No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Could Justice40 reproduce injustices in the critical mineral sector?
The evidence is clear that fossil fuels—and the fossil fuel industry and its enablers—are driving a multitude of interlinked crises that jeopardize the breadth and stability of life on Earth. Every stage of the fossil fuel life cycle—extraction, processing, transport, and combustion or conversion to petrochemical products—emits planet-heating greenhouse gases and health-harming pollutants, in addition to causing widespread environmental degradation. We review the vast scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are the root cause of the climate crisis, harm public health, worsen environmental injustice, accelerate biodiversity extinction, and fuel the petrochemical pollution crisis. Fossil fuels are responsible for millions of premature deaths, trillions of dollars in damages, and the escalating disruption of ecosystems, threatening people, wildlife, and a livable future. The fossil fuel industry has obscured and concealed this evidence through a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar disinformation campaign aimed at blocking action to phase out fossil fuels. We focus on the United States as the world’s largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises. We present the science-and-justice-based solutions that already exist for governments and civil society to restrict the influence of the fossil fuel industry, stop fossil fuel expansion, phase out fossil fuel production and use, and make a rapid, just transition to clean, renewable energy and materials across the economy, while holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for its deception and damages. The necessary transition away from fossil fuels will provide innumerable societal and planetary benefits and forge a path forward to sustaining life on Earth.
While vital for the development of 'clean' energy technologies, the extraction and processing of critical minerals and rare earth elements entail a range of overlapping social and environmental harms in local communities across the world. The transition to low-carbon economies invokes a host of multiscalar dilemmas, injustices and trade-offs, notably between the global imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the local consequences of mineral mining. There are profound barriers to delivering a just energy transition at a planetary scale given the reliance of green technologies upon socio-environmentally harmful extractive practices across critical mineral supply chains. Adopting an interdisciplinary lens and drawing from a set of international case studies, we critically examine the intersection of critical minerals with just transition governance and explore possibilities for more plural, holistic and integrated just energy transition pathways. In this introduction article, we detail the ways in which the production of low-carbon technologies is bound up with global inequalities and ongoing coloniality. We then demonstrate the importance of adopting a global, inclusive outlook on just energy transitions. Drawing from the concept of planetary just transition, we provide an overview of the key debates around the role of critical minerals in a just energy transition.
This article examines the contradictions of the capitalist system, particularly its exploitation of labor, humans, and nature, as the root cause of the global polycrisis. It argues that energy transition projects, when not anchored in an internationalist and just ecological transition paradigm, can lead to material conflicts between domestic interests and those on the periphery of the system. The article emphasizes the need for a planet-wide just transition, necessitating an internationalist critique of extractivism and debates connected to post-extractivism. Just transition programs will look different everywhere, but ultimately depend on one another to ensure that they are actually just. By examining the conflicts posed by extractivism in a green transition projects, from energy to transportation, this paper argues for expanding just transition debates in an internationalist manner so that the political practice of transition in one place does not come at the cost of creating sacrifice zones somewhere else.
Rapidly transitioning the global energy system to renewables is considered necessary to combat climate change. Current estimates suggest that at least 30 energy transition minerals and metals (ETMs) form the material base for the energy transition. The inventory of ETMs indicates a high level of intersectionality with territories less impacted by the historic forces of industrialization. To identify the current global footprint, 5,097 ETM projects were geo-located against indicators for indigeneity, human modification of land, food production, water risk, conflict, as well as capacity measures for project permitting, consultation and consent. Study results differentiate ETMs to improve visibility over linkages between technology, resources and sustainability objectives. Our analysis reveals that more than half of the ETM resource base is located on or near the lands of Indigenous and peasant peoples, two groups whose rights to consultation and free prior informed consent are embedded in United Nations declarations.
In this Perspective, we suggest that research on just transitions and energy justice needs to better attend to the increasingly important trade-offs arising from issues related to speed and acceleration of low-carbon transitions. We identify and elaborate two important tensions that policymakers face when they want to simultaneously achieve both just and rapid low-carbon transitions. First, the way in which participatory processes may increase justice but slow the speed of action; and second the way in which incumbent mobilization can accelerate transitions but entrench injustices. Such an analysis shifts the focus from mapping justice dimensions to acknowledging the inevitable trade-offs and winners and losers produced by transition processes as a first step to better navigating them.
