coe041_stenson.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Hello, everyone. We're really glad to have you here on the Cultures of Energy podcast brought to you by the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. Yes, at Rice University. Thank you, sons, and I am here with my handsome and debonair. Oh, thank you.

Speaker2: [00:00:47] Wow. High praise today.

Speaker1: [00:00:49] Well, I was thinking in juxtapositions because of what the the bit of conversation that we're going to have. And you're not

Speaker2: [00:00:56] You're not casting aspersions on who we're talking with.

Speaker1: [00:00:59] I had there was another there was a different man who was in my head and so I had to make I had to make the juxtaposition here, and you came out very, very, very well in comparison.

Speaker2: [00:01:10] Well, first of all, let's let's talk about the person we're going to talk about who's not a psychopath and

Speaker1: [00:01:15] Oh, oh god, yes. No, let us not make that accidental.

Speaker2: [00:01:18] Let's start by talking about who we're going to be speaking with on the podcast today, which is the wonderful, generous and kind. Canadian novelist Fred Stenson. And we're going to be talking about his book Who By Fire, which came out from Canada Doubleday a couple of years back. And it's a wonderful discussion or wonderful, I mean, also disturbing in a lot of ways. Rendering of the early history of oil and gas development in Alberta. Yeah, Fred's native Alberta and the legacies and traumas of that experience through the lens of two generations of one farm

Speaker1: [00:01:53] Family, right? And the novel kind of moves back and forth between these different time frames in a really nice way. And we talk about that in the podcast. And some of it is, you know, I mean, it's historical. Definitely. Fred has done his research on it, but some of it's also autobiographical. Yes, like these are some experiences that that he and his family and neighbors and other folks who knew in Alberta and

Speaker2: [00:02:16] Modeled on those experiences. I don't think they're exactly the same. But but they're they're there anyway. But let me tee you up for the what you were, the person you were previously speaking about. Hey, Simone, how are you feeling about the election, which is happening in a week from now?

Speaker1: [00:02:30] Well, I know that anxieties are high. Ever since there was yet another email break. I'm so sick of hearing about emails like like anyone would put anything libelous or that would get them into huge trouble into an email. To do that, you have to send a sex to a 15 year old girl. That's that's how you say the horrible stuff you're going to say.

Speaker2: [00:02:50] There's no way I saw on Twitter over the weekend, though somebody said, I wish Anthony Weiner would send a dick pic about the no Dakota Access Pipeline standoff and violence so that people would actually cover that in the mainstream media instead of these like spurious, you know, whatever it might be lurking in some email thing, which is. And then also Salman Rushdie sending out this thing saying, you know, focus up America. This is a person who may have who may have sent an email astray versus a psychopathic, sexist child molesting right?

Speaker1: [00:03:23] What's it got? Monster.

Speaker2: [00:03:25] What does this have to do with anything? Yeah. So anyway,

Speaker1: [00:03:28] Especially our first female

Speaker2: [00:03:29] Boy, I feel like I'm disclosing some political positions so far today. Ouch. Right? Yeah. Anyway, but I was asking you, how are you feeling? Are you feeling good? Are you feeling confident?

Speaker1: [00:03:39] Well, I'm feeling pretty good because I already voted and I voted on the first day that we were able to hear in in Texas. Yes. And there were huge numbers of people out at the polls and at the poll that we went to in particular. And honestly, I've never seen anything like it. I've done elections observing in Nicaragua at twice and Nicaragua, where people still appreciate and value their right to vote. People go out and they're there on the day of voting. They don't do early voting, but they're out there in massive crowds and lines. And so it was a little like that and I've never seen anything like it in the United States, honestly. So anyhow, there were there was a line out the door. You had to wait to vote. Never seen that like half an hour and it was actually here in Houston. It was more than 50 percent more than our record first day of voting. And I heard in Austin it was like over 200 percent more. So people were out in droves. And I would

Speaker2: [00:04:45] Like to ask Texas. The number, I think, is 43 percent well, on average. So still, that's huge. That's impressive. And I liked I liked the demographics I was seeing in that line. I saw a lot of young women and just women see a lot of people of color. Yeah, I saw a lot of people who looked determined to vote, which I felt was a good sign.

Speaker1: [00:05:02] Yeah. Well, you know what I saw? I saw people actually like flexing their index finger. Oh yeah, they were right-handed. People were like they were just like building up that muscle. They're like, Oh. You know,

Speaker2: [00:05:11] So they could punch it with a punch

Speaker1: [00:05:13] And hit it, hit it hard and directly.

Speaker2: [00:05:16] Well, share the cute thing also about about Bridge coming to an end and her being allowed to cast the vote. I. That's.

Speaker1: [00:05:23] Oh, yes, right? Well, yeah, I'm sure other mothers with daughters across the country have thought of that too.

Speaker2: [00:05:30] There were a lot of there are a lot of young young girls in the line,

Speaker1: [00:05:32] Which was she was very excited. Of course, she was going around and like asking everyone who they were voting. You're probably not supposed to do. And if you were like a burly Texan Trump supporter, you'd probably get hopefully get arrested for such behavior. But if you're a little seven year old, you're allowed to do that, right? Yeah. So we got it. We got a good sense. If anyone was voting for Trump, they weren't saying it very loud in that line.

Speaker2: [00:05:54] No. And that's that's again, a sign of hope. Yeah. Anyhow, so you know, we're all jangly here, as I'm sure many of you are as well. And that doesn't mean just people in the United States. I think people across the world are super jangly about this election, too. But anyway, we're keeping we're keeping the fire of hope alive here and we're coming back again. This is our special Tuesday edition, so we may be coming back again with more thoughts on Thursday. Hopefully, nothing else will break in the way of like last minute, like horribly UN prepared announcements from FBI directors and the like. But whatever.

