Slow justice: a framework for tracing diffusion and legacies of resistance

ABSTRACT

Efforts to advance environmental justice are often halting and uneven. How can we identify the longer-term significance of protests that seem to have failed? In this article, we turn to work on environmental injustice to examine the consequences of environmental justice movements over time and across space. We draw on the scholarship of Rob Nixon on ‘slow violence’: rather than the spectacular, visceral, and immediate violence of war, he argues that environmental degradation is a violence that operates in cumulative, slow-moving, accretive, and multi-causal ways. Borrowing – and flipping – Nixon’s conceptualization, we suggest that a parallel process of ‘slow justice’ is taking place. As with environmental damage, mobilization for environmental justice can have consequences that are dispersed in time and place, occur in non-linear forms, and operate at multiple scales. To track the pathways through which slow justice emerges, we develop a three-part typology of social movement connectivity. Using the categories of people, projects, and processes, we identify the geographically and temporally distanced social, material, and governance legacies of moments of resistance. Through a case study of mobilization against fossil fuel infrastructure in the Mackenzie Valley in northern Canada in the 1970s, we use the typology to trace how this moment of mobilization shaped other efforts of environmental justice organizing, including for campaigns in different regions and on different issue-areas. We argue that slow justice can reframe how we understand the outcomes of social mobilization projects, making visible the often obscure, indirect, and long-term accrued benefits of environmental justice work.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• slow violence
• movement legacies
• infrastructure
• pipelines
• governance

Introduction

‘If the world was a bank, it would have been saved already,’ read one cardboard sign inscribed with blue and green marker (Kucharuk, 2019). The poster was one of dozens held up in the crowd in downtown Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, on Friday, September 20th, 2019. The subsequent Friday (September 27) drew even larger crowds in Whitehorse, contributing to the hundreds of thousands of people turning out in cities across Canada and millions more around the world for a series of global ‘climate strikes’ (CBC News, 2019). The protests were inspired by the movement ‘Fridays for Future,’ a series of school strikes catalyzed in 2018 by Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg and propelled by youth across continents.

For some, these September events signalled a turning point in climate activism: a show of global solidarity for action and renewed attention to the issue in media and public spaces. But for others, particularly those who had long been observing or participating in the climate movement, this was just the latest round of marches and gatherings. Protests in 2005 and 2006 drew tens and even hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to demand climate action (Global Climate Campaign, 2007), demonstrations took place around the world for the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen (The Guardian, 2009), and the 2014 People’s Climate March was, at the time, unprecedented, taking place in more than 150 cities and drawing over half a million people worldwide (Davey et al., 2014; Feeney, 2014). Many of the signs at the 2019 climate strikes echoed those on posters at marches and demonstrations over a decade earlier: ‘there is no Planet B’; ‘Climate Justice Now’; ‘Don’t be a Fossil Fool.’ Yet public calls for action and mass displays of concern have not, so far, galvanized meaningful global transformation for a climate-stable world.

Climate protests are not the only collective action efforts that have not resulted in the hoped-for outcomes. In some cases, even apparent victories towards environmental or social protections have not been durable. Noted environmentalist David Suzuki, quoted in a media interview in 2013, said, ‘Many of the battles that we fought 30 or 35 years ago, that we celebrated as enormous successes […] Thirty-five years later, the same damn battles have started again’ (Gatehouse, 2013). The continuation or reprise of protest efforts highlights the challenges facing communities and campaigners who push back against environmental injustice, especially persistent, recurrent, and cumulative forms of damage. Environmental studies scholar Rob Nixon (2011) describes these slow-moving, incremental, accretive, multi-causal forms of harm that are dispersed in time and space as ‘slow violence’: damage that is invisible, or at least difficult to track, and without the media salience of more direct, spectacular forms of violence. Nixon’s account of slow violence is not of inevitable destruction; he pairs the identification of this process with a discussion of economic historian Joan Martínez Alier’s (2002) concept of the environmentalism of the poor – ongoing attempts by those most affected by environmental injustice to challenge conditions of damage. Still, the momentum toward harm seems difficult to reverse.

We know why these claim-making efforts continue: the issues at stake are urgent, even existential. However, given the seeming futility of many of these actions, disillusionment and despair among movement participants is unsurprising. For those mobilizing against social and ecological damage, they might ask why they should continue to show up for events, such as marches, public hearings, and other collective activities, since these efforts often seem so ineffective. The processes of slow violence continue around the world; for instance, of many possible examples, we see dispossession in the repeated exclusion of local communities in Mozambique from nearby protected areas through militarized operations (Witter & Satterfield, 2019), and in the ongoing arsenic poisoning of Yellowknives Dene communities from a mining site, compounding patterns of colonial disruption (Sandlos & Keeling, 2016). But to evaluate whether the only trajectory is towards violence, we must consider what environmental justice outcomes might look like. The co-existence and thriving of human and ecological communities may be harder to identify than damage, since these conditions of social and ecological integrity are often perceived only after being disrupted. Yet processes of contamination and harm often operate in tandem with those of protection, revitalization, and restoration.

While the environmentalism of the poor (Martínez Alier, 2002; Nixon, 2011) aims to centre the agency of communities responding to slow violence, we suggest that conceptual extensions can further enable us to see the active and generative pursuit of freedom, integrity, and well-being by communities – including communities not (or not yet) harmed by slow violence. Our angle of analysis presents several questions: does front-line environmentalism only respond to damage, or are communities pre-emptively creating pathways of resilience? Can we identify the advance of environmental justice – an undammed river, or a landscape unfragmented by a pipeline, uncontaminated water and wildlife, or a community never displaced from ancestral homelands – when these dynamics might not look like outcomes at all? Can we attribute these conditions of integrity and repair not just to direct resistance efforts but also to previous or distant movements? And how, then, should participants in one movement consider the potential far-reaching and even unintended consequences of their efforts to contest injustice?

