According to Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, inspired by Archilochus’s aphorism that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” one set of thinkers dig into a single topic all their lives, while others spread their interests wider. In some ways, perhaps, Warren Cariou is a hedgehog who wants to be a fox, or at least a hedgehog with curious fox-like tendencies.

For decades the Canadian multihyphenate’s point of focus has been the Athabasca tar sands, but rather than limit himself to, say, simply writing about them, the effects of Canada’s immense oil industry, and alternative Indigenous land relations, he has cultivated a broad range of both artistic and scholarly practices in an effort to better understand the region and its inhabitants (human and nonhuman alike) and to spread awareness of what has been happening there. He has written stories, directed documentary films, written and edited numerous articles and books, and developed a novel photographic practice he calls petrography involving bitumen collected directly from the tar sands. In addition, he teaches at the University of Manitoba and edits the First Voices, First Texts series at the University of Manitoba Press, which aims to bring works by Indigenous voices back into circulation.

In late July 2024, Cariou traveled to Bryn Mawr College to meet with students in the STEM in the Liberal Arts (STEMLA) Program, lead a cyanotype workshop, and deliver the inaugural Summer STEMLA Lecture. As part of this visit, he spoke with students in my course. We had recently read his “An Athabasca Story,” a modern folktale in which the traditional hero Elder Brother encounters a remarkable new sight: the industrial sublime in the form of massive trucks and other artifacts of petromodernity reshaping the Athabascan landscape. The story serves as a lesson, though one whose ambiguous moral is left to be teased out by the reader, as Elder Brother succumbs to temptation, begins digging in the tar, and finds himself collected by a truck and transformed into a being that echoes in our gas tanks, “rattling […] down deep in the bowels of the machine.” That, the story’s conclusion suggests, is “Elder Brother, trying to get your attention, begging you to let him out.”

In all these ways, Cariou complicates the story of oil in Western society. His petrography underscores the agential power and beauty of natural bitumen, while “An Athabasca Story” invites readers to think about their complicity and power in energy systems.

We reproduce our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

—José Vergara

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PARTICIPANTS: Daiana Azim, Marie-Claire Davenport, Lucy Dellera, Samantha Duran-Sanchez, Selby Hearth, Kaitlyn Kruemmel, Lisa Li, Zinat Nasrin, Taaliyat Ojifinni Faiqah Oladejo, Adrianna Porter Meachem, Chelsea Quainoo, Rosa Ramirez Almanzar, Melanie Rosas-Reyes, Sofia Sergi, Autumn Shemitz, Claire Thomas, Andrea Truque, Arlene Ulloa, José Vergara, Joelle Wise, Alyssa Ya

 

Arlene Ulloa (AU): In “An Athabasca Story,” you illustrate the impact of the oil developments on the land. Could you share more about the personal and community stories that inspired it?

 

Warren Cariou (WC): I’m from a place called Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, which is downwind of the tar sands. The acid rain that comes from the tar sands goes to our forests. But when I was growing up, even though the tar sands were already being developed at the time, I didn’t really know much about it. I just heard, “There’s some development over there,” but there was really no reason to go. Then, as I was getting older, some people I knew went to work there and came back driving big fancy trucks. It became more and more of a thing for people in my community to go and find work. It was not until I was 31 that I finally decided to look at it myself.

I was just astonished by what I saw. This was in 1998, and, at that point, there was very little public general recognition of what was happening, even though the bitumen mining had been going on for decades there and was already massive. So, I wanted to get the word out to people within my community and then beyond: about the extraordinary transformation of this landscape and the effects on the people who live nearby.

A lot of my work in my academic career has been a little bit different from the work I’ve done as an artist and activist. My area of research is Indigenous storytelling traditions, and I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of time with Indigenous storytellers, especially with the Cree and Métis, my own tradition. That work is often aimed at helping storytellers tell their stories, or to share their stories in new ways, or to record them or create books out of them. And, of course, in this process I’ve learned a lot from those storytellers; I’ve been able to spend time with them, visiting, and sometimes going out on the land with them.

That’s the two sides of my career: the environmentalist side and the work I’ve done with the storytellers. And the two have come together in ways that I wouldn’t have predicted.

Taaliyat Ojifinni (TO): What inspired you to use bitumen—which is a very toxic and dangerous material to work with—to produce images?