Speaker1: [00:06:29] You know, I mean this this latest FBI release of potentially suspicious emails, although doubtfully so yeah, it's really a minor compared to the Trump fiasco. Exactly. And I kind of wish that we could have had this conversation when when that when that video broke. Yeah, because I feel like that was stirring up a lot more emotion. Not and controversy, I guess in some senses, but a lot stronger reaction. Or maybe I just felt it more because there are so many women out there like there was this whole Twitter world. Share your story, which I don't know. I mean, having to break it down into what? How many characters do you get on Twitter? Too few hundred and forty? It's not really not really sufficient to, you know, to share that kind of experience, but the fact that all these women were doing it was it was inspiring in a lot of ways. So that was that was an exciting point. So out of the ugliness comes some justice, I guess.

Speaker2: [00:07:31] And every woman has met that dude, you know, everyone has noticed that guy.

Speaker1: [00:07:34] It's just a matter of how old you were

Speaker2: [00:07:36] When you did right. And the hope is like those people are carrying those memories into the voting booth with them. You know, this is who you're voting for, right? Or hopefully not voting for. Well, with that, we are going to turn it over, I think, to Fred Stenson, who will be a calming presence next to all of us. His concerns are real

Speaker1: [00:07:57] And since love Fred, he was that was a real pleasure to.

Speaker2: [00:08:01] Can I say one more thing? This is the first episode that we've done through a request or kind of a recommendation from one of our listeners. So I think that that might be something other people want to think about is, you know, if there are folks out there who you would think would be great on this podcast, you should let us know because, hey, we will interview them.

Speaker1: [00:08:20] Yes. And while you're at it, go put some go. Put some words up on on iTunes. Yeah, you could do. We need more words and stars. Yeah, we need stars and we need hopefully nice words.

Speaker2: [00:08:32] Let's prioritize first vote. First of all, make sure you vote and then on your way home from voting, please, you know, check on iTunes and add some stars to our our trove there

Speaker1: [00:08:42] And to all of our progressive leftist friends in other parts of the world. Please feel free to hack into the UC system and vote yourself. Be happy to have you in there to right?

Speaker2: [00:08:54] Ok with that. Go Fred, go Fred. Well, welcome, folks back to the Cultures of Energy podcast we are so happy to have on the line from Cochrane, Alberta with us today author Fred Stenson, and we're going to be talking about his recent novel Who by Fire, as well as some reflections on energy and environment issues in Alberta. I imagine, and I think I'm going to pass it over to Simone here to get things started.

Speaker1: [00:09:26] Well, welcome, Fred.

Speaker3: [00:09:28] Hi there.

Speaker1: [00:09:29] We're so we're glad to have you here. You know, and since we have you virtually here in Cochrane, Alberta, and I wanted to see if you could give us kind of a rundown or a capsule of the book who by fire, so that for our listeners who might not have had a chance to read it yet can have a sense of of the plot line and the narrative and some of the important characters that you'd like to share so that we have a sense of it as we go forward in the conversation. And as I said a minute ago, you don't need to do any spoilers, no need to give anything away that you don't want to give away. But if you could give us the lowdown on the book, that would be great.

Speaker3: [00:10:08] Okay. Happy to do so. And it's a farm family that's been there for a few generations. They suddenly have a sour gas processing plant being built just a half mile west of them, or upwind and up slope, and it's a sour gas plant. I'm not sure if your readers will be familiar with that, but but it means that there's a high percentage of hydrogen sulfide in the gas. Or it did mean that in this case and and hydrogen sulfide, it's colorless gas that smells like rotten eggs until it's at a sort of a lethal level of concentration. And then it's odorless, and it does very much have the power to kill a person or a large farm animal, for that matter, because it paralyzes the lung. Just one deep breath that could do that paralyze your lung. And if if you can't get into fresher air very quickly, you'll pass out and it'll kill you. So this is the situation that faces the family and what happens with the plant is that it malfunctions. It doesn't work it. There was no pilot plant. They they were in a hurry to get it online to support a pipeline, the company and and it malfunctions it.

Speaker3: [00:11:36] The the gas does things to steal that they didn't anticipate and basically the plant leaks. So the situation gets extreme very quickly for the surrounding families and the Ryder family, who are at the heart of the book. Elon and Tom and their three children are the closest people the most affected. Now there is a second half to the book. I intercut the chapters, so you get the two stories at once as you read through, and it's the story of the youngest child and the family, Billy as as a six year old man. And he's he has become an engineer and he's a gas processing engineer, and he's at the end of his career running a sulfur unit in upgrader in the oil sands in northern Alberta. And Bill, of course, has a has a lot of loyalty issues. He's never really gotten over the basic loyalty issue that his family suffered so from the industry that he's made his living from and that, you know, his sort of search for for some kind of peace is at the heart of the book, right?

Speaker1: [00:12:53] And he really struggles through addiction and all kinds of things in the story itself in many ways in order to kind of bring that to resolution.

Speaker3: [00:13:03] Mm hmm. Yeah, he's you know, he he hoped he could just be, you know, a sour gas engineer, do a good job and and not be troubled, you know, but but whenever he's confronted by the community around the sulfur plants that he works in, if he's forced into a situation where he has to speak to the neighbors, all of what's happened to his own family comes pouring back and it's difficult for him.

Speaker1: [00:13:31] Mm hmm. I mean, one of the things that I found really compelling and and it sort of worked as a very powerful set of gears and mechanisms in the book was the way you do switch back and forth between nineteen sixty and something closer to the present, right? So you've got these two timelines that are running asynchronously, but telling a similar story in many ways, it sort of bookending the story. Can you tell us a bit about how how that idea, that operation of time works for you? The narrative and why you chose to kind of move between those two time escapes in the story?

Speaker3: [00:14:10] Yeah, the the choice to do it that way was very much, I think, motivated. I mean, one thing I wanted to kind of urge on the reader was was a sort of a compelling story of how things haven't changed as much as, say, the oil industry would have us believe. And also the, you know, the various governments involved will suggest that, you know, the difference between 1960 and today is night and day and and we've got all that taken care of now and that sort of thing can't happen anymore. And I was very struck when there was a case in Alberta, a family, the leader of this family, they had a kind of a communal existence. A guy named Webo Ludwick, which was he wasn't a very likable fellow. They farmed in this area of northwestern Alberta. And the problem they were having was a problem with sour gas. And this was this is long after our problems. It was 25 years later that his issues began and and a friend of mine, Andrew Niccol, for a very well known author about these issues, wrote a book about Ludwig, and I read it and reviewed it for a magazine here in Alberta. And what struck me really hard was just how much the same the situation that family faced in terms of sour gas and oil companies and government was to what we had faced. You know that that the Das was very much loaded against them in exactly the same way. In fact, after they'd had a bad round with our gas in their home, you know, the company representative would come and use exactly the same words, you know, that they used to use with us because my story is based, you know, on a on something that did happen to my family.

