Arnold 2017_Bare Nature.pdf

741808 SACXXX10.1177/1206331217741808Space and CultureArnold research-article2017 Article Bare Nature and the Genocide– Ecocide Nexus—The Conditions of General Threat and the Hope of Cultural Adaptation: The Case of Canada’s Tar Sands Space and Culture 1–15 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331217741808 DOI: 10.1177/1206331217741808 journals.sagepub.com/home/sac Jobb Dixon Arnold1 Abstract This article develops the concept of bare nature by examining the interdependent and underlying conditions that make genocidal and ecocidal processes possible. Agamben identifies states of exception as a juridical key to understanding the legitimating logic that facilitate acts of arbitrary exclusion, targeted killing, and the life and death policy decisions that affect large segments of the population. Such regulated, collective precarity constitutes bare life. I argue that bare nature is produced through a parallel process involving ecological “sacrifice zones” that function as states of exception that regulate other-than-human life in service of extreme energy extraction, creating the conditions for ongoing ecological destruction. In the second part of the article, I argue that the local impacts of extreme energy projects like the Canadian Tar Sands contribute to the conditions of bare nature and bare life globally, presenting a “. . . general (transnational) danger threaten[ing] the interests of several states and their inhabitants.” In closing, I turn to the ascendant Indigenous politics in Canada to consider what local cultural survival, global ecological adaptation, and nonsovereign governance models involve in the era of climate change. Indigenousled politics grounded in land-based normative ethics provide a basis for building alternative futures based on establishing and maintaining conditions of holistic interdependence. Such interdependent conditions will be able to emerge in direct proportion to the extent that the conditions of bare life and bare nature are delegitimated, decommodified, and rendered inoperative. Keywords bare nature, Tar Sands, genocide–ecocide nexus, climate change, adaptation, Indigenous Climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet. —United Nations, Paris Climate Agreement (2015) 1Menno Simons College, a joint College of Canadian Mennonite University and University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Corresponding Author: Jobb Dixon Arnold, Department of Conflict Resolution Studies, Menno Simons College, University of Winnipeg, 520 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3C 0G2, Canada. Email: [email protected] 2 Space and Culture 00(0) It is the time when even the colonizers are grasping the implications of their destructiveness and when the finiteness of the planet grows more apparent every day. We are experiencing the unprecedented convergence of human-created crises. —Waziyatawin (2012, p. 66) Bare Life and Bare Nature: Conditions of Cultural and Ecological Violability This article develops the concept of bare nature introduced in Shields (2012). Specifically, the article contributes to the study of bare nature by expanding the analysis to consider what conditions of ecological precarity make the status of bare nature possible in the context of the Canadian Tar Sands and beyond. This investigation begins with Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) conception of bare life, where Shields locates the origin of his thinking on bare nature. Bare life is a state of being brought about when populations of people have been stripped of any state-based legal right to territory, subsistence, or security (Foucault, 2007). Bare life is a biopolitical condition through which life is managed by a style of governance conducted through predictive, regulatory regimes of control applied to the level of populations (Foucault, 2003). This biopolitical style of governance produces populations that are passive and manageable, regulated through the application of sovereign power at borders, detention centers and through exclusionary citizenship laws. As these processes are applied at the level of population, groups of people are either made to live or left to die based on legal fiat. At the heart of this Euro-American tradition of sovereignty is the need to preserve state-based sovereign power, which is the ostensible purpose of the juridical mechanism known as a “state of exception” (Agamben, 2005). States of exception literally suspend existing legal systems that constrain the exercise of sovereign power, allowing any, and all means—including violence—to be used to preserve the Sovereign and protect specific national interests. The major problem with this juridical model of sovereignty is that states of exception are no longer exceptional; they have become normalized and permanent realities across many spheres of globalized society. The proliferation of states of exception alongside the neoliberal market economy has opened up the possibility for a theoretically limitless exercise of sovereign violence over lands and people across the globe (Agamben, 1998). In what follows, I argue that the spreading conditions of bare life are in part being driven by a parallel spread of the conditions of bare nature. This parallel reflects the reality that we are currently living through an unprecedented convergence of cultural and ecological catastrophe (Morton, 2007). These conditions of global precarity are increasingly entangled with the regimes of biopolitical governance that makes ecocide and genocide possible and predictable (Bauman, 2007). Producing