Since the early 2000s, there has been an ‘extractive imperative’ in Latin America that made intensified extraction the policy solution to all socioeconomic challenges. More recently, a similar consensus has emerged in a diversity of political, economic and geographical contexts - such as Turkey, India and the United States - that makes it possible to speak of a ‘global extractive imperative’. The imperative is especially evident in settings also characterised by authoritarian neoliberalism and the burden of resistance against extractivism is suffered overwhelmingly by marginalised communities at extractive frontiers. Emerging efforts to declare a share of existing reserves of fossil fuels ‘unburnable’ would not only help make progress towards tackling the climate crisis, it would also broaden the societal bases of societal struggles against capitalism’s extractive excesses.
Mining is the single most destructive assault on the environment. It moves more earth and produces more toxic waste than any other industry. 1 Large-scale use of minerals began with the Industrial Revolution and has grown exponentially in centuries since. The size and scale of modern mining operations is unprecedented. Between 1970 and 2004, the global extraction of major metals grew by over 75 percent, industrial minerals by 53 percent, and construction materials by 106 percent. 2 Worldwide demand for numerous metals, as well as for energy sources such as coal, oil, gas, and uranium, has been spurred by a variety of factors, including China and India's expanding economies, increased production of consumer electronic products, and the highest military and industrial consumption rates of these materials in history. 3 The resulting boom in commodity prices and decrease in mineral stocks has led to a major reorganization of the global mining industry. Individual companies are scrambling for new supply sources in order to diversify their investments across commodities and geographic boundaries. In addition to direct owner-Gedicks_LAYOUT (1).indd 1 12/6/15 9:35 PM
Indigenous peoples experience water insecurity disproportionately. There are many parallels between the injustices experienced by racialized and marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples. However, the water insecurity experienced by Indigenous peoples is distinctly shaped by settler colonialism. This article draws on examples from Canada and the United States to illustrate how jurisdictional and regulatory injustices along with the broader political and economic asymmetries advanced by settler colonial States (re-)produce water insecurity for Indigenous peoples. We conclude by engaging with how Indigenous peoples are pushing back against these arrangements using State and non-State strategies by revitalizing Indigenous knowledge and governance systems.
Rather than seeing Indigenous nations as only ‘frontline’ communities based on subsistence, we need to understand Indigenous peoples as groups that are politically marginalized in structures of colonial states and who might not stand to benefit – perhaps are even threatened by – climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.
Mining, and oil and gas companies developing resources on land historically occupied and used by Indigenous peoples have faced criticism for offering few benefits to local communities while inflicting environmental damage. The Red Dog Mine -- a joint venture between Teck Resources, Inc. and the NANA Regional Corporation -- has often been cited as an example for developing extractive industries in a way that does benefit Indigenous communities. The mine is located in an economically impoverished region in Northwest Alaska that has few other wage-earning opportunities for the largely Iñupiat population. Although the mine has brought demonstrable financial benefits to the region, questions persist about its long-term benefits to local communities. This paper assesses a suite of long-term benefits of the Red Dog mine, based on findings from unique 14-year panel dataset. The paper focuses on the direct effects of the mine on the individual Indigenous workers of the region. Specifically, the analysis addressed the following set of questions: How does employment at Red Dog affect workers’ mobility and long-run earnings? How long do most local residents hired to work at the mine keep these jobs? What percentage of the mine workers live in the communities in the region, and what percentage of the total payroll do local workers receive? The findings illustrate the strengths and limitations of partnerships between Indigenous organizations and extractive industries, and offer insights relevant to Indigenous communities across the arctic and around the world as they plan development of local resources.
