Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, “Intactness,” and Extractive Industry in Canada

Debates over the environmental costs of industrial resource extraction in Alberta, Canada—home to a petrochemical industry that plays an outsize economic and political role—are reaching a fever pitch in response to government regulations on industry, data on climate change threats, and social movements pushing for environmental protection. Away from the news headlines, scientists are developing new metrics and models to calculate biodiversity loss and other outcomes of industrial environmental contamination. But these data are not only used to provide evidence of environmental harm. Practitioners of settler science like the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute employ such data in combination with the metaphor of environmental “intactness,” generating colonial mythologies of terra nullius anew, and enabling industrial extraction to continue. This paper theorizes a technology of settler colonial concealment. It shows how settler technologies of quiescence operate through the strategic use of scientific metrics, thereby concealing evidence of colonial harm and promoting a fiction of environmental “intactness” in a province that is home to one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world.

politics of measurement, settler science, polluting industry, reproduction of violent colonial relations, environmental contamination, ecology, production of ignorance

How do the seemingly banal models used in some practices of settler science play a central role in reproducing violent colonial relations? This paper argues that such violence does not play out directly but rather through the production of knowledge that is used to justify the expropriation and dispossession of land. I develop the concept of technologies of quiescence – of quietness, stillness, inactivity, or dormancy; of making quiet or calm¹ – to name the particular technologies, developed and mobilized by settler states, that minimize or displace concern and produce apathy. Such technologies work to conceal and suppress evidence that colonial violence has been done (and is still underway), and thereby enable the settler state’s ongoing colonial practices to proceed, often uninterrupted and unrecognized.

This paper investigates the production of quiescence, apathy, ignorance, and doubt by analyzing how particular data practices in environmental science help to epistemologically and politically scaffold the settler colonial mythology of terra nullius.² In particular, I show how the environmental metaphor of “intactness” works to elide the multifarious violences perpetrated by the settler colonial state against Indigenous Peoples and lands. Before I continue, I want to position myself in relation to this work. I am a non-Indigenous settler scholar, and this positionality informs my commitment to identifying and critiquing the mechanisms through which colonialism’s operations are naturalized and made to appear ordinary and unremarkable; my aim is to contribute to the work of dismantling persistent structures of colonialism.

This paper focuses on the metaphor of “intactness,” used by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) in the production of biodiversity data, and investigates how such data are used to sustain industrial resource extraction in the province of Alberta. The ABMI uses a common (though not uncontroversial)³ method in the field of ecology: the biodiversity intactness index, or BII. Ecologists R.J. Scholes and R. Biggs, based at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Environmentek in Pretoria, South Africa, developed the BII as a metric for assessing the rate of biodiversity loss that would be sensitive to subtle changes and allow for interventions before species disappear from a region or become extinct (Scholes and Biggs 2005).⁴ In the absence of a pre-industrial baseline measurement, the ABMI uses the BII to create a statistically modeled baseline or reference condition.⁵ The ABMI is obligated to provide such data to international environmental protection organizations such as the Forest Stewardship Council; when this metric is used to find that biodiversity is intact and minimal harm has been done, this enables the ABMI’s industrial clients to obtain approval to continue their extraction operations. By meeting these organizations’ standards for environmental management, Canadian industry can continue to export the products of extractive industry to international markets, supporting the settler colonial state’s valuation of land as “matter to be extracted from, used, sullied, and taken from, over and over again” (Simpson 2016).

The ABMI’s use of the BII enables resource extraction to continue, thus propping up the settler colonial Canadian state, a state in which any threat to resource extraction is seen as an existential threat. By orienting its operations around the BII, the ABMI directs scientific and public attention toward the idea of a pristine, “untouched” condition: one in which neither the ecosystem nor biodiversity is particularly threatened. The adjective intact, meaning untouched,⁶ erases the harm done by industry and the settler colonial state more broadly. It presumes presence rather than absence, and not only presence but a bountiful presence that leaves little space for measurements indicating absence or endangerment. Conversely, if the index had been named to point at matters of ecological concern, such as contamination, then findings about contamination would be more readily generated.

The ABMI’s use of the BII aggregates data in ways that suggest that biodiversity in Alberta is largely “intact,” despite the reams of data on the catastrophic scale of contamination wrought by the tar sands (CBC 2014; Graney 2020), which international NGOs, including Greenpeace, have identified as “the world’s most destructive” industrial extraction project (Berman 2017; Leahy 2019). The metaphor of intactness is mobilized by the ABMI both to disappear evidence of harm wrought by industry and to enable colonial extraction to proceed with impunity. In this way, the ABMI’s use of the BII is a concrete modeling practice that enables what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call “settler futurity” to be produced through settler science (2012, 3).

