Format/Structure

The panel will consist of four speakers, each presenting for 15 minutes and a moderated discussion after all the presentations.

Long Abstract

From oil spills in the Niger Delta and a giant tailings dam disaster in Brumadinho, to the sacrifice zones that gold mining has left behind in Johannesburg, resource extraction ushers in complete environmental transformation. With the global intensification of mining and oil drilling, concerns over environmental justice are mounting. This panel zooms in environmental histories and the plural forms of environmentalism that emerge in localities of resource extraction across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Why do concerns over pollution and community wellbeing sometimes express themselves as protest movements, whereas elsewhere people seemingly learn to live with toxicity? How does history explain patterns of environmental perception and action? Notwithstanding fruitful debates about the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Martínez Alier, 2023) and political ecology analyses of extractivism and environmental justice (Dunlap, 2024), environmentalism is still too often understood in binaries of resistance and resignation. We seek to pluralise notions of environmentalism beyond activism, to also encompass everyday acts of care and subtle forms of environmental action as well as historically informed analyses of the relations between human groups and extractive ecologies. By asking where, when, and why environmentalism emerges in African, Asian, and Latin American zones of extraction, we seek a grassroots understanding of what environmental justice means. Although resource extraction occurs across the globe, we hypothesise that it has specific environmental dynamics in the Global South due to racial capitalism and markedly unequal state-company-community relationships that make the effects of toxicity and waste particularly stark. What kinds of environmentalism emerge in these settings of environmental injustice? We particularly welcome contributions that speak from historical and ethnographic engagements with extractive communities and landscapes. Through a political ecology approach we seek to pluralise understandings of environmentalism and open debates about environmental justice in localities of mining and oil drilling in the Global South.

This Panel has 11 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper