In this installment of Helios, Amy Janzwood speaks with Darin Barney about her book Mega Pipelines, Mega Resistance, which examines pipeline politics, social movements, and state power in Canada. Focusing on the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion projects, their conversation traces why pipelines become sites of democratic conflict, how resistance takes shape across Indigenous nations, environmental organizations, and local communities, and how regulators and governments structure extractive outcomes. Together, they discuss infrastructure as a political object, the constraints of regulatory participation, and the conditions under which large-scale resistance forms in periods of renewed extractivism.

Could organizing power systems regionally on an "energyshed" model empower citizens and redistribute the political control of energy systems in a democratic direction? In this introductory exploration, Darin Barney highlights the political implications of energysheds, arguing that they "will be made, not found."