Keywords

Prelude

Notes from COP26 Climate Conference: Confronting Climate Coloniality

We begin this chapter with our reflections from the United Nations COP26 climate conference (26th meeting of the Conference of Parties on climate) in late November 2021, following our participation in various events in and outside the summit. The summit itself was a space dominated by corporations, fossil fuel companies and powerful governments and included a zone for NGOs, civil society groups and green capitalism entrepreneurs promoting carbon reductionism (Net Zero), the financialisation of nature and a raft of techno-utopian innovations. Politicians and corporate leaders brought activist slogans into their speeches, while youth and civil society voices were celebrated and ‘staged’ within the mainstream conference (Aykut et al., 2022). Outside COP26 itself, a ‘fringe’ of loosely connected activist spaces were sites of counter-narrative and the expression of decolonial, anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist politics. The Peoples’ Summit involved social and environmental justice activists, youth, Indigenous groups, critical academics and trade unions whose diverse registers and claims converged around a sense of grassroots globality in opposition to the re-enchanting of green capitalism that was going on inside the COP (Aykut et al., 2022).

From our vantage point as feminist political ecology (FPE) researcher-activists experiencing the dissonances, exclusions and erasures as we navigated these COP26 spaces, we witnessed the contrast between the climate narratives of the corporate fixers and the stories from those who embody the impact of extractivism and corporate greed: mining, toxic waste, oil drilling and ecological degradation. Our COP26 reflections inspire the questions that frame our dialogue in this chapter: how does climate colonialism surface in the reflections we share from our research and activism? How is it that the root causes of climate change—extractivism, injustice and disconnection from nature—are simultaneously rendered invisible and reinforced in corporate and state responses? Are colonial and extractive injustices being reproduced in green initiatives as nuanced community perspectives remain unheard? What alternatives to extractivism might be heard in these stories?

Mai: I am reminded of Indonesian President Jokowi’s speech delivered at the World Leader’s Summit at the beginning of COP26 in Glasgow, UK. He put “climate change as a major threat to global prosperity and development”, and then went on to answer that threat by offering, among other things, the development of an ‘electric car ecosystem’, and the development of a green economy-style Special Economic Zone (SEZ). All this means that Indonesia admits to the existence of climate change but continues extractive development with the same pattern. The expansion of the electric car industry means the enlargement of forest and land clearing for extracting nickel in islands of Sulawesi and Maluku, and coal extraction in Kalimantan to produce the materials and dirty energy for the manufacture of electric car batteries. The expansion of the biofuel economy means the expansion of large-scale palm oil plantations in remote parts of the country, especially in Papua. The proposed measures also include a green SEZ that involves constructing a large-scale dam along the Kayan river to power a smelter plant in Kalimantan. Isn’t his speech a form of climate denial?

Eunice: My experience of COP 26 was different from any other I had previously attended. Not only because I attended virtually, but the attendance by lobbying “polluters” like giant fossil fuel companies and social justice activists had increased significantly compared to previous years, warranting mention by various media outlets. The overwhelming presence of the trending #NetZero on LinkedIn and the notable attendance of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry confirmed COP as a pledging event, which codifies greenwashing. I got the sense that the Peoples’ Summit had become larger and more organized, which is a ray of hope that the greenwashing happening on the inside is being countered. Like previous COPs, there was lack of nuance; an example is the classification of livestock being bad for the environment and climate. The issue was picked up by other scholars who brought sheep to the COP with the aim of illustrating that the issue is not livestock per se, but their intensified production. This message resonated with the Maasai community that I work with in Kenya, and how they are disproportionately affected by extreme weather patterns but now risk facing social penalties by being lumped in with intensive livestock farmers elsewhere in the world who are the targets of climate activism.

Dian: I presented at the COP Coalition Peoples’ Summit alongside the other authors here. I presented the stories of different people in Kalimantan, Indonesia, whose life has been changed by oil palm in different ways, depending on their class, ethnicity, migration status, ability, age and gender. There are terrible stories and there are some hopes. There are differences in ways oil palm is produced, and differences in ways it affects peoples’ life around it. I remembered that one of the participants in our COP Coalition event from the Global North expressed their shock as they think of oil palm production and its impacts in a homogeneously violent way, and another participant expressed concern about greenwashing in oil palm large-scale sustainability programmes, both coming from the belief that boycotting palm oil will do good for all. At the same time, I remember the anxieties of some small-scale oil palm farmers I met as boycotting destroys their hope and reduces the price for their oil palm harvest. The green discourse in the Global North towards oil palm, that often overlaps with the movement to support Indigenous people, brings different impacts to those rural people who do not necessarily fall into the ‘Indigenous’ category and who interact with oil palm trees in their everyday life. And this impact is not always a good thing.

Alice: Throughout the COP, the side events and the People’s Climate Summit different people and organisations created and held diverse spaces for storytelling, sharing and listening. Through these stories and spaces, diverging ways of knowing, ways of doing things and ideas about climate action were articulated and imagined. Striking juxtapositions arose. Many concerned with climate justice are urging deep unlearning from our histories, learning the histories of colonisation and discovering languages, practices, stories which have been marginalised and which might be revived. At an activist event, an Aboriginal speaker (from colonised Australia) described how, in their culture, they are “walking backwards” into the future, looking back towards their ancestors with 60,000 years of land stewardship and harmony rather than speculating about the future. Conversely, at an unofficial side event the next day with ‘storytelling’ in the description, a group of mostly Australian financiers and bankers shared their ‘visions’ for the future; their pragmatic imaginations conjured scenes of what Net Zero 2050 would look like in ways that I’m sure they thought were utopian (international investment innovations, green industry) but to me seemed to be taking us closer towards dystopia. “If we believe it, it will come true” they said with conviction, and it scared me to think they might be right as their speculations begin to materialise from these sectors so detached from what it means to be good stewards of the land.