Speaker3: [00:16:14] And and as as as shown in the book, you know, the family, you know, they call up in the night and say, you know, you've got a bad problem with gas or kids are sick. And the guy would say, Well, okay, you know, we'll we'll come and see you in the morning. We'll work on things here and we'll come and see you in the morning and and see if you're okay, you know, and I thought, well, even as a child, I thought, Well, what? What good is that right? Well, use is that, and that was the same thing that was happening to the Ludvig family. So the personal connection, the fact that it wasn't a resolved issue, where were things that motivated me to to write the story? And having the two timelines was very much about dealing with the fact that, you know, this hasn't gone away. We still have these problems that community people are still, you know, fobbed off in a way there may be more people coming around and saying nice things. But but the situation is still the same. Nothing, nothing is really there to help them unless they choose to go a lawsuit route.

Speaker1: [00:17:25] Mm hmm. Yeah, I was wondering. I was wondering if there were some autobiographical motivation here for the book, too, but I think this point you've just made is is super important that, you know, things have kind of stayed the same in many ways, and that's an important thread to to draw through this book. I would say, and as you just described, it's almost like there's a playbook or a set of, you know, speech codes that are expected to be said whenever troubles arise and that that stayed the same over these generations is is kind of troubling.

Speaker3: [00:18:00] Yeah, I find it difficult. I think that this, you know, I even compared it to sports. You know, I have bill in his mind as a as an adult engineer. You know, he he thinks of it as you know, there's team, you know, there's kind of team environment or team community and then there's team government and oil and and they just bashing away at each other, you know, decade after decade and when they're, you know, in a way, you know, he says team oil and team government always win in a way because they have more lawyers to throw at it. More money, more more tackles. I guess if you want to hold the football analogy, right? Right.

Speaker2: [00:18:48] But maybe more concussions too, of course.

Speaker3: [00:18:52] Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:18:53] You know, Fred, Fred, one of the things I wanted to I mean, a lot of praise for the book, but you know, I want to also note. Just, you know, I think you handled a very difficult issue very subtly, and you do a good job of bringing up a lot of different it's not just a kind of good versus evil story, I think because one of the things that I got a strong sense of in reading the book is is the way in which people in Alberta, you know, have been torn by the oil and gas industry in the sense that on the one hand, it has brought pollution, toxicity, precarity to people's lives. On the other hand, it's been this engine of modernization and growth, and it's fed the cities and in such a way that it really has, you know, driven Alberta from being more of a frontier society or an agrarian society into what we would consider to be a modern society, warts and all. And you just, you know, how do you think about that or what are your thoughts in terms of that, if you will? Some some might call it a devil's contract, right with with oil and gas in Alberta, but certainly has made Alberta into an incredibly important part of Canada, an incredibly wealthy part of Canada, too.

Speaker3: [00:20:05] Mm hmm. Yeah, no. All that, all. That's very true. I mean, people sometimes forget that, you know, after World War Two, Alberta was very much of what we call have not province. We were losing population. The province was in debt at that time and the oil industry began. You know, it's it's serious. Beginning its major beginning that still carries on to date was in 1947, when there was a Big Oil find at Leduc in Alberta close to Edmonton. And after that they had a kind of a new geological key that they could use, and it unlocked a lot of reservoirs all over Alberta. And suddenly we were an oil province. And you know, the difference was light and day from losing population. All of a sudden our population was zooming upward and from being an indebted province. Suddenly, the, you know, the farmer government, the social credit government was banking a lot of money and. And so there was industrialization happened very rapidly and city growth and so on in the 1950s. And so the province in many ways has has, I think, been or felt indebted to the oil industry. Now, if we just sort of set aside things like pollution and climate change for the moment, that the thing was that progress was always bought at the expense of of certain people, those people were pretty well, always rural people. So it really created a kind of a rural urban split. The sacrifices were all being made by rural people and the the benefits tended to accrue in the cities, the creation of a very solid middle class and so on. And even in the small towns, I portray the fact that the local small town isn't very isn't very sympathetic with the problems of the of the farm families. In the novel, the local town is seen there has a new revenue stream and they're very much enjoying it, right?

Speaker2: [00:22:28] And it's also striking that the development or the arrival of industry seems relatively unknown on, you know, kind of mediated by government and government is kind of a a strange, you know, kind of remote presence in the book. There's one kind of sympathetic, I guess, congressperson who who Tom, the father of the family, writes to and gets a little help. But basically, it seems as though government has largely a role in this scenario. And that leads also to the kind of further precarity of the family situation and their inability or a sense of collusion, I guess, between government and industry. That leads also to the sense of the disenfranchisement of these rural farmers.

Speaker3: [00:23:09] Mm hmm. Yeah, it is, I think, a really significant fact that in a place like Alberta, and I'm sure this is probably the same with with some of the more rural states that have resources in the U.S. that our governments, you know, our government in Alberta at the time that the oil arrived. You know, they there were very few people that within the government that understood this thing scientifically or chemically or, you know, they really they just really saw it as a as a boon. And when they needed explanation, I mean, there was one place they could go and that was to the oil industry, right? I mean, they would in time, you know, hire their their own engineers, you know, to. But. Even then, I mean, it was engineers talking to engineers, it wasn't the political apparatus really didn't have much penetration into it, and they simply did what they were advised to do for the most part. I mean, their decisions, the provinces decisions were things like, do we export or do we not, you know, they weren't, you know, is this safe or is this not, you know, they just thought, Well, you guys know what you're doing? And and the odd thing is in southern Alberta, I mean, when I say the plant malfunctions, that may seem like something an author might throw in, you know, make the story go round.

