When our research group first met to consider what the concept of “literary biodiversity” might offer in an age of climate emergency, we began with a free write on the topic—or on “literary biodiversity and you!” as one participant jokingly put it. Recalling the generic essay topics that one encounters in high school, the tongue-in-cheek prompt generated many nuanced responses, thoughtful questions, and careful critiques that stimulated discussion throughout the retreat. Later, I was surprised to find a Government of Canada website entitled “Why Biodiversity Is Important to You.” With its uncanny echo of our free write, the website takes up a similar prompt but in a markedly different way. I was struck not only by the website’s emphasis on simplicity when addressing biodiversity loss, but also by the unstated assumptions and layers of irony that characterize how the settler-colonial nation, with its long history of destroying biodiversity in the name of resource extraction, defines and understands the concept.
Defining biodiversity as “the variety of living species and ecosystems on Earth and the ecological processes of which they are a part,” the website “highlights fascinating facts about biodiversity in Canada” and outlines the federal government’s work “to conserve it and use it sustainably.” Providing a random assortment of information—lists of flora and fauna, statistics about parks and lakes, tips to implement in readers’ daily lives—the website provides minimal context for the complex connections between seemingly disparate aspects of nature positioned as separate from culture. The website’s form and content perpetuate Canada’s investment in extractivism which, as Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson argues, “removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning” (qtd. in Klein). The website rhetorically removes these relationships, repackaging “biodiversity” as a series of “fascinating facts” for Canadians to consume like nature itself.
This consumptive approach to nature is evident in the opening paragraph:
Why is biodiversity so important? The answer is simple. We all want to continue living in a country where we can watch birds, go fishing, walk in nature, swim in lakes and rivers, and do all the activities that take us outdoors while enjoying fresh air and clean water. The diversity of life is essential for us to enjoy these simple pleasures.
This deceptively simple answer, offered in response to a question marked by grief for many as they witness the intensifying loss of human and more-than-human life under extractive capitalism, assumes a national body that views nature as a resource. The “we” is narrowly defined by a singular desire: to preserve biodiversity because nature is valuable, above all, as a source of human pleasure. Providing examples of “nature at work,” such as plants producing oxygen for “us” to breathe, the website advocates for greater recognition of how nature sustains (certain forms of) life.
Ironically, this emphasis on preserving biodiversity relies on the same violent settler logic that threatens it. Invoking the language of the Doctrine of Discovery, the website asserts that “[p]rotecting biodiversity starts with knowledge and exploration,” which includes “research, monitoring, politics, regulation, enforcement, conservation and partnership activities.” As Zoe Todd (Métis) argues, the federal government increasingly supports Indigenous-led conservation efforts which, when grounded in self-determination, positively impact biodiversity; however, the government tends to promote Indigenous conservation efforts without supporting sovereignty, all while investing billions in resource extraction projects and partnering with industry to criminalize land defenders (“Respect”).
The government’s role in destroying the biodiversity it strives to protect is apparent in its celebration of the national parks system—which, as the website notes, originated in 1885 with Banff National Park, the site of our retreat: “We have the best national park system in the world and have grown it by almost 50% since 2005.” This point masks how the parks system is a key part of Canada’s tourism industry, which exists because the government violently expropriated Indigenous lands in the name of white settler nationalism to justify railways, highways, extractive industries, and the destruction of biodiversity.
Notably, the website highlights Wood Buffalo National Park, not Banff, as Canada’s exemplary national park. According to the website, at 44,807 kilometres, Wood Buffalo is Canada’s largest national park; spanning Alberta and the Northwest Territories, it is home to North America’s largest bison herd and the endangered whooping crane’s only nesting site. The website does not mention the park’s proximity to one of the most notoriously destructive resource extraction sites in Canada: the Alberta tar sands. The Mikisew Cree First Nation and other Indigenous nations have long criticized the devastating impacts of bitumen mining in the Athabasca region, and as recently as June 2023 a UNESCO report asserted that oil sands and hydroelectric development pose a significant threat to the park’s unique biodiversity (Weber).
These gaps are not simply blind spots; rather, they are the function of a settler-colonial logic invested in aligning the nation’s extractivist investments with contemporary environmental discourses and policies. How might other stories re-narrativize this colonial, extractivist approach to biodiversity that removes relationships (to recall Simpson)?1
Working at the intersections of Indigenous studies, environmental studies, and anthropology, Zoe Todd offers a decolonial approach to biodiversity that is instructive for restorying fossil fuels, which are often represented as inherently destructive substances that pose a serious threat to biodiversity. Notably, the characterization of fossil fuels as innately toxic is a story more often told by environmental organizations than governments or corporations, which reflects how colonial assumptions about nature-as-resource cut across multiple discourses and signals a need for restorying biodiversity. Reflecting on her relationship to her home province of Alberta, where I also live as an uninvited guest and settler on Treaty Six territory, Todd reminds readers that fossil fuels are “long-dead beings” or kin that the oil economy “weaponises” by unearthing them from their resting places and transforming the massive deposits of carbon and hydrogen into threats (“Fish” 104). “So,” Todd asks, “what other worlds can we dream of for the remnants of the long-gone dinosaurs, of the flora and fauna that existed millions of years ago?” (107). This question strikes me as a crucial one for those who want to think with the concept of literary biodiversities.
