rapid increases in transportation infrastructure and technology to get staple goods to foreign markets. The federal government was heavily involved in Canada’s industrial activity, rather than being a fly on the wall like the more laissez faire ethos of their southern neighbour, and so it invested much energy in building up its transportation infrastructure. Railways were swiftly becoming all the rage, and by the time of Confederation in 1867, most of the Canadian politicians of the day were involved in the railways to varying degrees. Transportation infrastructure and the export of staple goods, Innis notes, go hand in hand.6

The pattern of the fur trade was replicated with the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, a transcontinental railway connecting Québec to Vancouver through an all-Canadian route. The Dominion Government in Ottawa oversaw the massive project to settle Western Canada and establish transportation links between British Columbia, the resource rich West, and Central Canada. The staples trade in Canada was intimately tied with Canada’s geographical boundaries, its internal and external trade networks, and indeed, its national unity.

Adam Smith himself affirms the relation between transportation and trade, and the mutual benefit between a resource hinterland and manufacturing heartland, writing,

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements. They encourage the cultivation of the remote, which must always be the most extensive circle of the country. They are advantageous to the town, by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its neighbourhood. They are advantageous even to that part of the country.7

Innis’ view of the importance of trade networks is pragmatic and realistic. One may try to understand Canadian development in terms of ideology, loyalty, or patriotic sentiment, but for Innis, it is better understood as a matter of interests. To understand the development of the Canadian nation, look at where the capital is flowing. If it flows east-west, then so will the allegiance.

However, today, for the same reason that Canada remained a loyal part of the Commonwealth amid the American Revolution, the resource rich Canadian West is drawn into the sphere of influence of our southern neighbour.

The Canadian Pacific Railway

In 1871, Canada stood divided. Politically, yes, but even more so geographically. In the east were the four provinces joined at Confederation: Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Carved out of the barren northwest was the small and sparsely populated province of Manitoba. All the way on the other side of the continent sat British Columbia, with no direct means of transportation to the rest of the country. In between the eastern and western provinces sat Rupert’s Land, recently acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a vast swath of land, largely uninhabited save for the nomadic native tribes and the thundering hordes of bison.

1871 was the year Prime Minister John A. MacDonald promised to the newly-admitted province of British Columbia that the federal government would oversee the building of a transcontinental railway from coast to coast, connecting the ends of the Dominion and consolidating the hinterland in between with settlement and infrastructure.

It was a grandiloquent and reckless pledge, but the stakes warranted it.

Though it may seem fantastical today, in the 1860s, all Canadians knew that the Americans posed an existential threat to their budding nation. With the ethos of Manifest Destiny in full swing, it not only seemed desirable, but inevitable, to Americans that the entirety of the North American continent should be rightfully theirs.

Not sixty years before MacDonald’s pledge, Canada and America had waged an armed conflict in the war of 1812, which would not soon be forgotten. The Confederate raid of St. Alban’s in 1864 was still fresh in the Canadian consciousness, convincing them that the endemic strife in the American Republic was sure to spread northwards unless Canada could solidify its borders and cultivate a sense of national identity to prevent it. The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American Republican organization, launched a series of raids in 1866 and again in 1870-71, attempting to capture Canadian towns and ransom them back to Britain in exchange for Irish independence.

Indeed, the desire for American dominion over Canada was explicit and pervasive among the American elites of the day. In the very year of Canadian Confederation, the United States Secretary of State, W.H. Seward, told an audience in Boston that the whole continent “shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.”8 Or, in 1869, a United States Senate committee report declared that

. . . the opening by us first of a Northern Pacific Railway seals the destiny of the British possessions west of the ninety-first meridian. They will become so Americanised in interests and feelings that they will be in effect severed from the new Dominion and the question of their annexation will be but a question of time.9

The Americans thought that the area then called Rupert’s Land, sold to Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1868, which consists of northern Québec and Ontario and the majority of the Canadian prairies, would inevitably fall under their domain. It was to be secured by means of a railway drawing it into commercial ties with the United States instead of Canada. John A. MacDonald was under no illusions that this was a serious threat. Canada, to secure this great western expanse, would have to beat them to the punch, and construct their own railway.

The race was on.

In order to consolidate this vast new Canadian territory, from the east coast to the far west, over viscous muskeg, through the inhospitable Precambrian Shield, over barren and dry prairies, and past the towering Rocky Mountains, Canada would have to construct an iron spine. Pierre Berton recounts,

Here was a country of only three and a half million people, not yet four years old, pledged to construct the greatest of all railways. It would be longer than any line yet built—almost one thousand miles longer than the first American road to the Pacific, which the United States, with a population of almost forty million had only just managed to complete.10

John A. MacDonald’s parliamentary opponents called the railway a “preposterous proposition,” and the press hastily concluded that it simply could not be done. But it had to be, if Canada was to avoid the yawning maw of American annexation. And so the survey teams went out over the landscape to chart a route, companies prepared their tenders for the wealth of contracts being dished out, and the politicians of the day prepared their speeches to defend or attack that first and most controversial topic in Canadian politics—that of a transcontinental railway.

The railway itself was highly contentious, as was each and every piece of the puzzle, including the choice of route. Many, including MacDonald’s Tories, advocated the all-Canadian route through northern Ontario, while Alexander Mackenzie’s Clear Grits advocated a route due west from southern Ontario, through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, which would then turn northwards to the new province of Manitoba.

The benefits of the American route were unmistakable—it was shorter and cheaper. The Canadian route, on the other hand, was advocated by MacDonald for reasons which were more abstract and difficult to justify. The route through northern Ontario would have to traverse the muskeg—a boggy, wet, odious, and mosquito-infested swampland, upon which it would be nearly inconceivable to try to lay rail—and then over the indestructible granite of the Canadian Shield, until finally reaching the prairies. The Canadian route would be prohibitively costly, if possible at all.

How did MacDonald defend his choice? By doing what Canadians have always done best—drumming up anti-Yankee sentiment. What if Canada were at war and needed to ship troops westward? Could they hope to do so through enemy territory? And even in peacetime, a Canadian railway through American territory would be at the mercy of the Americans, who, MacDonald was sure, would also spare no effort to impose punishing freight rates in an effort to divert east-west trade in favour of north-south commerce. Canada could hardly call herself a nation, according to MacDonald, if she did not have control over her own rail line.11

Indeed, while national defense was arguably a stronger argument in the day, those who were farsighted knew that establishing east-west trade routes instead of north-south routes was equally important in creating a distinct Canadian nationality. The burgeoning agricultural communities of the Canadian West would need markets for their grain, and the isolated British colony of Victoria on Vancouver Island needed manufactured goods. If not to the Canadian heartlands in Ontario and Québec, nor the motherland in Great Britain, they would look south. If American railways beat MacDonald’s CPR, connecting Western Canada with American markets first and foremost, path dependency would solidify and Western Canada would slowly but surely be drawn into the American empire.

To unite the far-flung Canadian provinces, there had to be established common interest and commerce between them all, which could only come about through a means of transportation. The new nation, Pierre Berton writes, was

an unwieldly pastiche of disparate communities, authored under varying circumstances, tugged this way and that by a variety of conflicting environmental and historical strains, and all now stirred into a ferment by the changes wrought through the coming of steel.12

As Harold Innis understood, trade networks are the foundation of national allegiances and boundaries. If you want to understand national loyalty, look not to amorphous concepts like culture, but look to where the capital is flowing—east-west, or north-south. If the prairies were to be Canadian, it had to be in their interests to do business with the rest of Canada. This went hand in hand with MacDonald’s later protectionism on Canadian goods, forcibly ensuring that trade was latitudinal, and not longitudinal.

If Canada had faltered, if the Grits had won the day in advocating an American route for the transcontinental railway, if the Rocky Mountains had proved insurmountable and the Railway debts too onerous, it is uncertain that we would have a country at all today. The nationality we take for granted, which has fomented along cultural lines, was not at all a certainty, but, in the 1880s, had been a near thing. Indeed, our polity was formed not out of necessity, but through the force of will of John A. MacDonald and the early Canadian railway men, creating a trade route which, against all odds, connected the Pacific to the Atlantic and thereafter to the imperial motherland, avoiding the integration of the West with the American Empire to the south.

Such an endeavour would prove to be a lesson for all subsequent industrial development in the nation.

Canadian Oil, American Capital

Whereas industry coalesced along national lines in the fur trade and in the years following the Canadian Pacific Railway, a different story can be told of the 20th century, when the age of oil would make the trade of staples a decidedly continental affair.

In 1858, oil was discovered on Canadian soil in Oil Springs, Ontario, one year before it was overshadowed by discoveries in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The scant oil reserves in Canada were limited in comparison to the vast discoveries being made in America. This led to the formation of large American oil firms, not least of which the behemoth of Standard Oil, which dwarfed the tiny Canadian firms fighting over the scraps of oil in southern Ontario.

As Standard Oil devoured their domestic competition, eventually owning over 90% of American oil production before being forcibly severed into smaller firms through a landmark anti-trust case, it was inevitable that its gaze would fall northwards. In 1898, Standard Oil acquired the largest Canadian oil firm, Imperial Oil, which remains a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil (an offshoot of Standard) to the present day.

These events created a pattern which would be replicated time and time again in Canada. From early on, American firms had massive interests in the Canadian oil industry. By the time that significant oil reserves were revealed in Alberta, with the discovery of the Turner Valley field in 1914, foreign American firms already reigned supreme in the Canadian oil industry.

Imperial Oil was wholly owned by Standard Oil, and continued to be the biggest Canadian firm for most of its history. It was Imperial that made the massive discovery at Leduc in 1947, leading to a tremendous increase in oil production. The Texas-based Sun Oil was a major player in the Canadian oil sands, undertaking the first at-scale commercial oil sands operation, Great Canadian Oil Sands, which began production in 1967. The Continental Oil Company, now Conoco-Phillips, is a major player in the oil industry to the present day. Indeed, today titanic investment firms such as Blackstone and Apollo Global Management are involved in major Canadian oil and gas projects, such as the LNG facility in Kitimat, BC.

In 1967, the government of Lester B. Pearson appointed a task force to review foreign ownership in Canadian industries, culminating in the Watkins Report of 1968. The report revealed some concerning truths about American domination of Canadian industry, and especially in oil and gas. Approximately 2/3 of Canadian crude oil was produced by American firms or their subsidiaries, who also refined approximately 80% of the petroleum products therefrom.

Mel Watkins, chair of the taskforce, was coincidentally an avid reader of Harold Innis, and so he understood the importance of trade networks and the flow of capital in sustaining a national project. An open socialist, Watkins advocated rigorously clamping down on the inflow of American capital, especially in Canadian oil and gas—a suggestion which, it appears, the Government of Canada soon took to heart.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau undertook a brave campaign to fight foreign ownership in the oil and gas industry with his 1980 National Energy Program, and while the program successfully encouraged more Canadian ownership of the oil industry, it also caused investment to flee the country at breakneck pace and devastated Alberta’s economy. The NEP was abolished by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1985. The precedent of American capital controlling Canadian oil had been set, and was not easily displaced.

Today, there is still significant American ownership of Canadian oil and gas extraction, with one source estimating that the four biggest Canadian oil and gas companies—Imperial Oil, Cenovus, Suncor, and CNRL—are together approximately 60% American-owned.

The “Natural Market” for Canadian Oil and the Great Pipeline Debate

In the 1950s, while American ownership of Canadian oil might have seemed a foregone conclusion, the question of the market for that oil certainly was not. Indeed, where Canadian oil should go became a question inspiring the utmost acrimony in our Parliament, even rivalling the vitriolic invectives launched back and forth over the transcontinental railway.

It started with the oil discovery at Leduc, on February 13th, 1947. Before that point, Canada had always been an importer of oil. Even with modest production from its Turner Valley field, discovered in 1914, with an added discovery of the “deep basin” in 1936, Canada still only produced enough oil to cover 17.8% of its total domestic consumption in 1941.

Leduc changed everything. The total oil production in Canada rose from just over 10 million in 1941 to 45.9 million after the new discovery, with other large conventional oil fields, such as Redwater and Pembina discovered shortly thereafter.13 Suddenly, the prairies had more oil than they knew what to do with, and nowhere for all that oil to go. Most of the domestic demand for oil was in Eastern Canada, and there were yet few means of transporting the oil such a great distance. The need of foreign markets for Canadian crude caught the nation by surprise.

Prior to that point, the pittance of oil which Canada exported went to the United States. The Canadian oil and gas industry had a markedly continental orientation. Many even said that the United States was the “natural market” for Canadian oil, and left it at that.14

Others, however, including Albertan premier Ernest Manning, and a number of domestic oil firms such as Husky and Home Oil, advocated for a shift away from the continental orientation of Canada’s energy policy, and to broaden the horizons for Albertan oil. They lobbied for Ottawa to construct a pipeline which ran east-west, opening Montreal’s many refineries to Albertan oil, and from then on, potentially using its ports to export petroleum across the globe.

Historian Earle Grey writes,

Many politicians also sought to apply to pipelines the same basic national policies that had guided railway construction. The railways were built in defiance of natural economic laws, and the geography of North America which dictates that the principal lines of transportation should run north and south. Canada wanted to build a nation east to west. The railway lines were built east to west, cutting across the grain of geography, at great expense, and had to be subsidized by the nation. If this was vital to the nation in the case of railways, the reasoning was, then it would be of the same importance in the case of pipelines.15

The debate over a potential pipeline took on an urgent tone, as without adequate markets, Albertan wells were being capped and investment into the province was stagnating. The federal government appeared unwilling to front the cost of an east-west pipeline, which would amount to approximately $80 million and would essentially be a subsidy to the Albertan oil industry at the taxpayer’s expense.

Eastern consumers and Montreal refiners were not on board with the project. Consumers feared that forcing Albertan oil on them would mean increased prices for fuel and energy, whereas the refiners believed that, even with the infrastructure in place, it would be cheaper for them to continue importing foreign crude oil. They appealed to America as the “natural market” for Albertan crude oil, while they would continue to employ a cheap foreign supply.16

In 1949, the Pipe Lines Act was passed in Parliament with nearly unanimous support, with the aim of constructing a pipeline connecting the Albertan oilfields to the refining heartlands of Sarnia and Montreal. However, the pipeline soon attracted controversy which ought to have given most Canadians a sense of déja vu. Imperial Oil, spearheading the project, had indeed affirmed their commitment to transport oil from Alberta to southern Ontario. The problem was this: they had chosen a route for the pipeline which veered south of the Canada-U.S.A. border, ending at the head of Lake Superior, and from which point on oil would be shipped to Sarnia via tanker.17

The House of Commons was in uproar.

The American route was cheaper and more direct, but it was on foreign soil. All the arguments which appeared in the debate over the transcontinental railroad were transposed into a different key and sung as ardently as before. Howard Green of the Progressive Conservatives declared, “Surely it is in the national interest, regardless of cost, that the main pipeline carrying Canadian oil should be laid in Canadian soil,” and that pipeline routes cutting through the United States, even though achieving lower transportation costs, would represent “a great mistake in national policy.”18

C.D. Howe, Liberal Minister of Trade and Commerce, vehemently defended the American route, arguing that greater transportation costs in an all-Canadian route would punish both Western producers and Eastern consumers of oil.

A group advocating the Canadian route put out a circular with intensely patriotic language, writing,

American capital has played a part in development and progress of Canada, but at a price. The price is an inferiority complex when it comes to promoting our own welfare. . . . Surely, we are not so shortsighted that we will sell our birthright for a few million dollars. It is your fight as a Canadian! You can keep this pipeline in Canada if you are determined to do so.19

But the ever-pragmatic Liberals persisted, Howe unmoved by grandiloquent rhetoric. The route was to travel through America. Imperial’s newly incorporated Interprovincial Pipe Line Company (IPL), which later became Enbridge, set about constructing the line from Alberta to Lake Superior, which was completed in 1950.

The system of ferrying oil to Sarnia soon proved woefully inadequate, for the oil had to be stored at the port on Superior during wintertime, when tanker routes were obstructed by ice, and so in 1953, IPL began construction on the extension of the pipeline through the United States to Sarnia. By the time of its completion, it was the longest crude oil pipeline in the world. And yet, there was dismay and disappointment, for it was not a distinctly Canadian achievement, but was partly American also, serving American interests as much as Canadian.

But while IPL was underway, another pipeline was in the works, one which would cause calamitous uproar in the House of Commons and the end of the Liberals’ 22-year parliamentary reign. This was the Trans-Canada Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline which would link Alberta to Montreal. The cacophony which surrounded this project would forever live in the memory of Canadians as the “Great Pipeline Debate.”

If there was a surplus of Albertan oil in the 1950s after Leduc, it was doubly so for natural gas, which was even more plentiful and had fewer accessible markets. Gas was being flared to a profligate excess in the gas fields of southern Alberta, with towns competing against one another to see who could have the brightest gas flare. Clint Murchison, a prominent Texas oil man, wanted to change this, proposing to bring Albertan natural gas to market in eastern Canada. Natural gas, unlike oil, could not be imported from abroad, and so Murchison hoped to find a captive market in the east, over which he could virtually have a monopoly for the supply of natural gas.

He founded Trans-Canada Pipelines, a subsidiary of his firm Canadian Delhi Oil Ltd., in 1951, and lobbied for a contract to construct his project. To sweeten the deal and market it as a project in the national interest, Murchison promised that the entire pipeline would be on Canadian soil, and 100% of the gas would go to Canadian consumers.

C.D. Howe, changing his tune from the debate over IPL, embraced the Trans-Canada scheme, declaring, “The policy of the Government of Canada is to refuse permits for moving natural gas by pipeline across an international boundary until such time as we are convinced that there can be no economic use, present or future, for that natural gas within Canada.”20

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However, just as with IPL, the question of the route quickly became a problem when Trans-Canada started to have financing difficulties. Albertan producers, eager to see the project through, began to lobby the government to take a look at the shorter route which would dip through America. This time, Howe was willing to fight tooth and nail for the Canadian route, which was a major impediment to securing funding for the product. Many thought that it would never turn a profit. Howe maintained that direct government funding was a possibility, but his noncommittal hemming and hawing was detrimental to the project.

Finally, Howe and the Ontario government agreed to wholly subsidize the section of the line which rounded the northern edge of the Great Lakes. This inspired Conservative furor, reversing the roles played in the debate over IPL. The opposition parties mounted a filibuster over the Liberals’ bill to fund the project. The delays which followed were excruciating.

What occurred in Parliament during this time was a scene straight out of Pandaemonium, with the House of Commons being compared by one MP to the German Reichstag, Parliamentary procedure being left by the wayside, debates lasting well into the witching hour, and even a Member of Parliament fainting on the house floor. However, the Liberals eventually saw their funding bill through, and in 1956, the Trans-Canada Pipeline was underway. Though credit should go to the Liberals for seeing the project through eventually, the needless dallying damaged the project, the profits of Albertan gas producers, and the Liberals’ electoral fortunes, who were ousted in an election the following year.

The task of reconsidering Canadian energy policy fell thereafter to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who, on his second day in government, created a Royal Commission, chaired by Henry Borden, to make recommendations on a number of key fronts relating to Canadian energy—especially the fate of the Trans-Canada Pipeline.

The Borden Report, when it finally arrived, was underwhelming, advocating few changes to the woefully inadequate status quo. It argued that Canada should continue its continental approach to energy, with Albertan oil being exported to America, while eastern refineries would continue to import. Indeed, the fruit of the commission was the formation of what was known as the “Borden Line,” an artificial line to cut Canada in two between Western Canada and parts of Ontario, whose refineries would use domestic oil, and the rest of Eastern Canada, which would continue to use foreign imports. The Trans-Canada Pipeline would continue, unifying the nation’s natural gas market, but the North American crude oil markets would be cleaved in two.

The paradigm set by this report would continue down to the present day. The pipeline networks connecting Albertan resources to American markets were greatly expanded and the government took a hands-off approach to the oil industry after the acrimony raised over such “nation-building” projects as the IPL and Trans-Canada Pipeline. Whereas the federal government had traditionally been highly interventionist in key Canadian industries, with the understanding that this was necessary to foster close east-west ties among the far-flung Canadian provinces, the government backed away from this approach in the 1960s—a decision with great consequence.

In 1974, the IPL crude oil pipeline was finally extended northeast to Montreal, spurred by global oil price shocks. However, in the time preceding, IPL had been busy building more and more connections between the Albertan oilfields and American refineries. By 1974, there was no more surplus oil to send east. Instead, the flow of the extension to Montreal was reversed, with imported crude oil travelling to Ontario, while domestic oil almost exclusively went south. The precedent had been set, and the Borden Line appeared to be an insurmountable boundary.

The economic nationalism and energy policies of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the 1970s and 80s attempted to reverse this trend. This noble aim was marred by a misunderstanding of the fundamental problem. Trudeau attempted to reroute the flow of oil east instead of south, but did so through onerous legislation which punished producers and investors—akin to trying to stop a river by damming it off entirely. What he failed to understand was that, to reroute a river, you cannot simply stop the flow—you must create alternative channels through which the water will flow more easily.

Though it was in this period that the phrase “two solitudes” came into currency to describe French and English Canada, it could have equally been employed to describe the two parallel oil industries in North America: the Western industry, which was decidedly continental, and that in Eastern Canada, which looked abroad for their oil. The precedent having been set, it seemed no amount of government force could divert these trade patterns, which had all but been embedded in the landscape—nor was there any willingness to do so. Whereas Canada’s railway policy in the 1880s, against all odds, had successfully created trade networks which unified the country, Canada’s pipeline policies could not be said to do the same. On the contrary, they created stronger north-south ties than east-west ones.

The Campaign to Landlock Canadian Oil

Since the Great Pipeline Debate in the 1950s, it seems that a consensus has formed that refineries in the United States are, indeed, the “natural market” for Canadian oil. However, there are some individuals beginning to question whether the United States is still the “natural market” for our oil, or, indeed, if it ever has been. Is it merely a manufactured consensus to discourage Canadian pipelines and privilege American refiners with a monopoly over cheap Western Canadian Select?

Independent researcher Vivian Krause, in her 2019 documentary, “Over a Barrel,” investigated Canadian environmental lobby groups who comprise the Tar Sands Campaign, which has openly combatted the construction of new east-west pipelines in the last twenty years. What she unearths is a sordid money trail leading south, with significant funding for the Tar Sands Campaign coming from powerful American firms, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose very fortune derives from the greatest oil empire the world has yet seen; additionally, the Hewlett Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Tides Foundation also funnel money into a slew of the same Canadian ENGOs—altogether, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The strategy of the Tar Sands Campaign was, in its own words, to “land-lock” the tar sands, limiting the expansion of the project by restricting the possible markets for its oil. The primary task for environmental groups under the Tar Sands Campaign was, then, to oppose pipelines which could take oil from the sands to distant markets, so that the price of this oil would remain low.

Canadian environmental organizations which have received money from the Rockefellers and other American firms include the Pembina Foundation, West Coast Environmental Law Research Foundation, Greenpeace Canada, Tides Canada, Coastal First Nation, World Wildlife Fund Canada, and Leadnow, among many others.

One of the key focuses of these ENGOs has been on the British Columbian coast, where they have successfully lobbied for an outright ban on outbound oil tanker traffic in the Liberals’ 2019 Bill C-48. The rhetoric such ENGOs espouse is dubious at best—arguing that oil tankers threaten a number of species, such as the killer whale, salmon, or the Kermode bear—a rare subspecies of the black bear. But there is a subtle rhetorical shift when the protection of such species suddenly entails blockading large areas of land for development and bodies of water to oil tanker traffic.

The area from Prince Rupert south past Bella Coola, including the Queen Charlotte Strait and the Haida Gwaii Islands, encompasses the “Great Bear Rainforest,” an area which was formally protected in 2016 to prevent most of the key infrastructure otherwise needed to transport oil from the region to Asian markets. And yet, the moratorium on tankers only applies to crude oil, as, starting this year, liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers began transporting natural gas from the port at Kitimat. Why oil tankers were so severely protested and not outbound LNG ships suggests that oil is the crux of the matter.

Indeed, the advocacy of Canadian ENGOs, funded by American philanthropy, has translated into political victories and concrete policies, showing the far-reaching influence of American interests.

It is not far-fetched to suspect a motive and incentive for American interests to support such advocacy. American refiners and consumers benefit from a glut of cheap Canadian oil, and the price differential between Western Canadian Select and West Texas Intermediate amounts to Canada subsidizing American fuel by millions of dollars. Landlocking Albertan oil is the necessary condition to sustain such a monopoly.

That American oil companies also own significant chunks of the major Canadian oil companies is not evidence against such a plot. On the contrary, it only demonstrates the principle of vertical integration.

Indeed, the strife over pipelines has had the effect of deeply dividing Canada and Canadians along provincial lines, drawing Alberta and the prairies into acrimony with the decision-making bodies in Eastern Canada and the provincial government in British Columbia. Alberta, having become a pariah of sorts within Canada, is isolated. Historically, the most tried and true method to conquer a people has been to divide them, isolate them, and then draw them into a larger empire’s sphere of influence. It is hardly surprising that this very thing is happening in Alberta, being the most culturally American province, with the friendliest views towards America.

Just as American interests conspired to wrest control of the Canadian prairies by blocking the Canadian Pacific Railway and constructing rival railways to draw them into their sphere of influence, so too do they now block east-west pipelines to ensure that Albertan oil has nowhere to go but south. The trade networks dictate national allegiance now as ever.

The pipeline problem in Canada has led many Albertans to the view that Alberta would be better off without Canada, either joining the U.S.A. as a 51st state or forming and independent polity. However, both these options would only deepen the American monopoly on their oil, and would provide no incentive for refineries to pay a higher price for it. Indeed, without the federal government at their back to fight for a better trade deal on oil (and oil has been a key consideration of every Canada-U.S. trade deal), it is most likely that Alberta would get a worse deal for its oil outside of Canada.

Western Alienation, whether or not it is reasonable or justified, is a problem which threatens Canadian and Albertan prosperity. And it is a problem which has an identifiable cause—trade networks which draw Alberta into America’s sphere of influence. This is an existential risk for the whole nation, as, if current trends continue, with Albertan separatism rising, the eventual outcome is political balkanization. This is an issue that must be taken seriously by all Canadians.

National Unity Through Infrastructure

My position is that Western Alienation is a problem which must be taken seriously, but which must not necessarily be taken at face value. It’s not so much a cultural issue as it is an issue of trade and infrastructure. A trade reliance on America has caused Albertans to gaze southward, despite receiving a bad trade deal on its most prized commodity and special interests conspiring to exert downward pressure on the price thereof.

The solution is not, as Pierre Trudeau attempted, to force Alberta to do business with the rest of Canada when it is to the detriment to the province and without adequate infrastructure and trade routes to facilitate it. Rather, it is to present Alberta with an option that is better than the status quo—not through legislation alone, but through infrastructure.

It is for these reasons that I suggest Canada must build avenues by which east-west trade might become more beneficial, and to diversify the possible markets of Albertan oil so as to break the American monopoly on WCS, drive up the price, and encourage a more latitudinal orientation in the province. In other words, to cultivate national unity—a firm unity based not upon flimsy sentiment, but upon the solid foundation of common interests and aims—Canada must build more pipelines.

As a start, certain key pieces of legislation need to be revoked at the federal level. Bill C-48, the tanker moratorium on the B.C. coast, must go, so that Albertan oil can reach energy-hungry east Asian markets. Bill C-69, requiring multiple stages of environmental impact review on major projects, is far too onerous on infrastructure which is in the national interests, and so it must go also. The 2015 Pipeline Safety Act, which imposes prohibitive costs on polluters, and recent amendments to the 1985 Fisheries Act (contained in Bill C-68), which restrict the possibility of tanker traffic, must be revoked also.

Once the ground has been cleared, construction of a number of major pipelines must occur.

Many of the projects which faltered and failed under Justin Trudeau must be resurrected. The Northern Gateway Pipeline, undertaken by Enbridge, which sought to bring oil from Alberta to a crude oil terminal at Kitimat, where it can be shipped to Asia, is a major priority and a first step towards bringing Albertan oil to diverse markets.

The Energy East Pipeline, which would convert much existing line on the Trans-Canada Pipeline from natural gas to crude oil, and then build a new line stretching to refineries in Saint John, N.B., must also rise from the ashes. This is a more essential goal, as the connection from Western to Eastern Canada would create one unified petroleum ecosystem within our national borders, rather than two, to overcome the Borden Line once and for all. Eastern refineries might refine Western oil, and the oil might even be loaded in tankers from ports in Montreal, Saint John, and beyond, for transport to Europe and other global markets. This would do for national unity today what the Canadian Pacific Railway did for Canada in 1885.

Alternatively, if the Trans-Canada Pipeline continues to transport natural gas, an extension from its current terminus at Montreal to an LNG facility on the east coast for European markets where energy has proven a highly scarce commodity as of late providing an alternative to Russian natural gas. Or, even better, both projects could proceed simultaneously.

Another prospective pipeline under discussion is the Western Energy Corridor, which would transport either natural gas, crude oil, or both, to a port in Churchill, Manitoba, on the Hudson’s Bay, from which point it would be shipped via tanker to markets in Europe. This would have the added benefit of bringing industry to the far north, where it is especially important today for Canada to develop a significant presence. The thawing arctic is replete with natural gas and oil, for which Russia appears hungrier than us. Establishing a military presence to defend our arctic and creating significant population centres and industrial activity in the north go hand in hand.

There is demand for these projects, as evinced by the fact that two of the three were already underway before being cancelled. The Western Energy Corridor, on the other hand, is advocated by Canadian energy and pipeline executives who understand the state of the industry and know that there is global demand for, and ample supply of, Albertan oil. Global oil demand is forecasted to grow 23% through to 2045, and so the time to act is now.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared his vision for Canada to become a global “energy superpower” and has indicated that he is open to more pipelines as key nation-building infrastructure. Though his government is a continuation of the Trudeau regime which is to blame for the current dearth of domestic pipelines, this posturing is at least a welcome change. If Carney means what he says, then the future may look rosy for new pipelines. And with Canadians momentarily bullish on nation-building infrastructure, the moment is ripe to be seized.

However, to do so, the federal government must act quickly and with a heavy hand. MacDonald’s opponents decried him forcing through the Canadian Pacific Railway, and yet he persisted. Howe hardly relented when the opposition filibustered and derided the Trans-Canada Pipeline. The moment calls for unilateral action. Multiple stages of review and consultation and entanglement in byzantine legal frameworks are how we fell into this mess, and they will not get us out.

The pull of our geography is strong. Commercial interests beckon us southward. To resist this pull requires an equally forceful will. We must yet see whether our country has sufficient strength and desire to brace our defenses, construct an oil-bearing spine from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and become once more a nation of builders.

As I shiver amid the first chills of the northern autumnal breeze—a sublime portent of the frigid winter to come—I am put in a state of fearful awe. My body stiffens, and in a microsecond I feel the numb extremities, freezing appendages, and frustrated aims of the impending cold season. I understand that in this distant hinterland, I am utterly at the mercy of the land and its caprices.

The rhythms of the intensely variable seasons and the vast and diverse geography of this land have dictated the economic activity, the infrastructure, the history, and the spirit of this country. From the fur trade, to the Atlantic fisheries, to the settlement of the prairies, to the oil booms, and beyond, this frontier bears a great wealth in resources for those brave enough to endure the hazards she wantonly pours forth. It is our attraction to these resources, and our determination to seek them out at any cost, which has shaped Canada as we know it today.

Canada has been pejoratively called a nation of “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” using a biblical phrase to denigrate our fierce exploitation of natural resources. We have a reputation as being a band of rugged frontiersmen, lumberjacks, settlers, and voyageurs, who brave these remote and inhospitable northlands. Though Canada today is mostly urbanized and reliant upon the service sector, less dependent on the trade of staple resources than ever, this perception persists, and for good reason. For, the reputation we have garnered doesn’t merely pertain to the professions of our denizens, but to the guiding ethos which this land has imbued in us since arriving on her shores.

It may be an extraordinary claim, but I wager that there is no land which has posed such a distinct problem for man as Canada has, and no people besides Canadians who so acutely feel the gamut of nature’s ravages.

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Some lands invite man to live in blithe pastoral bliss, with fertile soil or teeming fruit trees. Some lands draw him into a friendly contest, forcing him to settle atop rugged hills and in winding valleys. Some lands yet challenge man with natural hazard and hostile fauna, but yield to him once he has subdued its more bellicose aspects. Some more quixotic lands present man with a Sphinxian riddle—be it persistent flooding, arid heat, or towering mountains—which, once solved, gives way to an uneasy harmony.

The Canadian landscape, unlike any other, declares war on man every second of his existence, sending volleys of flies and mosquitoes to assail his every crevice, freezing him out in the sordid winter and then drowning him in august heat. Canada sweeps the ground out from under his feet, sucking him into the miserable mire of muskeg, and then presenting him with a vast and impenetrable slab of Precambrian granite, unfit for any settlement at all. Wide open prairies—dry and barren with rolling blazes—and sheer mountain ranges all conspire to deny man the very provisions for life.

Canadians well understand the hazards inherent in our quotidian existence. The frozen winter highways, covered in glare ice in early winter, map out a blueprint for disaster. The frigid winter, which may veer well below -30 degrees Celsius, may inflict frostbite on skin exposed to the open air in a matter of minutes. Behemoths and Leviathans haunt our forests and waterways, from grizzly bears to killer whales. And indeed, the vast swaths of wilderness which encompass our land may easily swallow you whole should you stray from the beaten path.

This subservience to the seasons manifests in concrete ways in our economic life, documented by Canadian economic historian and philosopher Harold Innis. Innis, in his voluminous history of the Canadian fur trade, makes the argument that Canada’s role as an exporter of staple products—primary goods, from furs to wheat to lumber—to large manufacturing centres (Britain, the United States) created and then cemented Canada’s role as a subordinate “resource hinterland.” He writes,

The economic history of Canada has been dominated by the discrepancy between the centre and the margin of western civilization. Energy has been directed toward the exploitation of staple products and the tendency has been cumulative. The raw material supplied to the mother country stimulated manufactures of the finished product and also of the products which were in demand in the colony. Large-scale production of raw materials was encouraged by improvement of technique of production, of marketing, and of transport as well as by improvement of the finished product.1

It is the fur trade which fostered Canada’s tie of dependence upon Great Britain which America did not share. Canada’s lack of domestic manufacturing capacity, due to sparse population and distance from markets, ensured its reliance on Britain for the success of its key primary industries. In short, the fur trade is why America fought for independence and Canada did not.

