The Sublime in the Oil Sands

Edward Burtynsky and the Divine Power Delegated to Man

Fort McMurray, Alberta¹

I am headed to Fort McMurray for the first time. Thus far, I have only heard stories and seen photos of the epicenter of the oil and gas industry in Canada. On the drive, heavy trucks fly past me, carrying loads taller and wider than buildings. The long, winding highway through the boreal forest leads to a wide and steep river valley, in which the city of Fort McMurray is cozily nestled under a fresh snowfall. I go on further. As I drive, the signs of heavy industry are more conspicuous—a sawmill, a pipeline terminal. It is not until I ascend the hill north of town on Highway 63 that I grasp: I am in the midst of the largest industrial project on earth. Before me are clouds of smoke from various oil and gas plants stretching as far as I can see. I am enraptured.

Driving to site north of Fort McMurray early in the morning. In the darkness, production facilities illume the horizon like the fires of Mordor, whose luminescence all but cast away the night, and whose smokestacks blow putrid clouds to accent the black sky. As the sun rises, the thick smog which envelops us is painted a caustic amber.

I have seen tailings ponds whose noxious contents have no visible boundary, contained by the largest dam in the world. The rank air emanating from them is forever imprinted upon my mind. I have seen oil and gas plants that tower over me, grotesque in their byzantine assemblage of pipes, towers, furnaces, and tanks, but that are somehow awe-inspiring also. None, however, rival Syncrude, a Petropolis unto itself, which stretches further than eyes can see, visible from space, whose thick smog spreads for miles and whose processing facilities rival the skylines of most cities.

Syncrude—the scale of this project is breathtaking.

I have seen pipelines that scatter over the landscape like a tangled web of arteries carrying essence through the body. I have seen flare stacks that reach to the heavens like Olympic torches. I have seen rows upon rows of pumpjacks drilling together with military uniformity. I have seen oil leases dot the prairies, surrounded by fields of wheat and canola—and from on high they seem to stretch out infinitely far. And it is beautiful. Or, perhaps not beautiful, but somehow alluring. How can rusted and haphazard assemblages of pipes be so enticing? How can pollution? How can oil and gas plants? If not beauty, then what is it that makes them so alluring? Yet I stand in awe, admiring these sights. Their scale leaves me breathless. If not beautiful, then I suspect the proper word is sublime.

Making such a distinction between the beautiful and sublime has become uncommon. Modern art and aesthetic theory have so deeply challenged what it means to be beautiful that the barriers around this attribute—also between it and the sublime—have fallen away. The two have become synonymous in common parlance. We must recall that, at one time, mountains were commonly regarded as ugly, though awesome, so that a great theological quandary arose in the 17^th century revolving around the question of why a perfect God would create a world with useless, bleak, barren, and ugly mountains.² The answer, according to Thomas Burnet, was that this Earth is a fallen world, holding little resemblance to the perfect world present at Creation, which, obviously, did not have any mountains.

However, despite their ugliness, no one can deny that mountains are grand and breathtaking. What this reveals is that there is a unique sensation proper to certain aesthetic experiences besides merely the beautiful and the ugly. Thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries wished to describe this phenomenon, and so an old term was brushed up and repurposed: the sublime. Whereas it classically been used by Longinus to describe an intensely emotional experience incited by poetry, its meaning gradually changed. Around the time of the Baroque period, artworks and architecture captured the sublime, demonstrating that it had visual and sensory components and was not only an intellectual phenomenon. It came to be associated primarily with the sensation of awe inspired by grandeur and fear. This understanding of the sublime was formalized in the aesthetic treatises of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.

Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) sparked a renewed interest in the study of the sublime since it was discussed in the early literary criticism of Longinus. Burke makes sure to differentiate the sublime from the beautiful. The beautiful, he argues, excites pleasure, and ugliness pain, whereas the sublime excites awe. As such, the sublime is not identical with, but most often opposed to the beautiful. In fact, it bears more resemblance to the ugly and grotesque. For, according to Burke, the experience of the sublime is one borne of fear, danger, and the thought of pain. It is a stronger experience than the beautiful because of the greater intensity of negative emotions. However, the sublime is also enticing. This is so because in a sublime moment, one is safe from the source of danger—the threat is only imagined.

