Green gold and clay tips: Dirt economics in British Columbia and Cornwall

The presentation is a critical reflection, borne partly from memoir, partly from academic research over a thirty-five-year period in British Columbia, Canada, on the changing nature of resource economies and their conceptualisation.  It took me a good decade as a professor of economic geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC) studying the “Green Gold” of the province’s forest economy before I finally realised that my own Mid-Cornwall childhood and adolescence were also spent in, and shaped by, a resource economy.  In the terms of Harold Innis, the great Canadian economist cum geographer, I had grown up in a resource hinterland.  Tacking between my memories of an upbringing in Cornwall and my academic research as a Professor at UBC on the forest industry and latterly the transportation and processing of oil and natural gas, I consider in this talk the profound economic geographical changes affecting the extraction, governance, and politics of resource-based economies set against contemporary socio-environmental concerns.  Innis coined the term “dirt economics” to describe the form of inquiry and cultural and political attitude necessary to understand the full character and consequences of a resource (or staples) economy.  My aim in this lecture is to demonstrate the power of dirt economics and geography in fulfilling that task.