Write An Essay On Fort Mcqueville
MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE
Fort McMurray, AB Located in Northern Alberta at the confluence of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers, Fort McMurray is a frontier urban settlement, and the primary service centre for the Athabasca tar sands— the world’s third largest known oil deposit (Dorow and O'Shaughnessy, 2013). Records dating as far back as the 1700s point to the Chipewyan and Beaver peoples being indigenous to the Athabasca region, with present day First Nations having largely descended from the Dene, Cree, and Métis people. In 1870, following European colonization, the land was established as a Hudson’s Bay Trading Post, and remained a remote outpost of less than one thousand people until the creation of the Great Canadian Oil Sands Campany in the 1960s. As Major and Winters (2013, p.143) note, “Fort McMurray existed before the oil sands industry. It is not the result of a corporate takeover nor is it a classical company town. However, like all resource towns, it exists”— albeit in its current form— “because of fixed, valued resources that multinational corporations want to commodify.”
In the first decade of the 21st century, the region underwent a period of massive transformation as more than …show more content…
Harvey argues that one of the pervasive tendencies of capitalism is to create crises of overaccumulation, which take form as surpluses of labour (unemployment), surpluses of capital (a glut of commodities, idle productive capacity, or a surplus of financial capital with nowhere to invest), or as both, without any means of bringing them profitably together. Such surpluses, he argues, are absorbed by several means, including their reallocation elsewhere through the opening up of new markets. As Harvey (2004, p.65)
Fort McMurray, AB Located in Northern Alberta at the confluence of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers, Fort McMurray is a frontier urban settlement, and the primary service centre for the Athabasca tar sands— the world’s third largest known oil deposit (Dorow and O'Shaughnessy, 2013). Records dating as far back as the 1700s point to the Chipewyan and Beaver peoples being indigenous to the Athabasca region, with present day First Nations having largely descended from the Dene, Cree, and Métis people. In 1870, following European colonization, the land was established as a Hudson’s Bay Trading Post, and remained a remote outpost of less than one thousand people until the creation of the Great Canadian Oil Sands Campany in the 1960s. As Major and Winters (2013, p.143) note, “Fort McMurray existed before the oil sands industry. It is not the result of a corporate takeover nor is it a classical company town. However, like all resource towns, it exists”— albeit in its current form— “because of fixed, valued resources that multinational corporations want to commodify.”
In the first decade of the 21st century, the region underwent a period of massive transformation as more than …show more content…
Harvey argues that one of the pervasive tendencies of capitalism is to create crises of overaccumulation, which take form as surpluses of labour (unemployment), surpluses of capital (a glut of commodities, idle productive capacity, or a surplus of financial capital with nowhere to invest), or as both, without any means of bringing them profitably together. Such surpluses, he argues, are absorbed by several means, including their reallocation elsewhere through the opening up of new markets. As Harvey (2004, p.65)