What generates the terror central to the sublime are the characteristics of vastness, obscurity, power, terror, privation, and intensity. It is primarily due to their vastness that mountain ranges are sublime. They rise to tower over the viewer and stretch out towards infinity. It is due to obscurity that a foggy night can be sublime. Power can make kings sublime, as terror can make wild beasts. Privation can make the darkest tragedies sublime. Intensity is also a key component of sublime experiences—making Beethoven’s booming Fifth Symphony sublime, but his tranquil Sixth Symphony only beautiful.

It is, then, clear how the oil sands elicit the sublime, in Burke’s understanding. Primarily, their sublimity is through scale, power, and intensity. The Komatsu trucks, used to transport oil sands from the mines to the central processing facility, are larger than the average Canadian house; the tires alone are more than twice my height. Such a vehicle could crush me in a moment. As such, it is sublime.

The sheer power of industry is enough to elicit the sublime. But these projects are also massive, as I have described. The largest oil fields in Cold Lake and Suncor’s surface mining operations are visible from space. Additionally, the intensity of these projects—their incandescence, their acrid smell—contribute to their sublimity also.

Immanuel Kant’s conception of the sublime differs from that of Burke, however. In his Critique of Judgement (1764), Kant argues that the sublime is not found in the world around us. Rather, experiences of the sublime result from a complete breakdown of our reasoning faculties. As Kant writes, “Nature is therefore sublime in those of its phenomena, whose intuition brings with it the Idea of their infinity. This last can only come by the inadequacy of the greatest effort of our Imagination to estimate the magnitude of an object.”³ For Kant, man uses innate categories of reasoning to understand the manifold around us. When these categories fail to interpret what we sense, then the sublime results. The sublime comes from us, not from the objects themselves. In this way, Kant’s philosophy descends into a lonely solipsism, wherein men are never able to grasp the “things-in-themselves” in the external world.

It is for this reason that Kant also writes

That the mind be attuned to feel the sublime postulates a susceptibility of the mind for Ideas. For in the very inadequacy of nature to these latter, and thus only by presupposing them and by straining the Imagination to use nature as a schema for them, is to be found that which is terrible to sensibility and yet is attractive. [It is attractive] because Reason exerts a dominion over sensibility in order to extend it in conformity with its own realm (the practical) and to make it look out into the Infinite, which is for it an abyss. In fact, without development of moral Ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime, presents itself to the uneducated man merely as terrible.⁴

The sublime, then, turns out to be a rational phenomenon, as opposed to a brute phenomenon like beauty. In Kant’s terms, then, the oil sands are sublime in that they stagger the mind’s ability to estimate the scale of this project. It is not fear which inspires awe, but the mind’s understanding of its own impotence.

Edward Burtynsky - Alberta Oil Sands #9 (2009)

But there is a problem in my account, as both Kant and Burke are skeptical about the idea of human works producing the sublime—especially works such as are seen around me. For Burke, succession and uniformity are requisite for edifices to be sublime. He writes, “designs that are vast only by their dimensions, are always the sign of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be great but as it deceives; to be otherwise is the prerogative of nature only.”⁵ Human works are, then, sublime insofar as they emulate nature. As such, there is no explanation to how the awkward angles, disproportionate parts, and variation of oilfield projects could invoke the sublime. For, they do not resemble nature. On the contrary, they are the furthest thing from natural.

Kant is more opposed to human works invoking the sublime, writing that

we must not exhibit the sublime in products of art (e.g. buildings, pillars, etc.) where human purpose determines the form as well as the size; nor yet in things of nature the concepts of which bring with them a definite purpose (e.g. animals with a known natural destination); but in rude nature (and in this only in so far as it does not bring with it any charm or emotion produced by actual danger) merely as containing magnitude.⁶

What Kant indicates here is part of his greater argument, that purposiveness is a quality the mind attributes to things, rather than inhering in them, and as such, things which the mind understands as purposive are understood by the mind. These instances cannot invoke the sublime, for the sublime is a complete breakdown of the cognitive faculty. For the mind to experience the sublime, it must be at a loss as to categories which it can employ to understand the manifold.

