Sep 28
Biology Seminar: Mindy Price, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Macalester College, “Spectacles of the Arctic Agricultural Frontier”
Mon, September 28, 2026
• 3:30pm
- 4:30pm (1h) • Olin 141
Climate change is reshaping our world, not only through ongoing crises, but through anticipated possibilities. In the rapidly warming Arctic, political, economic, and environmental futures are increasingly imagined and contested. Climate crises endanger Arctic ecosystems and communities, while melting ice and warming temperatures are increasing global speculation for new resource extraction, transportation, and territorial boundary-making. In this talk, I will unpack scholarly visions of the Arctic as a new agricultural frontier. Drawing on seven years of research in the Northwest Territories, Canada, I will discuss how scientists use climate projections and crop suitability models to depict the Arctic as a future breadbasket, and how this vision contrasts sharply with the experiences of local Indigenous growers and small-scale commercial producers. Drawing on political ecology’s concept of socionatures – that social and environmental systems are inseparable – I show how the Arctic is changing, and people are changing too, in sometimes contentious and unexpected ways.
Event Contact: Peter Stone