Pipelines & Settler-Colonial Extractivism w/ Liam Fox geopolitical ecology

Liam is a PhD researcher in Geography at the University of Toronto and a volunteer tenant organizer in Vancouver. He’s interested in labor, community, and movement organizing strategy, and the politics of reproduction under capitalism.

In this episode, we sit with Liam Fox to discuss the extractivist paradigm of pipelines ripping through Indigenous land in so-called Canada. Specifically, we discuss the regulatory regime in which oil and gas extraction (and the infrastructures required to move it) is articulated and applied. This inevitably entails the engagement with ‘Canada’ as a settler-colonial, extractivist state, bringing to the fore an engagement with the expropriation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples as well as Indigenous resistance. 

We also discuss Liam’s PhD research, which focuses on the history and future of political and class consciousness in and around Alberta’s tar sands. Projects like Liam’s are incredibly important for those of you who are thinking about things like the Just Transition, Climate Justice, and/or a Green New Deal. 

We land in a space of thinking about solidarity and class consciousness; specifically, building unlikely alliances as an essential strategy for anti-capitalist futures. 

From there, we conclude with some thoughts on organizing/mobilizing in our immediate communities as a means of achieving said solidarity across difference. This is where Liam’s role as community organizer with the Vancouver Tenants Union comes in. 



Main pieces discussed/mentioned in this episode:


Liam Fox’s paper: Pipelines in the “Public Interest”? The Jurisdictional Work of a Concept in Canadian Pipeline Assessment


Naomi Klein’s interview with Leanne Simpson: Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson



Further recommendations:


Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboirin 


Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Coulthard