The pervasiveness of the “intactness” metaphor shapes scientific knowledge about biodiversity in Alberta, and it interrupts and restricts public discourse on industrial pollution as colonialism (Liboiron 2021). The BII does not produce data documenting a pristine, untouched environment, but instead produces data indicating that biodiversity remains intact enough for extraction to continue. Framing biodiversity as “intact” enough not only enables colonial extractive industry to continue but also directly counters Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) as well as other Indigenous forms of resistance against settler colonial extraction and science, particularly those led by Indigenous women (Walia 2013). Extending scholarship on how settler colonialism enables environmental violence (Shadaan and Murphy 2020) and on how “scientific epistemologies and their monopoly on truth claims” can exacerbate existing inequities (Cech et al. 2017, 745), this paper argues that intactness can act as a new iteration and continuation of the terra nullius doctrine. A foundational mythology animating settler colonial knowledge cultures, the notion of terra nullius has helped to shape colonial knowledge production, including the development of metrics in science. The metaphor of intactness, I argue, is used to cement settler control over land and resources while obscuring and marginalizing Indigenous refusals of settler science and industry.

The fact that settler colonial states establish and maintain themselves through acts of violence directed towards both Indigenous Peoples and the land has been well documented by many scholars (King 2019; King, Navarro, and Smith 2020; McGregor 2018; Whyte 2018). I am interested here in the settler colonial technologies that act in concert with such acts of violence, enabling colonial destructiveness to proceed uninterrupted and even unrecognized: technologies of quiescence. I analyze how these technologies operate through a scientific model that disappears evidence of settler colonial harm and promotes a fiction of environmental “intactness” in a province that is home to one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world.

In this analysis, I am practicing what Deboleena Roy calls a feminist critique of science focused on “interrogating the impact of reductionist thinking” in the sciences (2018, 5). My analysis explains how the development of a scientific metric (including its history and the intentions informing its development) and that metric’s strategic uses are effaced when it becomes naturalized as the frame through which a phenomenon is measured and perceived. I show how the contingency of the ABMI’s use of the BII metric is obscured, thereby enabling the knowledge produced by the ABMI to seem logical and inevitable. As part of this special section entitled “Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture,” this paper illuminates how metaphor as method enables the BII to act as a mechanism of settler colonial knowledge production, taking the form of a technology of quiescence.

By calling “intactness” a metaphor, I am not suggesting that there is no utility to the measurements taken via the BII, nor that scientists conducting this research at the ABMI are not acting in good faith. Instead, I aim to draw attention to how intactness brings the broader frame of settler colonial science into view, by emphasizing how the metric of intactness narrates the past, present, and future in the interest of the settler colonial state,⁷ producing quiescence through erasure. As a technology of quiescence, intactness as a metric of biodiversity exemplifies what Donna Haraway calls “the simultaneity of fact and fiction, materiality and semioticity, object and trope” (1999, 82–83). By focusing public attention on intactness, the ABMI grossly simplifies and papers over critical aspects of biodiversity research. Most conservation work focuses on habitat, not species,⁸ as biodiversity exists at multiple levels. And even at the species level, biodiversity involves species composition, interactions, richness, and evenness (Chapin et al. 2000). Not only is this complexity erased under the intactness metaphor but also, in emphasizing intactness, the ABMI distracts from industrial harms and the harms perpetrated by colonialism more broadly.

STS scholarship on the politics of measurement is central to the concept of technologies of quiescence. A large body of work on the politics of measurement shows that data collection practices are informed by the social and political context where the science is being carried out, as well as by the assumptions and positionality of the scientists themselves (Brown 1992; Frickel et al. 2010; Kimura 2016; Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert 2016; Lave 2012; Li 2009; Liboiron et al. 2021; Matz, Wylie and Kriesky 2017; Ottinger 2010; Pine and Liboiron 2015). Related scholarship on the politics of quantification, including Ted Porter’s (1995) work on quantification as a technology that enables measurements to appear politically neutral and Dan Bouk’s (2015) work on statistics as a practice mobilized by state and industrial actors to explain and justify inequities, has also informed this paper.

Many Indigenous scholars’ interventions into this body of work demonstrate the need to analyze metrics and instruments in the context of colonial relations (Liboiron 2021; McGregor 2018; Murphy 2006; Palmer 2020; Rodriguez-Lonebear 2021; Smith 2021; TallBear 2013; Walter and Carroll 2021). Among the crucial contributions made by these authors is the anti-deterministic insight that such technologies do not inevitably produce data in the interests of colonial reproduction. Instead, metrics and instruments can also be mobilized to serve Indigenous communities and to resist colonial structures.

