Kate Neville, University of Toronto Yukon College workshop 2016 1 The underlying power relations of sustainability: who and what is being sustained, and at what cost? Comments for the Borders in Globalization conference, June 21-22, 2016 I am splitting my time across places right now, in Toronto on Dish with One Spoon treaty territory and in Atlin on Taku River Tlingit territory as well as here, as a visitor, on Ta'an Kwach'an Council and Kwanlin Dun First Nations territory. One of the lessons I am learning from my colleagues and teachers in the north and across indigenous communities is the need for stating my position identifying where my perspectives come from, what view I have of the world as a result of who I am: my history, teachings and teachers, family and ancestry, places of origin. And in many ways, these questions of identity are themselves questions of borders what lines we draw in ourselves and across our communities, what is contained within and excluded from our understanding and experience. To cross borders, to flow over borders or move between them, we need to understand that there is a dividing line. In the discussions so far, we ve seen that this very fundamental premise is understood in different ways with David Neufeld s reflections on Yukon First Nations conceptions of boundaries, Barry Zellen s comments on the rewriting of lines and borders, Harold Gatensby s reminder that we are all shared and ancient water. We can understand borders as culturally determined, historically contingent, socially and ecologically aligned or fragmented, and contested yet in all cases, they are powerful and significant, as they determine and confine movement, relationship, and autonomy. My own work, in line with these themes of borders, tends to focus on the connections between the local and global, understanding movements across borders as implicating both physical materials and abstract finance. Specifically, I look at the ways in which local communities are embedded in global markets, and at how distant consumers and investors can shape the activities in a very specific place. I tend to focus on energy commodities around the world biofuels in eastern Africa, and, most recently natural gas in the north. But in many ways, my work is even more abstractly connected to the physical ground: I often look at what happens in places before projects actually take place not the actual growing of sugarcane for bioethanol or putting in a drill rig to hydraulically fracture shale for gas, but rather the debates about the possibilities for these developments, and what this means for relationships between and across communities, governments, and companies. Sustainability, in these decisions, is something at stake: what kinds of activities will have what kinds of impacts, and on which people and places. That is, what will enable different stakeholders and rights-holders whether human or non-human to continue to exist and, possibly, to thrive? And who or what will be constrained by the choices that are made?
Kate Neville, University of Toronto Yukon College workshop 2016 2 For biofuels, the questions that emerge in places such as coastal Tanzania hinge on the trade-offs involved in growing sugarcane, palm oil, and other crops for liquid fuels. For natural gas in the Canadian north, we can identify some similar questions, though the land in question tends not to be agricultural. We have questions of ownership, of profit, of risk, and of reward: whose land might be used, and who owns that land? What activities are currently taking place in those spaces, and will they be displaced? Who will run the operations, and who will reap the profits? What water will be used, and what are the impacts of production? Who will consume the products, and with what return to the place they are produced? And who takes the risk that is, if things fall apart, or fail to launch, or there are unforeseen problems, who pays the price of the venture? These are fundamental questions about how we think about communities, economies, and ecologies, and the ways they are implicated in global markets. The conversations about the proposed projects often intense, emotional, and hotly contested reveal not only differing calculations about trade offs, but often wildly divergent views of the world itself, and the values associated with different modes of life. They, at their core, revolve around questions of power. Crucial to a discussion of sustainability is a look at the power dynamics that underlie authority, and not only in terms of who gets to make decisions, but also about who sets the terms for the debate in the first place. The question of sustainability is not, fundamentally, a technical one. It is a political and a value-based one. While we might think about science informing policy, or scientific studies revealing impacts, understanding sustainability involves a deeper questioning of what is included in our science in the first place what is counted as visible, legible, and important, and what the boundaries are of the systems we assess. These are not determined through technical work, but through the very ways that we understand the world and who the we is that is vested with power. This panel, focused on sustainability, has two papers that carefully examine the policies that govern resource development and other projects one on transboundary environmental assessments, and the other on seismic line re-use. Sustainability, in the first case, might seem to be a question of identifying the impact on a place and determining how developers can mitigate harm to a given ecosystem or species. In the second, it might involve an assessment of the risks to worker safety and landscape disturbances. And in both, it is weighed off against the economic or financial costs what is spent and what is gained through a project and its modifications, and the costs of regulatory oversight needed to monitor and evaluate the implementation of these policies. If we push harder at this, and think more deeply about the questions of values and power, we come to a series of questions that underpin these policies: what is a project for? Why are seismic lines or environmental assessments being used at all? That is, what development trajectory are we on, what kind of investments are we making as a society, and what kind of economy are we creating?
