Capillaries of capital : space, power, and fossil fuel flows in the colonial present ...

• Main Author: Simpson, Michael Phillip
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2022
• Subjects: Athabasca River
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0374140; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0374140

In the spring and summer of 2018, opposition to the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline emerged as a frontline in the global struggle against fossil fuel industries. Opposition to this project had been simmering for years. In the face of planetary climate change, the Anthropocene, and the Sixth Great Extinction, pipeline developments across North America had become highly controversial matters, targeted by environmental activists, advocates of climate justice, and many Indigenous communities. This dissertation places conflicts over tar sands bitumen extraction and pipeline developments within a broad historical-geographical context of settler colonialization and capital accumulation in Canada. The chapters roughly follow the flow of crude bitumen along the pipeline, historically and geographically, from the first colonial encounters of this material oozing out or the banks of the Athabasca River, to present-day conflicts on the west coast of Canada. I begin by tracing the historical processes of settler ...