There are parallels between technologies of quiescence and agnotology—the study of how ignorance is fostered, particularly by industrial actors accused of causing harm—but there are also important differences. STS scholarship has demonstrated the perils of focusing only on the production of knowledge to the exclusion of the study of the production of ignorance (Frickel and Kinchy 2015; Richter, Cordner, and Brown 2021). Scholarship on agnotology has focused primarily on how industry deliberately produces ignorance and manufactures doubt, showing that ignorance is not a passive or default state but instead one that is strategically aspired towards in contexts where ignorance can be more powerful than knowledge (McGoey 2012). Crucial here is Michelle Murphy’s concept of “regimes of imperceptibility,” first developed in Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (2006). This is a generative framework for analyzing the historical and political contexts in which certain phenomena are rendered perceptible and others imperceptible, and the way that imperceptibility is “at times purposefully generated and maintained…by industry-sponsored science” (2006, 10). In my analysis, the BII is similarly revealed as a domain of imperceptibility, one that renders intactness more “measurable, quantifiable, assessable, and knowable” (Murphy 2006, 9) than contamination.

Industry’s vast economic resources are crucial in enabling the production of doubt, as shown by STS researchers studying Big Pharma and Big Tobacco (Proctor 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010). As Robert Proctor (2008, 17) writes, “if there is a diversity of views on tobacco as a cause of cancer, what fraction of that diversity has been created by the industry itself?” We could ask an analogous question about the role of settler colonial states in deliberately producing ignorance: If there is a diversity of views on the causes of chronic health inequities affecting Indigenous communities, what fraction of that diversity has been created by the settler state itself? And more specifically, in the context of technologies of quiescence: How does settler colonial science contribute to the settler state’s drive to conceal and suppress evidence of harm? The resources available to a settler state in generating doubt, uncertainty, and ignorance are different from those available to private industry, to be sure, but they may be even more effective in producing ignorance. We can see these mechanisms of erasure, aiming to produce quiescence, in diverse state practices: the censorship and redaction of incriminating documents stored at federal archives (Griffith 2019), the destruction of scientific archives holding data on environmental harm and climate change (Learn 2017; Zeffiro 2015), the rewriting of elementary and high school curricula (Deerchild 2018; French 2020), the privileging of scientific data practices that prop up settler colonial doctrines, and even official apologies for colonial violence (Barrera 2015).

How is settler colonial violence obscured or rendered unrecognizable? Both terra nullius and the metaphor of “intactness” are settler fantasies that are disproportionately influential because they are embedded within and emboldened by the settler colonial institutions of law and science. I describe these practices as particular to Canada as a settler colonial state that remains dependent upon an extraction economy. The metaphor of “intactness” advances what Audra Simpson (2016) calls “settler statecraft” by obscuring the colonial extraction and violence inherent in industrial contamination of Indigenous lands and Indigenous communities. It is crucial to understand terra nullius not as a historical myth but as something living now, which requires ongoing maintenance and support in order to remain influential and to continue to bolster the settler state’s ambitions. Settler science plays an important role in continuing to generate terra nullius anew.

If we understand settler colonial science as producing knowledge that serves settlers’ interests and is designed to “rescue settler futurity” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3), then we can ask, how might environmental modeling produce knowledge to justify settlers’ desire to remain? What sort of model would produce knowledge that would naturalize—or complicate—the intention to remain? The concept of intactness offers a promising start.

The ABMI is an environmental monitoring organization that began operations in 1997; its initial funding was provided by the forestry industry (Cronmiller and Noble 2018). Today, the ABMI is a public-private partnership employing credentialed scientists who analyze data collected at the University of Alberta and the Royal Alberta Museum (ABMI 2015; Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021).⁹ The ABMI operates through government funding and academic grants, with the assistance of fees collected and voluntary contributions¹⁰ from the oil, gas, agricultural and forestry industries.¹¹ Half of the members of its board of directors are affiliated with industry: three are representatives of industry lobby groups, and two others hold positions in industry leadership (ABMI Board of Directors, 2021).

There is evidence to suggest that the ABMI uses the BII to indicate that extractive industry in the province has resulted in only negligible biodiversity loss. For instance, ABMI reports have claimed that biodiversity was 94 percent “intact” in the energy-producing region (Carson 2011). Claims of intactness rely on evidence of living species of plants and animals.

In a 2015 speech, the ABMI’s executive director, Kirk Andries, explained that this data is provided to corporations such as the Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, Inc., which commission the ABMI as an “independent third party” to do “scientifically credible reporting” to “validate environmental management practices.” Industry stakeholders, Andries (2015) said, are “the people I would define as our customers. These are people who tell us what they need to know. What is the challenge that they want resolved?…They describe their knowledge requirements, and we produce a model to try to drive outputs that can generate knowledge that can be applied to the practice of management.” The interests of industry stakeholders may thus shape the ABMI’s use of the BII. Andries also described how the ABMI helped the forestry industry obtain a “Gold Star” rating from the Forest Stewardship Council by providing evidence of “acceptable levels of environmental intactness,” which then helped the forestry industry gain “enhanced access to markets” (2015).

