Environmental injustice and post-colonial environmentalism: Opencast coal mining, landscape and place

Abstract

In this article we use a case study of opencast coal mining in the southern valleys of Wales to explore the ordinary and everyday spatialities of environmental injustice. Responding to recent geographical critiques of environmental justice research and engaging with post-colonial studies of landscape and environment, we provide an account of environmental injustice that emphasises competing geographical imaginaries of landscape and ‘ordinary political injustices’ within everyday spaces. We begin with a discussion of how historical environmental injustices in Wales have been framed within nationalist politics as a form of colonial exploitation of the country’s natural resources. We then make use of materials from recent research on opencast mining in South Wales to examine local understandings of and everyday encounters with mining, highlighting contradictory discourses of opencast mining, landscape and place, and the injustices associated with mining developments in this region.

Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution

“…Examining cases of environmental justice victories risks overlooking the "banal forms of disadvantage" (Whitehead 2009, 669) that often persist with cases of environmental injustice, and there have been repeated calls within human geography for increased focus on the everyday experience of pollution (Hobson 2006;Bagelman and Wiebe 2017;Milbourne and Mason 2017). Just as STS scholars have pushed for a focus on the politics of "undone science" (Frickel et al 2010;Hess 2016), so, too, might we consider the everyday realities of undone environmental justice.…”

Energy periphery: Uneven development and the precarious geographies of low-carbon transition

“…The energy-environmental contestations (e.g. Martinez-Alier 2001; Martinez-Alier et al 2016) have been explored, for instance, in relations to coal mining (Milbourne and Mason 2017), fracking (Holifield and Day 2017), biofuels (Baka 2013), wind (Cowell et al 2012), solar (Yenneti et al 2016) and many other energy types and projects. These studies demonstrate not only social contradictions in such developments, but essentially spatial conflicts where already less privileged place-based communities experience systematic disbenefits or harms as a result of local environmental damage and pollution or are exposed to land grab and direct displacement and dispossession.…”

“…However, the density of energy distribution and consumption network may contrast with the position of periphery as part of production. Milbourne and Mason (2017) highlight that the same peripheries have for many years been exploited for their national resources, such as water, wood and carbon-heavy resource extraction required for traditional energy production, with little concern over environmental and socio-economic impacts. This fits well with conceptualisations of "resource peripheries" (Hayter et al 2003, p. 17); these are places of relatively weak economic, social and political power, vulnerable to dependence on external core investment and thus having limited choice over industrial development and diversification.…”

Deep entanglements: History, space and (energy) struggle in the German Energiewende

“…In a second article, the authors (Milbourne & Mason, 2017) furthermore explore the potential of a 'right to landscape' through struggles against opencast coal mining in South Wales.…”

“…However, while a focus on (energy) landscapes usefully reveals the interplay of natural, technical and cultural phenomena, it lacks an appreciation of the histories of struggle and contestation, which can contribute to richer analyses and accounts of energy transition practices. Milbourne and Mason's (2017) paper powerfully engages with the relationship between struggles for environmental justice and the geographical imaginations around landscape and place. However, while Wales's energy history is present throughout their paper, the particular kinds of intense historical struggle and contestation, for example during the 1984-85 Miners' strike when South Wales was one of the areas where support for the strike was strongest (Francis, 2009;Kelliher, 2017), could have been more clearly drawn out.…”