A distinct formulation of Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ) is required in order to address the challenges of the ecological crisis as well the various forms of violence and injustices experienced specifically by Indigenous peoples. A distinct IEJ formulation must ground its foundations in Indigenous philosophies, ontologies, and epistemologies in order to reflect Indigenous conceptions of what constitutes justice. This approach calls into question the legitimacy and applicability of global and nationstate political and legal mechanisms, as these same states and international governing bodies continue to fail Indigenous peoples around the world. Not only do current global, national and local systems of governance and law fail Indigenous peoples, they fail all life. Indigenous peoples over the decades have presented a distinct diagnosis of the planetary ecological crisis evidenced in the observations shared as part of Indigenous environmental declarations.
In this article we analyse and theorise how power is exercised and subjectivities reworked to achieve and maintain socio‐political order in areas of large‐scale international extractive investment. Through a critical review of recent literature on the political ecologies of the international mining and hydrocarbon industries, we explore the strategies that firms and their allies deploy to secure and preserve the transformed relations of land and resource access upon which accumulation relies. Inspired by the work of John Allen we analyse these strategies with attention to the modalities and techniques of power used, highlighting the diverse ways socio‐political stability is pursued despite the industry’s destabilising effects. What emerges is that, contrasting the sector’s reputation for coercion and domination, transformed regimes of access to land and resources at the extractive frontier are to a significant degree achieved and stabilised through what Allen calls the “quieter registers” of power. Attention to the varied and overlapping ways extractive firms and their allies exercise power to secure and maintain access to land and resources highlights limitations to David Harvey’s influential accumulation by dispossession framework for understanding how extractive capital circulates into “new ground.” It also directs attention to processes of subject formation at the extractive frontier, and to how industry expansion may be facilitated through the production of particular kinds of subjects. To illustrate this, we outline three interrelated ways subjectivities are reworked through peoples’ encounters with the logics, materiality, and power of contemporary extractive industry. We suggest that those living in the shadow of large international extractive operations become extractive subjects.
The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period. Yet while strike statistics have been collected for many countries since the late nineteenth century (van der Velden 2007),1 until the present no administrative body tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilizations or protests related to environmental issues at the global scale, in the way that the World Labour Organization tracks the occurrence of strike action.2 Thus until the present it has been impossible to properly document the prevalence and incidence of contentious activity related to environmental issues or to track the ebb and flow of protest activity. Such an exercise is necessary because if the twentieth century has been the one of workers struggles, the twenty-first century could well be the one of environmentalists. This Special Feature presents the results from such an exercise—The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice—a unique global inventory of cases of socio-environmental conflicts built through a collaborative process between academics and activist groups which includes both qualitative and quantitative data on thousands of conflictive projects as well as on the social response.
This Special Feature applies the lenses of political ecology and ecological economics to unpack and understand these socio-environmental conflicts, otherwise known as ‘ecological distribution conflicts’, (hereafter EDCs, Martinez-Alier 1995, 2002). The contributions in this special feature explore the why, what, how and who of these contentious processes within a new comparative political ecology.
The articles in this special issue underline the need for a politicization of socio-environmental debates, whereby political refers to the struggle over the kinds of worlds the people want to create and the types of ecologies they want to live in. We put the focus on who gains and who loses in ecological processes arguing that these issues need to be at the center of sustainability science. Secondly, we demonstrate how environmental justice groups and movements coming out of those conflicts play a fundamental role in redefining and promoting sustainability. We contend that protests are not disruptions to smooth governance that need to be managed and resolved, but that they express grievances as well as aspirations and demands and in this way may serve as potent forces that can lead to the transformation towards sustainability of our economies, societies and ecologies.
The articles in this collection contribute to a core question of sustainability science—why and through what political, social and economic processes some are denied the right to a safe environment, and how to support the necessary social and political transformation to enact environmental justice.
