Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-m9pkr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T19:25:19.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2014

Aviva Chomsky  and
Steve Striffler
Aviva Chomsky
Affiliation:
Salem State University
Steve Striffler
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Reports from the Field
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 85 , Spring 2014 , pp. 194 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 1977), 2–3 Google Scholar.

2. For Eric Wolf, “it is not so much the growth of an industrial proletariat as such which produces revolutionary activity, as the development of an industrial work force still closely geared to life in the villages. Thus it is the very attempt of the middle and free peasant to remain traditional which makes him revolutionary.” Wolf, , Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, NY, 1969)Google Scholar, 292.

3. Burns, E. Bradford, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA, 1980)Google Scholar, 141.

4. Schumacher, E. F., Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Daly, Herman, ed., Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco, 1973)Google Scholar. A more Malthusian critique of human economies and their impact on the earth also reemerged in the 1970s with Erlich's, Paul The Population Bomb (Cutchogue, NY, 1968)Google Scholar. See also the postwar contributions of Osborn, Fairfield (Our Plundered Planet, London, 1948)Google Scholar and Vogt, William (Road to Survival, New York, NY, 1948)Google Scholar.

5. See Research & Degrowth's “Short History.” http://www.degrowth.org/short-history (accessed December 18, 2013); Stoll, Steven, The Great Delusion—A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth, (New York, NY, 2008)Google Scholar; Martínez-Alier, Joan, Pascual, Unai, Vivien, Franck-Dominique, and Zaccai, Edwin, “Sustainable De-growth: Mapping the Context, Criticisms and Future Prospects of an Emergent Paradigm,” Ecological Economics 69 (2010): 1741–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gudynas, Eduardo, “Buen Vivir: Today and Tomorrow,” Development 54 (2011): 441–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. See República de Colombia, Presidencia de la República, Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, “Política de Defensa y Seguridad Democrática,” 2003. http://www.oas.org/csh/spanish/documentos/Colombia.pdf (accessed December 18, 2013).

7. Sintracarbón, “Boletín de Prensa 27,” February 27, 2013. www.sintracarbon.com/images/boletines/boletin-prensa-negociacion-27.pdf (accessed December 18, 2013).

8. Acosta, Alberto, “Extractivismo y derechos de la naturaleza,” in Justicia indígena, plurinacionalidad e intercultralidad en Ecuador, eds. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura and Jiménez, Agustín Grijalva (La Paz, Bolivia, 2012)Google Scholar, 171.

9. See Jeffrey R. Webber, “Ecuador's Economy Under Rafael Correa: Twenty-First Century Socialism or the New-Extractivism?—An Inteview with Alberto Acosta,” Upside Down World, July 12, 2010. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2586-ecuadors-economy-under-rafael-correa-twenty-first-century-socialism-or-the-new-extractivism-an-inteview-with-alberto-acosta (accessed December 18, 2013).

10. Outside environmentalists may be viewed with suspicion, as ecological imperialists. The term generally refers to the environmental plunder of peripheral regions. Today, it is also an epithet applied to outside environmentalists who wish to “preserve” fragile environments and prevent much-needed economic development.

11. The Sierra Club's “Beyond Coal” website resolutely promotes the notion that coal use can be ended without any negative impact on consumption or lifestyle. See http://content.sierraclub.org/coal/about-the-campaign (accessed December 18, 2013).

12. Pellow, David N., Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 8–9 Google Scholar.

13. Emily Brownell notes that the Love Canal disaster in 1978 mobilized a new, more populist environmentalism that became the root of today's environmental justice movements. “Yet because public attention did little to lessen actual waste generation, these assessments need to be complicated. Love Canal shifted the center of the environmental movement closer to questions of environmental injustice, but it also shifted waste disposal onto transnational environments as the next frontier to hide it, unnoticed.” “Negotiation the New Economic Order of Waste,” Environmental History 16 (2011): 268–89Google Scholar.

14. Eller, Ronald D., Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945 (Lexington, KY, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 195.