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Accepted Paper:
Towards a transformative future. The local experience of coal transition in the Turów mining and power complex area in Poland
Katarzyna Majbroda
(University of Wroclaw)
Starting from anthropological fieldwork, the paper shows the specificity of the coal transition in Poland, around the Turów mining and power complex, emphasizing that this process is not only an ecological changes for the environment, but also a social transformation towards a more just future.
Paper long abstract:
We are living in the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), a new geological era in which human activities are affecting climate, ecosystems and the environment like never before. Increased extraction of natural resources, high CO2 and fossil gas emissions, overheating of the planet (Eriksen 2021), disturbed ecosystems and biodiversity loss are associated with large-scale economic and industrial development. Although the world has reached some consensus on the need to implement decarbonization policies and develop low-carbon infrastructure the process is advancing in different ways in different parts of the world (Loloum, Abram, Ortar 2021). The global and top-down scales of these visions miss in-depth local sociocultural understanding and local communities' own participation. Therefore, the paper emphasizes the experiential and transrelational dimensions of the coal transition (Iovino, Oppermann 2014), while problematizing the category of environmental justice as non-obvious, dependent on the perspectives adopted and the position taken in the networked conceptualized relationships, contexts and conditions of the European Green Deal policy and energy transition. Is it fair? To whom? Starting from anthropological fieldwork, the paper shows contextual specificity of the coal transition in Poland, around the mininig and power complex Turów, emphasizing that transformation is not only a network of infrastructure and technology changes for the environment, but also a social transformation towards a more just world and its future (Boyer, Howes 2019).