Mike Gismondi

Athabasca University · Centre for Social Sciences

Can history and historical thinking help us to strategize key transition challenges ahead? Most transition thinkers make use of historical perspectives, sometimes obliquely, to frame their energy and society research. Yet, specific socio-historical forces driving accelerated energy use, climate warming, biodiversity loss and systemic inequities are...

When citizens take collaborative action to meet the needs of their community, they are participating in the social economy. Co-operatives, community-based social services, local non-profit organizations, and charitable foundations are all examples of social economies that emphasize mutual benefit rather than the accumulation of profit. While such g...

A sociological study of the Alberta tar sands 1895-2010. Popular discourses on looming catastrophes of all sorts tend to fall into two patterns: either we are doomed and there is nothing we can do about it or “the system” will fix itself and there is nothing we need to do about it. Both are, in a sense, excuses for ignoring alarm signals, and avoid...

This article will argue that a seemingly trivial dispute between the Nicaraguan government and an American lumber company operating on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast escalated to become a major source of tension between the U.S. State Department and Nicaragua, as well as a catalyst that drew U.S. banks into Nicaragua. Despite its significance, the conv...

To imagine and enact an alternative financial ecosystem is no small feat, making the question of spreading the impact of local finance options of high interest. In this chapter we introduce the ‘Unleashing Local Capital’ (ULC) program, a cooperative local investment innovation designed by the Alberta Community and Cooperative Association (ACCA) to...

In exploring social acceptance for community energy generation and energy transition, we combined the theoretical lenses of social acceptance research and critical studies of power in transition studies to reveal provincial polyphasia. Fossil fuel rich Alberta is home to thelargest oil sands deposit and third greatest crude reserves in the world, a...

Este artículo presenta cuatro perspectivas sobre la historia y la teoría del cambio social estructural de largo plazo. El estudio argumenta cómo estas perspectivas pueden adelantar el trabajo sobre transiciones, la historia ambiental, la historización del Antropoceno, la historia desde abajo y el tiempo plural. El propósito es promover un mayor com...

Feature Commentary in forum on "Educating For the Future We Want." Great Transition Initiative. Spring 2021. https://greattransition.org/

In 2015, three long-time community and cooperative practitioners and one distance education professor working on local sustainability issues decided that it was time to explore a digital learning space. We were looking for a way to pool ideas, experiences, knowledge, and resources among people working in the social and solidarity community and comm...

Since the 1990s, the tar sands enterprise has evoked a collision of worldviews. At one extreme: proponents of the industry’s growth and the development of what they perceive as a valuable energy source that creates investment, jobs, taxes and royalties, with reparable or justifiable costs. At the other: critics alarmed at the socio-ecological disru...

In Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization (2017), Kevin MacKay clears a path through today’s social and ecological crises with sharp critique. Along the way, he rethinks causes, marks strategies for change, charts an alternative route, and guides us “toward a system of life.” In Radical Transformation’s introdu...

When citizens take collaborative action to meet the needs of their community, they are participating in the social economy. Co-operatives, community-based social services, local non-profit organizations, and charitable foundations are all examples of social economies that emphasize mutual benefit rather than the accumulation of profit. While such g...

Although one might not expect a relationship to exist between heritage buildings and what is broadly known as the social economy, the intersection of specific needs have conspired to create an association. Cash-strapped social economy organizations are frequently looking for an affordable home, while heritage-building owners (private, non-profi...

The excessive power of global finance capital and financial markets contributes to social inequality and ecological unsustainability. This challenge is being increasingly addressed at a community level, in innovative forms of cooperative investing that are widening membership and increasing the capital pool, while putting financial democracy, commu...

Uses social practice theory to analyze the challenges met by Alberta Community and Cooperative Association to spread a local investment innovation.

Today, it is quite common to come across promising social innovations that tackle important sustainability concerns. The excitement around them floods our newsfeeds, seeps into household conversations, and inspires new generations of social entrepreneurs. What is less common, however, is the wider adaptation and scaling of successful sustainability...

