Contesting coal and climate change using scale: emergent topologies in the Adani mine controversy

Jolley, Connor; Rickards, Lauren

doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12376

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…The finch's image legitimises activist concerns and acts as a shortcut to place-based attachment that, according to our data, is not reflected in the demographic makeup of anti-Adani activists. Jolley and Rickards (2020) have established a range of distinct scalar geographies in relation to Adani mine news media coverage and argue that mine supporters use slippages across regional, state, and national scales to obscure inconsistencies. Investigating activists' use of the finch, we suggest that it is also transformed into an instrument of legitimacy for activists opposing the mine to convincingly traverse scalar geographies while inviting care by envisaging its future extinction.…”

Section: Extinction Studies and Agential Subjectificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

Hine

Mayes

Hurst

2022

Geographical Research

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The black-throated finch is an endangered species whose highest quality remaining habitat directly overlaps with the site of the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland, Australia. The image of this finch has been widely used by anti-Adani protest groups as a powerful symbol for the destructive nature of greenfield coal mining. Drawing on extinction studies literature, we problematise the use of the black-throated finch as a symbol of imminent extinction, highlighting how activists have constructed a fixed finch on-the-brink ontology that narrows possible futures for the species. We identify how the finch has been strategically deployed as an affective tool for engaging publics while the anti-Adani campaign has been primarily driven by concerns around climate change futures. We use primary sources of anti-Adani ephemera as well as interviews with key scientists, activists, and image-makers involved in the debate about the Carmichael coal mine. We argue that critical evaluation of the effects and potential consequences of simplified environmental activist narratives and the instrumentalisation of nonhumans is needed to support and enable activism that centres care and responsibility within multispecies entanglements. Engagement with the complexities of environmental intervention in relation to the finch, and not exclusively the mine, is also necessary to locate openings through which more-than-human futures can be creatively imagined and enacted.

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Section: Extinction Studies and Agential Subjectificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

Hine

Mayes

Hurst

2022

Geographical Research

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“…It is a deeply historical vision of the future. As Jolley and Rickards ( 2020 ) note about another contemporary manifestation of the “fossil fuels forever” climate imaginary—the pro‐Adani coal mine campaign—the dominant temporality it invokes is “backwards looking.” While the COVID‐19 recovery plan has “progressed” from coal to gas, it retains this backwards orientation, both to try to conserve the existing distribution of power and status and to turn society’s back to the threats that lie ahead. Armed with the STEM graduates the government is trying to reprogram universities to produce; it is a plan that aims to secure the dominance of the fossil energy elite against emerging criticism.…”

Section: Snapping Back From Covid: Australia’s “Gas‐fired Recovery”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of COVID‐19

Grove

Rickards

Anderson

et al. 2021

Geographical Research

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The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post‐event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency. This distended temporality brings into sharp relief other slow emergencies such as racism, poverty, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which inflect how the pandemic is known and governed as an emergency. In this article, we reflect on COVID‐19 responses in two settler colonial societies—Australia and the United States—to consider how distinct styles of pandemic responses in each context resonate and dissonate across the racially uneven distribution of futurity that structures liberal order. In each case, the event of COVID‐19 has indeed opened a window that reveals multiple slow emergencies; yet in these and other responses this revelation is not leading to meaningful changes to address underlying forms of structural violence. In Australia and the United States, we see how specific slow emergencies—human‐induced climate change and anti‐Black violence in White supremacist societies, respectively—become intensified as liberal order recalibrates itself in response to the event of COVID‐19.

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“…Much has been written about these environmental law cases, including their coverage by news media (e.g. Jolley and Rickards 2020;Konkes 2018;Nixon et al 2021).…”

Section: Taking Coal To Courtmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the future of the coal industry lies in the speed of the global transition to renewable energy sources, and the pace of global economic growth (Cunningham et al 2019). Within this global context, developing the coal reserves in Central Queensland's Galilee Basin is variously represented as being an economic necessity or a retrograde step along the road to Australia's low-carbon future (Jolley and Rickards 2020). Of all the proposed projects or those already underway, Adani's Carmichael coal mine has received the most prominent opposition.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Coal versus Coral

Konkes¹,

Nixon²,

Lester³

et al. 2021

QRE

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The likelihood that climate change may destroy the Great Barrier Reef has been a central motif in Australia’s climate change politics for more than a decade as political ideologies and corporate and environmental activism draw or refute connections between the coal industry and climate change. The media fuel this debate because in this contest, as ever, the news media always do more than simply report the news. Given that the Reef has also been central to the evolution of Australia’s environmental laws since the 1960s, it is not surprising that the Reef is now a leading actor in efforts to test the capacity of our environmental laws to support action on climate change. In this contribution, we examine the news coverage of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) 2015 challenge to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine to observe the discursive struggle between the supporters and opponents of the mine. Our analysis of the case shows that while the courts are arenas of material and symbolic contest in the politics of climate change in Australia, public interest environmental litigants struggle both inside and outside the courts to challenge the privileging of mining interests over the public interest.

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Contesting coal and climate change using scale: emergent topologies in the Adani mine controversy

Cited by 15 publications

References 91 publications

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of COVID‐19

Coal versus Coral

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