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to our climate-changed future. Instead, versatile new tools will be needed to address the unexpected,
urgent and immediate problems once guarded against through risk assessments and incremental
policy course corrections.
Yet, like resilience, the idea of adaptation is fraught with the potential for misuse amid the power
imbalances of many environmental management contexts. Faced with the need to adapt to a rapidly
changing environment, Canada’s indigenous communities are experiencing considerable pressure
and incentive to reformulate the way they perceive, value and act toward their environment and the
resources it contains. Much as they have for the past 200 years, southern society, science and
technology are continuing to reshape indigenous epistemologies and self-perceptions as an implicit
exercise of colonial conquest (Douglas 2007; Latour 1993).
Douglas (2007) has addressed the many forces that have promoted the separation of nature from
subsistence-based communities – a process he describes as “enormously beneficial, as it allows
modern societies to treat nature as an objective, manipulatible sphere that is separate and distinct
from humanity”(215). Latour (1993) has shown how early nineteenth century programs of European
scientific inquiry used the ‘rhetoric of inclusion’ to exploit Inuit knowledge and abilities in scientific
expeditions and resource exploitation while fundamentally disregarding and marginalizing
indigenous interests and concerns. Through the lens of history, these examples provide greater
insight into the ongoing concern over the postcolonial inequities of Arctic environmental change.
These concerns are commonplace in many resource management debates and can be seen in
everything from Haalboom & Natcher’s (2012) unease over the potential consequences of labeling
climate-impacted indigenous communities “vulnerable” to calls by Veland et al. (2013) for
researchers and policy-makers to do a better job of epistemologically ground-proofing risk
assessments.
It is within this evolving and polarized worldview that Canada’s coastal communities now contend
with the everyday use of their environment’s ocean resources. Agrawal (2006) has discussed how
limiting governance tools to the representation of a small set of desirable features within an
environment – for example, funding just enough science to estimate the quantity of oil and gas in
the ocean seabed – can result in the devaluation of the day-to-day use of resources by local residents
in management calculations (61). Agrawal’s work, which focuses on the evolution of forestry
practices under a colonial regime, speaks to the social conflicts that emerge from management
classification systems developed out of and in support of colonial rule. The Canadian settlement
history of indigenous landscapes as well as the current reformulation of natural resource policies to
better serve the needs of the current conservative agenda share many characteristics with this
colonial narrative – not least, the underlying reality that people’s lives fundamentally depend on the
quality of their environment and their ongoing access to and safe use of the renewable resources
those environments produce.
How then are these fractures in the ideals of integrated ocean management, the move to shrink
science and the consolidation of decision-making playing out in regard to the ability of Canadians to
safely depend on ocean resources at provincial and local scales? One way to answer this question
may be found in Canada’s capacity to address the problem of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
The New Insecurities of Canadian Integrated Ocean Management