Anna J. Willow - Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Nature Resource Disputes

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.

Anna J. Willow is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University, USA. She studies how individuals and communities experience and respond to externally imposed resource extractive development.

First published 2019

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2019 Anna J. Willow

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ISBN: 978-1-138-60739-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-60740-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-46719-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by codeMantra

David W. Orr

Growing up in western Pennsylvania in the 1950s, I saw abandoned strip-mines with acres of ruined, mined-over land. But the devastation was small-scale and patchy and fixable with competent reclamation. The surrounding landscape retained much of its integrity and beauty. Decades later, flying over West Virginias coal country, I was unprepared for the shock of seeing hundreds of thousands of acres of decapitated mountains. We flew in a Piper Cub from Yeager airport in Charleston. Five minutes south of the Kenawha River at 5,000 feet it was devastation from horizon to horizon. In two hours of flying we saw maybe 10 percent of the 1.2 million acres of land that had already been ruined by mountaintop removal. It was stark testimony to economic derangement for which we have no adequate words. Some of the most ancient mountains and most diverse forest ecosystems on Earth destroyed beyond any possibility of reclamation for a pittance of cheap energy, which is to say for a lie.

Fossil fuels have never been cheap. Their true cost is hidden by an economic calculus that ignores externalities including human health, ecological functions, economic justice, and biological diversity. Mountaintop mining extracted a pitifully small amount of useable energy while destroying ancient mountains, entire ecosystems, streams, rivers, wildlife, and the lives of the people who live there. It employs perhaps 5 percent of the labor force once employed in deep mining and so cannot be justified as job creation. The practice of blasting away mountaintops is not an anomaly, but rather the characteristic pattern of grab-and-go in the age of extraction that feeds into the maw of unlimited economic growth. Whether calculated by full-cost economic calculations, net energy analysis, decent and robust moral calculations, or simply human betterment, the extractive economy thrives in a web of lies.

The most obvious lie is that we can destroy soils, forests, landscapes, biological diversity, oceans, and climate stability without serious penalty to our pocketbooks, our childrens prospects, or our souls. The extractive economy is a series of Faustian bargains that condemn our children and theirs to a future of want and desperation living on depleted soils, ugliness, and impoverished ecologies. The truth is that we cannot escape the laws that govern the larger economy. In John Ruskins words, the rule and root is that what one person has, another cannot have; and that every atom of substance, of whatever kind, used or consumed, is so much human life spent. The extractive economy lives precariously by a process of subtraction: For every piece of wise work done, so much life is granted; for every piece of foolish work, nothing; for every piece of wicked work, so much death. In other words, the prosperity promised by proponents of the extractive economy is a deceit that equates the amount of stuff extracted from the Earth, processed, sold, and eventually discarded with true prosperity. The lie is that we can thrive as members of a vandal economy that impoverishes everything it touches.

A second lie is that the unpriced costs of the extractive economy are necessary and so must be endured. Necessary for what, for whom, and for how long are questions seldom asked. The fact is that the industrial economy began in backroom deals that led to monopoly, enclosure, exclusion, and colonization. To its beneficiaries, it mattered not a whit whether the lives ruined were those of Scottish crofters, English yeoman farmers, Native Americans, Russian peasants, slaves, women, children, the old and infirm, rubber tappers, factory workers, or coal miners. Their suffering was always justified as the price to be paid for progressthe most loaded and ironic word in the English language. The fact is that the extractive economy deflected and warped our history and diminished our common horizon. There were always better and less frenetic choices to be made rooted in justice, fairness, law, democracy, and the kind of truly enlightened self-interest that would have drawn on Indigenous knowledge, disciplined affection for place, the study of natural history and ecology, economic common sense, and better alternatives such as efficiency that required much less energy and much more design intelligence. We knew better than we acted. The ripple effects and unpaid costs of profligacy plague our present age with untold perplexities and endless conflicts.

The third lie is that the world can best be improved and managed by division. Accordingly, extractors and improvers of all kinds divvied up the world into separate categories, departments, bureaucracies, specializations, nationalities, ethnicities, and worldviews. By division and separation, the few exerted domination over the many in other categories of people, landscapes, religions, cultures, economies, and even times. The benefits of division were measured in percentages, tons, board feet, acre feet, yield, and eventually in Gross Domestic Product. In Robert Jackalls words, the industrial, financial, intellectual, and political elites presiding over the extractive economy do so in an ethos of organized irresponsibility and recklessness that has become the disquieting hallmark of our times.