Abstract

This talk examines what it means to be landlocked in the Canadian province of Alberta. In the local vernacular, being landlocked is only partly about lacking access to an ocean and, from there, global markets. Another aspect of being landlocked is more of a geopolitical condition enforced by everybody from activists to American presidents seeking to stop or slow extraction from the Alberta oil sands, the world’s fourth largest reserve of fossil fuels. In this presentation I examine why this kind of talk is telling in another way: it is an alert to how the geosciences that make extraction possible are also constitutive for political rationality. To see how this is so, I examine the histories of how geosciences mattered to projects of empire that established Alberta and its oil industry. This includes many surprises, from British royalty seeking special rights to Alberta’s energy, to American nuclear ambitions to melt heavy oil into production, to legal practices that put millions of years of Earth’s history on the same scale as the property rights used to legitimise extraction and dispossess Indigenous peoples. Additionally important is how Alberta’s energy industry is entangled with contemporary debates regarding human impacts on the planet. As I will show, closer attention to what being ‘landlocked’ presses for a new understanding of how the practices through which the environment is known and related to shapes political legitimacy.