| This dissertation addresses energy cosmologies surfacing in conflicts over development in central Alaska. Multiple perspectives on nature, land, and power circulate within and beyond energy politics, indicating that energy is not a neutral category but one composed of historically transient, politically contingent discursive and conceptual fields. The study recounts a recent series of financial and ecological energy crises and consequent prospecting for new natural resource development. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2010-2012 included regional fossil and renewable resource agencies, petroleum and power production sites, public hearings on energy consumption, regulation and development. The author interviewed renewable energy researchers, forestry scientists, consultants, engineers, environmental activists, state legislators and tribal representatives. Several processes were found to render some kinds of energy knowledge authoritative while marginalizing others. Authoritative knowledge developed alongside a proliferation of quasi-public entities developing natural gas production and transportation schemes. Simultaneously, rapid climate change and ongoing energy supply crises disrupted local livelihoods. Resulting renewable energy projects threatened to import many of the social inequities institutionalized in decades of petroleum production. Both renewable energy research and natural gas pipeline planning expanded on the neoliberal logic of the boondoggle, such that a satellite industry of planners and consultants profited while not actually resolving the region's crushing energy supply issues. By means of the social production of ignorance, state and industry actors made their vision of the energy future, founded on theories of scarcity and boom/bust economics, dominant. Relationships between regulatory and religious communities espousing theocratic revival bolstered this vision. Ontologies of impending crisis, Dominion over natural resources, and extractive capitalism as moral obligation resulted in an eschatology of fossil resources. The study finds that, despite the potential of studying ontological pluralism in contested extractive sites, energy development here remains a site of neocolonial governmentality best suited to political economic analysis. The life of material things surrounding energy (natural gas, wood, pollution particulate, forest fires) makes visible patterns of political relationship that ultimately serve not only to shore up existing social and ecological inequity but also to expand the scope of quasi-public corporate forms and amplify inequality in new ways. |
