Bare Nature

Nature as Ellipsis

In the Athabasca Tar Sands region, the needs of the hydrocarbon extraction industry take priority—a strategic activity that is the foundation of the dynamics of the global economy in energy terms.

For many, if not most of the people who live close to extraction activity, our respondents show that problems are recognized but are denied, repressed, and blamed on an anonymous, “they.” Thus, for employees, “A lot of things are hush hush here. They don’t talk too much about . . . because if they talk about it a lot of people will be paranoid.” However, this willful ignorance requires continual reaffirmation and effort. In the experience of another local resident:

There’s lots of times even I don’t notice it as much now that I have my white vehicle, but when I had a wine—I had a van before that was a wine colour, and almost every morning you’d get up, and there was like a yellow film . . .

The area is characterized by such background indicators of pollution and toxicity. Indicators include signs such as the “yellow film” but also the smell of oil or bitumen, or childrens’ health. Toxins are mobile, traveling as air pollution across airsheds and flowing in water along rivers. Thus, downstream communities such as Fort Chipewyan have some of the highest cancer rates in North America (Alberta Cancer Board, 2009; Austen, 2007). However, while there is a grasp of pollution as systemic and thus generalized, the manifestations of pollution and environmental degradation in terms of effects was discussed by respondents in individualized terms. Impacts were disassociated from the activity producing harmful effects.

However, our respondents approached health individualistically, “personally.” Health is understood as a matter of personal luck rather than a certainty dependent on exposure. A resident comments:

R: I’ve been very fortunate as have my husband and kids that none of us have any problems but a lot of people in town have asthma or other bronchial problems and they attribute it to the air quality in [community deleted]. For us personally, it’s never been an issue.

Nonetheless, everyone knows someone who suffers from asthma due to the air quality, or other chronic conditions correlated with the polluted groundwater, unfishable rivers, and exposure to toxins and carcinogens that have a known, cumulative effect on human bodies:

R: Yeah. I met this Aboriginal guy who used to actually fish in the river 30 years ago. But now he says the fish is poisonous here. He says that he can’t fish anymore; although I have seen myself people fishing, but this Aboriginal guy. . . . Aboriginal people have a sense of the land, and this river is so important for them.

. . . the oil from the oil sands naturally seeps into the river, so that has always been there, so it depends. Now I don’t know . . . I can’t speak on what my company throws into the river and what other companies throw into the river . . .

. . . It’s done the best of their abilities, I’m sure, with good intention at the end of the day. I’m sure there’s problems.

Indeed, indirect impacts and costs have a more broad and corrosive effect in subtle ways over a longer period of time:

I mean it’s all about quality of life. . . . You don’t want to be here forever and there is people here that do leave . . . and two years later they pass away because of what s here . . . I’ve worked with them and they’re gone after they retire. Some even before then so . . .

What are we to make of these quotations from residents and workers in the area? In them, and across over a hundred interviews, nonhuman nature consistently appears in several ways. It is a resource and opportunity subject to what respondents such as the one above characterized as “rape and pillage,” “fish,” “forest.” There is a “sense of the land” and reference point for cultural value systems. However, nature is an “it,” a neutral otherness that is not directly named, and to which is only alluded. Exploitation appears in several forms, directly as pollution, “what my company throws into the river,” or a telltale “yellow film” indicating “what’s here,” or “degradation.” This is manifested in a constellation of indexical symptoms: “yellow” dust on the car, the color of warning signs in Canada, “asthma,” “bronchial problems,” “poisonous” fish—toxicity, poor air quality, paranoia, and death.

Nature—as ecosystem services, nonhuman life, and resources—offers an ecological-scale context for social interaction and resources that fuel human activity. For simplicity, we refer to ecosystems and environment as nature (contra Morton, 2007). From our interviews, nature can be understood in three ways: as a provision, which is to say a resource available for exploitation; as a cultural reference point; and as in the quotations above, the natural also disappears or is “withdrawn” from discourse when it becomes implicit, taken-for-granted, or where respondents appear to avoid or are unable to directly refer to and name it. These forms of nature are not mutually exclusive.

Bare nature already confronts humans as both a burden and as an essential resource that is taken for granted or presumed outside of direct interests and projects: the atmosphere, climate, water, forest, and other ecosystem elements that are imagined or left beyond our collective care. As such our interest below will be that form of absence that is nonetheless paradoxically present. In the transcripts of our interviews, sometimes one has a sense that nature is dropped in a sudden change in thought as if the person is rethinking what details are needed and how they can best setup or communicate what they have to say: “but when I had a wine—I had a van.” At the extreme point, it vanishes into an ellipsis: “They don’t talk too much about . . . because if they talk.” And later, “They pass away.”