Inspired by our reflections on COP26 we weave a dialogue through stories and reflections from our research and/or activism in Indonesia, Kenya and the United Kingdom. We explore what is learned when our reflections on grand narratives and systemic injustices are woven together in the warp and weft of feminist political ecology, with its emphasis on situated knowledges, lived experience and the everyday. Our various threads converge and diverge around the issues that decentre root causes, erase nuance and extend injustices in climate responses.

Introduction

The story of climate breakdown responses is one of dissonance between mainstream discourses that highlight capitalist market- and techno fixes and those of climate justice activists whose counter narratives call these out as ‘false solutions’ that perpetuate injustices and fail to address root causes. In this chapter, we respond to what Farhana Sultana has described as the ‘unbearable heaviness of climate colonialism’: an ongoing coloniality underpinned by processes of capitalism, imperialism and development that were inherent in the staging of COP26 (Sultana, 2022, p. 3). We do this by bringing together our reflections—what we have previously labelled as ‘untold stories’—from our research and activism with communities in Indonesia, Kenya and the United Kingdom.Footnote 1

Dian Ekowati reflects from her research on the everyday care that enables life to be sustained in the oil palm landscape, a landscape that is often described as an extractivist agricultural system, but that at the same time is framed as a green alternative to the carbon economy. Siti Maimunah is an activist and researcher working alongside communities in Kalimantan, but more broadly is seeking to understand the operation of resource extractivism in Indonesia, working with NGOs to support communities affected by extractivism projects. Alice Owen brings her insights from her research on the politics of knowledge as a campaign against a new onshore oil extraction site (Horse Hill) has unfolded in the South of England. Although the local impacts of the site can seem unspectacular compared to extractivism elsewhere (including by British companies in areas colonised by Britain), critical attention is drawn to the climate impacts of the project through campaigning and protest. This exposes the ways in which extractivist logics and implicit climate denial permeate the local experience and the global climate crisis. Eunice Wangari reflects from her research on the gendered nature of environmental changes in the Maasai pastoralist community in Kenya as the community adapts to erratic weather events like prolonged droughts and recurrent floods, and where relations between people and cattle create differentiated experiences to environmental changes. Rebecca Elmhirst contributes through her immersion in these stories and the questions they inspire and address, alongside the reflections she brings from longstanding research with communities in Indonesia’s oil palm landscapes. Three of us write from positionalities embedded in the Global South, and two of us in the Global North.

We build our dialogue around the systemic roots of the climate crisis and unjust responses, understood through the concept of extractivism (Willow, 2018). Extractivism refers to an increasingly prominent modality of capitalist accumulation based on destructive processes of subjugation, depletion and exploitation of nature and life. It includes the exploitative extraction of a broad range of natural and human resources from colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas (Veltmeyer & Petras, 2014) and as such, is deeply entwined with the dynamics of coloniality, imperialistic forms of corporate power and deepening inequalities (Pereira & Tsikata, 2021). Its logic is one of endless growth, corporate enclosure of land and water, erosion of biodiversity and the exploitation of life, rooted in and enabled by coloniality (Gómez-Barris, 2017).

Our dialogues draw on a loosely convened feminist political ecology (FPE)—a nexus of environmental feminisms based around an understanding of and response to global systems and their material consequences (Sundberg, 2016). Bringing feminist political ecology perspectives to bear on extractivism means we connect an analysis of global systems with lived experience, the everyday, the emotional and personal, and do these by attending to intersecting forms of power, including patriarchy, racism and coloniality, worked through at multiple scales. Our research reflections do not share a common conceptual framework, but our connections in the convening space of FPE means we share an understanding of extractivism as configured differently in places with particular histories, relationships and responses to the logics of racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gómez-Barris, 2017; Pereira & Tsikata, 2021), and this is reflected in the stories we explore in the chapter.

We have previously described these stories as ‘untold’ in the sense that the coloniality of climate knowledges and discourses marginalises and eclipses those stories that do not easily fit into mainstream climate policy narratives (Chao & Enari, 2021). Moreover, where stories are incommensurate and incompatible with the kinds of stories that ignite globality and connection in climate activism, they may remain unheard, risking new and perhaps hidden forms of injustice for the most marginalised in marginalised communities. FPE requires an ethics of care in how we theorise, research, discuss and write, attuned to the diverse, situated and nuanced ways in which each of us knows, recognises and embodies intersecting forms of power. Our reflections are partial, dependent on our positionalities and our geographical, ontological and political situatedness.

Rather than bringing ventriloquised narratives ‘from’ communities, we build dialogues around our reflections, shaped through the myriad relationships of academia, activism, friendship and family, in which each of us is enmeshed. Donna Haraway (2019) states that it matters what stories tell stories, it matters whose stories tell stories. We consider what we learn when we bring our reflections from our research and activism contexts together and suggest that in relating/re-telling together, the adjacency of differently situated stories posed through some common themes helps gain perspective on the contours of extractivism and climate coloniality in the everyday and helps us to confront the challenges of bringing nuance and avoiding erroneous solidarity when these stories are brought into climate justice activism spaces. We begin by outlining what we mean when we describe extractivism as a root cause of climate coloniality in the contexts of our research, before opening our dialogue around questions that emerge when we bring our stories together. We close with some reflections on community alternatives, where these foster or recover more reciprocal ways of living outside an extractivist logic.

Climate Coloniality: Extractivism as Root Cause

In early 2022, several months after COP26, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group 2 published its report on the impacts of climate change on people. Significantly, and for the first time, the report named colonialism as a driver of the climate crisis and as an ongoing issue that is exacerbating community climate vulnerability (IPPC, 2022). This attention to root causes associated with an ongoing coloniality in climate impacts and responses has long been a connecting thread linking campaigns for climate justice, including those of Indigenous and land-based peoples’ movements in the Global South, race and environmental justice activists and those rooted in global justice/anti-poverty campaigns. Climate justice aligns with the environmentalism of the poor and dispossessed in their struggles for land and livelihood and against an underlying economic system that provides profit for a few but depletion and harm for many (Tokar, 2020).

