INTRODUCTION
I started thinking about land in 2014, on my first visit to the Canadian tar sands. The “tar sands” are a mixture of sand, clay, and bitumen, a molasses-thick variety of oil. They are mostly mined from the ground, leaving gaping barren valleys where boreal forests once thrived and a gargantuan carbon footprint. Canada’s store of them, in the north of the province of Alberta, were said to be the third-largest oil reserve in the world, and new tar sands developments were sprouting like dandelions across the region. America’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, had called the bevy of new proposals “game over for the climate.”
It sounded like an existential threat. I was living in New York City, and the memory of Hurricane Sandy cutting off power and plunging the city into darkness two years earlier was still fresh. Dread over climate change had begun to color my view of the future, a nightmare of Sandy’s brethren dropping by periodically to batter our city as the oceans rise to swallow our streets from below. And every action we took—driving a car, buying anything with plastic—simply fueled it more. The enormity of the climate threat was paralyzing.
Mixed into the blend of dread and panic was also a tinge of guilt. I had grown up in Calgary, the city a few hundred miles south of the tar sands, where most of the oil corporations are headquartered. My father worked as a chemical engineer in the region for nearly four decades, and a scholarship from his company, Imperial Oil—a Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil—covered my entire university tuition.
I went to write a story for The Nation about the Tar Sands Healing Walk, a procession through the oil developments led by local Indigenous people. Privately, I went to do my part to counteract the climate paralysis, both as a kind of penance and a rosy-eyed vow to fight for the heroes against the villains. And the council of villains was an all-star lineup: Shell, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Total, BP, Sinopec, and PetroChina. Koch Industries—the corporation of Charles and David Koch—was one of the largest leaseholders in the oil developments, if not the largest.
The Healing Walk started just outside the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray. A procession of hundreds, we passed vast stretches of overturned earth and buildings exhaling smoke—facilities where the bitumen is isolated and converted into lighter oil. Sparkling lakes of wastewater residue dotted the land and are apparently so vast and numerous that they can be seen from outer space. I pictured kayaking across the still, unbroken surface of one tranquil pool. Then cannons started firing sporadically along their shores, a warning to migrating ducks not to land in the toxic soup. Traversing this devastated landscape, I felt especially small.
“I would like our land back,” Nancy Scanie told me plainly. A diminutive woman with Jackie O sunglasses shielding nearly half her face, she had led the slow-moving procession with a wooden staff in hand, her body draped in a shawl like a prophet leading her followers to freedom. Born in 1939, she was a Cold Lake Dene First Nations elder, and Clan Grandmother to the Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous environmental advocacy group. In her memories, the prolific forests of her Dene homelands were filled with moose, and everyone lived in log cabins lining the icy lake and river shores in the wintertime, each with their own trapline to provide a bounty.
The tar sands developments fall on Cree, Dene, and Métis lands that were ceded to the Crown in the late nineteenth century. In exchange, the Indigenous nations were confined to reserves and stripped of their language and culture (often violently, through church-run residential schools), though they retained the right to hunt, fish, gather, and perform ceremonies on their traditional lands, well beyond reserve boundaries. A threat to these environments, the tar sands developments also threatened these treaty rights. The climate crisis was woven into the same story of Indigenous dispossession from their lands, a process that left tribal nations unable to protect their environments and maintain their cultural identities.
Yet this was no simple story of heroes and villains. It was complicated by the presence of a nearby community that had gotten rich by joining the development frenzy, under the leadership of a chief who didn’t exactly support the vast developments but didn’t wholly oppose them either. At the Healing Walk, a few non-Indigenous environmental defenders argued to me that the Fort McKay First Nation had sold out and were legitimizing the oil developments by giving their Indigenous “stamp of approval.”
“Don’t think they didn’t try to make a stink about it,” Eriel Deranger, then a spokesperson for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, countered when I brought this up. A neighboring tribe, they had sued the Crown, government, and oil companies for violating their right to consent to the developments, and their treaty rights. “They tried to say these projects were destructive, but tar sands were not a hot topic then. That community basically got destroyed, and no one batted an eyelash—not anyone in the environmental movement, not anyone anywhere,” she explained. “When consultation and accommodation”—that is, government obligations to engage with tribes when their rights are at stake—“first started happening in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the only thing they really had left to do was to be compensated.”
The tribe, it seemed, was a glimpse of our possible future, one where we had failed to stop the new developments. So after the Healing Walk, I drove an hour to Fort McKay, a five-hundred-person hamlet in the heart of the Canadian tar sands.
