Karen Hebert

KAREN E. HEBERT, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada, received funding in April 2018 to aid research on “After Risk: New Economies of Environmental Care and Collaboration in Coastal Alaska.” What does it mean to fight for environmental futures through the language and practice of care and collaboration? This project, which funded a new phase of long-term ethnographic research in two different regions of coastal Alaska, examined a series of emergent environmental campaigns and probed their workings and effects. A common thread across the initiatives, from efforts to promote salmon stewardship to alliances to map ecological knowledge, is the way that even longstanding resource uses, like commercial fishing, are becoming reframed as labors of environmental care rather than exploitation. Through semi-structured interviews, participant-observation, and document analysis, the research tracked the engagement of actors including rural residents, NGO workers, corporate officers, scientists, activists, and government officials. Findings demonstrate how efforts to build alliances around the caretaking of species at risk often animate powerful new coalitions. They also reveal the heavy burden this work creates for rural residents and other core players in resource development struggles whose parameters are rapidly expanding across space and time. The research thus points to how conditions of vulnerability are being broadened today while responsibility for confronting them proves unevenly distributed.