When we describe extractivism as a root cause of climate harm, we are referring to what Chagnon et al. (2022, p. 3) describe as ‘a complex of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differentials underwriting and rationalising socio-ecologically destructive modes of organising life through subjugation, depletion, and non-reciprocity’. While there has been some debate that the concept should be restricted to its origins in the white settler context of Latin American political economy, core–periphery inequalities and mineral extraction at scale, we follow a more expansive reading of extractivism located in feminist political ecology. We see the logic of extractivism as involving the appropriation of human and more-than-human life forms, depleting and draining in a potentially irreversible way. Extractivist logics involve a centralisation of power and the deepening of relational and intersecting inequalities (colonial, racial, patriarchal, interspecies): extractivism is a modality of ‘development’ that conditions and pressures all life forms (Chagnon et al., 2022). A range of experiences across different geographical settings exists within these abstract characterisations of extractivism, reflecting different histories of coloniality and settlement, contemporary geopolitics and the ‘nature’ of what is being extracted.

On the Indonesian island of Kalimantan, the ecological injustices produced through extractivism are clear, taking shape through the country’s mercantilist colonial history and its legacies, and through more regionalised forms of political dominance and oppression between dominant and marginalised ethnicities (Chua & Idrus, 2022). Since the colonial period, East Kalimantan has been an area for land, forest, mineral and oil exploitation, with rivers turned into the transportation infrastructure for the extraction of raw materials to supply markets in the Global North. Coloniality is expressed in the state’s granting of land concessions to international mining companies: like the colonial strategy of divide et impera, these mining companies divide farmers and ecosystems to get ‘cheap nature’ (Moore, 2015). Siti Maimunah (Mai) describes the depletion and draining of life as extractivist mining, and its irreversible impacts make other ways of relating to land impossible:

Mai: I received a series of news reports via WhatsApp from a friend from East Kalimantan when I had just arrived in Scotland to attend COP 26 in Glasgow. Febi Abdi, 25 years old, was a resident of Makroman village, Samarinda, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. His body was found at an abandoned coal pit owned by PT Arjuna. Febi is at least the 40th person to die in an abandoned mine pit in the last decade; most victims were children. Nearly 60% of Indonesia’s 3,033 abandoned mining pits are in East Kalimantan and most are coal pits (Shahbanu et al., 2018). In Makroman village, mining companies managed to coerce the local farmers in the hilly areas into selling their land for mining extraction, with the promise of employment with the company. In the growing seasons that followed, rice fields (sawah) on the lower slopes began to fail due to erosion, flooding, and water shortages. Surviving sawah owners must struggle with the rise in production costs due to reduced soil fertility, water shortages, and weed and pest attacks, eventually selling their formerly productive fields to the mining companies with a loss of livelihood.

In Murung Raya, Central Kalimantan, the operation of an extractive mega project affected the identity of the Murung people and changed their relationship with nature. The river was the primary source of clean water, while river fish and game meat from the forest was the primary protein source. Today, the river water is no longer drinkable, and the Murung have to collect water from creeks far from the village or buy it. Coal extraction in Kalimantan is a history of capital accumulation and destruction of the earth that has contributed to the pollution of the atmosphere. As this damage is ignored, extractivism contributes to the accumulation of climate disasters globally.

Elsewhere in Kalimantan, the logic of extractivism takes shape through the granting of oil palm concessions to large-scale companies. Corporate investments in oil palm in Indonesia exhibit the key features of agrarian extractivism: vast, capital-intensive monocultures reliant on external inputs and technologies, driven by profit-maximisation rather than social and ecological well-being, creating a form of corporate occupation (Li & Semedi, 2021). The term ‘plantationocene’ has been used to describe the agro-extractivist mode of production, processing and labour, with attention drawn to the colonial legacies of this way of controlling bodies and nature to enable the extraction of profits (Wolford, 2021). In common with the extractivist logics of mining in Kalimantan, Dian Ekowati describes the impacts of this mode of oil palm production on the communities whose stories she shares in her research:

Dian: The power behind large-scale oil palm grows the trees in such a violent way that depletes lives (human and more than human). Oil palm cultivated on a large-scale covers hundreds of thousands to millions of hectares of land, planted solely in oil palm trees. Monoculture is the only known way for planting oil palm by the oil palm companies. I remember how we often got lost when passing through a company’s oil palm blocks (concessions) due to the similarities of surroundings: same trees, pattern of planting and similar dirt roads. Relegating/subjugating other forms of life is the feature of a large-scale oil palm plantation.

The complex entanglements of coloniality and extractivist logics in Kenya reflect colonial legacies that have transformed relationships between people, land and animals. The historical marginalisation of pastoralist communities in Kenya by land dispossession can be traced to the colonial era but continued through the post-colonial administration excising large portions of rangelands and demarcating them for wildlife conservation, separate from humans. In addition to demarcating wildlife conservation parks, further Maasai land was allocated to white settlers and crop growing communities, whom the government perceived as engaging in more profit-oriented forms of production. As Eunice explains, pastoralism was and is still seen as an archaic, primitive and unproductive form of land-use in dire need of modernisation.

Eunice: It is no wonder that pastoralism’s negative portrayals dominate pastoral policies. One popular perception was that overstocking and overgrazing of cattle was causing desertification in the fragile drylands. This mistaken view has been refuted in research, but government pastoral policies advocated for sedentarization and restriction of mobility for pastoralists and their livestock with the aim of modernising them to mirror the European livestock farmers in temperate climates.

