Ocean frontier assemblages: Critical insights from Canada's industrial salmon sector

Abstract

The ocean frontier has become central to a range of new and emerging strategies aimed at realizing the potential of the ocean economy. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the configuration of the ocean as a frontier and its role in transforming marine spaces through the case of salmon aquaculture in Canada. To this end, we engage with ‘frontier assemblage’, an analytic that is developed from scholarship on agrarian and extractive resource frontiers in Asia. We use this approach to identify and extend three interrelated conceptual sensibilities. First, we use ‘frontierization’ to suggest that ocean frontier spaces are not only articulated at leading edges. Instead, frontierization happens at indeterminate sites, including those that have undergone earlier rounds of capitalist resource extraction. Second, we explore how ocean frontier resource extraction is assembled in ways that are indeterminate, but not radically open. Using the case of salmon aquaculture in Newfoundland, we show how resource extraction could have been ‘otherwise’. Third, we critically assess the promissory politics that are key to the ocean frontier. We argue that the frontier assemblage analytic—and the sensibilities we use—provides an approach to critically assess strategies aimed at realizing the ‘untapped’ resources of the ocean frontier.

Pathogenic proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism

“…From the eastern seaboard of Canada to the fjords of Chile and Norway, the farm-raising of seafood is often interpreted as a technology of spatial control that alienates, reterritorializes, and redefines ocean spaces through new forms of marine enclosure (Knott and Neis, 2017; Marshall, 2001; Pitchon, 2015; Schreiber, 2003). Aquaculture literatures document how coastal waters that support diverse groundfish, prawn, herring, lobster, urchin, and scallop fisheries become further alienated from communities and longtime fishers as areas of the marine waterscape become incorporated into changing property regimes that grant exclusive user rights to aquaculture corporations (Knott and Mather, 2021; Marshall, 2001; Pitchon, 2015; Schreiber, 2003). In the Salish Sea, salmon aquaculture developed through practices of experimentation, both of techno-scientific design and of geopolitical exchange.…”

“…Knott and Neis (2017) situate aquaculture on Canada’s east coast within an increasing trend of “ocean grabbing” in which appropriation of marine space and resources by state and private entities has detrimental impacts on preexisting community livelihoods and other-than-human inhabitants of the waterscape. Knott and Mather (2021) similarly propose that aquaculture exemplifies the transformation of the ocean into a commodity frontier, with marine waterscapes increasingly framed as spaces of under-utilized economic potential. Indeed, part of Canada’s national development plan involves expansion of the “blue economy,” with offshore energy, freight shipping, shipbuilding, and aquaculture poised as solutions to help Canada “build back better— and bluer” after economic downturns during the COVID-19 pandemic (Canada and Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 2021; CEDC 2021).…”

“…While studies of aquaculture in Canada have importantly illuminated how the frontierization of the ocean and the property regimes it engenders result in contentious social divisions (Knott and Mather, 2021; Marshall, 2001; Young and Mathews, 2010), the links between ocean grabs and settler-colonial structures that demand to be “territoriality acquisitive in perpetuity” (Coulthard, 2014:152) remain underexplored. Economic growth in BC is tied to the increasing appropriation of ocean space (Silver, 2014), and contemporary iterations of ocean grabbing fit within much longer histories of dispossession that continue in their attempts to erase Indigenous presence from the land and waterscape.…”

Oil, Transitions, and the Blue Economy in Canada

“…While there is ample literature on the environmental problems and injustices associated with the expansion of the oil industry as well as the emergence of the blue economy, both as a concept [8,9] and its regional manifestations [10][11][12], little has addressed both. That is, little work has addressed the tensions of continued oil industry expansion in the face of the climate crisis in specific regions framed as "blue economies," an increasingly prominent governance approach guiding ocean development worldwide.…”