Review, by Aaron Rynd
Bitumen: The People, Performance and Passions behind
Alberta’s Oil Sands
by Peter McKenzie-Brown (2017)
This book is a milestone in that no history of Alberta’s oil
sands can be written without taking it into account. More than that, no such
history can be written without using McKenzie-Brown’s sources.
There are three explanations for the book’s importance.
First, McKenzie-Brown was the principal driving force behind the Oil Sands Oral
History Project. Anyone who touched the development of the oil sands was
approached, and it is difficult to imagine anyone alive having more knowledge
of the sector than McKenzie-Brown. Second, the world is entering an energy era
shrouded in uncertainty except that it will differ enormously from the past.
Now is the time to take stock, because the rules of the game are changing.
Third, as Muhlstein brought a deep and broad understanding of the background to
Cavelier de La Salle in her 1992 study, showing both the man’s stature and his
feet of clay, so McKenzie-Brown knows the background of what he describes in
this book.
Bitumen keeps its promise: it presents the people whose
efforts gave birth and nourished the oil sands project. The reader comes to
know them, their successes and failures. If successes dot these pages, so do
the plans that perished. The pioneers of the oil sands rose, but also sank back
into the obscurity of time. Bitumen portrays their passion, for that is what
the oil sands became for these men, an emotional journey. Was it also the
source of a fatal flaw? They had logic and argument aplenty. Without the desire
to create a new industry, the oil sands would never have experienced lift-off.
And yet the height at which hubris forms is never revealed before it’s too
late.
“Men” it was, because the pioneers of the oil sands were mostlymen. Creatures of their time, McKenzie-Brown places them in context. They
formed a fraternity of explorers with a common vision. Again and again in
Bitumen, we find men with similar upbringing and experience picking up the
challenge and carrying it a few steps forward. Everyone is different, and yet
they feel animated by the same spirit. The characters form a type; for example,
the inventor with an idea and strong convictions, the corporate executive with
a vision and ego to match.
McKenzie-Brown treads a narrow line. His is not a history in
which he elevates a thread or chief actor for close study, setting the
remainder into the dark curtains at stage-rear. This is a Chinese scroll or panorama,
best read in multiple sittings. Moreover, McKenzie-Brown doesn’t promote a
positive or negative view of the destiny of the oil sands. Whatever may be its
future, the fact remains that the oil sands absorbed the dreams of a host of
North America’s energy giants. We aren’t yet ready to set them all in context,
but when that day arrives, Bitumen will be a useful research tool as well as an
object requiring explanation in itself.
I’ve just noticed that my copy of Bitumen rests against A
Distant Mirror and the Structure of Science. Not uncomfortably.