These more extractive forms of livestock production based on sedentarisation have compromised mobility, a key strategy used by the pastoralists to cope and adapt to climate variability and other changes. Mobility allows for use of spatially heterogeneous and climatically variable resources. Reduction in mobility increases the risks of degradation as only part of the rangeland is heavily utilised, making pastoralists susceptible to droughts.

Eunice: During my field work, elderly respondents recall the earlier days when Maasai grazing land went as far as Nairobi (approximately 250 kms away) and all the way to Laikipia, in Northern Kenya, where the current Northern Maasai are located. They reminisce how access to the rangelands made life easier for the community during events like droughts, floods, pest invasions and diseases. The effects of these land grabs have severely compromised the community’s ability to respond to climate shocks and stressors that frequent the region.

Socio-political and colonial processes of agrarian extractivism and neoliberal conservation are transforming landscapes and the ways pastoral communities relate to them, reducing mobility and preventing them from using their traditional knowledge and practices, undermining their livelihoods and life-making.

Our reflections on the specific histories and experiences of extractivism draw out the ways these have been shaped by colonial pasts in the Global South. In what sense is coloniality associated with the extractivist project that Alice is researching in a Global North context and how does this relate to extractivisms elsewhere?

Alice: In school history lessons I learnt about Tudor royalty, the Industrial Revolution and the success of the British Empire, the abolition of slavery. Large, dark chapters of England’s history of plunder, violence, dispossession and (cultural) genocide were either neglected or reframed to tell a particular story of the nation’s pivotal contribution to global ‘progress’ and the making of the modern world. Decolonial scholarship and critical histories retell the story of modernity, giving due importance to the colonial encounters by the British and other colonising countries which led to violent erasures and subordinations of peoples, cultures and territories.

An essential tool to colonial expansion and the extraction of wealth were the logics of extractivism, justified through scientific reasoning and Christian morality which compelled the conquering and taming of unruly ‘Others’. A key trick underlying the ‘Death of Nature’ (Merchant, 1980) and in justifying colonial extractivism was (and is) to render the Other as ontologically available for extraction, describing certain peoples as inhuman and other-than-human nature as inanimate. This move transforms the Other into a potential resource, and under the imperative of nation building comes the ‘need’ to dominate, exploit and accumulate the wealth of these ‘resources’. Scientific innovations made (and make) accelerating resource extractivism seem inevitable; the technical ability to map resources pre-empts their extraction, the innovation of technologies aspires to bring them into being. Since 1835 the British Geological Survey has mapped resources in the UK’s interests both nationally and overseas. In 2014, the Weald Basin in Southeast England was surveyed by the BGS to estimate the potential shale oil and shale gas resources, indicating between 2.20 and 8.57 billion barrels of shale oil could be in the region. Somewhat inevitably such findings attracted prospective industries, including to the Horse Hill site where both unconventional (shale, requiring additional stimulation such as by hydraulic or acid fracturing) and conventional oil plays have been explored.

The UK and the Industrial Revolution were at the heart of the rise and spread of fossil fuels, setting in motion the climate crisis. The centrality of fossil fuels to industry and society was not inevitable but a choice to maximise the reliability, mobility, productivity and thus profits of industry compared to the use of traditional energy sources such as water mills (Malm, 2016). The rise of urban industry in the eighteenth century was accompanied by the enclosures of the commons, meaning people who had once lived closely with the land with certain rights and responsibilities were forced to find labour in cities. Although much less violent than in colonial contexts, this dispossession and disconnection from the land underpinned by the logics of extractivism also marks a loss of ways of life more in tune with nature. With much industry outsourced from the UK over the last century to countries with less stringent human rights and environmental regulations, it is possible for many in the UK to live without considering either the social and environmental costs of high-consumption lifestyles or the forgotten ways of thinking about nature as something humans are a part of rather than apart from. Perhaps it is through unusual confrontations with extractivism, such as the arrival of potential onshore oil and gas in the English countryside—or indeed experiences of the droughts and heatwaves exacerbated by the climate crisis—that the underlying assumptions of modernity can be brought into question.

In the stories we share, extractivism reflects a political ontology based on imaginaries of human exceptionality, nature–culture dualisms and mechanistic or technocentric ways of understanding or relating to the world. Extractivism extends beyond (ab)using the earth as it is also a way of acting and being in the world; it constitutes a specific way of thinking, knowing and acting—of relating to nature (Willow, 2018), which is normalised in Global North contexts, as Alice describes. Reductive political ontologies underpin green economy initiatives based on achieving Net Zero carbon emissions as a ‘solution’ to climate change. When green economy initiatives emerge within an extractivist logic, this perpetuates a human mastery of ‘nature’ through greenwashing technofixes (e.g., off-setting carbon emissions through neoliberal conservation, as described by Eunice) and novel extractions (e.g., palm oil production as biofuel, as described by Dian or rare earth mineral mining, as promoted by Indonesia’s president, as Mai has explained). These forms build from and entrench climate coloniality (Sultana, 2022), reinforcing the interplay of colonialism, extractivism and climate injustice. So far, we have considered the ways in which the depleting and draining properties of extractivism unfold in our research contexts. As we thread our way back to the questions inspired in our COP26 reflections, we turn now to explore the themes that emerge when we bring our specific and situated reflections together.

Climate Vocabularies: Expanding the Extractive Frontier

Climate change narratives and accompanying vocabularies are variously mobilised by campaign groups to support claims against extractive projects, sometimes at odds with the concerns and experiences of those experiencing the everyday coloniality of extractivism. Conversely and simultaneously, the state and extractive industries use vocabularies of climate change to legitimise an expanding and deepening of extractivism under the guise of green industry. Our dialogue in this section considers the geographical and discursive dissonance of climate change vocabularies as they are introduced and mobilised in fossil fuel extraction contexts in Indonesia and the United Kingdom.