Inspired by Todd’s question as well as his own intimate encounters with naturally occurring bitumen on the banks of the Athabasca River and in his petrography,2 Warren Cariou (Métis) also restories bitumen in his art and writing. For example, in “An Athabasca Story” (2012), Cariou offers a story about Elder Brother, a complex figure and important spiritual being in Cree and Métis storytelling (Beeds 63). Driven by cold, hunger, and a longing to connect with his relations, Elder Brother wanders away from familiar territory and stumbles upon the Athabasca tar sands. In an ironic reversal of the terra nullius myth, the story describes the “empty” landscape as Elder Brother bears witness to the horrifying visuals, deafening sounds, and sickening odours of resource extraction (“Athabasca” 70). Combined with the pro-capitalist story of oil development relayed by a worker, who “talk[s] as if he ha[s] no relations at all” (“Athabasca” 72), Elder Brother’s overwhelming sensory encounters with the tar sands attest to how resource extraction’s monocultural hellscapes arise not from bitumen itself, but from the toxic neo-colonial relations that transform it under extractive capitalism.
Cariou’s story illustrates how an extractivist approach to biodiversity runs directly counter to Indigenous ways of knowing grounded in intimate relationships with the land. In a recent essay, he writes: “Indigenous modes of relating to the land represented political, and . . . sensory, threats to the burgeoning carbon-based modernity”; in contrast, individualistic capitalist ideologies condition people “to regard the land from a distance, as a thing to be manipulated rather than a living entity we are utterly dependent on” (“Landsensing” 313). This extractivist view “deaden[s] our senses, numbing our abilities to distinguish the nuances and the teachings of the land” (312). In contrast, “landsensing”—a term Cariou uses to describe the “particular skills of ‘sensing’ the land, which were very highly developed among Indigenous people before colonization, but which [have] been affected by colonial interventions in various ways” (309)—requires an intimate relationship with the land. He argues: “We need to find better ways to feel our connection to the environment, and to the sources of our energy, so that we understand at a deep bodily level what is at stake in our relationships with the world” (322).3 Cariou’s tales of multisensory intimacy offer a sense of how bitumen, and biodiversity, might be storied differently.
Notes
1. Thank you to Dr. Willow White (Métis) for inviting me to consider this question in this way.
2. See Cariou, “Petrography and Bitumen Poetics,” and Cariou, “Petrography.”
3. In an earlier essay, Cariou describes this relationship as “energy intimacy” (“Aboriginal” 18).
Works Cited
Beeds, Tasha. “Remembering the Poetics of Ancient Sound kistêsinâw/wîsahkêcâhk’s maskihkiy (Elder Brother’s Medicine).” Indigenous Poetics in Canada, edited by Neal McLeod, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014, pp. 61–72.
Cariou, Warren. “Aboriginal.” Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman., Jennifer Wenzel, and Patritica Yaeger, Fordham UP, 2017, pp. 17–20. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1hfr0s3.6.
—. “An Athabasca Story.” Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment, no. 7, spring 2012, pp. 70–75.
—. “Landsensing: Body, Territory, Relation.” Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures, edited by Larissa Lai and Smaro Kamboureli, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2023, pp. 307–23.
—. “Petrography.” Warren Cariou, warrencariou.com/petrography. Accessed 31 Aug. 2023.
—. “Petrography and Bitumen Poetics.” Poetics and Extraction, special issue of Canadian Literature, edited by Max Karpinski and Melanie Dennis Unrau, vol. 251, 2022, pp. 147–50.
Klein, Naomi. “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson.” YES! Magazine, 6 Mar. 2013, yesmagazine.org/socialjustice/2013/03/06/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-nomore-leanne-simpson.
Todd, Zoe. “Fish, Kin, and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, vol. 43, spring/summer 2017, pp. 102–07.
—. “Respect for Autonomy and Sovereignty of Indigenous and Local Peoples, not Arbitrary Protection Targets, a Key to Protecting Global Biodiversity.” Critical Indigenous Fish Philosophy, 1 Dec. 2022, fishphilosophy.org/2022/12/01/indigenous-sovereignty-and-autonomy-notarbitrary-protection-targets-a-key-to-protecting-global-biodiversity.
Weber, Bob. “Wood Buffalo National Park Still on Environmental Threat List; UNESCO Calls for Action on Oilsands.” Canada’s National Observer, 5 July 2023, nationalobserver.com/2023/07/05/news/wood-buffalo-national-parkenvironmental-threat-list-unesco-oilsands.
“Why Biodiversity Is Important to You.” Canada.ca, Government of Canada, 29 Nov. 2022, canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/biodiversity/-publications/ why-biodiversity-is-important-to-you.html.
Dr. Stephanie Oliver is an associate professor of English at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus, where she teaches Canadian, postcolonial, and diasporic literature. Her research interests include literary representations of smell and diaspora, writing about sensory encounters with oil, and the poetics and ethics of breathing in settler atmospheres. Her work has been published in Canadian Literature, Transformative Dialogues, and Teaching Innovation Projects; most recently, her article “‘Stinking as Thinking’ in Warren Cariou’s ‘Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto’” appeared in the special issue of Canadian Literature on poetics and extraction. She also co-edited (with Kit Dobson) the special issue Everything is Awful? Ecology and Affect in Literatures in Canada for Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a manuscript about smell in recent Canadian literature and has a chapter on Rita Wong and settler atmospherics forthcoming in the collection Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics and Poetics Today (U of Alberta).
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