For those interested in altering contemporary systems of power, these questions are vital. In this paper, we articulate an analytic framework to identify the links between distant and disparate efforts to advance environmental justice, with the unconventional starting point of integrity rather than damage. For this, we return to Nixon’s slow violence, but invert his analytic framework, presenting an approach to track what we call slow justice: the spatially and temporally dispersed forms of repair, restoration, and resilience that may accumulate slowly and in causally complex ways. We present slow justice as arising through three diffusion pathways: social, material, and institutional. As a shorthand, we describe these pathways as people, projects, and processes.

We proceed as follows: In section two, we further characterize slow justice and introduce the three-part typology. Drawing on theories of diffusion and non-human agency, we propose a relational approach to analyzing interactions among people, places, and decision-making processes across issue-areas, geographies, and generations, and consider what is at stake in this conceptual extension. Section three describes our slow justice framework, showing how to make visible the connections between movements that arise over time and space that counter or prevent social disruption and ecological damage. In section four, we illustrate the framework by applying the slow justice typology to a case of pipeline resistance in the Canadian north. We trace the legacies of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline project and the Berger Inquiry through to subsequent movements for Indigenous sovereignty and self-governance, land protection and conservation, and food sovereignty. Finally, in the conclusion we return to the question of protest ‘failure,’ considering the intertwined nature of slow violence and slow justice, and the need to consider both damage and integrity. Through the typology, we contribute to ongoing social movement study efforts (e.g., Della Porta & Rucht, 2002; Giugni, 1998; Meyer, 2009), as well as those beyond the academy (e.g., Solnit, 2005),¹ to unpack the invisible threads between seemingly disparate campaigns and collective action efforts, especially where outcomes might be difficult to identify.

II. Slow justice across time and space: a theoretical lens

Since movement dynamics are interwoven across time and space, it can be difficult to identify how one movement or campaign shapes or affects another. Here, we extend the organizing framework proposed by Nixon for examining the causes and consequences of environmental degradation – that is, slow violence – to consider spatially and temporally distant outcomes beyond damage, tracing these indirect consequences of movements. Slow justice describes the consequences of mobilization efforts aimed at advancing environmental justice, which – like their violent counterparts – are dispersed in time and place, largely invisible, and operate at multiple scales. Environmental justice movements are often led by communities harmed by environmental degradation, but also by those that prevent such damage. Further, even when resistance efforts are unsuccessful for directly stopping harm, efforts to slow or prevent damage can have effects beyond a specific moment or project. Such actions can catalyze movements elsewhere.

Environmental degradation constitutes more than structural violence, Nixon (2011) explains, as it involves dynamic processes instead of static institutions of inequality. In tracing environmental injustice, Nixon (2011) identifies complex causal chains with non-linear modes of connection, or what scholars in science and technology studies might call ‘entanglements’ (Liboiron, 2015, p. 4). These entanglements engage not only human actors, but non-human elements of the world, too, as has long been understood in Indigenous politics (e.g., Watts, 2013), and is increasingly recognized in other fields, especially in the context of what some term the Anthropocene (e.g., Eckersley, 2017; Biermann & Lövbrand, 2019, pp. 18–19). For instance, while human activity might directly release toxicants and generate greenhouse gas emissions,² contamination and climate change also implicate dynamics beyond human control. Such indirect pathways from initial instances of dispossession to contemporary forms of injustice are widely documented. This is particularly so in places shaped by legacies of colonialism, as seen in the development of unconventional oil and gas projects on First Nations territories in British Columbia, Canada (Garvie et al., 2014/2015), and in urban-rural labour migration patterns in forest-dependent communities in Java, Indonesia (Peluso, 2011). Some activities can set into motion pathways of intertwined social and ecological change that operate beyond the boundaries of the initial interventions.

Similarly, the pursuit of environmental justice involves dynamism and interactive effects over time. Both violence and justice may operate in ways that involve human agency but also escape it: environmental processes may be initiated by human activity but may continue and even intensify without ongoing interventions through feedback loops, tipping points, and the participation of non-human entities. Put another way, human actions can amplify or disrupt ecological and biophysical processes through both direct and indirect interventions. Thus, rather than offering a linear model of causality in our analysis of slow justice, we consider obscure and indirect connections between protests, campaigns, and movements.

Slow violence and slow justice operate in similar spatially and temporally distant ways (see, Table 1). What might slow justice look like? As with the violence arising from environmental degradation and contamination, justice arising from environmental activism can be hard to see and track. Specific efforts to achieve justice may be small, and the results might accumulate slowly over time. The outcomes might not always be immediately evident as outcomes. At first glance, a river flowing unimpeded might just seem like a natural feature of an ecosystem. But under closer scrutiny, with historical and political context, we might see that river as the outcome of resistance to dams, diversions, and withdrawals. For instance, that the main stem of the Fraser River is undammed is surprising in contrast to most of BC’s other major waterways, which are dammed. Through attention to the politics of what was not built, geographer Matthew Evenden (2004) finds that the Fraser is not just a free-flowing river – it is the political outcome of a protracted battle between fisheries and hydropower interests. The results of movements may thus be invisible, where a project is not built, or not proposed at all.

Table 1. Characteristics of slow violence and parallels with ‘slow justice’.

