Envisioning a Green Energy Future in Canada and the United States: Constructing a Sustainable Future in the Context of New Regionalisms?

A variety of actors in Canada and the United States are actively constructing a vision of a greener society that includes an environmentally sustainable energy future. Canadian provinces and states in the United States share environmental management, corporations collaborate to drive green development and implement local energy projects, and activists on both sides of the border share environmental protest strategies and mobilization frames. A transition to regionalism of greener energy resources along the Vermont–Canadian border is indicative of a larger “new regionalism” of sustainable identity, despite very concrete and pressing external pressures and energy challenges concerning global climate change, resource depletion, and energy sustainability challenges within the larger nations of both Canada and the United States. In this article, we aim to characterize this green visioning of a sustainable energy future, by focusing especially on the Vermont–Canadian border region, and additionally point to the benefits and contradictions that result.