Speaker3: [00:24:42] But in fact, you know, my family was involved in a very similar situation. And many, many years later, I wrote a book. I commissioned a book on the history of gas processing in Canada, so it is actually able to talk to the engineers who who worked on the plant because that plant was very important in the history. And and what they explained to me was, you know, it's called hydrogen and brittle ailment. And I do as much as I think an average reader wants to hear, explain this process in the in the novel of how that this the hydrogen ion, when the when the H2S level, the hydrogen sulfide level is high and it's very high pressure and there's a bit of carbon dioxide, the hydrogen ion is sort of set free in that situation and penetrates the steel and cracks the steel. And the better the steel, the more it cracks the steel. And and that is how the plant comes to leak. And it was a problem that they started to understand why it was happening, but it took them a long time to understand how to make it not happen. And I guess the the what I see the government as having been very culpable in that era was was that they they knew the plant was malfunctioning and and they never, ever shut it down or even, I think, considered shutting it down, despite the fact that you know that for the riders, their house is shaking, stinking the gas is potentially lethal.

Speaker3: [00:26:28] Sometimes they have to run in the night and go to the grandparents and the town. Their animals are dying. Pigs were dying. So many pigs died in that area in that era that everybody went out of pigs. Nobody could. She could make any profit in it. So nobody had pigs for I think it was about 15 20 mile radius downwind. And you know, and the fact that just the government and then I mean, the government also did a health study which which found no, no serious problems. And I think it was at that point that the community's kind of exploded into the sand. Some of them, I portray it, a community that starts in a lawsuit. It isn't the community in which the protagonists live, but another community that that is able to get together and have a lawsuit, which was actually that idea of a lawsuit was based on what my own family and community did back then.

Speaker1: [00:27:32] Wow. Mm hmm. There's a really disturbing and powerful pouch in the book where there where the leak has begun, and there's a cell who's who's ready to give birth to these piglets. And lo and behold, the piglets are born, but they essentially die instantaneously because of the hydrogen sulfide that's in the air. And so they're not they're not stillborn, but they they don't even really have a chance to live. And then Tom, the father, says, you know that he's going to put them in the freezer as a way to preserve them. And this reminded me so much. I don't know if you've seen this film. It's a documentary that made the rounds here in the United States a while ago called Gasland, and it reminded me so much of this scene in Gasland, where you visit this rural setting and there's been a leak, you know, from the fracking operations, and it's essentially killed off this entire stream and everything in it. And many of the creatures surrounding it. And there's a woman who lived nearby and she goes and she collects all of these dead animals and puts them in her freezer. And it's that same kind of disturbing scene where you see basically human beings trying to preserve the bodies of these, these dead animals in order to to ultimately, you know, make a point or be able to to save them, to preserve them for scientific. Analysis later to make a case, and I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about, I guess, the power of of these dead animals to to make a strong point about toxicity and about the future and accounting for that toxicity. Is there something unique about these, these dead creatures that that helps us to see something that we might not see otherwise?

Speaker3: [00:29:29] Yeah, I think that's a really a really good point. And I have seen that film and was struck by by the comparison. I saw it after my book was written. And I think the the idea, I mean, in terms of the story, the the death of the farm animals, I mean, first of all, when it's baby pigs, you know, pigs in notorious are, you know, are unique rather in in that they have very small lungs for their body size and so that they do make a good sort of farmyard canary for for the problem. They'll die first. And that's why in the novel, without trying to give too much away here. But there is a kind of a progression whereby at first they can maybe say, Well, this just warns us that this is dangerous. But as things progress and they start to understand, though, this can, this could kill us as easily as it kills these animals. And and I think, you know, you know, especially on a farm, I mean, people, I think, get the impression perhaps that that farmers could be callous about death on their farms or just view it as financial and nothing else, right? But I think you share your life so, so much with with your cattle and your pigs and so on that your sheep that you know you, you do your utmost to make sure that that they don't die. You know, it's your work. It's in a way, your life's work, and you do care about it quite intensely. And so this, I think, strike, you know, it's it strikes home very painfully and and instills the fear really quickly because you do see yourself, you're living, mechanism your body in terms of those animals, bodies. And yeah, so. And then in addition, I mean, there's certainly a poignancy to it. You know, it's you're in the business of raising live animals not in, you know, in putting in. So somehow your whole livelihood, the whole method you have to exist is put into doubt.

Speaker1: [00:32:02] Right. And it's important to I think that Tom sticks around and risks his own health, if not his own life, to to help the soul and the process to be there when these piglets are born.

Speaker3: [00:32:14] Yeah, you know, and it's and that's, you know, quite I mean, that's a hard scene. You know, everybody there, you know, the children are upset as their mother takes them to town and she's she's furious at Tom for staying. And, you know, and she tells him, he's stupid, you know, to do it. And he says, I believe the line is, yeah, this this gas plant makes us stupider every day. Right? Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:32:45] You know, and in a way, I mean, just just to follow what you were saying, Fred, that you know, the relations that that farmers have with the creatures that they coexist with and help to cultivate is a very intimate one in a way that's a kind of a family that's there. And I think that, you know, one of the great themes of the novel is about, on the one hand, the the the pressure that living in this kind of existential anxiety can bring upon a family the way it can sort of tear it. It it seems in a way. But then also, you know, by the end of the novel, there's there is at least I mean, or rather quite a lot of sense of the potential resilience and potential a family to regenerate or to make new types of family, too. But, you know, overall, it is, you know, really for a lot of the novel, it's really quite traumatic. What happens to the family?

Speaker3: [00:33:37] Mm hmm. Yeah, I wanted I wanted the novel to be about about trauma, really and what we know now. I mean, when we talk of PTSD and so on, I mean, trauma is a very common thing to talk about now, and it was an extremely uncommon thing to talk about a few decades ago. And and I think that. When a family goes through something like this, I mean, the mother ally, it's where she was born, this place and when, you know, I mean, inevitably they have to think about leaving and for her leaving, it's not exactly as if they're, you know, it's not like a family in a city saying, Well, I think we'll move to a different subdivision or something. You know this this land, this place is so much part of it. You know, it's where all her entire memory of life exists. And and she finds that extremely, extremely hard to think of. And and also, I mean, the children, you think, well, you know, they're they're not going to be as affected because, you know, they get to move on or they do move on and they take up their lives in different ways. And and but I just wanted to follow that through. I want to follow that through. You know, that's another reason for having the two time horizons is I wanted to study well, what did happen to this family, the whole family, the individuals and the totality of the family? You know, did it split them apart? Did it force them away from the land? You know, questions like that that I think aren't thought of very much, you know, when people think they'll look at a town and they'll invariably, you know, when when the local histories are written, people talk about the prosperity, you know, the angle is always positive and about prosperity. And so the people there sacrificed once at the time. But they keep on being sacrificed in a way they're not even part of the community history. Their trauma isn't part of that story. And that I am fascinated by, actually.

