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Presentation short abstract

Green extractivism restructures the felt, relational terrain of everyday life in communities whose territories supply the global green transition. This paper proposes 'contested emotional-psychosocial landscapes' to think through the contradictory dimensions of harm and resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Scholarship on environmental defenders has increasingly documented the emotional and psychosocial toll of violence, criminalization, and dispossession. Yet they risk flattening the contradictory, dynamic, and politically generative dimensions of emotional life in environmental conflicts.

Drawing on emotional political ecologies (Sultana 2015; González-Hidalgo and Zografos 2019), liberation psychology (Martín-Baró 1996), and social reproduction approaches (Mezzadri 2025), this paper treats the emotional-psychosocial landscape; or the felt, relational terrain through which communities sustain everyday life, as a terrain of power relations and struggle. In contexts of green extractivism, this terrain is not simply damaged from outside but actively entered and restructured from within: criminalization manufactures distrust and fractures solidarity; corporate capture of care infrastructures instrumentalises the very bonds communities depend on. Through participatory research with communities resisting a geothermal project in Poco Leok, and nickel mining in Wawonii, Indonesia, we show how these mechanisms work not against social life but through it; from the anticipatory fracture of a community under threat to the compounding destruction of one already inside operational extraction.

The emotional-psychosocial experiences we document are real in their harm and irreducibly contradictory: anger and grief that fuel collective action alongside exhaustion and fracture that hollow it out; solidarity that sustains social life alongside betrayal and suspicion that unsettle it. We propose the concept of contested emotional-psychosocial landscapes to name this condition, insisting that sitting with its contradictions is analytically and politically necessary for understanding what green extractivism does to social life, and what it takes to struggle against it.