The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a series of concatenating problems in the global production and distribution of food. Trade barriers, seasonal labor shortages, food loss and waste, and food safety concerns combine to engender vulnerabili­ties in food systems. A variety of actors—from academics to policy-makers, community organizers, farmers, and homesteaders—are considering the undertaking of creating more resilient food sys­tems. Conventional approaches include fine-tuning existing value chains, consolidating national food distribution systems and bolstering inventory and storage. This paper highlights three alternative strategies for securing a more resilient food system, namely: (i.) leveraging underutilized, often urban, spaces for food production; (ii.) rethinking food waste as a resource; and (iii.) constructing produc­tion-distribution-waste networks, as opposed to chains. Various food systems actors have pursued these strategies for decades. Yet, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to urgently con­sider such novel assemblages of actors, institutions, and technologies as key levers in achieving longer term food system resilience. These strategies are often centered around princi­ples of redistribution and reciprocity, and focus on smaller scales, from individual households to com­munities. We high­light examples that have emerged in the spring-summer of 2020 of household and community efforts to reconstruct a more resilient food system. We also undertake a policy analysis to sketch how government supports can facilitate the emergence of these efforts and mobilization beyond the immediate confines of the pandemic.

This essay considers carbon capture and storage (CCS) in relation to struggles over value and territorial jurisdiction in the Alberta Tar Sands. Critical engagements with CCS have pointed to the legitimising function of the technology and highlight its role normalising extraction in the tar sands. We suggest that neither the significance of CCS nor the legitimation function it performs can be fully understood absent an analysis of settler colonialism. CCS we argue is a colonial flanking mechanism directly centred on the governance of harm that construes harm in ways that reproduce settler colonial entitlements to Indigenous lands, bodies and ecosystems and helps to consolidate state jurisdiction and power in the tar sands. This construal of harm also productively intersects other colonial strategies of harm reduction relative to the tar sands, including the criminalisation of Indigenous jurisdiction, and is part of a broader relational context that prioritises settler colonial futurity.

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