geopolitical ecology youssefbouchi

In this episode, we sit with Max Ajl, author of A People’s Green New Deal (2021), to discuss a range of issues pertaining to climate justice. We discuss the GND’s (lack of) engagement with anti/imperialism, class struggle over the socialization of the means of production and why it’s necessary in a just transition, the political economy of land, structural adjustment programs, national sovereignty, Palestine, and how all of these things connect. 



Max Ajl is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. He has contributed to a number of journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society.

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Concepts to look into that Max refers to:


“Imperial core” & “World-System” are terms adopted from the World-Systems Theory. It is a framework for conceptualizing the global dimensions of the capitalist mode of production in such a way that sees spaces of concentrated capital accumulation, industrial development, and advanced militarism as the “imperial core” and spaces where land and labor are exploited in service of the former as the “periphery.” Of course, the theory is much more complex than that and deserves further reading. The wikipedia page does a decent job at explaining it and you can access it here. 
“Primitive accumulation” is a Marxian term that refers to the accumulation that happens prior to capital accumulation. In short, capital accumulation refers to the surplus value extracted by the owners of the means of production (capitalists) from the worker (by worker we mean the working class as traditionally understood but also from nature). Primitive accumulation is what precedes this moment, and in Marx’s usage of the term it was referring to the Enclosures in England, whereby peasants were displaced from their lands, yanked from their sources of food and labor, in service of privatizing large tracts of land and insert them into a market system in the making. Today, there are contemporary adoptions of this term to conceptualize the necessary dispossession enabling profit-making. An example of this is David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession.”
If you’re unfamiliar with “feudalism” or the feudalist mode of production, visit this page.
“Structural Adjustment Programs” are loans issued by the IMF and World Bank to countries in crisis under the pretense of stimulating "economic growth and development" but are fundamentally imperialist tools used to open up postcolonial geographies to Western capital. The loans are conditional upon the recipient country's adoption of "structural adjustment" which refers to a policy paradigm in which the state privatizes some assets and sectors, cuts back on social spending, and overall creates conditions that are favorable to capital accumulation with a degraded social safety net. Read this short article for more context.

Holly Caggiano is an Assistant Professor in Climate Justice and Environmental Planning at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Her research explores social dimensions of climate transitions in the US and Canada, and how diverse stakeholder groups form coalitions to advocate for energy systems change. 

In this episode, we chat about efforts to mobilize towards a just energy transition, ranging from the Green New Deal as a framework for community action to building cultures of sustainability and care on campuses and beyond.

Paper by Holly discussed in podcast: 

A new framework for imagining the climate commons? The case of a Green New Deal in the US 

Some valuable resources mentioned by Holly: 

Planning the Green New Deal: Climate Justice and the Politics of Sites and Scales by Kian Goh

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief - a group that gives Holly hope! 

Sophie L. Van Neste is an associate professor in urban studies at INRS (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal), holder of a Canada research chair in urban climate action. Her research focuses on social movements in urban environmental politics and participatory action research for justice in climate adaptation. 

In this episode, we sit with Sophie and discuss the politics of climate adaptation, or how urban landscapes are changing as a result of a warming planet. Key topics include planning/organizing around extreme heat in Lachine, Montreal; the role of historical uneven development in present day climate adaptation; and “climate justice” as a framework for coalition building. Hope you enjoy it!

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Some papers by Sophie: 

Place, pipelines and political subjectivities in invisibilized urban peripheries

Forthcoming, discussed in this episode: Extreme heat and uneven urban development : missing politics in climate adaptation. Van Neste SL, D’Amours, AM, Poulin E. 2024.

Some valuable resources mentioned by Sophie: 

⁠Just Climate Adaptation In Cities: Reflections For An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda⁠ by Vanessa Castán Broto

Check out the website of the living lab on climate adaptation to which Sophie belongs:https://laboclimatmtl.inrs.ca/ 

Sophie asks you to keep an eye out for a collaborative book coming up co-written with municipal and community actors. 