Within days of taking office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order establishing the Justice40 initiative, which directed federal agencies to ensure that at least 40% of the benefits of federal investments flow to historically marginalized communities. This article traces how Justice40, as interpreted and enacted by government bureaucrats, academics, industry researchers, and activists, intervenes in the governance of the energy transition it seeks to put into motion. Drawing from ongoing critical participation in energy research and development arenas and taking inspiration from Kim Fortun’s notion of the “informating of environmentalism,” this article argues that Justice40 can be understood as an attempt to informate justice, rendering it into problems that can be understood, manipulated, and audited through information systems. Scrambling to manage their accountabilities to the executive branch, Congress, and the American taxpayers footing the bill for massive infrastructure investments, Department of Energy programs are rolling out intricate systems of quantification, whose objectives of commensurability obscure local conceptions and prioritizations of justice. While Justice40 articulates lofty goals of energy transition enhancing the wellbeing of people who have otherwise been harmed by or excluded from the country’s existing energy infrastructure, its everyday practice has the ironic effect of undermining both epistemic and procedural justice.
This article theorises the processes of colonisation, wealth accumulation, and inequalities creation that the current paradigm of a resource‐hungry green transition enacts on the most vulnerable populations. We suggest that the extractivist logics and related technical fixes are leading to a “climate necropolitics”. In this, the socio‐economic system is increasingly defined by classes’ carbon exposure and consumption. Through the “green growth” of late capitalism, we theorise the advent of four carbon‐defined classes. Bounded by the access to climate tech capital and consumption of low‐carbon products, these include the ultra‐carbonised, decarbonised, still‐carbonised, and uncarbonised classes—with the first two acting as dominant classes and necropolitical agents sustained by the remaining lower classes. Inspired by Marxist scholars, we suggest that the current status quo is untenable and will result in class warfare during which coalitions between classes could reorient the “make live and let die” of the current green transition paradigm.
Indigenous participation in the Australian mining workforce has rapidly increased over the last 15 years, yet little is known about what outcomes have been achieved for those employed. Using a case study of Rio Tinto's Argyle Diamond Mine in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, this paper begins to explore the extent to which Aboriginal people succeeded in achieving, as articulated in the Indigenous land use agreement, "good careers at the same time as following their culture" (MPA, 2004:101). To consider this issue, we draw on elements of the Yap and Yu (2016, 2016a) Yawuru wellbeing indicators, on the basis that the structures and indicators of wellbeing followed by the Traditional Owners associated with the agreement have not been recorded in the wellbeing scholarship. With the mine closed in late 2020 after almost 40 years, the question of what outcomes Aboriginal employees have achieved is a critical one to consider. Although disaggregating the effects of mining employment from other aspects of the benefit stream within the agreement is not straightforward, a focus on the experiences of those Aboriginal employees at Argyle provides a corrective to the lack of empirical research over the last decade.
The benefits of employment in resource extraction figure prominently in state rationales for resource extraction. However, in Canada, the site of study, while the worker is a key figure in rationales for extraction, this same worker disappears in state attention to extractive/mine closure. The paper's focus on Indigenous mining labour is driven by a community–university research partnership with Dene communities in the Northwest Territories facing forthcoming closure of diamond mines on their land. Approaching mine closure as a juncture that can both reproduce or resist the settler extractive economy, we argue that the Canadian state responses to the labour implications of mine closure, and its lack of coherence, express the settler‐colonial tension between the reproduction of the (Canadian) settler state and its requisite labour force, and the social reproduction of Indigenous communities.
New tools can guide US policies to better target and reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in air pollution exposure.
In June 2022, six Boeing 737s—fully loaded with tents, food, satellite Internet equipment, drones, geophysical survey gear, drilling equipment, and a team of experienced geologists—flew to a remote airstrip in northern Quebec. The geologists were hunting for major deposits of the minerals needed to power a clean-energy future. Given the mix of cutting-edge scientific computing and old-school bravado, it was as though they were channeling Alan Turing and Indiana Jones simultaneously. • Our startup, KoBold Metals, acquired an 800-square-kilometer mineral claim in this region of Canada based in part on predictions from our artificial intelligence systems. According to the AI, there was good reason to believe we'd find valuable deposits of nickel and cobalt buried below the surface. Summer snowmelts in this near-arctic area created a brief window to bring in a small village's worth of equipment and personnel to test our predictions.
