Valentine’s Day this year reminded me of the many weddings I performed as a parish pastor in Alberta. While all the ceremonies were successful (every couple came out wedded), in a few sad cases the marriage didn’t last more than a few days or weeks.
In each case it was due to problems with in-laws. Marriage, it turns out, isn’t just dependent on the successful joining of two people, but on merging two families and cultures.
Coming back from a Faith in the Oilpatch conference in Lethbridge a couple of weeks ago, I realized that a similar dynamic exists in the oilpatch. Oil companies and rural communities have been in long-term “marriages” with each other for a century in Western Canada.
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Generally they have found stable, if uneasy, ways to co-exist.
However, new technologies have come online in the last few years: horizontal drilling, hydro-fracturing and thermal extraction from oil shale, to name a few.
And new government regulations about carbon offsets have led to oil companies erecting wind turbines near their drill sites.
The changes are destabilizing corporate-community relationships. Fear of aquifer contamination is a serious issue. Fracking, the pressurized injection of water and chemicals to fracture rock formations and release oil and gas, has resulted in a few high profile events as bizarre as a house explosion in Ohio and flammable water flowing from faucets in Rosebud, Alta.
The fracking isn’t just happening in rock formations. Trust is breaking down between oil companies and rural landowners.
Even worse, the fracture lines extend into rural communities. Horizontal oil wells can reach out a mile or two, potentially affecting the wells of many neighbours. Wind turbines on one farm may hinder neighbours from using aerial spray applicators.
Some need oil company jobs, while others resent the influx of workers that stress health care capacity and attract sex trade workers.
Some eagerly accept surface right compensation offered by pipelines, while others care more about unhindered livestock movement, land access or higher compensation.
These folks all have to live with each other, at church, on the curling team, in school, for the next 50 years.
So it’s about more than the contract between an oil company and a landowner. It’s about the cultures and communities in which they are embedded.
At that Faith in the Oilpatch conference, Donna Kennedy-Glans, former vice-president of Nexen Inc. and director of Integrity Bridges, suggested that rural and urban churches have a role in helping their oil workers and executives, landowners and town employees talk about the issues together.
“The idea isn’t for faith leaders to God-wash the issues,” she said, “but to build bridges between the polarized debates that people seem to be stuck in right now.”
Most faith traditions emphasize the interconnectedness of life. They insist that oil and land and all other things belong first to God. Using them in a way that reflects God’s concern for the whole community will perhaps require some marriage counselling.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.
