Jeremy J. Schmidt. Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026).
Here are some events that have happened since my book, Landlocked, went to press last year. Some are widely reported, while others seem technical details. What they share with my book’s central tenants is that political legitimacy is achieved through the ways in which states know and relate to land. In Alberta, I argue, two forces work together to tie this knowledge to claims of legitimacy. One is an appetite for applying international norms to domestic policy; the second is the use of geosciences to position the province as the rightful heirs to Earth’s history.
So, what has happened while copy editors, typesetters, and indexers did the often-invisible work of bringing to life a book that previously existed only on my laptop?
In late 2025, Alberta quietly redefined watershed boundaries so that its two largest watersheds, the Peace and the Athabasca became one. The redefinition was a workaround to the provincial prohibition on inter-basin transfers that stops water being moved from one basin to another. The solution? Redefine the watershed.
In early 2026, Alberta dissolved the Alberta Water Council, which had been the key provincial level advisory group on water policy for two decades. My own PhD work had involved interviewing people on the AWC not long after it was formed as part of Alberta’s 2003 Water for Life strategy.
In July 2026, Alberta announced two new pipelines, one to the west coast and one to Ontario. They then announced a new data centre for Meta would be built near Edmonton, powered in part by its own natural gas facility. To round out July, Alberta issued permits to expand coal mining without federal impact assessments or a regulatory hearing.
All of these developments would have fit comfortably in my book. Each one, in its own way, brings the historical account that Landlocked offers into the present in a way that furthers its core argument: understanding political legitimacy requires looking at the details of how states know and relate to land. This is an idea that complicates the usual story that legitimacy is something democracies achieve through the consent of the governed, or via a social contract, or through how the “will of the people” translates (or not) into popular sovereignty. Those aspects are all important, but they miss an important aspect of legitimacy, which is that it takes place with respect to territory.
As I worked through archives in Canada, the US, and the UK a different idea struck me: legitimacy also turns on how geosciences—plural and always changing with new techniques and practices—make possible the extraction of value from land. This idea is especially relevant in countries like Canada that started out as colonies focused on extraction at the peripheries for profit in the metropole (and various points along the way). The place of geosciences carried through into confederation and battles over jurisdiction over resources. It continues to animate the divisions of power over water and energy in the form of Canadian confederation that structures Indigenous dispossession today.
These are big claims, but they are the best way to make sense of my research. I initially started out working on water policy in Alberta but came to see that water was almost always made instrumental to the extraction of value from land—first through calories from crops in the rush of western settlement, and later through oil and gas extraction. So, to tell Alberta’s water story it was necessary to also tell its energy story. But energy is itself a land story. And this led to the question: how does Alberta legitimate its energy story? I am not the first person to ask this question. But what struck me was how the role of geosciences in Alberta means that it has a long history of telling its story in geological terms.
One place Alberta tells its energy heritage story is on its website. It is a story that ties geology to people, and which Métis scholar Zoe Todd has examined for how it transforms—weaponizes—Indigenous kin into fossil fuels. But very little of that story can be made sense of without water, which also has planet shaping force in extracting value from land. For instance, a key technology in Alberta’s in situ oil extraction superheats steam to mobilise bitumen that is too deep to mine from the surface. That is where roughly 75-80% of Alberta’s reserve of oil lies, and in situ technologies find their most apt comparisons in reference to geological forces. My book’s introduction is oriented around just such a claim, where early on the force needed below ground was explained as needing roughly “one hundred atmospheres of pressure” to get viscous bitumen moving.
From there, I trace Alberta’s water and energy history together. I make no claim to tell a “total history.” I leave lots out—some footnotes took on a life of their own and turned into articles. One is on forgotten controversies on international waters that flow between Alberta and Montana, another is on how Alberta’s Geological Survey published an extension to the game Minecraft based on data gathered in response to complaints about environmental health and oil sands extraction in Peace River.
“To be landlocked, in Alberta’s case, isn’t only about the nonstop rhetoric about distance from oceans, provincial sovereignty, or national energy security. It is also about being locked into an extractive relationship to land.”
What is in Landlocked, I hope, is enough to back up the claim that to understand political legitimacy much more attention needs to be paid to how environmental knowledge is constitutive of state claims to territory. The environmental knowledge states produce isn’t merely instrumental to forms of legitimacy that reside elsewhere in an imagined political calculus of what democracies are or do. Rather, environmental knowledge is fundamental to state claims to territory, and this requires a new approach to political legitimacy itself.
Importantly, this isn’t only a claim about the past, but also about how claims are made on the future. In the final chapter, I detail how Alberta’s climate policy emerged in the 1990s and was shaped by the same thinking—sometimes the same people—who oversaw the massive state investment that made extraction from the Alberta oil sands a reality.
To be landlocked, in Alberta’s case, isn’t only about the nonstop rhetoric about distance from oceans, provincial sovereignty, or national energy security. It is also about being locked into an extractive relationship to land.
Feature Image: “Edmonton High Level Bridge – Great Divide Waterfall” by Edmonton Economic Development Corporation is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Latest posts by Jeremy Schmidt (see all)
- New Book – Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta - September 29, 2026