Understanding ExtrACTIVISM

Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes

Anna J. Willow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429883897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects' proponents and opponents, beneficiaries and victims. Through a series of engaging case studies, she argues that diverse contemporary natural resource conflicts are underlain by a culturally constituted 'extractivist' mind-set and embedded in global patterns of political inequity. Offering a synthesizing framework for making sense of complex interconnections among environmental, social, and political dimensions of natural resource disputes, Willow reflects on why extractivism exists, why it matters, and what we might be able to do about it. The book is valuable reading for students and researchers in the environmental social sciences as well as for activists and practitioners.

1

INTRODUCTION

Today’s extreme extraction does unprecedented environmental damage, but both its underlying causes and its most urgent consequences are socially constructed and profoundly political. This book considers how culture and power inform natural resource disputes. The stories it contains bear witness to the devastation of ecological systems, land-based livelihoods, and cultural identities confronted by peoples as distant—and as different—as Yonggom hunter-horticulturalists of south-central New Guinea, Navajo pastoralists of the southwestern United States’ nuclear sacrifice zone, and Euro-American residents of Appalachia’s coal mining communities. Together, these stories expose extractivism’s inequitable foundations and colonial roots. Yet extractivism is increasingly answered by ACTIVISM. This book therefore tells not only of loss, but also of resistance.

My goal is threefold. First and foremost, I aim to raise awareness of interrelationships among cultural and political dimensions of contemporary natural resource extraction and its associated environmental degradation by bringing situations that only rarely make the nightly news to light. I assemble narratives that highlight both sides of the extractivism/extrACTIVISM formulation, which means tracing trajectories that encompass industrial resource exploitation as well as the actions taken to counter it. Second, I encourage readers to forge connections between the cases they study, the choices they make, and the items they encounter in their daily lives. Along the way, I call into question the sustainability and justifiability of a world system that permits some individuals to reap immense rewards from extractive undertakings while the vast majority of others neither benefit from resource removal nor participate in decisions about when, where, and how it will occur. Thirdly and ultimately, I am optimistic that in the juxtaposition of extractivist schemes and activist responses presented here, readers will recognize successful strategies for resistance and identify promising possibilities for a future beyond extractivism.

Extractivism

Extractivism is a mindset and a pattern of resource procurement based on removing as much material as possible for as much profit as possible. Extractivism removes natural resources from their points of origin, dislocating the emplaced benefits they provide. Clear-cut logging, massive hydroelectric dams, mineral and coal mining, and oil and natural gas production show us extractivism in action. Because capturing resources on today’s enormous scale requires the physical rearrangement of landscapes (and sometimes also employs complex chemical processes to separate substances that are desired from those that are not), adverse environmental effects often ensue. Economically, extractivism is characterized by a reliance on primary commodities, an export market orientation, and (as critics like to point out) high poverty rates and inequitable concentrations of wealth.¹ Politically, it has been tied over time and space to expansionist states that pave the way for extractive industries’ success—a political formation that international development sociologists Henry Veltmeyer and James Petras call “extractive imperialism.”² An interwoven system of ecological and social destruction, extractivism leads to local dispossession.

Extractivism is not simply the use of natural resources, which is something humans in every corner of the world have been doing since time immemorial. Contemporary extractivism springs from a neoliberal, late-capitalist outlook associated (according to prominent human geographer David Harvey) with an inherently unsustainable single-mindedness in which long-term environmental consequences are ignored in favor of short-term contractual relations that encourage the extraction of as much as possible as quickly as possible.³ For our purposes, neoliberalism can be defined (again following Harvey) as a political and economic framework that places the utmost value on private property, free markets, and free trade, while at the same time advocating “the financialization of everything.”⁴ Contemporary extractivism is a quintessentially neoliberal relationship to natural resources. As activist author Naomi Klein sees it, extractivism is rooted in

the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.⁵

More than just a way of using the Earth and its resources, extractivism is also a way of thinking. It is a way of being in the world, a way of positioning ourselves in relation to the natural realms we occupy. Like neoliberalism, extractivism is “both a cause of environmental change and a product of changes in the way we interact with the environment.”⁶ Extractivism is necessarily an environmental as well as a political project, simultaneously a social and an ecological debacle.⁷

ExtrACTIVISM

ExtrACTIVISM means taking action to counter extractivist development and domination. Everywhere extractive industry operates is home to someone. Our planet does not have the luxury of boundless unclaimed territory. Regions sacrificed in the name of extraction are almost always already inhabited, utilized, and valued in ways that are largely incompatible with the extensive environmental transformations that extractivism implies. Whether residents’ claims to lands and resources are misunderstood or summarily dismissed, externally imposed extractive schemes disrupt subsistence economies, jeopardize affirmative place-based identities, and hinder communities’ capacity to function as effective independent entities. For these reasons, extractivist projects are often perceived as attacks and are, consequently, often met with defensive resistance. Conflicts between those intent on profiting from the removal of natural resources and those determined to protect their lands and lives have been frequent and fierce.