Characteristic	Slow Violence	Slow Justice
Invisible	Damages – such as the unseen contamination of water, air, land – are hard to see and track	Benefits – such as the reduction or prevention of contamination, or a project not being built – are hard to see and track
Dispersed	Source of damage distant in space from the location(s) where harm is experienced	Source of mobilization distant in space from the location where advances in justice are realized
Delayed	Source of damage distant in time from the time at which harm is experienced	Source of mobilization distant in time from the time at which advances in justice are realized
Incremental	Specific contributions of an individual/industry to damage may be small	Specific contributions of an individual/campaign to justice may be small
Cumulative	Damage accrues over time, with additional degradation contributing to more felt effects	Benefits in justice accrue over time, with additional campaigns contributing to more energy, cohesion, and connection
Entangled in place & social relations	Damage intersects with legacies of poverty, colonialism, exploitation, fragmentation	Justice campaigns intersect with legacies of survival, resilience, reciprocity, and collective action
Unequal implications	Damage has uneven implications for different people, based on socio-economic, political, and identity-based vulnerabilities	Benefits of justice have uneven implications for different people, based on socio-economic, political, and identity-based characteristics
Corporeal	Degradation experienced as bodily harm	Benefits experienced as bodily safety and health

Along with invisibility, the consequences of slow justice are also uneven. Varying political histories and social conditions can lead to different outcomes for people based on geographic, socio-economic, political, and identity-based characteristics. Still, we consider these concepts as intertwined, rather than analogous. Here, we heed Indigenous studies and education scholar Eve Tuck, who calls for a move away from ‘damage-centered research’ to a ‘desire-based framework’ of analysis (2009, p. 415) when conducting research in and with communities who have been harmed or disenfranchised. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) interventions on desire, Tuck (2009, p. 418) explains that desire can hold both loss and hope, and so ‘reaches for contrasting realities, even simultaneously.’ Connections between slow violence and slow justice, then, might occur in several ways: they might operate in tandem, emerging out of the same activities and movements; slow violence might provoke justice movements that have long-standing legacies; and slow justice might prevent slow violence from taking place. Further, while slow violence outcomes might seem persistent and irreversible, and slow justice ones contingent and fragile, we suggest these readings could be upended. In the case of slow violence, not all damage is irreversible or unrepairable. In that of slow justice, some forms of environmental integrity and community cohesion are durable, adaptive, and resilient.

The covert and obscure dimensions of movements are of interest to many social movement scholars. Theorists have long considered the ‘historical roots’ of collective action (Giugni & Grasso, 2015, p. 340), analyzing the dynamics of activist networks, grievances, and available resources over time and across place (among many, Giugni & Grasso, 2015; Klandermans & Oegema, 1987; Snow et al., 2004). Scholars suggest that sustained organizing, much of which goes unnoticed, provides the foundation for moments of visible collective action (Marullo & Meyer, 2004, p. 662; Taylor, 2016). Over time, social movements wax and wane; periods of apparent dormancy are often when community ties and identities are developed, resources are gathered, participants are trained, and grievances are articulated and framed (Snow et al., 2004, p. 11; Snow & Soule, 2009). Studies of movement organizers have highlighted how leaders learn from past protest and participants creatively work with existing repertoires of contention (e.g., Soule, 1999; Tilly, 2008). Networks and social relationships that are forged during campaigns have ongoing significance for participants, and can shape future organizing efforts (Hagen & Hansford-Bowles, 2005; McAdam, 1988; Stoddart & Tindall, 2010). As work on historical timescales of movements reveals (Haydu & Skotnicki, 2016), a longer-term perspective can clarify the role of individual experience, identity development, and community relations that enable and provoke future action (Downton & Wehr, 1998; Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015; McAdam, 1988). This wide-ranging work demonstrates how participants, tactics, and discourses diffuse along multiple pathways, connecting movements over time and space.

Our work adds to a rich body of literature on diffusion and movement legacies (e.g., Soule, 2004), along with the significance of time in political dynamics (e.g., Haydu, 2020). There is space to further develop analytic approaches to diffusion, and in particular, a need to focus on outcomes that might be overlooked: the incremental advances in well-being, the protection of environmental integrity, and sites of resilience and repair that constitute forms of justice. As cogently reviewed by sociologist Jeffrey Haydu (2020, especially pp. 626–627), social movement scholars identify multiple pathways of diffusion, often differentiated as relational (among individual movement leaders or participants) and non-relational (involving cultural categories, social movement organizations, the media, and more). These pathways allow observers to identify connections across movements – where similarities do not simply represent ‘independent responses to similar conditions’ (Haydu, 2020, p. 626), but causally connected claim-making efforts. Building on this work, we propose a somewhat different approach to the existing relational/non-relational divide in diffusion pathways, and instead consider a multiplicity of relations that emerge: social relations; relations of materials; and relations of institutions.

While the latter two might usually be understood in the literature as non-relational pathways of diffusion, we consider that they integrate elements of shared identities, common histories, physical connections, ideational exchanges, and affective attachments. Building on ideas of non-human agency – for instance, where structure and agency are blurred (e.g., Nash, 2005) and where other-than-human communities constitute sovereign nations (Whetung, 2019) – we consider that there can be relations between, within, and among people, materials, and non-human entities, rather than simply among people. A multi-relational angle allows us to more clearly examine the intersections of individuals, collectives, symbols, discourses, and structural dynamics when tracing the more distant effects of social movements. Our three-part typology of diffusion pathways enables more systematic analysis of the long-term and causally complex consequences of mobilization. The categories of people (social), projects (material), and processes (institutional) provide a framework for tracking the interpersonal, issue-based, and governance legacies of moments of resistance.