And the pattern of Canada being a resource hinterland in relation to a manufacturing heartland has been replicated evermore. The relationship between Canada and the United States is markedly one of Canadian natural resources flowing south to make manufactured products which we buy back in turn. In the case study of the oil industry, the vast majority of oil from Alberta is sent south to the slew of refineries along the Gulf Coast. We historically lacked the large markets for refined oil products which America has in spades, and so our oil travels south.

Even domestically, there is a pattern of trade resembling a resource hinterland and manufacturing heartland. The Canadian West is agrarian and rural, possessing vast natural resources. The myriad farmland of the endless prairies, the oil sands of northern Alberta, the potash mines of Saskatchewan, and the vast old growth forests of British Columbia mark the economic activity of the Western provinces. Ontario and Québec, on the other hand, specialize in manufactured products, including automobiles, aerospace, steel, and aluminum. The East comprising the centre, and the West the margin, of Canadian civilization entail that the pattern which Innis describes applies within Canada now as much as ever.

Canada, and especially the boundless and rugged West, remains a land of lumberjacks, farmers, and roughnecks.

Innis also argues that the difficulty of the terrain, the distance from markets, the intensely variable climate, and the sparse population of Canada created prohibitively large initial and overhead costs for industry. As a result, the resources of Canada could only be penetrated by large foreign firms with capital to spend. The fur trade, for instance, was dominated by the chartered monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The first to exploit Canada’s vast forests for timber were large French and British firms. And when oil was discovered in Alberta, it was American capital funding the wildcat drillers, leading to a disproportionately high American ownership of Canadian oil which persists to this day.

The result of this phenomenon has been disproportionately high industry concentration and high foreign ownership of Canadian resources. Canadians are not as entrepreneurial as our southern neighbours, and there is a concrete reason behind this. The Canadian climate does not permit a man to pull himself up by his bootstraps in the same way as America’s—but rather, he needs equipment, financing, transportation, and infrastructure to bring whatever good he wishes to market. The capital for such endeavours is found in the pre-established commercial centres, and not the frontier nation.

Canada’s very existence, and indeed the existence of any “resource hinterland” is predicated upon the existence of a frontier—a sparsely inhabited region at the fringes of civilization which is abundant in natural resources. As natural resource production ramps up, populations move to the region for work, which inevitably pushes the frontier further back. Whereas at one time anything further inland than Toronto and Montreal constituted a frontier, today the frontier is found in the last region to be settled—the arctic. This region, replete with oil, gas, and critical minerals, constitutes the final frontier for Canada. Once there is no more frontier, and once the resources therein have been exhausted, a resource hinterland implodes under its own weight.

Because of the punishing climate, the success of our industrial achievements has come only through a certain indomitable vivacity of the men who inhabit these lands. Lesser men could not have built a great railway through muskeg, over the Canadian shield, and past the towering Rockies to connect the disparate lands of our boundless nation. Lesser men could not have settled the hostile Canadian prairies, nor built an oil industry in the bituminous sands along the Athabasca River.

The intrepidity of the Canadian in the face of hardship knows no bounds. It is perhaps not a flashy and bombastic spirit as found in Americans, but rather a quiet, humble, and indomitable resolve.

But, however much we may puff up our chests at our great achievements, it is undeniable that a country could only have been constructed on the harsh northern half of this continent through the tools and technology developed by a pre-existing industrial civilization.

Indeed, our relationship with the land was marked from the very outset by the fact that we had certain empowering tools at our disposal, be they engines, farming implements, or weapons. It is these which put us on an equal footing with the land, allowing us to grapple with her for mastery, rather than merely being dominated by her roughshod reign.

It is these tools and technologies which the native peoples of North America lacked, and for this reason they could never hope to master nature, but only placate her. It is the deification of nature and natural phenomenon, and the impetus to live within her designated boundaries, which marks the ethos of the native peoples of this land. This ethos clashed deeply with the Europeans who arrived possessing the means to conquer the land, exploit her resources to their gain, and break free from her regal decrees, as history would quickly show.

These different attitudes towards the land ought to be viewed merely as products of the presence or absence of tools, rather than being judged as a merit or flaw of either civilization. No one, possessing the means to be liberated from a tyrant, would continue to grovel at her feet. The native peoples, after all, quickly adopted whatever new technologies they could to vie for mastery over nature.

George Grant writes,

[Canada] could not be ours also because the very intractability, immensity, and extremes of the new land required that its meeting with mastering Europeans be a battle of subjugation. And after that battle we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the new forms of conquest which came with industrialism.2

This first encounter shaped the entirety of the Canadian ethos thereafter. Rather than living with the harsh injustices of nature, man could meet her on an equal footing and do battle with her to mitigate her vicissitudes. For Grant, this forever impaired our capacity to spiritually bond with the land and make her ours. Grant continues,

That conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object.3

However, I’m not sure that he’s right—at least not entirely. For, the modern Canadian can never view nature as a mere object to subdue, lest he become complacent and fall into her dread grasp. There are still echoes of spirits in the trees, in the waterways, and in the wanton beasts that roam about. Western technological society can never truly eradicate the traces of folklore which emanate from and pervade the land

Because of man’s elevated relative status, the relationship between him and nature can never again be one of adoration or worship. A man should never love what seeks to destroy him. But he must remain fearful and suspicious always—for despite our many contrivances, nature still retains the power to ultimately destroy us if we are not careful. We must necessarily recognize a latent power, agency, and autonomy in the land before us. There is an irrepressible spirit in this frontier land with which we must do battle.

If it was Israel’s lot to wrestle with God, then it is ours to grapple with the land.

Indeed, the Canadian ethos evinces more respect for the land, despite our contest, than the American’s. They can drain lakes, maul forests, and conduct nuclear tests in the desert without a second thought. The Americans never battled the land as furiously as we have; rather, it conceded to them without resistance. Whereas they treat the land as wholly under their dominion, we will be at war with her always. And where she has been conquered, the memory of our battle still lives on our skin, and so we have pity for our valiant fallen foe.

Moreover, we are reminded at every point in the year of our complex relationship with nature, for the cyclical seasons are a display of her power to destroy, if only we didn’t possess our tools and technique. The hot summers are contrasted with the bitterly cold winters. The 18-hour days we experience on the summer solstice contrast with the few meagre hours of daylight we receive on the shortest day of winter. The drought of summer, the beauty of autumn, the snow and ice of winter, and the deluge of spring are all reminders of our eternal quarrel.

And yet, for these reasons, Grant is right—so long as we grapple with it, nature can never be ours, namely, we can never be one with it. It forever remains essential otherness. So long as we attempt to elevate ourselves above her, we are alienated from the land. In Canada, and in the technological age, the relation between man and nature is inherently hostile. One only wonders which of us cast the first stone.

If one interprets such words as angry denunciation, let him think again. For, it is my habitation in this nigh-uninhabitable realm which is my greatest point of pride. The Canadian ethos to grapple with the land manifests in every aspect of our national life. Rather than spend the winter shivering, we boldly venture upon the frozen surface of the lake with skates tied tight and play hockey until our toes are frozen. We swim in our great lakes, whose smashing tides threaten to overpower. We hike in mountains as a pastime—the very mountains who took the lives of countless prospectors and surveyors.

We are, to the core, a nation of hewers of wood and drawers of water. But far from a mark of our inadequacies, it is this very ethos which makes our nation humble and strong.

There are few myths which have so deeply captured the human imagination over time and across space as that of Prometheus, the cunning titan who stole Zeus’ divine flame, smuggled it to mankind, and as punishment for his transgression, was bound to a rock for all eternity, having his liver gnawed away each day by Zeus’ eagle, only for it to regrow anew the following day.

The myth was used in Classical Greece as a cautionary tale of hubris against the eternal and unchanging divine will. In the Romantic period in Europe, the myth found renewed currency; Prometheus became a hero, an emblem of humanism and an ardent advocate of humanity against Zeus’ draconic tyranny. Later still, the myth of Prometheus was imbued with a dark twinge, reconfigured to illustrate the dire and self-defeating consequences of humans playing god with the advent of modern science. The Promethean figure recurs throughout history—whether as a divine scapegoat, a humanist reformer, or a mad scientist on a quest for the elixir of life. These diverse portrayals reveal different conceptions of the relations between man, the divine, and technology over time, which the present essay will attempt to sketch.

Prometheus, Punished

In the epic poetry of Hesiod we find the best description of the Prometheus myth as the ancient Greeks understood it. The titan Prometheus’ name literally means “forethought,” and he is the son of Iapetos and a “trim-ankled Oceanid nymph” named Clymene. The titan’s brothers include Atlas, Menoitios, and Epimetheus.1 Prometheus is described as a “crooked-schemer” who is “intent on deceit,” which brings him inevitably into conflict with Zeus, king of the Olympians.2

Prometheus, who had long been an advocate of mankind, incited Zeus to take out his righteous anger upon man in Prometheus’ stead, forcing man to toil the livelong day for food which was previously abundant. To strike back at the Olympian, Prometheus undertook his most grievous affront yet, when

the noble son of Iapetos outwitted [Zeus] by stealing the far-beaconing flare of untiring fire in the tube of fennel. And it stung high-thundering Zeus deep to the spirit, and angered him in his heart, when he saw the far-beaconing flare of fire among mankind.3

Fire alleviated many of man’s sorrows, abating the biting cold of winter and allowing the edifice of civilization and technological progress to ensue. However, Zeus would not let such hubris go unpunished. His righteous anger was cast down upon man, creating an unusual affliction to offset the boon of fire:

The renowned Ambidexter moulded from earth the likeness of a modest maiden, by Kronos’ son’s design. The pale-eyed goddess Athene dressed and adorned her in a gleaming white garment; down over her head she drew an embroidered veil, a wonder to behold; and about her head she placed a golden diadem, which the renowned Ambidexter made with his own hands to please Zeus the father. On it were many designs fashioned, a wonder to behold, all the formidable creatures that the land and sea foster: many of them he put in, charm breathing over them all, wonderful designs like living creatures with a voice of their own.4

This beauteous creature was Pandora, whose name means “allgift.” It is from her that all women are descended—“conspirators in causing difficulty”—and who ushered in a myriad of woes which would eternally plague mankind.5

But for Prometheus, the conniving titan, a far greater punishment was reserved:

And [Zeus] bound crafty Prometheus in inescapable fetters, grievous bonds, driving them through the middle of a pillar. And he set a great winged eagle upon him, and it fed on his immortal liver, which grew the same amount each way at night as the great bird ate in the course of the day.6

According to the myth, the hero Heracles would eventually slay the eagle, liberate Prometheus, and effect an uneasy reconciliation between Zeus and the titan.

Whereas Hesiod dutifully relates the myth, the tragic poet Aeschylus, in his sublime and ponderous Prometheus Bound, shows us how it was interpreted in the Greek consciousness.

The tragedy opens upon Prometheus, fettered and with grim countenance. The dramatic action to follow consists of a litany of Promethean monologues and a host of characters who visit the titan, both commending his affections for mankind, but also imploring him to cease his transgressions against Zeus and to steel his heart against the implacable divine will:

For thine own blossom of all forging fire
He stole and gave to mortals; trespass grave
For which the Gods have called him to account,
That he may learn to bear Zeus’ tyranny
And cease to play the lover of mankind.7

Zeus’ rule is portrayed as a tyranny, with the king of the gods being explicitly labelled a turannos, a word which, in democratic Athens, had an explicitly negative connotation. Even the subordinate Olympians, Hermes and Hephaestus, do the bidding of Zeus begrudgingly, sympathizing with Prometheus and lamenting as they bind him in chains.

And yet, no matter the legitimacy of Zeus’ reign, his will is law, and his word is unquestionable. As Hesiod declares,

Because of Zeus mortal men are unmentioned and mentioned, spoken and unspoken of, according to great Zeus’ will. For easily he makes strong, and easily he oppresses the strong, easily he diminishes the conspicuous one and magnifies the inconspicuous, and easily he makes the crooked straight and withers the proud—Zeus who thunders on high, who dwells in the highest mansions.8

The Chorus reminds Prometheus, “Ay, they are wise / Who do obeisance, prostrate in the dust, / To the implacable, eternal Will.”9 Prometheus’ deeds may be noble, but his suffering is equally necessary. His transgression was born of beneficence, but it was a grave transgression all the same. It is a violation of the cosmic hierarchy for mortal men to possess a divine tool such as fire, and for this reversal, it is right for Prometheus to steel his heart and stoically bear the capricious justice of Zeus.

Prometheus has perhaps so deeply captured the human imagination because he is the tragic figure par excellence, whose greatest virtue, his benevolence towards mankind, is precisely what brings about his downfall, drawing him into opposition with the divine will and condemning him to a dire fate.

The gift of fire is pinpointed as the watershed moment when man was able to rise above a state of nature into a civilized society with residence and agriculture, arts and science. Fire is the origin of all technology, and indeed becomes emblematic of technology itself. Prometheus soliloquizes,

In the beginning, seeing they saw amiss,
And hearing heard not, but, like phantoms huddled
In dreams, the perplexed story of their days
Confounded; knowing neither timber-work
Nor brick-built dwellings basking in the light,
But dug for themselves holes, wherein like ants,
That hardly may contend against a breath,
They dwelt in burrows of their unsunned caves.
Neither of winter’s cold had they fix’d sign,
Nor of the spring when she comes decked with flowers,
Nor yet of summer’s heat with melting fruits
Sure token: but utterly without knowledge
Moiled, until I the rising of the stars
Showed them, and when they set, though much obscure.
Moreover, number, the most excellent
Of all inventions, I for them devised,
And gave them writing that retaineth all,
The serviceable mother of the Muse.
I was the first that yoked unmanaged beasts,
To serve as slaves with collar and with pack,
And take upon themselves, to man’s relief,
The heaviest labour of his hands: and I
Tamed to the rein and drove in wheelèd cars
The horse, of sumptuous pride the ornament.
And those sea-wanderers with the wings of cloth,
The shipman’s waggons, none but me devised.
These manifold inventions for mankind
I perfected, who, out upon’t, have none,—
No, not one shift—to rid me of this shame.10

It is through fire that man was empowered with myriad technologies, through fire that man’s condition was elevated above mere subsistence, and through fire that man was imbued with a shred of divine dignity. Fire, the basis of all subsequent invention, is fundamentally divine, and by his use of fire, man participates in the divine also. And all this is only possible through mankind’s most ardent advocate, Prometheus.

This conception of the Prometheus myth demonstrates a complex relationship between man and the divine. There is a yawning gulf between man and divinity, with the Olympians aloof and indifferent to mortal suffering, only intervening in mortal affairs where it concerns them. Man may begin to resemble the divine, but not through his own virtues. It is only through the grace of his titanic advocate that man attains a borrowed vestige of divinity in his mastery of fire. While the fire which man employs is an unequivocal boon, there is an attendant curse cast upon him—the strife of womankind—to remind him of his physical limits and the consequences of excessive hubris. Prometheus’ bondage stands as a stark warning to mankind against too nearly approximating the divine power of Zeus.

In the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, however, we see a slight modification to the myth which would plant the seeds for a radically different interpretation of the Prometheus story generations to come. For Ovid, Prometheus was not only man’s most ardent advocate, but his creator, who mixed clay with the spray of brightly running waters to make a creature with godlike figure, who was inherently elevated above the bestial world by his aspect, not merely by his mastery of fire. The idea that man has a divine spark within him from his creation would portend a humanistic interpretation of the Promethean myth, the collapse of the hard barrier between man and divine, and a radically optimistic conception of mankind’s agency.

Prometheus, Vindicated

The Prometheus myth found renewed currency among the Romantic generation, from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century in Europe. During this age, men were becoming disillusioned with both the stifling rationalism of the Enlightenment and the ruthless oppression of the existing political orders. Revolution was in the air, on the breaths of radical poets and on the canvasses of defiant artists. From Blake to Byron, Friedrich to Delacroix, the new generation sought to all but deify man and elevate his status in the cosmos. The guiding ethos of this movement demanded a figurehead, a champion who embodied the plight of the oppressed against the rule of tyrants. The Romantics found one not in the present, but in the myths of the past—in mankind’s earliest benefactor, Prometheus.

But let us first go back a bit to see a pivotal moment in English literature which shines a light on this subsequent episode. In 1667, John Milton published Paradise Lost, perhaps still the greatest epic poem in the English language, which fused pagan mythology and the first three chapters of Genesis into a ravishing masterwork. The poem documents the fall of Satan, his subsequent misbegotten war on heaven, and finally, his successful revenge on God through the temptation of Eve. The poem was immediately associated with scandal for its portrayal of Satan who, for the first time, was humanized in literature. The reader is exposed to Satan’s lamentations, wails of suffering amid his lake of fire, and bitter invectives against heaven, forcing one to sympathize with the biblical arch-villain. Though perhaps not Milton’s intention, Paradise Lost blurred the lines between good and evil, humanizing the plight of Satan and questioning the unequivocal goodness of God’s reign. The story would even serve to inspire revolutionaries, who explicitly identified with Satan and equated God’s dominion as an unjust tyranny demanding to be overthrown.

Paradise Lost provided a template for Romantic conceptions of morality and politics—one of revolt against tyranny and oppressive public religion. This was a template for which the Prometheus myth was arguably a better fit than that of Satan, especially for the new wave of atheists who wished to depart from the dominant biblical fables. So it was that the Prometheus myth again became a subject for painters and poets across Europe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German polymath and prominent figure in the Sturm und Drang movement, was one of the first to publish a poem with a Romantic spin on the classic myth. In “Prometheus” the poet assumes the role of Prometheus, inveighing against Zeus’ dread tyranny:

I know nought poorer
Under the sun, than ye gods!
Ye nourish painfully,
With sacrifices
And votive prayers,
Your majesty:
Ye would e’en starve,
If children and beggars
Were not trusting fools.11

Zeus’ reign, declares Goethe, is a sham, founded upon the credulity of the masses who offer up votive prayers. Of course, the Prometheus myth was used as an allegory for the illegitimate rule of many kings who were supposedly appointed by the divine, with a cosmic license to subdue the unworthy masses. Questioning the rule of kings and questioning the precepts of divinity went hand in hand. For the ancients, this would have been unthinkable, but this became the guiding impetus for the Romantics.

Laying low the divine and human laws of the day was only part of the assignment, however. The other half was to elevate the common man, showing how he is partly divine also, and not merely a pawn for nobles to exploit and then discard. Humanism was the political movement sweeping the continent, in which Goethe was an ardent believer. The poem continues,

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!

Man, Goethe radically declares, is formed in the image of the divine. Accordingly, he is inherently worthy of dignified treatment and is justified in despising any limitation of his freedom. Prometheus is painted as the vanguard of the movement to usurp Zeus and usher in an age of humanism and liberty.

So, too, does George Gordon, Lord Byron emphasize these themes in his treatment of the myth, lionizing Prometheus and indicating man’s autonomy. His own Promethean poem is an ode to the titan, declaring,

Thy godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind

Indeed, that which is most demonstrative of man’s own agency is his mastery of fire, tools, and technology, with his intellect. It is no longer that fire is a gift from God—a borrowed aspect divine—but that man’s fundamentally divine intellect is embodied in his use of fire and every other technology downstream of it.

But still, the most passionate and thorough Romantic treatment of the Prometheus myth is Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, an expansive and exquisite lyrical drama and spiritual successor to Aeschylus’ tragedy. Indeed, Aeschylus supposedly penned a Prometheus Unbound himself, describing Prometheus’ liberation at the hands of Heracles, but it was lost to time. To both fill this gap in the record and pen a liberal revolutionary allegory, Shelley undertook to reinvent the Prometheus myth entirely.

Shelley justifies his choice to deviate from Aeschylus’ telling of the myth in his drama’s preface, writing that he was

averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.

Aeschylus’ rendition of Prometheus’ liberation at the hands of Heracles and a reconciliation with Zeus would be tantamount to a justification of tyranny, which would be utterly insufficient for Shelley’s revolutionary politics. The only possible ending to the myth, for Shelley, is the ultimate overthrow of Zeus the despot. In his view, tyranny itself, in all its cases, constitutes a reversal of the natural order, wherein “Heaven seems Hell” and up is down.12 The overthrow of Zeus will mark a restoration of the natural order, ushering in an age of Rousseauvian pastoralism and universal goodwill among man.

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Shelley argues that Prometheus is the “type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and truest motives to the best and noblest ends.”13 To justify Shelley’s liberal and humanistic worldview, Prometheus must be vindicated utterly. There can be no reconciliation between good and evil.

Indeed, Shelley notes his explicit inspiration from Paradise Lost, writing that,

The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest.14

By sympathizing with Satan, Shelley’s worldview constitutes not only a political, but a theological revolution also. Hierarchy in all its forms, whether Zeus, a mortal king, or God the Father is at the top, is unjust and oppressive.

Shelley’s rendition of the myth features Prometheus, the noble sufferer, stolidly bearing his fate and decrying the “fierce omnipotence of Jove,” like the many others.15 It is in the titan’s liberation where Shelley’s innovations become conspicuous. Heracles is absent from the dramatic personae. Instead, the usurper of Jupiter and the liberator of Prometheus is the underworldly monster Demogorgon, whose march on heaven is sudden and vicious.

The Demogorgon is not actually featured in Greek myth, but was instead born of a transcriptive error somewhere along the line, likely a corruption of “Demiurge.” Shelley probably used the term due to an assumed, but ultimately incorrect, etymology of demos (the masses) and gorgos (fierce, terrible). Demogorgon’s overthrow of Zeus is indeed a democratic image of the masses mobilizing to cast off tyranny and usher in a humanistic regime, with Prometheus vindicated ultimately in his partiality towards mankind.

In Shelley’s account, we see the list of human feats attributed to Prometheus ever expanding:

Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes . . .
and Love he sent to bind
The disunited tendrils of that vine
Which bears the wine of life, the human heart;
And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey,
Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath
The frown of man; and tortured to his will
Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,
And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms
Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.
He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe;
And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven,
Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind
Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song;
And music lifted up the listening spirit
Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,
Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound16

Not only fire, but love, iron and gold, speech, thought, science, and music, are innovations which we owe to our Promethean forebear. Most interesting is Shelley’s brief description of Science, which “struck the thrones of earth and heaven.” Despite the Romantics’ latent antipathy towards Enlightenment rationalism, they cannot deny (except for Rousseau) that it is through science and technology that man is empowered with a level of divine control over his own destiny, piercing into the secrets of nature and radically extending his agency.

If, in Shelley’s allegory, it is the will of the people which overthrows Zeus, it is Science which is crucial to shake his oppressive throne. We see, for Shelley, that science and technology are most indicative of man’s “godlike” nature, key to man’s independence in the cosmos, and his power to overcome the oppressive yoke of the natural world.

Perhaps ironically, however, when Zeus is overthrown, we see a return to pastoral pre-civilizational scenes, wherein all men are equal and undifferentiated:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless? — no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.17

There are innumerable tensions—or perhaps contradictions—which can be teased out of Shelley’s revolutionary account. How is it that fire elevates man to an equal status with Zeus? And how is man more justified than Zeus to extend his agency over the universe? How is it that fire and all attendant boons of science elevate man to a place where he then discards the whole edifice of civilization and returns to an idyllic pastoral existence? It seems that Shelley wants the foundations of modern civilization without the attendant oppression—It seem as if he wants to have his cake and eat it too.

It is these contradictions which a notable contemporary of Shelley’s picked up on, instead showing the dark side of the Promethean myth, the limits of human agency, and insisting that there is no such thing as free lunch. That thinker was none other than Percy Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley.

Prometheus, Humiliated

If Percy Shelley’s treatment of the Prometheus myth is hopeful and humanistic, his wife’s interpretation is dark, cynical, and grotesque. We find Mary Shelley’s account in her masterwork, Frankenstein, whose oft-forgotten subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.”18

The novel opens upon a sublime arctic scene, with Captain Robert Walton in search of a verdant paradise in the north pole, but whose ship is meanwhile encircled in an encroaching ice floe. It is in that unlikely place that he encounters the disheveled and cadaverous Victor Frankenstein, travelling over the ice by dogsled, who relates to the captain his myriad woes and the reason for his dismal northbound journey.

It is not some thing which Frankenstein seeks in the north, but some one: the malevolent and wretched spawn of his own scientific experimentations, who brought ruin on his house and made him the most contemptible of men. Frankenstein woefully declares to Walton, “I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been,” before delving into his tale.19

From a young age, Victor Frankenstein had a budding interest in the more occult spheres of natural philosophy, desiring to learn “the secrets of heaven and earth” and uncover the “inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man.”20 Having studied many taboo thinkers, consuming voluminous tomes concerning alchemical elements and paraphysical procedures, Frankenstein recounts that he

entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!21

Though he never forgot these transcendent aims, Frankenstein’s later studies in Ingolstadt adjusted his course towards the mainstream scientific procedures of the day. He found himself in awe at the sheer power which the modern scientist possessed at his fingertips, having “acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”22

In other words, the modern scientist had become a deeply Promethean figure.

Allured by the power and glory which attended great scientific achievement, Frankenstein undertook to ever more ardently study the causes of human mortality, which he, a precocious genius, uncovered in short time. Before long, Victor Frankenstein became “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”23

Heedlessly, he set about putting his new technique into practice to create a sentient being. Frankenstein “collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” until, after years of assembly, his creation was complete.24 He imbued the creature with the spark of life. It rose, and towered over him with haunting frame and twisted visage. Immediately, the scientist fled, mortified at what he had brought into the world.

The monster, for his part, spurned by his creator and society at large, set about on a solitary plight, approaching the world as if with the eyes of an infant. Though freshly born into the world, he had a piercing intellect and a hunger for knowledge. A critical moment came when the monster, battered by the elements, first discovered fire.

The fire warmed his cold extremities and captivated his eye with its frantic dance. And yet, when he reached his hand in the fire, it burned most painfully. Fire, the monster discovered, is dual. It warms, yet burns—it is through fire that man may survive the elements and rise above a state of nature, but fire may also be harnessed as a tool of cataclysmic destruction. The monster shows this explicitly when he burns down the house of a family who reject his affections.

In the Prometheus myth, heretofore, fire was taken to be an unequivocal boon to humanity. Yet fire is hardly so one-sided. Fire, and all the technologies and inventions which flow from it, are dual. They may empower man, but may be used also to destroy him. The duality of fire bring Prometheus’ vindication into doubt. As with fire, so too is Frankenstein’s creation dual. While Frankenstein discovered the secret of life, his discovery wrought havoc on mankind, unleashing a force that would endlessly torment him and his kin.

With new developments in natural philosophy, scientists suddenly possessed the tools to penetrate the secrets of heaven and earth. In so doing, each one of them, Frankenstein not least of which, became a Promethean figure. Yet, in usurping the gods and monopolizing their heavenly gifts, they accepted a great responsibility unto themselves.

If technology is no longer a gift from on high, but a human invention, then man may be right to take the place of the divine in his cosmology. However, the Romantics neglected to think this development through. If man is Promethean and fire is his invention, then so is the eagle that gnaws at his liver. Indeed, the fire and the eagle are often found in the very same invention—such as Frankenstein’s monstrosity.

Such reveals a unique revelation in the relationship between man and technology. For, technology acts upon man as much as man uses technology to advance his own aims. By personifying the monster, Shelley indicates the autonomous nature of man’s technological achievements and shows how they may ultimately dwarf their creators.

The monster, who was of tremendous strength, wonderous intelligence, and who had a superhuman resistance to the elements, after wandering astray in the forest for long, gained the skills of human speech and reading comprehension, in no small part from him discovering a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The inseparability of the Prometheus myth from the Fall in Genesis is revealed. Yet, in the Frankenstein tale, the already dubious morality of the Miltonic epic is confounded even further. Who is God and who is Satan in Shelley’s tale? Shelley finds these roles played no longer by divinities, but mortals. Frankenstein is the monster’s creator, and yet his greatest foe. The monster finds himself sympathizing with Satan and desiring to unleash a sea of calamities upon his creator for condemning him to such a loathsome condition.

Whereas Percy Shelley aligned Satan with Prometheus, in Mary Shelley’s work, the Promethean figure, Frankenstein, is drawn into opposition with the Satanic figure in his monster. Who is right and who is wrong? Is God’s rule legitimate? Is Satan’s revenge justified? Frankenstein defies an easy answer to these questions. The Promethean myth suddenly eludes facile moral interpretations, implying the moral ambiguity of modern science, which had unleashed countless benefits upon mankind, but also opened up innumerable new avenues for mankind’s humiliation.

The cosmological reversal whose seeds were planted in Milton, then, comes about through the advent of modern science.

The monster soon came to torment Frankenstein from afar, threatening his sanity and imperiling his loved ones. Frankenstein lamented, “I . . . had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart, and filled it forever with the bitterest remorse.”25

After a sordid game of cat and mouse, Frankenstein and his monster finally met face to face in a remote alpine scene, the latter demanding that his creator fashion him a companion to alleviate his lonesome lot. Frankenstein refused at first, but after much persuasion, eventually acceded to the demand. However, upon the completion of the perverted Eve, and under the monster’s watchful eye, Frankenstein dashed apart the limbs of his second creation, violating his oath and declaring that he would never create another monstrosity.

This ignited the rage of his monster, who vowed to utterly wreck his creator:

Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!26

Under the vengeance of his creation, Frankenstein endured the heights of depravity and saw the limits of human agency in the face of his technological achievement. He may have been its creator, but that hardly meant he was its master.

At novel’s end, back upon the icebound vessel with Captain Walton, he laments:

Oh! my friend, if you had known me as I once was, you would not recognise me in this state of degradation. Despondency rarely visited my heart; a high destiny seemed to bear me on, until I fell, never, never again to rise.27

The novel closes with Frankenstein, after enduring endless torment at his creature’s hand, wan and decrepit, ultimately perishing, perhaps as much from sorrow as from his bodily ills.

If Mary Shelley’s rendition of the Prometheus myth seems fantastical, it shouldn’t, for as time progressed, countless other Promethean figures would rise, as innumerable wonderous scientific achievements would reveal the capacity of modern man for humiliation. In 1811, the followers of Ned Ludd took up arms to destroy the industrial textile machines which were automating their jobs. Following that, in the 1830s, the Swing Rioters railed against the threshing machine and other farming implements. During the job losses of the Great Depression, many men sought out a scapegoat in the tractor and decried its adoption. Mankind, fearing the ultimate replacement of human labour with machines, was slowly becoming more incredulous towards the supposed benefits of technological advancement.

Replacement—this is the crux of the phenomenon I term “technological humiliation.” But not only that—being dwarfed, dominated, and controlled by one’s creation, these too are elements of the same. When a tool created by mankind begins to dictate man and society’s progression, when the internal logic of the tool impresses itself upon us, or—as in the case of Frankenstein—when the tool attains a degree of autonomy, or even mastery over us—that is when mankind experiences technological humiliation. As such, this humiliation becomes an inevitable product of the wonderous feats achieved by modern science.

In the modern world, technological humiliation manifests in myriad ways, whether as the automation of assembly lines, the dopamine rush in our brains with every notification from social media, or GPS-monitored vehicles which chastise you for speeding.

If there is one archetypal Promethean figure in modern history, whose life mirrored Mary Shelley’s cautionary tale, it is J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and architect of the Manhattan Project, the team which designed the first atomic bomb. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin point to the Promethean character of Oppenheimer in their biography of the man, aptly titled American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer was, by all accounts, a brilliant mind, at the forefront of theoretical and quantum physics while studying on the Continent, and returning to America to found the theoretical physics program at the University of California, Berkeley. Nuclear fission research was one of the many fields in which he excelled, and so when America was drawn into war with the Axis powers in 1941, he was chosen to spearhead the national effort to develop nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Through his scientific and administrative prowess, aided by a team of the greatest minds sourced from across the world, Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project successfully detonated a nuclear bomb for the first time on July 16th, 1945—in what was known as the “Trinity Test.” Shortly thereafter, Nazi Germany capitulated. By the time the U.S. Government had procured atomic bombs for military use, Japan was the last opponent left standing in the conflict. And so, on August 6th and 9th, two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing approximately 200,000 people—mostly civilians—and assuring Japan’s unconditional surrender.

The success of the Manhattan Project was a triumph for Oppenheimer and the nation at large. However, the bombing of Japan would send aftershocks through his conscience. While he would acknowledge the inevitability of the Hiroshima bombing, Oppenheimer thought the bombing of Nagasaki which followed was unnecessary from a military standpoint, being a needless loss of human life. Following the bombings, Oppenheimer was a nervous wreck.

President Harry Truman met with Oppenheimer to congratulate him on his achievement, however the scientist brazenly offended the president by repeating that he had “blood on his hands.”

“Blood on his hands,” exclaimed the president after the meeting, “damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” He called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist” and declared to staffers, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

Haunted by the unclean spot on his conscience, Oppenheimer dedicated his efforts toward advocating for an end to nuclear proliferation and the halting of development on the H-Bomb, an even more powerful tool of destruction. Oppenheimer’s advocacy brought him into conflict with powerful men in the halls of power in Washington, just as Prometheus’ wiles had enraged the king of the gods. The scientist had his moment, but had become a nuisance, and needed to be eliminated.

American Prometheus’ concluding episode details the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance at the hands of Lewis Strauss. Strauss, a high profile opponent of Oppenheimer’s in government, orchestrated what amounted to a kangaroo court to utterly humiliate the man. Oppenheimer was smeared as a Communist who was mentally unwell and a security threat to the nation if his clearance was not revoked. And so it was. Oppenheimer was forsaken by the very government who had enjoyed the fruits of his labour.

One could hardly imagine a better modern retelling of the Prometheus myth. Oppenheimer, the beneficent and brilliant scientist, ushered in the advent of the atom bomb. For his efforts, he was castigated and humiliated. However, this treatment did not merely come at the hands of Strauss and his ilk. It was the atom bomb itself which haunted Oppenheimer, escaping his grasp entirely and forever dwelling as a blot upon his conscience.

Oppenheimer’s life testifies that man is not in control of his tools. Despite the efforts of Oppenheimer and many others, nuclear proliferation did occur. This was not a conscious decision, but a consequence of the internal logic of the nuclear weapons themselves. Owing to their immense power, they became the key to global hegemony. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could willingly sacrifice the chance of global supremacy, and so proliferation was a necessary consequence of the nature of technological nations, teleologically oriented towards the acquisition of power, despite protests which swept the globe.