 

WC: It’s by accident that I came to be a visual artist. It all began when I visited the Indigenous communities that are directly in the middle of the tar sands: the Fort McKay First Nation and the Fort McKay Métis Nation. These communities are right next door to the oil industry’s tailing ponds, massive bitumen mines, and processing facilities. And as I was visiting there, I saw that this tar—which we associate with the bitumen mines—is actually just lying there on the surface. I went for a walk in the Fort McKay First Nation, and I found a lump of bitumen on the ground, and then I realized that there were other similar lumps scattered throughout the community.

I had seen a lot of bitumen in the devastated landscapes of the bitumen mines. But seeing it here, in such a mundane and tranquil setting, surprised me. That was when I first understood that this material is natural. So, I was inspired by this realization, and I wanted to try to do something different with the bitumen: to recognize that it doesn’t have to take the horrific, landscape-destroying form that I had seen in the mines. I wondered: what could I create with bitumen?

And I remembered my first-year art history class when I learned that Nicéphore Niépce, the French inventor, had created the first photograph out of a material called bitumen of Judea. I wondered if Niépce’s material was the same as this bitumen that I’d seen on the ground in the Fort McKay First Nation. I started doing some research and found one of the world’s experts on the first photograph. His name was Dusan Stulik, and he worked at the Getty Conservation Institute, and I just emailed him and said, “Would it be possible to make a photograph with this bitumen from the tar sands?” I wasn’t really expecting any response. But a couple of hours later I got an email, and all it said was, “Can I phone you?” Dusan is a chemist, and he had studied the history of Niépce’s photograph and how Niépce had made it, but he was also thrilled that someone wanted to make a new version of bitumen photographs in the contemporary world. I was very fortunate to have his advice and guidance as I began my experiments.

I tried to emulate Niépce’s process as much as I could, using bitumen that I had gathered on the land beside the Athabasca River. I didn’t think it was going to work; but, eventually, the images formed as they had for Niépce back in 1826. At that point I became fascinated with the process. And so, over the last 10 years, I’ve ended up making a lot of images using bitumen.

In addition, I’ve restlessly tried all different kinds of ways to get people to see or to resee what is going on there in those mines. After all, it’s easy for us to think about it for a little while, and then put it away, since we don’t know what to do about it. But I try, even just to remind myself: This is still there. This problem is still there and proliferating.

 

Marie-Claire Davenport (M-CD): In your interview with First Comic News, you stated that “one could even say that the culture of oil is a fundamental aspect of contemporary western folklore,” bringing attention to how our culture today would be impossible to achieve without oil. In “An Athabasca Story,” you make Elder Brother immortal, and transfigured into an oil widely used by Western culture. In that story, is there an implication that, in fueling Western folklore, we change (or appropriate) the folklore of other cultures? If so, what is the importance of Indigenous folklore in Western culture?

 

WC: Appropriation of community-owned stories is a crucial issue for Indigenous cultures, because certain stories contain vital teachings about a community’s identity, their spirituality, and how to survive on the land in their territory. Unfortunately, Indigenous stories have been subject to appropriation for a long, long time, by anthropologists first and then by other writers.

Thinking of the tar sands region, what is happening to the land—in the name of oil extraction there—is very similar to appropriation of story. I have an article called “Terristory” in which I talk about how, from Indigenous perspectives, land and stories are not very different. They may be two sides of the same thing. Extractivism, in a corporate or colonial process, is there to separate out something of value, take it out, make it your own, package it up, and make some profit off it. Taking a story can do the same thing.

Storytelling is deeply connected to the land, and this is true for the Elder Brother narrative that found its way into “An Athabasca Story.” That story actually came about as a result of bringing together those two sides of my work that I talked about earlier. I had been working with a Cree elder named Louis Bird, and he had told us a lot of traditional Cree stories: including some stories about a character whose name I can’t say right now, because there’s no snow on the ground, and Cree people have a particular protocol around that. But we can gesture toward his name by calling him Elder Brother.

Those stories are trickster stories, and Elder Brother is a character who has great spiritual power, and he can be very helpful and generous to humans. But he also is very fallible and makes a lot of mistakes. And those stories are teaching stories: they teach us by negative example.

Louis had been telling these stories, and then I traveled back to the tar sands, and I thought: What if this character Elder Brother came here and discovered what’s happening to the land? What would his response be? Louis had also told us about how the stories are so deeply tied to the land, and it made me wonder: What happens if the land is altered? Does it alter the stories?

Unconsciously I tried to work that out while I was writing, and the answer I came to is yes, it does. It does change the stories, when the land itself is changed.