Bare Nature The conditions of precarity outlined above are directly related to the structuring logic of colonial capitalist modes of production that require greater access to finite lands and the elimination of any Indigenous peoples who stand in the way of this agenda (Harvey, 2005; Powell, 2007; Wolfe, 2006). Colonial capitalism requires evermore extreme forms of energy extraction as well as the sustained support of the state, including access to forms of sovereign violence needed to establish and sustain these projects. Together, these forces comprise what Crook and Short (2014) describe as a genocide–ecocide nexus. The genocide–ecocide nexus both requires and creates the conditions of bare nature as more and more ecosystems are brought under colonial capitalist regimes of power and systematically devoured by mass industry. The ecological destruction and climate change associated with these Arnold 3 processes contribute directly to the cultural condition of human precarity known as bare life. The genocide–ecocide nexus requires the passive acceptance of local communities, as well as the financial participation of the global community in order to continue. These processes have been able to maintain legitimacy because of the influence exerted by politicians and corporate elites on the dominant narratives. In such discourse, ecological and cultural destruction are presented as necessary trade-offs with the economy and jobs. This positioning allows corporations and states to insist that projects like the Tar Sands are actually vital for the “national interest” and the attendant ecocultural “collateral damage” as simply another cost of doing business (Galtung, 1990). In the Fort McMurray Tar Sands industry, the forces of late capitalism continue to intensify. Here, the ecocide–genocide nexus produces the conditions of bare nature through systematic and relentless transformation of vast ecological and cultural richness of the Boreal forest into the singular substance of bitumen—Tar Sands oil. As Shields (2012) describes it, The process surpasses the creative as it is almost alchemical. The sovereign sets in play a ritual of legislative fiat by which earth itself is transfigured, pulled out of one semiotic system of nature to be reborn as capital in the form of land. . . . In the sites of resource extraction, nature is reduced to a form of non-human bare life. This crude resource status, emphasizing the raw caloric capacity of hydrocarbons, could be called “bare nature.” (pp. 210-211) The production of bare nature transforms ecological life systems into the singular power of oil. The conditions of bare nature, however, are present both before and after the extractive event itself. For example, the organizational capacity, logistical resources, and industrial technology required for this process to function provides an indication of the human and infrastructural capacity needed for business-as-usual in the genocide–ecocide nexus to continue. The conditions of bare nature emerge when lands are surveyed and zoned for destruction. As in cases where minority groups of people have their legal rights gradually stripped away in preparation for state-sanctioned assaults justified through emergency measures, ecological sacrifice zones are enacted to enable and sustain processes of extractive violence. Bare nature, as described by Shields (2012), also points to something of the remnant that is left once the “complex ecosystems, including other forms of [other-than-human] animate life” are reduced to a singular economically intelligible “energy capacity” devoid of any “supplementarity of values” (pp. 211-212). Just as the “spiritual resources” of a people are drained through the processes of genocide, so too is the spirit of the land and its relationships and energies stolen away by the massive industrial apparatus (Lemkin, 1944, p. 83). Climate Change, Sacrifice Zones, and the “General Danger” of Bare Nature The extraction, separation, and processing of tar sands into marketable bitumen impacts enormous amounts of territory and involves some of the most energy-intensive methods of accessing fossil fuels (Pembina Institute, 2016). In addition to the regional destruction wrought by the Tar Sands, the massive CO2 emissions from the projects contribute to propelling global climate change. Climate change, in turn, is driving regional ecological collapse across the planet. This global collapse is characterized by mass extinction (Ceballos, Ehrich, & Dirzo, 2017) extreme weather events, and intensifying violent conflict (Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane, Seager, & Kushnir, 2015; Welzer, 2012). Anthropogenic climate change is contributing to conditions of bare nature around the globe. The scientific consensus supports the claim that the ecological conditions of bare nature are directly implicated in bringing about and sustaining the conditions of bare life. These precarious 4 Space and Culture 00(0) conditions lead to resource scarcity that drives intergroup competition known to increase the likelihood that ethnocultural minorities and marginalized groups be scapegoated for many of the social problems (Homer-Dixon, 1999). Conflict analysts identify climate change as a major “threat multiplier” and an “accelerant” of violent conflicts, such as war and genocide (Nuccitelli, 2017). As climate change contributes to the conditions of bare nature and bare life, the distinction between what constitutes a “natural” disaster and purely “social” disasters will continue to collapse (Welzer, 2012). In recent years, the study of genocide has returned to a more holistic understanding of the genocide beyond the limited legal scope of the Geneva Convention on Genocide to more holistically consider the nonlegal conditions of possibility. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish jurist who invented the term genocide, recognized that widespread atrocities occur through a particular combination of local instability and international legitimacy that together create the preconditions for mass destruction. Such a broad and interdependent understanding of genocidal processes is central to the conception which Lemkin himself appears to have held for his inspired neologism (Jones, 2012). As Thomas Butcher (2013) describes, Lemkin . . . presents social groups as holistic [and] interdependent, meaning that a change to one element affects multiple other elements [and secondly], they are “non-reducible,” meaning that the group cannot be reduced to merely the sum of its parts… In Lemkin’s view the ontological character of a human group meant that the destruction of that group would necessarily take the form of a synchronized attack. (p. 255) According to the Geneva Convention on Genocide, destruction of group life involves “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (United Nations, 1948). These conditions are often achieved when the state intervenes, creating and sustaining the environmental conditions conducive to the incremental escalation of genocidal processes. For example, regulating access to food was a tactic used by the Nazis in nations they occupied in order to deprive groups of people they considered to be racially inferior, of the calories needed to survive (Lemkin, 1944, pp. 79-93). The conditions of precarity described both as bare life and bare nature create and maintain the conditions that the genocide–ecocide nexus needs to operate. The fact that these conditions of precarity are becoming more widespread present, in Lemkin’s (1933) powerful phrasing, a “. . . general (transnational) danger [that] threatens the interests of several States and their inhabitants.” For Agamben, the paradigmatic example of conditions that produce bare life can be found in the Nazi concentration camps. The camps reveal the extreme conclusion of the conditions facilitated by states of exception (Sofsky, 1997). [Since] the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the crimes that are committed there . . . . (Agamben, 1998, p. 174) The internal logic through which states of exception produce bare life is strongly analogous to the use of “national sacrifice areas” to create and maintain the necessary conditions for the production of bare nature (Lerner, 2010). Sacrifice zones are effectively states of exception imposed upon the land, stripping it of all rights and creating the conditions for violence without accountability. Like sites of indefinite detention, on lands designated as sacrifice zones there are virtually no legal restrictions governing what can permissibly be done. The systems that make both of bare life and bare nature are legitimated by capitalist policies and backed with sovereign force, allowing for the incremental processes of both genocide and Arnold 5 ecocide to unfold, embedded in day-to-day interactions. These dynamics are facilitated through the processes of cultural violence which normalize and mobilize populations involved in this work through the manipulation of shifting affective intensities (Galtung, 1990; Thrift, 2004). Affective Dimensions of the Ecocide–Genocide Nexus Land-based relational ontologies include day-to-day practices, ceremonies, and rituals that are central to many different Indigenous Peoples’ identities and ways-of-life (Deloria, 1973). Such Indigenous perspectives operate within a cosmology of interdependence with the land and culture, according to which ancestors and spirits are an active part of the ongoing cultural and spiritual life of the people (Johnson, 1982). Such Indigenous-led understanding of land-based relational ontologies is highly compatible with scholarship that is more attuned to the affective dimensions of social life (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Bare nature and bare life are conditions in which the affective flows which infuse life with meaning are regulated, controlled, suppressed, and deadened. Affect in this sense includes the preconscious transmission of microlevel physiological cues that act both through and on human relations, as well as on the relations that exist between people and their physical environment (Gould, 2009; Massumi, 1995). The recent turn to affect has expanded the Western conceptual language for understanding the deep ontological dimensions of place and ecological interdependence (M. Smith, Davidson, & Bondi, 2009). Affective currents circulate between groups of people, but these flows also pass through and are contributed to by other-than-human beings and the land itself (Arnold, in press). These land-based ontologies cannot be reduced to social–institutional networks, merely social figurations (Powell, 2007). Grounded conceptions of relational genocide understand these processes as destroying the ecologies of affective connectivity and life forces that are essential and constitutive components of meaningful group-life (Davidson, Park, & Shields, 2011). Deborah Gould (2009) provides a powerful analysis of how such affective force circulates among groups connected through precarious relational ontologies. In her powerful ethnography of early AIDS activism in the United States Gould argues that, “The most important contribution of the emotional turn is that it introduces a different