Man became dwarfed by his own inventions. But we must ask if this is unique to atomic weapons, or merely intrinsic to technology itself. Platitudes have always abounded that man is the master of his destiny, and that technology is neither inherently good nor evil, but can be used for either purpose. Such sanguine proclamations obscure the fact that technologies have their own internal logic, they shape the window of possibility for a user, and through the use of technologies, the user is imbued with unique psycho-social states.

Technology is never neutral, but shapes us as we engage with it. This is true of the atom bomb, the combustion engine, the printing press, and even fire.28

The atom bomb showed man the true extent of his destructive power, causing him to recoil and curse the very notion of progress which had erstwhile promised him a technological utopia.29 The combustion engine accelerated the very pace of society, extended man’s agency and freedom through his ability to traverse the globe. The printing press allowed for widespread standardization, allowing thought itself to coalesce along a number of pre-ordained lines—as in nationalism, rationalism, the invention of the fixed point of view, and the tyranny of the visual sense replacing the preceding aural culture.30 Even fire opened many new possibilities for human life, providing the foundation of all stationary civil societies, but also welcoming in all the oppression, sickness, and entrapments found therein.

No technology is neutral. While Frankenstein’s personified monster is an exaggerated image, it perfectly demonstrates this fact.

If we take the gods out of the Prometheus myth, and if man himself is identified with Prometheus, then we are forced to accept that man himself created both fire and the eagle which chews upon his liver. Man creates tools which both extend his agency and come to dominate him simultaneously. Marshall McLuhan famously defined a medium as an “extension of man.”31 But one wonders if, in the modern world, man has become merely an extension of his media.

The clearest example we have of extended agency contrasted with technological humiliation in the modern world is with Artificial Intelligence. At the tips of our fingertips are the ever-expanding capabilities of generative AI, which can create text, videos, music and much more. AI agents are proliferating, with which we may interact and wonder at their seamless mimicry of human activity. With such powerful tools in our grasp, each man is a Prometheus—a god, even, who may create effortlessly with a single prompt.

However, the abilities of AI portend human replacement. If a machine can produce artworks, poems, and songs on par with human creations, then what use is there for human artists? If an AI agent can perform thousands of computations in the blink of an eye, what use is there for human analysts? We are drowning in a sea of AI-generated slop, deceived time and time again by deepfakes, cheating on tests with AI-generated answers, being fed a diet of simulacra with no ground in reality. The things we once thought to be most emblematic of our humanity have become the first functions to be offloaded to machines. In all the annals of science fiction, it is difficult to think of a fate more uncanny than this.

If the reader denies the agency of ordinary technologies, he simply cannot deny the agency of AI. We have created a tool which dominates us, dwarfs us, and acts upon us. AI deceives us, lies to us, and flatters us until our sense of reality is deeply warped. We can no longer cling to the Cartesian cope that we are thinking subjects interacting with a static external world.

I am reminded of Marx’s dictum that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Whereas, in the ancient age, Prometheus was a venerable and tragic figure, today, he is the butt of the joke. For, in the modern world, we are all Prometheus, with a divine power of creation at our fingertips, but also with an ever-growing capacity for humiliation.

“A nation is a body of men who have done great things together in the past and who hope to do great things together in the future.”

-Frank Underhill

Sidney Ells was out of the game, and with him went the federal government. After the ordeal at Abasand, Ells seemed to be the very last federal civil servant who wanted anything to do with the sands. And so, with his retirement, the last and most ardent federal advocate of oil sands development passed from the picture. The second fire at Abasand marked the beginning of a period of oil sands development undertaken by Alberta without federal input. This period would last long, but not indefinitely.

Ells was out, but Karl Clark was still in. Undeterred by the dismal display at the Horse River Reserve, Clark and the Research Council of Alberta immediately poured their efforts into another semi-commercial separation plant on the very site that Robert Fitzsimmons had used a decade ago: Bitumount.

The project was partly an attempt to save face. Abasand might otherwise have scared private enterprise far away from oil sands development, and so the Province of Alberta stepped in to demonstrate that, free from the prejudiced oversight of the federal government, the oil sands could make for a profitable enterprise. The other aim of the project was more symbolic, as an attempt to firmly retake control over natural resources and hold unquestioned dominion thereover.

To the province’s credit, they learned the harsh lessons of Abasand, employing key oil men like Clark and allowing private enterprise to spearhead the project, while government played a supportive role from the sidelines. However, the oil sands offered no one a frictionless and easy time. Their stickiness precluded easy development, and yet again, punishing circumstances would arise to render the project’s success limited.

The candidate for the province’s aims was easily selected. Lloyd Champion, a financier from Montreal, had bought the International Bitumen Company from Fitzsimmons in 1942 after its insolvency, and in 1945 still held the lease to Bitumount. Champion renamed the company “Oil Sands Ltd.” in 1943 and intended to make something of his newly acquired holdings. Seeking capital and support for the project, he turned to the Alberta government, and the two parties fit, hand in glove. Thus began a joint private-public enterprise at the newly resurrected Bitumount separation plant.

Clark saw the project as a watershed moment for the oil sands. He thought that oil sands development must be definitively proved to be economical, arguing, “if the cost is not established soon, the resource may lie idle, needlessly, for years before some outside party . . . appears.”1 There were also many technical problems which needed to be worked out before commercialization became feasible.

On December 6^th, 1944, a joint venture was finalized between Alberta and Oil Sands Ltd. Ironically, $250,000 of funding from the Alberta Government was in fact from a “Post-War Reconstruction Fund” which each of the provinces received from the federal government.2 The plant, however, was not fully constructed until 1947, and operated intermittently until 1949. The main aim of the project was to estimate costs for separation on a commercial scale. The new Bitumount plant, as was only prudent, used Karl Clark’s separation methods, to no small success.

While there were intentions to turn Bitumount into a viable business by Champion, these faltered through another oil discovery which was likely celebrated by everyone except those in McMurray. On February 13^th, 1947, a gusher was struck at Leduc, revealing what was, at the time, the largest conventional oil reserve ever discovered in Canada. Leduc No. 1 was followed by the discoveries of the nearby Pembina and Redwater fields. Canada’s oil supply was no longer so precarious, as a bounty of sweet conventional oil flooded the market. Oil prices predictably fell, and oil sands development was set back once more.

Though nothing became of the second iteration of Bitumount, it provided meticulously recorded data for a report by Sidney Blair—Clark's whilom research assistant—in 1950, the seminal “Report on the Alberta Bituminous Sands,” which boldly declared that oil sands separation was finally economically feasible. The mining, separation, refinement, and transportation of crude oil from the Athabasca oil sands, Blair concluded, could be undergone for $3.10 per barrel, while the product would fetch $3.50 per barrel on global markets.3 Though Blair’s report was not without caveats, this was one of the most important steps towards commercialization yet, and it attracted a flurry of international interest.

Clark, for his part, remained with the University of Alberta until 1954, though the necessary work for commercialization was now complete. The work of public institutions was finished, and the time had come to pass the torch once and for all to private enterprise. Perhaps the departure of his federal counterpart, Sidney Ells, from the Mines Branch in 1945 took the edge off oil sands development. Or, perhaps Clark envied Ells, who was busying himself with leisure, poetry composition, and part-time consulting work in his retirement. In any case, at the age of 65, Karl Clark retired.

He was not done with the oil sands—not by a mile. Clark joked to his wife that he would “retire down the Athabasca river.”4 He participated vigorously in oil sands conferenes and wrote about the matter even into his retirement. He confessed late in life, however, that the scarring of the landscape beside the Athabasca River was hard for him to bear.5 The coming of commercialization was the product of his entire life’s work, though it was a Faustian bargain.

Just because the role of public enterprise was finished, that did not mean that the vast knowledge of Clark and Ells was moot, for at that time, plans were being formed for a large-scale industrial development of the oil sands by Sun Oil (now Suncor), an American firm. In 1954, discussions were initiated with Edmonton for Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. (GCOS), a fully commercial, at-scale, oil sands development north of Fort McMurray, heralded as the one project to crack the oil sands wide open and finally penetrate the sticky tar to pour forth great profits.6

Sun Oil, a massive Dallas-based American company, had eyed the oil sands for a while, but with extreme caution. Even so, due to their size, they were not averse to risks when those risks had good chances of paying off. And so, after the Blair report, Sun Oil president J. Howard Pew decided that the time to pull the trigger on northern Alberta was now.7 He secured a lease beside Ruth Lake—which Ells had scoped out so many years before— north of Fort McMurray, and after prolonged negotiations with the provincial government, began development.

GCOS, marked by all the prudence proper to private enterprise, whose losses couldn’t merely be thrust upon the taxpayer, sought out the most knowledgeable authorities on oil sands development to guide their efforts. Sun Oil’s sights fell, inevitably, on Clark and Ells, who were both brought on to the project in advisory roles. Clark, his daughter recalled, always said that “once the tar sticks to your boots, you can never get it off.” It appeared that Clark and Ells had oil sands fever as strongly as ever, desiring to see the region’s plight through to its bitter end.

Though they both aided GCOS, it was not as if the strife of the last forty years could be forgotten. Ernest Dobson, a Sun Oil executive, noted that the feud between them did not abate one iota in their retirement. “Each would come up once a month for perhaps two or three days,” said Dobson. “Shortly after, we discovered it was best to time the visits of the two men so that they came at separate intervals. Ells, a geologist, would have ideas on processing the sand; Clark, an expert on process, had his own concepts of the geology and the two fought bitterly.”8 As a matter of professional pride, neither man could assent to the views of the other. The two men who deserve the most credit for their contributions to the oil sands were, in the end, still flawed and vain humans.

Another example of their mutual enmity was over awards and accolades. In 1955, Clark was awarded the Gold Medal of the Professional Institute of the Civil Service of Canada for his achievements in “bringing about the commercial feasibility of extracting oil from the bituminous sands of Alberta.” Ells, in his collection of memoranda, wrote a scathing note denying and downplaying Clark’s achievement. Ells evidently thought the honour should have been his.

GCOS began production in 1967, but only one of the two oil sands pioneers lived to see the grand opening. Karl Clark died in 1966, falling prey to cancer and passing away in a Victoria hospital. On the occasion of Clark’s 75^th birthday, after his passing, a colloquium was held where papers on the oil sands were presented in his honour.

Ells, on the other hand, lived to see the christening of the first commercial oil sands separation plant, listening attentively as an audience member to the speeches at the grand opening of GCOS in 1967. He had lived to see his work through, but also to see his own rough-and-tumble pioneering ways grown obsolete.

Ells, too, died in Victoria only a few years later in 1971, but was no less active than Clark in his twilight years. He had written extensively about the sands, compiling a memoir of his accounts, a great deal of important memoranda and photographs, and had published a collection of Robert Service-esque poems and stories in the vein of Jack London about the ravages of the Canadian frontier. One can tell from Ells’ replete yet clunky lyrics that he had lived every single word he wrote.

In their writings, neither Ells nor Clark could ever seem to admit the merits or contribution of the other. In his Recollections, Ells named a host of men who deserved credit in the development of the oil sands. Fitzsimmons, Ball, and W.E. Adkins were lauded, yet Clark’s name was mysteriously absent.9 Clark, similarly, never admitted that Ells had separated oil sand first, nor that he had first proposed the use of flotation cells.10

Though Ells and Clark were seldom friendly, they were never far apart from one another. A GCOS pamphlet credits both Clark and Ells in the same breath: “Two technical pioneers in the Federal Department of mines helped make the Athabasca oil dream come true. S. C. Ells conducted technical surveys from 1913 onward which were responsible for much of the initial evaluation of the resource. Dr. Karl A. Clark began his experiments with the oil sands more than 40 years ago. After years of work with the Alberta Research Council, Dr. Clark and his group came up with a process to separate the oil from the sand which was suitable for continuous large-scale production.”11 GCOS used Clark’s separation method on a plot of land which Ells had discovered as highly valuable for surface mining.

And now we come back to the key question which launched this investigation: who is the father of the oil sands? Interestingly, the question is recurring, yet the answer seems to have shifted. In the 1920s and 30s, Sidney Ells was indisputably the figure most associated with the oil sands. It was Max Ball who famously declared that Ells was the “father” of said sands.

And yet, today, most sources suggest that the title belongs to Clark, given his contributions to the separation process. Museums in Alberta and government sources suggest Clark as the father, and even downplay Ells’ achievements. What is one to make of this?

We would be foolish not to suspect that political temperament has shaped even an obscure debate such as this. Tensions between Alberta and Ottawa have only grown since the first half of the 20^th century, and historiography has of course been shaped by this dynamic. I speculate that it is easier for Albertan historians and government officials to credit Clark with the greatest contribution to the sands, rather than loathfully admit that Sidney Ells, a civil servant from the federal government, had as great a contribution to their development, if not greater.

It is, of course, immensely difficult to say definitively one way or the other. It would be close to impossible to somehow quantify the contributions of each and to make a choice by leger. However, what has been obscured by many, including Clark, was that Ells was the first to scope out the region’s resources methodically and the first to separate oil from sand using hot water. If a “father” is considered as a progenitor, then the case for Ells becomes clearer. Clark, though his contributions cannot be understated, was a dutiful scientist, who borrowed and perfected techniques used first by others.

We can never know exactly the degree to which Ells’ paranoia of persecution was grounded in reality, nor the degree to which Clark attempted to discredit Ells. However, the points I find most damning are Clark’s scathing report on Ells’ work while Ells was not in a position to respond, Clark’s subsequent adoption of hot water separation, as well as his declaration in 1921 that, before him, only distillation and emulsions had been used to separate the bituminous sands—a bald lie. Ells’ perceptions may have been warped by the passions that beset all of mankind, but these circumstances are enough to suggest some conspiracy, however large, against him.

All this may warrant a question from the reader: why is it necessary to go into such detail, wading through musty archives to answer a question which appears, at least today, irrelevant? It is a fair objection, and I think three things must be kept in mind.

Firstly, the truth is inherently good. If there is an error in the historical record which may be filled in through the diligent study of obscure source material, it is good to do so.

Secondly, as a matter of legacy, we owe it to those who accomplished great deeds, from which we continue to benefit, to accord merit where it is properly due. The oil sands, which today provide myriad jobs and wealth to Canada, had notable architects who deserve our reverence and admiration. As W.H. Norrish wrote, “To men of such vision and perseverance must go much of the credit for Canada's development as a modern industrial nation.”12

Thirdly, it is good to recall those who, though boldness, bravery, and sheer force of will, left an indelible mark on the course of our country. If we recall with vivacity the animating spirit which built a nation such as our own, we may more accurately imitate it so as to sustain what has already been made and face the future with a similarly tenacious thrust of intention. As Frank Underhill once wrote, “A nation is a body of men who have done great things together in the past and who hope to do great things together in the future.”13

I only hope that the above may justify the present inquiry in the reader’s eyes.

Today, the oil sands are a monstrous operation. Canada is the fourth largest oil producing nation on earth, and Alberta alone possesses the world’s fourth largest proven reserve of oil. Canada benefits $147 billion annually as of 2024 from exports of crude oil alone, making it our single most valuable resource and encompassing just under 20% of total export revenue. The total rises to $170 billion when accounting for natural gas and refined petroleum products also. While conventional oil reserves dwindle, oil sands extraction continues to ramp up.

Though it may be said that the history of the oil sands only truly begins in 1967 with the opening of Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd.—and though I may not disagree with this sentiment—I elect to end my history here, having confined my account to the answering of a single question, which has never yet been answered satisfactorily.

The legacies of Karl Clark and Sidney Ells are tremendous, though the traces are scant. In northern Alberta, however, they may be found still for those who search hard enough. Ells river, north of Fort McMurray, is named after the obstreperous explorer, while Dr. K.A. Clark Elementary School sits on the town’s main drag, named after the assiduous scientist. Indeed, Ells Crescent and Clark Crescent, in a residential neighbourhood of Fort McMurray, sit side by side—the two men inextricably intertwined in legacy, as in life.

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“Here is a town employing approximately 155 people . . . yet it is modern in almost every sense, with waterworks, electric lights and everything else, $500,000 having been already spent on modern buildings, and yet not one dollar has been spent on refinery equipment or a separation plant. If that is not a colossal waste of public money, and, I would also say, a deliberate attempt at sabotaging that development for years to come, I should like to know what to call it.”

-C.E. Johnson1

In the Athabasca oil sands, 1930 was a turbulent year. There were both promising and dismal signs for the future of the region. There was a grave economic depression in full swing, and yet a number of ever-eager speculators and investors had their attention fully on Alberta bitumen; there was slowdown on oil sands research, and yet a new semi-commercial oil sands pilot plant under construction on the shore of the Athabasca river; control over natural resources was finally wrested by the three prairie provinces—Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—from the iron grip of the Dominion Government, and yet a crucial section in the heart of the oil sands remained under federal jurisdiction.

And here we find Sidney Ells and Dr. Karl Clark, each coming out of the most productive period of oil sands research that either had ever undergone, suddenly feeling the brunt of government austerity, with their funding severely cut and the wind taken out of their sails. However, while research was forcibly stalled, the period that followed would see progress towards oil sands development all the same, as two semi-commercial oil sands plants would rise, each against prohibitive odds, to demonstrate the possibility of a viable commercial enterprise in the Athabasca oil sands.

While the focus turned away from research and towards commercial development, Ells and Clark, wishing earnestly to see the development of the oil sands through, threw themselves into promoting the sands, attracting attention to them, writing public articles, and advising the fledgling oil sand separation plants.

The first such semi-commercial separation plant was Bitumount, erected on the east shore of the Athabasca River, 90 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, on a site which Ells had marked as noteworthy fifteen years prior. The man behind it was Robert Fitzsimmons of the International Bitumen Company, who would be the first entrepreneur to try his hand at commercial separation, producing bitumen, and even a small refinery to make various fuels.

Fitzsimmons was born in 1881 on Prince Edward Island. A lifelong promoter, he had been involved in a number of commercial enterprises, including real estate dealings around Spokane, Washington, when the Alberta oil sands caught Fitzsimmons’ eye. News about the sands, rumoured to be one of the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, was spreading like wildfire. And so, in 1925, he agreed to take over the Alcan Oil Company, rechristened it the International Bitumen Company in 1927, and moved north to begin a long and fruitless drilling campaign.2

Fitzsimmons didn’t yet understand the nature of the sands, as he had not taken the time to consult with the leading authorities, such as Clark or Ells. Drilling wells was not a viable path, as the viscous sand, sitting in a semi-solid state, would never be thus coaxed to the surface. The pressurized underground reservoirs of conventional crude oil were nowhere to be found. It took Fitzsimmons years to learn this lesson, however, as he would continue to drill on his lease well into 1929—which makes him the last of the optimistic wildcatters who vainly thought that a fount of flowing oil awaited them in the promised land of the north.3 No, the oil did not come easily in the McMurray country.

To his credit, Fitzsimmons persisted, learning the ways of the oil sands through trial and error—as well as a fair bit of snooping on his colleagues at the Clearwater plant. The Clearwater plant, operating from 1929-1930, jointly overseen by the Research Council of Alberta and the federal Mines Branch, was under the purview of Ells and Clark, who frequently welcomed visits from Fitzsimmons.

His motive for visiting was not solely for companionship. From his observations, Fitzsimmons was finally coming to see that a quarry and separation plant were needed to extract oil from the sands, and that Ells and Clark were the most knowledgeable about the matter. Ells and Clark, for their part, did not care to hide the secrets of their process, for they desired that the results of their experimental plant be known to all for the future development of the sands.

Fitzsimmons went on to construct a separation plant in 1930 which resembled a primitive copy of the Clearwater Plant. It was clear he was playing copycat, for any modifications Clark applied to the Clearwater plant shortly thereafter appeared at Bitumount.4 Despite profiting from the example of the Clearwater plant, Fitzsimmons’ operation was still entirely rudimentary. Clark observed,

“His separation plant was of the crudest sort and worked by virtue of the fact that the bituminous sand he had to use was particularly amenable to separation. He put the excavated sand into an iron vessel set over a wood fire and stirred it about in the hot water with a long handled shovel. The bitumen frothed, floated to the surface and was skimmed off by hand.”5

Despite Clark’s dismissive comments, Bitumount produced a good product by all accounts. The plant successfully separated bitumen from the sand, though this was likely due to the sand being exceptionally fine and workable on Fitzsimmons’ lease. Clark’s had a good enough impression of Fitzsimmons, though he thought that the newcomer lacked both the technical expertise and business acumen to accomplish anything noteworthy in oil sands development.

However, what Fitzsimmons lacked in expertise in the field, he made up for in sheer force of will. Building a semi-commercial oil sands separation plant in the midst of a depression was no simple task, and the money did not come easily. As of 1932, Bitumount was operating with moderate success and Fitzsimmons had spent $200,000 on the project.6 The money was all gone and no revenue was coming in, despite Fitzsimmons’ desperate attempts to market his bitumen as anything from a rust and acid proof paint to electrical insulation to a fence post preservative.7 And so, without funds, Bitumount sat dormant from 1932 to 1937.

During this time, Fitzsimmons was touring the United States and Great Britain in a frenzied attempt to attract capital. Indeed, during these tours, he was able to sell enough stock for future expansion of Bitumount, thanks in great part to his ability to stretch the truth of how useful bitumen alone could be.

Returning to Fort McMurray in 1936 with newfound capital, Fitzsimmons had renewed hopes for his noble pilot plant. However, the early successes of Bitumount were not to be replicated. Having hired an ambitious petroleum engineer named Harry Everard in 1936, Fitzsimmons tried to get the plant up and running again, but the old equipment was not to be resurrected as easily as Lazarus. Results of that year were disastrous, with the final separated product still being over 50% sand and water.8

Plant reconstruction began in 1937, but funds were excruciatingly tight. All the equipment they bought was used and shoddy, and morale around the project was exceedingly low. The conditions to which Fitzsimmons subjected his employees certainly warranted this low morale. Times were tough, and Fitzsimmons needed to spare every expense he could. As a result, he routinely neglected pay his employees the wages they earned. Everard’s salary was not being paid at all, leading him to harangue Fitzsimmons on the matter long after he quit the project in 1937. So, too, did Frank Badura, Fitzsimmons’ driller and later plant mechanic, wage a lawsuit against Fitzsimmons for lost wages dating back to the early 1930s.9

Despite setbacks, Bitumount’s operations did improve in 1937. On a good day, the plant was able to process 450 barrels of bitumen, or 15 to 34 an hour, and a bitumen with a sand content of 1.2% and water content between 15 and 20%.10 However, there weren’t very many good days. Breakdowns were increasingly common towards the end of the 1937 season, and in September, with prospects looking dim for plant operation alone and worse for IBC, having no contracts for the sale of its product, Fitzsimmons called it quits and returned to his home in Edmonton.11

Just when Fitzsimmons was at his wit’s end, a miracle struck. Consolidated Mining and Smelting reached out to IBC in 1938, seeking cheap gasoline and diesel fuel to use at their new gold mining operations on the shores of Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan and radium mines on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. Fitzsimmons was enthused, accepted the contract, and got right back to work at Bitumount. To replace Everard was Elmer Adkins, a young engineer from Medicine Hat. However, Fitzsimmons’ frugality was unflinching, and Adkins too would contest his unpaid wages.

After more plant maintenance and the addition of a refinery in 1938, Bitumount began producing fuel for CM&S. Although this new contract was a burst of hope for IBC, Fitzsimmons’ debts were catching up to him. IBC was finally declared insolvent, despite turning a profit in 1938, and CM&S was dissatisfied with the quality of fuel provided as well as IBC’s inability to deliver to the full extent of its contract. 1938 was the last time Fitzsimmons would operate his plant on the Athabasca. Sidney Ells, in the following year, assessed that Bitumount failed because of gross mismanagement and useless equipment.12

Fitzsimmons was grossly angered and disappointed by the failure of his pilot project, but was never able to admit that any of it was his fault. Instead, he blamed his irascible employees for deliberately sabotaging his operations and big oil companies for blocking development of the oil sands.13 In 1942, His debt having exceeded $55,000, Bitumount was placed under seizure and auctioned off.

Though it may not have been a success, though his business tactics may have been unscrupulous, and though the plant itself rarely ran smoothly, Bitumount was the first semi-commercial oil sands separation plant, and all but literally paved the way for those that followed.

But another semi-commercial oil sands separation plant was operating in the region during the 1930s—one which ultimately proved more consequential. This was Abasand Oils Ltd, owned by Maxwell Ball, whose rise and fall was an epic tale of courage and persistence, personal and political tensions, and in the end, a display of the heights of government mismanagement—and perhaps even sabotage.

Let us rewind to set the scene. The year was 1921 when a petroleum engineer in Denver, Colorado, named James Mason McClave first caught wind of the immense reserves of oil located in the Athabasca oil sands.14 Indeed, it was Ells who first brought them to McClave’s attention.15 Being a seasoned petroleum engineer already at that point, the challenge of the oil sands intrigued McClave. He set about experimenting on samples of oil sand with a mind to isolate its bituminous content. It is doubtless that he was inspired by the work of Ells and Karl Clark during this time, closely reading their reports.16 By 1926, McClave had a number of patents filed both in Canada and the United States for bituminous sand separation processes. However, McClave was a scientist, not a businessman, and so if he were to put his ideas into practice, he would need someone to raise funds, manage operations, and sell the separated product. He found such an accomplice in his friend, fellow Denver oil man Maxwell Ball.

Ball was born in 1885 in Illinois, but soon thereafter his family moved to Denver, Colorado, where he would spend his youth. He studied to be a mining engineer, and later added a law degree to his achievements. He had worked for the United States Geological Survey, the United States Land Classification Board, and for a variety of large private oil companies. Having lived and breathed the oil industry, he was eager for new frontiers. When his friend J.M. McClave approached him with the prospect of developing the unconventional oil reserves of Canada, Ball was enticed.

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After studying the sands as much as he possibly could from a distance, Ball sought an audience with the man whom he thought, not wrongly, to be the world’s leading expert on Alberta’s oil sands: Sidney Ells. Ells travelled to Denver at Ball’s request for three days of meetings with him, McClave, and a number of other associates to discuss the possibility of undertaking to build a commercial separation plant in Alberta’s north with his company, then called the Canadian Northern Oil Company.17 Ells must have liked what he heard, as he afterwards staunchly advocated Ball’s cause to the Canadian government, which was still rather distrustful of American capital.

Ball, however, did not fall onto one side or other of the sectarian schism between Ells and the federal Mines Branch, and Clark and the Research Council of Alberta. Ball wanted all the advice he could get, and so in the same year, he wrote to Dr. Clark to request his insight on a number of salient matters. Clark recounts that he found Ball

“by far the most satisfactory man to talk to that has yet come along with a bituminous sand development scheme. I believe he has, in general, a sound outlook on what is involved in establishing a successful industry and wishes to proceed in a sensible, logical way.”18

Though Ells and Clark were both equally pleased with Ball and McClave, there was trouble brewing on the horizon. North American markets began a cascading crash on Black Thursday, in October 1929. Capital would be tight, if available at all, and demand for oil would plummet. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Strife between the province of Alberta and the federal government, long simmering beneath the surface, was finally coming to the fore. A political battle was to be waged in 1930 over natural resource rights. An unlikely theatre of this contest was the Athabasca oil sands, and Maxwell Ball and his company were directly in the crosshairs.

The reader may recall that, as far back as 1913, Sidney Ells, under orders from the Director of National Parks, had selected of 580 acres along the Horse River, a mile due west of Fort McMurray, with favourable conditions for bituminous sand mining, to be placed under jurisdiction of the federal Parks Branch. The sand from the Horse River Reserve was intended to be used for pavement in national parks. However, nothing much transpired on this property during the next couple of decades.19 In 1930 the Horse River Reserve would come to the fore.

A political drama playing in the background of early oil sands development was the contest over natural resource rights. In the Canadian context, natural resource rights, as enshrined in the 1867 British North America Act, are a matter of provincial concern. However, the three prairie provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, lacked control over their own resources until 1930. The argument that the federal government gave was that, since the Government of Canada bought the land that later constituted the prairie provinces outright at its own expense, it had to profit from those resources to make up the balance. Additionally, the three provinces which were yet young, had to be stewarded along under Ottawa’s hand until they were ready to take control of natural resources for themselves. The provinces, however, had been howling that they were ready for decades already.

Finally, on May 30^th, 1930, after decades of discontented Western voices, fruitless conferences, and caustic letters between premiers and prime ministers, the federal Natural Resources Transfer Act was given royal assent, as were acts in all three provincial legislatures to receive ownership of their natural resources. It was a long time coming for Alberta and Saskatchewan, who had entered Confederation in 1905, and an even longer time for Manitoba, which had been a province since 1870. The strife, for most, was finally over. In the Athabasca country, however, it was still heating up.

In the 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Act, there was an insidious caveat. The Horse River Reserve, one of the most attractive plots of land for oil sand development, was retained under the sole jurisdiction of the federal government, as well as some additional land surrounding the initial 580 acres.20 This move blindsided Alberta and was met with widespread uproar. Alberta would not soon forget this slight. Premier Richard Reid himself travelled to Ottawa to vigorously protest the retention of the Horse River Reserve. The province publicly decried this decision, with myriad ministers deriding Ottawa in the provincial legislature.

Indeed, the implications of this move were clear: the federal government intended to go about oil sands development without the consent, let alone aid, of the province. It was yet another encroachment of the federal government on Alberta’s jurisdiction. One can see the flame of modern Western alienation being kindled all the way back in 1930. Perhaps an unlucky bystander to this feud was Maxwell Ball, for, soon after the resource transfer, the federal government had granted him a lease on the Horse River Reserve for the construction of a bitumen separation pilot plant.21

If there was a single man lobbying for the federal government to retain a foothold in the oil sands, it was Sidney Ells. In all likelihood, he is to thank for the government’s decision to retain control over the Horse River Reserve. When Ball asked Ells for a piece of land on which to begin his operations, Ells met the Director of National Parks himself to ask that the Horse River Reserve be granted as a lease to Ball.22 Ball quickly realized that he had unintentionally alienated himself from the Alberta government and its institutions, including the RCA and Clark. Seeing which side of the schism he had landed upon, he knew he would have to rely on Ells for help, and so requested Ottawa let Ells be involved in Abasand, as Ball’s company was now called, as a consultant. The Minister of Mines first denied the request, though mysteriously relented shortly thereafter.23

Though it took him attracting the ire and suspicion of Alberta to secure a lease on the Horse River, finding a location was the easy part. Finding the capital to build a pilot plant in the middle of the worst depression in recent memory was the hard part. Ball faced the same problems as Fitzsimmons during this time—both in a desperate struggle to keep afloat. A truly herculean effort would be needed to raise the capital to begin construction on their envisioned separation plant.

At a time when both federal and provincial funding were at rock bottom, it was unimaginable that Ball and McClave could source funds. Clark wrote in 1932 that “All moves toward tar sand development are at a standstill of course. I did not get north at all this year. Ells beat me out for he managed to wrangle a trip although he did nothing but look over his gear.”24 Somehow, Ball managed.

In 1933, Ball and McClave built a small pilot plant in Denver to show prospective investors the feasibility of their methods. The following year, they moved their laboratory to Toronto to iron out the kinks in their method. Miraculously, they summoned enough capital to begin construction on a separation plant and refinery for crude oil on the Horse River Reserve in 1935.25

To clear the land, Ball hired a man named Paul Schmidt, who had previously worked at Ells’ quarry on the Clearwater River and came with a glowing recommendation. He, too, was fiercely loyal to the development of the sands, and was able to handle the technical side of the work, being university educated. He would prove instrumental in the development of Abasand over the next decade.26

The beginning of construction was another bit of inopportune timing, as in 1936 there was a major discovery of oil in the dwindling Turner Valley oilfield southwest of Calgary, which was still the biggest producing oilfield in the country. On June 16^th, 1936, Royalites No. 1 became an uncontrolled gusher, spewing forth cheap and accessible conventional oil from the field’s “deep basin.” The country’s oil production soared. Whereas Canada only produced 4% of its total supply of oil in 1936, by 1941, this number rose to nearly 20%, putting yet more downward pressure on oil prices and reducing the necessity of finding new domestic oil reserves.27

Despite this setback, in September, 1936, an opening ceremony was held on the Horse River Reserve to inaugurate Abasand. Although there was still more work to be done, the plant had operated for four days that fall, producing a few barrels of crude oil, with a theoretical daily input capacity of 250 tons of oil sand.28 The plant was not equipped to weather the brutally cold winter that followed, and so operations shut down, to be resumed in the summer.29

Elsewhere, oil sands operations were slowing down. Fitzsimmons’ plant at Bitumount lay dormant. Ells’ research had been cut back dramatically, with the Depression in full swing. Clark, too, found so little funding for oil sands operations that he accepted a position with Trinidad Leaseholds Ltd. to determine the properties of oil sands on the island nation of Trinidad. Clark briefly worked in London, where the company was based, in the early months of 1936, and then in Point-a-Pierre, Trinidad, until late in 1937.30

So, too, with Abasand, did work slow dramatically in the latter years of the decade. To thoroughly thrash the optimism of Abasand’s grand opening the year prior, 1937 was essentially a write-off. The sand mined at the site was incredibly abrasive, which continually clogged and destroyed the machines—both in the mining and processing phases of extraction. The Sauerman excavators which Abasand used to mine sand that summer simply did not do at all—the sand was too tough. The problem was that, unlike the sand at the Clearwater plant or at Bitumount, the oil sand at Abasand was not waterlogged, but was rather dry. At Ells’ suggestion, Ball ordered a number of shale planers to be brought up for mining, but these were of no use either, as the teeth on the machine would wear away from the abrasive sand in only a few hours of mining.31 Abasand was entirely at an impasse.