 

Zinat Nasrin (ZN): Do you think that if the man had offered Elder Brother warmth and shelter during his time of need, it might have prevented him from resorting to greed and ultimately causing his own downfall?

 

WC: The fact that Elder Brother is starving at the beginning of the story is something that’s very common in Cree and Métis and Anishinaabe stories. Winter is a time of privation, and there are other stories in those traditions about things that can happen if you’re starving. So if people resort to cannibalism, for example, the Wendigo may arrive and they become Wendigo. That’s part of that same tradition.

Do you think Elder Brother could have approached this differently when he first arrives there? Is the onus on the truck driver to welcome him?

 

M-CD: From what I understood of the story, this was almost a completely different environment to Elder Brother. I don’t think it’s fair to say that he could have reacted differently. He totally could have, but he was a little thing placed into an entirely different system.

 

Melanie Rosas-Reyes (MRR): In the story, the system is already set in place. We’ve been accustomed to that. I don’t think he was ever at fault. At the end of the day, he’s the one who gets punished, but it also goes to show that it’s a question of how the system has been ingrained in this society.

 

WC: If Elder Brother wasn’t cold and wasn’t hungry, probably he would just have said, “Okay, see you later.” When he talks to the truck driver, he’s actually making a plea. It’s important within a lot of Indigenous cultures, and certainly in Cree and Métis cultures, that when someone shows up out of nowhere, you have to host them. Again, there are important survival reasons for that, because it’s such a harsh climate. If you turn someone away, they could die. So, when Elder Brother meets this person, he expects to be treated as kin.

But Elder Brother is not treated that way. In fact, that’s one of the things that Elder Brother says about the truck driver: “This man talked as if he had no relations.” To have relations is to have connection to others, but also to have responsibility toward them, too. That’s partly where this story takes off on a dangerous trajectory, because Elder Brother is expecting to be treated as a relation, and when he’s not, things snowball. But Elder Brother still has some choice in the matter in terms of his response to the rudeness that the truck driver treats him with. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Does he have any other options?

 

M-CD: He’s almost like a little child, the naivete. If someone says something that completely shakes you out of your worldview like that and just seems very cold and harsh, typically most people would respond in a cold and harsh way.

I had a related question. Why is Elder Brother immortal?

 

WC: This goes back to the Cree and Métis oral traditions, where the stories of Elder Brother show that no matter what happens to him, he always seems to come back. Elder Brother’s immortality as we see it at the end of the story is because in many other stories in this tradition Elder Brother makes a mistake, and it leads to something negative happening to him, but he always comes back in some other form. This is partly because the people don’t die, in the sense that the community is still there, and he is a representative of them. He is a cultural hero, even though he makes a lot of mistakes. So I’m just following that tradition when I say he can’t die. But yes, instead of dying, he can be in a very difficult situation for a long time.

Lucy Dellera (LD): But wouldn’t that be almost worse? Because it says that he lives on any time you start a car. He’s basically forced to relive his own trauma like that. Do you ever see him reflecting on that?

 

WC: When I first wrote the story, I was thinking about the humorous endings of a lot of Cree stories, where Elder Brother gets himself into trouble because of his mistakes. But sometimes I forget that these endings are also horrifying. When my wife read the story the first time, she was shocked, and she said, “This is not funny at all.”

And absolutely, it really isn’t funny that Elder Brother is trapped in this system. But I wanted to utilize that structure of humour that we find in traditional oral stories to help us think about how we’re implicated in choices. Especially in choices that are, maybe, similar to the ones that Elder Brother makes. And that those choices have effects on us that are perhaps not as visible to us as they will be to our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren.

Even though Elder Brother can’t die, that may in fact be a worse thing for him in a sense, that perhaps his fate is up to us. If he’s there in that gas tank, then is there another way to not invoke him? Is there a way to leave him, or it—the oil—in the ground, for example, and have a different life?

The bitumen that I work with in my petrography has really reinforced to me the idea that it actually does have a life. It is agential, in a way. It has an animation, and it doesn’t have to go in a direction that petromodernity wants it to go. We can resist making the same choice that Elder Brother makes.

 

ZN: If the man had provided some comfort to Elder Brother, then he wouldn’t have done that. In society we have something to do, so that people don’t fall into greed or take desperate actions.

 

WC: For me, this is one of the dilemmas that we see Elder Brother navigating when he’s treated with rudeness and a selfishness where the truck driver says, “Get off this land!” Owning land is not a concept that he would understand. Could he have done anything different?

