Page 141 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 11

Bearing Witness and the Logic

of Celebrity in the Struggle Over
Canada’s Oil/Tar Sands

Patrick McCurdy

INTRODUCTION
Although Canada’s bitumen sands have been extracted on an industrial
scale since the 1970s, they did not enter the public consciousness as a
contentious issue until decades later. The current wave of protests against
the tar sands may be traced back to 2005 and campaigns run by envi-
ronmental non-governmental organisations (eNGOs) such as Greenpeace,
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Forest Ethics (Katz-Rosene 2017).
However, if you had to pick a date as to when contention over the tar sands
really entered the public imagination, it would perhaps be January 17,
2008. On that day, a group of activists from Stop the Tar Sands erected a
sculpture in front of Calgary’s Telus Conference Centre where the fifth
annual Canadian Oil Sands Summit was being held. The installation
depicted three Alberta government politicians—represented by three
stuffed men’s suits—each with their head buried deep in a large pile of
symbolic ‘tar sand’. A briefcase lay in place of the submerged head of each
scarecrow-like figure each clearly labelled with a politician’s name:

P. McCurdy (&)
Department of Communication, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
e-mail: pmccurdy@uOttawa.ca

© The Author(s) 2017 131
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_11