Most Popular Books by Andrew Nikiforuk

“A robustly researched and smoothly written overview of the many challenges confronting our devotion to fossil fuels” from the author of Tar Sands (Quill & Quire). Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world’s most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion. In this provocative book, Andrew Nikiforuk, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, argues that what we need is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and truly human scale. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute “In his cautionary tale about the evils of oil . . . Nikiforuk makes his case for impending doom if we don’t mend our energy-spending ways.” —The Star “In this cogently argued book, Andrew Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor. Oil dependency, he writes, is a modern form of slavery—and it’s time for a global abolition movement.” —Taras Grescoe, author of Shanghai Grand “A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty.” —Ronald Wright, author of On Fiji Islands

Co-published by the David Suzuki Foundation.

Co-published with the David Suzuki Institute.

Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of improbable bark beetle outbreaks unsettled iconic forests and communities across western North America. An insect the size of a rice kernel eventually killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico. Often appearing in masses larger than schools of killer whales, the beetles engineered one of the world''s greatest forest die-offs since the deforestation of Europe by peasants between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The beetle didn''t act alone. Misguided science, out-of-control logging, bad public policy, and a hundred years of fire suppression created a volatile geography that released the world''s oldest forest manager from all natural constraints. Like most human empires, the beetles exploded wildly and then crashed, leaving in their wake grieving landowners, humbled scientists, hungry animals, and altered watersheds. Although climate change triggered this complex event, human arrogance assuredly set the table. With little warning, an ancient insect pointedly exposed the frailty of seemingly stable manmade landscapes. Drawing on first-hand accounts from entomologists, botanists, foresters, and rural residents, award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, investigates this unprecedented beetle plague, its startling implications, and the lessons it holds.

At Trickle Creek in northern Alberta, Wiebo Ludwig thought he’d buffered his tiny religious community from civilization, but in 1990 civilization came calling. A Calgary oil company proposed to drill directly in view of the farm’s communal dining room. Ludwig wrote letters, petitioned, forced public hearings, and discovered the provincial regulator cared little about landowners. After the oil company accidentally vented raw sour gas, Ludwig’s wife miscarried. Hostilities against the oil company began with nails on the roads, sabotaged well sites, and road blockades. They culminated in death threats, shootings, and bombings. The RCMP recruited a Ludwig acolyte as an informant, and in an attempt to establish the man’s credibility the police themselves blew up an equipment shack. Ludwig was charged with 19 counts of mischief, vandalism, and possession of explosives, and he was later convicted on five charges. This taut work of nonfiction, first published in 2002, won both a Governor General’s Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for True Crime Writing. With the escalation of oil and gas extraction over the past decade, the unsettling questions Saboteurs raises about individual rights, corporate power, police methods, and government accountability are more relevant than ever.

Our health and habitat are being threatened by biological invaders moving at unprecedented speed. Avian flu and its potential to cause a human pandemic is only one example of a worldwide menace unwittingly unleashed by the forces of globalization. The combination of unfettered free trade in living organisms, increased mobility, and urban crowding has created an increasingly volatile environment for the world’s 6.5 billion people. Nikiforuk argues that it shouldn’t take a pandemic to make us rethink the deadly pace of globalization and biological traffic. Authoritative and wide-ranging, Pandemonium is a clear-eyed guide to instability, unpredictability, and the hidden biological terrorist on our doorstep.

The catastrophe in public education and what we can do about it.

The unrestrained release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the burning of fossil fuels now threatens the political stability of human civilization. Every year, climate change kills approximately 300,000 people and costs the global economy more than $100 billion. Even the most conservative of predictions for the future anticipates that extreme weather events combined with food and water shortages and increased diseases could unravel many nation states by 2040. While most scientific experts now call for radical reductions in GHGs (by 80 per cent) by 2050, many nations remain reluctant to change course. The favourable outcome of United Nations Climate Change Conference talks aimed at establishing a new global carbon treaty, to be held in Copenhagen this December, is in doubt. The greatest threat to our future, argues famed Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer Dixon, is not "that our fossil fuel economy will disappear but that it will endure."

En entrant dans l''ère du bitume dans les années 1990, le Canada a pris un virage pétrolier d''une capacité de destruction sans précédent. Les sables bitumineux de l''Alberta font partie des derniers gisements pétroliers de la planète et les multinationales avides ont foncé tête baissée dans cette extraction, pour satisfaire notre aveugle dépendance. Pourtant, ce dangereux projet énergétique crée un fardeau écologique, social et économique colossal pour le pays et le reste du monde. Dans une zone de 140 000 km2 de forêt boréale rasée, qui représente un investissement de plus de 200 milliards de dollars, qui utilise 3 millions de barils d''eau par jour et consomme quotidiennement assez de gaz naturel pour chauffer une ville de 6 millions d''habitants, s''entasse une population croissante, dans des conditions rappelant le Far West. Cette industrie sale et coûteuse ne pourra jamais satisfaire la demande pétrolière actuelle et aggrave considérablement les changements climatiques. Sa croissance déréglée, encouragée par les États-Unis, fait du Canada un État pétrolier à la santé démocratique aujourd''hui menacée. Nous ne pouvons plus plaider l''ignorance ; le temps est venu de regarder le monstre bitumineux en face. La publication de la version française de l''ouvrage magistral d''Andrew Nikiforuk sur les sables bitumineux constitue un fait marquant dans l''histoire environnementale au Canada. Ce travail exceptionnellement bien documenté demeure d''abord et avant tout un cri du coeur.