“Environmental regulation functions through discrete timelines with linear notions of progress. Often, timelines are criticized for being unreasonable with unreachable deadlines (in Canada, for example, in 2012 Bill C-38 was criticized for axing timelines in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, see Doelle 2012). Given the linear and bounded logics of environmental regulation, including, the limitations of “significance determination” and a “valued components” approach to project assessment — this call for papers examines the messiness or nonlinear in a move to “queer” logics of environmental regulation. We propose a queer analysis of time, space, and environment to examine how cultural indicators, economic and environmental value are constituted in environmental regulation and project assessment. Our move to queer environmental regulation, seeks to further challenge what defines a “meaningful and efficient” regulatory process (Udofia, Noble, and Poelzer 2017). This is crucial as rural, often Indigenous communities historically and in the settler colonial present continue to bear the largest burden of state and proponent based linear (mis)calculations of time, efficiency, and meaning in regulatory processes.

We propose to query the dilemma of time, value, and environmental regulation by bringing environmental studies together with queer theories. We are inspired by José Muñoz’s dissatisfaction with what he called “straight time” and its propensity to only imagine futurities that replicate the “here and now” (2009). Muñoz put forward that alternative futures are possible if normative temporalities can be dislodged and disrupted. We are also informed by recent moves in Indigenous scholarship, like Driftpile Cree Nation scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Poltergeist Manifesto (2016). In this work, he questions, “[what it would mean] to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life?” (2016, p. 24). This boundary between the human and nonhuman world that rests on, as Belcourt puts it “a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social,” (2016, p.22) is necessarily reified in environmental regulation.

Motivated by Muñoz’s refrain that “queerness is always in the horizon” and Belcourt’s blurring of the delineation between human and non-human life, we welcome a range of theoretical and/or empirically based papers that trouble dominant temporalities and nodes of production and meaning in environmental regulation.”

References
Belcourt, B.R. 2016. A Poltergeist Manifesto, feral feminisms: Feral Theory. (6) pp 22-32.
Doelle, M. 2012. “CEAA 2012: The End of Federal EA as We Know It?” Journal of
Environmental Law and Practice (24)
Muñoz, J.E., 2009. Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press.
Udofia, A. Noble, B., Poelzer, G. 2017 “Meaningful and efficient? Enduring challenges to Aboriginal participation in environmental assessment”, Environmental Impact Assessment Review. (65) pp164-174.