Fault Lines
Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan's Oil Economy
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- €24.99
Publisher Description
Oil is not new to Saskatchewan. Many of the wells found on farmland across the province date back to the 1950s when the industry began to spread. But there is little doubt that the recent boom (2006–2014) and subsequent downturn in unconventional oil production has reshaped rural lives and landscapes. While many small towns were suffering from depopulation and decline, others reoriented themselves around a booming oil industry.
In place of the abandoned houses and shuttered shops found in many small towns in Saskatchewan, housing developments sprang up with new trucks and boats parked in driveways. Yet people in oil-producing areas also lived amid flare stacks that made them ill, had trouble finding housing due to vacancy rates that were among the lowest in the country, suffered through family breakdown because of long working hours and time spent away from home, and endured spills and leaks that contaminated their land.
In the summer of 2014, at the height of the boom, geographer Emily Eaton and photographer Valerie Zink travelled to oil towns across the province, from the sea-can motel built from shipping containers on the outskirts of Estevan to seismic testing sites on Thunderchild First Nation’s Sundance grounds.
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This combination of Eaton s (Growing Resistance) informative, objective text and Zink s haunting black-and-white photography reminiscent of classic Depression-era portraits strikingly documents a landscape whose transition from grain silos to oil pump-jacks has received scant attention; in studies of the Canadian oil economy, the prairie province of Saskatchewan has long been overshadowed by its petrochemical giant neighbor, Alberta. Eaton and Zink ably chronicle the history of Saskatchewan s oil development, along with its economic and environmental impacts, through scores of interviews and visuals that illustrate life in a province subject to the boom-bust cycle of an industry dependent on world commodity prices. The stories of those most directly affected family farmers whose often desperate need for additional cash opens the door to oil leases, First Nations people whose ongoing struggle for land rights recognition is overridden by developers, temporary foreign workers tied to uncertain contracts, women working in a predominantly male environment come alive in all their nuance and humanity. The bars, hotels, and shops that support the oil economy also come into sharp focus. Zink and Eaton portray a precarious population with little control over an existence driven by unseen and unaccountable global forces.
