Between waste and profit:Environmental values on the Central African Copperbelt

Industrial mining activity has transformed the environment of the Central African Copperbelt in the twentieth century. Copper extraction and processing altered the urban landscape, generated much waste, and caused severe long-term pollution. This article examines changing environmental values among diverse Copperbelt actors, including mine engineers, government officials, mineworkers, doctors, and farmers. Why were air and water pollution long accepted as ‘negative externalities’ of copper production? How have the environmental dynamics of mining on the Copperbelt been ‘naturalised’ over time? By focusing on topics such as air, water, health, cleanliness, and pollution, the tensions between the profit-oriented motives of mining companies, the technocratic solutions proposed by engineers, and popular concerns over human and environmental wellbeing are revealed. Although resignation towards industrial pollution on the Copperbelt prevailed for most of the twentieth century, views of environmental change were always contested and have changed recently. Relying on unique archival sources and interviews, this article shows changing attitudes towards copper mining in the Anthropocene

Healing Justice: Environmental Defenders and a Thriving Amazonia

My dissertation, “Healing Justice: Environmental Defenders and a Thriving Amazonia,” uses multi-sited transnational fieldwork to explore the political economy of contamination and people’s struggles for biocultural survival in the oil frontier of Amazonian Ecuador. Over 27 months, I conducted participant observation and ethnographic interviewing in Ecuador and several international courtrooms with Indigenous leaders, mestizo campesinos, state authorities, lawyers, and oil industry spokespeople. Whereas affected people described the lived experience of oil contamination as akin to targeted chemical warfare, industry representatives denied any intention to cause harm. I address this gap by questioning scholarly accounts of contamination as the collateral damage of capitalist pursuits. By probing entanglements of the industries of oil, health, and environmental remediation, I instead consider contamination—and the management of its attendant harms—as a means for enacting control over people ‘in the way of’ extraction. My dissertation’s central contribution to social science’s understanding of environmental violence is its analysis of how the harmful impacts of biotoxins allow for the consolidation of state and corporate power. While critiques of neoliberalism and Marxist-oriented environmental theories have focused on disincentives to responsible business conduct, my work examines financial flows between industries that create what I call an “incentive to contaminate.” Demonstrating, for instance, how the sale of petroleum-derived chemicals to clean up oil spills feeds into this incentive, my findings point to how ecological harm enables the expansion of extractive industry. By centering community-led projects for repair, this dissertation additionally elaborates local political ecologies of health, which weave together a decolonial ethics of multispecies care in a world relationally ruptured by oil development