Speaker2: [00:36:07] And so for the for the youngest member of the family, for Billy, who, as you said, becomes the main character in the second timeline for him, you know, and maybe to a lesser extent for his siblings as well. It feels like there's a real difficulty to reestablish the kind of family that was lost there, the kind of structures and the sense of intimacy and safety. You know, in much the same way that people who have experienced various kinds of traumas, whether they're of war or something else, often, you know, carry those those feelings and the sense of anxiety into into kind of self-destructive behaviors. And so Billy is coping with gambling addiction. He's coping with alcoholism. And as you said, he's also working in in in an industry that in some ways he knows has wreaked such havoc with his own life. So it's kind of he's in the middle of a whirlwind really for for for much of the book, is that something that you feel like resonates with the sort of folks you've grown up with in Alberta? Do you see that that second generation of people who've who've come up who grown up in a sense with oil and gas in Alberta who have that, that mix of emotions?

Speaker3: [00:37:15] Yeah, I mean, I think that this sort of thing exists, you know, I have no doubt about it existing in a way it depends on like Billy is is different. Billy and Bill are both different in that that in that, you know, he has such a.. All the things that he's good at are things that the oil industry would love and an employee. All the things that he's good at or as a kid and interested in just fit hand in glove with an engineering degree. You know, so that his mother can tell really early on, you know, his father imagines Billy taking over the farm, but you know, she can imagine so clearly that he'll do. He'll be do very well in in something that relates more to something like the oil industry and that his future won't be on the farm, but we'll be in that industry. And I mean, that's that's true now. I can't I can't sort of say how many people would have the problems that Billy had, because not so many people, lots of people from farms go to work in the oil industry. For that reason, that farm boys are very much valued because they know how to work and they're used to machines and and and so on. And and they're loyal. I bet they have.

Speaker2: [00:38:48] And they're loyal. I bet.

Speaker3: [00:38:50] That's right. Yeah, their loyalty may not not feel as challenged if they didn't have the same kind of extreme problems when they were young. But but Billy, that's. That's the the uniqueness in a way of his trap, I'm sure there were others around like him, but you know, he he's, you know, it is his kind of specific destiny to be an only son to have had that family that were that were, you know, seriously traumatized by. And perhaps, you know, their health compromised by a gas plant. And here he is working in that industry. So it just he's he's never quite able to get over it, you know, never quite able to be simply at ease. You know, and it's to use the analogy again, you know, team oil versus team agriculture or whatever. I mean, he he's never quite able to just pick one. And, you know, and he's never quite respectful of those people who who do simply say, Well, I'm on team oil, so everything we do is good or, you know, or the reverse of that he can never eat. So he's kind of formed by nature to to have to deal with that ambivalence for all time.

Speaker1: [00:40:16] Mm hmm. We've been we've been talking quite a bit about the people in the book and their relationships and their experiences in the past and in the present and with each other. I wanted to also turn some attention to this figure of the company and how that kind of played out in your imaginary and your crafting of the book. So the company is called Aladdin, and I'm sure that that's not coincidental that for many readers, that evokes some mystery, some magic, a kind of spectral entity. And so I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how, how you how you think of the company or how that that character came to be. Maybe, maybe in multiple forms. But what is this figure of the company called Aladdin?

Speaker3: [00:41:07] Yeah. I think the thing about the yeah, the company, the corporation, I really I've spent quite a bit of time in the novel discussing what what that what that entity is in the society and and how it factors into that whole team play type of issue. I think that the corporations, when they first showed up in a in Alberta, in the 50s, 40s, 50s and 60s, the they represented a kind of sophistication and a financial power. And I suppose a a kind of chemistry, a magic that they could do, as you say. And and you know, the government would would have great confidence in them would be very sort of thankful to them. And and they would come in with a real swagger and flourish. A lot of the companies the original companies came up from the states and and they, you know, they had a lot of confidence they had they'd brought into a lot of farm communities before, and they felt very confident. The uniqueness of this story, I think, is that the is that the companies, their system, their magic didn't work. I mean, their magic failed and and caused a lot of danger and problems that not even they were expecting. They were expecting a certain level of threat that they would have to deal with. But watching what happened was much, much greater. And I think that then you get into a kind of a true color situation. The government showed its true colors by favoring the favoring the oil companies over the farmers and the community by choosing the backing the company's side. Even when the the plant is obviously failing and the corporations show their true colors and that they're they're willing to be sympathetic and they're willing to come and visit you and talk to you. But what they really aren't willing to do is change what they're doing, right? They're not willing to miss a day of production.

Speaker2: [00:43:50] And that's and that's

Speaker3: [00:43:52] A government isn't willing to make them do it either.