There are 12 conservation land trust organizations (CLTOs) in the province of Alberta, Canada that actively steward land. Together they have protected over 1.09 million hectares of land. Using in-depth interview data with published documents on CLTOs, this paper examines how CLTOs make decisions as to which projects to pursue and the kinds of justi...

Footprints in the Oilsands: A Double Diversion with Global Repercussions, Sociological Imagination, 50,1,2014, 13-44.

This research is part of an Action Research Program entitled “Understanding Local Capital – Phase 2,” and is being conducted concurrently with the implementation of the Unleashing Local Capital Project (ULC). The objective is to better understand how communities raise local capital, as well as mobilize other resources (social and human capital) to...

For much of the history of Alberta’s tar sands, a series of visual conventions have shaped Canadian imaginaries of the resource, the emergence of the non-conventional oil industry, and the mining of oil. We introduce a series of archival images dating from 1880 until the opening of Great Canadian Oil Sands (Suncor) in 1967, to analyze how visual re...

The global economy has undergone a profound socioeconomic shift brought on by the changing structure of the global marketplace and the free flow of capital. In essence, investment capital is now free to move internationally seeking out the highest levels of return with little or no restrictions or social conscience. Without delving too far into glo...

Social economy innovation in sustainability is altering policy environments. The activities of green social organizations combine social and ecological missions in ways that pose new questions across sometimes discrete policy silos and levels, identify emergent policy problems and solutions, and generate new alliances of social actors who pressure...

To convince others that something is right or wrong, we need a language of ends, not means. We don’t have to believe that our objectives are poised to succeed. But we do need to be able to believe in them. Ill Fares the Land, 2010:180

The consequences to the ecological foundations of human (and non-human) life from climate change, losses in biological diversity, trans-boundary waste movements, rising sea levels, changes in weather and food production, and so on are of a magnitude not previously experienced and pose not just a threat but also a certainty of changes to our collect...

Since the 1990s, the tar sands enterprise has evoked a collision of worldviews. At one extreme: proponents of the industry’s growth and the development of what they perceive as a valuable energy source that creates investment, jobs, taxes and royalties, with reparable or justifiable costs. At the other: critics alarmed at the socio-ecological disru...

The Athabasca tar sands may have been born virtually overnight in the international media, but only after a decades-long incubation period during which the maternal side of Albertans shone. This incubation is captured – the baby itself in fact constructed – in discourse as much as in industriousness. And within this discourse, it is the images that...

Society’s short 100-year love affair with oil has been replete with regional supply concerns, heated contests over access to the globe’s more substantial pools, price roller coasters, and nasty environmental disasters. Today, however, the political discourse on oil has ever so hesitantly ventured into entirely new terrain – the End of Oil. As with...

Canada’s boreal forest ecozone is a major part of the global boreal region that encircles the Earth’s northern hemisphere, serving as a significant storehouse for the world’s freshwater supplies, and carbon, contained in its trees, soil, and peat (http:// pubs. pembina. org/ reports/ 1000-cuts. pdf, 2006). The boreal is also home to a rich array of...

Human history has often been described as a progressive relinquishment from environmental constraints. Now, it seems, we have come full circle. The ecological irrationalities associated with industrial societies have a lengthy history, and our purpose is not to catalogue this litany of horrors. Collectively, however, we have crossed certain literal...

Incumbent Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach (2006–) says that he “doesn’t need to tell” the Fort McMurray business community how their support for the Athabasca oil sands is key to the economies of Alberta and Canada. He then announces to citizens of the city and the province that it is their responsibility to supply energy to the world. Much government...

I came across Louis Helbig’s images on the web one Sunday morning, about two years ago. Sitting at my kitchen table, I called him up to express my admiration for the photographic work. Like Peter Gzowski’s old CBC Morningside radio show, he picked up the phone in his kitchen and we talked for a couple of hours, swapping perspectives on the politica...

Athabasca University—Canada’s Open University evaluated learning management systems (LMS) for use by the university. Evaluative criteria were developed in order to ensure that different platforms were tested against weighted criteria representing the needs of the university. Three LMSs (WebCt, LotusNotes, and Moodle) were selected for the evaluatio...