Kate Neville, University of Toronto Yukon College workshop 2016 3 On seismic lines: we need seismic line re-use policies if we are going to use seismic line testing for oil and gas development which suggests the decision has already been made to explore for and develop oil and gas resources. But there is an environmental movement around fossil fuels that aims to keep resources in the ground, not to develop these energy sources, but to instead invest heavily in energy efficiency, new urban and transportation design, renewables, and other energy options. Before reaching a policy decision on seismic line re-use, a precursor decision must be made about oil and gas development, in the face of climate change. Having the technology to access particular resources is not the same as having the political and social will to do so. If we want to address sustainability more completely, not just at the margins, we must ask these underlying questions, and think seriously about the implications of their answers. These are political and social questions, and in many ways, they underpin debates happening in the Yukon right now, that have been underway since about 2012, over the development and regulation of oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing. This is a contested debate that I ve been following for the past few years. Hydraulic fracturing technology took off in the US in the early 2000s, and other parts of the world including Canada looked to these developments to access previously inaccessible reserves of oil and gas in tight rock, especially shale formations. The technology quickly attracted attention not only for its technical potential, but also for its associated impacts. Questions arose about the quantity of water needed for fracturing, water quality concerns, wastewater and chemical contaminants, links with seismicity and earthquakes, noise and other community impacts, and climate impacts through methane leakages. Some places adopted the technology, while in other places there were bans and moratoria; regulations varied widely across jurisdictions. In 2012, the issue of hydraulic fracturing arose in the Yukon, and the government launched a series of technical and public hearings to assess the risks and benefits of hydraulic fracturing. One of the issues that became clear to me in these debates was that different parties were asking fundamentally different questions: some, including the government, were asking about the risks and benefits of the technology, and if the benefits outweighed the risks, and what regulations could mitigate the risks. Others were asking an underlying question about whether oil and gas development ought to happen at all, forget the type of technology being used was this a path of development that should be embarked upon? Debates focused on a number of areas of concern, especially four main ones but with different views of what a sustainable path through these would look like: security in the north; transition paths; complexity and redundancy; and visions of economies and places.
Kate Neville, University of Toronto Yukon College workshop 2016 4 o First, security in the north: and especially northern energy for northerners this is also phrased as a question of energy security. One view suggested since northerners rely on fossil fuels, these should be produced in the north. Another suggested that renewables would be not only a better environmental option, but in fact a more secure one. Nick Wilson s presentation yesterday on pipelines raised this point quite strikingly, with his interrogation of the necessity of such infrastructure and consequent discussion of a particular view of energy security. This led me to wonder whose security is being upheld through oil and gas development and an economic logic and whose security is being compromised by these very same developments and calculus. o Second, transition paths: this was a question of investments that lock in particular pathways. If, ultimately, the goal is to transition away from fossil fuels, does it make sense to invest in natural gas development and the long-term infrastructure? Would such investments prove worthwhile for the short-term transition, or would they change the incentives such that transitions happened more slowly? This becomes a question about a vision of future: ought we to focus on developing resources for current social organization, or developing resources for a vision of how society could be organized in the future? o Third, complexity and redundancy: natural gas as a transition fuel offered the promise of a simple single solution to reduce carbon, while other options involved a complex matrix of possible energy sources; the clean fuel future of gas offered a hopeful simplicity that other pathways to reducing emissions could not offer. In many ways, fossil fuel developments are much easier than a grid of multiple imperfect energy types. They also hold the promise of more efficiency: a single, clean, streamlined system. However, a matrix offers both more redundancy and more resilience: while not offering efficiency (with multiple sources, types, and some overlap), they also diversify energy options and offer back-up systems for when things go wrong. Are we more concerned with eliminating overlap or providing redundancy in case of failures of part of the system? o Fourth, future economies and places: in large part, the divided views on fracking could be understood as representing very different worldviews those seeing economic development as a path to environmental sustainability versus those seeing economic development as contributing to environmental degradation. Or put another way, what counts as a viable and durable economy? Who determines the appropriate metric of value, and what decides on the relative weight of financial measures versus non-monetized systems of worth? How do we view traditional economies versus capitalist and commercial economies? Accumulation versus restraint? Resources versus ecosystems? Are we owners, stewards, or guests in these places; is this a frontier or a homeland a place of dwelling?
Kate Neville, University of Toronto Yukon College workshop 2016 5 The views on these four issues reflect a number of different ways of understanding our place on the planet, and the trade-offs being made with differing priorities and timelines. They reflect different perspectives on what makes something valuable, necessary, and possible, and what our understandings of ownership, relationship, and reciprocity mean and often, we see one path as the only path, failing to recognize alternate systems of valuation. Sustainability is at its heart a political challenge, regarding the path to well-being, human versus non-human interests, visions of the future, shortand long-term economics, and risks and threshholds in complex systems. Ultimately, questions of sustainability are tied up with what it is that we want to be sustainable, what we want to gain or achieve, what we are willing to give up, what levels of loss are tolerable, and what we see as a possible, desirable, and meaningful future.