Excavating the Alberta Oil Sands with Public Justice

The massive oil sands developments currently unfolding in northeast Alberta are yielding complicated energy and economic paybacks as well as presenting many social, economic, political and environmental risks and costs. How should society analyze, interact and respond to these enormous developments? How can we discern whether the implicated actors are being responsible, or determine whether governments have historically, and are currently, playing appropriate public justice roles? In other words, how can we develop stewardly, equitable, and just policy responses and action-plans in response to the oil sands boom?

This speech explores the dominant modernist ‘approach to analysis’ currently used to understand most aspects of the tar sands boom. It argues that this approach obscures the deep-running, competing ideologies that currently fill-in the content of the state’s and government’s role. A public justice approach to the government’s role—conducted within a penetrating, integral approach to analysis—can offer new and liberating insights into the oil sands boom. This speech sketches out these approaches and briefly illustrates them with examples drawn from the tar sands. A public justice approach, the speech concludes, inspires action steps that free us from our society’s ethos of powerlessness, offers practical and concrete changes, avoids merely imposing technical adjustments on an over-all troublesome set of developments, opens up greater space for public debate, and re-orients the current approach to the oil sands.

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Watch the video and slides from John Hiemstra's presentation "Excavating the Alberta Oil Sands with Public Justice."

For more resources and information about the oil sands debate, see our Oil Sands Resource section