Kate J. Neville is the research associate director at the School of the Environment and is cross-appointed with the Department of Political Science. Her research interests are in global environmental politics, with a focus on resource governance, global commodity markets, and contested water and energy projects. She is the author of Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and Fracking (2021) and of Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work (2024).
Your book Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work explores questions of idleness, considering the labour both of humans and of the myriad other inhabitants of the world. What was the inspiration for the book?
I’ll start with a story, as this book started with so many stories: I live part of the year in a cabin in northern BC. Not far from the cabin, there is a gravel road that leads to a lake, and there are culverts along the road to stop it from being flooded by the various ponds and marshlands along the way. Many years, there are beavers that dam the culverts, and the rising waters flood the road. There is an ongoing battle of wills that ensues: locals who try to dismantle the dams or relocate the beavers, and the beavers, who keep rebuilding and returning. One year, there was a little sign that some kids stuck up: “save the beavers!”
This story is part of the impetus for the book: how does human work sometimes enable but often disrupt the work of other beings on the planet, and how do we reconcile or alter our drive for productivity as a result?
These questions align with my research, which tends to focus on the downstream and spillover consequences of energy projects that are presented as climate solutions. So often, we think about the need to expand renewable or low-carbon energy production—but we need to ask what all this energy is for. That is, what work are we doing with all that energy, and what are the outcomes of that work? We need to think about what it means to expand energy use, including renewable energy, to extract resources, to alter land use, to expand production and consumption. Work can bring value, meaning, fulfillment, and survival—and is crucial to all of us—but at the same time, work can damage and disrupt, exploit and exhaust. Finding ways to think through these tensions and contradictions feels essential in a time of rapid environmental change, and this book was one way to explore these ideas.
You teach the first-year course ENV197H1: Idleness and the Environment: What Does Sustainable Work Mean? Was the course developed before or after you wrote your book? What concepts are explored in the course?
I started wrestling with these questions of idleness years ago, and I developed this first-year seminar class, ENV197, as a chance to explore these ideas in more depth. I taught this course for the first time as a virtual class during the first year of the pandemic, in a time where so many of the contradictions of our work and environmental relationships were laid bare, whether the restricted mobility for some against the required—and dangerous—movement for others, or the reduction in local air pollution from reduced traffic in some places against the deluge of single-use plastics for protective equipment and take-away goods. I was so impressed and inspired by the ideas and energy my students brought to our sessions, and started writing the book the year after.
In the course, we consider the role of humans within broader ecological communities, and ask questions about—among others—how to think about the undirected time needed to make art, how technologies shape our attention and connections to the world around us, how waged labour complicates our relationships with caregiving and other sustenance activities, how we might consider different arrangements of exchange including gifting and sharing economies, and how silence and rest might allow us to recognize the work and lives of others.
In the paper The false promise of deep-sea mining with Professor Jessica F. Green you argue that your “political economy analysis illustrates that arguments in support of deep-sea mining in the international seabed are based on false claims and false hopes.” Can you expand on this. Why should we be worried?
Proposals to extract metals and minerals from the seabed — in regions that are hundreds or even thousands of metres deep, from hydrothermal vents to seamounts to abyssal plains—are proliferating, although they are not new. This renewed or intensified interest in mining in the oceans has come from a colliding series of pressures, from the increased sophistication of underwater robotics to the soaring international interest in so-called critical minerals. The seabed has minerals and metals such as nickel, copper, manganese, cobalt, iron, and more—these are used extensively in electronics and high-tech systems. The demand for these materials has been projected to soar, and intensified mining has been described by some proponents as necessary to support the expansion of renewable energy infrastructure, including batteries.