Activists and world leaders increasingly call for bold climate action. Yet proposals remain far from the transformative systemic changes required. While many remain in denial that system change is necessary, others who call for system change fail to articulate what that change would entail. It is critical that the climate movement identifies and promotes specific strategies for change. Identifying synergistic proposals associated with ecosocialism and degrowth, we describe a set of policies, programs, and strategies that have the potential to justly minimize warming and that could become key demands of climate movement organizations attempting to influence governments in the Global North. While there are stigmas associated with ecosocialism and degrowth, the described strategies can be promoted without using these terms. Articulating specific strategies for system change is necessary to challenge the powerful actors and interests that continue to maintain the status quo and our current climate trajectory.
Climate change policies' implications for the capitalist system call for us to go beyond efficiency-driven extractivism and further analyse the outcomes of green policies. The implementation of Mozambique's climate change policy resulted in the emergence of green extractivism, a variation of extractivism that is based on the extraction, expropriation and transfer of emissions rights from rural poor, in favor of external accumulation. Emission rights are one's ability to rightfully use and benefit from ecological assets. Thus, under green extractivism, rural households are not only being deprived of resources determinant for their social reproduction, but also of their right to emit.
The Biden-Harris administration has invested considerable policy focus on environmental justice, including the Justice40 Initiative and renewed White House Council on Native American Affairs. This work has included financial investments in Tribal economies, prioritizing Tribal healthcare, and major Tribal infrastructure investments. The Justice40 Initiative aims to deliver at least 40 percent of the benefits of federal investments in climate and energy to disadvantaged communities, including many Tribes. To identify communities that should be targeted by Justice40 investments, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is developing a new Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). Executive Order 14008 references how this new screening tool should be based on lessons learned from EJSCREEN. For Tribes, however, EJSCREEN does not adequately represent environmental justice needs relevant to the goals outlined in Justice40. In this thesis, I will discuss gaps in EJSCREEN that must be addressed in the forthcoming screening tool in order to improve the representation and inclusion of Indigenous perspectives on environmental justice. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the environmental justice movement in the United States, including the development of environmental justice screening tools. Chapter 2 highlights environmental justice issues that have been highlighted by many different Tribal communities that are not represented in EJSCREEN. Chapter 3 reviews the methodologies and datasets used in EJSCREEN, and their relationship to Tribal perspectives on environmental justice. Chapter 4 concludes with a set of recommendations for the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool such that Tribes may fully benefit from Justice40 investments
Criticality and supply risk models seek to address concerns of potential disruption to global metal supply. These models need to incorporate disruption events that arise from within the mining industry's market structure. In this paper, we review what we refer to as events of "mine life cycle disruption". These include project abandonments, premature closures, care and maintenance, and ownership changes. Life cycle disruptions not only cause production disruptions but also embed social and environmental risks in global metal markets. They arise from the highly variable business environment in which the resources sector operates. Changing commodity prices directly influence mining revenues and drive decisions on whether to halt or push forward a project. While some disruptions are involuntary and induced by external economic conditions, others are purposefully triggered by certain mining companies that use them to their advantage. We examine the frequency of these disruptions based on a contemporary global inventory of 35,000 mining projects and present the findings against recent developments in the research literature. We conclude that life cycle disruption events are an important consideration in balancing the demand for metals and the social and environmental impacts of mining and propose pathways for managing these events and their effects.
This article examines hidden costs of three prominent mineral supply chain ‘solutions’ that respectively aim to create ‘conflict-free’ minerals, curtail corruption, and reduce mercury pollution. Our analysis underscores the heterogeneous ways in which global capitalism shapes regulatory injustices spanning multiple scales, illustrating how ‘clean’ mineral supply chain schemes can hide inequitable territorial and economic regimes of accumulation and labour exploitation resulting in social harms for artisanal and small-scale mining communities, negative environmental impacts, and the reproduction of extractive political economies dominated by large corporations. We argue for increased critical attention to how mineral supply chain schemes narrowly circumscribe spaces for pursuing counter-hegemonic ‘transformation’.