Bare Nature

There are future absences, a death that is somehow not interrogated as a fate relevant to the respondent. There are also present, actual absences. In some of the conversations above, nature is a literal absence, a silence: “R: No Reply.” This provokes the interviewer to take their turn in the conversation. They give an assurance, “I: No one will know that you work for. . . . ” What is referent that appears as silences and gaps, like death or an absence that is present? While it is accompanied by affect and marks a failure of words to express an experience, in these conversations, the ellipsis appears to also indicate not only an absence but some “thing” present. I propose that bare nature is the ellipsis. It is as if, somewhere at the back of the mind, nature is grasped only as a gap or nonentity. Is it possible that a lurking sense of the natural as a virtual totality that one might speculate is culturally or socioeconomically specific to our time of climate change and our place in an ecologically fragile part of the planet?

Bare nature is not only nature reduced to the caloric capacity of raw, hydrocarbon-bearing sands and shales. It is a resource and an expendable form that is so deprived of recognition, so eclipsed that it becomes to be socially understood as an absence, a gap. It is a kind of open secret that cannot be mentioned (Taussig, 1999). Reread the response: “Hush hush here. They don’t talk too much about . . . ” and there is the gap again, the ellipsis. Until a point where the rhetorical absence takes the shape of a gap in perception: “there’s lots of times even I don’t notice it.”

In tangible terms, bare nature is the excess of the environment that both supports human activity and must be sacrificed or moved aside to allow exploitation of resources. It is an absence, an intangible which only takes form in as absence, gap, or ellipsis in discourse. Nature, reduced to its energy capacity, its tonnage or as cubic meters of substance, overburden, deposit, or as its raw availability, any supplementary values are repressed—nature as beauty, for example, or as a complex ecosystem including other forms of life—is repressed. This form of natural bare life can be eliminated without claiming responsibility for the collateral damage to these repressed aspects of the ecosystem.

“Place” may be and is literally consumed by being dug up and strip mined in resource extraction—a disruption for decades of flora, fauna and any habitation before meaningful remediation and renewal of the local biosphere is possible. It is eliminated, but before this removal, it is reduced to a symbolic absence or gap. Bare nature is an exclusion that,

Deprives the site of bare nature of its participation in semiotic systems which give meaning except as an Other to the spaces of everyday life whose humanity is augmented. The landscape without meaning or semiotic form is technically monstrous. This may explain the typical reaction to this absolutely excluded element of the spatialization of nature which is one of horror. In stark contrast to this suburban mindset is the detailed knowledge of geological strata, of flora and fauna, the sense of natural cycles and long-term geological time that laid down the bitumen resources which characterize interviews with elderly long-term residents. (Shields, 2012, p. 212; see also Arnold, 2014)

Part of the uneasiness of the respondents I have cited may also be anchored in the collective memory of the local environment a few decades earlier. The many rivers and boggy spruce forest with standing water make this particularly evident locally. As another resident noted, “Water is a huge precious commodity that is used in the extraction process and the oil sands, they don’t pay for water. It’s just a resource that they just gobble up.” How can we understand this in relation to the environment in general and the vehemence with which it is also so often misrecognized or denied in the region? For those environmentalists who do discuss this, the response is dominated by scorn and denigration. There is a loud chorus that shouts down misgivings and criticism. Critics are aesthetes or uncourageous humans whose lack of a will to power places human survival at risk. They are people outside of the praiseworthy world of enterprise and with that, risks, the markets, and economic and social betterment.