III. Applying the slow justice framework: diffusion pathways and complex causality

Diffusion takes place along social, material, and institutional pathways through multiple mechanisms. Connections, as Nixon (2011) illustrates through his analysis of writer-activists, can be traced through narratives, which use imaginative leaps to reveal linkages between seemingly distant communities. Alternately, sociologist Wendy Wolford (2004) points to spatial strategies of connection. She examines how participants in the Movement of Landless Rural Workers in Brazil develop place-based understandings of themselves and their communities, describing the ‘spatial imaginaries’ that arise. She finds that these perceptions of belonging shape peoples’ involvement with the movement. Spatial ties – even when more ideational than physical – can overcome barriers to participation, including for those far from sites of disruption. Science and technology studies scholar Sara Wylie’s (2018) research on hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) offers another path towards making environmental damage more visible. With the development of collectively sourced community-based databases and monitoring platforms, Wylie’s work enables people dispersed over space and through time – including participants in the temporary workforce of the industry – to compile evidence of health and social impacts from the oil and gas industry. Through this new electronic infrastructure, the lived experiences of people and the interconnections within ecosystems can help make visible contamination from fracking, providing tools to hold corporations and governments to account.

How might these narrative, spatial, and infrastructural strategies of creating visibility inform an analysis of slow justice? Taken together, the literature suggests that stories hold power within and across social movements, stories are most powerful when grounded in place and in material contexts, and tools are needed to collect, evaluate, and understand these stories. Our relational typology of social ties (connections between people), material conditions (specific and symbolic projects), and new forms of governance (institutional and decision-making processes) offers an organizing framework to trace connections across otherwise disparate movements and campaigns (Table 2). We follow these relations – that is, social, material, and governance – to identify how mobilization in one place might inform and influence collective action elsewhere.

Table 2. Three-part relational typology for tracking slow justice.

Category	Type of connection	Relations to look for over time/space
People	Social/human	Interpersonal connections between individuals, groups, networks
Projects	Material/physical	Similar geographic locations, ecosystems, types of projects
Processes	Governance/institutional	Shared or repeated bureaucratic, regulatory, and/or technical systems

The first part of the typology, people, focuses on social ties and networks. Here, we draw on classic relational forms of diffusion, considering social networks that develop, leaders that emerge, and iconic figures that arise in campaigns and movements. Specific people and groups can carry ideas, motivations, and public recognition between and across campaigns. Such connections can be pivotal in shaping future organizing, even when later work is focused on different issues. Interpersonal ties can be powerful: for example, some civil rights activists later played key roles in women’s rights and anti-war movements (McAdam, 1988). Networks are part of this: in a review of research on youth political participation, sociologist Dana Fisher finds that ‘[p]olitical involvement in activism and the social connections that are made through such involvement lead to higher levels of political participation in the future,’ through ‘social networks of activists that facilitate longer-term engagement and retention’ (2012, p. 123). Beyond interpersonal and network ties, an individual or group might be understood as a synecdoche, where a specific person or organization represents a broader movement, set of values, or common goal. People can become key symbols that carry meaning to future movements. Social relations can thus be traced through individuals who take on symbolic significance, groups who forge shared identities, and networks of organizations that carry institutional memory and historical knowledge.

The second part of the typology, projects, are the links that are held and sustained through material connections. Within this pathway, we attend to relationships between people and places, narrative strategies that arise around specific objects, and also to the unintended connections that arise across biophysical and ecological systems. Since landscapes are constructed through the entanglement of social and ecological dynamics (Tsing, 2004),³ they can be understood both materially and symbolically. Place-based grievances can arise in specific places when development projects disrupt a sense of belonging (Groves, 2015; Pearson, 2016). Local attachments are sometimes considered troubling in siting disputes, when a small (usually already powerful) group’s preferences take precedence over sharing burdens or providing collective benefits; however, place attachments can also catalyze more expansive concern about social and environmental justice (Boudet, 2011). The spatial dimensions of claim-making become particularly salient where holding or taking space is centred in protest activities, such as in the Occupy movement (Halvorsen, 2012). Further, project-based movement linkages can be created through the exchange of shared discourses and symbols. Movements against particular types of projects can contribute to a trans-local form of activism (Healy et al., 2019, p. 232), where resistance efforts can link parallel grievances across place (Rootes, 2013). Such dynamics have been documented in protests over pipelines, including in work that draws on Naomi Klein’s (2014) concept of ‘Blockadia,’ involving a ‘roving, transnational conflict zone that has become host to the showdown between environmental activists and the fossil fuel industry’ (Bradshaw, 2015, p. 433). We understand place-attachments within the materially oriented category of projects, as we consider that social movements may categorize quite different development plans as similar, based on the activities or their consequences. For instance, we might think of material connections transcending space for pipeline projects (similar infrastructure being built) or fossil fuel projects (similar commodities being produced) or even extractive projects more broadly (similar disruptions of ecologies and communities). We see these material linkages in debates over ‘land grabs,’ where communities identify project-based ties between quite distinct activities, for instance, linking agricultural expansion, mineral and fuel extraction, and establishment of protected areas all as activities that similarly enclose land and exclude communities (Borras & Franco, 2012). Relations between projects can propel social mobilization across time and space.

