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Of Oldtimers and Construction Wizards: Environmental Expertise on the Canol Project

Sat, March 17, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Riverside Convention Center, MR 8

Abstract

This paper explores competing understandings of environmental expertise on the Canadian Oil Project, more commonly known as Canol. A Second World War megaproject spearheaded by Americans but conducted predominantly on Canadian soil, Canol was meant to secure Alaska’s access to fuel supplies in the face of Japanese threats to Allied shipping in the eastern Pacific. Between 1942 and 1944, American civilians and soldiers accordingly built a constellation of small-diameter oil pipelines and associated infrastructure across northwestern Canada and Alaska. Since the 1970s, historians have criticized Canol’s deleterious effects upon arctic and subarctic environments. Indeed, they attribute the Project’s failure and swift abandonment partly to the “general state of ecological unconsciousness” (Coates and Morrison 1992:85) in which it was conceived and realized.

I trouble this narrative of environmental ignorance by giving a more complex account of the construction, adjudication, and circulation of environmental expertise throughout Canol’s lifespan. While Americans were initially unfamiliar with these environments and best practices for operating therein, northern and Canadian experts assisted the Project from the beginning. Indeed, the problem sometimes lay not in an absence, but an excess of expertise. Scores of self-proclaimed experts on the Project’s environments showered civilian constructors with contradictory information and advice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, construction foremen and engineers distrusted this site-specific expertise. They preferred to rely on their own rapidly accumulating stores of northern experience, and on their pre-existing technical expertise. But in the eyes of some Canadians, American constructors too easily conflated environmental experience with environmental expertise. They also continued to deploy southern personnel and practices that proved unsuitable or unequal to construction atop permafrost. Although American crews eventually learned how best to build pipelines and access roads across northern terrain, their newfound knowledge and skills travelled poorly across time and space, increasing the remit and severity of Canol’s environmental malfeasance.

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