In the spring of 2008, an estimated 1,600 migratory ducks landed in the wrong place: a pond of toxic sludge in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the heart of Canada’s Oil Sands. The birds, slick with oil, struggled to get out of the bitumen-covered water; wildlife officials shot the ones that didn’t die to put them out of their misery. The ducks’ deaths brought international attention to Northern Alberta. Syncrude, a company that dumped oil byproducts into the tailings pond, was ultimately fined almost $3 million.

But at the same time, there were other problems in the oil sands — human ones — that escaped media attention, according to Kate Beaton, the author of the upcoming graphic novel Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. Beaton graduated from university in 2005. She moved to Fort McMurray to repay a mountain of student loans. A white lie got her a job in the “tool crib” at the Syncrude Base Mine, where she handed wrenches and hard hats to workers. Beaton was working as a secretary in an Albian Sands office when the ducks died in the toxic pond. She used the copier during her lunch break to scan cartoons for her future career. 

Beaton is well-known for her sharp historical, literary and satire in Hark! A Vagrant is a New York Times bestseller. Though Ducks maintains the same knack for humor, it is darker, recounting Beaton’s two years in Fort McMurray in impressive detail. Ducks has already drawn comparisons to classic graphic novels such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. It depicts Beaton’s colleagues in an empathic way, while at the same time describing the harsh realities of oil sands life: isolation, environmental destruction, as well as an endless stream sexist comments. 

In an interview with Grist, Beaton explained why she thought a new story needed to be told about Alberta’s most controversial industry. This interview was edited to be more concise.

Q. You’ve written that people often characterize the Alberta oil sands as either “entirely good or entirely bad — the jobs and profits vs. the climate-rattling destruction.” How did you push back against that dichotomy in your book?

A. A. Rarely are you able to see the workers as they operate a machine or drive a pickup truck. Nova Scotia, where migrant workers are exported to Alberta, is where I come from. There isn’t a family around here that isn’t affected by a loss of a loved one to the oil sands. When I read about the oil sands I rarely see the humanity of the people. It’s about politics or environmental issues, which are important, but for me, it’s a personal story.

An excerpt from “Ducks.” Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly Q. These larger themes allow readers to make connections, but can you see a connection between the way oil camps exploit both people as well as the environment?

A. Well, when you go out there, you lose your sense of yourself very quickly, because you are so isolated, you’re far from home, and you’re resocialized into an environment that is really unnatural. My camp dormitory had 48 rooms and two other women. If you are a man, you are not expected to do anything except work and perform work-type masculinity — we’ve all seen the “hurt feelings report.” It’s a joke about somebody complaining about how their feelings were hurt. And that’s the type of stuff that you see all the time. This is why mental health suffers when you hide your pain. The huge gender gap has a clear impact on women’s lives.

It seems to me that this is a simple parallel. People’s lives are not being cared for. If there was somebody having a mental health crisis or a drug crisis, they would just be gone — either they would leave work or they would be fired. They would be gone as soon as they left. We would never see them again. 

Q. Q. What were workers’ views on environmentalists?

A. Greenpeace was not on the side workers when they showed up to protest the duck deaths. Their goal was to make a big stir and get to the top of the news. Greenpeace created a mess that people had to clean up and put workers at risk.

An excerpt from “Ducks.” Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly Q. Why did Ducks become the title?

A. A. It was a massive wildlife loss and it looked awful.

It was a tragedy, and it shouldn’t have happened, but the ducks made headlines, and meanwhile, 2008 was one of the deadliest years for crashes on Highway 63, connecting Fort McMurray to Edmonton, which they called the Highway of Death. I witnessed a few of the fatal crashes. And there were a few workplace deaths when I was there — the companies always downplayed how dangerous the actual sites were. Many rare cancers were reported by the Indigenous communities near the oil sands. Nobody seemed to care. For whatever reason, the ducks got people being like, “Hey now, you have to do something.” And I’m like, “Well, what about the people here that are suffering?”

Then there’s the obvious metaphor too, that these were migratory animals that got stuck in the oil, like the workers.

Q. You’ve said that you weren’t that aware of climate change when you left for the oil sands in 2005. What was your attitude towards it at the time?

A. So, when I left for the oil sands, Stéphane Dion, the minister of environment in Canada, said, “There is no environmental minister on earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big.” That’s where we were on climate change in 2005.

Q. Q.

A. Well, I don’t think that any environment minister would be that honest right now. At least she was honest. They got close to $150 per barrel of oil in 2008, one year that I was there. It was the peak of the boom and was the highest price anyone had ever paid for oil in Fort McMurray. It seemed like a torrent of people were coming in and it was unstoppable.

Fort McMurray actually, if you recall, was on fire in 2016, and it’s been through a lot. But at that time I worked there, we weren’t yet reckoning with everything that we were doing. 

The book could have been 3 billion pages and it would never have been enough — I got to touch on some of the environmental things because they came my way every now and then. I have to say that the buffalo in the reclaimed field look very sad. 

An excerpt from “Ducks.” Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly Q. The buffalo in the reclaimed grass?

A. A. If you look up videos, there’s like a man in a hard hat with his hand going through the grass and he’s like, “The buffalo are happy here.” And so when you’re driving up at Syncrude, you could see the fenced-off area for the buffalo, but Syncrude is right there like pumping shit into the air beside them, because it’s right next to the base mine. And so the buffalo are just like, “Hi. This isn’t really my natural habitat.” 

The post The year’s best graphic novel might just be about life in Canada’s oil sands first appeared on Raw News.