Climate ‘impacts’ describe the risks and already unfolding realities of social and ecological breakdowns that result from anthropogenic climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The climate crisis is a planetary phenomenon, but as climate justice campaigns insist, responsibility for and vulnerability to climate change play out along the contours of coloniality and inequality. Climate impact narratives—including in localised and critical analyses of climate impacts—tend not to define the social and ecological impacts of extractivism (the root cause of climate change) as ‘climate impacts’. This creates a disconnect between the devastation and violence caused by the extraction of fossil fuels (and other socio-ecologically destructive processes) and that which is caused by the combustion of fossil fuels. In this sense, we suggest that climate change narratives which describe climate change as happening everywhere or elsewhere can overlook—sometimes strategically, sometimes ignorantly—local everyday experiences of extractivism.

How Is the Vocabulary of Climate Change Dislocated from the Everyday Experiences of Extractivism?

We consider this question from the contrasting fossil fuel extraction contexts of Kalimantan in Indonesia and the Surrey Hills in the United Kingdom.

Mai: In Sungai Murung village, Central Kalimantan, or Makroman village in East Kalimantan, the coal extraction areas on the island of Kalimantan, farmers and women do not use the vocabulary of “climate change” in everyday activities. When I met Tukiyem, a woman vegetable picker, she told me about Genjer leaves (Limnocharis flava—Yellow velvet) which is increasingly difficult to obtain because of coal mining. In Central Kalimantan, while bathing on the Lanting (a floating hut in the river where people bathe and wash clothes while telling stories), I didn’t hear anyone talk about climate change. Yet the Lanting reveals the changing nature of flooding. Swidden agriculture (rotational farming) depends on rainwater, but now the rainy season is uncertain. Instead, the women told me a story about women’s protests and coal road blockades in 2015 because the river water was polluted by coal mine waste, causing river water to become undrinkable. Coal mines impact rice fields, gardens, and water sources in Makroman village. Meanwhile, Sungai Murung village has been surrounded by logging companies since the 1970s and coal extraction since 2000. Clearing of land, destruction of forests and gardens, use of transportation, and burning of coal are the causes of climate change, destroying nature and ruining human bodies. This means that irregular flooding, river pollution, undrinkable water, failed harvests, deaths of children in abandoned coal mines are because of coal extraction: they are a climate vocabulary.

Why does the vocabulary of people who live around extractive zone disappear from the negotiating table at COP 26 or at previous COP meetings? The answer is because mainstream, Western-biased knowledge divides society and nature. Climatology separates climate change indicators, such as carbon dioxide, as external to the community and more-than-human nature (Lohman, 2019). Effectively, climate change is separated from its cause, extractivism. The mainstream is keeping the climate change narrative away from everyday life because the climate crisis is considered a threat to capital accumulation that depends on extractivism. The mainstream solutions directed by the state, corporations, elites, and international NGOs are framed in technical, scientific language, and implemented on a massive scale: they expand the operation of extractivism.

The community in Samarinda shows how coal extraction in their territory, and its impact on families and communities, is an inseparable part of ‘climate change’. Farmers’ representatives in Makroman and residents of the city of Samarinda began discussing the relationship between village and city, rural and urban, coal mining, and climate change in 2012. They established a citizen movement called “Samarinda Menggugat”. They used their climate vocabulary to sue the Indonesian government for failing to protect Samarinda citizens from coal extraction and its contribution to climate change. In 2013, the representatives of “Samarinda Menggugat” brought a lawsuit to the Samarinda District Court; it became the first citizen lawsuit in Indonesia (Toumbourou, 2014). One of their demands was to urge the Indonesian president and the East Kalimantan governor to close hundreds of abandoned coal mines in Samarinda. Their case was twice won in the city and provincial high courts in 2014 after 27 court trials but lost in the Supreme Court in 2016.

Samarinda Menggugat was connecting coal and climate—teaching us about climate vocabulary. Mai’s account shows the ways in which climate change vocabularies emerge (when introduced by the state, corporations and NGOs from outside the community) and were submerged when the community centred its case around environmental justice.

Alice: I am so often hesitant to bring my experiences and observations of the onshore oil industry from the South of England into conversation with the testimonies Mai shares of the loss of lives, livelihoods and ways of life associated with open cast coal mining in Indonesia. I acknowledge the experiences of extractivism in England are incomparable to colonial contexts, yet there are commonalities in the way extractive logics and power are imposed. The violences experienced in colonial contexts have provoked insightful multi-dimensional analyses of extractivism; learning from (and taking care not to appropriate or extract) these perspectives and critical analyses can inform an understanding of extractive logics and power relations here in the centre of empire and fossil-fuelled industrial expansion.

Here—at the small (approximately two hectares) Horse Hill oil production site, set back from an oak-lined road between suburbia, Gatwick airport and privately-owned countryside—the experiences of extractivism are unspectacular. Perhaps the most pronounced way extractivism is evident is in the continued support given to the industry by the council, regulators, police and central government which overlooks and implicitly denies evidence of environmental and climate risks. Many of these risks are invisible, from the chemical fumes that sometimes surround the site, to the changing pressures and chemistry deep underground that pose a potential risk of seismicity and groundwater pollution, to the greenhouse gas emissions when the oil is combusted and the associated impacts of anthropogenic climate change. For the campaigners objecting to Horse Hill, the challenge is not only that these risks, which do not dramatically or directly affect local communities, can be difficult to mobilise around, but moreover that the systems of national planning policy and local governance are not designed in a way which accounts for the potential social and ecological costs of the proposed project.

