Montgomery Simus

Energy transition minerals, 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.

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.

Monty’s broader research interests comprise energy transition minerals, 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.

Primary doctoral supervisor: Joy Porter, 125^th Anniversary Professor of Indigenous & Environmental History, University of Birmingham.

Secondary Supervisor: Charles Prior, Professor of History, University of Birmingham.

For more on Pebble Mine, see here: https://www.bbnc.net/our-corporation/pebble-mine/

In addition to his PhD research, Monty serves as the Global Director of Public Affairs, Policy, and Blue Finance for The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit organization that develops and scales technologies to rid the world’s oceans and rivers of plastic — with millions of kilograms removed to date.  In 2023, Monty was an inaugural Impact Leader-In-Residence at Harvard University, focused on global water policy, conflict, and fostering collective hope for a water-just future.