The community is boxed in on all sides by the oil developments. Despite being perched on the banks of the Athabasca River, fed by glaciers in the Rocky Mountains, all the community’s drinking water was trucked in. It is the base for the Fort McKay First Nation, which had spent the last three decades providing support services to tar sands corporations through the tribe-owned Fort McKay Group of Companies. They were known for encouraging further oil development, and many in the energy industry considered them a model First Nations community.
I met their then-chief Jim Boucher in his impeccable corner office in the center of town, lined with windows overlooking the Athabasca River, its waters shimmering in the afternoon light. (Boucher served as elected chief from 1986 to 2019, with just a two-year gap in the ’90s.) “We swam in there,” he recalled. He pointed to a forested hill where he had lived as a child, when there were no roads or electricity, the water was drinkable, and everyone lived off the land. At 6:00 each morning, he paddled with his grandfather to the Muskeg River, a tributary of the Athabasca where their fishnet hung heavy with the day’s catch. Then they canoed back to the hill with their haul. Boucher’s job was to carry the load from the river, then up the slope to where they grew cabbage, potatoes, and carrots in a tiny plot.
His is the last generation of the tribe to have lived in this way. Surveyors began appearing in the 1950s, running seismic lines and drilling holes to measure how much oil was underground. Then the developments arrived in 1963, when Boucher was twelve years old. One day, he left his grandfather’s cabin to check the squirrel, mink, and weasel snares he had set the previous day, and “I came across a big freakin’ clearing where all my snares were,” he told me. A cluster of men were operating heavy machinery.
“My grandfather wasn’t told that was gonna happen,” he said. Needless to say, Boucher lost all his snares, and soon after that, they bulldozed his grandfather’s cabin too. That clearing is now part of the Syncrude oil site, a joint venture of Canadian, American, and Chinese companies spanning sixty-three thousand acres. “They just went ahead and did it.” This was simply how business was carried out back then. The government and company “struck a deal between themselves,” he said, “and the people were left on the sidelines. They weren’t consulted.” And the government certainly didn’t ask how the development would impact his people. “We lost an important area for food and harvesting.”
Soon, people started noticing changes. Something was wrong with the fish, which tasted of oil. The snow they melted in wintertime for drinking water was covered in soot. The river water made people sick. The Cree Nation spoke out about the destruction but were ignored. Boucher grew into Fort McKay’s outspoken young radical, sent to represent the tribe at regulatory hearings and castigate the government and energy industry for wantonly destroying his community’s livelihood and health, without even compensation for the damage. “Essentially, I was the big mouth at Fort McKay,” he chuckled. When no one registered opposition to new projects on tribal land, Boucher helped set up road blockades to force the energy industry to negotiate. “I was pissed off.”
The government had already shattered his family. He and his siblings had been seized from home and placed in Christian residential schools, like other Indigenous children across Canada from 1894 to 1996, and his mother died while he was enrolled. Reading history books in the library, he learned the reason: his people were “ethnic” and stood in the way of white settlement. “I wanted to make sure that these things didn’t happen again to our community. I wanted to make sure that my children and grandchildren weren’t going to be taken away.”
Still, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that life definitively changed in Fort McKay. Although two decades of oil development had polluted the ecosystem, making it impossible to live entirely off the land, the community had at least been able to rely on trapping to get by somewhat comfortably. Then animal rights activists in Europe succeeded in marginalizing the fur trade. Fort McKay found itself with no choice but to cooperate with the energy industry. In 1985, the tribe founded the Fort McKay Group of Companies.
“We fought for a long time to preserve our way of life,” Boucher told me. “We had a lot of discussion in our community about what our future was, and a lot of people were involved. We knew that our way of life was under threat.”
NEW YORK CITY
That visit was the early seed to this book. In the story of the climate crisis, many small, poor communities in resource regions occupy a gray area like Fort McKay, and when I really thought about it, everyone in the US and Canada is implicated at the very least as a fossil fuel consumer. I started focusing instead on the systems that placed us all in this bind. The journalist Jane Mayer’s 2016 investigation, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, shed light on how the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel giants came to dominate America’s political and economic system. Yet Jim Boucher had also mentioned that Fort McKay’s struggles were precipitated by another system: white settlement and the landownership system established to support it.
