On Oil by Don Gillmor

Some books you read for escape. This one you read to understand the world you’re standing in.

In On Oil, journalist Don Gillmor brings a rare kind of authority to the page. Before he was a writer, he was a roughneck, working the oil rigs during the Alberta boom of the 1970s. He’s seen this industry up close, with grease under his nails and a paycheck signed in crude.

That firsthand experience gives this slim, powerful volume its grip.

Gillmor traces our long, tangled relationship with oil, the substance that has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution all at once. It has started wars and ended them. It has infiltrated governments and, in some cases, quietly become the government.

Here, he unpacks how regulatory capture took hold in Canada and beyond, how oil companies worked to misdirect conversations about the environment, and how the earliest warnings about global warming were buried. It’s a clear-eyed look at an industry in its twilight, still fighting to survive even as we fight to survive the climate crisis it helped create.

The latest in the acclaimed Field Notes series, On Oil is sharp, thoughtful, and refreshingly readable. Big ideas in a compact package.

Perfect for the curious reader, the conservation-minded, or anyone who wants to linger over a subject that shapes every corner of modern life.

Pour a cup of something warm, settle in by the water, and dig in. We think you’ll find plenty here to talk about.

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