Corporate ecology: BC Hydro’s Stikine-Iskut project and the unbuilt environment

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2011.01.006

Journal of Historical Geography

Volume 37, Issue 3, July 2011, Pages 358-369

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2011.01.006 Get rights and content

Abstract

For every successful megaproject, there are dozens that have failed to launch, left as paper remains, imaginary geographies of development and enterprise. Although most scholarly attention focuses understandably on the projects which have been built, we need to look again at those projects that have been put aside, rejected, and cancelled. Failed projects produce unbuilt environments, and these have their own peculiar effects. This paper interrogates the planning, development, debate and abandonment of a massive infrastructure project in a remote area of northwest British Columbia. BC Hydro’s attempt to build five dams on the Stikine and Iskut Rivers in the late 1970s and early 1980s never materialized. However, in the ten-year attempt to justify the economic and environmental cost of the proposed dams, BC Hydro commissioned several dozen large resource inventories and analyses of biophysical, cultural, socioeconomic and hydrological data in the Stikine Watershed, where this information had been largely absent. In doing so, BC Hydro circumscribed the terms of the debate around dam construction, framed the constituents of the debate and reordered knowledge about the region. Locals and other interested parties began to engage with the river differently. I argue that the apparatuses of scientific, engineering and technological engagement that were implemented by BC Hydro resulted in both material and discursive changes to nature in the Stikine. I develop the concept of ‘unbuilt environments’ to understand the changes that emerge in the wake of failed infrastructure projects.

Section snippets

What makes a river?

Between 1973 and 1983, BC Hydro tried to develop the Stikine district with a massive power venture by damming the Stikine and Iskut rivers. This plan brought them into conflict with local and metropolitan groups. The ensuing debates over resource use hinged on the way various stakeholders saw their responsibility and role over the plateau. The dialogue drew upon animals, their habits and habitats, and ‘nature’ more generally. Interested parties used these nature metaphors in attempts to frame

‘Technically feasible and economically attractive’: framing the constituents of the debate

An essential part of the planning process for major new projects is the early identification and assessment of potential effects the projects could have on wildlife, forests, agriculture, recreation, archaeology and human settlements. BC Hydro recognizes the need to avoid unfavourable impacts wherever possible and the responsibility to mitigate or compensate for them when they cannot be avoided. To obtain the data necessary to make informed judgements, BC Hydro’s planning process provides the

‘Intervenors’: local and metropolitan environmentalist critique

‘Intervenors’ was BC Hydro’s preferred term for public interest groups agitating against the Stikine-Iskut project. Friends of the Stikine and Residents for a Free-Flowing Stikine were the most prominent of the approximately thirty groups active in protest.⁴²

‘The river is central to our lives’: Tahltan actions and reactions

The Tahltan have lived in the Stikine-Iskut watershed since time immemorial. Oral histories and ethnographic data shows that they have derived their social and economic livelihoods from area resources for thousands of years. The river was the centre of this northern lifeworld: it was the central transportation conduit, the main food basket and prominent cultural symbol. The dams challenged that social and economic worldview by imposing stark limits of how the river could function and what it

Failure and the study of unbuilt environments

As a result of talking about how they ‘knew’ the Stikine watershed, developers, contractors and conservationists frequently afforded wildlife and the river in general a type of environmental currency in efforts to circumscribe the ecological effects of the dams which were designed to promote the development of the Stikine watershed. Vested groups like the Tahltan, government surveyors and bureaucrats, environmentalists, resource extraction companies, contractors and recreationists conceived of

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Matthew Evenden for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to co-panelists (Matthew Evenden, Sarah Pritchard and Craig Colton) as well as audience members at the American Society of Environmental History (ASEH 2010) meeting in Portland where a previous draft of this paper was presented. Thanks to Matt Dyce for guiding me towards the ‘unbuilt environments’ literature and to Eric Leinberger for his work on the maps. Financial support for the research of this material

References (0)

Cited by (8)

The on-paper hydropower boom: A case study of corruption in the hydropower sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina
2020, Ecological Economics
Citation Excerpt :
For example, by 2017 in Serbia, only 3.5% of planned projects were implemented and the proportion in the South-East European region was also very low at 9% (Riverwatch and EuroNatur, 2018). The existing literature on unbuilt projects, however, concentrates on megaprojects, and mentions factors such as corruption (Harris-Brandts and Gogishvili, 2018), budget overruns (Ansar et al., 2014), sociopsychological impacts on affected populations (Kirchherr et al., 2018), and the “material remains and altered perspectives of nature” (Peyton, 2011, p. 358). This follows the general trend in this field as research on the impacts of built projects also mainly focuses on large hydropower plants (e.g. Jennett, 2007; Shandling and Lock, 2008; Sovacool and Walter, 2018).
The demand for hydropower production, as a prominent sustainable development strategy, has created a boom in the number of planned hydropower projects, especially small ones. These projects are mainly located in post-socialist transition and developing countries. However, emerging evidence suggests that most of the projects remain on paper. One reason for this is prevalent corruption. In the literature, corruption has been identified in megaprojects but a significant number of hydropower projects are smaller in size. This leaves a literature gap and a subsequent lack of understanding regarding corruption and its potential connection to the absence of hydropower construction. We argue that it also creates a ‘safe space’ for corrupt actors who use the sector for personal gain. In this paper, we address this nexus of unfinished hydropower projects, sustainable development in transition countries, corruption, and lack of scholarly attention by presenting empirical evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina. We highlight that sustainability goals associated with hydropower might be distorted, especially in transition countries as they are intermingled with hydropower projects that are embedded in complex bureaucratic structures. We conclude that focusing on the sector might improve its management, thus contributing to sustainable development, and also help to decrease the corruption risk.
Brokers of hope: Extractive industries and the dynamics of future-making in post-colonial Greenland
2019, Polar Record
Estimations of value in “Belgrade's Amazonia”
2024, Economic Anthropology
The Water Histories of Hungary’s Major Rivers: Environmental Debates around Antal Réthly and Emil Mosonyi
2023, Historica (Ostrava)
Modern and Nonmodern Waters: Sociotechnical Controversies, Successful Anti-Dam Movements and Water Ontologies
2021, Water Alternatives
Unbuilt and unfinished: The temporalities of infrastructure
2020, Contemporary Megaprojects: Organization, Vision, and Resistance in the 21st Century

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text