Damage and Repair in Environmental Assessment

Contemporary scholarship regards the acknowledgment of harm as an ethically necessary precondition for work on the environment. In this article, I show that the admission and subsequent management of harm have long been central to racial and colonial projects. To do so, I trace a logic of what counts as tolerable damage and what is thought to be able to be repaired in environmental assessment reports produced for the Alberta tar sands. What I find in these documents is that anxiety over complicity with historical damage leads to fantasies of reparability. In analyses of the political culture of the tar sands, I argue that conceding damage is better understood as an attempt to manage the appearance of violence and reinterpret its history. In the different examples on which I focus, responsibility for harm is performed. By making impacts legible and detailing plans to address them through mitigation, compensation, or replacement, resource extraction companies engage in fantasies of repair and admissions of destruction. This article works to theorize what function such gestures serve and how they contribute to perceiving the environment as something that must be managed. I show that its function is to describe the nature of loss along with a theorization of its reality.