But if an account is to be inductive (which Kant’s is, admittedly, not), then it must account for experience which could provide a counterexample. As I contend, the oil sands are sublime. I experience this firsthand. It is a pleasure upon gazing at the infrastructure which the concept of beauty cannot explain. Rather, it is similar to the experience of the sublime, and as such I place it under this label. And if Kant and Burke fail to include such experiences with their criteria for sublimity, then these accounts demand expansion.

Indeed, I am not the first to expose the sublimity of the oil sands. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky was, infamously, the first to capture this in his volume Oil (2009), which features photographs of oil and gas projects all over the world, and most notably, from northern Alberta. Burtynsky uses aerial photography to capture the grandeur of sweeping petrochemical vistas, emphasizing the scale and intricacy of oil sands projects. Industrial landscapes in his photographs are not dystopic hellscapes, but are enticing—or perhaps they are both. He captures pipelines at Cold Lake, tailings ponds from Fort McMurray, and refineries in Eastern Canada. Internationally, his work explores the oilfields of Texas, California and Azerbaijan, as well as scenes from “car culture”—motorways, racetracks, and bike rallies.

Edward Burtynsky - “Oil Fields #2” (2009)

Burtynsky claims that his work aims not to normatively critique the subject matter, but only put it on display. This claim is met with much incredulity from the art world, which is overwhelmingly left-leaning and, therefore, opposed to any exploitation of oil and gas. The sublime is, then, politicized in the discourse around Burtynsky. Some of his detractors argue that his photos cannot be sublime because the subject matter constitutes a moral atrocity. Richard Kover critiques the notion that Burtynsky’s photos evoke the sublime, writing,

While Burtynsky’s photos of the oil sands may evoke or allude to the sense of the sublime, we may wonder whether the actual experience of the oil sands could truly constitute a sublime experience. The dispassionate photographic lens may lend itself to a certain sense of security and being above the fray, yet one senses that this feeling would easily dissipate were one confronted by the tangible facts on the ground.⁷

Here he argues that Burtynsky's photographs can only convey the sublime because the audience is taken away from the direct implications of the oil sands as experienced on the ground. It is a fitting argument to make for one who has not worked in the oil sands; I find the opposite to be true.

Georgiana Banita similarly critiques Burtynsky, writing

I see problems, however, with looking at oil through the prism of the sublime. The territory on which oil excavation encroaches is not a pastoral, garden-like plot of land, but an endless expanse of rugged scenery. Precisely because the petro-sublime often associated with works by Edward Burtynsky and with countless documentaries fits so well with the standard Canadian wilderness that Northrop Frye described as “a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting,” it is more difficult to mount resistance to it.⁸

Again, we see the idea of the sublime in the oil fields rejected not on aesthetic, but political grounds—that characterizing it as sublime makes opposing the oil sands more difficult. Ironically, it is only Banita who is here politicizing the oil sands, and not Burtynsky, who is merely taking a photograph. Michael Truscello argues that Burtynsky is complicit “with the atrocities of oil capitalism”⁹ and Nadia Bozak writes that “Because Burtynsky systematically aestheticizes industrial civilization’s environmental incursions, his images are marked with an almost insentient detachment and lack of critical positioning that can be troubling.”¹⁰

But these detractors all entirely miss the point, as they clearly do not understand the sublime. Aesthetic experience is not inherently political. Experiencing the oil sands as sublime does not lead one to support oil and gas, nor does it lead them to reject it. Burtynsky is merely showing that the oil sands are sublime—and his photographs are irrefutable evidence of this. To reject the sublime on political grounds is a category error. What Burtynsky is attempting in his work is to help us understand and challenge what can be sublime. Contra Kant and Burke, Burtynsky is demonstrating that human infrastructure can be as sublime as, if not more than, natural phenomena. That oil fields are sublime does not make them “good” or “bad” any more than a mountain may be by virtue of its sublimity.

