Environmental Struggles Research Articles

The Watersheds Speak: The Voice of Ecosystems in Northern New York's Environmental Movements☆

AbstractThis paper explores how connectivity to place has brought life to contemporary environmental struggles in what is now known as New York State. Layers of memory, colonization, and stewardship are embedded within a community's relationship with their environment. By focusing on two case studies, the authors will illustrate how this relationship shaped successful place‐based resistance. Throughout our work, we offer the alternative methodology of ecocentric storytelling and artistic representation to elevate the voice of both ecosystems and all their inhabitants. Both case studies are centered on environmental/social movements that foreground the inherent personhood of the natural world. The first will focus on the Ashokan Reservoir, in the Catskill Mountains, on land guarded by the Lenape. It is a location that has suffered multiple waves of colonization and successfully resisted a large damming operation. The second case study will be centered on the Upper St. Lawrence River/Kaniatarowanénhne Watershed, Haudenosaunee Territory, where rural communities are uniting to grant Rights to the Rivers that bring life to their communities. Both cases exemplify the story of communities that defended their livelihoods and environments by uniting with their most reliable allies, the Water, and all their more‐than‐human guardians.

The struggle for an alternative future: Anticipatory actions and socio-environmental movements in Alt Empordà (Catalonia)

This article describes the environmental practices and discourses of local actors in the Alt Empordà region in Catalonia and how they contribute to the production of a vision of the environmental future. Based on a political ecology of hope framework, it presents different anticipatory actions and strategies which have created this vision of the environmental future since the 1970s, presenting key historic moments and actions which are central to various strategies which have been elaborated in order to secure access to the land and its resources. For decades, different successful campaigns have nourished a particular outlook, aimed at creating an environmental future which is accessible, attainable, and pragmatic. The article then analyzes how recent environmental changes and the consequences of these changes for the different local environments are significantly changing the actors’ view of the environmental future. Different shades of darker futures are emerging, in which the clear gains from environmental struggles are less tangible. It is hoped that in these futures access to nature will be more inclusive and less oriented towards a modernist and developmentalist approach to the territory. This perspective favours a thriving nature, but does so by rethinking conventional conservation models in order to take into account the changing nature of the environment in a climate change context. It is hoped that the region's demographic structure will enable its inhabitants to maintain, occupy and live on the territory, rather than leaving it to consist of protected areas or tourist areas only, and to build a different relationship with energy and water consumption. Finally, we discuss how these transformations modify local perceptions of the future and may foster an “anticipated solastalgia” as an emerging category of environmental thought.

Understanding Kerala's Environmental Struggles: A Comprehensive Background

Understanding Kerala's Environmental Struggles: A Comprehensive Background

Making Space for Peace in Contexts of ‘Non-war’ Violence: Challenging War-Peace Binaries Through Feminist, Spatio-Temporal, and Decolonial Approaches

ABSTRACT Peace is often represented as a matter of time, as a political state that happens after war. This special issue contests this linear and binary view by giving an account of being and thinking between the boundaries of peace and war. It challenges mainstream ideas, political discourses, and collective imaginaries about the location of violence, peace, and peacebuilding. It does so by providing empirical and theoretical arguments as to why Peace and Conflict Studies and Geographies of Peace should widen their scope of empirical sites to include contexts of non-war violence, such as military urbanism, counterterrorism, police violence, migration, environmental struggles, and continued everyday violence and peacebuilding in different locations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. To do so, the special issue presents four theoretical lines of inquiry: 1) spatiality; 2) temporality; 3) feminist phenomenology and; 4) decolonial thought. Collectively, the articles make a strong case, epistemologically, theoretically, and methodologically, about peace as a complex embodied experience that should be analysed in time and space. The special issue concludes by calling for ‘making space for peace’ through in-betweenness, care, and non-violent resistance.

Convergence in action: framing the climate crisis at the 2021 Pre-COP counter-summit in Milan

ABSTRACT With the emergence of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, youth climate activism has attracted increasing attention. Climate strikes are part of a long trajectory of mobilizations for climate justice, rooted in global justice and environmental struggles. Although research on social movements has analyzed differences and continuities within these, there have been few systematic comparisons between youth climate strikes and ‘traditional’ climate justice marches. Our paper contributes to fill this gap. We focus on the framing of climate change in two different protest actions that took place in Milan, Italy, during the Pre-COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2021: a climate strike by Fridays for Future, and a ‘traditional’ climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors. Relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, we discuss differences, similarities, and spaces for convergence among activists in these different fora, focusing on the framing of climate change, and on the meanings attached to ‘system change’.

