Landlocked : Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta / Jeremy J. Schmidt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schmidt, Jeremy J., Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Chicago University of Chicago Press, [2026]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A study of oil-rich Alberta reveals the entwined relationships among geoscience, governance, and power. The Canadian province of Alberta holds the world's fourth-largest reserve of fossil fuels, with oil sands famous for bitumen, a viscous form of petroleum. A critical testing ground for international environmental ideas and energy policies, Alberta pioneered state-led efforts to understand, extract, and sell bitumen. Without natural access to ocean ports, Alberta must negotiate pipeline routes with neighboring provinces and nations to reach global markets. But Alberta is also landlocked in another sense: it is caught in an extractive relationship with oil-rich earth. In Landlocked , Jeremy J. Schmidt focuses on Alberta's energy industry, particularly its use of water and oil, to argue for a new way of understanding how political authority is forged and maintained through the environment. Schmidt details how water and oil were enrolled in early state-making projects, such as irrigation, and examines the consequences of Alberta's efforts to extract value from land, including a series of events in 2013 that released 4.2 million barrels of bitumen into underground environments. By uncovering the ways that geosciences supported activities-from land settlement to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples-that produced environmental policies and approaches to management and governance, he shows that they aren't merely instruments of state power but central to Alberta's political identity and legitimacy.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction. One Hundred Atmospheres of Pressure: Landlocked Politics and Environmental Legitimacy

Chapter One. A State of the Earth: Geosciences and Planetary Politics

Chapter Two. Private Land, Public Water: Crafting Colonial Environments

Chapter Three. Provincializing Energy: State Geoscience and Fossil Economies

Chapter Four. NASA of the North: From Bitumen Resource to Oil Reserve

Chapter Five. Water for Life: Dam Resistance and the Disarming of Democracy

Chapter Six. Accelerating Geology: Emergency Management and Scientific Controversy

Chapter Seven. A State of the Climate: Carbon Populism and Extraction from Future Atmospheres

Epilogue. Landlocked Legitimacy

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed August 05 2026)

ISBN:

9780226849362