Kant helps us understand the precise nature of the error these critics make. The sublime experience consists not of imposing the mind’s categories onto phenomena, but the phenomena impressing their ends upon the mind. The human mind imposes the category of “purpose” onto objects in order to better understand them. It is, rather, when objects violate the human understanding of purpose when one experiences the sublime. It is for this reason that nature is sublime when it is wild and untamed, when one cannot understand it logically and instrumentally. Therefore, critics of Burtynsky who argue that his photos are not sublime because they are not instrumental towards the correct political ends not only mischaracterize Burtynsky’s photographs, but also demonstrate a startling ignorance of what the sublime truly is. It is precisely not instrumental, and viewing the world in instrumental terms precludes one from seeing the sublime anywhere.

Is it not possible, then, that the sublime exists in the oil sands precisely because these projects seem to defy instrumental characterization of any kind? To illustrate in simpler terms, I will use an example. A beautiful building is simple for the mind to understand in instrumental terms. The purpose of a building is usually simple and readily apparent to the mind—it exists to house people, to contain the workings of government or business, etc. And, with most buildings, it is easy to understand how any particular building serves this purpose. As such, most human infrastructure is easily understood by the mind’s categories. Instrumental reasoning is the question of what something is for. This question most often has a simple answer, but where it does not, the sublime abounds. In this, Kant and Burke’s arguments that sublime experiences could only be produced by natural phenomena proved accurate to the extent that human infrastructure was not yet possible on the scale of the Canadian oil sands.

The oil sands, however, resist instrumental characterization in the same way as most infrastructure. The sheer complexity and scale of the project constitutes an abstraction from the question of what it is for and how it achieves this purpose. A single pumpjack is hardly sublime—this is for oil and it extracts oil by pumping it from the ground. The oil sands are not so easily understood, however, and especially not to someone ignorant of the processes involved. What purpose do hydrocarbon cokers and crackers serve in this process? Or expansive tailings ponds? Or dozens of smokestacks? Or all the different pipes, carrying differing materials, which intertwine in central processing facilities? It is much more difficult for the human mind to graft the category of purpose onto the oil sands. Just as nature is sublime where it defies human understanding, so too are the oil sands. Complexity qua abstraction brings the mind into a stupor. The scale of projects like this only became possible after the industrial revolution, and so with new developments in infrastructure, what was true in Kant’s day about human works being incapable of producing the sublime is no longer so. Burke writes that human artifices are merely sublime as they emulate nature. This, too, is brought into doubt by the advent of the oil sands, which are, according to the criteria of both Kant and Burke, sublime of their own accord.

Edward Burtynsky - “Oil Refineries #23” (2009)

Moreover, the error Kant and Burke make in excluding human artifice from attaining the sublime is to suppose that human works are mere things whose purposes we design. But if even the things of our own creation impose upon us the way ways they demand to be used, then they evade the categories of our understanding. A profound anthropocentrism haunts the sublime of Burke and Kant. Such accounts deny human creations any causal power.

The oil sands dwarf man. He has created a monster over which he no longer has dominion. He has created something autonomous, something vital, something nightmarish. Just as Frankenstein’s monster tormented its creator, so too do the oil sands torment us. Such is the essential lesson of Burtynsky. Incensed reactions to Burtynsky belie a certain sanguinity, clinging to the hope that we may still be masters of our creation—that is, these critiques are born of anthropocentrism.

A task which was previously reserved for God alone is now available to man also—the ability to create that which defies instrumental understanding. In the book of Job, God astounds the lowly Job for questioning God’s ways through a furious invective, enumerating phenomena which defy human understanding:

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?¹¹

This speech is God’s indication to Job that his mortal knowledge is insufficient to understand God’s works, let alone God’s plan for the world.

It is not only God’s work, but human work now which defies instrumental understanding—not only the oil sands, but any massive industrial project. Human industry, as such, has taken on a wild and untamed quality just as nature alone once held. A common sentiment is that industry is expanding as if with a mind of its own, and not only nature, but humans, are incapable of doing anything to halt its advances. Burtynsky is capturing, not endorsing, this development.