Speaker2: [00:43:55] Yeah. And that's actually really interesting. I mean, I had such foreboding as I was reading, let's see the first half of the novel and I. Kept thinking I knew how this book was going to end, and it turned out I was wrong. But I do think the ending, although again, I think there are ways in which you can interpret the ending as having a positive and a hopeful aspect to it. One of the strongest messages you come away from is just that these companies, you know, they may have lost their kind of texts and folksiness of the 1960s, but they really haven't learned a lot along the way. They seem to still approach, you know, the way they deal with communities in a very kind of fortress mentality, right? You know, you're either with us or against us. And you know, we're here to do our job and don't question us. Don't try to, you know, keep an eye on us. And we're not really here to, you know, to engage with the community as as a group of people, but rather as a site for the extraction of of a of a commodity. I mean, is that is that is that kind of where you wanted this to end? Did I get that right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:44:59] Yeah, I think I think it is, I think it is. And that I think they are always enabled. They're always enabled by government to be that way. And I'm a great believer. I mean, the thing is, corporations, of course, exist for the bottom line. And that's in a way what's wrong with them is that is that they don't have any specific, you know, responsibility or duty. They only they have what they'll do, what they can't be forced to do. They'll do a certain amount of what they can't be forced to do or aren't forced to do to show goodwill. But I think the thing is what I feel after all these years of of watching Alberta because I've lived here my whole life is that. And having worked as a writer for people in the oil industry, what I do believe is that they will do what they're regulated to do. Ok. You know, they they they won't punish themselves of their own volition, but they will meet the regulations. They'll fight against them, they'll argue against them or they'll argue that they're too severe. But once they exist, and this was proven in the 1970s when we had a new government after many, many decades of a social credit government, when we first had a conservative government under Peter Lockheed, all of a sudden they were able to write new regulations. All of a sudden we had a we had an environment department and and the industry met the regulations.

Speaker3: [00:46:53] And in fact, in meeting those regulations, I met a lot of these engineers guys and I lance in the book is is is kind of designed as a composite of some of the men I met who are very idealistic engineers who were extremely proud of the the degree to which they could remove sulfur elemental sulfur from sour gas and render it what we thought of then as harmless, right? You know, now there's some question marks about sulfur dioxide that they that nobody worried about them, but they were able to neutralize the hydrogen sulfide to a very high degree. And, you know, and we set a standard for the world. Mm hmm. We had, you know, our our gas industry was going all over the world because it was superior after what had been come up with in Alberta. And these are individual engineers, you know, who were who were doing this stuff, you know? And so the thing is, I mean, I think we we saw the power of regulation. And it's and and I don't sort of feel that the corporations are just maverick and won't do what they're asked to do. I think they will do, they'll fight it right to the finish line, but then they'll do it. And that's why you have to have a government that's willing to enforce really high standards.

Speaker2: [00:48:27] I mean, how much how much of getting government into into, let's say, more of an informal, more being more proactive about enforcement comes back to having a public that really understands these issues and is really engaged with them because I think that's another I felt like a storyline in the in the book is the is the gradual coming to awareness that there's a real learning curve that the public or the community has with this form of development, but that over time you get the sense that they are becoming more empowered to to demand for a different type of regulation or a different type of behavior by the company. And that even translates in a way down to the level of some of the characters themselves. Again, Bill, who looks in the mirror late in the book and says I'll do better. And that's in a sense as an existential statement. But I think it's also in a way for me, captured just a general sense of of people, everyday people needing to kind of face up to the to the externalities that this type of industry creates, as well as frankly, to their own addiction, to fossil fuels and all sorts of different ways as a way of entering into a new type of relationship with oil and gas. Again, I'll just ask you, was that more or less where you're going with that or did I get it wrong?

Speaker3: [00:49:44] No, I think you're you're you're you're right. What I think where I think the failure happens is is often the government gets too involved with the industry. They become they become too friendly with one another. Um, and and that prevents a strengthening of regulation and a firmness about enforcement. What happens with the public? The public becomes co-opted to the degree that, you know, a province like Alberta agriculture has has tended to to slip down as a percentage of total economy or certainly total revenue for the province. And and the as. And there, you know, in terms of employment, we're seeing a situation right now. You know, price of oil is low price of our our bitumen based oil is is lower than than other kinds of oil. We have very high unemployment in Alberta right now for the first time in, you know, 50 years. Wow. Practically. I mean, we had some in the 80s, but really you have to go much farther back to find this kind of consistent level of unemployment with no break in the future. Apparent. And so what you know, the public have, have they blame it on? They blame it on the the government. They somehow think that the government is responsible for an international oil glut.

Speaker3: [00:51:35] You know that the government is responsible for, you know, the the growing problem of climate change. You know, they look for their local answer somehow and local someone local to blame it on. And we have a new government, an NDP government, to everyone's surprise. And they have, of course, are being blamed for everything regardless, regardless of where the fact that it makes no sense. So if the public won't have sensible ideas, you know, if they won't adhere to a common sense when it comes to the relationship between themselves and the oil industry and the government, there's there's very little hope, and I really do kind of blame the public as much as anyone because I think if the public demanded better regulation, better performance, better environment, better care of the environment, the government would demand it of the oil industry and the oil industry would comply. Right. I mean, there is the danger they'll take their money elsewhere, but I think that's a lower danger than people. You know, that's a constant threat that you know, the oil industry will use. Of course, they will threaten to do so, but they tend not to move away.

Speaker1: [00:52:59] I mean, one of the things in reading the book now and the present, and one of the reasons that we wanted to talk to you more about the book is that one can't help but think of the analogous situation, possibly with with the tar sands in Alberta. And of course, this has been controversial both in the United States and in Alberta in terms of it being an important revenue source, but one that is also quite destructive of the natural environment and also puts people at risk in some ways too. And so you think of this, this recent wildfire around Fort McMurray and that that really brings that home, how the kind of the complex risks that are involved with this kind of extraction. And so I wonder in terms of your own personal experience or those of others or or the book itself, do you see parallels and analogies between what's happening in the present with the tar sands and what happened with sour gas back in the 60s?

Speaker3: [00:54:04] Yeah, no, it is. There's interesting comparisons to be to me made. I think the the oil sands is maybe a little bit more of a stretch, but what I think is very comparable is fracking. Mm hmm. Ok. You know, fracking fracking is very close to to what happened to us. And it's the problems that are that people are reporting now from fracking are real air pollution type problems. The thing about the oil sands is, you know, there are certainly native communities there for McKay, for Chip. And but it's really if they if they were, if there was a more numerous public. General public there, I mean, I think it would have been public attention would have come to that area a lot earlier. So many people think that the that the sour gas. I'm sorry that the oil sands is new. I actually did a film, a two part film to one hour shows about the. About the oil sands, in 2005, it was completed this two part series, and, you know, there was a lot of money in these these shows, they were high production values. They were significant shows 2005 and the producers went to, you know, CBC History Channel Canada Discovery, all of these people. And the answer they kept getting back was it, well, it it's such a it's such an obscure subject, right? Well, I just don't I don't know that we could get a national audience for this. And within, you know, within the next four or five years, I mean, the oil sands was crawling with, you know, French producers, you know, British producers, American producers all producing shows about the oil sands. And and the thing is, people think the oil sands is only as old as when they first heard about it themselves. Right. And that means they often think it's like a post 2005 occurrence. Well, it's been around since. You know, they've been commercially producing oil sands since 1964. Wow.