In its “Species Website Manual,” the ABMI defines intactness as “a measure of how much human footprint has affected species’ abundances” (ABMI 2017b, 24). In an October 2016 edition of a publication called ABMI Science Letters, the ABMI defines “human footprint” as “the temporary or permanent transformation of native ecosystems to industrial, residential or recreational land uses that is visible from air photos” (Sólymos and Schieck 2016, 1). Given the extent to which environmental contamination remains invisible to the human eye and indetectable to human senses—even in localities where community members possess intimate knowledge of their environment and are extremely attentive to changes¹²—it is startling to learn that the ABMI measures change through aerial photography. This speaks to the scale of environmental harm that is perceptible to the ABMI, while also prompting questions surrounding the methods used by the ABMI to distinguish between sampling sites they consider to have “no human footprint” versus areas where the “human footprint” may have caused biodiversity loss.

This science letter also states that “humans have visibly transformed 27% of Alberta to date” (Sólymos and Schieck 2016, 1, emphasis added), raising the question of what percentage of this region has been transformed when taking into account the kinds of harm and contamination that are not visible via aerial photography. While the authors state that one of the “key messages” of the letter is that the ABMI’s measurements “provide tools for exploring alternative management options in land-use planning,” it is unclear what sort of “alternative management options” might be prompted (Sólymos and Schieck 2016, 1).

My critique of the ABMI’s use of the BII metric is based on my analysis of publicly available documents published by the ABMI, including the science letter, annual reports, published articles, and brief “explainer” documents such as Figure 1. In pursuing this research, my attempts to gain access to other scientific reports that would provide detailed elaborations of the ABMI’s methods in conceptualizing intactness and producing data through the BII have been frustrated. This problem of restricted access to documents is, of course, not new. As Ann Laura Stoler’s (2009) work shows, we can learn as much about a colonial regime through a colonial archive’s absences as we can learn through the documents that are made accessible. Furthermore, the deliberate restriction of access to ABMI documents reflects technologies of quiescence in action, particularly the concealment and suppression of evidence of harm, as well as the mollification and redirection of interested researchers and concerned citizens.

The “Biodiversity Intactness Index” produces measurements of plants’ and animals’ relative presence or absence in Alberta by comparing “the predicted current relative abundance of a species in a given region to its predicted reference relative abundance in that region if there were no human footprint” (ABMI 2017a, 1). The ABMI acknowledges outright that this measurement of the “reference relative abundance,” or, in other words, pre-contact levels of intactness, can only be predicted through the use of models, since these data do not exist in a form that is acceptable to dominant Western scientific standards governing what constitutes reliable data.¹³ There is a strong element of uncertainty implicit in this document, in its insistence on prediction in the absence of data, making it a fertile domain for the production of doubt.

The ABMI produces quiescence by introducing slight methodological amendments to the commonly used BII metric in ecology. For instance, while it is standard practice in ecology to measure each species separately, the ABMI groups many different species together in its calculations. There is also an unmistakeable PR emphasis in the ABMI’s scientific reports; this reflects the ABMI’s status as a public-private partnership that reports to Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc. and the Forest Stewardship Council to assist industrial actors in gaining “enhanced access to markets” (Andries 2015; Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021).

Figure 1 illustrates how the ABMI’s use of graphic design and PR-friendly science communication enables its production of quiescence. This illustration is emblematic of the pro-settlerism perspective espoused by the ABMI, which is naturalized and rendered logical when embedded in the ABMI’s discussion of biodiversity loss. This perspective is immediately evident in the first sentence that appears in Figure 1, which reads, “The ABMI was designed to detect large changes in biodiversity in Alberta” (italics added). Here the ABMI acknowledges that its use of the BII is not sensitive enough to detect small changes in biodiversity, even when these small changes are ecologically significant. Furthermore, the ABMI equates pre-contact environmental “intactness” with a “0% human footprint,” thereby eliding Indigenous presence while also characterizing Indigenous lands prior to European settlement as “empty, unproductive, and in need of capitalist possession” (Murphy 2017, 10).

The ABMI calculates abundance in both “increaser” and “decreaser” species, emphasizing its symmetry and suggesting that the metric equally registers both the maintenance and the loss of biodiversity. However, Figure 1 also illustrates the capacity of technologies of quiescence to conceal evidence of harm and to displace concern. The “increaser” species profiled here, the coyote, increases in number at a much faster rate than “decreaser” species, such as the chickadee, decline when urban expansion and industrial extraction processes threaten animal habitats. The ABMI’s graphic design makes the decrease in chickadee abundance seem minimal, as though there weren’t many chickadees to begin with. It suggests that this decrease in chickadee abundance is relatively insignificant compared to the thriving coyote population. But one species’ increase in number does not make the biodiversity loss of another species any less catastrophic; indeed, such a decrease may be a sentinel of other forms of environmental contamination that may be even more advanced and less perceptible.

