Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects’ proponents and opponents, beneficiar...

Post-Carbon Futures: Imagining (and Enacting) New Worlds through Transition Studies explores the multitude of possibilities for conceiving and creating fulfilling post-carbon ways of life.Offering diverse perspectives and abundant empirical examples, this robust volume sheds new light on how complex ecological, economic, and political factors contour processes of conscious cultural change. The works gathered here center contributors’ experiences and observations of life in...

This book offers a comprehensive and current look at the complex relationship between anthropology and activism. Activism has become a vibrant research topic within anthropology. Many scholars now embrace their own roles as engaged social actors, which has compelled reflexive attention to the anthropology/activism intersection and its implications. With contributions by emerging scholars as well as leading activist anthropologists, this volume illuminates the diverse ways in which the anth...

Environmental Activism on the Ground draws upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship to examine small scale, local environmental activism, paying particular attention to Indigenous experiences. It illuminates the questions that are central to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement while reappraising the history and character of late twentieth and early twenty-first environmentalism in Canada, the United States, and beyond. This collection considers the different ways ...

Next World Conversations is inspired by a simple truth: Times of crisis catalyze visions of better worlds. Temporarily overshadowing the larger and longer-term catastrophes of climate change, ecological decline, and social injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered dramatic transformations in how we work, learn, and interact. Even as loud voices demanded a return to business as usual, many of us realized that the old normal we had left behind was very deeply flawed. We will not go back. In...

Uplifting account of the struggle between the Grassy Narrows First Nation and the Canadian logging industry.In December 2002 members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation blocked a logging road to impede the movement of timber industry trucks and equipment within their 2,500-square-mile traditional territory. The Grassy Narrows blockade went on to become the longest-standing protest of its type in Canadian history. The story of the blockade is a story of convergences....

This book theorizes the roles of optimism in anthropological thinking, research, writing, and practice. It sets out to explore optimism’s origins and implications, its conceptual and practical value, and its capacity to contribute to contemporary anthropological aims. In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this volume contemplates how an optimistic anthropology can energize the discipline while also contributing to bettering the lives, communities, and environmen...

This timely volume examines resistance to natural resource extraction from a critical ethnographic perspective. Using a range of case studies from North, Central and South America, Australia, and Central Asia, the contributors explore how and why resistance movements seek to change extraction policies, evaluating their similarities, differences, successes and failures. A range of ongoing debates concerning environmental justice, risk and disaster, sacrifice zones, and the economic cycles o...

'Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.'Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. Yet despite its failures, the same market-driven ideas are being applied to everything from famine to climate change. We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses: why do things cost what they do? Radical, original, nimbly argued, The Value of Nothing draws o...

Citizens expect their governments to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international conferences like Rio II to the U.S.’s failure to pass meaningful climate legislation, governments’ progress has been lackluster. That’s not to say leadership is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. Action—on climate, species loss, inequity, and other sustainability crises—is being driven by local, people’s, women’s, and grassroots movements around th...

In the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, renowned public intellectual and scholar Stephen Clarkson asks whether North America "exists" in the sense that the European Union has made Europe exist.Clarkson's rigorous study of the many political and economic relationships that link Canada, the United States, and Mexico answers this unusual question by looking at the institutions created by NAFTA, a broad selection of econom...

Prior to May 2015, the oil-rich jurisdiction of Alberta had, for over four decades, been a one-party state. During that time, the rule of the Progressive Conservatives essentially went unchallenged, with critiques of government policy falling on deaf ears and Alberta ranking behind other provinces in voter turnout. Given the province’s economic reliance on oil revenues, a symbiotic relationship also developed between government and the oil industry. Cross-national studies have detected a c...