Landownership is critically important for fighting climate change and protecting the environment because owners control how their land is used, a decision that can mean the difference between an oil development and an intact forest. Economies and cultures hinge on these decisions too—hunting, fishing, gathering, and ceremony can usually coexist in an environment, but open-pit mining threatens almost all other forms of land use. I was also struck by Boucher’s remark that animal rights activists in Europe had dealt the definitive blow to his tribe’s old ways. Laws, cultural norms and trends, and a manifold array of complex forces also mold our relationships to the land.
Soon, I realized that similar forces also created the landscape of New York City, where I have lived since 2006. My Brooklyn neighborhood, Crown Heights, is historically Caribbean, African American, and Hasidic Jewish, but over the course of the 2010s, I watched the rents around me rise at one of the fastest rates in the city. Home prices in the zip code grew by nearly 200 percent,1 while the white population nearly doubled and the Black population fell by a third.2 And in came the textbook markers of gentrification: artisanal grocery stores, cocktail mixologists, luxury condominiums, and, of course, those notorious oat milk lattes.
The same year that I visited the tar sands, the filmmaker Spike Lee went on a rant about gentrification that went viral. “Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the South Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?”
Lee pinned it on white people. White people called the cops on his father for playing music in the house he owns. Lee wanted to throw a Michael Jackson party in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park after the pop icon passed, but white people complained that it would generate too much garbage. “Have you seen Fort Greene Park in the morning?” he railed. “There’s twenty thousand dogs running around.” He compared gentrification to colonialism. “You can’t just come in the neighborhood,” he spat, “like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus.” A lot of white people felt really guilty but didn’t know what to do. Were they personally responsible for the rising rents?
Lee was overreaching with the analogy—Native dispossession was driven by a suite of federal policies to, quite explicitly, exterminate tribal nations and erode Indigenous people’s ties to their lands. But his rant captured the heated, prickly spirit of the gentrification debate. These culture conflicts were flaring up all throughout Brooklyn, and I began to think about why the two processes did, indeed, feel similar.
I was once handed a sticker that said Before It’s Gone, Take It Back at a protest. This was an activist project in Flatbush, the mostly Black neighborhood south of Crown Heights, to document Brooklyn’s gentrification. “We don’t want anyone to get displaced,” the organizer, Imani Henry, told Bklyner at the time, “whether you’re a white middle-class person who’s lived in Flatbush forever, or if you moved in more recently.” I stuck it on my laptop and am eyeing it now as I write.
Nearly a decade earlier, Miami housing activists had taken over a parcel of public land and built an encampment where houseless people, priced out of regular housing, lived for months. They gave themselves a similar-sounding name: Take Back the Land, echoing Nancy Scanie’s words—“I would like our land back”—with an extra dash of combativeness. This group was part of a national alliance of unions, housing groups, and community organizations that had coalesced around the conviction that low-income communities of color have a right not only to stay but also to shape and design their surroundings. Borrowing a phrase that the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre coined in 1968, they called themselves Right to the City.
The groups were American, but the forces they opposed transcended borders and sprawled across history. “The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value,” the German philosopher Friedrich Engels observed in 1872. Old buildings in these hot, upcoming neighborhoods work against the trend, depressing land values “instead of increasing it,” since landlords can only raise rents so much in shoddy, overcrowded workers’ houses. So those buildings “are pulled down and replaced.”
In a 2008 essay entitled “The Right to the City,” the Marxist geographer David Harvey argued that Engels’s description “applies directly to contemporary urban development in much of Asia—Delhi, Seoul, Mumbai—as well as gentrification in New York.” Gentrification captured “valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for many years.” In Seoul, developers hired “goon squads of sumo-wrestler types” to clear the slums. But in the US, dispossession was “less brutal and more legalistic.”
Here in America, developers won court orders to raze affordable housing and build luxury condos and box stores, using tools like eminent domain, which allows the government to seize private property for public uses. These fancier buildings could attract a different kind of resident or customer, ones with more money to spend. But the critical factor was that developers weren’t just building anywhere. They targeted particular neighborhoods, particular locations.
The average renter or buyer usually talks about land, the immovable part of the real estate package, using another phrase: Location Location Location! Is the property near public transit, good schools, parks, or well-to-do neighbors? Is the soil fertile and connected to markets by rail or roads? Does a tar sands mine loom next door?
Land, or location, comes at a premium. A study of global housing prices from 1870 to 2012 shows that the rise and fall of property values doesn’t hang on building and construction costs.3 They are tied to the value of the land. Land, not buildings, is where there’s money to be made.
