Law Commons^™

Narratives In Conflicts: Alaska Natives And Offshore Drilling In The Arctic, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This Symposium Essay examines and elucidates the ways in which the narrative constructions that constitute the “imaginary Arctic” factor into litigation surrounding Shell Oil’s highly controversial attempts to drill for oil and gas in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska’s North Slope. Judges, lawyers and litigants involved in the Shell litigation have deployed a number of well-established storylines against each other: the Arctic as Classical Frontier, the Arctic as Spiritualized Frontier, the Arctic as Ancestral Homeland, the Arctic as Developing World, and the Arctic as Neutral Space. The litigation literature produced by this “battle for the Arctic” offers an …