Figure 1 does not actually demonstrate how the ABMI uses the BII to measure environmental harm; instead, it merely communicates the habitat preferences of two species. Many of the ABMI’s short “explainer” texts, like Figure 1, present similar narratives that dramatically oversimplify environmental monitoring projects conducted by the ABMI. These “explainer” pages contain minimal text and instead feature images that present field sites as bountiful, with biodiversity “intact” and data that appear strikingly eager to be collected and analyzed by ABMI scientists. There is no mention of monitoring projects being hampered by a lack of access to industrial extraction sites for data collection, or any other barriers that scientists might face. In these ways, it becomes evident that the ABMI enables the reproduction of colonial relations through the production of intactness as the frame for understanding biodiversity and industry in Alberta. The ABMI produces this frame using a PR approach that is remarkably devoid of scientific specificity; it is the aura of intactness that pacifies and displaces concern, rather than precise numerical calculations.

While intactness might pass as a neutral descriptor of fact, we need to attend its work as a metaphor. As an influential metric in ecology that informs controversial, impactful, and irreversible decisions around industrial extraction and its continuation and expansion, intactness acts as “a metaphor that illuminates something else” (Haraway 1999, 82). What is that “something else”? I argue that it illuminates settler colonialism as a value that structures socio-technological life in Canada, although it is not always recognized as such; instead, it is often received as a “view from above, from nowhere” (Haraway 1999, 589). It functions as what Marie Battiste calls “a culturally imperialistic stream that ignores or erodes, if not destroys, other ways of knowing” (2013, 104); it structures science, it structures social policy, it structures education, and yet it often continues to evade settler recognition as a structuring entity.

The ABMI’s metaphor of intactness dematerializes actual ecology by shifting attention to the fantasy of an immaterial thing: the idea of an intact ecological space that promises future health and wealth for its inhabitants. This promise does not necessarily need to be uttered aloud: it is implied through the long-standing Albertan paradigm associating continued extraction with societal collective good and prosperity (Adkin 2016; Shrivastava and Stefanick 2012; Takach 2017). How does the profusion of images of environmental health and economic wealth that is enabled by the metaphor of intactness prevent residents of a settler colonial state from seeing and confronting the multifarious forms of harm perpetrated by colonialism? How does the metaphor of intactness support and further entrench “contemporary constructions of Euro-Canadian whiteness as neutral and observing, as a positionality in which one gazes upon the ills of colonialism but cannot quite think of oneself as involved, responsible, or actively constitutive of (and constituted by) those ills” (Cameron 2011, 171)?

The ABMI’s use of the BII plays a pivotal role in preventing settler Canadians from recognizing the land currently called Canada as stolen Indigenous land, while also projecting an image of Alberta as consisting of “virgin” landscapes that remain untouched by industry. As a rhetorical move that conjures up notions of innocence, the ABMI’s use of the BII furthers the central project of settler science as a form of knowledge production that elides public understanding of colonial space. Lee Maracle’s trenchant description of colonial space is apt here: “a physical space that once belonged to someone or someone else: like tuberculosis colonizing the lung. It once belonged to the breather but now is occupied by the tubercular bacteria and the host will die of it if a war is not waged against the tuberculosis” (2017, 123).

Considering how intactness functions as a metaphor, it is useful to think with Haraway about a metaphor’s centrality to the paradigm in which it emerges. She writes, “a metaphor is the vital spirit of a paradigm (or perhaps its basic organizing relation).…It leads to a searching for the limits of the metaphoric system and thus generates the anomalies important in paradigm change” (Haraway, quoted in Roy 2018, 135). If the metaphor of intactness enables settler colonial environmental science to produce a future for itself, then what might lead to paradigm change? One possibility is to take up the opposite of the metaphor of intactness: brokenness, contamination, loss, or incompleteness. What sort of metaphors would enable the production and circulation of knowledges that no longer conceal this brokenness? Which metaphors could prompt a new paradigm?