ontology, a different conception of social reality” (Gould, 2009, p. 17). This decentering of mainstream understandings of “reality” resonates strongly with Indigenous land-based ontologies that prioritize interdependence and relational connection which go beyond social–institutional conceptions of social group-life: Affective ontology opens up a conceptual space that has shrunk considerably with the rise of rationalactor theories in the social sciences and has been difficult to inhabit in light of the important claims of the cultural and linguistic turns about the centrality of linguistic meaning-making practices in social life. (Gould, 2009, pp. 17-18) Gould’s analysis strongly suggests that the condition of bare nature can also be understood in terms of the deadening exclusion of vibrant ecologies from participation in complex affective ontologies. The conceptual space—and indeed the life-space—needed for mobile affective forces to circulate is a necessary part of the “unique genius” that makes these distinctive cultural groups deserving of protection (Short, 2016, p. 19). Rather than being allowed to circulate, the cultural life force of both Indigenous peoples and Tar Sands workers is usurped into the affective-economies that are needed for the operation of the genocide–ecocide nexus. Affective economies are the dynamic pathways through which emotions circulate and “do things,” specifically “they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). In the case of bare nature and bare life in the Tar Sands, affective alignments are 6 Space and Culture 00(0) mobilized in services of the biopolitical management of populations including the displacement of Indigenous bodies and the recruitment of a massive mobile labor force that is needed to ensure that extraction continues (Dorrow & Dogu, 2011). Land-Based Relations Bare life and bare nature provide a basic cultural and ecological index of the condition of ontological vulnerability and place-based violability. The incremental and cumulative intensification of cultural and ecological destruction has been acutely experienced by Indigenous Peoples whose bodies and lands have suffered greatly in the warfare of colonial progress (Moses, 2002). Andrea Smith (2005) writes that, as “Native peoples [particularly Native women] have become marked as inherently violable . . . their lands and territories have become marked as violable as well” (p. 55). Indigenous land-based ways of knowing (epistemologies) and ways of being-in-the-world (ontologies) continue to be on the frontlines of ongoing genocidal processes, including the destruction of sacred lands. Indigenous ways-of-life and the wisdom contained within Indigenous legal systems provide a clear alternative to the logic and legal underpinnings of the genocide–ecocide nexus (Borrows, 2010). Starting from land-based ways of knowing and being, is a critical step toward reframing and regrounding the existing conceptions of relational genocide to better account for and contest the conditions that support the genocide–ecocide nexus (Coulthard, 2014). The dispossession of the Indigenous Peoples and the destruction of their traditional lands continue, despite well-established connections indicating that the ecocide occurring in the Tar Sands is connected to processes of ongoing colonial genocide (Huseman & Short, 2012). The interdependent nature of ecologically and culturally destructive colonial processes has always been well understood by the Indigenous Peoples subjected to these multifold violences. Despite the continuing legacy of destruction, the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of North America has failed. This is attested to by the fact that these land-based ontologies persist, Indigenous populations are recovering and intentional land-based cultural reclamation programs are proliferating across diverse Indigenous territories (Alfred, 2014; Saul, 2015). One prominent figure in the movement of Indigenous resurgence is Glen Coulthard, a Dene Scholar who, along with Lee Anne Simpson and others, has started the Dechinta Bush University, a land-based cultural learning center located on traditional Dene homelands (http://dechinta.ca). Such land-based centers are a practical response to the genocide–ecocide nexus, by reframing ethical responsibilities in terms of land-based relationships and laws which govern human and other-than-human life. As Coulthard explains, In the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib (which is my community’s language) . . . “land” . . . is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land . . . but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on. Seen in this light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this meant that humans hold certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. (Coulthard, 2014, p. 61) Coulthard’s reformulation of Indigenous land-based ethics presents a direct challenge to the state-based “liberal multiculturalism.” The Canadian states reliance on the cultural politics of recognition has created a paradoxical situation in which Canada loudly endorses social reconciliation between Indigenous and Settler communities while actively maintaining colonial capitalist underpinnings of the ecocide–genocide nexus. Coulthard’s argument does significant work toward helping non-Indigenous peoples recognize the continuity between the current dangers Arnold 7 associated with ecological and climatic crises and the colonial–genocidal processes that have been confronting Indigenous peoples for over 500 years. Despite increased recognition of the cultural rights