Precedents: Minimal Forms of Life and Nature

Some precedents illuminate the paradox of bare nature as an absence. For example, in his 1998 text Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben explores the political relation between the violence of law and “bare life” first remarked on by Walter Benjamin (1996) in his essay “Critique of Violence.” Written in 1921, Benjamin considered the links between legal, state violence, and biblical divine violence that revolves around the inclusion or exclusion of humans in legal orders founded on moral politics. In these, violence is the prerogative of the sovereign. “Bare life” or “naked life” (zoe, “biological existence”) is the mere fact of existing bodies that the State seizes hold of as a ground against which to define the polity and those subject to Law. He builds on Aristotle’s (1995) comment in Politics: “While . . . [the polis] comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life” (Aristotle, 1995, p. 1252). Bare life is exclusion from the political community, or political life of speech and social action (bios cf. Arendt, 1998; see also the pharmakos below). Benjamin establishes the distinction between human life proper to political community (bios) and the mere existence of humans (zoe) in a “state of exception” of the homo sacer who, while once within the legal order, is expelled from it. Only by thinking beyond the legal order’s ban can law’s sovereign violence be overcome by the inclusion of bare life into the political life (Agamben, 1998; Magnuson, 2008). This is set up as a problem of law, but it more subtly poses a set of questions around the specialization of insiders and outsiders, and the ethical relationship formed between the sovereign self, the abject other and the instrumental stance normalized by modern societies toward the world and environment as a context of all social action (Van Loon & Mack. In Press).

Agamben’s (1998) concept of “bare life” can be deconstructed to show the paradoxical quality of being both an element within the schema of sovereignty and yet an excluded status. It is, strictly speaking, a political impossibility. In Ziarek’s words, Agamben’s point is that “bare life, wounded, expendable, and endangered, is not the same as biological zoe, but rather the remainder of the destroyed political bios.” Neither one nor the other but “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (Agamben, 1998, p. 109; Diken & Laustsen, 2002; Kruger, 2005). Homo sacer is a liminal figure of the threshold between civilized and barbarian, culture and nature. The discussion is useful because it exposes the operations of subjectification under sovereign power. It falls apart, however, if there is the presumption of a natural a priori: zoe. There is a bare life that one can be reduced to. This is a putative anthropological minimum of the real that is somehow available to theory without any social construction or cultural baggage. Baudrillard shows this is an impossibility. As such, it is not only a political impossibility but an abstraction, a purely ideational position in an abstract diagram of various modes of life and a position, in this case, outside of the real. More directly, the bare existence of humans or of life simply does not exist in a pure state. For humans, this would be a purely nonsocial state. In general, this would be life without ecological relations. It is essential to consider the implication of bare life as exclusion, shunning, and privation in sexual, class, colonial, racist, and interethnic forms of violence and discrimination (Ziarek, 2012). Gustafsson (2013), drawing on Colony (2007), notes that “Agamben subsumes animal life insofar as he locates the problem of animal being as that of a living being (zoe), in the direction of the human” (p. 14). Animal life “is taken, suspended, and consequently included via exclusion . . . animality . . . is an interiority that is suspended, taken outside” (p. 16) the human.

The spatial tropes of above–below and inside–outside mark the struggle to articulate the human–nature relation at the same time that this classic dualism is more fluid, both more imbricated in the other, and eliminated by developments in life science, bioscience, and nanoscience. In contrast to the homo sacer of Roman civil law, Greek city states practiced expulsion and exile both as a political solution to ridding themselves of tyrants, and as a symbolic ritual of expurgation of social and political ills. Two exiles were symbolically sent out of the city as pharmakoi, when crisis loomed. Later, this became an annual ritual during Thargelia, the spring festival of Apollo (Hipponax 5-10W/26-30Dg; 6Dg in West, 1989; see also Rosen, 1988). This echoed archaic practices of purification through human sacrifice (Girard, 1986). Their lack of appreciation of the contradiction suggests a negative symbolic relationship with something they are nonetheless dependent on economically (travel to work) and for survival (heating homes, cooking). The importance of the pharmakos is the combination of unclear or bipolar identity (cure poison) with their effectiveness. They embody objects of hatred because of their lack of category and stability makes them transferable but at the same time, they are efficacious (Stengers, 2015). They are exiled but still relevant—hence liminal, on the cusp of disappearance. They are a means of purging and social catharsis. Scapegoating is a theme that may also be relevant to understanding the negative attitude toward the Athabasca Tar Sands, the vilification of the local communities, and the oil and gas extraction on the part of hydrocarbon consumers elsewhere.

Unlike bare life but a bit like the pharmakoi, Bare Nature itself stands outside of a social relation, yet maintains an ecological integrity which makes it coherent in its effects even if it consists of the sort of natural processes or entities that are overlooked or whose presence is so taken for granted as to be ineffable. This disengagement from nature opens up a political and ethical chasm in which it is difficult to evaluate other options for relationships and in which valuation fails. This makes it more difficult to register the efficaciousness of bare nature, in contrast to the scapegoat or pharmakon.

