Minerals/Timber

The following projects include Resource Extraction and Social Unrest in Montana by Thomas Clark, Logging, Owls, and Unlikely Alliances around Environmental Ethics on the West Coast by Zack Shaver, and Neoliberal Conservation and REDD in Ecuador by Kela Hall-Wieckert. Each project follows a case study pertaining to the commodification and extraction of mineral and timber resources.

Time and time again, we see subsequent conflict occur between capitalist ‘stakeholders’ and marginalized communities arising from resource exploitation. This can lead to ingenious acts of resilience within communities, and alliances between those effected by resource exploitation, whether in regards to alliances between Indigenous nations and white citizens against mining in Montana, various environmental organizations resisting logging companies in the Pacific Northwest, or Indigenous communities in Ecuador proposing solutions to deforestation and degradation of the Amazon rainforest. Through each project, we highlight the global problems associated with capitalist reliance on resource extraction and how this reliance effects local communities. While the urgency of the problem of resource extraction is universal (especially in the face of climate change), each of these case studies outline particularist movements of resistance.

And while complacent administrations may deny the negative impacts of fossil fuel extraction, and the growing concern of climate change, communities around the globe continue to fight. Our collective presentation aims to highlight communities, whom in the face of unrelenting corporate intrusion, unnerving climate science, and an increasingly uncertain future, continue to battle for a greater tomorrow.