Negotiating Air in the Great Bear Rainforest. CO2 Emission Trade in the Context of Resource Use, Conservation and Decolonisation in Canada

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Emission Trading is not only a political and economic tool intended to reduce the vast amount of CO2-emissions in industrialized nations. Rather, it has been tied to global environmental strategies, and has by now been established as a worthwhile ‘alternative’ to the exploitation of natural resources. In embracing this global perspective, emission trading permeates local human-environment relations and political structures, and influences them substantially. This research project investigates one of the world’s greatest emission saving projects, the Great Bear Carbon Project at Canada’s Pacific coast, in the context of North American indigeneity. Drawing on the example of the Heiltsuk Nation and the superordinate association of the Coastal First Nations, the effects of the commodification of emission rights on their environmental and territorial relations will be examined. Local strategies for the use of natural resources are thereby situated between Indigenous endeavors for decolonialization, interests of multinational companies, international environmental movements and federal eco-policies. Building on the theoretical reflections on human-environmental relations of Bruno Latour, Marisol de la Cadena and Philippe Descola as well as on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of assemblage, interactions and political negotiations between human as well as non-human actors will be considered. The aims of this empirical study are to shed new light on the consequences of the global emissions trade and to better understand changing human-environmental relations of Indigenous peoples of North America.