Abstract: Contemporary discourses of net-zero decarbonization (also referred to as carbon neutrality) routinely overlook the landscape transformations required to offset carbon emissions. Conventional analyses also often fail to engage with decarbonization as an inherently spatial process, embedded in landscapes in which the biophysical, socionatural, and political economic dimensions of energy intersect. This creates a conceptual pitfall: the potential to misread and depoliticize strategies of putative decarbonization that might not, in fact, be carbon neutral, particularly when the cumulative effects of broader landscape transformations are considered. To illustrate this pitfall, our analysis queries net-zero decarbonization strategies that arise alongside—and often as a result of—simultaneous investments in fossil fuel production, a process we term recarbonization. We posit recarbonization as a variegated sociospatial phenomenon that materializes through the site-specific interplay between capitalist social relations and biophysical processes. In making this claim, we seek to bridge political economy with concepts of materiality and relationality that, we suggest, enable deeper theoretical engagement with multifaceted landscape transformations entailed by processes of energy transition. Drawing on a case study of the Peace River region in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, this article exposes the cumulative environmental effects and ongoing forms of colonial violence of some net-zero decarbonization agendas.



Abstract: The colonial relationship between Indigenous people and people of European origin has been characterized by conflicts, economic exclusions, and epistemological discriminations as well as the mutual sharing of knowledge, practices, and technologies. In many cases, the industrial development of space technologies such as telescopes and rocket test sites has continued the exploitative nature of colonialism. This article, however, offers a different story and concept of Indigenous decolonization that is not antagonistic but complementary to the space industry and Western liberalism more generally. The case is Space Enterprises, a company and Earth station owned by the Center for Appropriate Technologies in Alice Springs, Northern Territories, Australia and conceived by its Aboriginal owners, workers, and board of directors as representing a beneficial integration of their Indigenous self-determination and the space industry. This essay offers synthetic decolonization as an example of this integration with Western liberalism. Understanding the flows between the Indigenous-owned Earth station and satellites, as well as the connections between Indigenous and Western liberal planetary imaginaries, requires a theory of mediation. Towards that goal, planetary media is offered as a way of conceptualizing the flows of information between local Indigenous and planetary spaces and imaginaries. This essay argues that another decolonization is possible, one based on mediation between Indigenous and Western liberal systems of thought.