Authors

Discussion

Recent expansion of the transportation infrastructure and drastically intensified extraction of fossil-fuels have been rapidly transforming local landscapes into ecological ruins, polluting fragile minimalist Arctic eco-systems and generating conditions for environmental calamities and ecological anxieties about impacts of the current industrial developments among Indigenous communities in the Siberian Arctic. Such anthropocenic dynamic is an extension and continuation of a classic colonial scenario of the frontier expansion accompanied by violent processes of, borrowing from Amitav Gosh, terraforming (2021). The neo-colonial frontier ideology of the extraction and treatment of Indigenous lands as empty and open for subsurface extraction informs every construction project currently funded by the Russian state and private corporations in Russian North. This paper will discuss how the frontier ideology of ‘the world-as-a-resource’ is destroying fragile worlds of human and non-human communities living on and from Indigenous lands; how the promises of the connection and availability of transportation infrastructure by the extractive industries are never fulfilled; how socio-economic precarities and risks for human and non-human security are produced by agents of the frontier; what human and non-human connections and disconnections the practices and ideologies of frontier produce and reproduce.