Seeing Green: Lifecycles of an Arctic Agricultural Frontier^☆

Imaginaries of empty, verdant lands have long motivated agricultural frontier expansion. Today, climate change, food insecurity, and economic promise are invigorating new frontiers across the circumpolar north. In this article, I draw on extensive archival ethnographic evidence to analyze mid-twentieth-century recent twenty-first-century narratives development in Northwest Territories, Canada. argue that early imaginary is relatively intact its present lifecycle. It not simply climactic forces driving an emergent northern frontier, but rather more diffuse structural capitalism, governmental power, settler colonialism, resistance those forces. also show how social, political, infrastructural limits continue impede Territories discuss smallholder farmers Indigenous communities differently situate production within their local systems. This paper contributes critical debates agriculture literature by foregrounding contested space between state-driven dominant public underpinning imaginaries, cultural, material realities constrain them a frontier.