 

Daiana Azim (DA): Yes, because although he was hungry, when he started taking the oil, he got some, and he said, “Okay, you may need some more, because there will be more winters,” and continued digging. So, his conscience didn’t stop him going to that extent. So I would understand if he got a little bit of the oil. He depends on it.

 

ZN: He would have died without it.

 

WC: So, you think he needed to do it? That’s a really good point as well. How much does he need to take? Proportion is really important when we think about energy politics. How much do we need to dig? How much for each person? How much for each community? And what are the implications of that?

Because he starts to think, “What happens if it runs out? I need more, more, more.” And that leads him to having all four limbs stuck in this tar. He’s making a fundamental error that Elder Brother does in many of the other Cree and Métis stories. Everyone’s cold sometimes. But if you think that you can somehow take enough from the environment or from the land that you’ll never, ever be cold again, and you’ll never, ever be hungry again, and you don’t care about anybody else, then that’s likely going to lead to problems. This is exactly what he’s learning.

Appropriation of community-owned stories is a crucial issue for Indigenous cultures, because certain stories contain vital teachings about a community’s identity, their spirituality, and how to survive on the land in their territory.

LD: You also mentioned the idea of the truck driver saying “Get off this land!” and that being a foreign concept for Elder Brother. Could that also be a part of the error? He views the land as belonging to everybody, so he thinks, “Oh, I’m allowed to take this energy, because it’s mine just as much as it’s the bulldozer’s”?

 

WC: If he were a contemporary person, rather than someone who has this long existence going back many generations, he might also say, “That’s Indigenous land. I’m just gonna take it back, because it’s been stolen.” The question again of proportion comes up, and how much do you need?

This is something that Louis Bird talks about a lot in his storytelling. He talks about a teaching in Cree culture that is about taking too much versus taking enough to survive and to share with others. This concept is called pastahowin. Pastahowin is, as Louis describes it, a sin or transgression against nature. He says, if you commit pastahowin, then you’ll be punished. If someone’s a hunter, and they kill too many animals that they can’t use, that’s pastahowin. And if you do that, the punishment will be that the animal will never allow you to successfully hunt it until you have made amends. So, basically, the punishment is the withdrawal of nature’s bounty from you.

In a way, Elder Brother is committing a pastahowin, since he’s taking more than he needs. That could be understood to be part of the error he makes, which, then, leads to his downfall. That’s within the Cree perspective. His greed is pastahowin, but ideologically, he’s also adopting the worldview of that truck driver, saying, “Hey, this is working for this guy, and I should do what he’s doing.”

 

Sofia Sergi (SS): What was your writing process like for this story?

 

WC: It was almost like I was hearing the story, and that’s unusual. I usually slog at it and go through many drafts before I find where the story is even going. But, in this case, I remembered my experience of being in the tar sands, and I remembered Louis Bird’s stories, and suddenly the new story was there. I was along for the ride. This is probably the piece of writing that has come most fluidly to me, of anything that I’ve ever written.

 

Joelle Wise (JW): What was your intended message?

 

WC: I wanted the story to be about a big mistake, as almost all the Elder Brother stories are. I wanted readers to think about themselves in this situation. That’s where the story goes at the end, where I write about pressing on the accelerator and hearing Elder Brother. Petroleum is part of our everyday lives, and it is everywhere and is saturating contemporary culture, but where does that oil come from? Most people don’t think about that.

When Elder Brother reaches into the ground to grab some of that dirt for himself, there’s a voice that says, “Elder Brother, you’re hurting me.” I wanted that to be something that resonated for readers. One of you asked, whose voice is that? Do you have thoughts on who or what that voice is?

 

Alyssa Ya (AY): Nature? Or the Earth?

 

ZN: His own thoughts? He’s thinking, “Oh, should I do this?”

 

WC: Yes, it could be within his own conscience. He’s negotiating with himself in a way. That voice could mean a number of things, but I was thinking the land itself was saying that. Then when the voice says, “You’re hurting me,” Elder Brother responds, “Not nearly so much as they are.” That’s an interesting shift in his perspective.

 

ZN: He’s asking himself, “Should I do it? Do I have to do it?”

 

WC: Yes, this is about proportion, too. He’s suggesting, “Well, I’m only taking a little bit compared to that huge truck full of it. So, why shouldn’t I take as much as I can?” And that is something that we often do. We just say, “Okay, I’m gonna just do what I want to do, because it’s not as bad as what that oil company is doing.” And yet I’m also using that oil for many of the things I want to do. Elder Brother is playing a mind game with himself to say, Well, it’s not as bad as what others are doing.