Athabasca University—Canada’s Open University evaluated learning management systems (LMS) for use by the university. Evaluative criteria were developed in order to ensure that different platforms were tested against weighted criteria representing the needs of the university. Three LMSs (WebCt, LotusNotes, and Moodle) were selected for the evaluatio...

Athabasca University - Canada's Open University evaluated learning management systems (LMS)for use by the university. Evaluative criteria were developed in order to ensure that different platforms were tested against weighted criteria representing the needs of the university. Three LMSs (WebCt, LotusNotes, and Moodle) were selected for the evaluati...

The social and political contest over the meaning of the term "sustainable development" is vital. Those who win will dictate the agenda and the policies around future environmental issues. This book proposes a radical definition of sustainability, reclaiming the word from the rhetoric typically used by corporations and governments to facilitate unr...

This article reassesses the influence of American business on US foreign policy towards Nicaragua, 1893–1912. It describes three episodes that involved American interests in Nicaragua – the Reyes uprising of 1899, the Emery claim of 1903–1909, and the US & Nicaragua Mining Company claim of 1908–1912 – as evidence for a different interpretation of U...

The academy, like many public and private institutions before it, has been colonised by the discourses of consumerism, efficiency, and market discipline. By now it is a familiar trend and, as many countries have experienced the neo-right assault on the public sector, a familiar discourse. In this paper we examine the implications of this colonisati...

The paper indicates how a critical sociology could contribute to environmental impact assessment (EIA), and argues sociologists must become involved in evaluating the EIA process itself. Topics examined include: how EIA excludes and frames social issues; why social science should precede natural science; the social construction of impact science; b...

As more countries, industries, and international agencies respond to environmental concerns, their representatives look to nations like Canada for expertise in environmental assessment, policy, and standards, and for techniques to assist them in identifying and predicting the impacts of proposed projects on the biogeophysical environment and on hum...

In 1993, a decision by Alberta’s Public Health Advisory and Appeal Board to deny standing to certain dissenting parties because they were not “directly affected” set a precedent in Alberta that is now limiting the ability of environmental and public interest groups, and individual citizens, to raise a range of important issues before various resour...

This paper draws from a larger study of the environmental public hearings into a pulp and paper mill project proposed for northern Alberta, Canada.5 It explores the merits and shortcomings of public participation during these environmental impact hearings with an emphasis upon how members of the public contested the professional hegemony of state m...

Winning Back the Words chronicles the politics of the environmental public hearings on the Alberta-Pacific bleached kraft pulp mill in northern Alberta, and illustrates how the public challenged the authority of experts. Drawing from their own experiences in the hearings, the authors recreate the power struggles among participants over the words an...

Most calculations of risk disregard uncertainties, particularly for populations at special risk. The very young, the very old and the health impaired are seldom taken into account in calculations of risk. The important question is: Whose health are we not protecting? Reactive behavior in relation to toxic chemicals is considered to be immoral becau...

This essay engages two issues: (1) the possibility of a theory of dependence that accounts for resistance and accords resistance by social agents causal significance in historical processes; and (2) the importance of culture in the resistance to social change offered by social actors. I understand dependent development as an historical process that...

Malgré le fait que I'on s'accorde généralement d attribuer l'innovation religieuse aux classes sociales subalternes et que cette représentation des choses ne soit pas sans répercussions sur les mouvements sociaux et politiques, le cadre théorique et les pers pectives méthodologiques sur cette question n'en restent pas moins mal assurées et peu déve...

Theology, as an intellectual attempt of religious people to make sense of their chaotic times, is always politically partisan. From religious discourses oriented toward transcendent goals, social and political insights flow-injecting themselves into political struggles, legitimating some, delegitimating others, often lending the weight of sacred di...

The BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (BALTA) is collecting information on the scope and scale of the social economy in British Columbia and Alberta. As part of this research endeavor, the BALTA Mapping project conducted an online survey in 2008. This paper provides a first snapshot of the social economy in British Columbia and Alberta ba...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1991. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 485-513). Photocopy.