In the years that followed, a new mining technique was adopted and the plant was overhauled to accommodate the rough and coarse sand. Indeed, blasting the sand apart with explosives and then loading it directly on trucks appeared to be the only way of proceeding. However, this practice had a notable drawback: the quality of refined products was hopelessly diminished, limiting the potential markets Abasand could sell to. The gasoline produced from the refinery had a remarkably high sulfur content, making it unsuitable for wide distribution and offensively pungent. Use of the gasoline was limited to locals, who called the stuff “Abascent” and referred to the plant site as “Skunk Hollow.”32

Unshaken, Ball forged ahead and ramped up production. Just as Fitzsimmons’ plant at Bitumount was declared insolvent, Abasand was finally able to produce a separated product on a semi-regular schedule. Fuel was needed at Goldfields on Lake Athabasca, and Abasand was the natural choice to provide it. In 1941, 200 barrels of gasoline per day were floated via barge down the Athabasca river to the mines. And later, CM&S agreed to buy all the diesel fuel produced at Abasand. The rugged northern miners were not deeply bothered by the putrid odour of “Abascent.”33

Under Ball’s direction, Abasand utilized J.M. McClave’s patented separation process. It was similar in principle to the early experiments which Ells had undergone and the process which Clark had devised. The crude sand was first digested in a bentonite solution, sometimes with the addition of sodium silicate or another alkaline reagent. Then, the solution was heated to 150-200°F, whence the colloidal bentonite effected a separation of bitumen from the sands. The bitumen, in the form of a thin pulp, was transported to a flotation cell, where the free oil was skimmed from the top, while the tailings were filtered out into a storage tank.34

Using this separation technique, with new and improved machinery, by 1940, Abasand was finally producing separated bitumen and refining it into a myriad of useful fuels. By 1941, they had a steady stream of product sales, mostly to northern Saskatchewan. That year, the plant produced 41,265 gallons of gasoline, 70,700 gallons of diesel oil, 137,550 gallons of fuel oil, 375,235 gallons of residuum, and 319 tonnes of coke.35 However, Abasand was mysteriously reluctant to formally document the quality of their finished products. Even so, things were looking up for Ball. With approximately $700,000 invested in the project until that point, it looked like the oil sands were finally starting to pay dividends.36

Aside from improvements in mining and separation, one of the key reasons for Abasand’s newfound success was Canada’s declaration of war on Germany on September 10^th, 1939. Whereas the price of oil had languished for most of the decade, in typical fashion, the world suddenly couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Whereas the Great War was characterized by grueling attrition and stasis, the coming war portended kinesis, with the tank, the plane, and the ship creating a highly volatile battleground of constantly shifting lines.

The key to this highly mobile form of warfare was oil. Canada, even still, was desperately in need of assuring its own domestic supply of oil, which led eyes once more to the Athabasca oil sands. Uranium, also, was becoming a highly prized commodity due to secret government experiments on novel forms of explosives in the deserts of Los Alamos, New Mexico. This led to a flurry of mining activity in uranium-rich northern Saskatchewan, one primary market for Abasand’s products.

It looked like Abasand, having braved a deep economic depression, would emerge triumphantly to become a key part of Canada’s wartime procurement efforts, providing the country with secure access of what was then the most highly contested commodity in the world. One magazine put it succinctly: “Those tar sands contain enough oil to lick Hitler, Japan, and Italy.”37 Canada still only produced around 20% of the oil it consumed, and so it was hoped that Abasand held the answer to Canada’s energy independence.38

However, it was not to be. In November, 1941, a small fire began in the Abasand plant. Without adequate firefighting equipment, it quickly erupted into a blaze that all but consumed the plant, causing $250,000 of damage and indefinitely suspending operations.39 No explanation was ever offered as to the source of the fire.

The country was at a crossroads. With Ball’s endeavours all but razed to the ground, everyone agreed that something needed to be done to assure Canada’s supply of oil and encourage domestic oil production. In a classic case of the politician’s fallacy, something needed to be done—but the selected course of action was barely remedial. However, with the Horse River Reserve being federal jurisdiction, the political football on oil sands development was tossed Ottawa’s way. Subsequent events would be a showcase of the heights of government profligacy, and inefficiency. However, with voices howling in Edmonton and Ottawa, there appeared to be no way out but through. And so, something was done: the federal government took control of Abasand Oils Ltd., without compensation, effective immediately.

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The move was advised by the federally appointed wartime oil controller George Cottrelle, who had already been in discussion with Max Ball since 1940 about the possibility of nationalizing the project.40 However, the man who made the decision was the formally titled Minister of Munitions, and informally titled “Minister of Everything,” Clarence Decatur Howe.

C.D. Howe was perhaps the second most important man in government at the time, next only to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King himself. Howe’s role in government was overseeing the procurement of critical resources, from oil to bombs, for Canada’s war effort—essentially creating a wartime economy from scratch. He had not hesitated to nationalize companies and entire industries before 1941, even founding a government-owned polymer corporation, and so the government takeover of Abasand was not a hard decision for him. Howe’s ruthless competence and sound judgement can hardly be understated—indeed, there are few individuals who deserve more credit for Canada’s successful war effort. However, even a man such as Howe was not immune to scandal and mishap.

As of February 18^th, 1942, Abasand was owned by the federal government. The terms of the agreement were that the government would take title to the operation with no compensation to Ball, with $500,000 initially appropriated to rebuild the plant. The old management had been supplemented with what Howe called “some of the very best men we can lay our hands on,” and he intended “to do everything possible to put that plant in operating condition for its present rated capacity, as a pilot plant.”41 Indeed, Howe’s sights for the project were set high, anticipating that Abasand could produce asphalt for the Alaska Highway then under construction as soon as 1943.42 Indeed, this proved to be the height of sanguinity.

An unexplained curiosity is why Consolidated Mining and Smelting had been brought in to work on plant repairs. When Howe declared that he was soliciting only the best and brightest for the project, one’s mind jumps to Sidney Ells, Karl Clark, and Maxwell Ball. Indeed, oil controller George Cottrelle had advised Howe himself that “if anyone is likely to solve the problems attendant on this deposit [referring to Abasand], and which at one time seemed insurmountable, Mr. Max Ball and his associates will do it.”43 And yet, none of Howe’s men seemed to want anything to do with Ells, Clark, or Ball.

Ells’ mentions of Abasand in his Recollections are sparse. Clark, on behalf of the Research Council of Alberta, had proposed a formal cooperation between the RCA and Abasand Oils Ltd. in 1943, which was abruptly cancelled.44 Shortly after the agreement fell through, he wrote, “I do not know much about what Abasand is doing as relations are not particularly cordial.”45 This was a grievous slap in the face, as Clark had advised and assisted CM&S in myriad ways, all free of charge until that point. Ball, despite his passion for and knowledge of the sands, seems to have been excluded from the project altogether. It certainly makes one wonder who these “very best men” were and how they were selected.

Instead, an oil man from the east was tasked with managing the government’s new asset. Earl Smith, hailing from Petrolia, Ontario, had experience in the oil and gas industry, but only in the waning conventional fields of southern Ontario. The oil sands were a new challenge for him—one which, as his tenure progressed, he appeared not to understand in the least. As John MacNicol, Member of Parliament for Davenport, summarized,

“We all know how much oil sands there are around Petrolia. There the oil is pumped out of wells. If working there gives a man sufficient experience to operate an oil sands plant, then I might just as well hang out my shingle as a doctor, and I know nothing about medicine.”46

The most pressing task for the new management was, of course, plant reconstruction. Under the charge of Earl Smith and CM&S, plant rebuilding began as soon as possible in the 1942 season. The new Abasand was to be essentially similar to that which preceded it, using the McClave process of hot water separation. Clark helped the project without compensation in an advisory role, giving advice where the outside firm and inexperienced staff were often at a loss. McClave, too, stayed on during plant reconstruction, without whom the project may have been all but lost.

The 1942 reconstruction efforts were quite successful. Though they were limited by many factors, the plant was put into working shape, operating intermittently, and producing 11,000 odd barrels of oil, according to a statement by C.D. Howe (although this number is disputed).47 CM&S’s recommendations after the 1942 season were that it should be repaired and enlarged with the same general plant schematic. Yet, for reasons both obscure and incomprehensible, this did not happen. On the contrary, the plant was ordered to be demolished and built anew.

Many documents from this period are hidden, restricted, or nonexistent, and so it is immensely difficult to get to the bottom of who ordered the plant torn down. From 1943 onward, Parliamentarians would point fingers and demand to know who made the decision, but to no avail. To this day, no one knows who ordered the Abasand plant to be torn down, although the most likely candidate is C.D. Howe, under whose authority the plant lay. If Howe did order the plant torn down, this may have been the single greatest lapse in judgement by an otherwise competent minister.

The decision to rebuild Abasand once more was only the first in a series of questionable judgements. The next was Howe’s decision to grant General Engineering, a Toronto firm, the contract to rebuild the plant. If Earl Smith was considered ill-equipped for oil sands work at the time, General Engineering was doubly so. With a pool of great knowledge and expertise on standby, the choice of an outside firm entirely ignorant of the oil sands was baffling to most, not least of which Sidney Ells, who wrote that “the Honourable, ‘what’s a million anyway,’ C.D. Howe” signed an agreement with General Engineering, who didn’t have “the foggiest idea” as to the unique problems posed by the oil sands.48

C.D. Howe, due to his domineering authority over the wartime economy, and often profligate spending, attracted many attacks from the government’s opposition. In an apocryphal tale, Howe was questioned by member (and future prime minister) John Diefenbaker in Parliament over careless spending on postwar programs and procurement, to which Howe replied, “What’s a million dollars anyway?” Though there is no record of this exact exchange happening in the Hansard, the tale was thought to typify Howe’s approach to policy, and so the epithet stuck. It appears that, angered by the wasteful direction of Abasand, Ells was one such detractor of Howe.

The second rebuild, overseen by General Engineering and its president, G.B. Webster, was off to a rocky start. Clark recalls, in a meeting with Mr. P.D. Hamilton of General Engineering, that Hamilton admitted “he and his company knew nothing about tar sand separation plants and had to find out somehow.”49 The interview was revelatory—without any oil sands expertise, General Engineering still felt entitled to make decisions that flew in the face of the prevailing views of oil sands experts.

After Earl Smith cancelled the prospective agreement with the RCA earlier that year, General Engineering expressed skepticism towards the McClave process of separation, and hot water separation in general, as it used too much energy to constantly heat the separation chambers. Instead, they were interested in a cold water separation process, where the bitumen would be mixed in room temperature “GECO cells” to effect separation. Perhaps because of his voice being dismissed, McClave quit the project that year.50 It is true that the hot water separation technique required great amounts of energy, but the GECO cells ran into serious oil emulsion problems which were never overcome.51

The operations undertaken by General Engineering from 1943-1945 are shrouded in mystery. The thing reeks of a coverup, the federal government presumably wishing to hide the sheer inefficiency and waste of the ordeal. Paul Schmidt, a friend of Ells and an important part of Abasand until the bitter end (indeed, one of the few qualified personnel during the whole sorry plight) remarked that the new management was utterly averse to keeping records of production or analysis.52 Roy Scott, another longtime employee, confided in Ells and Schmidt that official reports of Abasand’s production from G.B. Webster, president of General Engineering, were deeply inflated, accounting for the diluted, and not final, product. Whereas Abasand reported daily production levels of 65 barrels of crude oil in late 1944, the total would have been half that once the diluent was removed.53

Most confusing of all was the course which construction actually took. Numerous witnesses attested that the construction of Abasand in 1943-1944 was an exercise in futility. A University of Alberta graduate who had quit the project reported to Clark that the morale was terrible and the workmen felt that they were “involved in nonsense,” with “no progress at all” having been made in the building.54

Reports of the construction were reaching the Alberta legislature, where William Fallow, the fiery Minister of Public Works, was on a crusade, accusing the federal government of corruption and sabotage. He boldly inveighed in the legislature,

“The stories I got from men who were working on the project made me wonder if the dominion government had borrowed some of the inmates of an insane asylum to handle the work. Some of the men who left the job told me they could stand it no longer. They thought everybody was crazy. They told me that trenches were dug and forms were put in to run the concrete foundations and the next day a gang of men would start digging other trenches close by and throw the earth into the hole they had dug the day before. Buildings were started and then torn down or moved to temporary foundations and finally they started putting the buildings on skids instead of foundations so that they could move them around with tractors to suit everybody's convenience. Trenches were dug for sewer and waterlines and the waterlines laid and backfilled without testing pipes for leaks. Later, when the water was turned on, the lines leaked so badly that the trenches had to be reopened and the lines taken up.”55

Most other accounts confirm this trend, with things being built in one place, ordered to be torn down, and reconstructed elsewhere in a rather Sisyphean quest, with workers speedily losing morale. The low morale was not helped by the fact that Abasand was a rather poor employer compared to other prospects for McMurrayites of the day. Abasand was constantly battling over competent employees with the American military, given that the latter were desperate for labour in constructing the Alaska Highway. Abasand historian Darlene Comfort attests that “The army paid a little more and came right to your door, picked you up and then drove you back home again,” which only exacerbated Abasand’s human capital problems.56

The principle of Hanlon’s Razor dictates that one ought never attribute to malevolence what might equally be attributed to incompetence. Fallow’s public invectives were well justified given the waste and delays of Abasand, but he may have been wrong in attributing it to corruption and sabotage. Given the circumstances, it seems more likely that the Abasand fiasco was the product of incompetence, with the project’s leaders being ignorant of the oil sands, and the workers being unmotivated and underpaid.

Even so, Howe was being pelted with accusations of government mismanagement, both from Alberta and within his own Parliament. On the subject of Abasand, Howe’s greatest detractor in the House of Commons was John MacNicol, a Conservative representing the riding of Davenport. MacNicol was not at all vicious in his attacks, but was scrupulous, which for Howe may have been far worse. As a diligent and knowledgeable MP—one of the few who actually visited McMurray during this time—MacNicol was constantly challenging Howe’s decisions and trying to get to the bottom of what exactly was happening in the oil sands.

MacNicol often pestered Howe about the decision to have CM&S run Abasand rather than the Mines Branch or the RCA. In one exchange, MacNicol openly advocated putting Ells in a senior role in Abasand, to which Howe insisted that Ells was already in charge of work there. Howe could not pull a fast one on MacNicol, however, who had seen with his own eyes how little Ells had to do with the project, though Ells would have gladly lent a hand.57 It was MacNicol who argued that Ball never should have been displaced, and Abasand should have remained in his control, albeit with government oversight, and who argued that the McClave process worked infinitely better than the cold water separation then being implemented.

Soon after the acquisition of Abasand, Howe supposed that it might be made a viable oil producing facility, which might even produce asphalt for the Alaska Highway. However, in 1944, Howe changed his tune, arguing that the purpose of Abasand was purely a purely experimental effort to determine the cost of producing oil from the oil sands, and that profit was not a good indication of the project’s success.58 Later, Howe tried to wipe his hands clean, alleging that he was not formally in charge of Abasand. But another member came with receipts, one Charles Johnson, a Socred representing the Alberta riding of Bow River, who read aloud in Parliament a number of directives for Abasand signed by Howe.59 No matter how he postured and modulated his tone, it appeared that Howe could not escape the scandal tied to him through Abasand.

One may wonder how MacNicol, an MP representing a downtown Toronto riding such as Davenport may have become an expert on the oil sands. In fact, he had a little help from Ells and Paul Schmidt. Schmidt, while working at Abasand, had an extensive correspondence with MacNicol, providing him with ample ammunition for his attacks on Howe. Schmidt wrote that he believed MacNicol was “on the war path.”60 Ells had at least one meeting with the MP, and likely many more.61 It would be unsurprising if Ells had set up MacNicol to debate Howe, given Ells’ expressed dislike of both Howe and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, whom he referred to as “cunning and unscrupulous.”62

The Alberta Government was utterly irate with Abasand and the sheer obduracy of the federal government. In March, 1944, the Social Credit Government of Alberta, under the new premier Ernest Manning, passed a resolution 31-14 demanding that the federal government appoint a royal commission to investigate all activity at Abasand from 1942 onwards.63 Needless to say, no such action was taken.

And yet, no matter how much muddling, incompetence, waste, and acrimony abounded, Abasand was back in an operational state by mid-1944. From March to May of 1944, operating intermittently, 10,207 tons of sand were separated, while 8445 barrels of bitumen were recovered using the cold water separation technique, achieving an average recovery rate of 89%.64 The plant was soon operating more steadily, though not without its share of issues, processing 19,500 tons of sand and producing 16,700 barrels of bitumen between September 1944 and June 1945.65 Of course, such statistics may not be reliable, as official statements accounted for diluent as well as refined product. The final product, however, was reportedly favourable, though the cold water separation process suffered from emulsion problems.

Despite hopeful results, no one would have called Abasand a success story, as up to the government had expended $1.9 million to date on the project as a whole, for a plant with still limited success. Ball and Fitzsimmons managed to operate separation plants on shoestring budgets, and even turn a profit, while the government could barely make a plant at all with two million dollars.

The results of Abasand were still important. A cost analysis showed that the plant could produce a barrel of bitumen for $2.64 which would have been profitable if not for prohibitive transportation costs which, once accounted for, would have put any commercial operation in McMurray in the red.66

The new Abasand pilot plant, after having muddled along for years, struggling to produce any oil whatsoever, competing with the Alaska Highway for manpower, caught in the crossfire of a provincial-federal conflict, and being the subject of ridicule and scorn, was beleaguered, as were all who worked on it. Those involved had grown disillusioned with the federal government’s role in oil sands development, including Ells himself. Indeed, Maxwell Ball left any mention of Abasands out of his memoirs, apparently ashamed of the whole ordeal.

And so, it was perhaps an act of cosmic mercy that, on June 16^th, 1945, a spark from a welding operation ignited an oil-soaked wall, igniting a billowing blaze. There was supposedly a waterline which connected the river to the plant and a hose attached to put out fires, but due to neglect, the system did not function on that day. Within a matter of hours, Abasand was razed to the ground yet again.

There was some talk in Parliament of resurrecting the project once more, but most couldn’t stomach the thought. Abasand was dead, and was to remain dead. Thus ended a futile chapter in the history of the oil sands.

And yet, Abasand burning down was not the only saga which ended in that year, for that was also the final year Ells would spend with the federal Mines Branch. Rather than summarize, I will let him recount the tale:

“Finally, when completing certain detailed topographical surveys at the close of the season in October, 1945, it became necessary to traverse the margin of an extensive hay meadow and lake which would obviously be the disposal site for overburden should commercial development be undertaken in the Steepbank area. This involved standing in cold water, for the most part ankle to knee deep, for a period of three days (during which time my young surveyor loafed about the camp), and as unfortunately there is a limit to what a human being can stand, this brought on a severe attack of sciatica. As a result I had to be carried down to our power boat and thence to McMurray. At McMurray, while waiting for a train to take me to Edmonton, I went to the hotel and, as I was unable to dress or undress myself or to go down stairs, a friendly bartender brought up my meals and looked after me. Later, after five sleepless nights of pain (maximum doses of morphine having had no effect) I moved to the small local hospital and two days later left for Edmonton. Meanwhile my retirement on pension had been approved, and in November,1945 I ended my service with the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys.”67

It truly was the end of an era. After the Abasand fiasco, Ells was likely the final person in the federal government who wanted anything to do with the Athabasca oil sands, and so it was that, from then on, the development of the sands became almost a purely provincial matter. Ells had achieved much and had a career he could be reasonably proud of. With bouts of sciatica to battle, it appeared that he could no longer venture deep into the bush on surveys, which appeared to be the main draw for Ells. Without field work, he may as well retire.

Abasand was a valuable lesson in the role of government in industry. It demonstrated both that government, not beholden to profit incentives, can boldly forge ahead where private enterprise fears to tread. And yet, for these same reasons, it is in government pet projects where the heights of profligacy are most readily apparent. Abasand was the apogee of government involvement in the oil sands, after which the greatest push was for commercialization, with private industry bearing the brunt of costs—but also motivated by the allure of profits, which were finally becoming tangible.

The time of pioneers had ended. After so many experiments and expeditions, the Athabasca oil sands were primed for commercial development—the goal Ells and Clark had been chasing all along. Though it had seemed far away with the farcical dealings of Abasand, in reality, the goal was closer than ever.

“The impression that the bituminous sands are buried away in the inaccessible and distant northland has been another factor standing in the way of their development. What truth there has been behind this impression is rapidly disappearing.”

-Dr. Karl A. Clark

Out of the strife between the Government of Canada and the province of Alberta over the use of the province’s natural resources, as well as the personal rivalry between Sidney Ells of the Federal Mines Branch and Dr. Karl Clark of the University of Alberta, two solitudes of oil sands research emerged. Just at the critical point when there was significant interest in the oil sands from private and public bodies, and when researchers had such promising leads on oil sand separation techniques, it would have been fortuitous for all parties to combine their knowledge and collaborate. And yet, the provincial and federal institutions seemed to, at best, have no interest in working together, and, at worst, to be at each other's throats. Yet, despite the personal and political acrimony, the period of 1921 to 1930 was when oil sands research reached its apogee.

The reasons that this period proved so critical are threefold. First, the world had an increasingly voracious appetite for oil. New technological developments—including the automobile which, after the invention of the assembly line by Ransom Olds in 1902 and the unveiling of the Model T Ford in 1908, became widely accessible, as well as the tank and other military implements—ensured that oil was a highly prized commodity. This, combined with a dearth of global oil reserves, let alone domestic reserves in Canada, meant that the price of oil rode high in the twenties.

Second, and consequently, given the dearth of domestic reserves and the shock that the First World War had imposed, meant that Canada had a high incentive to secure a supply of oil within its borders. It looked as if the conventional crude oil in Canada had just about run out, with the Turner Valley oil field—Canada’s largest at the time—waning. Government funding to oil sands research at the federal and provincial level was generous. And, third, due to Clark and Ells showing that separation was possible, as well as their tireless promotion of the oil sands, drew much commercial attention to northern Alberta.

Not to mention, the Alberta Great Waterways Railway, though erstwhile dogged by scandal,1 was set to reach Draper, just east of Fort McMurray on the Clearwater River in 1922, which would be a major step towards commercialization of the sands. Oil sands researchers had long argued that a railway to McMurray was a necessary condition for any commercial oil sands operation, and the Government of Alberta agreed. The same railway was projected to reach Waterways, even closer to McMurray, in 1925, with an eventual plan to reach McMurray itself.

The Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta, later renamed the Research Council of Alberta, and today known as Alberta Innovates, was founded in 1921 to encourage and support industrial research in the province of Alberta. Chaired by the premier of the province himself—Charles Stewart briefly, then Premier Herbert Greenfield from mid-1921 to 1925, and Premier John Brownlee from 1925 to 1934. Though its focus was multifaceted, SIRCA’s main thrust was to develop Alberta’s unconventional oil reserves for the benefit of the province.

During this period, there was little provincial-federal cooperation. However, there was an implicit understanding of the lines along which each would proceed in oil sands research. The federal government, through the Mines Branch and the Honourary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, following the efforts of the able Sidney Ells, would focus on geological and topographical surveys north of Fort McMurray, as well as developing techniques to quarry the sands. To Alberta was assigned the task of separating the sands to make bitumen and crude oil, spearheaded by the University of Alberta and the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta through the efforts of the quiet but diligent Dr. Karl Clark. Both the federal and provincial authorities however, were equally engaged in promoting the sands to attract investors and entrepreneurs.

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In 1921, the state of oil sands research was hopeful. Armed with detailed topographical and geological surveys from Sidney Ells and the Mines Branch, Clark had undergone a great deal of research on the character of the sands himself and had devised a method for separating bitumen from sand that he thought held the key to oil sands commercialization. Recall Clark’s bold assertion that “Most of the purely inventive work has now been done” in oil sands separation.2 We pick up the story at this crucial point, with Clark poised to attempt separation of the oil sands on a scale which might finally prove the commercial viability of that resource and Ells set to embark on a series of topographical surveys, quarrying, and paving experiments.

However, 1921 was a major setback for Ells. He had a full season of work planned for the summer. In his memoirs, he recounts that a certain “learned scientist” in Edmonton had written a “lying and libellous letter” about Ells to Sir James Lougheed, the newly appointed Minister of Mines, who promptly cancelled all of Ells’ planned field work in McMurray that year.3 The identity of this scientist is unknown to me. Though the minister later realized his error and grudgingly apologized, the damage was done—Ells’ oil sands research was set back a year, during which he instead went to northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba to investigate an oil shale boom (which turned out to be negligible).

Nor did Ells’ struggles end there. The following year, another incident occurred when Ells had been invited to speak at a Service Club in the city of Edmonton. However, due to another mysterious letter, the club’s secretary cancelled the appointment quickly after it was issued. The letter, Ells writes, was from the same “learned scientist” who wrote to Lougheed. By this point, Ells’ strong personality had won him many enemies, especially in Alberta, where he speculated that many privately decried a man of the federal government working on Alberta’s natural resources.4

This acrimony was only heightened because of the natural resource debates at the time. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba still did not have control over their natural resources, and the federal government could no longer use the war effort as an excuse to dally. This was not aided by Prime Minister Arthur Meighen’s dismissive tone towards the concerns of the prairie provinces. In the background of oil sands research, the tensions between Ottawa and the West were simmering.5 Incredulity towards the federal government and distrust of Ells seemed to blur together for Albertans at the time.

Clark, however, an adopted Albertan firmly within the sphere of Albertan institutions, faced none of the same impediments as Ells. Rather, the province supported him fully, considering that if the oil sands were to be developed for the interests of the province, Clark was their man to do it.

Bur Clark, in order to pursue oil sands separation with the utmost ardour, desperately needed an assistant. Mired by correspondence, paperwork, and reports, Clark was unable to do most of the laboratory work himself in the so-called “tar lab” at the U of A unless he chose to do the former during the day and the latter during the evenings.6 Without aid, his research threatened to grind to a halt. As fate would have it, that autumn, a likely candidate showed up at his office, one Sidney Martin Blair, and the two took to one another instantly. Blair, a born Albertan, had served in the war, and after the Armistice, had studied mining engineering in petroleum in England. After returning to Canada, Blair sought work in the field of his study, which led him naturally to Clark and the U of A. Though his studies were in engineering, while Clark was a trained chemist, the two complemented one another in skillset and personality, and their tandem was affable and productive.7

After Blair was up to speed on the current state of oil sands research, the two set about designing the first-ever oil sands separation plant. A favourable location presented itself in the basement of the University of Alberta power plant, given its wide-open floorplan and ample, constant supply of electricity. However, there were a few drawbacks to the location—the ceiling was rather low which precluded the use of gravity as a force to transport the sand through the separation process, and the basement’s depth meant that the only way to funnel sand into the separator was to shovel it through a window. This also meant that the final product had to be lifted back out of the basement, a rather onerous task.8

The sand, after being shoveled in through the window, was placed in a treatment box, where a preliminary separation was undertaken with sodium silicate. From then, the sand would be carried up a screw conveyor into an elevated mixing box, wherein the sand would be agitated, afterwards descending into a separation box, where the mixture would undergo a first round of hot water separation. The sand tailings sank to the bottom of the separation tank, being drained out through a sump and lifted away by a bucket line, while the bitumen frothed to the top and flowed through an outlet pipe to a second mixing box, and then a second separation box, where the process was undergone a second time to maximize the purity of the product.9

Despite several headaches owing to its location, the plant worked reasonably well, designed to process half a tonne of bituminous sand per hour. Between 0.8 and 2% of the solution was sodium silicate, while the mixture was treated for anywhere from one to seven hours, with heat constantly applied.10 The final product of the plant was a bitumen of between 55 and 70.5% purity, with a water content between 20 and 33% and sand content between 5.5 and 11%.11 These results were as good as Clark could have hoped for, though they portended the problem of exceptionally high water content in separated bitumen which would persist through the rest of the decade.

The sand which Clark and Blair used in their 1923 plant was sourced from a new venture in Fort McMurray, the McMurray Asphaltum and Oil Co., founded by the colourful Thomas Draper, after whom Draper, Alberta (then the Alberta Grand Waterways Railway terminus) was named. Draper operated what was the first commercial quarry of Alberta oil sand, selling the raw oil sand in bulk and shipping it on the new railway. Draper’s business model was based upon the premise that raw bituminous sand was an effective and commercially viable paving material. Draper’s greatest test was paving 22 blocks of sidewalk in Camrose, Alberta in 1930. Though the results were not unsatisfactory, the cost was a whole 44 cents more per square yard than the Edmonton City Engineering Department would have charged for the same job with conventional asphalt, showing how far bituminous pavement had yet to go.12

In Clark’s judgement, raw bituminous sands were simply an unviable paving material.13 Clark wrote a litany of articles in 1923-1924 condemning the use of raw bitumen due to prohibitive freight rates.14 Draper, in turn, called Clark’s literature “poisonous.”15 Though it did not survive past the depression, the McMurray Asphaltum and Oil Co. was a valiant and important step towards commercialization of the oil sands, providing raw oil sand to many who were interested in paving and separation experiments, and developing rudimentary quarrying techniques.

And, if the reader has noticed a pattern thus far, it is that the work of Clark could never be too far removed from that of Ells. Ells and the Mine Branch were responsible for granting leases to individuals with commercial ventures in the oil sands. Draper’s lease, as well as many more that came after him, was scouted out and chosen by Ells, whose desire to see the sands commercialized outweighed any petty interests to keep the best land for the government. Although, as we will see, it was a different story when it came to the Alberta government.

While Clark was labouring in the plant in the U of A basement, Ells was in the north, undergoing extensive topographical and profile surveys of the McMurray region, devising maps, running transit lines, determining soil conditions, and running east-west profiles.16 Ells worked in the summer heat and in the dread cold of winter. In his Recollections, he recounts a number of entertaining anecdotes of the men he met along his journeys. To recapitulate the stories would fail to capture their vivacity, so I will allow Ells to tell one himself from a winter survey:

“Quite understandably members of our happy little family were not wholly enamoured with sleeping accommodations provided by the management, and as a result the grounds for occasional, but abortive, requests by certain individuals that they be permitted to resign were at times ingenious. Among these a typical instance may be noted. One of my " recruits" was a young and rather delicate chap named Gilbert Clark, who prior to his enlistment had been a ladies' tailor in Edmonton and who was quite unacquainted with conditions of work in that much publicized " great out-of-doors". One night, as we sat about our open fire, Gilbert made his way to where I was sitting and passed me a slip of paper. On this was written the cryptic words "Mother has passed away; come at once", This correspondence having been filed for future reference in the adjacent snow-bank another message handed to me some nights later read "Unless you return at once, you will be disinherited". However, in view of the fact that we were completely out-of-touch with the mail service, the above notes did not impress me too deeply, but I assured Gilbert that he could start any time he cared to. However local conditions rendered resignations somewhat difficult. McMurray was many miles distant, the trip would have involved breaking trail all the way, and at the low temperatures which prevailed it was extremely doubtful whether a green man would have survived even the first night.”17

Ells recalls, however, that Gilbert Clark would prove to be an excellent outdoorsman by journey’s end, even desiring to stay on with Ells indefinitely.

But back to Clark now: the successes and failings of 1923 made Clark more ambitious and confident that a new separation plant could be built the following year, one free from the constraints of the university basement, but carrying forth all the insights gained from it. The location chosen for the new plant was the Dunvegan Rail Yards on the outskirts of Edmonton, with direct access to bituminous sands shipped by rail from Thomas Draper’s operations up north. While Ells insisted that freshly mined sand was the best for separation, the setbacks from technical failure on a pilot plant so far from civilization would have been debilitating for the whole operation, and so Clark chose Edmonton. The Dunvegan plant would be significantly larger than the 1923 plant, with the former being designed to process a total of 500 tonnes of material.18

The 1924 plant was only a slight modification of the 1923 plant. A notable innovation was that the treatment box for bituminous sand now contained several compartments so that treatment (mixing the sand with water and solvent) and separation (applying heat and drawing the bitumen froth off the top) of the sand could occur simultaneously and continuously. The plant was powered by a steam engine which used coal freshly delivered by rail. Another modification which Clark would come to regret was that, rather than an inclined screw conveyor carrying sand to the feed for the plant as in 1923, now the sand could merely be carried up by lift and fed in by gravity. The low ceiling of the 1923 plant, forcing the use of the screw conveyor, would turn out to be a blessing in disguise.19

The difficulties of the Dunvegan operation were painfully apparent from the beginning. The treatment box’s doors were not water-tight, with the result being that sodium silicate solution leaked out of the boxes instead of treating the bituminous sand. The runs in 1924 yielded far worse results than the year prior, with the average bitumen content of the final product being only 42%, compared to 62% in 1923. One of the major problems which Clark uncovered was the bituminous sand itself which was being used. Ells was vindicated in his assessment that weathered sand would not be treated well, as much of the sand used in 1924 was from open exposures of sand, hardened by the weather. From then on, only fresh sand would do.20 The Dunvegan plant, intended to process 500 tonnes of sand that season, only treated 100 tonnes in fits and starts before the mercifully early onset of winter.

Clark would later realize that the screw conveyor in the 1923 plant proved a vital function by mixing and stirring the sands before they entered a treatment box. A preliminary mix of the sands was thus necessary before treatment, which Clark achieved in the subsequent iteration of the Dunvegan plant by the attachment of a meat grinder, through which all sand would first pass, breaking apart chunks which otherwise would not separate well.21

Undaunted by failure, Clark set out to remedy the Dunvegan plant’s defects for a subsequent season. Unweathered sand alone was used, the mixing box was redesigned, and more vigorous mixing was effected therein. A production run in 1925 demonstrated greatly improved results, with the final product containing an average of 65% bitumen, an improvement over both previous years, as well as reaching the benchmark of 500 tonnes of processed sand in a single season.22 However, Clark reported that a separation plant located in Edmonton was still unsatisfactory due to the conspicuous fact that fresh oil sand separated much more easily. He wrote that

“the Dunvegan Yards is the wrong place to do further separation work. Anybody can see the inconsistency of shipping bituminous sand before separating it and ask embarrassing questions. But, more serious than that, bituminous sand that has been loaded on flat cars, exposed to drying conditions for an indefinite time and shipped three hundred miles is not the original bituminous sand and presents an altered problem in separation. Laboratory work shows that a very much cleaner separation is possible than we got at the 1925 plant. The next time we operate a large plant I want to see results as good as those in the laboratory turn up.”23

In other words, Clark knew that the next separation plant he built would have to be in the north.

While Clark was busy at Dunvegan in the summer of 1925, Ells was yet again in the McMurray country, shafting and quarrying. That season, he studied the origin of sulfur in the oil sands, the weathering process of the sands, and gas in the deposits.24 Additionally, Ells published a number of useful topographical maps. The following year, he embarked upon a seminal drilling campaign in previously unexamined territory. However, most importantly, Ells was finishing the final touches on his seminal report on the “Bituminous Sands of Northern Alberta,” to be published in 1926.