of Indigenous Peoples, the need to listen and respond to the devastation facing their communities has never been greater. For example, the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Andrew Woolford (2009), contends that, . . . it is a disservice to force Aboriginal people’s experience of ecological destruction into a framework that acknowledges only the subsistence value of land to a group, even if this move might initially appear to advance their justice claims by clearly locating land and wildlife destruction within the terms of the [UN Convention on Genocide]. To fully acknowledge the Aboriginal experience of attempted destruction, we need to understand land and environment not simply as a means of sustaining group life, but as key components of group life. (Woolford, 2009, p. 89) Regrounding Land-Based Ontological Thresholds: Indigenizing Agamben Indigenous epistemologies make it impossible to separate what is sacred about humans from what is also sacred about the land. The ontological transformation accomplished through the production of bare nature is a forced conversion of cultural and ecological sacredness into forms of lucrative mineral wealth which translates to economic and political power. Cree scholar Tasha Hubbard frames these realities concisely when she writes: “According to Indigenous ways of knowing, humans do not hold exclusive title to personhood, and therefore neither does genocide [pertain just to human-people. Interdependence . . . entails, among other things, challenging human-centric and territorially shallow conceptualizations of group life” (Hubbard, 2014, p. 295). While the global systems that produce the conditions for bare life cannot ultimately be disentangled from the production of bare nature, regrounding the conception of relational genocide is a matter of focusing on the deep, rather than the shallow, conceptions of human life that exist on-the-ground, day-to-day realities that constitute experiences at the local level (Barnes & Dove, 2015). Human activities are but one force among many others that operate within deeply interdependent ecological systems. The affective forces constitute land-based relational ontologies that provide both the literal and metaphorical grounding of cultural and political struggles against genocide. This section further examines the stakes of these political struggles by focusing on the practical ontological conditions that make genocide and ecocide possible. In Ecology Without Nature, ecocritic Timothy Morton argues that “the very idea of ‘nature’ which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an ‘ecological’ state of human society” (Morton, 2007, p. 1). Taking a position that resonates with the Indigenous authors referred to above, Morton argues that the very idea of “nature” has served to keep people disconnected from their own ecological embeddedness. Morton does, however, resist engaging with questions regarding what, if any, boundaries determine “what precisely counts as human and what counts as nature.” “These terms are not irrelevant,” he writes, but “I have avoided the habitual discussions of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism that preoccupy much ecological writing” (Morton, 2007, p. 7). While I appreciate Morton’s aversion to muddling over artificial distinctions in the realm of aesthetic representations, the question of boundaries is a critical and concrete part of understanding the conditions that make both ecocidal and genocidal processes possible (Wimmer, 2008). Specifically, my concern is with the exclusionary boundaries that do not primarily exist in descriptive or aesthetic categories; rather, they are imposed functionally as arbitrary legal–spatial injunctions that create states of exception. Understanding the location of the thresholds that 8 Space and Culture 00(0) demarcate what lands and peoples can be made into bare nature and bare life is a necessary part of contesting them. Sovereign force applied through states of exception makes bare life and bare nature possible. In theory, exceptional measures are a way for the state to contain an emergency moment threatening the seat of power itself, like a revolution. What was envisioned as a technical legal maneuver to deal with truly exceptional scenarios has now become a primary mode of facilitating austerity regimes and neoliberal expansion through violent forms of colonial capitalism (Svirsky, 2014). The practical consequences of governance through exceptional measures include an increase in systemic biopolitical management of large populations. These are enacted to deal with the growing number of climate refugees and other peoples displaced by the general danger and regional precarity connected to climate change. When people and lands become entangled in webs of exceptional powers, even if death and destruction are not immediate outcomes, these processes often still lead to what Claudia Card (2003) has described as “social death.” This paradoxical condition blurs the distinction between life and death and returns us to Morton’s problematic question: “what counts as human,” and also, “what counts as nature” (Morton, 2007, p. 7). This line of questioning brings us to the second sense of bare life developed in the analyses with which we began. In addition to providing a genealogy of the legal regimes that have come to produce global biopolitical subjects, Agamben’s project is also an inquiry into what is sacred about human life. Agamben proceeds by way of Emile Durkheim’s conception of the sacred as relating to movement between deeply ambivalent threshold states: . . . there