Language Matters: Letter to the Globe and Mail

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

Letter to the Globe and Mail

Boom/bust. Repeat

Re The Resources Rout Is Deepening. Why There’s No End In Sight (Report on Business, Nov. 28): After coming off the highest real oil prices in the last century, Alberta was the first province to feel the impact of the commodity supercycle. But we’re accustomed to the endless boom/bust circle. As the joke has it, to make a small fortune in oil and gas you have to begin with a large fortune.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Bumpf

A Calgary-based writer, author and historian, during the last three decades I have done work for several corporate clients and also for industry and business publications – notably the trade magazines Oilweek and Oilsands Review. I have written about 1,000 magazine and journal articles, and executive speeches for a petroleum industry trade association.

For two years (2003-4) I taught both undergraduate and graduate English courses at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand, having earned qualifications through distance learning with the University of Saskatchewan. I later joined Chiang Mai University's Language Institute (2005-6), where I developed a course for mostly western students wanting to teach English as a foreign language. In this program, each of my students needed to develop and conduct a classroom session to pass. All the students in these sessions observed the classroom activities, and offered critiques the following day, as part of the teaching process.

After returning to Calgary, I revised, updated and copyrighted my study guide, which I titled The Language Instinct: Reflections on Teaching English as a Second Language. In many ways, the graphic I used on the title page of the book - it was freely available online - summarizes my perspective on teaching and writing as occupations.

My other books include Bitumen: The people, performance and passions behind Alberta's oil sands (2017); Footprints: The Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in Alberta (2016, with Robert Bott and Graham Chandler); Barbecues, Booms and Blogs: Fifty Years of Public Relations in Calgary (2008; co-editor and contributor); In Balance: An Account of Alberta’s CA Profession (2000, with Stacy Philips); The Richness of Discovery: Amoco’s First Fifty Years in Canada (1998); and The Great Oil Age: The Petroleum Industry in Canada (1993, with Gordon Jaremko and David Finch.)

I was coordinator and an interviewer for the Petroleum History Society's Oil Sands Oral History Project, which conducted 117 interviews with key people associated with the oil sands, and had each transcribed. For this and other contributions to its work, the society awarded me a Lifetime Achievement Award - only the second person to receive that honour - and named its substantial library after me.

Two of the books noted above - Footprints and Bitumen - have received the society's Book of the Year award.

British by birth, I am American by upbringing and Canadian by choice. I have completed the grueling Ironman Triathlon eleven times – twice in Hawaii, the other times in Penticton, British Columbia.