Landscapes of Recarbonization: Carbon Neutrality, Settler Colonialism, and Cumulative Environmental Effects in the Peace River Region, Canada

Abstract

Contemporary discourses of net-zero decarbonization (also referred to as carbon neutrality) routinely overlook the landscape transformations required to offset carbon emissions. Conventional analyses also often fail to engage with decarbonization as an inherently spatial process, embedded in landscapes in which the biophysical, socionatural, and political economic dimensions of energy intersect. This creates a conceptual pitfall: the potential to misread and depoliticize strategies of putative decarbonization that might not, in fact, be carbon neutral, particularly when the cumulative effects of broader landscape transformations are considered. To illustrate this pitfall, our analysis queries net-zero decarbonization strategies that arise alongside—and often as a result of—simultaneous investments in fossil fuel production, a process we term recarbonization. We posit recarbonization as a variegated sociospatial phenomenon that materializes 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 that, we suggest, enable deeper theoretical engagement with multifaceted landscape transformations entailed by processes of energy transition. Drawing on a case study of the Peace River region in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, this article exposes the cumulative environmental effects and ongoing forms of colonial violence of some net-zero decarbonization agendas.