Envisioning a Green Energy Future in Canada and the United States: Constructing a Sustainable Future in the Context of New Regionalisms?

Abstract

A variety of actors in Canada and the United States are actively constructing a vision of a greener society that includes an environmentally sustainable energy future. Canadian provinces and states in the United States share environmental management, corporations collaborate to drive green development and implement local energy projects, and activists on both sides of the border share environmental protest strategies and mobilization frames. A transition to regionalism of greener energy resources along the Vermont–Canadian border is indicative of a larger “new regionalism” of sustainable identity, despite very concrete and pressing external pressures and energy challenges concerning global climate change, resource depletion, and energy sustainability challenges within the larger nations of both Canada and the United States. In this article, we aim to characterize this green visioning of a sustainable energy future, by focusing especially on the Vermont–Canadian border region, and additionally point to the benefits and contradictions that result.

Keywords:

• green energy
• North America
• new regionalisms
• sustainability
• Vermont–Québec border region

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Stroup

Laura J. Stroup is assistant professor of Environmental Studies, Department of Economics and Geography at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. Her specializations include water resources and their management in the US, physical geography, and environmental policy. Research interests concern the water–energy nexus and examining how managers and stakeholders adapt their water management practices to climate variability and change.

Richard Kujawa

Richard Kujawa is a professor of Geography, chair of the Department of Economics and Geography and a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Studies Program at St. Michael’s College. His specializations include globalization and global governance, water, environmental policy, urban and rural landscapes, and sustainability.

Jeffrey Ayres

Jeffrey Ayres is Dean of the College at St. Michael’s College. His specializations include international relations, global and regional governance, social movements and contentious politics, and Canadian and North American Politics.