Speaker2: [00:56:44] Wow. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:56:46] You know, and these are these weren't dinky little plants. This this was, you know, the forerunner of Suncor and the forerunners in crude were getting started in that period. Hmm. Just very interesting that all this attention is now focused on me on the oil sands and and and part of what made it so quiet before was that there wasn't a city up there that they were just, you know, except for Fort McMurray, which is, you know, upstream. And, you know, and so that the the air shed and the water effects all tend to be from, you know, northward, you know, down the Athabasca River. Mm hmm. I mean. Yeah. Nobody cared enough. That's all. And I mean, you know, people, this has happened with native people in Canada for forever is that if they're kind of out of sight, they're out of mind. And they've done their best to bring that problem to to world attention. But that's not how it got to world attention.

Speaker2: [00:57:56] Right? I mean, it was only, yeah. Go ahead, please. Oh, no, I was just going to say on that very topic, we did an I had a conversation a few episodes ago about Standing Rock and about the Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance, which has been much in the news recently. And I knew that that that that resistance movement has drawn a lot of support from, you know, the Canadian side of things as well, where there have been, you know, indigenous or native movements that have have really successfully in some cases resisted pipeline projects. And that seems to be increasingly visible and also increasingly kind of a vibrant area of resistance. Are First Nations resistance to these pipeline projects? Is that your sense of things to so? So do you think we're we're reaching a tipping point there?

Speaker3: [00:58:49] Yeah, no, I hear you, I think, you know, native native resistance to to oil industry and other kinds of pollution and environmental degradation, I mean, it really is has gained extraordinary amounts of traction. I think the idle no more movement was in this country was tremendously important to the development of that resistance to the consolidation of that resistance. And and that in turn, I think has has helped. The situation in the oil sands is interesting because the approach the corporations had to the oil sands to the native population in the oil sands, which which was never a huge population, but it was nonetheless significant because of the age and the number of, you know, centuries that they've they've been there. And but the approach was to kind of pour money and, you know, to to really encourage native entrepreneurs and and to try and provide a lot of jobs. Right. And and that was quite successful, I think successful in one respect. It was successful in dividing the community because, you know, one part of the community will have done very well out of this. Another part of the community will only have suffered the downstream effects, the environmental problems and not really got a hold of much of the money. But I mean, there, you know, I mean, something that people really don't know is that, you know, there are millionaires in the community and legitimate millionaires, people that started companies that have done well, native people who have done that.

Speaker3: [01:00:49] And so that adds a complication that often isn't visible from outside from, you know, when you see James Cameron go to Fort Chip and sit down with the local people and that gets a lot of publicity. You know, it leaves an impression that everybody has done badly and suffered, and that's not true. You know, the truth is that, you know, I mean, that's why I portrayed Marechal, who is in the book, as you know, having a good living, right? You know, derived in part from the industry. And and she describes it at various points. It'll describe people she knows who who got kind of big, you know, God made a lot of money and kind of got big for their britches and forgot, forgot that they're people, you know? And all of that is is the part of the complexity of the story. And I really, as far as what I was trying to do in my book, is to present the story in its complexity. And certainly, I have strong feelings about what's what's right and and who has the better cause and all of that. But I still, as a novelist, I felt it was my job to present it in its complexity and not just do a cheap job of of making all the people on one side, fools and all the people on the other side, you know, heroes, that sort of stuff is just that just adds to the problems.

Speaker1: [01:02:33] Yeah. Well, I think we both agree that you definitely accomplish that. Absolutely.

Speaker2: [01:02:37] Yeah, these are it's complex narrative complex.

Speaker3: [01:02:39] So ActionScript

Speaker2: [01:02:40] You there say we were just saying that

Speaker1: [01:02:42] We feel we agree. We agree with you the complexity that you were able to bring.

Speaker2: [01:02:46] Yeah, no, that was a real success, I think, and that all the characters in the book are nuanced and complex. There are no caricatures in there at all, I felt.

Speaker1: [01:02:54] Mm hmm. As a as a final question, Fred, we wanted to bring us back to the question of literature and resources. So recently, we had a nice conversation with the author, Amitav Ghosh, about his new book That Just Came Out, which is called Deranged and the Great the Great Derangement, and it's a non-fiction book. But in that book, he makes the argument and he's made this a couple of other places, but definitely makes it very strongly in the book that there's been a tendency or a habit maybe of ignoring oil and I guess implicitly gas development and the entire repertoire of things that comes along with a carbon economy, with oil extraction, with the way in which it gets embedded into cultural systems. And social life, and he compares it actually the entire sort of meta oil industry with the spice trade and says that there is, in fact, no other historically important sort of equivalent that we can imagine. And yet, and this is his kind of key point. Hardly anyone has been writing about oil that is, we haven't seen oil and all of its all of its elements really coming across in literature and that that's that's a problem and a question to be posed. And you are in fact writing about it, at least a cognate of oil. And so I'm wondering if you can reflect on that proposition, whether there's there's trouble with oil, whether there's a difficulty in addressing it through fiction and and kind of digging into those those deeper and darker questions that maybe are associated with oil.

