Extracting Decline

<P>The Alberta oil sands are known around the world, but less visible are the workers who sustain this industry. <EM>Extracting Decline </EM>investigates how it became normal for workers to travel thousands of kilometres from Canada's Maritime region to make a living in the oil field.</P> <P>Katie Mazer reveals the intimate links between regional underdevelopment and Canada's extractive economy. In the decades after World War II, the Canadian state formulated the Maritimes as a national problem. Framing the region's rural economies as unviable, policy makers worked to remake the Maritimes to fit a modern vision of the national economy.</P> <P>Weaving together welfare and rural development policy, political economy, and workers' lived experiences, <EM>Extracting Decline</EM> documents how the devaluation of non-capitalist economies has helped transform land and labour for extraction. While the Maritime region has long been denigrated for its failure, <EM>Extracting Decline </EM>ultimately argues that it holds lessons for imagining a more just and sustainable world.</P>