Analyze

The political process is also always a learning process, a process of attunement. And becoming attuned to relations of power also means becoming compromised, to a certain degree, despite whether this attunement takes the form of compliance or resistance. For instance, the oil and gas industry has had a large influence on the structure and character of renewable energy advocacy in Austin, Texas, even as it was being developed as a strategy of resistance to petroculture. In particular, there was the purposeful move to imitate the mineral rights contracts that the oil and gas industry had developed in order to drill on private land, creating similarly structured leasing agreements for what would come to be known as “wind farms” in many of the same locations as former drilling sites. The idea here was to create a wealthy landowning class that could help lobby for renewable energy, much like previous land owners had for the oil and gas industry. Secondly, the Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association (TREIA) collectively decided to invite the utility industry to join their ranks in order to pursue renewable energy at the utility scale through the use of Renewable Portfolio Standards. And while Austin’s early energy advocates still speak of this as a winning strategy (and indeed it was), it also reproduced the utility as a center of power and promoted a top-down style of environmental advocacy that had long shut Austin's minoritized and marginalized communities out of its environmental benefits. Building support in this way, by appealing to those who are not only likely to share your perspective and its blindspots, but that have also already shaped the political landscape in their interest, this creates the perfect conditions for injustices to transpire, persist, and even intensify. Thus, part of the struggle for just transition entails keeping the question of what counts as environmental justice or injustice held open at the same time that the former is being pursued and/or the latter resisted. 

Adam, James. 2023. "Petro-ghosts." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

“This is a book about work. Really hard work. I’m always glad when people raise a fist against the injustices of systems, including pollution and its sciences. But I’d much prefer people pick up a shovel—or a microscope—with the other hand and get to work. Pollution Is Colonialism is designed to show how scientists and others are already working in an anticolonial way. We always already are in L/land relations, and they come out in our methods. Time to start.”

Excerpt From: Max Liboiron. “Pollution Is Colonialism.” (ebook, p. 67).