are two kinds of sacred things, the auspicious and the inauspicious. Not only is there no clear border between these two opposite kinds, but the same object can pass from one to the other without changing nature. The impure is made from the pure, and vice versa. The ambiguity of the sacred consists in the possibility of this transmutation. (Durkheim cited in, Agamben, 1998, p. 78) What are we to make of this ambivalent understanding sacred life? Agamben’s concern seems to be with what happens to life as it is subjugated, processed, and passed through a biopolitical apparatus. In other words, he is worried about what will happen to large segments of the world’s expanding and increasingly precarious population. These ethical considerations permeate Agamben’s analysis of the legal threshold spaces that produce and regulate life as biopower. The conceptual scope and analytical utility of the bare life concept has generated commentary and engagement with role of states of exception in colonial contexts (Svirsky & Bignall, 2012). A few commentaries have generated particularly rich analyses that help situate the concept of sacredness in relation to bare life and bare nature. Specifically, Judith Butler (2014) qualifies Agamben’s metaphysical and juridical approach as too “a-relational, contrasted only with the sovereign power that lays it bare outside of the polis” (p. 24). As discussed above, relational and embodied understandings tie together the affective and land-based understandings established as affective ontologies and ways-of-being (Coulthard, 2014; Gould, 2009). Additionally, Mark Rifkin (2009) contends that Agamben’s “emphasis on biopolitics tends to come at the expense of a discussion of geopolitics, the production of race supplanting the production of space” noting Agamben’s thinking has proceeded without significant “discussion of Indigenous Peoples” (p. 90). Rifkin’s indigenization of bare life is especially relevant in the context of settler-colonial states. Colonial processes employ exceptional measures to both “regulate . . . proper kinds of embodiment (“bare life”)” while they also use sovereign power to “legitimate modes of collective occupancy”—which Rifkin refers to as “bare habitance” (Rifkin, 2009, p. 90). These interventions into Agamben’s bare life paradigm provide a more grounded and relational way of understanding how states of exception function in modern biopolitical governance structures. Arnold 9 Indigenizing Agamben’s analysis of bare life decenters Western traditions of sovereignty, while emphasizing Indigenous legal traditions based on interdependent understandings of the affective and relational qualities that constitute unique ontological and ecological systems. The current hegemonic forms of biopolitical governance responsible for proliferating states of exception and sacrifice are not the only option. Perhaps most significantly, the decentering of Agamben’s totalizing analysis of absolute sovereignty exercised through states of exception opens-up important possibilities for delegitimating the violent potentials inherent in Westernsovereign processes (Sexton, 2016). Non-Western approaches to power offer culturally adaptive forms of governance based on principles of interdependence that have long been the basis of Indigenous legal traditions (Borrows, 2010). Bare Nature in Canada’s Tar Sands The Athabasca Tar Sands projects in Northern Alberta, Canada present a paradigmatic case study in bare nature. In his analysis of the cultural topologies forming around the populated hub of Tar Sands production, Fort McMurray, Shields (2012) notes that “nature is reduced to a form of nonhuman bare life” (p. 211). He writes that, In the sites of resource extraction. . . . This crude resource status [emphasizes] the raw caloric capacity of hydrocarbons, [that] could be called “bare nature.” Reduced to its energy capacity the supplementarity of values in the landscape—nature as beauty, for example, or as a complex ecosystem, including other forms of animate life—is repressed. (Shields, 2012, p. 211) The Tar Sands industry relies on massive amounts of labor and technology to first strip, then convert, land into a viscous form of petroleum called bitumen. The Tar Sands developments are facilitated by the Canadian state, which has leant its sovereign legitimacy to the industry, granting exceptional license that continues to facilitate and subsidize the ecocidal projects. To access Tar Sands through open pit mines, the lands must first be stripped of any protections, legal or cultural. The affective forces that inhabit relational ontologies, and animate social protest and resistance to the projects, must also be suppressed and pacified so that the industrial process may proceed. The production of bitumen directly strengthens the regimes of biopower by growing the population of laborers attracted to the job market while mobilizing affective economies associated with the industry. Through these processes, the Tar Sands operations are culturally legitimated; companies in turn frame this as “social license” allowing them to continue the work of transforming ecosystems into bare nature. As with the production of bare life, the systems producing bare nature are legitimated by policies backed by sovereign force, and presented as desirable and justified in the name of imperative national economic interest. Métis writer Warren Cariou’s documentary film about the Athabasca Tar Sands region, Overburden, provides firsthand testimonies from the people experiencing the converging conditions of bare life and bare nature (Cariou & McArthur, 2009). In the