Land as material, knowledge and relationships: Resource extraction and subsistence imaginaries in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Abstract

This article examines the social, historical and political constitution of land and resource imaginaries in Bristol Bay, Alaska. We compare the dynamics of these different imaginaries in the region within the early permitting debates concerning the proposed Pebble Mine to understand the contemporary politics of defining and constructing ideologies of extractive resource use. We show that the civic epistemologies and ontologies embedded in different social, scientific and political practices help explain environmental actions and outcomes. We demonstrate that the contested fields of social imagination allow for resource exploitation – commodification, extraction and profit – that endangers nature, but also allow for building alternative imaginaries and constructions of land and value as key components of environmental justice and land sovereignty initiatives. Contestations can also highlight problematic and unjust resource practices that disenfranchise and destabilize subordinate industries, poor communities, indigenous lands and subsistence or renewable resource use. These divergent discourses, and the deliberative valuations of alternative futures that they contribute to, are not effectively considered in Alaska’s large mine permitting process.

A State‐of‐the‐Art Review of Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Pollution

“…There are also many examples of these types of preventive conflicts in countries in the global South, such as the U'wa fight against oil drilling in Eastern Colombia (Arenas 2007), the Chiquitanos opposition to the Cuiabá pipeline in eastern Bolivia (Hindery 2013), resistance towards the Doba‐Kibri oil pipelines across Chad and Cameroon (Nelson et al 2001), or the fight of the Dongria Kondh against bauxite mining in their sacred homelands in India (Temper and Martínez‐Alier 2013). The fact that indigenous values (e.g., sacredness, spirituality) are often harmed by the expansion of commodity frontiers is a common thread in the IPs protests (Hinzo 2018; Panikkar and Tollefson 2018). Indigenous women across the world have been particularly vocal against pollution impacts from mining, hydrocarbon exploration, and toxic waste dumping in their lands (Krauss 1993; Macleod 2016).…”

Introduction to symposium ‘Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation’

“…Land imaginaries are highly divergent across time and space; they can become hegemonic, silenced, or marginalized; appear naturalized or be the grain for contestation; they work as a means of oppression as well as liberation. While recent scholarly interest in land has indicated the importance of these various views and understandings of land, they have so far mostly been addressed implicitly (for an exception see Panikkar and Tollefson 2018). This symposium moves the imaginary constructions of land to the centre of analysis and asks: What are the distinct views of land within current land transformations, how do they take shape, and what are their implications?…”

“…The first set of questions reflects our aim to go beyond the unilinear, somewhat homogeneous, view of land investment and commodification. To this aim, we place the emphasis on the spatio-temporal variation in land investment trajectories and consider land imaginaries as a field of contestation over different ideas and visions regarding land's past, present, and future (Panikkar and Tollefson 2018). Rather than seeing land investments as a kind of juggernaut that relentlessly rolls over the global countryside in an undifferentiated way, it is crucial to uncover the-sometimes drastic-divergence in land investment trajectories across space (Visser 2017), thereby taking the historical dimension more seriously (Edelman and León 2013;Ouma 2016).…”

“…As Andersson and Westholm (2019) argue, future imaginaries are inherently selective constructions, in which uncomfortable knowledge might be retained or marginalized by powerful stakeholders at the expense of other forms of knowledge. The dominance of (Western) scientific methods and institutions within these constructions, as Panikkar and Tollefson (2018) observe, often leaves activists and environmental organizations no choice but to learn the language of scientific knowledge-making or find skilled translators. While in Visser's case, the less tangible, not immediately observably climatic factors mislead the investors themselves, Fairbairn et al demonstrate how a finance-backed farmland investor in the Californian Cuyama Valley uses land's invisible-and therefore 'uncertain'subterranean attributes to create a land imaginary of ample water resources conducive to the company's financial and extraction interests.…”

Posthumanist participation: Beyond extractivism in the Dutch Wadden Sea Area

“…Thus, measurements shape what humans understand as causal relations, for example between an activity and its presumed environmental impacts, and in so doing, they (re)order relations between and among the underground matter by casting some parts as causes and other parts as effects (Barad, 2007a). This (re)ordering happens in relation to the particularities of the measurement, including prevalent assumptions and routinized practices that determine what should be measured and how (Panikkar & Tollefson, 2018;Stengers, 2010). These assumptions and routines enact specific socio-material realities, which become inscribed into methodological standards for measuring mining impacts.…”