Climate change does however present an opportunity through which the planning committee’s decision can be challenged. As with the “Samarinda Menggugat” case and the plethora of climate litigation cases pursued by citizens and NGOs over the last decade, the law is being sharpened as a tool with which to fight polluting projects and, in turn, draw attention to the local impacts and injustices of extractivism. Following the local authority’s decision to retain and extend the oil production site in 2019, local campaigners with the support of environmental NGOs have challenged the legality of this planning consent on climate grounds. The Judicial Review case centres on the failure of the council’s Environmental Impact Assessment to take into consideration the climate change impacts resulting from the combustion of the estimated 3.3 million tonnes of produced oil. The potential of this case to have a national impact on planning policy and a global impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions elevates Horse Hill from a local ‘NIMBY’ planning dispute to an emblematic struggle against fossil fuel extractivism as a root cause of the climate crisis.

Somewhat paradoxically, the legal challenge to the Horse Hill decision puts its faith in the systems, institutions and epistemologies upon which extractivism also relies. In the politically conservative area in which Horse Hill is located, the legal appeal is regarded as a respectable route for campaigners and has received significant financial support from locals. Before climate change hit the mainstream in 2019, thanks to the publicity brought to the issue by Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, Horse Hill campaigners found their climate change concerns failed to engage the public or could be politically divisive. Meanwhile, the (intentional) confusion and lack of clarity surrounding onshore oil extraction techniques and their relation to the fracking industry had made it difficult to mobilise people around unknown but potentially significant risks. Peaceful anti-fracking protests and direct action at Horse Hill and at other sites in the area posed a threat to company operations, and the companies sought to deter protest by pursuing legal injunctions. At Horse Hill, the company was able to essentially buy a far-reaching injunction against ‘persons unknown’, preventing anyone from partaking in specified legal activities which could interfere with the profitability of the company. Campaigners successfully challenged this attack on their right to protest, and the injunction was scaled back as a result, but recently introduced laws continue to criminalise dissent by dramatically increasing the punishment and sentencing of peaceful protest. Whilst the state continues to reshape policy and law in the interests of corporate extractivism, the judicial review appeal seeks to flip accusations of criminality and remains the centre point of the campaign.

Putting climate change at the centre of the campaign and legal challenge makes Horse Hill emblematic of the UK government’s willingness to sacrifice both the countryside and the climate to fossil fuel interests. Many Horse Hill campaigners care deeply about climate change, sometimes based on their own international experience in less economically developed (previously colonised) countries and an understanding of the global impacts and injustices of climate change. Others have become more recently concerned by climate change, with heightened awareness brought not only through activism but through lived experience of record-breaking heatwaves, droughts and energy prices which will impact the people and natural environments they love and care about. Connecting both local and global climate concerns to Horse Hill as a site of climate culpability, opens the opportunity to consider this local experience as part of a constellation of globally dispersed struggles against both the nearby and distant experiences of social, ecological and climatic impacts of extractivism.

We see this as an opening for building solidarity and for activism that addresses the ongoing coloniality of climate change by positioning citizens everywhere against extractivism everywhere, casting blame firmly on polluting and land-grabbing industries and the institutions they rely on rather than falling into the guilt-traps of individualistic (carbon footprint) or mis-anthropic (‘humans are to blame’) climate activism.

Alice: At a demonstration staged at Horse Hill as part of the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice during COP26, campaigners shared a recorded message from campaigners in Mozambique bringing a legal challenge against a UK government agency for funding a new mega gas project incompatible with the Paris Agreement climate commitments. The project has already forced thousands of people out of their homes and livelihoods and fuelled violent conflict and human rights abuses in the Cabo Delgado region. In the recording, the campaigner from Justiça Ambiental/ Friends of the Earth Mozambique expressed their solidarity with the Horse Hill case, urging those in Britain to support both cases and put pressure on the justice system.

Across the vastly different everyday experiences of extractivism, here is an opening through which the us/them narrative can be reimagined towards a common struggle against extractive corporations and the state systems that enable them.

How Is a Mainstream Climate Narrative Expanding and Deepening (the Coloniality) of Extractivism?

The previous dialogue illustrates the strategic mobilisation by activists of the climate change narrative as a way of connecting cause and effect, and as a (legal) tool with which to fight the local, everyday impacts of extractivism. In the same contexts, the climate narrative has also been used (co-opted) by extractive industries and states to legitimise the expansion and deepening of extractivism. Writing about the lithium triangle in Latin America, Voskoboynik and Andreucci (2022) describe how state and corporate discourses that justify extractive projects extend beyond an association with modernity and development, towards a strong ecological imaginary. Lithium extraction is presented as environmentally benign, through narratives of climate change, sustainability and the ‘green economy’. Their discussion invites us to reflect on the situatedness of climate narratives: who mobilises a climate story and to what effect?

Mai: Feminist political ecology recognizes the multidimensionality of power relations among and between humans and in more-than-human relationships, leading to a global climate change crisis. However, the mainstream narrative of climate change separates society and nature and, accompanied by a sense of global urgency, centres on the technological fix and market solution or is limited to various earthly indicators of climate change. It makes the problem of climate change seem unrelated to people’s everyday activities. Using the language becomes a political strategy to keep away the issue of climate change from everyday people’s survival and resistance. One example is by associating the “climate” with “carbon”, leading to the reason and answer of climate change being all that is related to “low carbon”, including “reducing carbon emissions”, or “low carbon development”.

In Indonesia, one of these low-carbon developments is attached to the development of energy projects, including geothermal, because it has low-carbon emissions, including low sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. One example of such projects is the Wae Sano geothermal project on Flores Island. In the local media, the geothermal company even asked residents and local government to play an active role in overcoming the increase in earth’s temperature due to climate change by supporting the geothermal project. However, the community is worried that this project will dry up the biggest lake in the area, which is the source of agricultural irrigation and water for daily needs. On June 7, 2022, I met Yoseph Erwin, one of Wae Sano’s residents who resisted the geothermal project. “One of our small sources of water, which was originally clear and hot and can be used to boil eggs, has now turned hot and yellow, even though it is only at the project exploration stage”, he said. Wae Sano people who refuse the geothermal project are not only labelled as anti-development but also have the potential to be labelled as a climate unfriendly. Those who use a “carbon” narrative are not only narrowing the perspective used to understand the roots of climate change but are also potentially supporting misguided solidarity with all that is claimed as “low carbon”, further supporting the green guise of oppression.