EVERYTHING IS BUILT ON LAND
Consider the word land. At first, you might conjure images of mountains, deserts, forests, or farms, where dirt, grass, shrubs, and trees carpet the ground. It’s understandable—land comes from the Old English word for soil. But it is also much more.
In America, we primarily think of land in terms of property, something that is owned, and use the term real estate to describe both buildings and land. We also treat it primarily as a commodity—something that is bought and sold for profit or used as collateral for a loan. Lacking a guaranteed social safety net, many of us strive to buy real estate as security for retirement or as family wealth to be passed on to children. Yet the free market also allows people of means to buy it purely as a financial investment, speculating that its value will grow. When it does—and it usually does—ownership and rents rise ever further out of reach for the average person.
This way of thinking about land has precipitated some of the most consequential episodes of American history—Indigenous dispossession, racial segregation, the rise of the environmental movement, the climate crisis. It has animated government policy and the dreams of bootstrapping strivers from the age of George Washington, land speculator, through the era of Donald Trump, real estate developer. It is easy to forget about land if you live in a city, where concrete, not soil, grounds our feet and buildings crowd out any sense of open space or view of the horizon. But everything stands on it.
Our highways, grocery stores, basketball courts, art galleries, beaches, and even the computer server farms that house our free-floating digital avatars are built on land. Ocean fisheries and space exploration require ports. Land holds the railways, pipelines, and electrical wires connecting every point, an infinite scribble of lines over and under the surface. Everything and everyone takes up space. But we can’t just go anywhere we like, much less use whatever resources we want, because all the land in America is owned by someone—an individual, corporation, tribe, institution, or government.
This book grew from my realization that the commodification of land is driving many of America’s most intransigent problems: ecological collapse, climate change, systemic racism, the housing crisis, economic inequality. Conflicts over land—who owns it, benefits from it, and decides how it is used—also underlie many of our most consequential social movements today. Free the Land is an attempt to understand the critical role that control over land has played in America.
I see its imprint over every environment I encounter. Surging rents are making it impossible for friends, neighbors, and cherished local businesses to stay in their neighborhoods, and some are leaving their cities altogether. Homeownership is a vanishing prospect for many of my fellow millennials, not to mention Gen Zs after us. Wildfires and floods are leveling towns, yet oil and gas extraction remain highly profitable uses of land, so governments and property owners keep encouraging it, worsening the climate crisis.
The problem is that our financial prospects, as cities and as individuals, are also tied to the commodification of land, a fact that is plain to see on the street where I mostly grew up. In 2018, I noticed a heated driveway appear a block away from my childhood home, where my parents still live. It was a few days before Christmas, and the entire city was shrouded in snow, but this driveway, emanating from a freshly-constructed miniature castle, was an exception. Snowflakes fluttered in an airborne ballet, then vaporized the instant they hit the ground. Not a streak of white was visible on the pristine gray stones.
Calgary is a wintery prairie city, where shoveling the driveway is a rite of passage and was my favorite household chore growing up. The tar sands boom also transformed the former ranching town into the oil capital of Canada, making it, for a brief few years, Canada’s richest city, and the fourteenth richest in the world.4 The driveway was practically a symbol of this transformation: the property was purchased by an executive of a Koch brothers oil-and-gas-pipeline company for $2.5 million in 2013—more than a dozen times what my parents paid for our comparatively modest house in 1990. This reflected a broader trend in our formerly middle-class suburb. Over the previous decade, nearly all the houses surrounding the heated driveway were demolished and resurrected as McMansions or sleek, angular contemporary homes. I mentioned the driveway to my dad. “Never have to shovel again?” he pondered. Then, a cackle. “Great!”
I imagined him arriving in Calgary in 1976, stoic, easygoing, and enterprising like he is today, and comparing his frigid new life to the tropical Malaysian climate of his youth.
“It was like going from heaven to hell,” he recalled. He had just been denied a green card from the United States and was forced to leave San Francisco, his home for a few brief years, in what he still thinks of as the low point of his life. But US Immigration had made its decision. One of his friends, another Malaysian Chinese from engineering school, was already living in Calgary and told him that local jobs were abundant and well-paid, and he asked if my dad would like to come crash on his couch for as long as he wanted.
Sure, why not?
This frozen snowball of a nowhere city, as Calgary seemed to him at the time, offered little by way of San Francisco’s vibrant cosmopolitanism. But he went, and he stayed, buoyed by the wisdom of his friend: “There are half a million people who live there. Why can’t you?”