With this comes both a sense of powerlessness at the rampant march of progress, but also awe at the ever greater scale of industry. Since Bacon and Machiavelli’s calls for man to assert himself and take control of nature, the humanist project has had to wait through many years of gradual improvement before the industrial revolution gave us the means to finally subdue the natural world and confidently proclaim that, just as God has dominion over man, so too does man have dominion over nature.

The humanist movement, which was realized in the industrial revolution and found its zenith in the Canadian oil sands, brings with it a great irony. While man has gained dominion over nature, it is only through tools which give him this dominion. These tools, however, dwarf man in comparison. And they may be used not only to obtain dominion over nature, but also over man. These tools bring with them responsibility for which man may be unsuited, and which require wisdom to operate for the Good—a wisdom of which man may be bereft. As such, in a somewhat Hegelian reversal, man having dominion over nature through tools leads him to be enslaved by these tools themselves and by unwise use of these tools. Technology gains a semblance of autonomy, if not autonomy itself, which leads to a renewed servility of man, not towards nature, but towards his own creation.

This twofold effect of industrialization reveals man’s dual nature—as having an element of the divine within him, but having a servile element also. God breathed life into dust. Man may subdue nature, but is subdued by his own creation thereby. This is yet another iteration of the Frankenstein story, wherein man has the divine spark of intelligence but lacks the perfect divine wisdom to use his creation for Good, and so is dominated by it. This dual nature, represented aesthetically, is the sublime. Frankenstein uses sublime imagery deliberately to make this exact point. Confrontations between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster occur in serene, hostile, terrifying, and austere environments such as the German Alps, a Glacier, the open sea, or during a raging tempest. The finale occurs in the ultimately sublime location: the arctic, both serenely calm, but callously unforgiving, whose blanched ice floes stretch out to infinity.

The often forgotten subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus” referencing Prometheus, the titan who took fire, once reserved for the gods alone, and gave it to man. Whether because of or despite divine will, man is able to fashion the world how he likes. The Greek myth correctly pinpoints fire as the watershed moment when man was elevated from a purely primal existence, fire being emblematic of technology, but also mastery, or technique. As Frankenstein’s monster discovers, however, fire has a dual nature—it warms the hand, but can also burn it.

The famous biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer was titled “American Prometheus,” as an allusion to this same tradition, arguing that the same force animating Prometheus to give the divine gift of fire to mankind was with Oppenheimer leading the team to design an atomic bomb. The same technology which can create virtually free power for all in nuclear power plants can also destroy the world. Prometheus, Frankenstein, Oppenheimer—they are all variations on a theme. It is no coincidence that each of their stories evoke the sublime.

These stories all feature a human creation with some degree of autonomy. Anyone who says the atom bomb is a mere tool, to be used for good or evil, is naively ignorant. The atom bomb represented a paradigm shift, in which the minds of men were fundamentally changed, the course of geopolitical events altered, and new possibilities opened up for mankind. The atom bomb is not neutral—it imposes upon us the ways it ought to be used. The atom bomb is causal and autonomous, just as fire, just as Frankenstein’s monster. It is awareness and wisdom which allow us to understand the way tools shape us so that we may use them for good and not be made their slaves.

If J. Robert Oppenheimer is the American Prometheus, then the Canadian Prometheus is, depending on one’s opinion, either Sydney Ells or Dr. Karl Clark, both of whom are variably credited as the “father of the oil sands.” Their work to develop techniques to separate oil from bituminous sand using water and heat allowed for the large-scale development of oil sands projects. Their technological advancements, too, are capable of tremendous good and cataclysmic evil. The benefits of the oil sands may be dwarfed by their deleterious impact on the environment. This duality, represented aesthetically, is a simultaneous terror and allure—and it is this we call sublime. The fact of man’s capacity for the sublime, his creation of a sublime object, and then his experiencing of it as sublime is an indication of man’s dual nature—divine but mortal. And so now I am in awe before the oil sands.