Sophie speaks to the legacies of uneven development also in this blog interview with the group Heritage Montreal and the McCord Museum; you can see there a few images of the site: https://blog.heritagemontreal.org/patrimoine-et-transition-ecologique-perspectives-urbaines-et-memorielles-avec-sophie-van-neste/ 

NOTE: it’s in French.

In this episode, we sit with Philippe Le Billon and Erik Post and discuss a wide array of topics all connected by a thread of seeing ‘sustainable development’ as yet another iteration in a long history of capitalist development. 

By examining violence and systemic injustices, as well as counter-hegemonic resistances, we situate the projects and paradigms advertised as ‘sustainable’ in a long history of colonial extraction and exploitation.

Of course, as with most things, there are nuances that cannot be ignored; that is, how does sovereignty and independence fit into this picture? How do we make sense of violence that may appear to some as happening in a vacuum, but are fundamentally intertwined with global empire? How do we reconcile national development in the Global South with the impacts of development on nature? 

These are some big questions, to which critical insight is offered by our guests Philippe and Erik today.

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Philippe Le Billon is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

His research interests bring together political geography, political ecology, and war studies. He has focused most of his work on the links between natural resources and armed conflicts, but has also examined the political economy of war and reconstruction, the resource curse, corruption, as well as natural disasters and political crises.

His work spans multiple geographies, from Latin America to South East Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa and it tackles various ‘resources’ wrought from the Earth: from food to fossil fuels to metals and minerals that are notoriously associated with the violence accompanying their extraction, such as Cobalt in the Congo.

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Erik Post is currently in Mexico conducting fieldwork for his PhD Dissertation, which he is working with Philippe on completing. Broadly, his research explores geopolitics, violence, and colonialism in Latin America and the decolonial futures proposed by Indigenous struggles for racial, environmental, and climate justice. 

He examines how these conflicts are influenced by, and themselves influence power structures, state and corporate discourses and practices as well as the mobilization of values, norms, and principles in the politics of sustainable development and alternative development rationalities.

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Important Resource shared by Erik Post and mentioned in this episode re: resisting extractivism in Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico: 

https://poderlatam.org/sierra-de-apuestas/

It is a website where people can consult and download the research report “La Sierra en juego. El costo de la extracción en la Sierra Norte de Puebla” which he wrote with PODER. You can also explore the accompanying online platform “Sierra de Apuestas" with an interactive map and network analysis of corporate ownership.

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Reading:

The Green Transition in Context—Cobalt Responsible Sourcing for Battery Manufacturing

Proyectos de muerte and proyectos de vida: Indigenous counter-hegemonic praxis to sustainable development in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico

Liam is a PhD researcher in Geography at the University of Toronto and a volunteer tenant organizer in Vancouver. He’s interested in labor, community, and movement organizing strategy, and the politics of reproduction under capitalism.

In this episode, we sit with Liam Fox to discuss the extractivist paradigm of pipelines ripping through Indigenous land in so-called Canada. Specifically, we discuss the regulatory regime in which oil and gas extraction (and the infrastructures required to move it) is articulated and applied. This inevitably entails the engagement with ‘Canada’ as a settler-colonial, extractivist state, bringing to the fore an engagement with the expropriation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples as well as Indigenous resistance. 

We also discuss Liam’s PhD research, which focuses on the history and future of political and class consciousness in and around Alberta’s tar sands. Projects like Liam’s are incredibly important for those of you who are thinking about things like the Just Transition, Climate Justice, and/or a Green New Deal. 

We land in a space of thinking about solidarity and class consciousness; specifically, building unlikely alliances as an essential strategy for anti-capitalist futures. 

From there, we conclude with some thoughts on organizing/mobilizing in our immediate communities as a means of achieving said solidarity across difference. This is where Liam’s role as community organizer with the Vancouver Tenants Union comes in. 



Main pieces discussed/mentioned in this episode:


Liam Fox’s paper: Pipelines in the “Public Interest”? The Jurisdictional Work of a Concept in Canadian Pipeline Assessment


Naomi Klein’s interview with Leanne Simpson: Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson



Further recommendations:


Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboirin 


Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Coulthard