The BIOS Project and the politics of scientific knowledge in Lancaster Sound

Keywords: Lancaster Sound; oil spills; politics of scientific knowledge; energy futures; extractive economies; emergent infrastructures
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56

Abstract

This paper analyses a long history of oil spill research jointly pursued by the federal government and oil and gas consortiums in the Canadian Arctic. The project centres on the Baffin Island Oil Spill (BIOS) Project run out of Cape Hatt on the far northern edge of Baffin from 1980-83, near the waters of Lancaster Sound, one of the most biodiverse areas of the Arctic Ocean. The project was unique – it was the first prolonged study of Arctic oil spill behaviour and the first to test techniques of burning, containment and recovery in an Arctic environment. But it was also unique, and controversial, as the first hydrocarbon-adjacent partnership between the federal government, oil and gas companies, and an Inuit community. Much of the work of monitoring, observation, data collection, a scientific infrastructure maintenance was done by residents of Pond Inlet, the predominantly Inuit community closest to Cape Hatt and the local population with a clear vested interest in the ecological health of the area. This paper tests the extractive dynamics of oil economies on the Arctic resource frontier, the politics of scientific knowledge and technical expertise, and the complex development of community/state/capital relations. More broadly, this paper centres the contested question of Arctic energy futures to probe the possibilities that follow durable and emergent infrastructures of Arctic oil and gas, while considering how a political ecology of failure (ie. an oil spill) can shape human-environment relations in the midst of extractive economies.