sterile language of the Tar Sands industry, overburden refers to the surface layers of Boreal forest, muskeg and the organic materials that lie atop the bitumen-rich sands themselves. Through a banal process of surveying, zoning, and leasing lands, corporations are granted the rights by the state to strip off everything that stands in their way of extracting bitumen—including the peoples, their ancestral cultures, and the local food systems (Blaser, Feit, & McRae, 2004). The peoples of the bitumen-rich lands have been stripped of the capacity to sustain their group-life in a way that is tied to that place. Instead of being honored as distinct peoples, they are treated as simply more ecocultural overburden to be removed from one of Canada’s largest national sacrifice zones. The communities negatively affected by the Tar Sands are predominately Indigenous. For these groups, the Tar Sands projects reflect another stage in the ongoing, coordinated, and systemic attack 10 Space and Culture 00(0) waged at the level of ontologies (Woolford, 2009). The destruction of these lands is also the destruction of a distinct group of Peoples who are, according to their own understandings and assertions, inseparable from the land. These conditions of ontological destruction have been made possible through the incremental convergence of sovereign states of exception and industrial states of extraction. As a result, the sacredness of the People and the land is being stripped proportionate to the extent that biopower is being accumulated by the two-headed leviathan of corporate–sovereign governance. Responding to the General Danger of Climate Change As Raphael Lemkin recognized in 1933, a holistic view of transnational danger creates an ethical imperative for coordinated and collective action to challenge the processes that legitimate the exclusion and dehumanization of groups of people. Global climate change and ecological catastrophe are directly related to mass industrial projects like the Tar Sands. The displacement of Indigenous Peoples is directly tied to the burning of fossil fuels which is also the primary cause of global crises of climate refugees (United Nations, 2017a). Collectively, these processes are driven by a form of colonial capitalism that is producing and sustaining the conditions underlying the genocide–ecocide nexus (Crook & Short, 2014). As the conditions of bare life and bare nature—epitomized by states of exception and sacrifice zones—continue to coincide, the distinctions between genocide and ecocide will continue to collapse. Evidence demonstrating the widespread precarity associated with climate change is everywhere, and the mass movements of people fleeing climate disaster and associated conflict have reached unprecedented levels (United Nations, 2017b). The spread of these conditions has led to more and more people being managed as bare life. Masses of precarious people are regulated through states of exception at physical borders, in refugee camps and through a renewed emphasis on internal national sovereignty that excludes Indigenous and stateless peoples from protections (Agamben, 1995). As climate change continues to strain the basic ecological systems that sustain all forms of life, the conditions of bare nature and bare life will continue to spread around the globe (Bauman, 2007). How can local-level cultural and ecological adaptations establish and maintain interdependent life-worlds in the face of globally destabilized environments? In times of scarcity, fear and precarity are powerful mobilizing forces that can lead to the polarization of identity groups, and provide social legitimacy to patterns of exclusionary violence (Homer-Dixon, 1999). However, the ontological threat posed by climate change is galvanizing a powerful new network of peoples actively organizing alternatives to the current entangled systems of fossil fuels and capitalism (Klein, 2017). The mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change has become a common, “superordinate goal” which large groups of people are able to orient toward, creating coordinated and collaborative global movements (Gaertner et al., 2000). Around the world new affective economies are helping to align disparate groups, giving rise to new cultural formations propelled and sustained by interdependent realities that differ from region to region (Ahmed, 2004). Affective alignments involve embodied intergroup relations and place-based ways-of-knowing that are key components of social mobilization (Gould, 2009). Affective alignments based on shared values and practices can create regional conditions for the collaborative cultural practices needed to establish and sustain meaningful social and ecological resilience (Amster, 2015). The capacity for groups of people to create, mobilize, and share local knowledge contributes to effective climate adaptation across and regionally specific difference will be a major factor in determining the future successes and failures of human societies (Henrich, 2016). The social conditions, ecological pressures, and affective intensities make up day-to-day conditions that reflect the unparalleled power of the forces of nature (Arnold, in press). Whether or not forms of Arnold 11 cultural and ecological homeostasis can be reached and sustained will depend on how the extent to which affective alignments are able to energize ecocultural practices that are well matched to regional threats and accessible to all people equally. Regrounding Ethics and Amplifying Resurgence The first step toward moving to a horizon of collective collaboration, is to honor