Alice: As the climate crisis worsens, a rapid and radical phasing out of fossil fuels is urgently required. This truth is obscured by policies and narratives that legitimise new fossil fuel extraction as part of the solution. The adoption and co-option of the language of climate action by industry and state to legitimise new oil extraction at Horse Hill in the South of England is an expansion and deepening of both the physical frontiers and the logics of extractivism. Following a decade of protest and diminishing public support for onshore hydrocarbon exploration in England promoted as an opportunity for energy security and economic growth, the mainstreaming of climate change concerns in 2019 provided a new vocabulary of ‘climate mitigation opportunity’ upon which onshore oil extraction could be pinned.

Rather than demonstrable facts, the climate mitigation opportunity narrative pushed by UKOG (the Horse Hill operators) is based on loose and generalised commitments to reducing carbon emissions which refuse to concede economic prosperity to socio-ecological viability. At the Surrey County Council planning meeting in 2019, UKOG representatives made a number of claims attesting to their commitments to emissions reductions and support for the energy transition, including the claim (found in court to be unevidenced) that oil produced at Horse Hill would have a lower carbon footprint because of energy savings from transportation. Acknowledgements of the need for decarbonisation were always caveated by the explicit assumptions that this should not risk “current levels of prosperity” and hence “oil and gas will have a significant role to play for some time to come”. This closely followed the policies and language of Net Zero 2050 and Transition adopted by the government to legitimise the logics of incremental change and postponement rather than immediate climate action addressing the root causes.

By paying lip service to climate concerns and framing economic benefits as incontestable, the company sought to undermine the claims of climate activists and portray them as naive or ignorant. This was further exemplified in the planning meeting by UKOG’s claims that they “are as committed to contributing to and safeguarding our local environment as any of our detractors”, co-opting the narrative of environmental care in an attempt to add to their own credentials whilst casting the genuine environmental concerns of the public as irrelevant. This tactic was used more explicitly to greenwash and legitimise their case that new oil is needed to support a low-carbon economy, claiming “even Greta Thunberg endorses the use of oil-based products by sailing in a high-tech yacht made of strong lightweight oil-derived carbon fibre composite”. This comment caused members of the public at the committee meeting to break their silence with expressions of disbelief; the audacity of claiming a renowned climate activist would support their project made campaigners feel insulted and gaslighted.

Through this combination of spin and mistruths reliant on the vocabulary of climate action, the greenwashing of oil production effectively denies the already unfolding reality (and coloniality) of climate impacts and delays climate action. New resource frontiers, from Indonesian islands to the English countryside, are legitimised as sacrifice zones to support the growth of a ‘green economy’. As the physical frontiers expand, so too do the depths of extractivist logics and relations. The narrative of climate change as a call to slowly decarbonise rather than to rapidly degrow the economy legitimises the creation of new ‘green’ industries and requires new or rebranded ‘green’ extractivisms. That extractivism can be legitimised by the climate change narrative illustrates the need to push for narratives that foreground system change and target industries responsible for multiple intersecting socio-ecological injustices rather than ‘just’ the impacts of carbon emissions.

The Coloniality of Climate Responses

Our second set of dialogues reflects on how the meaning of ‘green actions’ originating in the Global North with the aim of reducing carbon emissions travel to the Global South. We ask, what effects do the travelling of these ideas, which may be presented as a form of global environmental care, have on the local communities in terms of their livelihoods and lives? How do these ideas travel and what are the risks involved in generalised narratives, solutions or solidarities that do not have a nuanced understanding of the different forms or modes of production? Here, Eunice and Dian reflect from the contexts of pastoralists raising livestock in Kenya and smallholder communities in Kalimantan, Indonesia who are seeking livelihoods from the cultivation of oil palm in the spaces between the large-scale corporate plantations.

Eunice: Since the launch of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) Livestock’s Long Shadow report (Steinfeld et al., 2006) and more recently, the EAT-Lancet Report on healthy diets in the Anthropocene (Willett et al., 2019) calls to reduce consumption of livestock and livestock products as a solution to reducing greenhouse gases emissions have become common. There has been a massive dietary transition to vegetarian, vegan and white meat diets. While acknowledging that livestock production, like all other forms of agricultural production contribute to GHG emissions and must be aligned to mitigation efforts, these reports fail to differentiate between different ways of raising livestock, which have varying impacts on the environment (Scoones, 2021). Livestock and livestock products are blamed, rather than the method and scale of production. In addition, these mainstream climate narratives fail to recognize the benefits that some of the production systems like extensive pastoralism have for safeguarding the environment, livelihoods, and human lives. These benefits include reducing poverty, expanding livelihood opportunities, improving access to protein in diets, providing transport to the local communities (García-Dory et al., 2021). Thus, the focus ought to be on the production system rather than livestock and meat itself.

Pastoralism is an important form of extensive livestock production where pastoralists keep cattle, goats, sheep, camels, yaks, reindeers, and llamas on rangeland environments like deserts, savannas, steppes, arctic tundra, Mediterranean hills, and mountains, where alternative feasible livelihoods do not exist (Scoones, 2021). Such low input livestock production systems use rangelands with minimal inputs, have a lower climate, biodiversity, and water impact than the current climate narratives suggest. Compared to the intensive industrial systems, these extensive production systems can offer broader livelihood and ecosystem benefits. Through skilled grazing and different forms of mobility, pastoralists make use of pastures, grasslands, and shrubs, making the most of variability and climate related uncertainty (Scoones, 2021). Generalising all livestock production as harmful risks destroying low impact pastoralist livelihoods in Kenya that have nothing to do with damaging industrial livestock systems. This highlights the need to differentiate the impacts and contributions to environmental degradation between intensive and extensive livestock production.