From toxic industries to green extractivism: rural environmental struggles, multinational corporations and Ireland’s postcolonial ecological regime

ABSTRACT This article articulates the historical entanglement of Ireland’s big tech ecosystem with earlier forms of economic development and state-sanctioned polluting practices, particularly focusing on strategies for attracting multinational companies since the 1960s. The outsourcing of polluting multinational industries to Ireland’s rural regions has a long history, one tied into fault-lines of the country’s postcolonial condition and developmental economy in the 1970s and 1980s. During this era of economic liberalisation, Ireland’s environmental politics were frequently organised against the outsourcing of toxic chemical, pharmaceutical, and technological industries to rural Ireland. Ireland’s position as a western European nation-state undoubtedly means that wealth accumulated via these industries merits complicity in the global supply chains sustaining “green” extractivism in the Global South. But rural Ireland also bears an uneven share of responsibility for these industries, whose destructive externalities are often imposed on these places through large-scale infrastructures. Historical struggles for environmental justice in these rural sites foreground access to land, livelihoods, health, and cultures of place. Contributing to recent debates on the colonial endurances of contemporary “green” development, we argue that these rural movements should be a starting point for a “just” transition attuned to anti-imperialist goals in Ireland.

Environmental struggles and insularity: The right to nature in Mallorca and Tenerife

Islands worldwide experience commodification of land and natural resources that is closely related to touristic activity and urbanization. Islands represent the epitome of commodified represented spaces, power, and territorialization, and in this regard, focusing on islands may shed light on how the production of socio-natures shapes the dynamics of capital accumulation, dispossession, and resistance. We explore the contestation of urban-tourist development in Majorca and Tenerife. Both have experienced an intense expansion of artificial land uses since the touristic boom in the mid-20th century, which has intensified with neoliberal capitalism and the commodification of everyday life elements. Environmental struggles in both islands have facilitated greater mobilization than other claims. An empirical survey of the spatio-temporal evolution of these two islands illustrates and helps to deepen the conceptual development of the right to the island and nature. The idea of the right to nature consists of the right to influence and rule the processes by which nature–society relationships are (re)shaped by urbanization and capitalism. The notion of the right to the island relies on the political action to foster a sustainable island future.

More-than-Human Lifeworlds: Ethics, Ontology and Relationality in Local Environmental Struggles

Local environmental conflicts are often framed as “resource conflicts” in the political ecology literature. Based on ethnographic research on local community struggles against run-of-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region, this article aims to demonstrate the limitation of the “resource” frame in explaining the grievances of environmentally dispossessed communities and their motivations to fight against it. The article discusses how and why rivers are more than “natural resources” for the rural communities of the region, maintaining non-human entities as integral not only to the umwelt (environment, surroundings), but also to the lebenswelt (lifeworld). It develops a bodycentred, phenomenological perspective demonstrating how non-human entities become an essential part of our experiential and social world through habitual and corporeal encounter and interaction. It maintains the centrality of the more-than-human lifeworld in the constitution of relational ontologies and ethics of coexistence, and in the formation of political agency.

Defending Nature

Despite the violence of law enforcement forces in Turkey, both urban and rural communities are protesting environmental injustices, including the ecological destruction, human rights violations, health problems, and displacement that the extractive industry causes. Despite the recent increase in discussions on the topic, the extractive industry and environmental protests are not recent debates in Turkish politics. Since the military coup of 1980, changes in mining codes have led communities to organize environmental protests to defend their livelihoods, place, and culture. For four decades, many communities have organized successful protests that have helped develop the environmental movement in Turkey. However, while some environmental movements have been ongoing for many years through grassroots activism, others have failed to create a collective identity that enables the entire community to come together. Hence, in this paper, I comparatively analyse the anti-mining environmental struggles of two communities. In doing so, I show how local inhabitants have been able to organize an environmental movement against extractivism to defend their livelihoods and space under an umbrella organization...

Feminist Pedagogies on the Front Lines: Struggling Against a Mine, Struggling Against Patriarchy

In 2018, residents of the Vayots Dzor region in southern Armenia began occupying the entrance to a gold mine owned by Lydian International, at Amulsar mountain, to halt operation. At the forefront of this struggle were not only local men, but also many women who identified themselves as feminists from the capital city of Yerevan. Although feminism is marginalized as a political praxis and discourse in the country—including within leftist and progressive circles—feminists are on the front lines of various larger political struggles. Through ethnographic research within feminist and environmental struggles in Armenia—in which I was situated as a researcher, friend, and comrade—I found that feminists instructed those within and outside of larger political struggles on the importance of gendered understandings of social, political, and economic relations toward their transformation. This pedagogical work was necessary for their ability to do political work as women within these larger movements. I draw on Paulo Freire’s work on pedagogy to discuss feminist forms of pedagogy as praxis. I call these dialogical pedagogy, political pedagogy of the self, and reproductive pedagogy, and argue that each offers possibilities of feminist praxis within and beyond environmental struggles in a context of feminism’s marginalization.

