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Montgomery Simus

Postgraduate Researcher

Summary

Monty Simus’s interdisciplinary PhD research centres on one of the world’s primary sites of contemporary water cultures in profound conflict: Pebble Mine, Bristol Bay, Alaska. His project explores the new, global dependence on energy transition minerals; how Indigenous and non-Indigenous imperatives intersect within debates on their potential development; and what Pebble Mine — one of the largest known undeveloped copper-gold-molybdenum deposits in the world that sits aside Bristol Bay, the world’s largest salmon fishery — can teach the world about growing tensions between decarbonization and conservation.

Research interests

Monty’s broader research interests comprise water ownership, First Nations, climate-adaptive finance, natural resources, and the blue-green trade-offs that must be evaluated to make informed policy and economic decisions. In the summer of 2024, he presented a paper examining clean energy’s ‘wicked problem’ at the British Academy’s “Water Futures: Historical Perspectives from Indigenous Ecological Knowledge” event held at the University of Oxford, as well as, a paper on conservation, decarbonization, and green colonialism at the Roosevelt Institute of American Studies in the Netherlands.

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