and connect with Indigenous-led struggles. Indigenous peoples have been continually adapting to the cultural and ecological conditions of genocide and ecocide for hundreds of years in North America (Woolford, Benvenuto, & Hinton, 2014). In spite of the ongoing attempts to destroy their waysof-being, Indigenous cultures continue to carry teachings of land-based interdependence supported by legal traditions that show respect for both human and other-than-human creation (Hallowell, 1976). Part of the challenge that remains lies in continuing to decenter the hegemonic forms of European sovereignty that facilitate the genocide–ecocide nexus. Indigenous Peoples around the world are not merely resisting ecocidal practices, they are bringing to life a vision for land-based ecocultural homeostasis that resonates with sacred teachings. Regrounding global responses to climate change requires moving Indigenous epistemologies and governance models to the center of a transnational project coordinate through affective alignments of the populations currently managed as biopower. Learning from and implementing land-based laws and ceremonies in the context of rapid ecological change is a promising model for sustainable yet dynamic adaptation strategies (L. Simpson, 2011). Glen Coulthard (2014) conceptualizes the cultural resurgence of Indigenous politics through a land-based ethics, what he refers to as grounded normativity. Based on this framework, Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism [are] best understood as a struggle oriented around the question of land—struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by placed-based practices and associated forms of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way. (Coulthard, 2014, p. 60) Creating homeostatic social and ecological conditions must happen locally, prioritizing local values and practices grounded in meaningful relations between people and the land. Ninety years ago, Lemkin urged the League of Nations to take coordinated action to prevent the normalization of national socialism. We can now see how the spread of this ideology, and the international inaction in response, allowed for the preconditions of genocide to gain local traction and international legitimacy, actualizing a dramatic and transnational danger. Today, the spreading conditions of bare life and bare nature present a global danger that extends the scope of Lemkin’s concept of “global transnational danger” to a truly planetary level in form of the genocide–ecocide nexus (Short, 2016). The resources needed for change are currently available. The United Nations (2015) has facilitated the Paris Climate Agreement that provides a framework for facilitating global, institutional-level coordination of climate action (COP21). The United Nations has also adopted documents which provide framework for how local-level Indigenous rights ought to be recognized and enforced at the local level, through the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Even economic theories now agree that with the right balance of input and compliance, it is possible for self-organizing local systems to incorporate sustainable technology and redistribute power in ways that bring healing, spirit, and dignity back to both human and otherthan-human forms of life (Ostrom, 2009). Whatever steps are taken to mitigate the use of fossil fuels, resources depleting and global populations growing, states of bare life and bare nature are the new normal. Regionally specific 12 Space and Culture 00(0) forms of grounded normativity need to be implemented as the basis for building practical and sustainable alternatives to colonial capitalism. Enacting ecological interdependence involves creating new stories about how we can live together in our own corner of the world and how it fits with global adaptation. Canada’s resurgent Indigenous politics are mobilized by matters of life, death, as well as cultural survival through forms of ecocultural adaptation that have global implications in the era of climate change. Working toward tangible collaborative goals is not just a way to create deep resilience, it helps expose genocidal and ecocidal systems as illegitimate, unnecessary, and unacceptable. Movement toward modes of land-based governance supported by popular mobilizations that recognize and define themselves against the antagonistic premises of colonial capitalism is a already underway (Mouffe, 2013). The fact is, people around the world are finding themselves pressed by matters of life-and-death, to adopt alternative ways-of-living that are ecologically sustainable. This growing recognition of global interdependence is a hopeful sign (Lifton, 2017). While they are difficult to quantify and hard to label, affective economies where love for the sacredness of land is circulating with increasing intensity, energizing powerful currents of ecocultural change. The manifold forces involved in what might be called “land-affect” come in many forms (Arnold, in press). Indigenous cultural resurgence and other regionally specific articulations of change are emerging from local-level communities that have begun the work of mitigating the sources of climate change and adapting to changing realities on the ground (Amster, 2015). As more and more people around the world take part in creative local-level collaborations, centered on protecting and caring for the Peoples and lands around them, the conditions that give rise to bare nature and bare life will continue to be delegitimated, decommodified, and rendered inoperative. 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