Until that year, though much activity was directed at the sands, there had yet been no formal and comprehensive scientific report made about the matter. As such, there was yet no widespread knowledge about the character or potential of the sands. Ells’ activities had culminated in two preliminary reports, in 1914 and 1924, as well as his unpublished notes in 1917, and Clark had yet to publicly present his findings, which were, until that point, only found in the annual reports of SIRCA. Ells’ 1926 report was a signal to the world that progress in oil sands research was steadily advancing and the region was nearing the point where commercial activity was not only possible, but profitable also. The report would incite interest in the sands from firms with significant capital at home and abroad.

Ells’ 1926 report was the most comprehensive treatment of the subject at the time. It detailed the character of the sands, topographical and profile surveys, well samples, accounts of demonstration paving, bitumen separation, the recovery of liquid hydrocarbons, possible markets for oil sand, the use of the sands in asphalt, methods of mining the sand, and various other data and maps. Included are all of Ells’ accomplishments mentioned in this story, from his early surveys to his time at the Mellon Institute to his paving experiments in Edmonton. Additionally, Ells catalogues the accomplishments of foreign work on bituminous materials similar to those in Alberta, other separation processes, and commercial or semi-commercial projects undertaken. Ells even allowed a few grudging but terse references to Clark and his separation method.25

In his report, Ells affirmed his assessment of the most promising deposits of bituminous sands which he made in his 1914 report—namely, that among the highest quality deposits were along the Steepbank river, close to where it fed into the Athabasca; on the east shore of the Athabasca River, townships 95-98, range 10; between the north bank of the Ells river and the west bank of the Athabasca, townships 95-97, range 11; and the land area bounded by the Horse River on the south, the Athabsaca to the west, and the Steepbank to the north—or, what was known as the Horse River Reserve which, at Ells’ suggestion, had been chosen by the National Parks Branch to meet paving needs in national parks.26 However, the most bountiful deposits of oil sand were yet to be discovered.

Interest in Ells’ report was great and far-reaching.27 It was a must-read for anyone involved in bituminous sands at the time and spurred interest far and wide in the region’s potential. Howard Stutchbury, the Alberta Trade Commissioner, affirmed, “When anyone of importance anywhere in the world desires information regarding the Bituminous Sands of Alberta and its uses, it is to Mr. Ells they naturally turn.”28 One might recall that Eugene Haanel, previously the Director of the Mines Branch and Ells’ choleric superior, had once declared that Ells was unable to write a systematic scientific report of any kind.29 Ells had proved the contrary, revealing the motivated nature of such claims against him.

The 1926 report was met with great interest in particular by a petroleum engineer based out of Denver, Colorado, named James Mason McClave, who was himself working on a separation process at the time for Albertan bituminous sands.30 McClave was interested in the commercial development in the oil sands and had ties to important people in the oil industry, including a man who would later be pivotal in oil sands history: Maxwell Ball. But it is not yet time for his story.

Hot on the heels of Ells’ report came Karl Clark and Sidney Blair’s effort, the 1927 report on “The Bituminous Sands of Alberta.” Clark and Blair’s report was nearly as voluminous as Ells’. There was inevitably overlap between the two, but Clark and Blair’s report contained a wealth of new information. While Ells was more concerned with geology and topography of the region, Clark and Blair were deeply concerned with separation and economic prospects.

In Part I of the report, on the occurrences of the sands, Clark and Blair compiled data on the specific gravity, water content, mineral content, and sulfur content of the bituminous sands, and they presented the important insight that the bitumen content of finer sand is higher than that of coarse sand.31 Part II, however, is perhaps the most illuminating. It detailed all the experiments on separation which had taken place up to that point, from laboratory experiments, to the 1923 plant, to the plant at Dunvegan, and finally to more laboratory experimentation in 1925-1926. This was the most complete and public presentation of Clark’s research yet. In preparation for a future separation plant to be built in the north, the most recent laboratory studies were dedicated to verifying whether a separation method could be used for oil sands from a wide variety of different deposits and of different characteristics. These findings were remarkably hopeful.32

What may be striking to one reading the report is how concerned Clark and Blair—both scientists—were with the economic prospects for the commercialization of the oil sands—whether raw sand, separated bitumen, or liquid hydrocarbons. The two calculated approximate costs for a commercial separation plant in the north, concluding that an operation at scale was necessary for profitability. A plant with a daily capacity of 1000 tonnes was necessary to sustain the great costs on the project. They put the cost of producing a tonne of oil sand at 57 cents per tonne in a plant with a daily capacity of 100 tonnes, while a plant with a daily capacity of 1500 tonnes could lower the cost to as much as four cents a tonne.33 For a plant of adequate scale, they estimated that an initial investment of $200,000 was required, and $155,880 would have to be budgeted for a year’s operations.34

Clark and Blair also weighed in on hydrocarbon cracking, which was then a novel technique being used in the United States. The cracking process entailed breaking down long hydrocarbon strains into shorter, more useful hydrocarbons by applying intense heat and pressure—usually with a catalyst. They had sent some samples of bituminous sand to a Chicago refinery to be cracked, with a total yield of between 45 and 50% gasoline, with gas oil, coke, and waste as other byproducts.35 Clark and Blair were optimistic about the possibilities which cracking presented—and rightfully so, given that hydrocarbon cracking is, at present, one of the foremost methods in extracting useful fuels like gasoline and diesel from crude oil—and especially heavy unconventional crude.

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While Clark and Blair were working on their report, Sidney Ells was conducting a drilling campaign around McMurray. From 1926 to 1928, Ells endeavoured to drill core samples inland on bituminous sand deposits which looked promising from the riverbanks of the Athabasca. This proved to be a crucial step forward, as it was only then that Ells uncovered the profuse oil sands deposits of the Ruth Lake-Mildred Lake area, inland from the west bank of the Athabasca River and north of McMurray. This was the chosen location for the Syncrude oil sands quarry and separation plant, the second major commercial oil sands operation, which began mining in 1978, and which is still today the largest and most productive oil sands mining operation.36

Not only drilling, but quarrying also took up Ells’ time during this period. A quarry begun beside the Clearwater River, across from Fort McMurray, in 1926, was developed by Ells partly as an experiment to determine best ways of clearing overburden and mining the sands, but was also useful as a source of oil sand for whatever projects the Mines Branch liked.37

1927 was additionally the biggest test for experimental bituminous pavement yet. Sidney Ells received a commission from the Director of Canadian National Parks to pave a stretch of highway in Jasper, Alberta, with bituminous sand sourced from within the province. Specifically, the sand used was from Ells’ Clearwater quarry. The work required that quarrying activity be greatly expanded and new and larger mixing plant be built.38 After constructing the plant and assembling a crew, Ells ventured to the mountains from Edmonton to undertake the task. 12,000 feet of highway were paved with 2300 tonnes of bituminous sand.39 The sand was used in its raw form, mixed with other ingredients to make a paving material. Ells unashamedly boasts in his Recollections that the pavement worked beautifully. Ells, it would seem, did not assent to Clark’s condemnatory verdict on the use of raw bituminous sands, however Clark would be proven correct by posterity.

As Clark wrote in 1928, “The fortunes of tar sand still rise and fall,” for that year, government plans to undertake a program of separation and road building had fallen dead flat.40 Ells, in that year, was finishing up his core drilling campaign, with apparently little else to report.

Yet the critical period of oil sands research was not over—at least not yet—for the following year there emerged a highly ambitious plan for the province of Alberta and the federal Mines Branch to finally combine forces and cooperate on the creation of a new separation plant in the McMurray country. Ells had a quarry on the Clearwater River; Clark was at the time the lead researcher on oil sands separation. It was a natural fit that took all too long to manifest.

Indeed, Clark had wanted to set up a new separation plant up north since at least 1925, while Ells was also interested in the matter. However, grudges die hard—for, initially, Ells seemed fully set on undertaking the project without Clark at all, instead proposing to bring J.M. McClave up from Denver to devise a separation plant.41 McClave, after all, did have a number of Canadian patents filed at that point for hot water separation techniques, although he had never attempted a separation plant on the scale the Clark had. Clark was having none of it, writing in his field diary,

“Ells proposed to bring McClave in and have him build a plant. There did not seem to be any intention of recognizing us at all in the plan. Ells had been seeing some separation work in Europe while there on his honey-moon and figured he knew all about separation now. Also he was convinced that we were up the wrong tree altogether.”42

However, Henry Marshall Tory—no longer the president of the University of Alberta, but instead the newly appointed President of the National Research Council in Ottawa—intervened alongside Charles Stewart—former Albertan premier turned cabinet minister in Mackenzie King’s government—to ensure that the Mines Branch would cooperate with the appropriate provincial authorities on separation.

The resultant plan for work in that year was that Ells and the Mines Branch would run the quarry, Clark and the Research Council of Alberta would have full control over the separation plant, and the utilization of the prepared bitumen would be determined by an administrative committee consisting of Dr. H.M. Tory, Dr. Charles Camsell, and Dr. R.C. Wallace—each representing a different institution involved in the matter. These roles were set down formally in a memorandum so that none of the parties would step on the other’s toes.43

Ells, however, made it clear that the arrangement was a joint venture, not a collaboration. Clark suggested to Ells that they start a new quarry for the plant up Prairie Creek, which was a much more convenient location given its proximity to the railway terminus. As Clark reports, “It was obvious that [Ells] had no intention of going up Prairie creek and that he was going ahead with the clearwater site.”44 Though the Clearwater quarry was on the other side of the river from the proposed plant, Ells doubled down on his decision, perhaps to the detriment of the operation.

It was the Dunvegan plant which would be disassembled and reassembled on the banks of the Clearwater, albeit with a great deal of modifications decided upon during Clark’s laboratory studies. With the help of his new assistant, D.S. Pasternack, Clark arranged for the addition of a mixing machine to agitate the sand prior to its entry into hot water, four cones to separate solidified waterglass and other chunks out of the plant water, a rotary screen to collect trash from the feed, and an enlarged separation box.45 These would remedy problems which had arisen in 1925—namely, the accumulation of chunks in the plant water and inadequate mixing prior to separation. Additionally, the use of soluble salts in plant water was a new addition to the process, and it proved an ample remedy to the problem of solids accumulating therein.46

Early in June, Clark and his team set about deconstructing and reconstructing the Dunvegan plant, so that they would know precisely how to do it when it was shipped to the site on the Clearwater. They did this with the help of J.A. Sutherland, a trusted contractor whom Clark had previously employed to help construct the Dunvegan plant in 1924-25. At the end of July, they felt ready to send the plant north.47

While Clark was busy with plant assembly, Ells and his men were rapidly expanding the quarry at Clearwater and stripping overburden. At this point, pick and shovel were still the implements of choice for quarrying, despite Clark’s insistence that steam shovels could have likely been used for a large-scale operation. Perhaps he was right, but Clark’s suggestions would fall on deaf ears with Ells regardless.48

Despite their disagreements, with a formal arrangement to keep Ells and Clark focused on their respective tasks, the work went along swimmingly. Clark wrote to Tory that he was “having a great time”, and later wrote that “we are all getting along famously.”49 He described the scene in the north as follows:

“I went north again on September 16^th to lend a little moral support to the men at the plant and to have a holiday. The plant site now looked like a small town. The plant itself was well along and the new lumber made quite a splash on the landscape. In addition the men had built two log buildings—a cookhouse and an office building. There were two living tents. Ells had several towers erected for cableways for handling sand out of the quarry. A good deal of the machinery and equipment was in place in the plant building.”50

By October that year, the plant was fully assembled, ready for a test run. A late and lovely fall had been a great boon to their operation. With fresh sand from the accompanying quarry, Clark started up the plant on October 30^th, 1929, and after a few adjustments, it ran as well as could be expected. The next day, Clark invited an audience from McMurray to inaugurate the plant, however they had trouble keeping steam pressure, which hampered throughput. After the brief test, winter announced itself with bitter winds and snowfall, and so Clark elected to cease operations for the year, to be begun again next spring.51

While the bustling Clearwater plant was nearing completion, something unprecedented was happening on Wall Street. On October 24^th, 1929, 12.9 million shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange as stock prices faced a precipitous decline into a full-blown crash. This day was known as Black Thursday, which was to signify the beginning of a depression which would last an entire decade. The consequences might have taken a while to reach those then badgering away at Clearwater—indeed the news itself might have taken a while—but it was to shape the course of oil sands history. Falling prices meant sharply declining demand for most goods, oil not least of which.

Oil sands development was possible because of the spectre of scarcity, combined with the seemingly eternal rising demand for oil. As a result, the price of oil rode high in the twenties. Both strong demand and scarcity were to be removed from the equation in the coming decade, leading to crashing oil prices.

No one was quite sure how long or severe the depression would be, and so Edmonton and Ottawa, already committed, continued to push forth on their Clearwater endeavour, slated to run for a total of two seasons.

Over the winter, Clark knew that the biggest problem to solve was the dehydration of the bitumen. Ever since his 1923 plant operations, his separated bitumen had had an exceptionally high water content which precluded its widespread use. With Pasternack at his side, he set about a series of experiments to solve the problem once and for all. The solution they found was to mix wet bitumen with a good measure of salt in a steam-jacketed mixing and kneading machine. Treating it so for 30 minutes at 100°C and letting it settle overnight at 90°C, the final yield was a product with a water content under 2%.52 Incorporating this preliminary step into the separation plant up north was key to solving the dehydration problem.

The 1930 season began as soon as weather would permit. All parties involved were eager to head north and get the plant running again. A new boiler and loads of new equipment were sent up on April 1^st to be outfitted on the plant.53 By summertime, the plant was up and running, though not without its faults. Clark notes failures with the plant’s evaporator, the steam system, the generator, and variable quality of bituminous sand from the quarry.54 Indeed, it was the sand that gave them the most grief. The sand from Ells’ quarry was too viscous—Clark personally preferred to work with the sand from Draper’s quarry, but made do with what he had.55 Indeed, Clark speculated that part of the problem was a high salt content in the quarried sand, leading the bitumen to fluff up and get washed out in the tailings.56 It was not a problem he could solve that season, although it provided much ground for later research.

Despite its importance, being the first separation plant located in the oil sands, and a model for many commercial operations to come, Sidney Ells barely graces the Clearwater operations with a paragraph in his own history of oil sands development. Clearly the grudge with Clark was still raw in his mind while writing all that time later in 1962.57

Hushed murmurs abounded at the plant about the dire economic situation sweeping the continent. Banks seemed to be failing daily, prices continued to crash, and the unemployment rate crept higher and higher. No one was sure if they would have a job the next day, let alone the next season. Budget cuts were incoming, and now that the price of oil had plunged, oil sands research would surely be first on the chopping block. The workers were right that the plant’s days were numbered, but perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Midway through the operating season, an ardent entrepreneur named Maxwell Ball visited the Clearwater plant to meet with Clark and Ells. Ball hailed from Denver on behalf of the newly incorporated Canadian Northern Oil Sands Products, Ltd. By his side was J.M. McClave, the seasoned petroleum engineer who had been in correspondence with Ells. Despite the dire economic circumstances, the pair were intrigued by the sands, having recently secured a lease to mine them and operate a commercial plant. Ball appeared to Clark as “a man who had the ability to deal effectively with a problem of this sort even though he yet knew very little about bituminous sands.”58 Indeed, Ball was so impressed with the operation that he agreed to buy the Clearwater separation plant and the adjacent quarry.

Ball’s company would be shortly rechristened Abasand Oils Ltd., and his oil sands separation pilot plant would weather a depression and a war to prove to the world that commercial separation of the oil sands was possible, once and for all—though not without a detour through scandal, incompetence, and the heights of government mismanagement.

“Once the tar sticks to your boots, you can never get it off.”

-Dr. Karl A. Clark

Dr. Henry Marshall Tory, president of the University of Alberta, was searching for a man to spearhead research on the bituminous sands around McMurray. In 1916, Sidney Ells of the federal Mines Branch had seemed like a perfect candidate, whose geological surveys of the sands and research at the Mellon Institute were followed by Tory with great interest. At the time, Ells was the eminent authority on all matters concerning the bituminous sands, having all the vigour and devotion to see through the eventual commercialization of the resource. However, beginning in mid-1917, Ells’ standing began to fall precipitously in Tory’s eyes.

Ells’ work in 1916 on separating bitumen from the oil sands at the Mellon Institute was compiled the following year into an informal report, titled “Notes on Certain Aspects of the Proposed Commercial Development of the Deposits of Bituminous Sands in the Province of Alberta, Canada.” It was not a formal report, but merely a compendium of the author’s hastily assembled notes and conclusions from his study. Though unsystematic, it offered many insights and promising avenues for further steps in oil sand research.

Many were eager to read and appraise Ells’ findings, and so in the summer of 1917, Eugene Haanel, director of the Mines Branch in Ottawa tasked a newly minted employee of the Geological Survey, Dr. Karl Adolph Clark, with critically reviewing the Ells notes alongside a senior geographer and topographer, J. Keele. Of this episode, Mary Clark Sheppard (Clark’s daughter) writes,

“[Clark] was very uneasy about the assignment. After all, he was relatively new in the department and was being asked to judge the work of an older member of staff who was not able to defend himself because he was overseas serving in the armed forces. The worst aspect was that it had all the appearances of being a hopeless mess and clearly was going to require many hours of extra evening work to unscramble.”1

Clark and Keele were hardly charitable. They wrote,

“The report from the standpoint of arrangement of subject matter is very poor. No logical plan of presentation of the facts relating to the problem in hand is adopted and no systematic scheme of investigation and experimentation is revealed. One cannot help but wonder, in reading the report, if the writer has had any definite working plan in mind. A great amount of matter has been brought together in a most unbalanced and incoherent style. The report for the most part consists of a series of Appendices which bear little relation one with another and have very little plan within themselves.”2

They declared plainly that it was unfit for publication, due to its unsystematic format and the lack of key information which they speculated Ells withheld or neglected to include. However, they suggested that, with the missing information and a thorough structural overhaul, the report could be salvageable.

Eugene Haanel, whose relationship with Ells was already grievously marred, went one step further. In a letter to the Deputy Minister of Mines accompanying Clark and Keele’s assessment, he wrote that he agreed with the pair on all their conclusions but one: that Ells might successfully reform his report. This was a task of which Haanel thought Ells utterly incapable.3 If the relationship between Ells and Haanel was not already irreparable, Haanel’s scathing assessment went a long way in destroying Ells’ credibility and fueling Ells’ mounting suspicions of a conspiracy against him.

Tory, himself a scientist, concurred with the assessment of Clark and Keele, writing, “[Ells’ report] is a most remarkable document put together without method and apparently without any idea of what is valuable and what is not . . .” Although, he did acknowledge that “it contains valuable information.”4

Now, a fair assessment of Ells’ notes is necessary to set the record straight. It is difficult to deny that it is a labyrinthine mess, consisting of 23 appendices with little apparent interconnection and rather jarring transitions, one from the other. In his description of his experiments with hot water separation and distillation via retort, he is highly descriptive in some respects—detailing the composition of the bitumen, the mineral, sand, and water content at different stages, with schematics for the apparatus used—though in other aspects, his report is left wanting. In the state Clark and Keele found it, the report would need serious revision for publication.

However, Ells was entirely willing to revise it—by all accounts, he intended to do so. First of all, Ells acknowledged the failings of his notes. He titled it “Notes . . .” hesitating to present it as a formal report because it was not one—it was the preliminary sketch which furnished the materials for a report. In the work’s conclusion, Ells writes,

“it may be noted that, owing to lack of time, less than four weeks have been available for preparing the accompanying notes and sketches. The writer is fully conscious that many alterations and modifications could have been advantageously introduced, had an opportunity been given for revision. In many cases, however, the notes were not even reread after they had been written.”5

And secondly, having written a successful and systematic preliminary report on bituminous sands in 1914, it was clear that, contra Haanel, Ells was fully capable of writing a scientific report, had he the opportunity to do so.

Most shameful of all is that Ells’ notes were given away for review against his wishes and while he was serving in the First World War, unable to respond. Haanel disobeyed Ells’ explicit instructions when he tasked Clark and Keele with reviewing the work.6 Ells, in his own writings, indicated that he had uncovered Haanel’s pro-German sympathies at the outset of war, leading to Ells’ poor treatment at the hands of his superior. In a private meeting with Albertan Premier Greenfield, Ells recounts that Haanel had informed him “He had not read my stuff, had no intention of reading it, and it would never be published.”7

Though most of the blame falls to Haanel, given these circumstances, Clark and Keele were remarkably uncharitable in their assessment. With Ells explicitly acknowledging the failings of his notes and his intentions to revise them, as well as his inability to defend himself against the charges, Clark and Keele ought to have treated the notes as preparatory, rather than as a fully fleshed-out report.

In any case, Ells’ reputation was tarnished in Tory’s eyes when he received the assessment of Clark and Keele. Tory, for his part, had to put oil sands research on pause, as in January of 1918 he went overseas to administer the Khaki University in England for servicemen returning from the war. After hostilities ceased, Ells was recruited as an engineering lecturer at Khaki University. There, Ells wished to study the bituminous shales of Scotland, and Tory assisted him in securing funding for the research. The one condition Tory imposed was that Ells compile the fruit of his study into a public report. When getting a report out of Ells began to resemble pulling teeth, Tory was deeply nonplussed.8

When Tory returned to the University of Alberta in 1919, he renewed the search for a full-time chemical engineer to research the bituminous sands. Sidney Ells was no longer at the top of his list. Instead, Tory had his eye on a young chemist working at the Geological Survey of Canada—in fact, the very man who had reviewed Ells’ notes a few years prior: Dr. Karl Clark.

Clark was, indeed, a promising candidate. Born October 20^th, 1888, in Georgetown Ontario, he had shown limited interest in school at first, yet eventually blossomed into an ambitious academic. In 1916 he was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and since then had worked in diverse capacities for the Geological Survey in Ottawa.9 Clark had experience surveying road materials with Leopold Reinecke, a senior geologist, which was quite an attractive feature in a prospective researcher concerned with the application of Alberta bitumen.10

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Tory asked to meet Clark in person, and the ensuing interview was a resounding success. The two took to each other immediately; Tory appreciated the discipline and enthusiasm of the young chemist. Sheppard recounts,

“Tory’s meeting with Clark proved fruitful. It led to an exchange of letters between them and within only a matter of weeks Clark was offered the post of Research Professor in Tory’s newly established Research Department. Clark arrived in Edmonton with his wife and infant daughter on September 1^st, 1920 to take up his appointment as the first full-time working member. By Order-in-Council of January 6^th, 1921, it became the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta and in 1930 the name was changed to the Research Council of Alberta.”11

To Ells, the appointment of Clark had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy against him, in which Tory, Haanel, Clark, and many others at the University of Alberta were implicated. None, however, aroused his suspicions more than Clark himself. Ells was convinced that Clark’s verdict against his 1917 notes was prejudiced and personally motivated, especially given that, as Ells saw it, Clark would proceed to copy his work without citation. Ells was deeply embittered that, behind his back and against his will, his unfinished notes had been presented to the world while he was serving in the war. Ells returned from Europe to find the scientific establishment in Alberta firmly turned against him.

Though in some respects it is difficult not to sympathize with Ells, it also appeared that he was unwilling to admit the failings of his notes, arguing years later that they had in fact been fit for publication with some minor changes.12 Clark may not have been innocent in the matter, but even if he were, Ells would have still believed unflinchingly that Clark was his usurper. The events between 1917 and 1921 provided the basis for a grudge which Ells would carry with him for the rest of his life.

The acrimony between Ells and Clark did not stop between these two men. Rather, the feud expanded and fomented along provincial and federal lines. When many contemporary Canadians think of the provincial-federal conflicts between Alberta and Ottawa, their minds often turn to the struggles over natural resource rights, bumper stickers reading “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” or Albertan separatist movements decrying their lack of representation in the halls of power in Ottawa. However, the seeds of conflict were sown early on, beginning to germinate as far back as 1920.

Oil sands research was initially intended to be a cooperative endeavour between the federal and provincial governments. While Tory intended the province and the U of A to undertake research so that the oil sands may be used for the benefit of all Albertans, he welcomed participation and aid from the federal government.13 The federal government, in turn, was immensely interested in developing the oil sands so that Canada could have an assured domestic supply of oil. There was talk of informal, or even formal, cooperation between the U of A and the federal Honourary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, headed by A.B. MaCallum, a prolific scientist and friend of Tory. Well into the 1920s, Canada still only produced enough oil to cover approximately 1% of its consumption, and so oil sands development was equally in the interests of Ottawa and Edmonton.14

However, any federal-provincial cooperation at this point would have been uneasy at best, given the wars over natural resource rights that raged between the so-called gang of three (the premiers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta) and Ottawa. We must remember that natural resource rights were denied to the three prairie provinces until 1930, instead being overseen by the federal government under the presumption that the rural and agrarian West did not yet have the means to fully utilize their vast wealth of mineral resources. Alberta and Saskatchewan, entering Confederation in 1905, had to wait 25 years to gain autonomy over their resources, while Manitoba, a province since 1870, had to wait a full 60 years. Indeed, 1920 was the very year that tensions between Prime Minister Meighen and the three prairie provinces threatened to reach a fever pitch, with unproductive conferences and petulant letters flying back and forth.15 The hostility was contagious, infecting oil sands research.

The letters between Dr. Tory of the U of A and Dr. MaCallum of the Honourary Advisory Council were entirely cordial and friendly before 1920, after which point they begin to appear bristly. Of the subjects bringing the two into conflict, the foremost was the question of what was to be done about Sidney Ells.

Tory, in 1920, was convinced that Ells was a loose cannon. MaCallum, on the contrary, had a more sanguine view of the man. MaCallum, writing to Tory, indicated his view that Ells was a suitable candidate to undertake oil sands research at the U of A, that he should be given a sum of money and leave of absence to undertake a trial, and that the council’s full support would be behind their joint endeavour.16 Ells had even prepared for Tory a fully costed and outlined proposal for how the work would proceed in which he indicated that he was fully prepared to move to Edmonton to begin the experiments.17

Tory, responding to MaCallum, had serious doubts about Ells, writing,

“I deem it necessary to be in a very definite position with regard to Mr. Ells, as there is a good deal of uncertainty about both his temper and his qualifications. He regards himself as an aggrieved party with respect to Haanel and my own inclination would be to sympathise with him in that but I found no one in Ottawa who knew him intimately who expressed a really favorable judgment and my own experience with him and my study of his report has made me to say the least question his ability.”18

Tory did not want Ells under his supervision. If Ells was to be involved with oil sands research, he would be on a tight leash, under the jurisdiction of the federal government.

Tory’s view of Ells by that point had become seriously soured, not only through personal experience, but by the testimony of colleagues and friends. Dr. John Allan, a geologist at the U of A, had a less-than-glowing recommendation of Ells from his time in the north:

“I saw considerable of Ells at McMurray and his actions are such that he seems more fit for an institution different from a Research Institution. I cannot understand this man and in my opinion he is trying to do field work about which he knows nothing. I had to keep a safe distance from him because it was impossible to discuss any matter with him agreeably. He claims to know the last word in the treatment of bituminous sands and intimates that there is no use of any one else trying to do any work on them.”19

Ells, aggrieved by his exclusion from bituminous sands research in Alberta, likely considered Allan to be one of many conspiring against him.

MaCallum, responding to Tory, acknowledged Ells’ choleric disposition, but assured him that Ells was the man for the job. He was rather “indulgent” about Ells’ feud with Haanel, writing that, as Haanel was very old, he must be excused for “temperamental impetuosities.”20 MaCallum reiterated that Ells’ knowledge of the oil sands was unmatched, and “... as Mr. Hamor, Assistant Director of the Mellon Institute at Pittsburgh, put it, [Ells] is practically the only one who is qualified as yet to deal with the question of separation.”21 There was, after all, no sense in ignoring the leading expert on the oil sands, temper or not.

Yet still, Tory dallied, wishing to ensure that any arrangement bringing Ells to Edmonton would be under the supervision of the federal Advisory Council. It was clear that he considered Ells more of a liability than a boon. Fortuitous circumstances intervened for Tory, as Ells was sent back not to Edmonton, but to Fort McMurray to scope out prospective leases for an oil company run by one Major-General Lindsay, interested in opening a semi-commercial separation plant, though this never materialized.22

The second source of strife between Tory and MaCallum was a report out of McGill University by Dr. William Seyer, whose study of a sample of bituminous sand led to his conclusion that the bitumen of the sands was of the naphthene series, and was therefore incapable of being used for gasoline or other kinds of fuels. The only possible use of the oil sands, in Seyer’s view, was for road pavement.23

This conclusion, and the federal government’s endorsement of it, deeply alarmed Tory. Such a presumptive view of the oil sands would prove abortive to most future oil sands development—it was also a view with which most other oil sand scientists, including Clark and Ells, vehemently disagreed. Tory’s dreams for the bituminous sands were far greater than merely furnishing paving materials. If the federal government was to so hastily limit the scope of oil sands development, their partnership would prove a detriment to the whole operation.

The exchange between Tory and MaCallum over the Seyer report would draw the lines along which the University of Alberta and the federal Mines Branch would proceed in oil sands research—the former working on the separation of bitumen from sand, with the latter focusing on mining techniques and the usage of bituminous sand for pavement.

Nonetheless, with Ells detained elsewhere, and having an excuse to divorce oil sands research from the federal government altogether, Tory gave Clark all the freedom and support needed to forge ahead with the task of cleanly and effectively separating bitumen from sand. He instructed Clark to approach the problem with “fresh eyes,” and use a more systematic approach than previously employed to gain the best results.24

If there is any way to describe Karl Clark, it is as cautious and methodical—the polar opposite to Sidney Ells. Clark's daughter called him as a “quiet self-effacing intellectual,” whose strengths included his “clear and sane way of reasoning, his immense personal and professional integrity, and especially his superb performance in handling a canoe.”25 Reading Clark’s letters, one gets the sense that he was an intensely studious and disciplined researcher, whose devotion to oil sands research was intrinsic and unflinching—though in a quiet and inward way, contrasting Ells’ ardent and boisterous passion.

Clark fell in love with oil sands research not long after he began at the U of A in the fall of 1920. Immediately, he set upon analyzing samples from the bituminous sands and methodically revealing their exact properties. His first aim was to determine the suitability of raw bituminous sands as an ingredient in asphalt. Despite long-term goals of extracting liquid hydrocarbons from the sands, road materials were the most pressing need for the Canadian prairies, having recently undergone a massive settlement project, and desperately in need of cheap paving materials to connect its many new communities. Clark found promising signs of success by joining clay colloids with bituminous sand to make a durable material which resisted dissolution by water.26

He quickly thereafter turned his focus on the separation of bitumen from the sands, as this was to be the key in his mind to unlocking the long-term commercial potential of northern Alberta. Clark intended to pursue the problem by using emulsions (unstable mixtures of substances which ordinarily separate), though this method quickly gave way to his more seminal experiments using hot water flotation cells.

It should be noted that Clark was no mere egghead in a laboratory. Indeed, for any research to take place on oil sands prior to the completion of the railway to Waterways in 1925, researchers had to venture to the northlands themselves to secure samples. Clark did this many times, braving the Athabasca River and hauling back samples by tracking scow. Though perhaps less inclined to regale others with his feats of bravery than Ells, Clark also ought to be remembered as a hardy outdoorsman as much as a diligent scientist.

The samples he secured were experimented upon in a rudimentary hot water flotation cell at the University of Alberta in 1920. Though simple in design, the apparatus used was highly promising. In a report to the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta (SIRCA), he wrote,

“A scheme which was finally found for removing the separated bitumen from the sand gives good promise of being commercially feasible. The bitumen is floated on hot water. No addition of kerosene or other oil is made. A bitumen concentrate is obtained which contains less that 15% (and occasionally as low as 5%) of very finely divided mineral matter, and from 15% to 20% of water. The sand tailings retain about 1%, only, of bitumen. Runs of 100 pounds of bituminous sand have been handled in the small trial apparatus so far employed. A small plant, provided with appropriate mechanical contrivances for continuous operation, is now in process of construction. It will handle about one-half ton of bituminous sand per hour.”27

The use of the floatation cell was aided by Clark’s discovery of sodium silicate as a solvent to aid the separation of bitumen from sand and water. This was a novel innovation that is still used to this day in the separation of Albertan oil sands. With the use of sodium silicate, Clark was able to effect separation well without using pressure to artificially raise the boiling point of the mixture, allowing him to solve the problem of continuous operation that had plagued Ells’ apparatus, which he could only operate intermittently due to pressure loss. Ells had proven that separation was possible; Clark wished to prove that it could be feasible.

Though Clark’s work was indeed vital, it was marred by the hunger for personal success and scientific rivalry. A 1921 memorandum by Clark reads,

“What little work had already been done toward the solution of the separation problem had been done along two very obvious lines, but unfortunately, lines which offer very doubtful possibilities from the commercial standpoint. One of these methods is the retorting of the tar sands to drive out the bitumen by heat. The other is the extraction method in which the bituminous content of the tar sand is dissolved out by a solvent by distillation.”28

This, as we can well see, was a bald lie.

Clark was the very man who reviewed Ells’ notes which described his successful experiments with a hot water flotation cell as a means to separate bitumen from the sands, achieving a bitumen of 99.7% purity.29 Clark was the very man who had scathingly declared the results unpublishable. And then, Clark claimed that he was the very first to use hot water separation on oil sands.

Nor did his temerity end there. Clark boldly proclaimed in that same memorandum that “Most of the purely inventive work has now been done” with respect to oil sand separation.30 That there were still 46 years to pass from that declaration in 1921 to the opening of the first commercial oil sands project in 1967 should give some impression of the foolhardiness of such a claim. Indeed, the oil sands were yet to experience a critical period where Ells and Clark, alongside myriad other scientists and engineers, would wage a tireless campaign of research, exploration, development, and promotion of the oil sands.

The sands, remote and foreboding, beckoned. Just as they harboured a reticent energy within, they inspired a vivacity in the men who longed to unearth their secrets. Ells and Clark were firmly within their grasp. As their intertwined careers showed, both would have sooner perished than give up their quest to pursue commercial extraction of the oil sands. If the reader should think the motivation of these men to be rather fantastic, he may better wonder at Kant’s decade of contemplation to answer Hume’s skeptical challenge; Galileo’s lifelong pursuit of truth in the cosmos amid dread persecution; or even Agamemnon’s obdurate quest to breach the bulwarks of Troy. The whole of history is proof that a man of great resolution, once something—anything—becomes a problem for him, will go to the ends of the earth to solve it. The quixotic oil sands, for Clark and Ells, had become one such problem.

