It's not a question of whether a spill happens-only when", rings an oft-repeated slogan of oil pipeline opponents in Eastern Canada. Meanwhile, pipeline proponents are adamant that Canada must either "pipe or perish". Through a case study of a controversial tar sands pipeline project (the Line 9 reversal), this paper examines the workings of risk in environmental politics. I explore the similar anticipatory logics that undergird both support for and opposition to the Line 9 reversal, and query the blurry lines between environmental precaution and security preemption. I ask what a preoccupation with emergent risks enables, and what possibilities it might foreclose. As securing the future necessarily raises the question, 'for whom?', I suggest that one troubling consequence of a preoccupation with security is the potential to overlook which lives and ways of being in the world might be neglected in the rush to secure others. The analysis draws on ethnographic interviews and observations to explore the (necro)biopolitical dimensions of pipeline debates, and asks how we might anticipate otherwise. of this paper. I extend my thanks to colleagues and teachers in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto for productive conversations about this work. I am indebted to many people in Ontario and Michigan for making this research possible. This paper benefited greatly from the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editors at Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
In the Greater Chaco region of northwest New Mexico, new fracking technologies are stirring up lands, chemicals, and relations that concentrate attention in the surround. This article argues that extraction’s cumulative atmospheric effects are experienced by Diné residents of the region in ways that cannot be accounted for by the agencies that manage oil and gas. The state’s presumption of atmospheric commensurability is reinforced by techniques of settler governance that fragment ecological and ontological domains like air and land. This fragmentation often preempts the possibility for Indigenous claims to meaningfully disrupt administrative or judicial actions. Unfolding extraction’s atmospheres across three cases, I examine how scale mediates the problem of commensurability. I describe how prevailing approaches to regulating impacts of the oil and gas industry manipulate scale in ways that obscure the cumulative effects of extraction. Drawing on fieldwork with Diné residents of the region who have mobilized to study how fracking affects their wellbeing, and I show how this scalar work facilitates the commensuration of extraction’s impacts across Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds––as well as when this commensuration fails.
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