The contested environmental futures of the Dolomites: a political ecology of mountains

Abstract. In recent years, the eco-climate crisis has intensified the institutional debate on sustainable environmental futures and the need to boost green transition policies. Scholars in critical geography and political ecology have discussed the controversial nature of these policies and argued that structural transformation is needed, focused specifically on environmental conservation. However, little attention has been paid to mountain environments, which today are significantly affected by the eco-climate crisis and characterized by controversial trajectories of development, conservation and valorization. Therefore, by bringing together the political ecology of conservation and mountain geographies, this contribution reflects on the environmental futures of the Dolomites, in the eastern Alps, through an analysis of governance processes, conservation visions and rising environmental struggles. The Dolomites show the contested nature of environmental futures and their politicization, between ideas of accumulation by sustainability and radical environmental visions. Moreover, they encompass experiences and practices that envision a convivial conservation perspective with the potential to advance the political ecology of the mountain, with specific reference to the Global North.

The ‘rights of nature’ in an age of white supremacy?

The past 10 years have witnessed a flourishing of interdisciplinary research across the social sciences that aims to better theorize the relationships between structural racism and the deepening ecological crisis. In this article, I consider how grassroots lawyers and community activists for the ‘rights of nature’ (RoN) in the United States are transforming their discourses, legal tactics, and pedagogical strategies in the face of a national context marked by pervasive anti-Black racism. After considering how racism has historically accompanied efforts to extend moral and legal ‘personhood’ to ecosystems in ways that continue to make solidarity work with racial justice organizations vexed and difficult, I show that, despite these exclusionary legacies, RoN activists are experimenting with municipal law-making in ways that are bringing them into closer conversation with contemporary racial justice struggles. Instead of focusing narrowly on the problem of the denial of ‘rights’ to non-humans, RoN activists are increasingly concerned with the broader structural problem of state pre-emption over local decision-making and the profoundly anti-democratic nature of a state/corporate nexus that is limiting possibilities for progressive action across a wide range of justice issues. Whilst these legal experiments do not resolve enduring tensions between anti-racist and environmental struggles, they suggest important re-directions taking place among historically white environmental activists.

Advancing Sustainability and Social Justice in the Global South

Harmful anthropogenic activities adversely affect Indigenous populations, such as the Inuit people and Nigeria’s Ogoni people. Environmental degradation disparately burdens such communities, thus making them to seek for environmental justice. Tribunals at all levels have affirmed that failing to safeguard the environment violates human rights, especially for Indigenous people who need a healthy environment, food, and access to resources to survive. The Global South continues to grapple with a plethora of issues, including ecological unsustainability, poverty, and inequality, but issues of justice are often disregarded in sustainability-oriented projects. Therefore, there is a need for countries in this region to integrate social justice into environmental sustainability. The concept of environmental justice traces its origins to the US during the 1980s when scholars used it to describe the unequal effect of industrial pollution on the country’s racial minorities. The idea has significantly blossomed during the last five decades, expanding historically and geographically to cover various global environmental struggles. This article explores why the concept of social justice has resonance and usefulness for advancing sustainability and why it is timely for the concept to be considered for the Global South. It delves into these issues with a specific focus on the Global South, examining case studies from various countries in the region and exploring key insights from the Global North.

Women’s Movements and Environmental Activism in India: Theoretical Reflections Based on the Study of New Delhi

In India, the peasant mobilisations in 2020-2021 appeared as an echo of contemporary environmental struggles since the 1960s. The lead of these mobilisations taken by women has brought the gendered dimension of environmental and equality struggles in rural but also urban areas to the forefront.New Delhi as a capital is a major space of engagement for social and women’s movement. Since the 1970s, women and feminist organisations have been politicizing equality issues at both local and national levels. Although mobilisations in the cities enjoy a greater visibility, the space for women’s issues is made up of multiple movements that influence each other and sometimes aggregate.The visibility of women’s environmental struggles for equality in the last few years, led me to question the links between rural and urban women’s movements and the way environmental issues are addressed in these spaces.

Neglecting the Marginalized: Corporate Valuation Discourses in Environmental Struggles

Abstract The unequal distribution of environmental goods and pollution burdens is determined by valuation decisions dependent on the values present in the public sphere. Accordingly, corporations and movements of resistance adopt strategies to influence public value systems to prioritize their interests. However, pre-existing asymmetric relationships of power grant corporations a dominant position over the public sphere, eschewing environmental management towards instrumental and transactional modes of valuation. The hegemonic valuation of the environment is thus a product and source of power, and a key element for the reproduction of systems of oppression. This article will discuss the mechanisms used by extractive corporations to neglect alternative value systems, illustrated with examples from the oil giant TotalEnergies.