In this paper, led by a colleague, Justin Alger, at University of Melbourne (and also explained in this article in The Conversation), our team critically examines some of the main justifications for deep-sea mining. Using a political economy lens—that is, in an analysis focused on questions of supply chain dynamics, market volatility, production systems, and global economic distribution—we find that the arguments used by proponents do not hold up. We examine three main claims: that these materials are scarce, so we need supplies from the oceans; that mining in the oceans is better than terrestrial mining for the environment and for communities; and that the profits from deep-sea mining will be equitably shared around the world through intergovernmental financial mechanisms. First, we find that the supply limitations for many of these materials are geopolitical, rather than material—and these political supply chain challenges aren’t solved through new sources. Second, we find evidence from other industries that new sources of resources tend to be additive, not substitutive. Even if mining in the oceans is better than mining on land (although we remain doubtful of this claim), deep-sea mining is not likely to replace land-based mining, it will just expand supplies. And third, an assessment of commercial partnerships for deep-sea mining between countries in the global South and private companies from the global North provides reasons to be skeptical about shared global benefits from seabed mining.
Given the potential for these activities to exacerbate environmental harm and economic inequality, we join a wider call for a ban on international seabed mining. Energy production always involves trade-offs, but we always need to think carefully and critically about what we’re trading up, and whether our proposed solutions will actually solve the problems that we have identified. In this case, deep-sea mining seems poised to create new harm and damage without solving any of the environmental, supply chain, or equity challenges embedded in current mining projects and supply chains.
We are facing so many environmental challenges due to climate change and political upheaval. How do you prioritize what to focus on?
There are so many different pathways into imagining and building a kinder, more balanced, more just future, and so I don’t have any prescriptive advice on this. For me, the answer to this question shifts and changes over time, but usually comes back to both curiosity and care: what questions can I just not stop thinking about, and what places keep pulling my head and heart? I initially came to energy politics through a love of water, looking at the disruption of rivers by hydropower, at the impacts on wetlands of biofuel crops—these aquatic systems I love so much. I also have been pulled into some projects because of the energy of communities that are leading the fight for their protection.
How do you integrate idleness into your life?
In my book, I set out to better understand how work and idleness are intertwined and interconnected. As I found, idleness as a concept encompasses some contradictory meanings, from rest and relaxation to unproductive and undirected activity. It is, as I write in the book, unruly and anarchic, resisting our control. Among the themes I bring out in the essays are the need to question dominant forms of value in a world so preoccupied with extraction and consumption, and the importance of recognizing when human work interferes with the work of other beings on the planet. For me, then, idleness is often about both quietness and attention—an inward stillness and an outward alertness. This is both an intellectual and a visceral challenge: creating mental space to imagine, reflect, and considering and noticing the world beyond and around me, seeing and recognizing the work of plants, animals, water, soil, and all those other lives. Although I think we can practice this everywhere—and need to especially in the midst of built environments and busy urban spaces—I find it easiest to channel idleness and attention when on the water, paddling a coastline or down a river, tapping into rhythms beyond my own making and control.
What is one of your favorite novels?
A tough question: I love reading fiction, and I often turn to novels for respite and for courage, to encounter empathy and understanding that rely on imaginative entry into others’ lives and worlds. Two that I return to often are are Anne Michaels’ tender, compassionate, grief- and love-infused Fugitive Pieces, and Barry Lopez’s fierce, troubled, and hopeful Resistance.
In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels writes: “there is nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another.” We may not have control over our wider surroundings, over the contexts we find ourselves in, over the systems and structures that shape our lives – but even in the midst of damage and sorrow and fear, we can choose at every moment how we turn towards others, what actions we take that protect, uplift, and sustain them.
And Barry Lopez writes a manifesto in Resistance that I have framed on my wall at home – with part of it as follows:
“We regard ourselves as servants of memory. We will not be the servants of your progress. We seek a politics that goes beyond nation and race. We advocate for air and water without contamination, even if the contamination be called harmless or is to be placed there for our own good. We believe in the imagination and in the variety of its architectures, not in one plan for all, even if it is God's plan. We believe in the divinity of life, in all its human variety. We believe that everything can be remembered in time, that anyone may be redeemed, that no hierarchy is worth figuring out, that no flower or animal or body of water or star is common, that poetry is the key to a lock worth springing, that what is called for is not subjugation but genuflection.”
To be skeptical of progress as an aim unto itself; to question hierarchy; to turn towards mystery and poetry; to bear witness to—and then imagine past—all the damage into a multiplicity of futures.