Abstract

This article introduces a Special Section on time and temporality in natural resource extraction. The Special Section illuminates the importance of both resource temporalities and temporal strategies around resource extraction, including nostalgia and identity, political strategies to delay projects, and contested attempts at predicting and managing the future. In addressing these themes, contributors highlight divergent spatio-temporalities and memories of extractive landscapes, local people's anticipation of future effects from mining, and governmental and corporate practices to speed up project implementation. We suggest that various temporal aspects – such as history, memory, velocity, delay, and epistemologies of time – play a central role in how struggles and controversies over extractive development manifest in particular places. We also offer additional avenues for research on contested understandings of time and temporality in political ecology.Keywords: natural resources, extractive industry, temporality, political ecology

Highlights

  • Creating meaning and accumulating value from natural resources involves multiple economic, cultural, political, and biophysical processes, which occur over different timescales

  • Activists opposed to extraction may mobilize various spatial and temporal strategies to delay and indefinitely postpone projects, while proponents call upon the economic urgency of moving forward with extraction. Despite these temporal dynamics in the creation and extraction of resources, little political ecology scholarship has expressly addressed the temporal politics of natural resource extraction; instead, there has been more focus on the spatial and territorial dynamics and struggles over access and control of land, water, habitat, ancestral domain, and the subsurface

  • Some of the articles examine the political importance of nostalgia and future imaginaries around resources, while others demonstrate the importance of temporality in processes of capital accumulation, dispossession, and environmental mitigation

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Summary

Introduction

Creating meaning and accumulating value from natural resources involves multiple economic, cultural, political, and biophysical processes, which occur over different timescales. Activists opposed to extraction may mobilize various spatial and temporal strategies to delay and indefinitely postpone projects, while proponents call upon the economic urgency of moving forward with extraction Despite these temporal dynamics in the creation and extraction of resources, little political ecology scholarship has expressly addressed the temporal politics of natural resource extraction; instead, there has been more focus on the spatial and territorial dynamics and struggles over access and control of land, water, habitat, ancestral domain, and the subsurface. Some of the articles examine the political importance of nostalgia and future imaginaries around resources, while others demonstrate the importance of temporality in processes of capital accumulation, dispossession, and environmental mitigation Overall, they use temporality as a framework for understanding the socio-ecological dynamics of natural resources and for assessing the role of power and ideology in the politics of extraction

Political ecologies of resources and temporality
Temporalities of natural resource extraction
Conclusion

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