In the world that we inhabit, it’s almost impossible to live a life that’s completely separate from oil and petrochemicals. But does that mean that we should do what Elder Brother does and take as much as we possibly can? What is enough? What is an acceptable relationship that we can have with our environment that will allow us to survive, but also allow the rest of our relatives and the environment to thrive as well?

For Elder Brother, when he says, “not nearly so much as they are,” he’s basically made a decision: “They’re being greedy; I’m going to be greedy.” There was another option. He didn’t have to do that.

 

Claire Thomas (CT): The worker in the story says that soon there won’t be winter anymore. Was that representing climate change?

 

WC: I was thinking about how this worker might say, “Even if this does contribute to climate change, that will be a good thing, because you won’t have winter anymore.” As you probably know, in Canada, winter is something we sometimes dread. I wanted to represent a certain way of thinking, the way some people choose to instrumentalize or conveniently explain what’s happening as a result of our use of fossil fuels. Oil company apologists often peddle this misguided thinking.

 

MRR: Are we going to end up in a similar fate as Elder Brother?

 

WC: On different days I may answer that question differently. My levels of hope and despair fluctuate. I see progress. I see the possibility of thinking about our relationship to our energy sources in new ways.

For me, one of the things that we need to grapple with is: Even if we do move toward using different energy technologies, “green” technologies, they still have environmental impact. If we have an overly rosy view of that, we’re going to be disappointed. For example, hydroelectricity is sometimes understood to be a clean technology, but, from the perspective of Indigenous communities who’ve had their territory flooded, it’s not. It’s very destructive, in terms of toxicity in the soil, and it’s very damaging economically and socially as well: with loss of land and destruction of traditional ways of life. There are many, many cases of this all around the world.

I’m hoping that we’ll start to understand energy on a more local scale. If we can utilize certain kinds of wind and solar power in particular, these technologies give us the possibility of having more local control of energy. I worry about the proliferation of megaprojects that are using wind and solar, because those may be just replicating the power structures that are still in place right now, which is what we see with all the hydro megaprojects around the world.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we can have smaller, locally controlled energy sources and technologies, I believe it will actually lead us to feel much more responsibility for our local environments. If the oil that comes from the tar sands is transported across the continent before it is used, people don’t make the connection between the violence at its source and the benefit it brings when it is burned or turned into petrochemicals. But if it’s a wind turbine right beside you, or some other energy source near your community, then you’re much less likely to just say, “Okay, it’s not my problem” if it poses a danger.

If the localization of energy is made more feasible, that will also enable a different politics. The closer we can have our power sources to us, the more we have a sense of responsibility toward them. I see a lot of hope in that.

AY: I’ve only read folklore from the past, and it’s cool to read a work of a current author. Is your goal for your writing to be preserved for future generations to look back on the problems of today through a historic lens? Or do you expect that these problems will persist in the future and rather have your writing serve as advocacy?

 

WC: I’ve been preoccupied by this issue for more than two decades now, and as time has gone on, I’ve been moving more and more toward experiment. Like trying to make a documentary film when I have no idea how to make a documentary film, because I just wanted to find new ways to make visible what was going on. I would write a story, I would write an article, and I felt like those were doing something. But I also knew there were other ways to make an impact, to get people’s attention.

For me, it’s always exciting to try something new, artistically. I do think that I’ll probably continue to do that. I don’t know what I’ll experiment with next, and whether it will be an abject failure or not, but the process of trying—of making that leap toward a different potential form of creativity—is really appealing to me. When I’ve already worked out what I’m going to say ahead of time, then it’s really hard to get excited about it. So lowering the stakes by saying, “I’m just going to experiment, I’m going to try this,” is a way of breaking my habitual ways of approaching creative work.

Experimenting is about being open to surprise, to things we didn’t expect. Surprise can sometimes shock us into seeing something that was right in front of us all along. In relation to the energy we use, most of the time we don’t think about it at all. We often only notice our entanglement in energy infrastructures when they fail. If there’s a blackout, you really notice how much you rely on electricity. If there’s an oil spill, you think about it for a little bit, but then it fades into the background.

So a lot of the work that I’m doing is psychological: trying to bring these things back into the collective consciousness. It’s so easy to not deal with them, because they’re so difficult. And I catch myself doing that, too. That’s why I want to try to surprise myself and come at these questions in a different way—to remind us of something that we probably all know: that there are corporate interests and government interests invested in making us forget about the violence that our energy connects us to.

