Two direct flights leave Vancouver for Fort McMurray every day, and I’m on one of them. Back in Creston, my stal­wart former com­rades are fin­ishing up the last few days of the summer planting season. I’ve been offered a spot on a recla­ma­tion crew working in the tar sands for a few weeks, and hungry for more of the money that can be made during the summer labour season, I’ve left planting a little early and signed on to the oil patch. This won’t be the first time I’ve worked in the Fort Mac area, starting in 1999 I worked for three sum­mers planting trees from remote camps run by Coast Range. This will be the first time I’ve worked directly in the oil industry, either in the Fort McMurray oil patch or any­where else (unless you count pumping gas at the Squamish Chevron for 2 months).

YVR radar and outbuilding.

Working for ques­tion­able indus­tries is a re-occuring theme in my life. Despite self-identifying as an ecol­o­gist and envi­ro­men­talist, I’ve been involved with 2 dif­ferent oil multi­na­tionals, the U.S. mil­i­tary and count­less log­ging com­pa­nies, either working for con­trac­tors hired by those dubious enti­ties, or working on grant money from them, or working on their prop­erty, or all of the above. This will be the closest I’ve come to directly sup­porting the dam­aging oper­a­tions of an industry I dis­like — usu­ally I’ve been taking grant money to do envi­ron­mental projects on their behalf, and at least with treeplanting I could take some solace that I was planting trees rather than cut­ting them. This time I will be pre­venting ero­sion on the dam walls of the mining tailing ponds of what I assume is the single largest source of carbon-altering emis­sions in the world. I guess I can still claim that I’m pre­venting run-off instead of directly extracting oil, but I think the excuses are get­ting a little thin here. I will be directly labouring on the infra­struc­ture of the Alberta tar sands.

I’m doing it for the money. Since I grad­u­ated I’ve been free­lancing, doing what I have decided to call “com­mu­nity and ecosystem infor­matics”, which has mostly meant web devel­op­ment and a little car­tog­raphy for socially and envi­ron­men­tally ori­ented clients. I like the free­lance life, I like tracking down jobs and taking on unex­pected tasks for inter­esting people and I’m opti­mistic about the direc­tion that work is going. But summer manual labour has the ben­efit of being con­sis­tent and, in some cases, well paid. A friend of mine who I know from the treeplanting com­mu­nity emailed me to ask if was inter­ested in joining this ero­sion con­trol crew, and somehow I over­came my eth­ical objec­tions in the amount of time it took me to operate my cal­cu­lator and my cal­endar. So here I am with the rockies floating by below me, bound for Fort McMurray.

Western Albertan oil leases under the wing.

I have to admit, I’m also curious to see Fort Mac again. Not that we’ll be seeing much of town, I’ll be living an hour north in one of the satel­lite indus­trial lodges which I’m told col­lec­tively house as many as 10 000 men and a dozen women. Fort McMurray has always had some­thing of a train­wreck fas­ci­na­tion for me. I’m curious for a glimpse of the changes in 8 years of oil industry accel­er­a­tion, and curious what it’s like to live in an indus­trial lodge. It will be a switch from my be-porched and be-gardened small-town lifestyle in Creston, that’s for sure. I won’t even get to cook for myself. What am I going to do in the evening?

Highway 63 north towards the tar sands.

I’m told it’s a good com­pany to work for, and they’re making it too easy for me, paying my flight and rental car and all acco­mo­da­tion and expe­neses. This is con­sid­ered normal in the oil industry, and it’s much dif­ferent than the co-op cul­ture of treeplanting, where most people pay daily camp-costs for the priv­i­lege of pitching a tent. Whatever it’s like, it will come and go quickly enough, I’m told there will be between 15 and 25 days of work. And then I’ll be back on the coast, and can enjoy some summer and get back into the free­lancing lifestyle.