If we cannot rely on moving directly to explore an environmental or geographical version of Agamben’s bare life or the pharmakoi, there are some other precedents and cognate theories nonetheless. For example, in his 1913 Philosophy of Landscape, Georg Simmel (2007b) contrasts “landscape” as a socially regular, or normative, and thus a selective set of perceptions to the raw material of bare nature. Later, Simmel (2007a) uses this phrase to indicate the vital minimum of a body. Sacred, beautiful, whole in itself, and yet integrated with the individual, landscape stands as a significant intersection of the sociology of art, the environment, religion, and individuation. The historicity of the concept ties it to modernity. Simmel uses this insight to launch a critical project on the unity of humanity and nature within an all-pervading life that continuously creates, sustains, and reforms them against the objectification of spirit imposed by a Cartesian outlook and the institutions of modernity.

By contrast, indigenous voices provide a durable source of critique of dominant rationalities of extraction and governance more generally. Bare nature is central to indigenous experiences of exploitation precisely as the human populace of the overburden that must be moved aside.

It is possible to argue that precisely what distinguishes anti-colonial struggles from the classic Marxist accounts of the working class is that oppression for the colonized is registered in the spatial dimension—as dispossession—whereas for workers, oppression is measured as exploitation, as the theft of time. (Kulchyski, 2005, p. 88)

The Canadian indigenous experience of removal and dispossession has been one of relocation into Indian Reservations. However, they have proved to be more resilient than the theory of homo sacer would suggest of those in these situations. Aboriginal scholars such as Coulthard (2010) and Deloria (2001) reflect on the continuing importance of land to aboriginal Metis communities from which it is possible to derive models for regrounding ethics in an ontological relationship around the ethos of land and place.

In two films, Land of Oil and Water (Cariou & McArthur, 2009a) and Overburden (Cariou & McArthur, 2009b), Warren Cariou interviews aboriginal residents of Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan in communities closest to oil sands sites. He documents how the strata above the oil bearing sand, the “overburden,” is removed along with the boreal forest and residents. As a local manager said,

Cariou shows that people are overburden as much as trees, muskeg, and animals. They all become part of a national sacrifice narrative understood as necessary in the name of progress and national interest. This industrialized state of extraction is compared by Arnold with states of exception in the industrialized nature of genocide to propose a theory of ecocide, whereby land can be sacrificed as Terra Sacer. There is a systematic ontological destruction power, organization, geography, rationalization, and legitimation (cf. Galtung, 1990). “Overburden” challenges representation. Arnold goes on to ask about the human implications of bare nature, in particular, the ethical compromises made by Canadians and the Canadian state to support mega projects under the dominant narrative of national interest, buttressed by recent legislation in the form of Bill C-51 (Parliament of Canada, 2015), which facilitates state violence against any who object or oppose activities in the nation’s interest. In one resident’s description, this sacrifice is a key trope:

Standing Reserve and Cultures of Extraction

How is bare nature different from philosophical concepts such as Heidegger’s “standing reserve?” “Bare nature” resonates with but is distinct from Heidegger’s (1977) critique of the reduction of the world to “standing reserve” (Bestand) in which nature, all things and, by extension, people, are seen only as a “stock” in terms of their usefulness for technical purposes. Heidegger’s work is among the most important critiques of modem technological culture and its relation to the nonhuman world. It encompasses many aspects of the exploitation of both nature and of people. “Bestand is what stands by, awaiting to be called upon, released, transformed and distributed. It doesn’t even have the appearance of an object any longer” (de Beistegui, 2005, p. 110). It is a pure commodity, merely available or set out as a stockpile on hand. The case of resource extraction would seem to be a classic example.

. . . what comes to pass in that requisitioning through which an inventory arises (der Bestand steht) and is thus a standing reserve. To place, position, set means here: to challenge forth, to demand, to compel toward self-positioning. This positioning occurs as a conscription (die Gestellung) . . .

A tract of land is imposed upon, namely for the coal and ore that subsists in it. The subsistence of stone is presumably already conceived within the horizon of such a positioning and even only conceivable in terms of this. The subsisting stone that, as such, is already evaluated for a self-positioning is challenged forth and subsequently expedited along. The earth’s soil is drawn into such a placing and is attacked by it. It is ordered, forced into conscription. This is how we understand the word “ordering” (bestellen) here and in what follows.

Through such requisitioning (Bestellen) the land becomes a coal reserve, the soil an ore depository. . . . The soil, land-homelessness of the standing reserve! (Heidegger, 2012, p. 26).

