Always and forever: Materializing an environmental public in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Abstract

In this article, we examine how residents of the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska, an area known for its vibrant salmon fishery, have mobilized to oppose the longstanding threat of large-scale mining in the Bay's headwaters. Drawing on ethnographic research in the region, we show how organizers and activists working to defeat the proposed Pebble Mine respond to unceasing if often unpredictable pressures that arrive in a distinctively erratic, fast-yet-slow fashion. Our analysis explores the implications of this condition for everyday efforts to bring together and maintain what we conceptualize as an environmental public: a community whose composition speaks to certain spatial, temporal, and material features associated with natural resources as well as to the bureaucratic demands of the resource-regulating, extraction-oriented state. By joining scholarship on resource temporalities with that on material publics, we add to studies of action in the face of extractivism in highlighting the tremendous behind-the-scenes labor and dexterity required to sustain an environmental public through the vicissitudes of a drawn-out struggle, requirements that in this case give rise to an always-and-forever political subjectivity primed for perpetual vigilance. While we focus on the specificities of the Pebble fight, we argue that this subjectivity and its burdens are central to a growing number of environmental contests today, as conditions of vulnerability are broadened at the same time that responsibility for confronting them proves unevenly distributed.