Tiffany Lethabo King calls for new concepts to support abolitionist and decolonial work: “Conquest must be perpetually elaborated and interrogated with all of our existing faculties, as well as the ones that have yet to be developed.…Conquest is always changing and in flux. It is in continual need of new language or new conceptual tools” (2019, 49). This need is particularly acute in contexts where the reproduction of colonial relations is subtle, quiet, and largely hidden, but nevertheless deliberately and intricately planned—as in the case of the ABMI. Owing to this subtlety, we might overlook how a scientific metric like the BII lies at the center of colonial resource extraction processes. We might look instead to the building of new pipelines, which remains a crucial arena for contestation. But industrial actors in Alberta are not only beholden to shareholders; they also need to produce scientific data showing that the environment remains intact enough to gain permission to build those pipelines in the first place. Through this lens, we see that a seemingly banal scientific metric like the BII is crucial to Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance (1999; 2008), characterized by Murphy as not only Indigenous “survival-as-resistance,” but also “about what has to end, what has to come apart …to dismantle violent infrastructures” (2017, 11).

The Papal Bulls of Discovery, issued in the fifteenth century, enabled colonization to take place through the Doctrine of Discovery, an international law that permitted colonial “explorers” to claim sovereignty over the lands that they “discovered” (Paul 2006). Crucial to the operation of the Doctrine of Discovery was the concept of “vacant land” or terra nullius. Lands whose inhabitants were not Christian—such as the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island—were categorized as “vacant” or terra nullius (Paul 2006).

Harsha Walia (2013) describes terra nullius as a “racist civilizing discourse” mobilized by colonial states to “uphold the political and legal right for colonial powers to conquer supposedly barren Indigenous lands,” and writes that it is more commonly associated with the settler colonial state of Australia than that of Canada. Similarly, Irene Watson (2014, 518) characterizes terra nullius as an “unspoken principle” in Australia, which persists in settler colonial knowledge cultures and institutions even though it was legally repudiated by the High Court in 1992. This paper argues that the BII is a concrete mechanism through which terra nullius remains extant in settler colonial environmental science. But rather than engaging in what Eve Tuck (2009) calls “damage-centered research,” focused on harm inflicted on Indigenous Peoples and lands, I have examined how a commonly used metric in environmental science plays a crucial role in reproducing colonial relations.

The ABMI’s use of the metaphor of intactness acts as a lever in the larger machinery of colonial industrial extraction in Canada; unless we know that the lever is there, we cannot step in to interrupt it. In this way, the paper takes up Murphy’s “invitation to consider what infrastructures and concepts have to be dismantled to make room for another way of being and knowing to emerge” (2017, 10).

There is a growing body of Indigenous-led work that examines how terra nullius continues to shape colonial violence in Canada, as well as draws attention to Indigenous resistance against it.¹⁴ Murphy describes terra nullius as a “legal fiction” that “is used to support a state’s claim of sovereignty over land they ‘find’” (2017, 11). This “legal fiction” remains profoundly influential and deeply rooted in settler colonial knowledge cultures today. Further, Murphy ties terra nullius not to the laws and institutions of the settler colonial state, but to the cultural reproduction of colonial relations: “land and life [are] coded by a colonial gaze as empty, unproductive, and in need of capitalist possession” (9–10, emphasis added). These scholars draw a direct line from terra nullius and the settler colonial Canadian state’s seizure of Indigenous lands to the state’s economic dependence on polluting industry, and then to the environmental violence inflicted upon Indigenous communities and communities of color, revealing it as simultaneously colonial violence (Liboiron 2021; Murphy 2017).

The legal context is important, as shown by the Yellowhead Institute’s Land Back report (Pasternak, King, and the Yellowhead Institute 2019), not only because it continues to pose barriers to Indigenous sovereignty but also because the legal repudiation of the doctrine of terra nullius remains incomplete. As John Borrows’s (2015) work shows, the doctrine of terra nullius continues to undergird state institutions and epistemic practices in Canada, despite repeated legal assertions on the part of the Canadian settler colonial state that “the doctrine of terra nullius (that no one owned the land prior to European assertion of sovereignty) never applied in Canada” (Supreme Court of Canada verdict in the case of Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, cited in Borrows 2015, 703). Borrows declares, “Canadian law still has terra nullius written all over it” (2015, 703). Moreover, state- and industry-funded practices of environmental science operate with terra nullius as a core unaddressed assumption, while also mobilizing the fantasy of a land that could, in the future, be returned to a pristine state, intact, no harm done. In this way, environmental science methods such as the BII enact a new form of colonial domination. This new form of colonial relations aims to coax subjects into submission, or quiescence.

Ultimately, the ABMI’s use of the BII enables industrial extraction to proceed with impunity. It does so by generating numerical measurements that are framed as evidence of a regional ecosystem that has supposedly not been harmed enough to justify halting industrial activity. This modeling rests upon multiple assumptions that are thinkable only through the lens of the settler state. Two assumptions undergird the ABMI’s use of the BII: the first is of a past “empty land” without any human footprint, actively eliding Indigenous presence, both past and present. A second assumption is that remediation would be able to fully “undo” (or conceal) the harms caused by extractive industry. The ABMI’s analysis projects a possible future of “abundance” enabled by processes of remediation described as a state in which “all human footprint is converted back, or ‘backfilled’, to native vegetation types” (Sólymos and Schieck 2016, 2). This fantasy of total remediation, which would erase all lasting effects of industry, conveniently overlooks chronic forms of contamination. In this sense the very concept of remediation gives voice to the same kind of fallacy as the concept of reconciliation: the misleading sense that there was once a harmonious moment of “conciliation” that could be regained.

In Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper (Pasternak, King, and Yellowhead Institute 2019), members of the Yellowhead Institute emphasize that the central question for Canada as a settler colonial state is that of land dispossession, not reconciliation; the land must be returned to its Indigenous land-, water-, and knowledge keepers.¹⁵ Analyzing the “existing land and resource strategies of federal and provincial governments,” the Land Back report seeks to identify the particular mechanisms through which the settler colonial state, in collaboration with industry, continues to “dispossess Indigenous Peoples of land and waters today” (8). One of the report’s key findings is the identification and analysis of “the legal fictions created by the Crown to empower itself to legally steal Indigenous lands,” with a particular focus on injunctions (33). What is the scientific counterpart of the injunction? If injunctions are a legal tool of the settler state that enable it to continue dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their lands today—including unceded lands that are designated as “Crown land”—then can we understand the ABMI’s use of the BII as similarly enabling dispossession and extraction by concealing evidence of the harm wrought by industry?

One of the most important interventions made by the Land Back report is the “Mine Sweeper Map,” with its potential to correct public understanding/ignorance of the relationship between the settler state’s prioritization of natural resource extraction, the Indian Act, the location of reserves, environmental destruction, and the mechanisms of continuing dispossession of lands and water from Indigenous Peoples (Pasternak, King, and Yellowhead Institute 2019). This map was developed to address the problems of scale and visibility that continue to be exploited by the settler state and industry because of the ways in which they promote quiescence. Visualizing the location of industrial extraction sites in relation to reserves, the Mine Sweeper Map powerfully interrupts the doctrine of terra nullius. The map uses aerial photography to reveal that “vast areas of Crown Land” that are “depicted on most maps” as “empty and unoccupied space” are neither empty nor unoccupied, but instead are spaces brimming with contestation and violence, where industrial extraction, active dispossession, “land alienation, denial of Aboriginal rights, and erasure of Indigenous law” proceed with impunity (26). Refuting terra nullius, the Mine Sweeper Map shows that any limitations placed on the visibility of these operations are not incidental but instead intentional, a central aspect of colonial planning; this insight applies as well to the ABMI’s promotion of the intactness metaphor.

While a vast gulf divides the ABMI and the Yellowhead Institute politically, the BII and the Mine Sweeper Map both use the same method for measuring the scale of environmental impact: aerial photography.¹⁶ This raises important questions about assumptions made in relation to technological determinism, and points to the flexibility of scientific methods. How can the ABMI and the Yellowhead Institute produce such different knowledges about the environmental impacts of industrial resource extraction, when using the same method? Does aerial photography become a colonial technology in the hands of the ABMI, and an anticolonial technology in the hands of the Yellowhead Institute? The question is more complex because both the ABMI and the Yellowhead Institute use several different methods simultaneously, which prohibits a reductive focus on aerial photography specifically. But the question remains: How can the use of the same method to photograph the same lands produce such different pictures of environmental impact? The ABMI emphasizes intactness, enabling resource extraction to continue, while the Mine Sweeper Map emphasizes contestation, dispossession, and harm, demonstrating the urgent need for change.

In conclusion, it is not the Biodiversity Intactness Index metric that is inherently colonial; it is the ABMI’s use of the metaphor of intactness to conceal and suppress evidence of harm that reproduces colonial relations by enabling ongoing practices of colonial dispossession and expropriation to proceed uninterrupted. This distinction points to the enormous capacities of anticolonial science to interrupt technologies of quiescence and to reduce their disproportionate influence.

Even as we enter a long-awaited moment of reckoning in settler colonial Canada (Callison and Young 2020), evidence documenting how colonial violence has continually been concealed and disavowed remains elusive, as settler science continues to produce quiescence through erasure. Increased attention to the work of metaphor in enabling this erasure, particularly through scholarship in feminist STS, stands to contribute methods for unveiling all that which metaphors have kept hidden for too long. In so doing, this work can open up a generative space of resistance.

I would like to thank Paul Grogan, Max Liboiron, Erin Martineau, Sarah Overington, the Special Section editors T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with earlier versions of this article. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

¹ The noun quiescence is defined as “The state or condition of being quiescent; quietness, stillness, inactivity, dormancy; an instance of this. Also: the action of making quiet or calm” (OED). Technologies of quiescence enact a mollification; they can soothe and pacify. They work to minimize or displace concern and they can produce apathy.