The city did not disappoint. He began exploring the clear winding rivers, thick old forests, and cobalt glacier lakes nearby. He skied the austere peaks of the Rocky Mountains, forever a spectral band along Calgary’s western horizon. Finally, armed with a chemical engineering degree, he also found a job.
It was nine years after the first commercial oil sands operation began, and Syncrude, then a research consortium of oil companies, hired him. Two years later, Syncrude finished constructing their mine, right where Jim Boucher’s grandfather’s trapping cabin once stood.
It was just forty-five minutes from Fort McMurray, the boomtown at the center of the oil sands operations, and my dad began commuting north—a 460-mile trek from Calgary—for four-day stretches at a time. He worked twelve-hour-shifts before falling asleep each day, exhausted, in the company barracks. He still frowns at the memory of the commute—the same frown he reserves for memories of his first Canadian winter. But at least there was a silver lining, he jokes: the barracks’ buffet-style cafeteria served unlimited steak.
Alberta’s growth had always included Chinese workers. Immigrants arrived in neighboring British Columbia in the 1880s to build the Canadian Pacific Railway and mine for gold, and some later crossed the Rockies into Alberta and stayed (despite a head tax on Chinese immigrants, a ban on Chinese immigration, and intermittent mob violence against Chinese businesses). Then Imperial Oil, now ExxonMobil’s Canadian subsidiary, struck oil in 1947. The population ballooned. So did the Chinese population.
Despite the roller coaster of euphoric booms and catastrophic recessions that is typical of oil regions, new immigrants continue to arrive, making it the fastest-growing city in Canada, especially young, and increasingly diverse. Despite its honky-tonk, cow town image in the cultural capitals out east, it is also a progressive city in a staunchly conservative province. In 2010, as police departments in the United States were imposing dragnet surveillance on Muslim communities, Calgary elected a young, Twitter-savvy man named Naheed Nenshi to become the first Muslim mayor of a North American city.
This liberal vision was not what motivated my father to move to Calgary in 1976. But on a recent drive through the Rockies for a family hike, I realized from one of my mother’s throwaway comments that it is why they have stayed. “This is a good place,” she remarked to no one in particular as we passed a government-run lodge where rooms and cabins are inexpensive, luxurious, and reserved for seniors and people with disabilities. I thought at first that she meant the lodge, the endless forest, the flock of wild sheep we had just encountered, and the sunny skies, but when I asked, she clarified that she meant society’s willingness to take care of its vulnerable residents.
Yet there is also something about those southern Alberta skies. Because of the flatness of the city and the prairies, and the region’s perpetual sunniness, the sky here is exaggeratedly big. On other occasions, my mother, a painter with an eye for the ever-changing natural light, has also perplexed me with cryptic remarks about the enigmatic sky.
“The sky here is so tall.”
“Tall?” I asked, peering up at the wisps of cloud.
She reminded me, wistfully, that as someone who grew up here in Canada, I have been enriched by far greater opportunities than she had.
I had heard this same metaphor from immigrant workers in Fort McMurray, a town that is often maligned for its man-camp culture of drugs and strip clubs but is also home to a diverse population of immigrant caregivers, janitors, taxi drivers, grocers, fast-food workers, and entrepreneurs. I have only ever visited the town for reporting trips and water protector gatherings like the Healing Walk, but it was there that I was finally able to picture, through the lives of other immigrants, what life might have been like for my dad in his first Canadian years. Driving past the strip malls and fast-food joints along Main Street, I imagined him as a young man with feathered hair, vinyl slacks, and aviator sunglasses in this alien land.
By the 2010s, Friday prayers at the town mosque had overflowed to such an extent that the Muslim community was forced to build a bigger complex. Large communities hailed from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Venezuela. The North African cabdriver, Jamaican Burger King clerk, and Filipina cashier at the Asian grocery all sang praises of Fort McMurray’s small-town community spirit and inclusiveness, but one person I spoke to in particular made me think of my dad. Maybe it was because Larsen Rivera—Filipino, long-haired, and baby-cheeked even in his midthirties—was also Southeast Asian and shared his outgoing, unflappable, easygoing nature, his ability to enjoy the “unlimited steak” of less-optimal scenarios. Also, he grimaced in a similar way at the memory of his first northern winter. Otherwise, their career paths could not have been more different.
Copyright © 2024 by Audrea Lim