A Green New Deal could put severe pressure on lands held by Indigenous and marginalized communities and reshape their ecologies into “green sacrifice zones.” Such cost shifting risks reproducing a form of climate colonialism in the name of just transition. Avoiding cost shifts opens interdisciplinary research questions regarding land-use policy, economics, politics, and non-Eurocentric knowledge and leadership.
Renewable energy transitions are essential for decarbonizing the world economy and mitigating global climate change. Yet many energy technologies classified as renewable have human health and livelihood implications that jeopardize the lives and wellbeing of those already most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The purpose of this study is thus to summarize the documented environmental justice (EJ) impacts associated with renewable energy technologies included in many renewable energy policies globally. Our motivation for this study is to ensure that renewable energy policies incorporate concerns for justice into their formulation and implementation. We provide a systematic review of the literature assessing renewable energy technologies from the perspective of distributive, procedural, recognition, and capability interpretations of environmental justice. Our review finds that there are ten common renewable energy technologies that have EJ implications documented in the current literature, and that future energy transition policy development needs to ensure these justice concerns are addressed.
We argue that the prevailing business model within the mining sector is no longer fit-for-purpose. Despite the myriad of technical challenges facing the sector, the ability to meet social expectations has emerged as the sector’s leading risk to future business. This change in operating context will demand a new business model that supports the effective management of both high social and technical complexity through creating, capturing and delivering value to a broad range of stakeholders including local communities, rights-holders, shareholders and host governments. The prevailing business model of the mining sector is described and its deficiencies for this new operating context are identified. An alternative business model is proposed which would reframe the industry’s value proposition, using local procurement to illustrate how mining companies can leverage past successful business strategies to drive additional value.
While the critique to economic growth is quintessential in the degrowth scholarship, one may observe a similar focus in various environmental justice movements around the world. This is particularly visible when it comes to the increasing perception that mega-development projects are both unjust and unsustainable, threatening the survival of people and environments. In this paper, we illustrate this focus by looking at two anti-mining movements in Eastern Europe (EE): Save Rosia Montana (Romania) and Krumovgrad (Bulgaria). The local movements describe open cast mining (even in the prospective phase) as potential destruction of basic sources of life (material commons such as water or crops, and community relations). The paper emphasizes a dynamic involved in doing environmental justice, or ‘de-growing EJ’: affected communities organize themselves by ‘staying in place’, producing alternative economies, organizing local democratic institutions. What potentially ´´grows´´ here, is a societal imaginary of justice on how to reproduce the socio-ecological conditions of life by protecting and re-defining traditional means of production and grassroots practices, knowledge, wealth, and values.
This article examines the social and environmental costs of living in the mineral age, wherein contemporary global livelihoods depend almost completely on the extraction of mineral resources. Owing to the logic of extractivism-the rapid and widespread removal of resources for exchange in global capitalist markets-both developed and developing countries are inextricably entangled in pursuing resource extraction as a means of sustaining current lifestyles as well as a key mechanism for promoting socioeconomic development. The past 15 years has seen a massive expansion of mineral resource extraction as many developing countries liberalized their mining sectors, allowing foreign capital and mining companies onto the lands of peasant farmers and indigenous people. This mining expansion has also facilitated the rise of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Transformations in livelihoods and corporate practices as well as the environmental impacts and social conflicts wrought by mining are the central foci of this article.
This paper maps out the publicly available literature on the social aspects of mine closure to identify the major themes and gaps that inform the current knowledge base on this topic. Our broad purpose is to characterise the social dimensions of the mine closure process. In doing so, we draw attention to the ways in which this knowledge base has been produced, and the sorts of topical issues that have received the most attention across the literature. Our review is framed by two critical issues: the real costs of mine closure are poorly understood; and significant sections of the mining industry engage in deliberate strategies to avoid mine closure or externalise the costs of closure, and the pursuit of these strategies can cause, or greatly add to, the social costs of mine closure. These issues are explored through a basic framework of accountability that connects notions of procedural fairness (the administrative elements of mine closure) with ideas on social risk (the things that mining companies are accountable for).