Speaker3: [01:04:47] Yeah, no. I this is that question is is close to my heart. I I think that I had a great deal of trouble writing, writing this book relative to the other books that I've done. It it it took a long time and and it I found that, you know, I had written historical fictions for the last period of time. And you know, one of the things is you're dealing with something that's kind of finished, you know, there aren't going to be many new sources. And on the fur trade or whatever. Whereas with the oil industry, I mean, things were changing every week, right? You know, and that would sort of alter the perception, especially of the present day part of the of the book, and it was stunning how much changed their lives. And that alone can make it difficult to write about. But also the the thing is the thing that I think is a problem in publishing amongst readers. And especially in the publishing industry, like stories that are pretty simple. Yeah, they like strong. They like hero villain. Um, they you know, the publishing industry, generally speaking, isn't really after nuanced stories, isn't after complexity. I mean, I'm I'm sure new books are defying my statement every day. So I mean, things get done and things get through and publishers publish good books. But overall, when they're advising you what to write, what their code, when they're coaching you, they're often coaching you for a one time line. You know, an identifiable hero, identifiable villain, somebody doing something to somebody else. And there's a, you know, and there's harm done and you know, you seek redress and it's got so.

Speaker3: [01:07:03] And I think the oil industry has always been a complicated story. We're all complicit in it because we burn, you know, fossil fuels in our homes and our cars, and it's basic to our lives. In many ways, a lot of people make their living from it. And so it's difficult in that way. Now there's another side to this, which is people will they'll they'll talk about the importance of it. They'll talk about the. But you know, the need for more information or need for the stories to be told. But finally, when that when those stories exist, they don't do terribly well in the marketplace. The publishing company loses money on them. So people think these things are important, but there's a real limit to how much they want to know about them and a real limit to how much time they want to spend reading about them. It's not, you know, they you'll do far better with Narcos. Yeah, right. Yeah. You know? And so that's been a problem. I thought there was almost a jinx associated with writing fiction or short novels or short fiction about oil. And part of it really is that people, you know again, they think it's important, but they really shy away from it. So many people I've heard of who said about my book or other books of this sort. They say, Well, jeez, you know, when I read the flyleaf and saw that it, you know, there was the word hydrogen sulfide there. There was the word sour gas plant there, and I just thought, I don't know. I'm just not I'm just not going to read a novel about that. Hmm.

Speaker1: [01:08:58] Right. I mean, I imagine people worry that they're not going to get pleasure out of it, right? It's going to be kind of horrifying and depressing. And they think, Well, that's not what I want to read before I go to bed at night or whenever they read.

Speaker3: [01:09:11] It's depressing and it's technical. And, you know, I mean, and I I work really hard at not making the, you know, not ignoring the technical technicalities, but not making them a burden. But but yet when people decide what the book's about before they know what it's about or or decide how it's written before they know how it's written, they'll they'll make choices against it, you know? So that makes you know, so the the publishing company, if they're not getting a an ample return on on a book like mine, I mean, they're not going to be drawn to do more of them. People need to back up their concerns with a curiosity, I guess.

Speaker2: [01:09:52] Yeah. No. And I think it's not. I mean, because in your book, especially the human stakes are there. The drama's there, the plot is there. But I think that, you know, one of the things that you mentioned about how we're all implicated in this, I feel like that leads to a kind of a deeper level of of unsettledness for for readers. And that in a way, you know that you have to when you read a book like this and you see what's going on, we all immediately think of just how dependent we are upon fossil fuels for our modern life. And so in a way, we really are always implicated somewhat in the villain character in a way that I think is is more intimate and implication than you usually find in fiction. You know what I mean? I feel like that's part of the issue with this, with this genre.

Speaker1: [01:10:34] Well, and the word that Fred used was complicit. Complicit? Exactly. Yeah, no. Which is actually worse than being.

Speaker2: [01:10:40] No, no. That's right. You're complicit. We're all complicit in it. And I think that kind of confrontation, you're right, is not the thing you necessarily desire out of your pleasure reading, but in a way, it's precisely what we all should be thinking about, because the environmental stakes have become so huge for the planet and all of its species. Right?

Speaker3: [01:10:58] Yeah. Yeah. You know, absolutely. One thing that might interest people about, you know, a lot of people ask me, they say, Well, how how did your book go down in Alberta? You know, because I think they assume that in Alberta, there would have been an automatic kind of revulsion almost at the fact that it may, you know, certainly showing the oil industry in a bad light in many ways. While you know, the striving for balance is there, but the you know, there's certainly a lot of criticism of the oil industry and and their assumption that other parts of the country would probably read it and take it in more readily than Alberta was. But the exact opposite was true. Hmm. This is where the interest was right here in Alberta, where the problem was, you know, and and I really didn't find that people were coming back and saying, Well, that was just hogwash. That was just bias and nothing but bias. I found and I knew quite a few people from the oil industry who had read it, and we're fine with it. You know, they um, I think they too. Their fear is as well that the whole subject will be rendered to to simply, that will will just be a kind of Robin Hood type thing and won't.

Speaker3: [01:12:40] You know, really delves into won't that the people on their side are just going to be shown as fools? The oil industry side and and that sort of thing. And so I think they were quite respectful of it and also interested in it. And and this is what makes me say that I think people are being a little false at times where they say, Oh, I'm very concerned about this. I'm very concerned about that. Of course, I would never read a book about it, but I'm very concerned and I think there's a bit of a sham, you know that, you know, I'm obviously this is a gross generalization. There are lots of people who are concerned and are reading about it. But still, I did, you know, even in terms of of the media on this book, the media didn't seem interested. Hmm. It was like, No, it's not our problem, right? It's not a concern. It's not our issue. You know, and that's. So I think that what I'm suggesting, I guess, is that there is. There's a gap between what people claim they feel about these subjects and and their real feelings, feelings that they would act upon. They just don't feel personally threatened enough. I think

Speaker1: [01:14:08] It's not dramatic enough yet, but I think Fred, you've really charted out a great impetus, though, for us to to right the oil, right to right through it and to keep on trying to tell those stories in different ways and until listening begins to happen or until the crashing down of recognition begins to happen among publics

Speaker3: [01:14:30] Right now. Well, thank you.

Speaker2: [01:14:33] Yeah, thank you. And above all, Fred, thank you so much for sharing this work with us for talking about this excellent novel. Who by fire? And we're going to put a link to that up on our on our web page, too as we move ahead. But yeah, keep keep doing what you're doing. We thought it was great.

Speaker3: [01:14:51] Well, well, thank you very much for your interest. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Speaker1: [01:14:55] Great. Thank you. Hope to meet you in person sometime soon, Fred.

Speaker3: [01:14:59] I hope so, too.