Journal
ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Volume 9, Issue 2, Pages 207-222Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12251
Keywords
Frontier; Agriculture; Arctic; Climate Change; Value
Categories
Funding
- Princeton University's Climate and Energy Scholars Fellowship
- Wageningen University Centre for Space, Place, and Society
- the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Association
- Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies Writing Fellowship
- Wenner Gren Foundation
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As climate change poses threats to established zones of crop commodity production, an Arctic agricultural frontier is emerging. Different Alaskan agriculturalists are taking advantage of changing growing conditions, emphasizing investment in local values and highlighting the need for addressing inequality in resource distribution and alternatives to narratives of change.
An Arctic agricultural frontier is opening as climate change threatens growing conditions in established zones of crop commodity production. Projections of northward shifts of viable agricultural land unleash fantastical interest in the improbable reality of farming the tundra. Expansion of Arctic agriculture has long figured in Alaska's history, including drawing settlers to the Last Frontier, where farmers face challenges of extreme conditions, weak infrastructure, and fragile markets. This article, based on joint 2019 fieldwork and ongoing ethnography of landscape change and comparative commodity frontiers by the authors, tracks this imaginative frontier to examine how and why diverse Alaskan agriculturalists seize upon emerging conditions of climate change. We propose climate opportunism to frame an understanding of how agriculturalists may gain from changing growing conditions, drawing attention to the values in and beyond monetary gain generated in the social space of frontier imagination and grounded projects of livability in the Arctic. Across differently situated cultivators (a multigenerational immigrant family farm, an Inupiaq Arctic agriculture project, an urban hydroponics enterprise), we find that the changing landscape intensifies investment in embedded local values, while opportunism practiced at various scales both underscores and potentially obscures inequalities in resource distribution and alternatives to apocalyptic narratives of change.
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