Unsustainable Oil

Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-1-77212-036-3
Verlag: University of Alberta Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 442 g

"Sustainable development is, for government and industry at least, primarily a way of turning trees into lumber, tar into oil, and critique into consent; a way to defend the status quo of growth at any cost." —from the Introduction

In Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions, Jon Gordon makes the case for re-evaluating the theoretical, political, and environmental issues around petroleum extraction. Doing so, he argues, will reinvigorate our understanding of the culture and the ethics of energy production in Canada.

Rather than looking for better facts or better interpretations of the facts, Gordon challenges us to embrace the future after oil. Reading fiction can help us understand the cultural-ecological crisis that we inhabit. In Unsustainable Oil, using the lens of Alberta’s bituminous sands, he asks us to consider literature’s potential to open space for creative alternatives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gordon, Jon

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Geologie Petrologie, Mineralogie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Prologue / Fast Food Vacation
Introduction / Unsustainable Rhetoric

1 Lyric Oil / Re-presenting Fossil Fuels As a Cultural By-Product
2 Oil Sacrifices / Petroculture and (E)utopian Imaginings of Progress
3 Impossible Choices / Fort Mac and Oil as a “Matter of Concern”
4 Irrational Oil / Ethos, Extraction!, Elder Brother, and Free Speech
5 Pipeline Facts, Poetic Counterfacts / Metaphor and Self-Deception in a Bitumen Nation
6 Oil Desires / Appetites and Fast Violence in the Bituminous Sands
Conclusion / Living (with) Bitumen

Epilogue / Whitney Lakes Provincial Park

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Gordon, Jon
Jon Gordon (1979-2016) taught Writing Studies at the University of Alberta and at Athabasca University. He was the winner of the William Hardy Alexander Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2012). He also taught at the University of Western Ontario, Maskwacis Cultural College, and at The King’s University.