| The Wood Buffalo region of Alberta, Canada is home to the largest oil sands deposits in the world. In recent decades, development of this resource has stimulated rapid industrial, commercial and residential growth in the town of Fort McMurray. A soaring population with varied backgrounds has migrated to northeastern Alberta in search of employment in the Athabasca oil sands and accompanying infrastructure. With these diverse backgrounds come varying perceptions of risks to human and environmental health. Social science literature suggests that risk perception is based on social processes and lived experience rather than on scientific research and statistical calculations. My ethnographic fieldwork supports the idea that perceptions of health and environmental risk are situated in particular ways of being in the world. Interpretations of the concept of health are fluid and amorphous, and residents are just as concerned with social wellbeing as they are about physical states of health. |