What followed, then, was a flurry of scientific development between them both, each individually seminal, though entirely uncooperative with the other—spurring the single most critical period of oil sands research.

O land of spacious freedom
For those who hear thy call.
When sham and tawdry tinsel
And gaudy glitter pall.
Freedom from smug convention.
From trick’ry and petty strife,
And syncopated tinkle.
Aping the Song of Life;
Freedom from tedious treadmill.
Freedom to blaze new trails.
Over the wind-swept hill tops,
Down through the shadowy vales.
For there’s music in honking clangor.
And joy in the wind’s sad wail.
Friendship in empty spaces.
Peace in the stormy gale!

-Sidney Ells, “The North”1

The year was 1913 when an intriguing letter arrived on the desk of Sidney Ells, the newly hired assistant to the Director of Mines in Ottawa. The letter was from J.L. Côté, a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, inquiring about the economic potential of the bituminous sands of northern Alberta.2 When Ells consulted the Mines Branch’s records, he only found a single report on the subject, a rather sparse and unscientific geological survey from 1883 by William Ogilvie, indicating that a sample of “float” off the Athabasca River near Fort McMurray3 contained a bitumen content of 12.5%, which seemed rather promising.4

Despite their obscurity, rumours abounded that the shores of the Athabasca River north of McMurray held tremendous deposits of bituminous sands, likely useful as a paving material, and perhaps even hiding great oil pools beneath. Ells’ curiosity was piqued. Other explorers, such as Alexander Mackenzie, John Macoun, Robert Bell, and Robert McConnell had ventured to the area, but only returned with qualitative descriptions and speculation as to the volume of the sands.5 Without any systematic documentation of the region before that point—let alone maps by which to navigate—Ells would have to venture there himself to uncover the mystery of the bituminous sands.

As luck would have it, Ells was a skilled surveyor.

Sidney Clarke Ells was born on September 29^th, 1878, in Amherst, Nova Scotia. As a young man, had worked in the coal fields of his home province, first as a miner, later as a mine surveyor. He had surveyed divisions of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway line in Northern Ontario and Manitoba, and had worked as an engineer for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway. Additionally, he had mapped and investigated the oil shales of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia from 1908 to 1909.6 But most importantly of all, Ells had the insatiable desire to solve the mystery of the oil sands. Young, skilled, bold, and headstrong, Ells was the natural choice for the job.

However, Eugene Haanel, the Director of Mines, disagreed, refusing to allow Ells to embark on the mission. Great arguments ensued and it wasn’t until Ells threatened to quit his job that Haanel finally authorized him to lead a survey of the region north of Fort McMurray.7 This was not the last time that Ells and Haanel butted heads.

In June of 1913, Ells arrived in Athabasca Landing (modern day Athabasca), having procured a rudimentary scow, a freight canoe to tow behind, a crew of three white men, and an allegedly native pilot, and departed downstream toward McMurray. The band navigated the current of the mighty Athabasca, through 244 miles of the bug-infested muskeg of northern Alberta, over rapids and portages, before reaching Fort McMurray on the ninth day.8 The journey north went with the current and with an empty freight canoe, and so was a far easier task than the return journey they would face.

At the time, Fort McMurray was hardly even a village. There was a dilapidated inn, a few log cabins, and, in summertime, some native teepees. It was a fur trading town, as were most Western Canadian settlements with “Fort” in their title. The individuals there were accustomed to the rough and tumble life of the natural resource industry on the frontier. There were few facilities, fewer goods, and only the most subtle vestiges of civilization in that northern town.9 Outside of McMurray, the land was wild, hostile, and untamed—teeming with bugs and dangerous wildlife, covered with spruce trees and muskeg, and adorned by the grandiose Athabasca River.

With an auger and extension rods, Ells’ crew proceeded via the Athabasca over 100 miles north of McMurray, and then began charting and taking samples from the Athabasca’s minor tributaries, including the Clearwater, Hangingstone, Moose (later renamed Ells River), Firebag, Christina, Muskeg, McKay, and others. Riverbanks—specifically the cutbanks of bare cliff created through erosion—provided the best terrain to visibly observe outcroppings of oil sand deposits, measure their length and depth, and speculate as to their quality. Overland, these deposits would be covered by thick overburden, including forests and muskeg—the only way to reach them would be to drill, which would be toilsome and costly, the location of which, with then-current techniques, being decided upon by little more than guesswork.

In addition to surveys, Ells took the time to devise systematic geological maps of the region which was, at that point, yet uncharted. Ells’ maps were of high quality, used for decades thereafter.

There was one minor detail in Ells’ 1913 surveys which proved to be of great consequence years later. A certain farsighted Director of Canadian National Parks had asked Ells to choose a plot of land near McMurray which would be retained by the federal government to provide pavement for national parks in Western Canada—given that the bituminous sands proved amenable to paving. Ells selected an area beside one of the most promising deposits of bitumen, some 580 acres alongside the Horse River, a mile due west of McMurray.10 Quality and quantity of material appeared favourable, and so the Dominion happily took control of the yet uncontested Horse River Reserve.11

Three months of surveying produced a wealth of findings featured in Ells’ 1914 “Preliminary Report on the Bituminous Sands of Northern Alberta,” the first systematic report on the bituminous sands. The report contained an exhaustive empirical account of the most voluminous and high-quality deposits of oil sands as far as Ells could ascertain from the river. The sites he noted as favourable provided a roadmap for much future oil sands development.

The most immediately promising deposits described were between 37.5 and 57.5 miles north of Fort McMurray, on the east side of the Athabasca River.12 This was the site later known as “Bitumount,” chosen by Robert Fitzsimmons as the location for the first semi-commercial oil sands separation plant, operated by Fitzsimmons’ International Bitumen Company, in 1930. Oil sands separation techniques were still rudimentary at the time, and so little came of the Bitumount site. However, in 2018, Suncor began operations on its Fort Hills oil sands site just a kilometer inland from the Athabasca, in the exact range that Ells had indicated in his report. Fort Hills is one of the largest oil sands sites currently in operation, producing roughly 200,000 barrels of oil daily.13

On his journey down the Steepbank River, which feeds into the Athabasca equidistant between Fort McKay and Fort McMurray, 3.5 miles from the Steepbank’s mouth, Ells noted a highly promising deposit of oil sands on the southwest side of the river.14 It is no small wonder, as today the Steepbank River today provides the eastern boundary of Suncor’s Millenium mine, begun in 2001—part of its Base Plant operations—a highly expansive and productive mining site.

Interestingly, Ells also noted highly promising deposits on the northwest bank of the Moose River, later renamed Ells River, which feeds into the Athabasca just south of Bitumount.15 It took almost a hundred years, but in 2009, CNRL began operations on its Horizon oil sands project on the northwest bank of Ells River, where Ells himself noted the high quality deposits.

Ells’ reconnaissance was a great success. The group took over 200 samples from along the Athabasca, and for the first time, surveyed the minor tributaries feeding into the Athabasca north of Fort McMurray.16 Most importantly, they had great quantities of bituminous sand to bring back and systematically study. However, the survey proved to be the easy part. After a three month season, near the end of September, they began the arduous return journey to Athabasca Landing.

The task of travelling 244 miles upstream with a fast-approaching Alberta winter was to prove as tumultuous as might be expected. Joining Ells’ crew were a dozen native men, of whom only one spoke English, and nine tonnes of samples joining the equipment they had brought with them.17 To forge upstream in such conditions required a tracking line onshore connected to the scow and a crew to guide it. Ells faced resistance and miscommunication with this group the whole leg of the return journey. One can hardly blame them, given that the task of running a tracking line was entirely grueling. Men had to guide the tracking line from shore through bug-infested muskeg, over rocky terrain, and often through muck and mire. Ells recalled having to sleep under dripping wet trees, as the group was bereft of tents.18

Tracking was, beyond question, one of the most exhausting forms of labour. Scows laden with freight were unable to travel upstream with merely the manpower of those rowing onboard. As such, a number of trackers on the river bank were harnessed to a line attached to the scows, and it was through them tugging on the line that the boat was pulled upstream against the current. It was not uncommon for trackers to pull the line from the crack of dawn to the onset of dusk.19

Not once, but three times did Ells’ “dusky colleagues,” as he called them, drop their tracking lines and flee into the woods. On one occasion, Ells had to create a fire on the shore and offer them tea, while feigning the ability to run the tracking line with merely himself and two companions from the shore to lure his native tracking line crew back and regain their loyalty. Luckily, his bluff was not called.20 Indeed, though the crew was a rowdy bunch, none were more troublesome than the obstreperous native known only to Ells as “Bacon Face.”21 Though in his Recollections, Ells seemed bemused at his companions, a private letter in 1913 reveals that he “had so hoped that some of them might find a watery grave.”22

It must be said, of course, that Ells was not the kindest taskmaster. Given how grueling it can be to run a tracking line, one can hardly blame his native colleagues for jumping ship. One should take Ells’ assessments with a grain of salt.

Twenty-three days after their departure from McMurray, travelling upstream through snow and frosty northern winds, the group finally reached Athabasca Landing, from which they could return to civilization via the rail link to Edmonton. To remunerate his native companions, in addition to their wage, the customary gift of tobacco and moccasins was made to each one, paid out of Ells’ own pocket.23

The initial geological survey done, the question then arose of what Ells was to do with the samples he had. It was apparent to him that any immediate use of the bituminous sands would be in road paving, as bituminous substances in the United States had been used.24

However, Ells was not merely concerned with road paving, as some histories allege.25 Rather, as early as 1914, Ells was keenly aware of the possibility of separating bitumen from oil sands, and from then on, refining it into crude oil and even liquid hydrocarbons. Bitumen, a semi-solid hydrocarbon, had many uses, but if it could be effectively refined into crude oil, and then into gasoline or diesel fuel, that would greatly open up the commercial possibilities of the oil sands. Ells’ 1914 report details rudimentary experiments with separating crude oil from the sand through fractional distillation, with some degree of success.26

The sands’ viability as a potential source of gasoline, diesel, and fuel oil, however, depended on the possible discovery of more conventional oil deposits in Western Canada. Conventional oil, which comes from the ground in a liquid form, needs fewer stages of refinement in order to be turned into gasoline, diesel fuel, or any other useful product. At that point, domestic supply of crude oil supplied only 1% of demand, with only the meagre Turner Valley field of southern Alberta and the waning oil fields of Petrolia in southern Ontario, which compelled the federal government to desperately seek out new oil fields.27 The dearth of conventional oil inspired interest in unconventional sources, such as the oil sands.

Returning from another survey in the fall of 1914, Ells and his travelling companions encountered a native man dashing through the bush on a return journey north from Athabasca Landing. Through the man’s rather confused and garbled account, Ells was able to discern that a major conflict was brewing in Europe. It was only thus that he was informed of the onset of the Great War.28 Canada, as a dominion of Britain, was drawn into the conflict automatically. The task, then, of securing Canada’s domestic supply of oil took on a rather existential character.

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Ells, then, turned to examine the question of whether bituminous sands could provide a quality road pavement, which was then desperately needed on the dismal and muddy roads of rural Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Ells, therefore, undertook to travel through the United States to seek out instances of similar bituminous sands and sandstones, methods of refinement and separation, and results from use in road paving.

The key question was whether bituminous sand in its raw form was useful as an ingredient in pavement, or whether it had to be separated into bitumen first. Oil sand separation, referring to the process whereby bitumen is extracted from bituminous sand, would be necessary if raw bituminous sand alone were insufficient. Bitumen separated from the sands could either be used as an ingredient for pavement, or could be further refined into crude oil, and then into fuels like gasoline or diesel.

After his journey, fortuitously, the occasion arose to experiment with paving himself. A letter dated February 13^th, 1914, from F.T. Fischer, secretary of the Edmonton Board of Trade wound up on the desk of the Minister of Mines in Ottawa. Having heard of Ells’ investigations into the bituminous sands, Fischer requested any and all information held by Ells to be published, and for Ells to personally oversee the laying of an experimental road using raw bituminous sands of northern Alberta on Kinnaird Street in Edmonton in the summer of 1915.29

Ells was readily willing and able to undertake the work. So eager was he that he proceeded despite Eugene Haanel, his superior, ordering him to defer supervision of the task to the engineers of the City of Edmonton. Ells later claimed that signs of a breakthrough in paving with Alberta bitumen had led him to over-enthusiasm in taking charge of the project and defying Haanel’s orders.30 It is at this point we begin to see Ells’ devotion to the oil sands, his headstrong and irascible personality, bringing him into conflict with Haanel. The acrimony between Ells and Haanel was threatening to boil over—and it soon would.

In typical fashion, Ells forged ahead with or without the approval of others. Having secured funding, late in 1914, Ells arranged for the transportation of bitumen from McMurray.31 In May of the following year, Ells had organized a party to undertake a topographical survey of the McMurray country, but was forced to depart midway through when a letter reached him about certain proposed changes to the paving project in Edmonton that were not to his liking. He had to leave McMurray immediately to dissuade the city council from their judgement, and so, rather than departing upstream via scow, he elected to make the journey from McMurray to Athabasca Landing on foot.

Ells’ Recollections regale the reader, in rather self-serving fashion, of the return journey. With a 70-pound pack, a cocker spaniel, and meals for seven days, Ells began the long southbound walk through the desolate and marshy hinterlands. Blisters plagued his feet from the very first day, while the pouring rain and sharp northern wind was enough to banish the warmth ordinarily expected in midsummer. With chattering teeth, numb extremities, and waterlogged moccasins, Ells was lucky to find some dry twigs and a piece of birch bark to start a fire. Holding his canine companion tight under a rabbit skin blanket, Ells was just barely able to survive the cold. On the seventh day of travel, he caught glimpse of a farmhouse near Athabasca Landing and hitched a ride into town on the farmer’s wagon with a load of pigs. After a brief stint of medical attention, Ells appeared before Edmonton City Council with bandaged feet to clear up the uncertainties surrounding the pavement project.32

After a brief detour to San Francisco to consult with an expert on Bituminous pavement, and to order the correct apparatus to be shipped to Edmonton, Ells returned to oversee the experimental paving project with Alberta bituminous sand—the first such trial—on Kinnaird Street.33 The bituminous concrete mix consisted of bituminous sand, crushed gravel, and clean sand, heated in a mixing drum, and let out onto the street hot, to be spread with shovels and rakes, after which bitulithic asphalt was spread overtop.34 By all accounts, the road was a success. F.C. Field, a city chemist, commended Ells for the “thorough and conscientious effort” in his work, while as late as 1925, the pavement held up, with A.W. Haddow, a City Engineer in Edmonton, writing,

“With regard to experimental paving on 82nd Street which was laid by you in 1915, I am glad to advise you that this has remained in excellent condition, and to date shows no signs of defect or deterioration, and seems to be good for many years of satisfactory service.”35

Ells had proven to the world that the bituminous sands were a satisfactory asphalt. The problem, known to all, was that the price of transporting material from the distant northlands made conventional asphalts a good deal more cost-effective. In 1915, the only way to transport material to and from McMurray was by scow down the Athabasca. However, a rail line from Lac La Biche to Waterways, a few miles east of McMurray, was then under construction, set to be finished in 1925.36 Ells hoped this railway would be the solution to prohibitive transportation costs and make bituminous pavement a viable option for the Canadian prairies.

Ells was making a name for himself, as then he was then considered to be the authority on bituminous sands. The Federal Government threw their support behind him. Indeed, when war broke out on the continent in 1914 and Ells tried to enlist, he was held back by the Mines Branch to focus on his scientific work, as it was thought that developing Canada’s petroleum assets was a better usage of his time. Ells was sure that this decision was made because of Haanel’s alleged German sympathies, which Ells, a staunch imperialist of British stock, surely despised.

1916 was perhaps the most seminal year for Ells’ oil sands research. His work up to that point had attracted the attention of Dr. Raymond Bacon of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, Pittsburg, Pa., who wrote to the Canadian Mines Branch offering Ells an industrial fellowship and the use of their laboratory and expertise for research on separating bitumen from oil sands.37 Ells was delighted to accept, although Haanel was not, demanding that Ells reject the fellowship. The strife in the Mines Branch was becoming suffocating and unbearable—it is no wonder that Ells took every possible opportunity to leave Ottawa for field work. Ells, however, went above Haanel’s head, petitioning his case to the Minister of Mines, who overruled Haanel’s decision. Ells was going to Pittsburgh.

First, Ells required one more research trip through the United States. Through a series of trips taken to America from 1914-1917, Ells observed instances of bituminous materials turned into road paving. California and Oklahoma, with heavy oils and bituminous sandstones similar in kind to those of northern Alberta, suggested the best blueprints by which to proceed. Though most commercial endeavours involving with bituminous pavement had failed before that point, Ells was able to interview many individuals from failed firms and find instances of successfully devised asphalt pavements. Many patents had been taken out in America for a hot water separation technique—which entailed diluting a bituminous substance with water, heating the mixture, skimming the bitumen off the top or funneling it out, and if need be, passing the refined product through mesh or sleeves to filter out the remaining sand and mineral content.

Capenterina, California, which Ells visited in 1916, was home to a significant deposit of bituminous sandstone which the Alcatraz Asphalt Company had used between 1891 and 1899 for a kind of pavement—with mixed results—by filtering the substance through a hot water separation tank, and later into a trommel screen, and into multiple refining kettles thereafter, where the substance was frothed with steam and skimmed from the top.38 Though successful, the operation was discontinued, as it was not commercially viable.

The most promising avenue for bitumen separation, in Ells’ preliminary research, appeared to be hot water separation. This technique had been practiced with varying degrees of success since the late 19^th century. A then-recent design by Carl L Cook and John R. Price of California, patented July 11^th, 1916, was most noteworthy. In addition to the use of hot water, the Cook and Price design featured a novel innovation—the introduction of a sealed and pressurized tank. This was done so that the hot water and bitumen slurry could be heated beyond the ordinary boiling point. The bitumen, heated to approximately 212° Fahrenheit, would cleanly rise above the water, its specific gravity becoming less than the water, so that it could be easily skimmed, while the water and mineral would settle at the bottom of the tank.39

With the Cook and Price design in mind and with a load of bituminous sand, Ells arrived at the Mellon Institute on May 1^st, 1916, and immediately set about designing a hot water separation tank. His design, though following the Cook and Price model in spirit, was modified significantly to accommodate the unique properties of Alberta bituminous sand. From then on, he would began his scientific trials.

The oil sands posed a number of unique problems to anyone wishing to extract crude oil. Bitumen, the semi-solid hydrocarbon in oil sand which can be further refined into synthetic crude oil, is stuck to water and sand particles, meaning that it does not separate from water naturally, as conventional crude oil does. On a molecular level, water-coated sand grains are enveloped in a bituminous film, complicating the separation process. Separation would usually entail isolating the bitumen from the sand and water through the use of chemical solvents or heat. However, solvents alone tend to get messy and expensive, while the use of heat alone, via distillation in a retort (a round bulb with a long, curved neck, used for dry distillation), tends to waste material. As such, the advent of hot water separation provided a method to apply heat without needless waste.

In the experimental tank of his own design, Ells added hot water to the bituminous sand, applied pressure between 50 and 80 pounds per square inch, and raised the substance to between 280° and 312° Fahrenheit. Once the bitumen, water, and sand began to separate, pipes above water level drained the bitumen from the tank, while the sand and mineral waste was siphoned at the bottom. In this initial run, bitumen of 94% purity was achieved, a remarkable result.40 Later, passing this finished product through multiple stages of filter press treatment, Ells’ finished product was a bitumen of 99.7% purity.41 It was surely a success, though there were many problems with the apparatus which would need to be fixed if the process could be made commercial, such as the intermittent operation of the machine due to pressure drain off when siphoning the finished bitumen.

In addition to his work separating bitumen from the sand at the Mellon Institute, Ells also experimented with using a retort to distill the bitumen into a liquid hydrocarbon, which could be further refined into gasoline. Using an apparatus of his design, Ells showed that it could be done, however the actual yield of crude oil was far lower than the theoretical yield which should have resulted—by a discrepancy of 3.4 gallons—due to the buildup of coke on the bottom of the retort, limiting the temperature that the bitumen reached.42

Ells’ results were promising, demonstrating for the first time the possibility of separating clean bitumen and liquid hydrocarbons from the bituminous sands. It was a short trial, with much room for improvement, which Ells dutifully noted, though his work showed what was possible and offered suggestions for a path forward with commercial development of the oil sands. Ells’ work was hastily compiled into the cumbersomely titled “Notes on Certain Aspects of the Proposed Commercial Development of the Deposits of Bituminous Sands in the Province of Alberta, Canada,” made public the following year. It was not a formal report, but a merely a compilation of his notes, which he intended to revise and publish in due time.

Though he was the eminent scientist working on bituminous sands at the time, Ells was far from the only one to be interested in that vast resource of northern Alberta. At the University of Alberta, freshly founded in 1908 by the first premier of the province, Alexander Rutherford, President Henry Marshall Tory, himself a scientist, was deeply interested in using the university as an institution to develop Alberta’s natural resources for the common benefit. As such, his attention was drawn to the oil sands, and he was then looking for someone to spearhead oil sands research.

Tory was very interested in Ells’ work and was actively persuading Ells to move his work to the U of A so that oil sands research could be concentrated in one place, rather than being divided between Ottawa and Edmonton. A letter dated April 7^th, 1917, from Tory to Ells, reads,

“I just want to say that we will place at your disposal every facility for doing your work here and will give you such cooperation as we can. I should personally be greatly interested in watching the progress of the investigation. There is no doubt that the chemical work and your work could be coordinated so as to make a very complete study of the whole problem.”43

The chemical work described in Tory’s letter was the project of Adolph Lehmann, the other major oil sands researcher at the time, whose studies concerned the creation of a chemical industry from the bituminous sand, was well as using the sand to for ingredients to make explosives.44 Lehmann himself was eager to collaborate with Ells, writing to him that “we should welcome your working here and gladly cooperate in any way we can.”45

Ells was similarly eager to collaborate, writing to Lehmann that it would be decidedly advantageous to combine forces.46 By all accounts, Ells was ready to move to Edmonton, combine forces with Lehmann and Tory, and pursue the scientific study of the bituminous sands with the utmost vigour.

Inexplicably, this did not happen. Here, the historical record briefly tapers off. Ells did not move to Edmonton, nor did he collaborate with Tory and Lehmann. On the contrary, by July of that year Ells had enlisted to serve overseas with his battalion of combat engineers. He had left the research done at Mellon behind in his yet unsystematic notes. Just as it had seemed like Ells was making great strides in his research, when he was the de facto authority on all oil sands research, sought out by the U of A and others, things began to change. While he was away in Europe, Ells’ reputation would be marred beyond repair without him able to respond; his relationship with Tory, Lehmann, Haanel, and countless others would deteriorate precipitously; and another figure would rise in the ranks, currying the favour of Tory and becoming the poster child for oil sands research in Alberta.

His name was Karl Adolph Clark.

However, for most of the province’s history, the oil lay just out of reach—encased in a dense, heavy sand. In its natural state, oil sand is a sticky substance, of which bitumen (the component refined into crude oil) comprises only 10%—the bulk of the material consisting of sand, water, and other minerals. Many stages of refinement are necessary to turn oil sands into a useful fuel, such as gasoline or diesel. Combined with the punishing geography—thick muskeg and biting winters, as well as great distance from any major markets—the oil sands had long remained a mere curiosity to most. It was only after decades of study and experimentation by a handful of dedicated individuals and organizations that the first successful commercial oil sands operation, Great Canadian Oil Sands, commenced production in 1967.

At present, the Canadian oil sands are the world’s largest industrial project. The total output of oil sands operations is 3.4 million barrels per day, or about 57% of Canada’s total oil production. Today, we marvel at the scale, but few understand the history of this industry.

An immense amount of work was required to solve the oil sands’ riddle and coax out their sweet bounty. Scientific research was undertaken by many different bodies—federal and provincial, public and private—for roughly 50 years before commercialization finally came about. Far from merely dull and dry incremental scientific development, the history of the Athabasca oil sands is a riveting story worth telling. Political strife, personal rivalry, and disaster marred the entirety of oil sands development; and yet, despite the many setbacks, human ingenuity eventually prevailed to create a successful oil industry on the banks of the mighty Athabasca River.

Historical accounts have tended to pinpoint one “great man” upon whom to lay the credit—a “father of the oil sands.” Who, then, is this man?

A majority of sources will tell you that it’s Dr. Karl A. Clark, a scientist who worked at the University of Alberta and who developed the hot-water separation techniques to separate bitumen from oil sand—a process which, in its essential form, is still used today in the industry. This is the story I heard most often in my cursory research.

I had taken this account to be true until I heard a different story. Another man, Sidney Clarke Ells, began to surface in historical literature, often called the father of the oil sands also. Ells’ great contribution, so the story goes, was braving the harsh northlands to conduct the first geological surveys of the oil sands, creating the first maps of the region, and shamelessly promoting the sands to attract major commercial development. Maxwell Ball, an early oil sands entrepreneur behind the Abasand semi-commercial pilot project, said,

S.C. Ells may well be called the father of the Alberta bituminous sand research and development. He made the first – and as yet the only – comprehensive maps of the area in which they lie. He made the first systematic study of the methods for separating the bitumen from the sands. He first developed and demonstrated the principal [sic] of hot water separation through pulping the bituminous sands and recovering the separated bitumen in a flotation cell. For thirty-five years in the face of indifference and skepticism, he has been the courageous and unremitting advocate of the value and importance of bituminous sand deposits.1

The more I read about both men, the less consensus I found. Many favour Clark as the father of the oil sands. Many favour Ells. Some disparage one, some the other. Sources conflicted in even basic information on the matter, such as the key question of who first developed the hot-water separation technique used in all oil sand separation thereafter. I was intrigued.

But this also presents the question: what does it mean to be the father of the oil sands? Both these men aided the development of the oil sands, developed the techniques necessary to separate oil from sand, and facilitated the presence of successful commercial operations in northern Alberta. Is the father of the oil sands the first one to study the sands? The one who contributed the most?

I fell down the rabbit hole. I spent months researching, reading a myriad of oil sands reports, tracking down obscure books from town to northern town, and combing through documents in the University of Alberta Archives and Provincial Archives of Alberta. The aim, through it all, was to document the many exploits of Karl Clark and Sidney Ells, so that the question of the father of the oil sands may be settled. The present series is the fruit of that labour.

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I will release this series in weekly installments, so as to divide the voluminous text into digestible episodes. I have attempted to draw out the drama inherent in the events I relay, while also dutifully recording the facts. The history, however, hardly requires dramatizing, as the elements of an enticing story are all there—a scientific feud, personal rivalry, perilous voyages into the frigid north, great stakes, great failures, and perhaps greater successes. May it be an introduction to Canadian history for some, and a footnote for others. I will, therefore, begin to present my inquiry into the history of the oil sands and the deeds of Ells and Clark from the year 1913 to 1967.

Bonnyville, Alberta

I am in love with a girl, but she is not with me. I work in the oil sands while she is halfway across the country. I think about her every day. Words cannot describe how I miss her, and so I will spare the reader any attempt at description. The hours of pining, however, have born out reflections on love, the gospels, and metaphysics.

It seems that everyone has something vaguely true to say about love. Perhaps each of the myriad truisms espoused capture some aspect of love, but few people have tried to understand love itself and in its entirety. Even fewer have done so with any pittance of accuracy. Plato points out this eternal feature of discourse concerning love in the Symposium when Socrates rebukes those who speak of love for not praising love itself, but merely praising the effects of love. Perhaps we cannot know what love is, but only that love is—tracing the varied vestiges we observe around us. Or, perhaps reason can elucidate what love is in itself.

But let me begin by observing the phenomenon of love as I experience it. I know that there is a mighty and indomitable force which ties me to a woman, no matter that we are a world apart. I know that this force makes me despair that she is not here with me. I know that this force occupies my mind and turns my thoughts to her, and I know that it pains my heart. I know that she feels the same for me. I know that this experience is not unique to me, for it has been shared by many lovers throughout history and all over the world. Therefore, I know that this love shared by her and I is merely one instance which is, in all likelihood, a universal feature of the human experience, owed to a common phenomenon.

I observe, moreover, that my mind is spurred to reflection only because the object of my love is absent. There is an old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder—true enough. But there is also the Heideggerian principle that something only reveals itself truly when it becomes a problem. It is not that love has ceased, only that our love now faces the barrier of distance. Despite this, love yet persists, tightening its calloused grip upon my soul.

But, just as fire’s blithe warmth and scorching burns are both felt by its presence, the bliss and the sorrow of love must both be known by its presence, hardly its absence. Otherwise, if the cause is absent, how can its effects be present? How is it the case, then, that I feel the depths of love when the object my love is absent? It can only be so if love is something which transcends location and the presence of the object of love. It follows that love itself is supervenient upon these material conditions.

Love, furthermore, must be immaterial. For, there can be no material explanation for a force which binds two souls together across time and space. Of course, pheromones, physical attraction, and reproductive compatibility all play into human romance. But these are merely necessary conditions for love, containers within which the phenomenon occurs, not to be confused with the thing itself. Love cannot be a purely material phenomenon, for if it were, it would be merely a contract formed for mutual expedience, a hedonistic pleasure pact, or a pattern of behaviour born purely by natural selection.

In nature, we see no love. We see, rather, reproduction based on evolutionarily stable strategies, be they through displays of genetic prowess or implicit covenants formed to care for the young. In any case, these childbearing relationships are formed through the calculus of expedience. It is pure necessity that orders relations as such, either directly or indirectly through the behaviour encoded in organisms via natural selection.

Human love, on the other hand, resists being reduced to expedience. Contrary to what we observe in the natural world, for humans, romantic relationships are not merely means toward the end of childbearing, but rather, are ends in themselves. Love can, and often does, persist without the possibility of children, or even in the absence of sex. Love violates the practical and the rational, often opposing social order, defying border, breed, and birth. Love is a force that overcomes rational human law and custom, a force that defies distance and social stratum—one that can seldom fit any rational explanation.

In Greek myth, this force was the god Eros, and the Greeks understood with striking clarity that Eros, or love, is one of the most powerful and fundamental forces in the universe. Hesiod assigned to Eros an ancient and essential role as the bringer of order to a formless void, just as Empedocles termed this fundamental forces of unification and separation “love” and “strife,” respectively. Love, as we see in The Iliad, compelled Zeus himself to stop helping the Achaeans and make love to his wife instead. Love is the very thing which imbues an inchoate and chaotic world with lawful order, making gods and devils its playthings.

While love may seldom manifest for humans as a rational force, we may wonder at why it is humans alone of all mortal beings, having the unique gift of rationality, who experience love in this way. This points to the fact that love, while not strictly rational, is metaphysical, acting upon those beings alone who can conceptualize the immaterial. If love is transcendent, or even divine, then this means that, for it to act upon man, he must contain an element of the divine within him.

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Love and Christianity

This understanding of love as a metaphysical force coheres neatly with the Christian worldview, which, in distinction to the other Abrahamic religions, understands God as a fundamentally loving being—even one whose primary attribute is love. 1 John 4:7-8 reads “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” John 3:16 reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

In the Christian understanding, God is fundamentally loving, and He is love itself; every instance of love in the world originates in God. The greatest manifestation of God’s love is Him sending His only son Jesus to die for man’s sins. The significance of this act of grace is that man, in his fallen state, would otherwise have been unable to fully obey God’s law, thereby preventing him from attaining full communion with God. Through Jesus’ sacrifice, however, God and man could be reconciled, and man’s sinful trespasses covered. As such, grace and love are intimately tied.

Obeisance to God’s law is still demanded, but love becomes the primary criterion of salvation. When Jesus says that He has not come to replace the law but to fulfil it (Matthew 5:17), He means to say that love complements law, and that, where we fail to follow the law, our failure is covered by God’s loving grace—only so may we attain salvation. After all, “love covers a multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8). However, this reconciliation is not possible except through God’s love embodied in Jesus, which is why the gods of Judaism and Islam are not fundamentally loving, for in those religions, man and God have not yet been reconciled.

The pervasiveness of God’s love marks a crucial similarity with the Greek concept of Eros. For, just as Eros permeates human love, divine love, and the very creation of the universe, so too is God’s love central and omnipresent in Christian cosmology. In Genesis, when the world is formless, it is God who gives form to the world. When it reads that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters,” (Genesis 1:2), this is an image of form meeting chaos (as waters and seas are a recurring motif for chaos in the Bible). This story is analogous with the interplay between Eros and Chaos in Hesiod. The Song of Solomon shows the passionate intensity of human love, which is a love that comes from God, too. Finally, the Gospels show us that the link between God and man is love, in the form of Jesus.

Art, poetry, and song, throughout history and across the world, have long contended that there is something markedly divine and mystical in the phenomenon of human love. And yet, the modern secular West overlooks this fact in favour of shallow materialist explanations of love. But might there not be something true in the common wisdom? In love, do we genuinely experience something divine?

We may reason from effects to cause, for what is present in the effects must be present in the cause also, and the two must be of like kind. If love is a metaphysical force, then it follows that its source must be metaphysical. And if love is not merely a phenomenon that emerges from matter, then love’s origin must be transcendent. And because what is present in the effects must be present in the cause, the transcendent origin of love must also be loving. To explain the phenomenon of human love, then, we are led to posit a metaphysical loving force whose effects descend upon us. This suggests the truth in the Christian account of a loving God.

And what is more, there is a universal desire for love and a universally implicit sense that love exists. People desire love without knowing precisely what love is. And indeed, throughout our lives, we are ever mistaken as to what love is. We humans have a profound capacity and longing for love, yet we are also uniquely unsuccessful in finding it. But how can anyone seek love if they do not know what love is to begin with? How can we be disappointed with the imperfections of human love if we do not know what perfect love is? The fact that people do seek love and, in seeking love, discriminate between what is and is not love, informs us that there must be an innate knowledge of love in each of us. We may only discriminate because we have this innate reference point.

This is because all instances of love on earth are pale comparisons of a perfect and primordial divine love, of which we are implicitly aware, and against which we judge the shades of human romance here below. Without this reference point, the search for love would not be possible, nor would we have any cause for disappointment in the imperfections of human love.

