A trip across Alberta in August 2010 provided a chance to head north, and we couldn't miss it. We arranged to join the official company tour of the sands, despite my concerns about that stern footnote in the tourist brochure: visitors were encouraged to take as many photographs as they'd like, but were required to sign a legal agreement that such photographs would not be shared with anyone, "including posting to any social-networking sites." If you can't share a photograph with anyone else, is it really a photograph at all?
As it happens, there was some mix-up, and the company's tour bus never stopped by our hotel to pick us up.
We turned to the couple next to us, and offered a solution: "We were planning to go up in a small plane after this: want to join us?" Off to the airport.
Oh, the joys of getting above it all, and taking photographs that no company can (yet) legally control.
Reference
Elizabeth Kolbert (2007). "Unconventional Crude." The New Yorker, November 12, 46-51, quote from p. 47." />
Fort McMurray
Not long ago, Elizabeth Kolbert offered a valuable profile of Fort McMurray, Alberta. In this small city-as-national-and-transnational epicenter of struggles over the future of the petroleum society, "what might be called the world's first unconventional oil boom is already under way. Since 2002, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Imperial Oil, which is primarily owned by ExxonMobil, have all received approval to construct major projects in the tar sands; Total has announced its intentions to follow suit. Over the next five years, investment in the Fort McMurray area is expected to amount to more than seventy-five billion dollars. Residents of the town have taken to calling it Fort McMoney." The estimates suggest an astonishing volume of bitumen -- perhaps the possibility of an equivalent of 1.7 trillion barrels of crude. Not all of this is economically feasible to recover and process, but if even a tenth can be harvested, this makes Alberta the world's second largest oil reserve after Saudi Arabia.
A trip across Alberta in August 2010 provided a chance to head north, and we couldn't miss it. We arranged to join the official company tour of the sands, despite my concerns about that stern footnote in the tourist brochure: visitors were encouraged to take as many photographs as they'd like, but were required to sign a legal agreement that such photographs would not be shared with anyone, "including posting to any social-networking sites." If you can't share a photograph with anyone else, is it really a photograph at all?
As it happens, there was some mix-up, and the company's tour bus never stopped by our hotel to pick us up.
We turned to the couple next to us, and offered a solution: "We were planning to go up in a small plane after this: want to join us?" Off to the airport.
Oh, the joys of getting above it all, and taking photographs that no company can (yet) legally control.
Reference
Elizabeth Kolbert (2007). "Unconventional Crude." The New Yorker, November 12, 46-51, quote from p. 47.