ABSTRACT
During recent negotiations over whether or not to develop energy resources in the Yukon Flats region of central Alaska, those involved appeared not only to disagree about the value of potential energy but also to deploy different ways of thinking about what energy is. The following account of these negotiations asks how multiple ontologies of energy animate such debates over natural resources. The term ontology used here helps to signal the presence of alternative and indigenous epistemic spaces (Watson and Huntington 2008) in such conflicts as it indicates ways of knowing and acting toward energy sources that, like water, land, and wildlife, are all too often considered neutral and static commodities. Oil, gas, and renewable fuels are curious hybrids that are at once social constructions of value and unruly objects with unique, place-specific, biophysical properties (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Whatmore 2006; Kaup 2008; Bridge 2009). They are multinational: material substances extracted and circulated among countries, metrics, economies, and other sorts of petro-capital alliance. But they are also multinatural in the ways that they exist in many natures, diverse cosmologies of resources, society, and environment. In Alaska, such curious hybrids—especially oil and gas—have a long and storied presence as a recurring gold rush, as sources of phenomenal wealth and indigenous empowerment and/or dispossession, and as harbingers of ecological collapse. These mythic narratives are underpinned by historical conceptions of what energy is and fields of knowledge of how it works that hover uneasily around the interactions of corporations, state and federal regulatory groups, tribal governments, scientists, and others involved in making decisions about regional development.