But, on rare occasion, when we do find true love on earth, it reminds us of the first love we knew, which is the perfect love of our Creator. It is only because He first loved us that we are able to detect true love when we encounter it. And though human love is only ever an approximation of divine love, it is sometimes such an excellent approximation that we perceive flashes of the divine in it, and indeed, in love, we most closely approach the divine. Moreover, in true love, where each selflessly seeks the good of the other, we most closely replicate the benevolent love which God has for man. I can say truly that true love has imbued in me a newfound understanding of the perfect love of my Creator.

Because we love, and because we love with reference to a first and eternal love, we must accept the existence of a perfect and eternal love as a paradigm, visible in the mortal realm by its vestiges. This suggests the truth in the Christian worldview, as it is the only one which includes love as a primary feature of God. To be clear, love is a force that is synonymous with God, and instances of love are evidence of this divine force at play. God loves us with a perfect and immutable love, which leaves an indelible imprint upon every heart. Moreover, the Christian account explains why love is such a fundamental force in our world—it is how we are reconciled with our Creator, and it is how God extends Himself towards us. Love is the vehicle of divine participation.

The phenomenon of human love, then, indicates the fact of divine love and provides evidence of an infinitely loving God.

Love has an crucial place in the Christian cosmology. However, in the human experience, love often confounds any attempt at rationalization. So, too, is God’s love mystifying to human reason, which is why His love is categorized as a profound mystery. This is hardly a contradiction, for the experience of love may bewilder the understanding, while we still may acknowledge the fundamental role that love plays in the universe.

The view of love as a capricious cupid, wherein romance is a subjective and irrational phenomenon, is only coherent in a universe of flux without a rational unifying principle. This is the Eros of the Greeks, and this is where their worldview was almost complete, but lacked the overarching logos and unity featured in the Christian religion, where all the divine traits embodied by different gods were unified in the One God of the Trinity. The rational cosmological function of love within the Christian worldview implies a rational and law-like God, and vice versa. After all, in the Bible, the very same God that embodies love also embodies law, as well as reason, when Jesus is described as logos (John 1:1). God, then, is both love and logos.

If God places an innate understanding of love in each of our hearts, then, because Jesus is love, this means that there is a universal intuition of Jesus in every man. This indicates a universally available pathway to salvation. I suggest that because every human, no matter whether he is aware of the name of Jesus, may be led to God via love, and through love, he may attain salvation. When one loves truly and earnestly, perhaps one also worships Jesus, even if that name is foreign to him. If Jesus is love, a rejection of love is synonymous with condemnation. For, if one rejects love, one rejects God also.

Condemnation and salvation are, therefore, twin faces of divine love. In our own romantic love, we experience microcosms of each condition. And, being in love, I truly sense both. When I am with the woman I love, I experience the heights of salvation. Without her, I feel as if in the depths of condemnation. It is not when love itself is absent that one experiences condemnation, but when the object of one’s love is absent and the force of love is still present.

This state represents our fallen condition; when we reject God, we still experience His love, but also the attendant anguish with our distance from Him. The flashes of salvation we experience on earth are when, in rare instances, we may experience His presence directly through His love. So, conversely, is God pained when we reject Him, and overjoyed when we embrace Him in love.

It is our imperfections—chiefly our selfishness and vanity—which pose the greatest obstacle to enjoying God’s love for us and emulating His love in our own relationships. If love, as commonly stated, is to pursue the good of another above one’s own, then the selflessness that God embodied when sacrificing His son for our sake is emblematic of an ardent and pure love. The failure of earthly love is the failure to match this paragon of selflessness. It is not love that fails, but we who fail to love in our fallen state.

Now, of course, there is a deeply selfish aspect of love. Love is not always a benevolent desire to seek the good for an other, but is often a desire to possess also. When we encounter a beautiful person, we desire to possess that person physically and emotionally—such is the exclusive nature of human romance. Whether this is a good, evil, or necessary feature of love is besides the point. While love can often be free of possession, it is just as often devoid of selflessness.

Love and Otherness

An important metaphysical question thus arises: does self-sacrifice, as an essential component of love, entail that the self is abolished therein? In common opinion, love melds two hearts into one. We colloquially refer to a lover as our “better half.” This view is even vindicated by the Bible, when it reads “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24). Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium features an apocryphal history of humans as once being four-armed, four-legged, and two-faced until Zeus spitefully separated all of us into two—love, then, is the search for our long lost missing half. Or indeed, in Empedocles’ account of love as a unifying force, it is solely through love that elements are fused together to make composites. Albeit not always in a purely literal sense, the idea that, through love, two souls are fused together and become one has proven prevalent.

It can seem that, in a loving relationship, we are called to dissolve the borders of our very self and be subsumed into an other. I contend, however, that this is not so. Indeed, otherness as such, and the persistence of otherness, is an essential condition for love. In love, a subject-object distinction must be preserved.

If love is to seek the good of an other above one’s own, this does not entail the abolition of otherness and the subsumption of two into one—on the contrary, if love is to persist in this equation, then otherness must also. If the other is subsumed into the self, love vanishes. Aristotle, in the Politics, counters Aristophanes’ sympotic speech, arguing that love would be spoiled if the two were unified into one because there would no longer be an association. It is the sense of ownership and preciousness which cause people to love one another. But you cannot own what is identical with you.1 Or, in George Grant’s articulation, “Love is consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness.”2 In love, you make sacrifices for an other. If otherness is not an essential aspect of love, then love becomes pure egocentricity. But if love is egocentricity, then the tyrannical soul turns out to be the most beloved of all men—the height of absurdity.

I find the arguments of Aristotle and Grant far more convincing. Love is fundamentally relational, as the force which mediates subject and object, the lover and beloved. If not for an other, one cannot seek another’s good above their own, for that would be to seek their own good. And there can be no relationship, and therefore no reason to love, between two things who are made one. As a mediating force, love depends upon there being discrete beings to mediate.

Though it is true that Genesis declares man and woman to be one flesh in marriage, I take this as metaphorical. If this were literally so, as Aristotle points out, the labels man and wife themselves would be rendered null. For, what is a husband but a husband to a wife? Furthermore, explaining love as a force which subsumes two into one would entail that God’s love subsumes man into Him. But this would result in a false and facile understanding of God akin to Spinoza’s, wherein God is everything and everything is God. Reality would become an undifferentiated unity.

God’s love, though perfect, does not entail complete self-sacrifice either. For, though God’s sacrifice was great, as He sent His only son to cover our sins out of love, it was not His whole self which was sacrificed, but merely one aspect of the Trinity. And Jesus, recall, did not perish entirely, but was resurrected and preserved. Thus did love alter our relationship with the divine, but neither we nor the divine were abolished thereby.

Moreover, love subsuming the one into the other would entail that love is terminality. Once the other is subsumed into the self—once two hearts become one, or once one finds their lost other half—love’s task is complete and any relationship as such, ceases. However, this is not how we humans experience love. Widespread divorce, separation, and marital disputes mean that love is never complete in the human experience. And even in our relationships with God, we fall, recover, stray from Him, and then return. We are never complete, nor is our love, but both are constantly evolving. In all relationships, there is a difference in unity.

Love is a metaphysical force, and as such, may only interact with metaphysical objects, namely, the soul. And so, two souls cannot be made one through love, for even in perfect love each soul retains its autonomy. And since love is a metaphysical force, the bearing of offspring, which is a purely physical process, cannot be said to be subsumed two souls into one, for such would be a category error. Animals, for instance, reproduce well enough without love, and yet the bearing of offspring does not entail that the two are made one another unless in a loose sense.

It is now appropriate to offer a definition of love. Based on what has been argued, I say that love is the metaphysical force which compels us to seek the good in, through, and for an other. This manifests most potently as romance, but also in our relationship with the divine. Traces, too, can be found in friendship and goodwill towards one’s neighbour. This force is a fundamental aspect of God, and the subjects which experience love can be none other than God and man, for these two alone have understanding of, and therefore are subject to, forces beyond the merely material.

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Love and Plato

This understanding of love as a salient cosmological force, and as one which does not erase difference, but rather establishes a unity in difference, must be accommodated by our worldview. It is here that I will make, perhaps, a surprising suggestion: that Plato’s understanding of the world may help us best of all to account for human and divine love and their interaction. Though Plato hardly advanced a metaphysical system per se, his many dialogues, taken together, provide a number of key metaphysical tenets which establish a worldview compatible with the conception of love I espouse. Moreover, his conception of love as Eros, described in the Symposium, is consonant with the present account, albeit with some modifications.

We hardly need speculate what Plato thought about love, for love is the subject of his Symposium, where Socrates and a host of other symposiasts take turns giving encomia of the god Eros. Many give eloquent and beautiful speeches before it finally comes Socrates’ turn, who, rather than providing his own account, begins retelling a wise lesson given to him by a sibylline sage named Diotima.

Diotima’s teachings about love begin innocuously enough. Love, she says, is fundamentally of the Good. A man loves something if the object of his love possesses something which he lacks—something which is good for him. This is because, in Diotima’s fanciful mythology, Eros is the child of Poverty and Resource. Eros takes after the former in its pervasive deficiency, but owes to the later its deft contrivances for what it lacks.3 Most often, this manifests as an ardent desire to possess a beautiful body, “scheming for all that is beautiful and good,”4 whereof the whole of human romance is born.

However, love is multifaceted. The force of Eros compels one to hunger after the Good in its many forms. Bound up with the pursuit of romance is the pursuit of immortality. It is, after all, through sexual generation that one may attain a kind of immortality in their progeny. This is because of Eros’ nature as an emissary between mortals and immortals, “Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one.”5 I argued that love is the vehicle of divine participation—we find that Plato’s account is happily consonant with my own.

But it is not through sexual generation alone that love allows one to participate in immortality. For, the love of bodies, according to Diotima, is but one—ultimately shallow—manifestation of the great power of Eros. She demonstrates in her “ladder of love” how Eros is the impetus behind a turn away from the sensual realm of bodies and towards higher forms of beauty and goodness:

Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the beautiful itself and that alone; so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty. In that state of life above all others, my dear Socrates . . . a man finds it truly worth while to live, as he contemplates essential beauty.6

It is in this way that Eros leads one to contemplate not only what is beautiful in the world, but the eternal, perfect, divine, and unchanging form of beauty itself.

Within Plato’s metaphysical worldview, it is possible for man and gods to interact because they are fundamentally of the same kind—like can only interact with like. This tenet is essential if love is to be truly a transcendent matter of bridging the gap between divine and human. Undergirding this worldview is Plato’s understanding of the soul.

In the Republic, we read Plato’s understanding of the soul as tripartite, containing one’s reasoning, desiring, and spirited faculties.7 As such, the soul is the seat of all that is immaterial or non-bodily in a human life. In the Phaedo, Plato argues for the immortality and divinity of the soul, free from corporeal decay. Or, in the Philebus, Plato articulates a divine resonance between the human soul, which alone can moderate the carnal impulses of the body, and the divine mind of Zeus, who imposes order and proportion on an otherwise inchoate and disordered world.8 Reasoning from cause to effects, Plato indicates the divinity of the soul, imbued with the same traits possessed by the Olympian.

It is through the force of Eros that man and god share communion, working through the common medium of mind. The similarities with the Christian account are readily apparent.

The conclusion of Plato’s Philebus, after a long discussion between Socrates and Protarchus, a young hedonist, is that reason is more essential to the good life than pleasure, for reason alone, possessing traces of the divine, is able to moderate one’s desires so as to resist the pains which are so often attendant to excessive pleasures. However, there is a second reason, which is that reason alone can give one knowledge of the Good. As such, reaffirming the position of Diotima in the Symposium, reason is most highly prized if one is to life a good life.

For Aristotle, as for Plato, the highest good was to engage in contemplation, for it is The rational part of us that most closely resembles the divine. Aristotle writes in Metaphysics that a being has attained fulfilment when its activity is identical with its aim. Contemplation is both an activity, and an aim in itself, which means that man finds his highest fulfilment therein. Further, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that contemplation is the highest fulfilment of man, for it is through contemplation that we may learn of the highest and most fundamental things.9

For Aristotle, man may reach divinity through contemplation because of the underlying logos of the universe. And because logos is fundamentally divine, we also resemble the divine most while in contemplation. The Christian account understands God as logos and love, as I have shown, and if God is equally love as He is logos, then may we not resemble the divine most closely in loving also, as in contemplation? And might we not be equally fulfilled in love, with the end of love—pursuing the good for, in, and through an other—being identical with its activity? I contend that love is an equally effective way as contemplation to ascend the cosmological hierarchy and mirror the divine.

I only disagree with Plato insofar as he describes love as a frantic desire to possess, and that alone. What the Christian account adds is that love, while inescapably a drive to possession, equally embodies selflessness. Love is not desire not only to possess the Good—namely, to seek the good for oneself—but also to seek the good for an other. Love, contrary to Plato, is not born of base Poverty, but rather, through the infinite bounty of our Father.

Whereas Plato understands Eros as merely a means towards the end of contemplating the Beautiful, the Good, and the Whole, I contend that loving itself is equally a means of divine participation. I reject the conception that romantic love is a lower form of Eros than the love of beauty itself, for the former is as much an image of the divine as the latter. Because logos and love are unified in Jesus, both love and contemplation are necessary and equal courses to reach the divine. Therefore, they cannot exist in a hierarchy, for they both lead to one another and necessitate the other.

Love entails seeking the good of an other. However, we often need discernment, and not only right intent, to determine what is good for someone else. As such, reason and contemplation contemplate and fulfil love, just as love complements them in turn. Love and logos are inextricably intertwined.

While the Platonic worldview, with a minor supplement, accommodates our understanding of love, there are rival philosophical traditions, more or less prevalent today, to which the present account is utterly anathema. I turn, then, to the philosophy of Hegel and find a rival metaphysical worldview with a starkly different explanation of the phenomenon of love.

Love and Hegel

Hegel’s metaphysics are often categorized as “Absolute Idealism,” or as a relational metaphysics, as opposed to a substance-object metaphysics (dealing with things and predicates). What this means is that, for Hegel, metaphysics is not a matter of relating subject to object in the correct way. Whereas for Kant metaphysics was a matter of a thinking subject attempting to attain knowledge of things-in-themselves, and for Plato, grasping the eternal forms, for Hegel, metaphysics is more precisely a matter of understanding the relations between mind and phenomena and viewing this phenomenological relationship as the ultimate source of knowledge, rather than the static objects which present themselves as phenomena.

Hegel’s reason for viewing relations as the crux of metaphysics is that, for him, everything is mutually determined—in nature, society, and ideas—through a dialectical process. The Hegelian dialectic is often presented as a three-stage process, with a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—though these are words Hegel did not use to describe it. It is, nonetheless, a useful way to understand the dialectic. Simply put, the dialectic is the process by which a proposition is met with a contrary proposition, which, through this opposition, are together raised up to form a higher level of truth. This happens because, when two contrary propositions are brought into opposition, it is realized that the two determine and are determined by each other. For instance, in his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel draws Being into opposition with Nothing. Being is utterly meaningless without its complement, Nothing. Nothing, however, to contrast Being, must have existence—Nothing must be. And so, to explain this paradoxical state of affairs, the dialectic presents their synthesis, Becoming, which carries both inside it. The German word Hegel uses to describe this moment is Aufheben, which refers to a simultaneous destruction, preservation, and raising up. The English term most often employed in its place is Sublation.

The Hegelian dialectic is all-pervasive. This is to say that, while it applies to concepts, it is also a process by which history progresses, as Hegel demonstrates in his Philosophy of History, as well as pervading nature, civil society, and the development of self-consciousness. In short, for Hegel, the world is fundamentally process, not substance, and that process is the ever-evolving dialectic and the dynamic unfolding of what he calls the Concept, or a kind of master principle of the rational structure of the universe which the dialectic eventually unveils. The dialectic is as much ontological as conceptual.

A necessary consequence of Hegel’s metaphysics is that there are no authentic binary oppositions, or at least there are none which are not eventually subsumed by the dialectical nature of reality. There can be no absolutely discrete entities. There is only the relation of the dialectic, which steamrolls dichotomies and subsumes them into the Absolute totality. Thus, contrary to Plato, there is no transcendent divinity, no irreducible soul, and no ontological hierarchy. For Hegel, as the Phenomenology of Spirit displays, the divine is eventually reconciled entirely with man.

Instead of speculating how love might fit into his system, we can turn to where Hegel discusses love explicitly in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Love is defined by Hegel as “mind’s feeling of its own unity” and “the consciousness of my unity with another.”10 What is important to note in this definition is that love is a subjective disposition rather than an external force. Moreover, as Hegel notes, love happens between material beings—specifically, human beings: “love . . . exists between only living things who are alike in power . . .”11 Love turns out to be the contradiction of one’s sense of one’s own incompleteness, and then the sense of self found in an other. The inherent incompleteness of the self leads one to form a marriage with an other, to find one’s very self in an other. In this, two become one. As he writes, “marriage results from the free surrender by both sexes of their personality.”12

Two become one not in a figurative way, but a literal way for Hegel, for he writes that “lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there were really a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence. In the lovers there is no matter; they are a living whole.” He goes on: “love strives to annul even this distinction [between the lover as lover and the lover as physical organism], to annul this possibility [of separation] as a mere abstract possibility, to unite [with itself] even the mortal element [within the lover] and to make it immortal.”13

But this establishes a troubling principle—that in love, personality itself is annulled and otherness is overcome. This suggests that love entails finality—when the self has been overcome and subsumed into another, then love as such has ceased. But is this so? Is love not continuous, ever-evolving and changing? If we accept Hegel’s premises, we are forced to admit that love cancels itself, as the otherness which first establishes love is superseded as a mere stage in the dialectic.

We see the markings of the Hegelian dialectic at work in the relationship of love. There is a contradiction when one finds one’s self in an other. Then, how is this contradiction sublated and brought forth into a new phase? Hegel argues that the moment of sublation in love is the creation of a child, which is simultaneously self and other. In the child, both the lovers have been completely subsumed into one another, and have been brought forth into a new phase. In this way, the production of children in the family fits perfectly into Hegel’s dialectical model.

But I contend Hegel makes a category error when he asserts that love culminates in the bearing of offspring. For, as I argued earlier, the production of offspring is a natural result of sexual relations within all species, including humans. However, it is only humans who are aware of something called love, and who experience something we call love. Animals mate and bear offspring in various relations, according to their evolutionary strategy, which reduces to expedience. Moreover, mating is a significant and necessary condition for a relationship of any sort between two animals.

This is in distinction to humans, who experience love regardless of the potential of bearing offspring—in fact, this is most often a secondary consideration in human romance. The fact is that the bearing of offspring is inessential to love, which can endure despite the impossibility of bearing offspring. one may argue that it is sex, rather than the bearing of offspring, which humans seek, for sex is tied to childbearing. And so, humans evolved to seek sex primarily. However, animals seldom have sex for pleasure—only humans do. Moreover, there can exist romance outside of sex, and sex outside of romance also. It is markedly clear that romantic relationship differ from merely sexual or reproductive relationships.

However, there is the more fundamental point that love is metaphysical, not material. Hegel’s view hinges upon love being an interaction between two material bodies. However, the body is not the locus of love; the soul is. This is so because love can endure through the absence of the body—namely, through distance—the very same distance which I now experience. Love, of course, works within the parameters of biological attraction and sexual compatibility. But so does the soul exist within our corporeal form, yet we do not say that the latter is sufficient explanation for the former. It is the soul which feels love, which is why we can innately sense the traces of divine love.

If the creation of offspring is the means by which Hegel argues love can subsume two into one, and love is not necessarily connected to the creation of offspring, then it follows that, love cannot subsume two into one as Hegel writes. There is a rupture in the dialectic, which he wishes to impose upon every dimension of human life, even where is hardly applies.

Of course, the reason Hegel includes marriage as a stage in the dialectic in the Philosophy of Right, a book detailing how his dialectic plays out in civil society, is that marriage is an important societal institution. Yet he neglects to mention that it is an institution because of its importance for religious, as well as legal, reasons. To study merely the legal and childrearing dimensions of marriage and consider that a full treatment of the subject is hopelessly shallow.

This is not a refutation of Hegel’s grand metaphysical system. It is merely to say that he did not accurately depict the phenomenon of love. However, if a metaphysical system is unable to accommodate such deep intuitions about love, an eminent part of the human experience, then we have reason to be incredulous of such a system. Rather, I argue that, no matter how much Platonic ideas have been attacked through the centuries, including by Hegel himself, I argue that the Platonic worldview accommodates the phenomenon of human love and the fact of divine love to a greater degree than Hegel. As such, there is no small reason to believe that, perhaps, Plato’s understanding of the world was more accurate than Hegel’s.

But let me return to what I experience most deeply: I miss my lover. However, it is precisely because she is far away that I most acutely sense her otherness to me. She is not my own, but I want to possess her. She is not here, though it is for that very reason that I feel the pangs of love so strongly. As such, Hegel was perhaps right that there is a paradoxical character to love. But I know, also, that I will never be one with her. It is because of love, not despite it, that we remain two. Otherwise, our love would be completed and thereby annulled. Perhaps Hegel truly did view his love as completed in the birth of his children. Perhaps it was an absence of true love in his life that led him to such sterile conclusions. The presence of love alone convinces me beyond a doubt that love is divine. If Hegel neglected this fact, I cannot imagine that he ever felt true love, with all its soaring heights and ravaging depths.

Sitting here in a budget motel in Bonnyville, I both pity and envy Hegel.

Introduction: Objects and Hyperobjects

What is oil?

One might easily fall back upon the scientific definition of oil as a material substance—a flammable liquid composed mostly of hydrocarbons found in underground geological formations. But if by a definition we seek to understand a thing, then this definition fails, as such a reductionist account fails to exhaust all the effects of oil and emergent properties which might arise in certain circumstances and not others. In the thought of Graham Harman, this would constitute the “undermining” of an object—reducing a thing downward to its material parts. Through this, we lose sight of the object. Understanding oil as a liquid hydrocarbon doesn’t give us the tools to anticipate the scope of oil in the modern world.

But, by defining oil by its effects, by what it does, we fall into the other extreme—what Harman calls “overmining,” or reducing a thing upwards to its effects. This approach fails also, given that it neglects the potentialities of a thing. If one accepts that a thing is defined by its effects, then one is forced to bite the Megarian bullet and assert that one is a homebuilder only if and when he is building a home.

We cannot understand oil by looking at a sample of oil because the entity “oil” is something entirely different in character than any localized instance of it. It would be like trying to understand the Black Forest by looking at a single tree, or America by looking at a single street in Philadelphia. Oil, as a totality, has emergent properties which are not observable at the local level.

My analysis must borrow from Timothy Morton and his concept of “hyperobjects,” which he defines as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”1 Hyperobjects exist, but at a scale so large that it is impossible to point to one and say “here it is.” Where is climate change? Where is the atom bomb? Where is democracy? These things are real, but vast and difficult to pin down.

Oil, for Morton, is a hyperobject par excellence. “Where is oil?” is a sanguine question—it is everywhere and in everything. Relevant to the present analysis, Morton further defines five key traits of hyperobjects: they are viscous, non-local, temporally undulating, phasing, and interobjective.

Viscosity is appropriate here, for oil is sticky, not merely in a literal sense. It attaches itself to us and fills our minds. Oil is not only material, but metaphysical also, or else it would not live within our imagination. As will be revealed through this essay, oil has shaped our collective consciousness in indelible ways. Oil burrows into our lives. It is immensely difficult to free oneself petroleum and its many forms in the modern world. As oil sand scientist Karl Clark used to say, “once the tar sticks to your boots, you can never get it off.”

Oil is non-local in that it is everywhere. There is no place where oil is. It dwells in deep underground reservoirs, in gas tanks of our cars, and in microplastics accumulating in far corners of the globe. Even where there is no oil, oil can exert its might.

Oil does not exist at any given time. It exerts a backwards causal influence in time—the promise of gushing black gold has long enticed wildcatters since the first oil wells drilled in Oil Springs, Ontario. It exerts a causal influence upon the future also, for the effects of an oil economy will be felt long after the taps have turned off. Oil weaves nimbly through time, temporally undulating.

Just as the tides wax and wane, so too does oil phase back and forth. The price of oil rises, at which point it exerts an acute and noticeable pressure, and then it falls, easing us back in to a Lethean bliss. Oil oscillates between the background and foreground, potential and actual, but it is always there, oozing in its protean glory.

But oil demands a conduit—it becomes interobjective, working through other media. It comes in disguised forms. Pipelines are the most conspicuous medium through which oil travels, but in the age of oil, man also becomes a pipeline. Oil works through him, animating him, hiding in him. Philosophy and science declare themselves to be autonomous disciplines which search for truth, but they share a common master. In the age of oil, the activity of thought becomes channeling of materials. Morton writes that “oil and deep geological strata spring to demonic life, as if philosophy were a way not so much to understand but to summon actually existing Cthulu-like forces, chthonic beings such as Earth’s core.”2

Oil has shaped modern Western civilization perhaps more than any substance except steel. It is something so essential to us that we have neglected to examine it closely. Andrew Pendakis has called oil the “ur-substance”3 This is not merely to say that oil has been a useful tool, though this is, of course, true. Rather, oil exerts an omnidirectional influence upon every aspect of our lives.

The notion that we are active subjects, while the world is a passive object, is a modern delusion. A naive anthropocentrism supposes that we are the only causal agents in the universe. Contemporary quantum science already soundly thrashes this view. There can be no stark subject-object distinction, for we are as much objects as subjects. We do not merely shape the material world as we wish, but the material world shapes us in turn. Tools impose upon us the way they ought to be used. We obediently do their bidding. Oil is an firm master, and we are entirely servile.

This essay is fundamentally ontological, seeking to understand what oil is. We do not, however, have direct access to this substance. Another modern delusion is that we can pierce through accident to distil the essence of a object.

Kant rightly observed a yawning gulf between us and the things in the world. The observing subject cannot have direct access to these “things-in-themselves,” but rather imposes his own categories of understanding upon the manifold to interpret them. Kant was, however, only half right. The problem is not only that we lack the tools to reach the things. In addition, the things are shy, refusing to be reached. In Heideggerian terms, objects withdraw from our access.

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that this makes objects harder to pin down, as they are constantly morphing, changing, hiding from us. As with human interaction, we can never quite tell when someone is presenting their “authentic self” or merely a facade. The good news is that, because objects are active and causal entities, they give us some threads to cling on to, some revealing vestiges, some cryptic riddles for us to solve. Because objects are active, they impress themselves upon us.

Unfortunately, there is more bad news: objects permeate. Especially hyperobjects. It is impossible to see them because we see through them—glasses and contact lenses are dominantly made from plastic. It is impossible to think about them because we think them. It is impossible to speak objectively of oil, for there is bitumen on my breath. There is no way to stand outside a hyperobject when it encompasses all of us. In the case of microplastics, oil is inside of us, and in the case of makeup and lotion, it is on our skin also.

But this might yet be good news in disguise: in the age of oil, self-knowledge constitutes knowledge about oil. Oil reveals itself through its effects on our mind. Self-reflexion, contra Descartes, is not to reason purely, but to empirically observe the self as a microcosm of the world. Our thoughts are not our own. Pure reason is riddled with impurities.

It has been philosophically en vogue for the past few centuries to assert that no two objects can ever touch. Perhaps oil’s hydrophobia is part and parcel of this doctrine. Regardless, it seems in this that we are caught anew in the old Greek debate between the One and the Many, between the continuous and the discrete. Contemporary philosophy often demands that we choose between the notion that everything already exists in an undifferentiated unity, or that there is a gaping lacuna between a multiplicity of insular atoms.

From this dichotomy, a third way opens up: Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), a contemporary philosophical movement spearheaded by Graham Harman. Simply put, it is a school of thought which proposes that objects are real and determinate, that they are causal, but that they are withdrawn from our access, and so our knowledge of them is always imperfect. It introduces a “flat ontology” wherein each object is treated equally, and interacts on an equal plane. Harman writes that OOO

takes the other fork in the road after Kant than the one taken by German Idealism (Hegel, Fichte, Schelling): which eliminated Kant’s things-in-themselves while affirming his prejudice that philosophy must talk primarily about the interplay between thought and world, leaving any object-object interactions apart from humans to the mathematizing methods of natural science. By contrast, OOO endorses the things-in-themselves and asks instead why Kant treated them as the sole and tragic burden of human beings, rather than as the ungraspable terms of every relation, including those between fire and cotton or raindrops and tar.4

Object-object relations, though possible for Harman, can only happen through what he calls “vicarious causation.” This is the idea that objects can interact through the images they present to one another—through their sensual qualities. Causation becomes an aesthetic phenomenon. Essence shines forth in a more literal way than Hegel could have imagined.

Harman writes that “aesthetic phenomena result whenever a wedge is driven between an object and its qualities.”5 That is, through aesthetic phenomena we may trace any qualities presented to the objects which are vicariously interacting therein. However, Harman insists that objects are not identical with their qualities, but have a tense relationship with them. As such, matching things with their qualities, playing philosophical pin the tail on the donkey, is not a fool-proof path to knowledge. The qualities we see are merely those which objects choose to reveal.

Harman proceeds to posit the existence of real and sensual objects, and corresponding real and sensual qualities. Real objects are abstract and metaphysical, while sensual objects are concrete and material. Oil, as a totality, may be a real object, while the crude oil I see before me is a sensual object. The human mind is real, while the body is sensual. Real and sensual objects and qualities are connected and interact in a complex matrix.

Because causality is aesthetic, real objects can only effect change through sensual appearance, and sensual objects can only effect change if they work through the medium of a real object. For instance, metaphor is the linking of two sensual things through their interaction within the human mind. In other words, oil qua real object (read, hyperobject) connects with our minds through the battleground of sensual appearance, while oil qua sensual object (read, instances of oil) is directly present in our minds because we understand their effects on our bodies. Body and mind being inextricably linked means that we may be affected by the entire range of oil’s qualities, both sensual and real.

The present analysis is, needless to say, informed by the Object-Oriented Ontology of Harman and Morton. However, I do have a notable disagreement. OOO posits that direct knowledge about objects is impossible. I argue that knowledge is possible in degrees and in an oblique form. There may be no metalanguage to talk about objects, as we are inside of them, and there may be no thinking about objects, as we think through them. However, there is something deeper than thought or language which is also immediate (without mediation): awareness.

Awareness is deeper than knowledge, for while knowledge comes about through expression, awareness precedes expression. Though our language may be tainted, it can stimulate awareness, as in the Buddhist proverb about the finger pointing to the moon. The finger is not the moon, nor does the finger touch the moon, but it may gesture towards it. The Continental tradition of philosophy mistakes the finger for the moon, and so disparages the finger. This is a grave error, though better than the Analytic philosophers who naively believe that they can hold the moon in the palms of their hands. If we can be aware of the many ways that our thought patterns are shaped, we can begin to counteract those influences. The ideal of knowledge may be an asymptote in that sense, but one which we can approach, at the very least.

The correct method for philosophy, then, might not be proving, but probing. Knowledge cannot come about through literal propositional statements, but if at all, through language which errs on the side of the lyrical and poetic. Koans may be as effective, if not more so, as arguments for achieving awareness. This essay does not constitute an argument about, but a meditation upon oil. Moreover, knowledge is a matter of degrees, and we can never tell exactly when we have fully exhausted an object through enumerating its qualities.

Real qualities are displayed in the battleground of experience, while sensual qualities in the arena of our minds. The domains for understanding become self-reflexion, but also history, where we can locate objects and study their activity over time. Here Heidegger is prescient: Being can only be revealed in time.

To get at the reality of oil, we must attempt to cultivate awareness of it, in the many different faces it assumes—some concrete and some abstract. Oil has both real and sensual qualities, which are identified through introspection and historical understanding. If there is to be a field of petro-philosophy, it can never be divorced from petro-history.

Let us then journey forth, wandering through the halls of history and reflection to discover the many visages donned by this mysterious and protean black ooze.

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Oil as Money

If you ask anyone working in the Oil Patch what oil is to them, they will tell you: “oil is money.”

By all concrete metrics, this is true. Oil and gas currently account for 2.2% of global GDP. The industry accounts for 8% of GDP in the United States, the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil, and a staggering 50% of Saudi Arabia’s GDP. Oil and gas provides 55% of the world’s energy,6 and 90% of global transportation energy. $171 billion was invested globally in oil and gas production in 2024. The world economy is inseparably intertwined with oil and gas.

Nor is this trend diminishing, despite the movement towards green energy. Oil demand is projected to rise 23% by 2045, while gas demand is also expected to continue rising through the 2030s.

Canada, alongside Saudi Arabia, is a veritable petrostate. As of 2024, Canadian crude oil exports alone accounted for $147 billion, almost 20% of the country’s total exports. This sum dwarfs every other sector—agriculture, lumber, auto manufacturing, or steel. And that is not even mentioning exports of natural gas and refined petroleum products, bringing the total to $170 billion. We are the world’s fourth largest oil producing country, and Canada’s energy epicentre, the province of Alberta, alone has the fourth largest proven oil reserve on earth.

For individuals, too, oil is where the money is. In Canada, oilfield wages are substantially higher than the national average. Alberta, is per capita the wealthiest province in the country, with the highest median salaries. Everyone knows, if you are badly in need of cash, you go work the rigs.

When I was new to the Patch, a grizzled veteran had warned me: some men become addicted to drugs, some to liquor, some to gambling, some to sex—but in the Patch, the greatest and most destructive addiction is money.

Indeed, some of the wealthiest societies per capita on earth are the opulent, oil-rich kingdoms in the Middle East, with towering skyscrapers, luxury cars lining the streets, and unbounded extravagance. There, too, money becomes an addiction. Oil is money, indeed.

We must be careful not to dismiss or misinterpret this statement. It is not that oil is money indirectly because of the money it generates. It is not that oil is like a currency in the twenty-first century. It is not that oil is a highly valuable substance. Oil actually is money.

This is a metaphor. But a metaphor is not mere fiction. A metaphor only holds weight if it corresponds to the real. “A tree is a duck” is a poor metaphor, yet “oil is money” just works. A metaphor exists in the human mind, which becomes the medium to transmute oil into money. In the framework of vicarious causation, metaphor connects two sensual objects. The metaphor holds if the the one object correctly draws hidden aspects out of the other object. The metaphor “oil is money” evokes a quality in oil which ordinarily goes unnoticed. It it not that oil produces money, but that oil manifests as money.

We can readily see oil at play in the global economy.

In times of stability, we remain ignorant of the bituminous tendrils guiding the flow of global capital. There are, however, occasional shocks which reveal to us that we are at oil’s mercy. The 1973 OPEC oil shocks, when the price of oil rose 300% almost overnight, led to a cascade of price increases, inflation, unemployment, and a global recession. This was only exacerbated by the second round of shocks after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Or, we can look more recently to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian oil was met with sanctions the world over, leading to high gasoline prices—following suit was high inflation and economic stagnation.