Edward Burtynsky - “Alberta Oil Sands #6” (2009)

By a “divine element” in man, I am not speaking metaphorically. It is only because of the divine element in us that we are receptive towards divinity. Like perceives like. The sublime is simultaneously enticing and terrifying, and it is no accident that this is our attitude towards the divine also. To illustrate, a return to Job is necessary. When God rebukes Job for questioning Him, the rebuke is accompanied shortly thereafter by God returning the fortunes which He previously took from Job. Our position relative to God is one of awful reverence. God may both terrify us and reward us in the same breath. Whereas Proverbs dictates that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,”¹² the gospels teach us to love Him. Both are true at once.

This disposition towards the divine is reflected in our experience of the sublime. It is purely due to our intelligence—the divine spark—that we can experience it. When we do, it is both terrifying and alluring. If we did not implicitly understand the dual nature of God—as fearsome and loving—we could never experience this, for what is present in the effects must be present in the cause. And if we did not have the dual nature of divinity and servility—the breath of God in the dust, as the Biblical story tells us—then we could not both create and cower before sublime objects.

Paradoxically, in the oil sands, I am reminded of my strength as a man and my weakness, my divine and mortal elements, the love and power of my Creator. As sublime experience is dependent upon the human understanding, the immaterial source of the human understanding must have impressed the capacity for sublime experience upon it. Sublime experience, therefore, is the human recognition of divine traces, in God and man.

Where we experience the sublime, we come into direct contact with divinity, either in Him directly or His creation. The sublime sensation I feel when gazing upon the oilfields is not merely a reminder of God, but an encounter with Him directly, as mediated through man. In the context of a mountain, the sublime is a divine reminder of God’s power. In the context of the oil sands, it is a reminder of the power bestowed upon man by God, the responsibility that comes with it, and the calamitous consequences where man’s power is not accompanied by wisdom.

The consequences of this doctrine must, of course, be humanistic. That the divine is present in man and revealed through his industry should not incline us to prevent industrial growth. Quite the contrary, industry serves human needs, and so it should be championed. However, we must resist the perennial hubris which afflicts our race. That the oil sands are sublime ought to be a welcome reminder not only of our divine nature, but of the responsibility that necessarily comes with this. As such, wise stewardship, and not only blind boosting, must accompany our endeavours. Industry is a solemn matter which requires not only intelligence, but an attribute of even higher divinity: wisdom.

Just as with Frankenstein’s creation, or with the advent of the atomic bomb, there is potential for great disaster in the oil sands. Such an admission is necessary, regardless of political persuasion. With acrid fumes poured into the air, with sprawling lakes of heavy hydrocarbons next to the Athabasca River, or with the imminent risk of human casualties from such massive equipment, there is a profound danger in the industrial project we have undertaken in northern Alberta. This project does, of course, serve a greater good for humanity. Even so, the risks may be catastrophic—for me and for my species.

It is only when gazing out over the oil sands that I grasp this truth—my dual nature and my responsibility. It is good that I am put in a state of fearful awe. If what I say is true, this is the proper disposition towards not only God, but man, and both of their works.

1. Essay first written in November, 2024

2. Kover, T.R. “Are the Oilfields Sublime?: Edward Burtynsky and the Vicissitudes of the Sublime.” in Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (2014), pp. 129.

3. Kant, Immanuel, J.H. Bernard trans. Critique of Judgement (2015), §26.

4. ibid, §29.

5. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1990), II.X.

6. Kant, §26.

7. Kover, pp. 145.

8. Banita, Georgiana, “Sensing Oil: Sublime Art and Politics in Canada” in Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (2017), pp. 432.

9. Truscello, Michael, “The New Topographics, Dark Ecology, and the Energy Infrastructure of Nations: Considering Agency in the Photographs of Edward Burtynsky and Mitch Epstein from a Post-Anarchist Perspective” (2012), pp. 193.

10. Bozak, Nadia, “Manufactured Landscapes” (2008), pp. 68.

11. Job 38:22-30.

12. Proverbs 9:10.