In recent years, tense encounters between multinational corporations and angry Indigenous groups—some of them dramatic and highly publicized, others relatively unknown to outsiders—have transpired in the unevenly developed nations of the global South as well as in “Fourth World” contexts of settler colonialism.⁸ Later chapters describe these cases in detail. Yet extractivism is neither a novel sensation nor an isolated byproduct of unusually irresponsible industrial practices. Not only are its origins closely intertwined with the history of European expansion and capitalist economic growth (as Chapter 2 makes clear), but extractivism also has profound consequences for communities in the Western industrialized world. These cases, too, are described below. Both extractivism and the extrACTIVIST responses it inspires are enduring and pervasive global realities.

For extraction zone residents everywhere, battling industrial encroachment is seen as a necessary struggle for survival. Diverse and determined, extrACTIVISM is tied to contemporary world economic, transportation, and communication systems. But we will see that its timing and techniques are culturally appropriate and situationally relevant, with contexts of resistance shifting over time and space so that direct action protest is complemented by legal challenges, appeals to international authorities, multi-scalar alliances, strategic media drives, and targeted corporate campaigns.

Perspectives

My understanding of culture and power in natural resource disputes is enriched by ideas emanating from environmental anthropology, landscape anthropology, interdisciplinary political ecology, and the global environmental justice movement. The words I write are guided by my deeply held convictions that (1) the natural environment and human actions are interconnected parts of the same whole, and (2) the world we share is increasingly imperiled and urgently in need of our protection.

Environmentalism has been defined by Kay Milton (an anthropologist who studies environmental activism and discourse) as “a concern that the environment should be protected, particularly from the harmful effects of human activities.”⁹ I joined the environmental movement as a naive middle-class teenager. Although I knew them only from zoos and documentaries, my concern for endangered species and threatened wilderness areas was genuine and profound. As I made my way through two years of art school and two years as an anthropology major at a large public university, my desire to make a positive environmental contribution grew. I went on for graduate training in environmental education and enjoyed working as a naturalist, but my need to explain what motivates environmental attitudes drew me back to the academic world of environmental anthropology, a field that investigates the global diversity of human–environment relationships and the environmental causes and effects of cultural behavior. I wanted to know what inspires some people to take dramatic action to protect the environment, while others eagerly exploit non-human entities and interactions for profit or (even more commonly) seem indifferent to the destruction that surrounds them.

It wasn’t until I traveled to northwestern Ontario, Canada, to begin the educational journey that culminated in my doctoral dissertation, that my epiphany finally occurred. It was the spring of 2003 and I had come to a place—called Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek in the Anishinaabe language and Grassy Narrows in English—where industrial clear-cut logging was ravaging a 2,500 square mile traditional territory treasured by generations of First Nations citizens. After years of unfruitful letter writing and conventional complaints, residents had erected a blockade to slow the flow of logs from their forest. Working at Grassy Narrows was a chance to learn how Indigenous people were responding to anthropogenic environmental change and, I hoped, an opportunity to combine academic research with support for a cause I believed in.

I initially assumed that the protest was primarily about environmental protection. But at Grassy Narrows, I quickly discovered that there was much more to it than the wildlife and wilderness I’d embraced for so long. I realized that it was impossible to make sense of environmental thoughts and actions without also understanding the distinctive beliefs and practices that position people as part of ecological systems and the intergenerational ties that bind them to historical homelands. I discovered that imbalances of power determine who can claim natural resources and how. I learned, in other words, that “environment” cannot be separated from “culture” or “politics.” We will return to Grassy Narrows in Chapter 3.

This revelation, combined with a burning need to put my thoughts into words (and have my words make some kind of sense to my professors), led me to landscape anthropology—a genre within environmental anthropology that explores the intersection of people, places, and perceptions. Building on scholarship in art history that defines landscape as “a natural scene mediated by culture” and geographical work that describes it as a “way of seeing the world,” environmental anthropologists have used the landscape idea as a tool for thinking about the diverse ways in which people from different cultures—and people who occupy different positions within the same culture—comprehend the physical environment.¹⁰ Because it acknowledges that individuals who live or labor in the same place may hold vastly divergent views of their surroundings, the landscape approach is valuable for illuminating the conflicting environmental comprehensions that underlie natural resource disputes.

People think about the environments they encounter in culturally constructed and diverse ways. Because different ways of viewing and valuing land and resources lead to different ways of using them, landscapes are often highly contested.¹¹ And because holders of divergent views are rarely equally empowered to make their physical reality match their cultural ideals, these same landscapes are also highly political.¹² Here, landscape anthropology merges with political ecology. Political ecology investigates how power arrangements between and within human groups concurrently shape and are shaped by available resources and changing ecological conditions. The phrase was first used by renowned economic anthropologist Eric Wolf in 1972 to underscore the effects of political relationships on human–environment interactions.¹³ Defined as “the study of manifold constructions of nature in contexts of power,” political ecology is an interdisciplinary effort rather than a singular approach.¹⁴ Embraced by anthro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Boxes
• Foreword by David W. Orr
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Legacies
• 3 Forests
• 4 Water
• 5 Mining
• 6 Coal
• 7 Oil and Gas
• 8 You Decide
• References
• Index