Empire, Labor, and Environment: Coal Mining and Anticapitalist Environmentalism in the Americas

Abstract

Latin American political movements linking traditional peasant values of subsistence with a leftist critique of imperialism are contributing to new forms of environmentalism there. While in the United States labor and environmental movements tend to operate within mainstream political and economic models based on privileging high levels of consumption and economic growth, Latin American voices are challenging both the global economic order and traditional concepts of economic development. From indigenous and peasant movements to leftist labor unions to political leaders, Latin Americans are calling for economic development that privileges the rights of rural peoples and their environments, and redistribution of resources domestically and globally. Yet they remain imbedded in an international economy based on extractivism and economic growth, which poses significant challenges to any alternative paths.

Energy and labour: Thinking across the continuum

“…Struggles around the social and environmental impacts of coal mining – particularly in terms of efforts to overcome ‘capitalism’s “jobs versus environment” trap’ (Stevis and Felli, 2016: 35) – have also been the subject of academic debate in the energy and labour domain, notably in Chomsky and Striffler’s (2014) exploration of how ‘Latin American voices are challenging both the global economic order and traditional concepts of economic development’ (p. 194) as well as Feng’s (2020) work on the contradictions that underpin, and reconciliations between, coal labour, environmental justice and place attachment in the Appalachian coalfields. At the same time, an emergent body of work based in the Global South has emphasized the role of indigenous communities in shaping the politics of extractive labour in the coal sector.…”

Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

“…Despoliation of the environment and violent conflicts at sites of extraction have thus been dismissed as unavoidable "trade-offs," subordinated to the imperative to generate employment, increase state revenue, and broaden access to "cheap, reliable" energy. This can be observed in both "Pink Tide" governments of Latin America, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, and neoliberal administrations in Mozambique and Bangladesh (Büscher 2015;Chomsky and Striffler 2014;Kotikalapudi 2016). Even China-increasingly praised for its leadership on climate change, and despite president Xi Jinping's ambition to create an "ecological civilisation"-witnessed a reversal from previous years' modest decline in coal consumption, driven by a government-led infrastructure boom (South China Morning Post 2017).…”

“…Tensions concerning voice, power, and representation-whose messages get heard and what goals are prioritized-always remain present and harken to the fragility of alliance-building processes. In the case of Colombia, the world's fifth largest coal exporter, noticeably different emphases and tactics are now at play in making economic arguments against coal, arguments that coal-mining developments replicate colonial violence, and arguments pinpointed on particular (devastating) health and social impacts at local scales (Chomsky and Striffler 2014;Healy et al 2019). Similarly, the DeCOALonize Kenya campaign 8 has sought to draw continuity between anticolonial struggles and current efforts to resist proposals for new coal-fired plants in the country, drawing attention to the replication of colonial logics and patterns of uneven development currently unfolding in national energy policy.…”

“…More widely, climate change has often been presented in international dialogue as a technomanagerial problem, creating abstractions out of "carbon markets" as part of emission "budgets" and national "inventories"; coal within global climate governance may be abstracted as carbon in a seemingly coherent world of science, material change, and policy. Yet coal, as carbon or energy, is easily divorced from culturally contested meanings in relation to lived, sociomaterial and context-specific struggles and historically constituted structures of power within which it is embedded (Chomsky and Striffler 2014;Erickson 2018;Malm 2013;Mitchell 2011). Outside the corridors of power, cynicism prevails over the resolve of policy makers to confront the incumbent power of corporate polluters and address local injustices of coal (Brown and Spiegel 2017).…”