The world is there to be used by us, and things have meaning only in terms of what they are “good for.” Modem technology presents the world to us in such a way that nature and the world are seen as something to be “set-upon.” Nature ceases to be something that is simply harnessed or worked with but is transformed:

aggressively challenged to prove itself as something useful and at our continual disposal. . . . Everything attains meaning merely as a consumable. Secondly, because things are only seen to have a meaning in terms of utility to our needs, when that utility is exhausted [things] have no value at all, thus they become eminently disposable. Thus, in the modem technological age, beings appear in the light of disposability (Rojcewicz, 2006) . . . the only meaning or worth the things of the world possess is how they can be used or exploited. (Miller, 2012, p. 274)

Respondents echo this argument:

In the case of bare nature, exclusion and denial of any relation of dependence on the environment and ecological services are spatialized onto the land. This is despite the increasing human and social dependency on resources extracted in the crudest manner. This projection of autonomy onto the environment reifies the relationship between humans and their world by freezing it and distorts the contribution that ecosystems as contexts for action make to social interaction. Bare nature is a form of disdain and denial via distancing. At the same time, it interacts intensively with the ecological environment, as in the case of mining and resource extraction.

However, abject things and beings, thrown aside and not even properly disposed of continue to inhabit, squat, and haunt the environment as bare nature. People too are caught, “enframed” in this logic, with social relations also reduced in this technological way of being.

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as an object, but does so, rather, exclusively as a standing-reserve, and man, in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve . . . he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 27)

The predisposition or outlook in which the world is understood as a standing reserve, applies to bodies and beings as well, with no exemptions for humans. The division of the subject from the object world is essential to Heidegger (1978) who privileges the human attunement to Being as a question and problem, rather than simply living according to the needs of survival and instinct (animals) or persisting as objects do. Heidegger critiques the result and defends the humanistic privilege given to people and the human body as a foundation for the moral and the political (Oliver, 2007). The human subject rejoins the object world as just another life-form and process. Ge-stell (literally, frame or support) condenses Heidegger’s systemic conception of the implications of this stance: it is a frame (cf. Goffman, 1974; compare also Dispositif cf. Foucault, 1970), assemblage, bringing together, and representing the world as a construction seized and destined as utility (de Beistegui, 2005). No longer nature, it is energetic, informational, and material flows.

. . . where does the chain of such requisitioning finally run out to? It runs out to nothing; for requisitioning produces nothing that could have, or would be allowed to have, a presence for itself outside of such positioning. What is ordered is always already and always only imposed upon to place another in the succession as its consequence. The chain of requisitioning does not run out to anything; rather it only enters into its circuit. Only in this does the orderable have its persistency (Bestand). (Heidegger, 2012, p. 28)

The specificity of “Standing Reserve” is its status as a symptom of Ge-stell as an ordering or enframing of reality. However, bare nature is a remnant of the autonomy of the phenomenal world from the subject. Heidegger notes that “Where the standing reserve comes into power, even the object crumbles as characteristic of what presences” (Heidegger & Mitchell, 2012, p. 25). My interest concerns the resulting remainder. Heidegger focuses on Bestand as relation or positioning for use (das Be-Stellen, “to beset with positioning,” “to set out”) but there is a remaining virtuality, even if it is not worth the name.

As such, bare nature is a form separated from substance. Such a form is without implication and is removed from ethical attention. Without substance, it is an absence, yet as a form (of nature), it is nonetheless present even if ideally in a virtual or abstract manner. Bare nature is distinct from Standing Reserve in that, if it is overlooked as even an object, if it is so phenomenally reduced, it does not even offer itself as an object of utility. It stands outside of relations of use that determine the status of objects and relations in Heidegger’s work and its role in chains of causality is overlooked. Precisely, when something ceases to matter, it enters a state outside of epistemological relations while remaining ontologically present. Bare nature is thus abject nature, a “present absence,” and a paradoxical “absent presence.”

It is that Heidegger’s conception conceals two modalities of Standing Reserve: stock at hand with potential, and detritus that no longer concerns humans? We can look to the work of artists such as Hayeur or Butynsky to explore these modalities beyond words (see Roy, 2014). Some may argue that bare nature is merely that face of discarded Standing Reserve. However, my proposal is that, we reserve a place for bare nature as the a priori to Standing Reserve, not its exhausted remnant. They are not exclusive. However, in retrieving this a priori, the ellipsis rather than the stockpile, we reorient Heidegger’s theoretical narrative away from the human at the center to a more holistic vision closer to aboriginal traditions that include that which tends to vanish as a lacuna.

