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Acknowledging environmental degradation as a profoundly political phenomenon, this article examines how uninvited environmental change transforms people's understandings of and relationships to the natural world. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in a semi-remote Canadian Anishinaabe community and among Euro-American residents of Ohio who oppose local shale energy development, I trace parallels between the disempowerment and vulnerability experienced by people with very different assumptions about the world and their place in it and very different positions within the global political economic system. While environmental justice scholars have revealed compelling correlations between social and environmental inequity, I argue that investigating environmental degradation's sociocultural impacts among relatively privileged groups can encourage more dynamic explorations of conjoined environmental/social/political systems and expose ongoing structural shifts. My comparative analysis seems to suggest that ever-increasing segments of the world's population now contend with environmental challenges that they did not authorize, and do not benefit from. I thus conclude by calling for additional investigations of environmental degradation in unexpected places and the implications of extensive inequity for global sustainability.Key words: Energy, environmental degradation, environmental justice, fossil fuels, hydraulic fracking, landscape, North America, shale gas

Introduction: Why Optimism -- A World Made Safe for (Future) Difference: Anthropology and Utopian Possibility -- Vertiginous Optimism: Optimistic Orientations in a Field of Chronic Crisis -- "Moving On and Moving Up": Productive Angles of Exploring Optimism -- Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: Planting Optimism in a Disrupted Ecology -- Indigenous Optimism in the Colonialcene -- Putting the Pieces in Place: Optimistic Futuring in Transition Culture -- Optimism at Scale: Exploring Everyday Activism in Atlanta's Alternative Food Networks -- Fusing Outrage and Hope into Acts of Resistance, Volunteerism, and Allyships -- Optimistic Anthropology in the Work of Systems Changemakers -- China 2060: Envisioning a Human-Centered Approach to Energy Transition -- Doing Anthropology Forward: Emerging Technologies and Possible Futures -- Afterword: Optimism as Capacity.

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, beneficiaries and victims. Through a series of engaging case studies, she argues that diverse contemporary natural resource conflicts are underlain by a culturally constituted 'extractivist' mind-set and embedded in global patterns of political inequity. Offering a synthesizing framework for making sense of complex interconnections among environmental, social, and political dimensions of natural resource disputes, Willow reflects on why extractivism exists, why it matters, and what we might be able to do about it. The book isvaluable reading for students and researchers in the environmental social sciences as well as for activists and practitioners.

Anishinaabe Cultural History and Land-Based Subsistence -- From Aboriginal Policy to Indigenous Empowerment -- A World Transformed the Grassy Narrows Blockade -- Beginnings -- The Blockade -- Blockade Life -- Negotiations and Networks -- Beyond the Blockade -- Conclusion: The Blockade is Still There

Acknowledging environmental degradation as a profoundly political phenomenon, this article examines how uninvited environmental change transforms people's understandings of and relationships to the natural world. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in a semi-remote Canadian Anishinaabe community and among Euro-American residents of Ohio who oppose local shale energy development, I trace parallels between the disempowerment and vulnerability experienced by people with very different assumptions about the world and their place in it and very different positions within the global political economic system. While environmental justice scholars have revealed compelling correlations between social and environmental inequity, I argue that investigating environmental degradation's sociocultural impacts among relatively privileged groups can encourage more dynamic explorations of conjoined environmental/social/political systems and expose ongoing structural shifts. My comparative analysis seems to suggest that ever-increasing segments of the world's population now contend with environmental challenges that they did not authorize, and do not benefit from. I thus conclude by calling for additional investigations of environmental degradation in unexpected places and the implications of extensive inequity for global sustainability.Key words: Energy, environmental degradation, environmental justice, fossil fuels, hydraulic fracking, landscape, North America, shale gas

ABSTRACT Landscape anthropology has explored relationships between peoples and places as well as culturally specific ways of experiencing and imagining the world that infuse these relationships. Departing from Kakipitatapitmok, the site of a direct‐action blockade maintained at Grassy Narrows First Nation since 2002, I employ analytical frameworks inspired by the landscape genre to consider the physical and conceptual "place" of Anishinaabe anticlearcutting activism. I draw on the Grassy Narrows case to suggest that when considered from an emic perspective, the landscapes we encounter are very often politically constituted. As a distinctive new way of being and relating within their boreal forest homeland, anticlearcutting activism has transformed Kakipitatapitmok into a politically charged vantage point from which Grassy Narrows activists comprehend, configure, and communicate their place in the world. I advocate for an anthropological conception of landscape that can account for activists' experiences of environmental injustice and their ongoing efforts to overcome it.

