Bare Nature and the Genocide–Ecocide Nexus—The Conditions of General Threat and the Hope of Cultural Adaptation: The Case of Canada’s Tar Sands

Abstract

This article develops the concept of bare nature by examining the interdependent and underlying conditions that make genocidal and ecocidal processes possible. Agamben identifies states of exception as a juridical key to understanding the legitimating logic that facilitate acts of arbitrary exclusion, targeted killing, and the life and death policy decisions that affect large segments of the population. Such regulated, collective precarity constitutes bare life. I argue that bare nature is produced through a parallel process involving ecological “sacrifice zones” that function as states of exception that regulate other-than-human life in service of extreme energy extraction, creating the conditions for ongoing ecological destruction. In the second part of the article, I argue that the local impacts of extreme energy projects like the Canadian Tar Sands contribute to the conditions of bare nature and bare life globally, presenting a “. . . general (transnational) danger threaten[ing] the interests of several states and their inhabitants.” In closing, I turn to the ascendant Indigenous politics in Canada to consider what local cultural survival, global ecological adaptation, and nonsovereign governance models involve in the era of climate change. Indigenous-led politics grounded in land-based normative ethics provide a basis for building alternative futures based on establishing and maintaining conditions of holistic interdependence. Such interdependent conditions will be able to emerge in direct proportion to the extent that the conditions of bare life and bare nature are delegitimated, decommodified, and rendered inoperative.