The third part of the typology, processes, is how movements for environmental justice can have consequences over time and space through governing institutions. We highlight pathways of diffusion that involve the institutionalization of governance arrangements and spread of models of organizing across campaigns. These might, as with projects, usually be considered non-relational mechanisms – and yet it is through ideas about similarities among groups or shared types of grievances that certain institutions are accorded legitimacy and significance. Strategies and venues used by environmental justice movements to voice their concerns, or by power-holders in response to those claimants, may later be taken up or demanded by participants making claims over quite different issue-areas. Campaigners might learn from the processes of governance used in other claim-making efforts, considering how others articulate demands, enable participation, or inform decisions. Scholars have studied processes of diffusion of innovation across social movements (even unsuccessful strategies: Soule, 1999), whereby governance and claim-making processes can connect widely differing movements. Together, these three pathways come together across time and space. We thus present this not as a radically new approach to understanding diffusion, but as a shift in perspective on these well-studied pathways that opens new analytic possibilities.

IV. Tracing movement legacies: the Mackenzie Valley and Berger Inquiry

The slow justice framework emerged from our research on the resistance to and financing of oil and gas pipelines in the northern areas of the settler colonial state of Canada, and the case of mobilization against pipeline projects in the Mackenzie Valley in the Northwest Territories (spanning Inuit and Dene territory) in the 1970s. We draw on secondary sources, including scholarship, grey literature, biographies, and media reports, to examine the legacies of this pipeline-related activity. Building on scholarship on social ties, material parallels, and governing institutions, we trace the trajectories – or diffusion pathways – of specific individuals, narratives, symbols, tactics, and outcomes from the Mackenzie Valley to a series of spatially and temporally distant campaigns and movements. Sociologists Jeffrey Haydu and Tad Skotnicki (2016) introduce three layers of temporal connections that shape social movements: large-scale historical changes; context-specific conditions; and legacies of past movements. Our work focuses on the third of these (legacies) but aims to forward-trace the consequences of a movement, rather than trace back to past movements. Our three-part typology of diffusion pathways offers a systematic approach for such analysis. We consider the development of social ties and symbolic power of groups and individuals involved in the pipeline debates (people), the narratives and emotional resonance of pipeline projects and land disruptions (projects), and the governance processes and institutional arrangements developed in the Mackenzie Valley Inquiry (processes), to identify the wide-ranging consequences of environmental justice claims.

The discovery of oil and gas fields in northern and Arctic landscapes in the 1970s catalyzed plans to extract and transport the resources to market via pipelines. Pipeline development aligned with Canadian state priorities, including national security and sovereignty. At the same time, Indigenous communities in the north had long resisted colonial authority, and many were reigniting political organization to assert sovereignty claims (especially, although not exclusively, in response to the federal government’s 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy – Abele, 2014; Southcott et al., 2018; Stanton, 2010). The federal government responded to political and legal pressure associated with Indigenous sovereignty and land claims in the Mackenzie Valley – including a claim filed by Dene leaders contesting the federal interpretation of treaty provisions (Abele, 2014) – by initiating public hearings in the north (Stanton, 2010, pp. 128–129). In 1974, a Royal Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Justice Thomas R. Berger, was established to assess the potential environmental, social, and economic impacts of a pipeline to transport Alaskan and northern Canadian gas from Prudhoe Bay and the Mackenzie Delta through Canada to the United States.

The ‘Berger Inquiry,’ as it was known, was conducted from 1974–1977 and involved visits to 35 communities along the Mackenzie River Valley along with cities in northern and southern Canada. The Inquiry considered pipeline proposals from Foothills Pipe Lines Ltd (a route for Canadian gas from the Mackenzie delta south to Alberta, known as the Maple Leaf Project), and from a consortium of companies known as the Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline (a route for US and Canadian gas from the Alaska North Shore and the Mackenzie Delta south to Alberta). Justice Berger took an unorthodox approach to the design of the hearing process. The Inquiry involved, among other things, the Commission: travelling to small, dispersed communities, speaking with people in informal meeting places and formats; requiring government funding to enable community members and other intervenors to participate in the hearings; mandating the formation of an independent advisory committee on pipelines for the Inquiry, funded by the federal government and with findings made publicly available; engaging in media outreach to ensure public access to information about the Inquiry; and providing interpretation services to expand participatory opportunities (Smith, 1982; Abele, 2014; Stanton, 2010, pp. 150–181). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s public radio broadcaster, aired daily reports in six languages during the hearings (Williams, 2021). This was not the process envisioned by the federal government for the Inquiry. The government had anticipated hearings in Yellowknife and Ottawa only; instead, Justice Berger travelled extensively to communities across the delta, spending time in community halls, homes, and fishing camps across the north, listening to people across the potentially affected region. To enable adequate time for hearing diverse perspectives, Justice Berger extended the timeline of the Inquiry – reportedly to the government’s ‘dismay’ (Waddell, 2018). Rather than adhere closely to an assessment of pipelines, Justice Berger understood the Inquiry as addressing the broader question of the consequences – social, economic, and cultural – of industrial development and natural resource extraction in the north (Southcott et al., 2018, p. 396).

Of course, the legacy of the Inquiry is not just a function of an individual. The Berger Inquiry took place at a time of renewed and revitalized Indigenous political organization – among others, in the north, Indigenous leaders formed the National Indian Brotherhood of the NWT (the precursor of the Dene Nation) in 1969, the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement (later replaced by the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation) in 1970, and Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (later the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami) in 1971 (Stanton, 2010, p. 131; Abele, 2014). Participation in the Inquiry processes reflected this pre-existing political organization, and in turn, the Inquiry served to strengthen Indigenous governance claims. The final report, released in 1977, presented an argument against any Mackenzie Valley route for at least ten years due to social and environmental factors (Berger, 1977), which led to the government agreeing to delay pipeline plans until land claims disputes had been settled.⁴ In some assessments, those against the construction of a pipeline in the north were successful: the pipeline across the northern Yukon and NWT was not built, and the landscape not fragmented by fossil fuel infrastructure.