² In Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call, Arthur Manuel writes that the first step toward decolonizing Canada “is a simple one…formally denounce the racist Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius as justification for settler presence on our lands” (2015, 275–76). The Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius have been mobilized to justify the European colonists’ seizure of Indigenous lands (David 2022). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Call to Action number 49 calls for the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius as concepts originating with papal bulls issued in 1455 and 1493 (Stefanovich 2022). Attention to this Call to Action was renewed when delegates from the Assembly of First Nations met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on March 31, 2022, and asked him to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery (David 2022).

⁵ The BII is not the only metric that the ABMI uses, but it is the metric that the ABMI emphasizes in its communication to broader audiences. This paper analyzes the ABMI’s prioritization of the BII as well as the ABMI’s unusual use of metrics that focus on intactness rather than measuring species interactions, richness, composition, and evenness (Chapin et al. 2000).

⁶ The etymology of the adjective intact is from the Latin intactus, consisting of the prefix in and tactus, the past participle of tangere (to touch) (OED). The Oxford English Dictionary defines intact as “untouched; not affected by anything that injures, diminishes, or sullies; kept or left entire; unblemished; unimpaired.” The ABMI’s use of the metric of intactness orients both scientists and members of the public towards thinking of Alberta as ecologically intact, whole, and uncontaminated, and rhetorically steers people away from considerations of diminished biodiversity, damage, loss, and irreversible harm.

⁷ There are important resonances here with Max Liboiron and colleagues’ (2021) work on how seemingly neutral measurements and research practices in environmental science carry with them their legacies as tools of colonialism. They write, “normal aspects of research…are engaged in these [colonial] relationships, usually in ways that are difficult to see because they are part of scientific norms” (Liboiron et al. 2021, 20).

⁸ In preserving habitat, it becomes possible to preserve many species. A reductive focus on charismatic species can distract attention away from changes in species interactions, and biodiversity loss more broadly.

⁹ For an analysis of the ABMI’s citizen science project “NatureLynx” as a practice of “public relations citizen science,” see “When Citizen Science Is Public Relations” (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021).

¹⁰ Corporations operating in the oil, gas, and forestry industries, including Shell Canada, Imperial Oil, Suncor, MEG Energy, Devon Energy Corporation, and Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc., are named as sponsors on the ABMI website (ABMI 2021).

¹¹ Close to half of the ABMI’s annual operating budget comes from Alberta’s Oil Sands Monitoring Program, which collects fees from the oil industry to fund monitoring in the province “according to a funding formula developed collaboratively by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Alberta government” (Government of Alberta and Environment and Climate Change Canada 2018). ABMI’s remaining funding comes primarily from the Government of Alberta, but is also supplemented by funds from the private sector, including Imperial Oil, Suncor Energy, and NorZinc (formerly Canadian Zinc) (ABMI 2020).

¹² For a more detailed exploration of these questions, see “'Water Is a Living Thing': Environmental and Human Health Implications of the Athabasca Oil Sands for the Mikisew Cree First Nation and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Northern Alberta" (McLachlan 2014).

¹³ The Yellowhead Institute’s Land Back report provides a powerful retort to this assertion by noting that this data does exist in the form of oral history. The Land Back report describes the difficulties faced by baseline studies in environmental science and points to the often-ignored resource of oral history and knowledges: “Oral history is one example of baseline knowledge and is a form of scientific monitoring” (Pasternak, King, and Yellowhead Institute 2019, 30).

¹⁴ As Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) argues, this emphasis on terra nullius should not detract from the long history—and powerful acceleration in the present—of Indigenous resistance and decolonial work against the attempts at genocide perpetrated by settler colonial states.

¹⁵ The Land Back report notes not only the loss of biodiversity but also the disastrous mismanagement of expropriated lands by the settler state and industry. The report indicts the “narrow, short-term view of Western environmental policies and practices,” emphasizing that “while biodiversity is declining in all parts of the world, it is declining much less rapidly in those lands still managed by Indigenous communities” (Pasternak, King, and Yellowhead Institute 2019, 64). The importance of funding and support for Indigenous land management practices was urgently discussed in the summer of 2021 as wildfires erupted across the west coast in the land known as British Columbia. If Indigenous land-keepers and knowledge-holders had been permitted to practice controlled burns in this region, these wildfires could have been prevented (Paling 2021).

¹⁶ I want to thank Max Liboiron for this important insight, and for their generous and generative comments on an earlier draft of this paper, which have significantly improved this work. Of course, I am responsible for all of this paper’s shortcomings.

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Sarah Blacker is a Sessional Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto. Her book manuscript in progress, Warding off Disease: Racialization and Health in Settler Colonial Canada, examines the role of data practices in making knowledge claims about the causes of health inequities.