Renewable energy and EU-led authoritarian neoliberalization: small hydropower in Rakita, Serbia and the upscaling of environmental struggles

ABSTRACT In light of the recent rise of authoritarianism and processes of ‘democratic backsliding’ in the Balkans (and other parts of CEE), the EU has projected an image of itself as a bastion of democracy and a counterweight to authoritarian tendencies and regimes. In contrast, this article points to the ways in which the EU – through its enlargement strategy – has legitimized authoritarian practices in candidate states. These practices have been inherently linked to the adoption of the EU acquis communautaire and deepening processes of neoliberal restructuring. In Serbia, the mandated transition to renewable energy, and the associated rise in small hydropower as a solution for meeting renewable energy targets, has led to an intensification of state-sponsored violence and coercion. By focusing on a small hydropower development in Rakita, Serbia, this paper highlights the inherently multiscalar nature of authoritarian state power and potential new avenues for contestation.

A Comparative Study of Environmental Struggles in the Poetry of Tanure Ojaide and Marilyn Dumont of First Nations (Canada)

Earlier studies on the Niger Delta poetry of Nigeria and First Nations poetry of Canada have focused primarily on the environmental and minority concerns in the individual literature of these two regions. The environmental concerns in these two literary traditions are a result of the minority status of the regions with hegemonies depriving the indigenous people of control in the ways their landscapes and waterscapes are engaged. This present study takes these issues to a comparative level, investigating how the two marginal groups are reacting to the hegemonies that pushed them to the peripheries and the aesthetics the selected poets employ to combat local and global environmental changes in their collections. Tanure Ojaide’s Niger Delta Blues and Other Poems, and Dumont Marilyn’s The Pemmican Eaters are comparatively explored with the focus of exposing the similarities and differences in the portraitures of their environments. This study finds that the selected poets from both regions depict the primordial symbiotic relationship that existed between humans and non-humans in their environments, especially prior to the commencement of mineral resources exploitation in their regions. Poems from both regions compare the harmonious past with the disharmony of the present to raise global awareness of the problems caused by capitalist agents in the exploitation of the environment. Similarly, oral traditions are depicted as viable aesthetics which promote the harmonious human-environment relationship. The selected collections of poetry have political undertones and represent the people’s collective aspirations, it is against this that they recreate the myths around their activists and heroes to document the history and raise environmental consciousness among the people. The poets of the two literary traditions compared, however, differ in the following areas: the poets of First Nations are more impressionistic in depicting environmental struggles while Niger Delta poets rely on metaphors and images to portray their environmental struggles. The study concludes that the environmental and minority struggles portrayed in the selected collections show the pursuit of environmental justice for their marginalised regions, and by extension, it is a contribution to the global environmental discourse.

Inculturation and environmental struggles: Catholic Church, public sphere and anthropocentric preservationism in Brazil

The article investigates the growing convergence between the Catholic Church and environmentalism in Brazil, aiming to demonstrate – through an anthropological reading of the Fraternity Campaigns that address sustainability and environmental crisis issues – how the national episcopate has been striving to reinvent the theology of inculturation as a system that incorporates, among other elements, the “natural world” as well. The hypothesis is suggested that the Church has been producing a symbolic narrative that articulates the fundamental elements of its theological conception of Creation with the set of social representations we know as ecology. This ecotheological narrative promotes a new perspective for interpreting biblical texts, seeking to recreate the relationships between Christianity and “nature” by projecting the origins of a certain Catholic environmental activism into a distant past. Despite being marked by anthropocentric categories, this new apostolic narrative seeks to assert, in favor of the Catholic Church and its pastoral work, a prominent position in the public sphere among the other relevant agents and institutions involved in present-day environmental struggles.

Fighting for Andean resources: extractive industries, cultural politics, and environmental struggles in Peru

Fighting for Andean resources: extractive industries, cultural politics, and environmental struggles in Peru

Caste, Environment Justice, and Intersectionality of Dalit–Black Ecologies

Caste and race, Dalits and Black people, and the common ground between them have been analyzed in many areas, but their conjunction in the environmental field has been neglected. This article locates Dalit ecologies by examining the close connection between caste and nature. Drawing from a plural framework of environmental justice and histories of environmental struggles among African Americans, it focuses on historical and contemporary ecological struggles of Dalits. It contemplates how their initial articulations under the rubric of civil rights developed into significant struggles over issues of Dalit access, ownership, rights, and partnership regarding natural resources, where themes of environmental and social justice appeared at the forefront. The intersections between Dalit and Black ecologies, the rich legacies of Black Panthers and Dalit Panthers, and their overlaps in environmental struggles open for us a new historical archive, where Dalit and Black power can talk to each other in the environmental present.