Globalization, Resource Extraction, and Social Movement Mobilization
2 min readRC24 Environment and Society (host committee)
The colonization of the Americas and other regions has gone hand in hand with natural resource extraction, which has included economies built on minerals, forestry resources, fisheries, and – more recently – oil and gas. Shifts towards globalization and knowledge-based economies within the urban centres of the global north have not resulted in moving away from resource extractivism. Rather, we see a reconfiguration of the commodification and extraction of earth resources that underlies contemporary lifestyles of overconsumption for the affluent of the world. This reconfiguration of natural resource extraction has often involved reaching further and further into new sites in remote and rural areas, including extensive “land use change” in biomes such as the Amazon Basin, Boreal forests and the Arctic. It has also involved the increasing commodification of resources such as drinking water. At the same time, this reconfiguration of resource extractivism has been met with resistance by environmental and Indigenous social movements. This session invites papers that focus on social processes of mobilization and resistance to resource extraction. The objective is to transcend the north-south division that has influenced research and provide a space for comparison.
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