But the Inquiry did not stop fossil fuel infrastructure in other areas in the north – either at the time, or in the decades to come. Pipeline construction shifted to southern Yukon and northern BC. Another set of hearings began in 1977 when Kenneth Lysyk was appointed to consider an alternate pipeline, the Alaska Highway Pipeline Project. Foothills proposed to carry natural gas from Alaska to Alberta along the Alaska Highway in the southern Yukon. An environmental assessment review was triggered by Foothills’ application in 1976 for a right-of-way, and hearings were held from 1977–1982, concurrent with and following the Berger Inquiry. Lysyk concluded that the majority of Yukoners, including the then-Council for Yukon Indians (later the Council for Yukon First Nations), saw the need for the ‘settlement and implementation of the Indian land claim’ before any pipeline could be constructed (Lysyk, 1977, p. viii). But a new bilateral treaty, the Canada-United States Agreement on Principles Applicable to a Northern Natural Gas Pipeline (the Treaty), was negotiated to enable pipeline construction, and Canada passed the Northern Pipeline Act in 1978 to oversee the Treaty through a newly created Northern Pipeline Agency. Public hearings about the pipeline’s impact in northern BC – leading to a report entitled ‘Forgotten Land, Forgotten People’ (Mair, 1980) – only took place after the decision to build the pipeline had been made. The ongoing planning and construction of pipelines in the north reveals the uneven outcomes from resistance to pipelines in the 1970s.

Both environmental disruption and protection emerge from debates in the 1970s – following Tuck (2009), we see concurrent conditions of both hope and loss. Slow justice in the Mackenzie Valley involves the crucial characteristic of invisibility: the absence of a pipeline protects and advances the rights of those in the region, as it allows for the continued integrity of northern landscapes and livelihoods. Still, while the Inquiry outcomes delayed pipeline plans, subsequent years saw renewed proposals for fossil fuel infrastructure in the same region. The Norman Wells Pipeline was built in the 1980s to transport crude oil from Norman Wells, NWT, to Zama, Alberta (National Energy Board, 2019). Permits for oil and gas exploration in the Mackenzie were again granted in the mid-1990s, and additional pipeline plans were forwarded in the early 2000s (Nuttall, 2008). By tracing the legacy of the high-profile contested energy and land use politics in northern Canada, we demonstrate the often-hidden ways that efforts to advance justice take place alongside injustice – and how they persist, resurge, and transform. The responses to infrastructure development in the Mackenzie Valley had multiple direct and indirect consequences, which we categorize through social ties, material parallels, and governing institutions.

People: the Dene Nation and Justice Berger

The legacy of the Berger Inquiry is evident in relational ties within collectives and between individuals. We situate these groups and people as synecdoche because they represent and carry the issues over time and across space. The Inquiry helped to facilitate justice claims for communities who, at the time, had unresolved land and self-determination claims against colonial authorities. The active mobilization of the Dene Nation (initially through the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories; Abele, 1983, p. 18) and other Indigenous leaders and political organizations shaped the Inquiry outcomes. Dene sovereignty claims and the unconventional approach of Justice Berger reframed questions of energy and economic development, represented by pipelines, into questions of treaty rights, land claims, and ecological and cultural futures (Abele, 2011; Dokis, 2015; McCall, 2011; Nahanni, 1977; Sabin, 1995). Through these processes, the Inquiry reinforced Dene assertions of sovereignty, and upheld the environment as a central concern.

Justice Berger had a track record of advocating for Indigenous rights before and after the Inquiry. In 1969, Berger took on the defence of the Calder case – Calder v. British Columbia (Attorney-General), which was brought by the Nisga’a against the BC provincial government. The case led to the 1973 landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision affirming that Aboriginal title pre-dated the Royal Proclamation of 1763, thus confirming the recognition of such title in Canadian law (Supreme Court of Canada, 1973; Stanton, 2010, pp. 142–143). Berger continued a career as a BC Supreme Court Justice and returned to legal practice in the 1980s after the Inquiry (Berger, 2005). He worked on subsequent legal battles over northern lands – including, notably, with the plaintiffs in a case brought by First Nations and conservation organizations against the Yukon Territorial Government over its land use planning process in the Peel Watershed in 2014 (described in more detail in the next section on projects).

The Inquiry coincided with and reflected a pivotal time in self-determination efforts by Indigenous peoples in the north, expressed in part through the efforts of the Indian Brotherhood of the NWT, an organization which later sparked the formalization of the Dene National Office and Dene Nation (Erasmus et al., 2003). The Berger Inquiry helped to amplify northern voices and Indigenous claims on the national stage. Canadian news sources covered and reported Indigenous claims; in addition, the participation of conservation-focused non-profit groups within and beyond the north also drew attention to environmental issues.

Through social relationships and iconic individuals (the latter, such as Berger, highlighted in media and public campaigns), the legacy of Mackenzie Valley organizing in the 1970s shaped land use debates to come. For example, the Peel Watershed case echoed previous claims of Indigenous sovereignty and centred on environmentally damaging development. A focus on interpersonal relations and identities can illuminate connections among movement organizers. Tracing individuals and groups over time might be straightforward with high-profile figures, but might also require seeking out less publicly acknowledged people and groups, considering – as does Nixon (2011) in his assessment of the environmentalism of the poor – that those on the front lines of action will often be the most affected communities, and they often continue to mobilize for justice for others.

