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Short abstract:

Examining the methods used by government- and industry-funded environmental monitoring organizations as well as community- and Indigenous-led monitoring projects, this paper analyzes the political consequences of the pluralization of expertise on environmental contamination in Alberta, Canada.

Long abstract:

What counts as expert knowledge on the environmental contamination that is produced by the petrochemical industry in Alberta, Canada? Examining the methods used by government- and industry-funded environmental monitoring organizations as well as community- and Indigenous-led monitoring projects, this paper analyzes the political consequences of the pluralization of expertise on environmental contamination in Alberta. Prior to the present moment of pluralization, there has been significant political pressure in Alberta to circulate data that minimizes evidence of the harm wrought by the petrochemical industry. In this context, knowledge produced through the use of dominant ecological metrics can alternately mobilize concern, prompting members of the public to take action, and, conversely, induce apathy.

With its focus on the pluralization of expertise in the field of ecology, this talk examines ecologists’ use of the metrics of inference and intactness. Inference can produce ignorance through scalar work that can render environmental contamination imperceptible, thereby limiting public knowledge of harm. Furthermore, expert knowledge that frames biodiversity as “intact” can have significant consequences for environmental regulation and policymaking in the region, enabling extractive industries to proceed. This form of expert knowledge can generate numerical measurements that are framed as evidence of a regional ecosystem that has supposedly not been harmed enough to justify halting or modifying industrial activity. In addition, the use of the metric of intactness can produce further epistemic and political tension when it directly counters Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as well as Indigenous refusals of settler colonial extraction projects in Alberta.