De/recarbonizing Landscapes of the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River

Research Project
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
2020 - 2022

Decarbonization is a space-making process, embedded in landscapes where the biophysical, socionatural, and material dimensions of energy transitions intersect. However, contemporary discourses of net-zero decarbonization routinely overlook the landscape transformations required to offset carbon emissions. This creates a conceptual pitfall: the potential to misread and depoliticize strategies of putative decarbonization which may not, in fact, be carbon neutral, particularly when the cumulative effects of broader landscape transformations are considered.

Our analysis queries narratives of decarbonization that arise alongside—and as a result of—simultaneous investments in fossil fuel production. We frame decarbonization as a socio-spatial phenomenon that materializes in variegated ways through the site-specific interplay between capitalist social relations and biophysical processes. In making this claim, we seek to bridge political economy with concepts of materiality and relationality which, we suggest, enable deeper theoretical engagement with the socionatural and ontological dimensions of the multifaceted processes of landscape transformation entailed by decarbonization. Drawing on a case study of the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, the project illustrates the empirical impact of this theoretical framework by illustrating how a focus on landscape can help to problematize contemporary decarbonization agendas which, in some cases, obscure the cumulative environmental impacts and violent socionatural reconfigurations that arise in decarbonizing landscapes.