Securing Tar Sands Circulation: Risk, Affect, and Anticipating the Line 9 Reversal

Abstract

“It's not a question of whether a spill happens—only when”, rings an oft-repeated slogan of oil pipeline opponents in Eastern Canada. Meanwhile, pipeline proponents are adamant that Canada must either “pipe or perish”. Through a case study of a controversial tar sands pipeline project (the Line 9 reversal), this paper examines the workings of risk in environmental politics. I explore the similar anticipatory logics that undergird both support for and opposition to the Line 9 reversal, and query the blurry lines between environmental precaution and security preemption. I ask what a preoccupation with emergent risks enables, and what possibilities it might foreclose. As securing the future necessarily raises the question, ‘for whom?’, I suggest that one troubling consequence of a preoccupation with security is the potential to overlook which lives and ways of being in the world might be neglected in the rush to secure others. The analysis draws on ethnographic interviews and observations to explore the (necro)biopolitical dimensions of pipeline debates, and asks how we might anticipate otherwise.