This article reviews recent literature relevant to the ongoing shale gas boom and introduces the Journal of Political Ecology's Special Section on hydraulic fracking. We highlight the need for ethnographic studies of the tumultuous social and physical transformations resulting from, and produced by, an unfolding frontier of energy production that unsettles social, economic, and ecological landscapes. We examine how intercommunity connections are vital to recognizing the shared structural conditions produced by the oil and gas industry's expansion, through examining the roles played by the oil field services industry, the sequestration of information and agnotology (the deliberate production of ignorance), divide and conquer tactics, and shared experiences of risk and embodied effects. Summarizing the contributions of the five articles included in the Special Section, we offer recommendations for further inquiry. We examine how social science studies of hydraulic fracking are producing new and innovative methodologies for developing participatory academic and community research projects.Key words: digital media, embodiment, energy, hydraulic fracturing, oil field services industry, shale gas

This article reviews recent literature relevant to the ongoing shale gas boom and introduces the Journal of Political Ecology's Special Section on hydraulic fracking. We highlight the need for ethnographic studies of the tumultuous social and physical transformations resulting from, and produced by, an unfolding frontier of energy production that unsettles social, economic, and ecological landscapes. We examine how intercommunity connections are vital to recognizing the shared structural conditions produced by the oil and gas industry's expansion, through examining the roles played by the oil field services industry, the sequestration of information and agnotology (the deliberate production of ignorance), divide and conquer tactics, and shared experiences of risk and embodied effects. Summarizing the contributions of the five articles included in the Special Section, we offer recommendations for further inquiry. We examine how social science studies of hydraulic fracking are producing new and innovative methodologies for developing participatory academic and community research projects.Key words: digital media, embodiment, energy, hydraulic fracturing, oil field services industry, shale gas

Foreword: extractive industries in global economies / June Nash -- Preface: a critical mass of engagements -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: confronting extraction, taking action / Kirk Jalbert, Anna Willow, David Casagrande, and Stephanie Paladino -- Histories & trajectories -- The great crew change? : structuring work in the oilfield / Diane E. Austin and Thomas R. McGuire -- Mega-mining sovereignty : landscapes of power and protest in Uruguay's new extractivist frontier / Daniel Renfrew and Carlos Santos -- Marcellus shale as golden goose : the discourse of development and the marginalization of resistance in northcentral Pennsylvania / Rob Cooley and David Casagrande -- Risks & rights -- Bounded impacts, boundless promise : environmental impact assessments of oil production in the Ecuadorian Amazon / Amelia Fiske -- The power and politics of health impact assessment in the Pacific Northwest coal export debate / Moriah McSharry McGrath -- Contingent legal futures : does the ability to exercise aboriginal rights and title turn on the price of gold? / Andie Palmer -- Corexit to forget it : transforming coastal Louisiana into an energy sacrifice zone / Julie K. Maldonado -- Struggles & opportunities -- With or without railway? : post-catastrophe perceptions of risk and development in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec / Geneviève Brisson and Emmanuelle Bouchard-Bastien -- Bringing country back? : indigenous aspirations and ecological values in Australian mine-site rehabilitation / Tamar Cohen -- Harmonizing grassroots organizing and legal advocacy to address coal mining and shale gas drilling issues in southwestern Pennsylvania / Caitlin McCoy, Veronica Coptis, and Patrick Grenter -- Alternative futures -- Images of harm, imagining justice : gold mining contestation in Kyrgyzstan / Amanda E. Wooden -- El Salvador's challenge to the Latin American extractive imperative / Rachel Hannah Nadelman -- Unconventional action and community control : rerouting dependencies despite the hydrocarbon economy / Tristan Partridge -- Toward transition? challenging extractivism and the politics of the inevitable on the Navajo nation / Dana E. Powell -- Afterword: an open letter to extractivists / Jeanne Simonelli -- List of contributors -- Index