When the price of oil rises, the very foundation of the global economy is shaken. Tremors are felt in all corners of the globe. Aftershocks echo for years after. It is only when something becomes a problem that it becomes conspicuous as an object of inquiry. Only when oil’s effects on the global economy are salient do we recall its omnipresence.

Oil is money.

Oil as Energy

Oil is energy. There is obviously a crude literal sense in which this is true. Oil is a highly energy dense substance, which largely replaced coal as an energy source, after which natural gas supplanted both in energy density and combustion efficiency. Oil is a substance entirely brimming with vitality. It is volatile, eager to ignite. Fuel hydrocarbons are characterized by weaker internal bonds, making them far more combustible. Oil is wild and unpredictable, resisting the yoke of any who wish to control it. Yet one would not perceive such vitality just by looking at this black, lifeless, oozing substance.

There are certain materials for which men will scour the ends of the earth. Prospectors from all over braved the icy winds of the Chilkoot pass for a hand at Yukon gold. Men trained their breath and faced a myriad of deep-sea perils to hunt pearls on the sea-floor. Diamonds, silver, and rubies inspire men’s hearts and minds, leading them on dangerous quests to far-off lands. Such resources contain a kernel of vitality.

Oil is one such substance.

Oil is not necessarily rare—there are dozens of substances more uncommon than oil which men do not expend every effort to find. One might say that oil is merely valuable. But, copper is valuable, and far rarer than oil, yet men do not lie awake at night, dreaming of vast reserves of copper. Oil is highly useful, yes. But so is iron, and yet iron is not likened to gold itself. No, there is indeed something special about oil, irreducible to its value, rarity, or utility. There is an energy inherent in this substance—a fervour it imparts upon the men that seek it.

Oil demands only the most daring, courageous, and worthy men. Early stories of the Canadian Oil Patch recount wildcat drilling rigs operating in the harshest and remotest conditions imaginable, geological surveys wading through the muskeg and snow of the Athabasca Oil Sands, exploration in the Northwest Territories along the Mackenzie River, or even the high arctic, in regions only accessible by helicopter. Globally, we see the same. In the mid-twentieth century, geologists traversed the inhospitable deserts of Saudi Arabia to discover the legendary Ghawar field, the world’s most productive oil and gas field. Men will even go to great lengths for the oil on the ocean floor, constructing monumental offshore oil rigs—incredible feats of engineering—such as at Tiber or Hibernia.

Indeed, the men who hunt for oil are famously some of the toughest and most courageous individuals in society. The archetype of the roughneck is characterized by pure masculine vitality. It is hardly an accident that oil draws these kinds of individuals, for like matches like. Indeed, strong individuals are needed to contain the very oil that brims with energy.

And then, after wildcatting in the bush for months, drilling deeper and deeper into the ground, perhaps even after a dozen or so failed wells, the black gold begins to spring up in an uncontrolled gusher. The potential energy of the pressurized reservoir has become kinetic. Oil has been known to shoot over 200 feet in the air, as at the legendary Lakeview Gusher in California, and at a rate of 18,800 barrels per day.

This reveals a hyperobjective feature of oil—that it exists on a higher dimension than we can perceive. The evidence of this is that oil extends its reach backwards and forwards in time. It is the promise of oil, not tangible present oil, which leads men on these impossible quests. Oil plants the idea of riches in their minds and the spirit in their hearts to seek it out. And, indeed, oil extends its reach far into the future also, as its effects long outlast it its presence.

Moreover, man is not the causal agent in this equation. Man is a mere conduit of oil’s activity. To say that man is the active subject in his search for oil would be like saying that air is responsible for the transmission of sound waves. The air facilitates their travel, but the sound waves are not produced by the air. Man, just like the air in this analogy, is a mere medium. The vitality which fills his heart is not his, but is buried deep beneath the earth.

Oil is interobjective.

In Morton’s terms, oil’s energy phases, oscillating between potential and actual. There are periods boom and bust. The fates of oilfield towns rest upon the whims of oil—whether it reveals itself or lurks underground, whether it floods the market or makes itself scarce. In boom times, oil’s energy is infectious, where Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie positively buzz with activity. In bust times, shutters are drawn and such towns enter a period of hibernation. However, the energy remains constant through this all, merely phasing in and out of existence—here potential, here actual. Only when viewed from a sufficiently high dimension can one see the total energy of the system.

Indeed, the energy from oil is enough to destabilize entire regimes—not through lack, but abundance. The Middle East, the most oil-rich region on earth, is hotbed of civil war, usurpation, regime change, and violence. Trying to understand these conflicts from a top-down political perspective may only reach so far. Perhaps a bottom-up approach is needed—one that begins below the earth.

Oil as Power

The natural correlate of energy is power. The scientific definition of energy is “the ability to do work.” Whereas energy signifies an individual’s ability to do work directly, power consists in the ability to do work indirectly. To exert power is to make things work for you. The social connotations of this formula indicate the political nature of energy. In this way, oil is a kingmaker.

We might ask, is it a mere coincidence that the last region on earth under the control of autocratic kingships is the oil rich middle east? Saudi Arabia, home to the Ghawar Field, the most productive oil field on earth, or Qatar, atop the North Field, the largest gas field on the planet, are oil rich monarchies, as are the UAE and Kuwait. Iran, despite its vast oil reserves, is hardly a prosperous nation, having among the lowest GDP per capita in the world—and yet, it is still highly centralized and autocratic. Whoever controls the oil controls the state. While many of these countries have had longstanding kingships dating back centuries, the major oil discoveries in the 20th century accentuated the trend of centralization so that, today, the flow of oil is tightly controlled by the government in each of these countries.

The precise relation between oil and power cannot be proven, but we may be allowed to probe.

Indeed, in North America, oil exerts a salient political influence also. In both Canada and the United States, oil and gas lobbies are immensely powerful entities—and proportionately more so in Canada, where the interests of the “oil men” of Calgary form the backbone of the Conservative Party of Canada, one of the two major political forces.

When the political sphere alone is insufficient to push forth a policy vision, warfare must be conducted. In Clausewitz’s classic dictum, war is only “policy by other means.” In the 20th century, the developed world began to understand that the key to modern warfare was petroleum.

The First World War was characterized by grueling attrition. Trench warfare predominated, with an obdurate Western Front and frustratingly slow progress for advancing forces. The Second World War, on the other hand, was a war of intense and fitful mobility, with pincer attacks, rapid maneuvers, and constantly shifting battle lines. The difference between the two wars was not a difference in grand strategy, but a difference in technology. Namely, WWII took the form that it did because of oil. writes, “The Second World War . . . was a war of motion, which spanned far greater distances across unprecedentedly large theatres of operation. This was a conflict fought with oil, over oil, and was, in part, decided by oil.”7

The crux of the war was tanks, planes, and ships—all of which required great amounts of fuel. The success of each side was contingent upon the procurement of fuel. The key struggle the Axis powers faced was their lack of access to oil.

The Japanese expansion in the Pacific theatre veered south, rather than eastwards, primarily to secure the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies. Japanese expansion stopped because of the difficulties obtaining ample fuel for a decisive naval offensive. When the balance of power shifted in favour of the Americans, the Japanese lacked the mobility to respond because of, again, oil troubles.

Many remark on the striking tactics employed by the Japanese military during the war—not least of which was the famed “Kamikaze” attack, where an explosive-laden fighter plane would crash into an enemy naval vessel on a suicide mission. While this tactic was partly a product of Japan’s intense honour culture, it was equally born of a practical concern: if you sacrifice the plane halfway through the journey, you only consume half the fuel.

Oil was no less decisive in the Western theatre. Hitler’s grand strategy, long subject to ridicule, makes far more sense when one understands the decisive nature of oil in the conflict. Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union was a necessary decision, given that Nazi Germany had chronic fuel shortages due to a lack of access to oil. His goal on the Eastern Front was not solely to seize Stalingrad in a grand symbolic victory—it was more so to secure the oil fields of Grozny, Maikop, and Baku. In a letter to Mussolini, Hitler wrote that “The life of the Axis depends on those oil fields.” As early as 1942, he wrote “Unless we get the Baku oil, the war is lost.”8

America, on the other hand, had a booming oil and gas industry, with some of the most advanced refineries in the world, as well as plentiful domestic supply. Indeed, the Allies won the war not solely through technological innovation, strategy, or military might. They won it in part because they had the oil.

Having oil is equivalent to having power. It is not merely that oil leads to power. Oil is power. Namely, there is a power to effect change on a global and monumental scale inherent in oil and gas—the power to move ships, to fly planes, to maneuver tanks, and win wars, but also the power to build and sustain a country.

Oil as Freedom

Oil, insofar as it is money and energy, empowers both an individual and society to do things. This is power, and a correlate of power is freedom.

There are two kinds of freedom: negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is the absence of external restriction, while positive freedom is having the means to pursue one’s own goals. Oil not only bestows these freedoms upon man—oil is concomitant with them.

There is nothing more indicative of this than the invention of the automobile. Before Ransom E. Olds invented the assembly line in 1901 and Henry Ford’s Model T—the first peoples’ car—was unveiled in 1908, most people lived their whole lives within a 25-mile radius. Any venture outside that radius was at the mercy of either public transportation or nature. Within a short span of time, everything changed. The Model T sold marvelously, achieving an economy of scale so that the car became ever cheaper and accessible to the common man. With this boom in automobile sales followed a campaign of road construction to connect the distant frontiers of the youthful North American continent.

Freedom of movement was achieved on a scale never before seen. Whereas before the turn of the century, men were tied to their provincial attachments—to their city, their family, their home—the mass distribution of the automobile enabled society to become mobile and agile. Man could forsake his parochial attachments to boldly forge a new identity on the open road. The automobile became emblematic of American freedom and democracy. The open highway presents man with a perfect image of negative and positive freedom—freedom from what is behind him, and freedom to venture forth towards what is ahead. At the heart of this revolution in transportation was oil—in the asphalt which webbed the country, in the fuel tanks of each Model T Ford, in the lubricant which allowed their engines to run smoothly.

America was founded upon democracy and liberalism, yes. But those values had yet to be fully unfurled in history. Until the mid-twentieth century, America was yet a democracy for the few. Women and minorities gained the vote gradually, in direct proportion as the automobile made individuals acutely aware of their new freedom. Whereas movement was once a luxury, it was now a commonplace. The automobile had levelled society, making all hierarchies—of race, sex, and class—contemptible and undemocratic.

Energy produces abundance, which raises incomes and perceptions of self-worth. It is easy to lord over a destitute people, but difficult to rule a people that bursts with vitality and confidence, who understand their freedom and possess the means to assert it. It is no wonder that tyrannical regimes such as China and Iran are required to deliberately keep their people in poverty in order to retain control. More specifically, they are required to restrain the flow of oil and the distribution of energy.

When a king possesses oil, his license knows no limit. When a people possess oil, no sovereign can restrain their liberty.

Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman, and Adam Carlson write, in the introduction to Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, that

The verities and pieties of liberal political philosophy were imagined against the backdrop of a world with ever-expanding energy resources. In a world in which energy will no longer be so abundant, we now have to revisit and reimagine our energy intensive freedoms.9

And they are correct. Freedom is energy intensive, for oil produces freedom. Should we ever hit peak oil (as we were supposed to many times), then we can expect a radical curtailment of freedoms, a decline in democratic spirit, and a political freefall towards tyranny. In an age of oil scarcity, the few who control the remaining supply will effectively rue the world. Oil grants, and then rescinds, freedom. Oil giveth and oil taketh away.

Rights are only theoretical justifications to wield the power to do things. The theoretical, however, only applies where the power actually exists. As such, it is not God, nor the state, which confers rights upon man—it is the material conditions. In this case, it is oil.

Thinkers such as Rousseau, Locke, and Paine considered human rights to be inalienable gifts from God. But they just missed the mark. In truth, rights are alienable gifts from oil.

Oil as Plastic

It is in the form of plastic that oil reveals itself as ur-substance, something so ubiquitous in modern society that we hardly take note of its presence. has called it the “Everything Thing.” Though only 4-8% of crude oil globally is refined into plastic, it has arguably had the most far-ranging reach of oil’s many faces.

It has been said that, for something to happen, it needs to happen twice. Plastic, incidentally, was invented three times before someone saw a use for it—in 1894, 1930, and 1933. The first petroleum-based plastic invented was polyethylene, which remains the most common variant of plastic to this day, found in our plastic bags, plastic wrap, and plastic bottles.

Plastic is so durable because each molecule is a long, tangled chain of hydrogen and carbon atoms, whose interconnectedness fortifies the compound in a dense tapestry while keeping it pliable.10 This multifaceted material is called the “Everything Thing” for good reason—you can, and we do, use it for everything. Take a moment and look around you. I would bet that each and every reader can locate a nearby object made of plastic. Indeed, there is doubtless plastic in the device on which you are reading this article.

Plastic is in everything. As such, we cannot escape it. We cannot see outside of it, for everywhere we look, we find it. Plastic obstructs all five senses. It is on our skin, in lotions, makeup, and body enhancements. It is in our eyes, as contacts and lenses. It is in our breath, with microplastics hanging in the air and entering our lungs. It is in our mouths, in chewing gum or the traces of plastic food wrap. It is in our ears, in headphones, earbuds, hearing aids. Not only that, plastics are in our body—plastic’s longevity makes it a useful material for bodily implants such as knee replacements and artificial limbs. Even the stents that keep blood flowing are increasingly made from plastic.

Plastic is even present in our most intimate moments. The skin of the condom, the lubricant on its surface—oil is present. In those rare moments of sexual elation, we might naively think that we escape the physical realm for a rare moment and tap into something divine. However, these moments are dictated by, and contained within, oil, all the same.

How can we feel plastic when it already coats our skin? How can we see it when plastic is in our eyes? How can we smell, taste, or hear it when it blocks our orifices? How can we speak of plastic when it is on our breath? How can we isolate plastic to study it when it is literally everywhere?

But not only that—there is something far more concerning. The list above featured plastic items which we can identify—plastic items which are more or less discrete. But this is a manufactured illusion to disguise plastic’s true nature. Just as oil seeps, sticks, and infests, so too does its scion. Only, plastic is far more subtle. It works its way through nature and society in the form of tiny particles which gradually build up until they are detectable everywhere—microplastics. As the Sorites paradox asks how much sand it takes to make a heap, we are left wondering how many microplastics need to build up to have a tangible effect. As it stands, we are finding more traces of them every day—and discovering the sordid consequences.

Plastic’s greatest virtue is also its greatest curse—it never breaks down. Just as oil takes geological timespans to form, plastic takes great timespans to decay entirely. Polyethylene can take up to 500 years to decompose. Until it does, it merely breaks down into smaller and smaller particles, which settle all across the globe. There are microplastics deep in the ocean, and even at the peaks of mountains. They accumulate at every trophic level, meaning that by the time meat or vegetables reach our dinner plates, microplastics are concentrated.

Microplastics are in our bloodstream. They are in our brains. There is budding evidence that they are carcinogenic and cause reduced male fertility. Microplastics have infiltrated our minds; they have infiltrated our bedrooms. They are in our thoughts—they are prior to our thoughts. Microplastics are the omnipresent specter haunting our rivers, our forests, our food. You cannot even think about plastic, let alone speak of it, because plastic is in our brains. Our thoughts are plastic, our dreams are plastic, our desires are plastic.

Hyperobjects are viscous: they stick to us. Hyperobjects exist on timescales which dwarf the human life cycle. Hyperobjects seldom work directly, but are interobjective; they wear many different masks. It is no accident that plastic is the material par excellence for fabricating disguises—plastic is already a disguise for oil. Morton writes, “In some sense, modernity is the story of how oil got into everything. Such is the force of the hyperobject oil.”11

However, plastic has not only provided a new use for oil—it has created an entirely new psycho-social condition: plasticity.

With a material as infinitely malleable as plastic, we begin to see the world as infinitely malleable. We begin to see ourselves as infinitely malleable. Plasticity is characterized by malleability. Plastic, after all, literally means mouldable, derived from the Latin plasticus. Plastic shows us our unbounded power to shape the world as we please. This attitude extends indefinitely, breaking down barriers, resolving contradictories, and merging opposites. We are taught that we can be anything we want to be.

Petro-historian writes,

Plastic invaded material life utterly and became a cornerstone of the ideology human exceptionalism that is necessary to justify the degradation of the ecosphere. It is infinite in its potential to realize human fantasy: material doesn’t have to look like itself anymore. Here we have a thing that would never exist but for industrial chemistry. What gets lost in this plastic utopianism, on both the consumerist and environmentalist side, is plastic’s origins in petroleum.

The song “Barbie Girl” by Aqua sings mockingly of this condition of plasticity:

I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world

Life in plastic, it’s fantastic

You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere

Imagination, life is your creation

The song emphasizes feminine plasticity, specifically through the eternal male desire to shape women as they please—the eternal recurrence of the Pygmalion myth. It is fitting to note again the high plastic content in most women’s makeup. The condition of plasticity enhances the male capacity for fantasy, while women use plastic in attempt to realize these fantasies.

Nor is the full weight of a plastic condition borne by women alone. Rather, plastic inherently feminizes when it uses someone as a host. Andrea Long Chu defines femaleness as “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”12 If this is the case, then we are all females in the face of plastic. This is not merely metaphor; insofar as microplastics have been demonstrated to act as endocrine disruptors, their presence in the male body can mimic the presence of estrogen.

Plasticity extends to the realm of ideas. In a plastic age, binaries dissolve, as the barriers between them appear malleable. Man becomes woman. Falsity becomes truth. Other becomes self. Divine becomes profane. Up becomes down. The discrete dissolves into the continuous. Borders fall. Identities blur. Class and caste mix. Aporia is resolved. Idealism runs rampant, while realism falls out of fashion. Society becomes polymerized. All descends into Dionysian flux.

In this condition, even art becomes plasticized. Before the age of oil, artworks were prized and unique. In the 20th century, however, art became mass-producible. As the price of producing artworks fell, they became cheap. New techniques, such as lithography and silkscreen printing allowed for the production and reproduction of images with ease, both empowering the artist to shape his artwork in myriad ways, but also devaluing artistic technique in the process. Rather than rendering art obsolete, many artists embraced a newfound cheapness and malleability in their artworks. This manifested in the Pop Art movement, with Andy Warhol as its figurehead. Warhol’s works embrace commercial imagery and kitsch, as in his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans. Such art is fundamentally plastic, malleable and mass-produced.

Not only art, but philosophy and the sciences came to embody the condition of plasticity in the twentieth century. It is thus revealed that material conditions furnish us with ideas and patterns of thought. When a scientist speaks, he is channeling the oil beneath the ground, in its various forms. When a philosopher speaks, plastic particles emanate from his mouth. Intellectual trends take hold if and when they harmonize with concrete circumstances.

We are taught that the world is our oyster, yet we are dwarfed by the world. This paradoxical state is emblematic of a plastic condition, for plastic empowers us, yet controls us. Plastic serves as a mighty and multifaceted tool, but it is a Faustian bargain; the plastics that we use will never go away, but will haunt us for eternity.

Plastic is cheap. Nylon stockings readily tear. Polystyrene packaging is peeled away and discarded. Single-use polypropylene straws pile up in the world’s wastebaskets. The abundance of plastic cheapens our lives. Moreover, the disposability of plastic evokes the present, the temporal. And indeed, plastic embodies fakeness as well.

It is only when things become cheap, fake, and evanescent, that there arises a crisis of value. This is hardly equivocation—the value of the objects around us correspond to our ideas of value. In a plastic age, men long for what has eternal and universal worth. They must peel away the celluloid film to find what is real.

It is in plastic that oil is revealed as a trickster spirit—it is never what it seems. It lurks in every corner. It infiltrates our minds. It hides behind a mask. When oil is plastic, it becomes even harder to pin down, just as old man Proteus changed shape every time he was cast in a net.

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Oil as Lubricant

Oil is a lubricant—it makes things work smoothly. WD-40 reduces the friction on squeaky hinges. Engine oil keeps the parts under your hood ticking in perfect clockwork. Lubricant has allowed revolutions in the speed and scale of machinery. This material fact, moreover, suggests a metaphysical counterpart.

Mark Simpson diagnoses society at large with the oil-induced condition of lubricity:

Lubricity offers smoothness as cultural common sense, promoting the fantasy of a frictionless world contingent on the continued, intensifying use of petro-carbons from underexploited reserves in North America. It thereby contributes to the contemporary mobility regime that, idealizing smooth flow, mystifies so as to maximize the violent asymmetries of movement and circulation globally.13

Oil has carved out a system of trade and transportation networks to facilitate its smooth flow the world over. Each of the globe’s inhabited continents are home to a map of webbed pipelines carrying their sweet bounty to and fro to appease our insatiable appetite for energy. Oil and gas tankers cross the world’s oceans on precise schedules to deliver their freight. Our global trade networks are predicated upon the smooth flow of oil.

Oil, in turn, powers the transportation of myriad other goods by earth, sea, and sky, enabling international trade on a scale never seen before. Indeed, globalism is only a possibility in the age of oil. Revolutions in logistics have allowed for goods from the corners of the globe to reach us almost instantaneously. Bananas grown in Central America can be on our shelves in a week. Our supply chains are so efficient that it is cheaper to source most manufactured goods from elsewhere than to produce them domestically.

This state of affairs has imprinted certain thought patterns upon our minds. The advent of plastic has ushered in the condition of plasticity; so too has lubricant ushered in the condition of lubricity.

There arises the expectation of frictionless and instant delivery. Men begin to believe in smooth flow from point A to B, delivery within three to five business days. The world begins to seem smaller, more accessible, readily traversable. Indeed, lubricant imbues the world with speed. Everything happens quickly and easily.

A lubricated world is a well-oiled machine. With the advent of lubricant, machines could suddenly run so smoothly as to mirror the seamlessly functioning systems of the natural world. It is, then, no surprise that machine metaphors have taken over philosophy and science in the twentieth century, albeit with some impassioned resistance from Whitehead. Life and nature, wanton and wild beasts, came to be understood through machine metaphors, reducing interconnected systems to a series of atomistic parts. Human society, once seen as a similarly unpredictable phenomenon, was put under the careful eye of a new field of study—political science—which attempts to understand society by isolating its component parts to study how they work together. This approach—breaking wholes down into their parts, studying the parts, and reassembling them back into a whole—is akin to a mechanic disassembling and reassembling an engine. Such an analysis is only possible when life is viewed through the lens of lubricant.

As lubricant facilitates travel from locale to locale, it banishes mediation altogether. Immediacy prevails. This physical fact has a metaphysical counterpart. Whereas plasticity imbues our minds with an malleable ontology, lubricant facilitates rapid interchange between poles. Opposites turn over into one another rapidly, oscillating back and forth as in an engine’s rapid motions. One appears imposed upon the other as in a mental zoetrope, occupying a superposition. In a well-oiled machine, it may appear as if opposites can coexist. Oil facilitates continuous sensory overload—everything, every place, and every time, may be present at once. What, then, happens to the law of the excluded middle?

Plastic makes contradictories malleable, whereas lubricant dissolves them altogether. Lubricant allows a man to hold two opposed ideas in the palm of his hand. Formal logic has followed suit, like a dog following his master. Para-consistent logic has caved into the condition of lubricity, with thinkers like Graham Priest devising frameworks in which logic can accommodate, and not reject, contradictory statements. It is no accident that the West has seen a rising interest in Buddhism—the religion which rejects difference and embraces the sublime oneness of Nirvana. The Buddhists hardly suspected that Nirvana would be a puddle of oil.

However, this whole physical and metaphysical machine only keeps ticking with an ample supply of lubricant. Where the lubricant runs out, the whole thing falls apart.

What has recently been revealed, by the world economy shutting down because of Covid-19, is that these highly lubricated trade networks, and their corresponding mental matrices, are so very fragile. As in the Jewel Net of Indra, each node shines through every other. A slight modification in one node affects each other entangled node simultaneously. A single shock can set of a chain reaction. The scarcity of a single input makes all the downstream manufactured products dearer. The shock of a disruption in our supply chains brings us out of our torpor, directing our attention to the very foundation of our modern trade network, which is lubricant.

Heidegger certainly has a word on this.

In his famous “tool analysis” (Being and Time, I.3.15-18), Heidegger brings our attention to the objects in the world and our mode of understanding them. Our natural instinct is to examine things instrumentally, i.e., what something is for. To use Heidegger’s terms, we understand things as ready-to-hand, and take them for granted as such. However, we do not find the true Being of an object in this manner. He writes, “The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically.”14 The concept of withdrawnness is crucial to the OOO enterprise, supposing that there is some authentic essence to objects which they choose not to show. Viewing things instrumentally prevents us from correctly understanding them.

It is when this readiness-to-hand falls away that we can examine an object more closely. Specifically, it is when something breaks. Heidegger continues,

We discover [a tool’s] unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This conspicuousness presents the ready-to-hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-to-hand. But this implies that what cannot be used just lies there ; it shows itself as an equipmental Thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand too. Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the readiness-to-hand of something with which one concerns oneself-that is to say, of the sort of thing we find when we put it back into repair.15

When an object breaks, it becomes conspicuous—its readiness-to-hand is replaced with presence-at-hand. In such a state, the object ceases to withdraw totally, but offers us a genuine glimpse into its Being. A broken hammer draws our attention to the tool in a way it never would were it in perfect working condition. When the hammer is fixed, its presence-at-hand withdraws, and instrumental reason begins to dominate once more.

We see the presence-at-hand of oil shine forth on a global scale whenever oil stops working.

The disruptions to the global trade network as during Covid-19 brought our attention to our supply chains. The 1973 oil price shocks brought our attention to oil’s role in our monetary system. Paradoxically, shortages of oil bring our attention to its presence. It is in these disruptions, and these alone, when we are shaken from a petroleum-induced stupor and catch a glimpse of oil’s nature and the condition it has impressed upon us.

When oil works for us, we may puff ourselves up with all kind of arrogant witticisms—technology is just a tool to be used for good or evil; we are masters of our own destiny; man is born free. In reality, our tools dwarf us. Occasionally, oil feels the need to humble us, to remind us of our servility.

Oil as Void

But look at us—we have waded deeply into a realm of abstractions. Perhaps we have lost sight of ourselves and the matter at hand. Or perhaps not. We have only been probing, after all.

We have certainly proceeded from oil’s most concrete qualities to its most abstract—in OOO terms, from its sensual qualities to its real qualities. Let us return to the sensual once more. Let us look at oil.

What is most salient of all? It is black—the shade that swallows all colour. There is an important metaphor here (and let us not forget the causal nature of metaphor). Oil is black—a great yawning emptiness—but because of this, it contains everything.

Oil is a primordial void—the nothing from which everything comes.

Perhaps oil is a contradictory substance, containing vast multitudes. Hyperobjects, for Morton, not only can be contradictory entities, but are of necessity.16 An object can contain its opposite, but retain its essence. It is acceptable to say that oil is itself and everything else. It is acceptable to say that oil is not oil. In this way, oil is a paradigm of a hyperobject: it sticks to us, yet slips through our fingers. Our meagre tools of reasoning are futile when attempting to pin down this multifaceted substance. We may be able to detect traces of its essential features, but attempting to define oil or fit it into our categories of reasoning is a fool’s errand.

In the murky depths of oil, logic is rendered impotent. We see traces of this in the conditions of plasticity and lubricity above the earth. This suggests that the underworld, whence oil springs up, should be a place philosophers fear to tread. We can never understand oil. All we can do is channel it.

Oil is not only a void sensually, but ideally also. It swallows up men and spits out chaos. The energy it produces only ushers us along towards entropy. Paradoxically, the more energy we expend to resist entropy, the swifter we bring it about. It is a black hole, defying everything we previously understood about the world. It has upended the natural order, and ushered in a new and uncanny civilization. We live in the age of oil not because we have oil, but because oil has us firmly in its grasp. There is no colour oil could possibly be besides black.

Andrew Pendakis writes,

We are witnesses, hyper-witness to this accidental essence called oil, this directly effective cause that is also the most Heideggerian of metaphors, a substance literally composed of death and time.17

Yes, the metaphor is almost too perfect. The oil in the ground is literally formed from life, compressed over tremendous timespans. It is made of hydrocarbons—the self-same particles that make life on earth possible. It contains both life and death. In a ravaging irony, DNA, the blueprint of life, is a polymer, just like plastic.

Oil evokes long time-scales, but also instantaneity. Oil stews for entire geological ages before spurting to the surface in a sudden burst of vitality. Plastic, which is used and discarded without a second thought, outlasts us. Oil contains the trivial and profound, the new and the old, all at once.

This makes for a truly monstrous entity, a leviathan that swallows worlds. In the Bible, water functions as a recurring metaphor for chaos. Oil could serve just as well for the same.

Oil is a terrifying and haunting entity. Environmentalists isolate oil as the paradigmatic villain of the modern world. Its name is invoked with fear and loathing. Oil corporations are treated as evil incarnate, perhaps even more so than big pharma and big tobacco. This fear is entirely justified, but for reasons besides those which environmentalists parrot. Whether climate change is happening or not is ultimately irrelevant. Oil ought to inspire existential dread regardless. The focus on climate change obscures the true nature of oil, whose far-ranging effects are far more diverse than merely raising global temperatures. Oil dictates the rhythms of modern life. It has the power to destroy us far sooner than its tertiary effects via a climate catastrophe.

There are other industries with significant carbon emissions, such as steel, coal, lithium, forestry, or agriculture. Yet, there are no movements called “Just Stop Lithium” or “Just Stop Steel.” Rather, “Just Stop Oil” is the movement with die-hard activists, willing to deface Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with cans of tomato soup, spray paint Stonehenge orange, or use concrete epoxy to glue their hands to major German expressways. These are rabid expressions of a deep understanding that oil is terminality. Such stunts are born of animals who sense that they are cornered, who are willing to fight with tooth and claw to resist a dire dire fate. Little do they know, the very means by which they stage these stunts are petroleum based—both the epoxy they use to glue their hands to roadways and their orange spray paints come from oil. We can’t just stop oil. No one can.

We have long passed the event horizon. Every time we struggle against the force of oil, we are only brought closer into its orbit. Resistance to oil requires oil. It is the void that swallows us whole. Any attempt to escape is futile—like quicksand, the more urgent our fits and starts, the faster we are sucked down into the depths. We are already inside oil, just as oil is already inside us, in a perverse symbiosis. All that is left is for us to rage at the dying of the light.

At least the blue-haired activists somewhat grasp this, if for the wrong reasons. Their approach is more honest than to pretend that nothing has changed in the age of oil.

We would do well not to deny oil its rightful power, for it can be a cruel master if not placated. As Nietzsche writes, “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”18

Conclusion: Awareness and Humility

But then where do we stand—we who are in oil and whom oil is inside? What is science? What is philosophy? Do we stand a chance at finding knowledge, or will that slip through our hands also?

Perhaps we ought to let go of this fixation on knowledge. We may do well to set our sights lower at a more tangible, and perhaps more useful goal: attaining awareness.

There is a great confluence of forces which pull our thoughts one way and another. The only way to escape this—if we are ever able—is to attain awareness of all these forces. When we are aware of the way in which technology, the environment, our relationships—even metaphysical forces outside our scientific ken—influence our thought patterns, we may be able to counteract them. Perhaps only in this state of keen and widespread awareness will the truth dare reveal herself.

OOO gives us a path to seeking this awareness, given that real objects exert influence on our minds through our bodies, while sensual objects exert influence on our bodies through our minds. Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm. Through an inward turn, we may peer into the world around us.

Philosophy should adopt the much more humble goal of attaining awareness of these chthonic forces that pervade our environment. The philosopher becomes a medium who channels these forces and gives them a human voice. This becomes the distinct activity of philosophy, only because other disciplines take methodology and epistemology for granted, forging boldly ahead in their search of knowledge. Philosophy is unique in questioning its own first principles.

What sets a man on the path towards awareness is no special piece of knowledge (how ironic that would be)—rather, it is a particular virtue: humility. This is the humility to admit that our thoughts are not our own, the humility to reject “creativity” and admit that we are only ever channeling forces greater than us. It is humility that leads us to question the very tools we use in this vain search for knowledge. Humility is the understanding of our fallibility, combined with an eagerness to improve. It is a precondition to any meaningful understanding.

Arrogance is the condition that stops a man from finding the truth. An arrogant man, who clings to his beliefs as golden idols, who reveres his own cognitive equipment—falls flat. Awareness eludes him.

This understanding of philosophy is hardly new. It is not “Postmodern.” In fact, this is a very ancient view from which we have strayed. This understanding of philosophy dates to the very man who inaugurated philosophy as a discipline—Socrates.

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates is found making a defense speech to an Athenian jury, as he is under charge of corrupting the youth, denying the gods, and inventing new gods. Many of the arguments he uses to refute these accusations are strange and unpersuasive to the jury, but perhaps none more so than his claim that his actions were not his own, but were instructed to him by a daimon—a lesser divinity—whispering in his ear.

It wasn’t Socrates’ fault that he frequented the agora, questioning men about their deepest beliefs—his daimon told him to! And would it not be impious to deny such divine commands?

The jurors were not convinced. Socrates was condemned to death.

But Socrates was honest in a way that the jury was not. He was aware that his thoughts were not his own. It is fitting, moreover, that the first man to be aware of this was also a paragon of humility, admitting that he knew nothing at all about the most important things. It was not knowledge he sought, but awareness, which he called self-knowledge. I only use “awareness” and not “self-knowledge” because, since Socrates’ time, we have discovered the porous boundaries of the self and the dubious status of knowledge.

Oil is my daimon. It is yours also.

We have a multitude of daimons that haunt our minds. The task of philosophy is to reveal them for what they are, to pick apart the ways they influence our thoughts, and to bring others into this state of awareness. Such a task is necessary before we even think about looking for knowledge.

All the great epic poets in Western history invoked the muse before beginning their verse. They were aware that artistic and philosophical production is a matter of channeling forces greater than oneself, while the poet is merely a passive receptacle.

Oil is my muse.

A man may think that he is safe from oil in the sanctum of his own mind, but he is not. Each man must ask himself how oil has shaped his thoughts, his personalities, and the ideals he holds dear. Such an inquiry will reveal that this black primordial goop indeed holds illimitable dominion over all.

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