I’m trying to go the other direction: to remind us of these connections by doing something unexpected, or by trying a different art form that may or may not work. An experiment is a great way to do that, with the recognition that it may well fail. But then you just try another experiment.

Does that ambivalence paralyze us, or can we do something about the damage that oil addiction is causing? To me, if we feel ambivalence, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re paralyzed

Kaitlyn Kruemmel (KK): It seems that you’re drawn to several different mediums to communicate the messages that you want to put out into the world. What aspects of each stand out to you, and are there certain things that you feel, for instance, literature can accomplish better than artwork like petrography and vice versa?

 

WC: Oral stories are quite different from written stories. They’re social. They’re shared among a group, or at least between a storyteller and a listener, and there’s something really powerful about that. The great strength of written stories is interiority, the ability to go into the interiors of people’s minds. In “An Athabasca Story,” I try to emulate the oral story mode, to make it feel like we’re a community of listeners. But, also, I do go into Elder Brother’s mind, so there is an element of interiority there too.

The documentary film work was also very social. We didn’t have an agenda. We just wanted to go and visit with Indigenous community members who are affected by the tar sands and ask, “What do you think?” We also wanted to ask the people in my community: “What would happen if this expanded into our territory?” We created the films, Land of Oil and Water and Overburden, out of stories that locals told us. It was very much a storytelling project. I loved the process of making those films and I felt that the final results enabled the people to share their perspectives with the wider world.

With petrography, I was most interested in the embodiment or the physicality of bitumen, because most people utilize petroleum in their daily lives without having much of a sensory interaction with it. Someone might smell gasoline fumes when they’re filling up their car, but most of the time, we don’t sense that it’s all around us. With bitumen, its smell and its stickiness are unavoidable. You feel its physical presence always. It sticks to my hands, and its smell gives me a headache if I don’t take precautions.

This is of course unpleasant at times. But I also think it has given me an opportunity to understand the bitumen in a new way, and it has enabled me to create something generative with this material, something that takes oil in a different direction from where petromodernity usually takes it.

 

Autumn Shemitz (AS): On your website, you write “I believe that this ambivalence about energy—fearing its negative consequences but needing its magic—is endemic in contemporary globalized culture.” What do you think is the best way to deal with the normalization of environmentally harmful energy sources? Is ambivalence the only option, or do we have the power to actually do something about it?

 

WC: This is something that I’ve been grappling with the entire time. When I went to gather the bitumen to use in my petrography experiments, I first traveled past the hideous and toxic-smelling mine landscapes. But where I eventually gathered this bitumen was in a place where it’s naturally occurring, and the landscape there was beautiful. There were plants growing out of the tar, and there were insects and birds, and the smell wasn’t overpowering—it was a nice, spicy scent.

I didn’t know what to do with that, as an activist. I wanted to hate this stuff. I wanted to say, “This is toxic, and we need to leave it alone, and don’t ever take it out of the ground.” But there is another side to it. The bitumen has tried to tell me something. The toxicity of it is there, but it’s also a powerful medicine. It can hurt us if we use it in the wrong way, and we’re doing that today on a huge scale. But I believe bitumen has positive powers as well.

Your question is: Does that ambivalence paralyze us, or can we do something about the damage that oil addiction is causing? To me, if we feel ambivalence, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re paralyzed. My ambivalence about petroleum would be maybe 98 percent horror and 2 percent seeing the positive side of it right now, but acknowledging that there are benefits or there are wonders that this material makes possible helps us understand the nature of our predicament.

Before I saw the beautiful area where the natural tar was, I wanted to just get rid of this stuff. But then I realized that’s not what we need to do. We need to acknowledge that we have a relationship with this substance, and we need to try to make it a good relationship as opposed to a very bad one, which is what it is right now. I think about the tar that I work with as a being that has agency and that can teach me something, if I have the humility to understand what that is. I’m hoping that I can open my mind to understand that.

But political action requires us to have some certainty about what we’re doing, and this is where it becomes complicated. if we become overly certain, we barricade ourselves away from recognizing the complexity of the situation. My ambivalence toward this material doesn’t mean we should not try to make change, because what humans are doing to bitumen—and to the rest of the world through our misuse of bitumen—is absolutely an act of pastahowin.

But there are other ways we can relate to it, and that we can relate to other sources of our energy, that would be more intimate and more connected to our sense of responsibility. 

Feautred image courtesy of José Vergara.