The environmental justice movement validates the grassroots struggles of residents of places which Steve Lerner refers to as “sacrifice zones”: low-income and racialized communities shouldering more than their fair share of environmental harms related to pollution, contamination, toxic waste, and heavy industry. On this account, disparities in wealth and power, often inscribed and re-inscribed through social processes of racialization, are understood to produce disparities in environmental burdens. Here, we attempt to understand how these dynamics are shifting in the green energy economy under settler colonial capitalism. We consider the possibility that the political economy of green energy contains its own sacrifice zones. Drawing on preliminary empirical research undertaken in southwestern Ontario in 2015, we document local resistance to renewable energy projects. Residents mounted campaigns against wind turbines based on suspected health effects and against solar farms based on arable land and food justice concerns, and in both cases, grounded their resistance in a generalized claim, which might be termed a “right to landscape”. We conclude that this resistance, contrary to typical framings which dismiss it as NIMBYism, has resonances with broader claims about environmental justice and may signal larger structural shifts worth devoting scholarly attention to. In the end, however, we do not wholly accept the sacrifice zone characterization of this resistance either, as our analysis reveals it to be far more complex and ambiguous than such a framing allows. But we maintain that taking this resistance seriously, rather than treating it as merely obstructionist to a transition away from fossil capitalism, reveals a counter-hegemonic potential at its core. There are seeds in this resistance with the power to push back on the deepening of capitalist relations that would otherwise be ushered in by an uncritical embrace of “green energy” enthusiasm.
This article considers the Navajo Green Jobs effort of 2009, an attempt to “transition” energy production from coal to wind and solar for the largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo Nation. Through ethnographic “revisits,” in 2008 and 2013, I argue that Navajo Green Jobs contained two problematic hybrid neoliberal assumptions about governance and development: (1) it decentered governing authority from the tribe to “the community” while undermining the legitimacy of the tribal government, and (2) it promoted private entrepreneurship over public investment as the vehicle for energy transition. Ultimately, the Navajo Nation rejected Navajo Green Jobs and re-appropriated its temporal language in order to justify a reinvestment in coal in the form of a new energy company, NTEC. This article concludes that consideration of the spatial and social embedded nature of energy production is vital for understanding energy transitions today.
Local Economic Impacts of Coal Mining in the United States 1870 to 1970 - Volume 77 Issue 1 - Mike Matheis
This article expands upon the current “resource curse” literature by using newly collected county data, spanning over a century, to capture the short- and long-run effects of coal mining activity. It provides evidence that increased levels of coal production had positive net impacts on county-level population and manufacturing activity over an initial ten-year span, which become negative over the subsequent decades. The results provide evidence that any existence of a “resource curse” on local areas due to coal mining is a long-run phenomenon, and in the short run there are potential net benefits.
Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike. Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Dinä (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern industrialism is established. In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable. © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
The Philadelphia Water Department has committed to taking a green infrastructure (GI) approach to reduce stormwater runoff and prevent combined sewer overflow events. Promoting GI as a stormwater management technique in a city necessitates development of a more distributed urban environmental management system, through which the city's water department needs to coordinate with a wide range of public and private stakeholders, shifting power from the utility to these other stakeholders. We argue that distributed urban environmental management can lead to more inclusive outcomes but only if there is an intentionality about how funds are distributed, which communities are prioritized, how partners are chosen and cultivated, and which types of projects are implemented in which neighborhoods. We suggest the development of an equity index to help identify communities that would most benefit from GI investment as critical for equitable GI planning. Using Philadelphia as a test case, we develop a Green Infrastructure Equity Index, designed with the indirect benefits of green infrastructure in mind, to determine which communities could benefit the most from investment in GI based on their “equity void ranking”. We argue that developing a GI Equity Index provides a much more nuanced analysis of communities that takes into account the built environment as well as the underlying social and economic conditions. The GI Equity Index also allows for a shift in the way we define equity. In doing so, it 1) changes the conversation about equity in GI planning using careful data analysis that takes into account both socio-economic and built environment variables; 2) provides a visual tool that communities can use to understand underlying conditions and the existing placement of GI; and 3) serves as a framework that can be tailored to allow communities to weight their priorities, putting more power in their hands.
