ABSTRACT
15The contemporary era of extreme energy presents an excellent opportunity to (re)consider how pervasive economic and political rationalities of extraction inform our relationality to socio-environmental disasters as well as the people and places that bear the burden of these disasters. Deepwater drilling, fracking, and the strip mining of tar sands have all become commonplace technologies accepted as dangerous, but necessary, for feeding the global appetite for carbon. The risk of disaster associated with the transportation of tar sands oil through the Keystone XL Pipeline, for example, not only stretches across the 10,000 miles of pipeline but into the communities that are served by the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest aquifers (Swift et al. 2011). Elsewhere, the cascading consequences of development, refinement, and transportation of oil have been seen in a range of technological “accidents” – Deepwater Horizon, the Dilbit Disaster, Lac Mégantic, and the Porter Ranch gas leak all demonstrate that contemporary society is generating hazards that cannot be controlled. But, the rationalities mobilized to grapple with the effects of such disasters allow for the underlying and systemic conditions that provide for their production to remain concealed. This chapter is an attempt to unveil those conditions, to demonstrate the danger of blindly imposing instrumental rationality in risky terrains, and to indicate how biopolitical disaster is manufactured on multiple registers.
