Petrocultures in Passive Revolution, or, the Autonomous Domain of Treaty Poetics Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea Director, Intermedia Research Studio Department of Sociology University of Alberta August 10th 2016 Draft for: Petrocultures: Oil, Energy Culture. Eds. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman. McGill Queens University Press. forthcoming As the smoke and dust settles, let us look back upon the wild ride we have just been on and contemplate this recent wonder in the history of fossil capitalism: The exploitation of the Athabasca tar sands, one of the world’s largest industrial mega-developments ever, still projects a spatial monumentalism seemingly super-sized to defy the very speed with which the sand now falls in the hourglass at the climate change endgame of oil. The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, incorporated in 1995 to provide an administrative grip on the development, is one of the world’s most expansive municipalities, spanning sixty-eight thousand four hundred and eighty- four square kilometres, a vastness that only magnifies in the mind’s eye the distances between settlements in Canada’s North. Bitumen mining, whether through open pit or steam injection wells, at its peak in 2014 processed 4.6 million tonnes of tar sand in order to produce 2.3 million barrels of oil per day. The net water consumed in production was by volume a staggering two to 1 four times greater than this yield of oil daily. Toxic tailings ponds now cover an area of more 2 than one hundred and eighty square kilometres, holding more than 760 billion litres of legacy effluent sludge. Press reports of occasional visitors to the region invariably depict them upon 3