Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, “Intactness,” and Extractive Industry in Canada

Abstract

Debates over the environmental costs of industrial resource extraction in Alberta, Canada—home to a petrochemical industry that plays an outsize economic and political role—are reaching a fever pitch in response to government regulations on industry, data on climate change threats, and social movements pushing for environmental protection. Away from the news headlines, scientists are developing new metrics and models to calculate biodiversity loss and other outcomes of industrial environmental contamination. But these data are not only used to provide evidence of environmental harm. Practitioners of settler science like the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute employ such data in combination with the metaphor of environmental “intactness,” generating colonial mythologies of terra nullius anew, and enabling industrial extraction to continue. This paper theorizes a technology of settler colonial concealment. It shows how settler technologies of quiescence operate through the strategic use of scientific metrics, thereby concealing evidence of colonial harm and promoting a fiction of environmental “intactness” in a province that is home to one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world.