Andrew Nikiforuk is the winner of the prestigious Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for his Tar Sands book. Nikiforuk has earned a reputation as an honest and provocative voice in Canadian journalism with an update to his Tar Sands book and a new book called the Energy of Slaves.

Are the Alberta Tar Sands and oil use making Canadian slaves to cheap oil? In Tar Sands, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands and argues forcefully for change. The Tar Sands supplies gasoline for 50 percent of Canadian vehicles and 16 percent of U.S. Demand. The Tar Sands also drains the Athabasca, the river that feeds Canada’s largest watershed, contributes to deforestation and climate change. Today we enjoy extravagant lifestyles due to the availability of cheap oil. Like slaveholders, we feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. Can we emancipate ourselves from cheap oil?