Projects: northern lands and infrastructure

Projects can also provide a distinct pathway through which movements can persist over time. The significance of place-based attachments is exemplified by land use conflicts in the Peel Watershed in the northeast Yukon, in the overlapping traditional territories of four First Nations: the Na-cho Nyak Dun, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Vuntut Gwitchin, and Tetlit Gwich’in (the last based politically in the Northwest Territories). The Peel Watershed is a largely roadless region that encompasses around 14% of the Yukon territory. The territorial government is mandated under the Umbrella Final Agreement to involve First Nations in consultation in land use planning (Peel Watershed Planning Commission, 2013). In 2004, the Peel Watershed Planning Commission was formed by the government with representation from First Nations to oversee the development of a land use plan in the Peel. After years of work, and multiple draft plans, the government announced the Peel Watershed Regional Land Use Plan (the ‘Final Plan’), which it approved in 2014. While the Planning Commission’s Final Recommended Plan had proposed that 80% of the region be protected in some form, with the remainder open to development (Peel Watershed Planning Commission, 2011), the Final Plan reversed the balance, with less than 30% of the watershed protected (Protect the Peel, 2017). First Nations and other stakeholders viewed the government as having violated the procedural terms of the Umbrella Final Agreement. In response, two of the four affected First Nations – the Na-cho Nyak Dun and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in – launched a court case against the government in collaboration with two environmental groups, the Yukon Conservation Society and the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS-Yukon). The plaintiffs were represented by Justice Berger and his law firm.

The legal case itself was decided on the finer points of the law; following a series of rulings and appeals in the territorial and higher courts, the Supreme Court of Canada, in 2017, ruled in favour of the plaintiffs (Protect the Peel, 2017).⁵ But the publicity surrounding the case focused on the significance of the region to Indigenous peoples and for conservation, with material concerns associated with environmentally destructive extraction and development at the core of outreach activities (Neville, 2021).⁶ The public support for the ‘Protect the Peel’ campaign sustained fundraising efforts for legal fees, among other things, thus proving central to the legal challenges against the government. As with the Mackenzie Valley Inquiry Report, titled ‘Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland,’ public statements about the Peel consistently described the watershed as the ‘homeland’ of four First Nations, underscoring the cultural significance and history of the region. Much of the campaign relied on – or at least provoked – images and narratives about the lack of industrial development in the watershed. ‘Among [the Yukon’s] wildest quarters is the Peel watershed, an immense wilderness, which drains an area larger than Scotland,’ wrote journalist Tom Clynes for National Geographic (Clynes & Nicklen, 2014), in one example of such media coverage. However, as documented by Megan Youdelis et al. (2020), CPAWS-Yukon had for many years emphasized that wilderness necessarily included people, and much of the publicity generated by the NGOs in the case – including in high-profile international outlets such as The Guardian – highlighted cultural traditions and ongoing First Nations presence on the land and waters (e.g., LaChapelle & Duschene, 2016). More centrally, First Nations leaders were the central decision-makers in the court case and campaigns, and at the forefront of media activity, as illustrated in a short film about the Supreme Court case shared by CPAWS in 2017, narrated by Dana Tizya-Tramm, then-Councillor (and later Chief) of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (O’Brien & Tizya-Tramm, 2017). Public concern about the case hinged not just on treaty process, but also – and most vividly – on concerns about place. The sense of the Peel as both a homeland and as a wilderness – whether direct (for those from and in the region) or imagined (for more distant observers) – held emotional sway for many, and material similarities were identified with the sense of place that the Berger Inquiry documented.

These material pathways, whether place- or project-based, connect movements and lead to questions about the corporeal consequences of social and ecological entanglements. Advances in slow justice shape the lived experiences of communities over time. Social movements can thus be linked by being held in the same or similar places, or by addressing similar kinds of projects, with connections enacted through emotional attachments and identities. As a result, the mechanisms of slow justice might unfold through these linkages, building momentum towards postponing or withdrawing damaging development plans as new projects are judged not only on their own terms, but based on parallel experiences in other regions or at other times. Through the lens of slow justice, the success of the Peel case hinges on the fact that, as with the Mackenzie Valley in the 1970s, a large area of the Peel was not disrupted.

Processes: public hearings

Along with social and material connections, the governance processes engaged by Justice Berger – described by political scientist Frances Abele as ‘institutional innovations’ (2014), in particular the broadly inclusive approach and wide-ranging public consultation – have had lasting implications far beyond northern Canada and pipeline projects. Some of the processes of the Berger Inquiry – including the use of preliminary hearings and public hearings – were adopted by later commissions of inquiry on resource management and land use, such as the Pearse Commission on Pacific Fisheries Policy and the Porter Commission on Electric Power Planning in Ontario (Smith, 1982, p. 565). Notably, the hearing format was influential beyond resource management proposals – the Inquiry was attributed as the inspiration for the creation of citizen commissions on a range of issues, including unemployment and food systems in Canada (Bishop, 2004; Martin, 2010). The People’s Food Commission, which was organized in 1977 and ran from 1978–1980, followed the Mackenzie Valley Inquiry’s lead (People’s Food Commission, 1980, p. 8), holding hearings in 75 communities (Webb, 2011), with commissioners hired from across Canada to ensure regional diversity in perspectives (People’s Food Commission, 1980). The model was revitalized in 2008 with the People’s Food Policy Project, which held ‘kitchen table talks’ across the country (Webb, 2011), reminiscent of the more informal dimensions of Berger’s visits to fish camps, community halls, and cabins during the pipeline hearings. This produced new sites of governance and legitimacy, and the process is credited with contributing to the first Canadian national food policy in 2019 (Food Secure Canada, 2019).