Bare Nature and Capitalism

Finally, it is worth noting that nature as a resource is the backdrop to Marx’s analysis of economics. As a background condition of possibility for capitalism, bare nature is an a priori to the four core features that Marx (1976) identifies as the “hidden abode of production” (p. 279; Fraser 2014). These features include private property, free labor, self-expanding value, and markets producing commodities by means of resource commodities relying on a background of noncommodities. Property involves the abstraction of concrete reality into the exchangeable form of property. As Lefebvre (1991) notes, land becomes privatized as a set of surveyed lots that can be bought and sold. Its uniqueness as singular places is monetized into a quantitative money value. Free labor power is exploited because workers are forced to procure the means of daily survival. Expelled from the land as urban masses, capitalists took, and continue to take, advantage of laborers. In these conditions, they are forced to sell their labor immediately whether they like the conditions of the wage contract. The law of motion of capital leads value to expand because value is added across the entirety of society through labor and realized as a surplus value that can be reinvested. (Marx, 1978). Across its forms such as rent, interest, and profit; “Capital in general” is a social relation based on the appropriation of surplus value to not only reproduce capital but the relation of capital (Marx, 1973, p. 209; see also Pilling, 1980). Noncommodities or precommodities include, for example, virgin land, “raw nature . . . the natural world prior to its appropriation and transformation in and through human labour” (Jessop, 2007, 2014), reciprocal assistance, the generic capacity for humans to labor, collective knowledge (Polanyi, 1977).

Bare nature is distinct from this “raw nature,” in that it is not a precommodity but rather a material input that lies outside of the production of labor and is given neither symbolic nor capital value despite its self-evident value as a precondition of human existence or even for the existence of life. Like Standing Reserve, it is a useful stock of inputs for both labor and capital. The planetary capacity to support life and renew itself constitutes a necessary base condition for capitalism as much as all human endeavor. Marx refers to this as the annexation, Landnahme, of nature as inputs and as a waste sink, a costless infinite resource expropriated without replenishment. Unlike the Heideggerian concept, it has even less valuation because bare nature is not even appreciated as an input. Bare nature is simply the res on which capital commodities and labor stand. It is a taken-for-granted null-point of value despite having a clear presence and contributing effect.

The paradox of bare nature as the presence of an absence is that it is rendered not representable, even as it is known virtually through its effects. “Raw nature” as resource remains but the supplementary character of ecosystems is masked by this utilitarian focus. Yet bare nature returns as haunting, as a vital essence, as a moment of aphasia or gap. In interviews, it appears in nonrepresentational forms such as smells and memories of a lost cohesion between the various analytical elements of nature discussed by Heidegger and Marx.

The region has a distinctive, heavy, oily smell that comes into town with southerly winds. One respondent said,

Again, the impacts are understood to be transient, anomalous and magically go elsewhere to some place and process that one knows little about, and, one might surmise, is best left unknown. Even so, the effects are known, if not experienced directly. The cause is apparent at hand. Consider the comments of four newly arrived workers:

Migrant work patterns mean that many residents have little investment in the local community and eventually move away once their labor is no longer needed. This process has an impact on what my colleague Sara Dorow has called “oily subjects” and their families, as does the reduction to a form of “bare life” of the landscape and ecology of the frontier. However, a group of newly migrated “foreign temporary workers” remarked on the oily odor of the bitumen in the air and drew out the causal link to the economic activities of the area by tying materiality and smell to the peculiarly high value placed on oil by our current society, globally:

An-Ethics and the Res of Bare Nature

Bare nature is distinct from bare life, standing reserve and raw nature. It is neither a theoretical scapegoat for a sovereign figure of law nor is it simply an annexation or appropriation of a resource. Whereas Standing Reserve is at the service of technicity and the transformative powers of both capital and labor, bare nature challenges both as an absent presence on which capital and labor are dependent. However, as an absence that appears as a silence or ellipsis in interviews, bare nature takes a form that is challenging for any attempts at its representation, or for an ethical relation or recovery of this gap. It is an-ethical. Once overburden becomes abjectly unrepresentable, it becomes difficult to not only symbolize but also to address as a claim on humans or the supporting infrastructure of industry and everyday life. When it returns as a personal ailment or disgusting sound, sight or smell, it is again difficult to represent and assess because of its repellent affect, monstrous effects, and grotesque qualities that defy any ethical relation.