Climate opportunism and values of change on the Arctic agricultural frontier

Abstract

An Arctic agricultural frontier is opening as climate change threatens growing conditions in established zones of crop commodity production. Projections of northward shifts of viable agricultural land unleash fantastical interest in the improbable reality of "farming the tundra." Expansion of Arctic agriculture has long figured in Alaska's history, including drawing settlers to the "Last Frontier," where farmers face challenges of extreme conditions, weak infrastructure, and fragile markets. This article, based on joint 2019 fieldwork and ongoing ethnography of landscape change and comparative commodity frontiers by the authors, tracks this imaginative frontier to examine how and why diverse Alaskan agriculturalists seize upon emerging conditions of climate change. We propose "climate opportunism" to frame an understanding of how agriculturalists may gain from changing growing conditions, drawing attention to the values in and beyond monetary gain generated in the social space of frontier imagination and grounded projects of livability in the Arctic. Across differently situated cultivators (a multigenerational immigrant family farm, an Inupiaq Arctic agriculture project, an urban hydroponics enterprise), we find that the changing landscape intensifies investment in embedded local values, while opportunism practiced at various scales both underscores and potentially obscures inequalities in resource distribution and alternatives to apocalyptic narratives of change.

To the farm, Mars, and beyond: Technologies for growing food in space, the future of long-duration space missions, and earth implications in English news media coverage

“…The idea of a "new agricultural frontier" is not new. Whether it is the "New World" plantation frontier with the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean (Mintz, 2011), the "green revolution" frontier which was mobilized all across the global South (Patel, 2012), the "arctic frontier" spurred by climate change (Bradley and Stein, 2022), or the growing landgrab in the "African frontier" (Cotula, 2013), the "Space and Food frontier" is but another stage in a long line of new food frontiers. However, despite seemingly being disparate from the other frontier stories and moving beyond terrestrial boundaries, 73% of the news media articles analyzed in this study directly connected growing food in space to our ability to solve food-related issues faced on Earth.…”

Seeing Green: Lifecycles of an Arctic Agricultural Frontier☆

“…Much of the recent literature on northern agriculture is written by climate scientists, agronomists, and soil scientists, and scholars often employ the concept of the northern agricultural frontier without critical interrogation of its cultural, racial, economic, and material legacies, with a few recent exceptions (cf. Bradley and Stein 2022; Meyfroidt 2021; Price et al 2022). Critical social scientists, however, have utilized the concept of frontiers to invoke literal and figurative borderlands, distant places, liminal spaces, and zones of possibility.…”

Landscapes of value

“…The nineteenth-century California Gold Rush and Oregon Trail offered speculative landscapes of promise and peril, riches and rags, but always migration toward an anticipated better found in lands beyond. Likewise, the Alaskan Klondike (Morse 2010) and London's (1963) The Call of the Wild underline adventures across unexplored frontiers and unpredictable futures and an Arctic that continues to call forward new forms of investment at the frontiers of climate change (Bradley and Stein 2022). The speculation of the gold rush in California has given way to new forms of anticipatory investment in the twenty-first century, as Anderson (2022) highlights in the extraordinary value of homes up and down the Pacific coast.…”

“…Frontiers of "salvage accumulation" also emerge across degraded landscapes, refuse and refuge for the left out and the left behind (Millar 2018;Tsing 2015). In this issue, Bradley and Stein (2022) highlight how climate change is exposing new frontiers for agrarian development in the Alaskan Arctic. As the cold recedes, development imaginaries advance, opening landscapes for investment but also Indigenous resistance-a process they dub "climate opportunism."…”

“…Frontiers of “salvage accumulation” also emerge across degraded landscapes, refuse and refuge for the left out and the left behind (Millar 2018; Tsing 2015). In this issue, Bradley and Stein (2022) highlight how climate change is exposing new frontiers for agrarian development in the Alaskan Arctic. As the cold recedes, development imaginaries advance, opening landscapes for investment but also Indigenous resistance—a process they dub “climate opportunism.” They note that, “while an Arctic frontier of large‐scale capitalist agribusiness is unlikely to materialize as presently imagined, agriculturalists foreground particular social values that make extreme conditions into livable futures and reveal a landscape of multiple political projects with ramifications for how climate change is both utilized and challenged” (Bradley and Stein 2022, 209).…”