The legacy of the Mackenzie Valley debates was therefore not only held in social networks and individuals, and in project similarities and place-based ties, but also in the processes of participation and public engagement that were developed, with consequences for future hearings on disparate issues. These governance processes linking distant movements reveal the unfolding of slow justice over time and space. With slow justice operating in ways that are delayed, incremental, and cumulative, we must consider how past movements have shifted the expectations of authorities and communities alike in terms of opportunities for participation, voice, and even recognitional justice.⁷

V. Conclusions

The effectiveness of movements is central to whether and how movement organizers choose strategies, recruit participants, accrue resources, build capacity, and persist over time. And outcomes of movements are of central interest to organizers: they are concerned with whether their efforts will have the intended effects, and what the unintended consequences might be. However, such choices and predictions are more challenging when movement outcomes are delayed, dispersed, or causally complex. Collective efforts might improve environmental conditions, enhance survival, and increase well-being, although in ways difficult to see and for which credit is hard to attribute. To identify the impacts of social movements, we need to not only start from situations of degradation but also from those of environmental integrity and community well-being. We need additional analytic tools to trace the outcomes of claim-making over time and across space. Slow justice, as a conceptual framework – assessed through our three-part typology of people, projects, and processes – offers such a tool.

Slow justice intersects with ideas of desire, autonomy, and emancipation, and with geographer Malini Ranganathan’s (2017) work on environmental freedom and decolonization. Her work points to the intersectional dimensions of structural violence, considering the racialized and gendered consequences of contamination and environmental damage – and also the anti-racist and feminist campaigns that can inform environmental justice action. Following Ranganathan (2017), we understand that the absence of contamination or the absence of extractive disruption might not only postpone ecological damage, but also nurture thriving communities with more equity and stronger cohesion and integrity. More complex ecosystems are more able to accommodate and adapt to disturbance. Communities with more robust relationships and cultural connections are more able to resolve conflicts and respond to new challenges. Since strengthening social bonds and ecological complexity can contribute to resilience and adaptive potential, such outcomes might add to the possibilities for the defense and sustenance of well-being over time, even in the face of future disruption.

This work has theoretical and practical consequences. Our framework emerges from the need to provide analytic tools for tracing these diffusion pathways. Theoretically, the slow justice framework enables the identification of causal connections across time and space that are otherwise invisible, providing pathways for tracking hard-to-see linkages and expanding our understanding of relationships among and between non-human actors and agents. Practically, this framework can reveal the contingency of seemingly immovable structures of power, and shift attention from the slow unfolding of damage to the sidelined processes of resilience and repair.

Seeing intact ecosystems and thriving communities as outcomes of success, not just as potential sites of future damage, helps to reveal the dispersed positive consequences of collective action that can otherwise be overlooked. This work thus offers an analytic and a normative response to the apparent defeat of many justice movements. We respond, then, to the despair and fragmentation that seems to have permeated some discussions of social movements. Taken individually, many protests or campaigns may seem to have failed, and slow violence might seem inevitable. However, our analytic tools enable participants and observers to see how justice, too, can accumulate and spread through people, projects, and processes that connect over time and across space. By reframing and rescaling our analysis, we observe that collective action can promote justice – increasing well-being and resilience to future disruption – even if these advances take place slowly and obliquely.

Acknowledgment(s)

For excellent research assistance on northern pipeline development, we thank Amy Janzwood, Laura Fernz, and Anna-Kay Russell. Thanks, too, to Matt Hoffmann for early-stage discussions of the idea of slow justice, to two anonymous reviewers for generative and constructive critiques (and terrific ideas for future work!), and to Kate Harris for thoughtful feedback. We also appreciate the excellent work of and help from the archivists at the Northwest Territories Archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430-2017-00409].

Notes on contributors

Kate J Neville

Kate J Neville is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment. She is the author of Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and Fracking (2021).

Sarah J Martin

Sarah J Martin is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. She specializes in the global political economy of food and agriculture, with publications including the book Green Meat?: Sustaining Eaters, Animals, and the Planet (co-edited with Ryan Katz-Rosene, 2020). Her current research explores the dynamics of food, feed, and fuel in relation to environmental politics and agri-aquacultures.

Notes

1. In Hope in the Dark, writer and environmental historian Rebecca Solnit (2005) examines the outcomes of collective action in pursuit of justice, noting that hope arises from the uncertainty of the outcomes of mobilization over longer time horizons, and especially from the potential for indirect consequences to our actions.

2. Here, we follow the distinctions drawn by marine scientist Max Liboiron and colleagues (2018, p. 334) between ‘toxins’ (which occur naturally, and generally circulate locally in small quantities) and ‘toxicants’ (which are created or mobilized through human activity, especially industrial scale processes).

3. These entanglements are particularly significant in regions that are seen through an extractive lens as frontiers and empty places, as anthropologist Anna Tsing (2004) illuminates in her work in the Meratus region of Indonesia. Tsing explores forests as ‘social, historical, biographical spaces’ (2004, p. 201), considering how relationships within forests are obscured through the construction of a division between people and nature. The human/nature division is seen in both resource extraction and conservation narratives, where ‘empty’ lands are open for plunder and environmental protection requires exclusion and dispossession.

4. The National Energy Board released its own report in 1977, Reasons for Decision: Northern Pipelines, rejecting the Mackenzie Valley route (National Energy Board, 1977).

5. The land use plan for the Peel Watershed was finalized in 2019 (Tobin, 2019).

6. Debates over the Peel also intersected with controversy in the Yukon over possible hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) for natural gas (Neville, 2021, especially chapter 5).

7. For more on concepts and forms of justice, especially the development of justice as recognition, see, e.g., Schlosberg (2004), Marion Suiseeya (2014).