To a large extent the narrative of a product, rather than its production method, being bad for the environment resonates with the oil palm caseexplained by Dian, where the effects of palm oil boycotts are already being experienced by the local communities growing oil palm. Although the boycotts of livestock and their products have yet to take shape in Kenya, it may be a matter of time as such information travels across the globe. Already, several of my friends and peers have heeded to the rampant calls to boycott livestock and livestock products and have converted into vegetarianism and veganism for environmental reasons. This trend will be fast tracked by the strong presence of European expatriate community in the country who are already searching for vegetarian options in the local restaurants, thus increasing demand. While their commitment is admirable, I often feel there is a gap in understanding what exactly makes livestock bad for the environment. The narrative risks boycotting products from people who have contributed minimally to the current global crisis we are going through, thus punishing them further.

The intrinsic connection between the Maasai and their cattle is stronger than just financial gains. Although there is the financial benefit of livestock keeping, most of them consider their livestock as important members of their family, illustrated in how they care for and relate with their livestock. Unlike in my community and others engaging in intensive livestock production, where the calf is separated from its mother upon birth, the Maasai cow and calf remain together until a new calf is born. This means that the calf continually suckles until it’s mature enough. I also noticed that the calves were allowed to suckle on one side as women milked the cows. This allows the mother–calf relationship to blossom. Livestock is often counted according to their parental lineage rather than numbers. Every evening the household women would count the livestock in relation to their mother’s. It was also common to purchase livestock to be slaughtered in the markets rather than slaughter one of their own. One study participant explained that his familial relationship with his livestock deterred him from slaughtering them: “It is like slaughtering a family member”. Many development NGOs find this paradoxical, especially during droughts, where livestock owners risk going without food rather than slaughter one of their animals. As an example, during my fieldwork, one of the study participant’s cow’s udder was eaten by hyenas at night. When the herders reported the incident to the owner, I assumed that the cow would be slaughtered for meat immediately as its capacity to produce milk had been compromised. To my surprise, the owner sought a traditional healer’s services to sew the udder and apply medical plants to ensure it healed. The owner knew the cow wouldn’t produce milk but still held on to it rather than sell it off to the butcher. Upon inquiry, she responded that it was her best cow and had given her a lot of milk in its lifetime, and she would continue taking care of it even though it may never produce milk anymore.

Dian: Eunice reminds me of the supposedly green action of boycotting palm oil for its association with deforestation. Both actions, which find purchase initially with consumers in Global North, purport to care for the more-than-human. Yet the next in the queue—rural people in the Global South—are lost when these actions travel over space to the land of producers.

In the Global North, consumers perceived the action to boycott oil palm as the only way to save the planet. When I was grocery shopping in Brighton in the UK, I read “this product does not contain oil palm” on many items—this lack of palm oil was framed as an intrinsically good quality and a selling point. There was constant news in the mass media telling me that oil palm cultivation is a main contributor to climate change and the culprit behind the forest fires, orangutan killings, and deforestation.

In the oil palm community context, where a previously forested landscape was replaced by large-scale oil palm, everyday life changed in ways that varied across communities, depending on intersections of power based around gender, class, ethnicity, migrant status, proximity to local power, and peoples’ relation with oil palm. The oil palm companies also matter. While researchers agree that large-scale oil palm companies negatively impact the landscape, humans and more-than-humans, there are some differences in experiences: where a few companies left communities with some wriggle-room for survival and where other companies did not. Where communities have this wriggle-room, some small-scale farmers have been inspired to plant the tree themselves and benefit from it. While mostly we hear about large-scale corporations and their extractivist impacts, in Indonesia (which produces most palm oil in the world), 40% of total oil palm area is accounted for by small-scale independent farmers. For these smallholders, planting oil palm trees is to improve their livelihood and to care for their family, not for accumulating profit at any cost to the humans involved, as in large-scale companies. The goal is survival and bettering life for future generations. Below, I draw out the different stories that come from these communities, based on research I undertook whilst working as a research officer at CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) in Indonesia.

An indigenous middle-aged woman who comes from a lower economic background showed us her everyday life. She wakes at 3am to start caring for her rubber plot, and to cook and prepare her 6-year-old child for school before boarding the truck that takes her to the oil palm plantation where she is employed as a casual worker. She earns less than 6 USD per day and works from 7am to 3 pm. She occasionally needs to tend her rice field after her work in oil palm plantations. She said that what she earns is barely enough to get by every day and meet her family’s needs. She worries that her first daughter, who is in high school, might not finish school. She hopes that her two daughters have a better life than hers (CIFOR, 2017a).

A second story comes from a young Indigenous couple who are permanent workers on an oil palm plantation, receiving a monthly salary, with extra if they harvest more than the target. They said that achieving the target is not easy but doable if they work hard. The couple have a small child who is taken care of by the couple’s parents when the couple works in the plantation. For this couple (the husband is a migrant from another village), oil palm gives them hope to start their own plots and a small shop for their future. They said that they don’t want to let go of their harvester’s work for the company even if they have their own plot and small shop in the future already (CIFOR, 2017b).

A final story comes from an Indigenous leader in the village who has managed to save some land. He has started his own oil palm but is anxious as he has no access to knowledge and necessary resources (seedlings, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) to do it properly. He strongly states that if the companies can benefit from oil palm, the villagers should be able to as well. He witnessed other communities who have prospered from oil palm. He anxiously waited for his two-year-old oil palm trees to show results. Oil palm trees begin to fruit after three years—if the fruit is bad at this point, then the trees are bad trees, and they have to be cut. The first important step to plant oil palm is making sure that the seedlings are good. But access to this information is difficult if you don’t know who to ask. As he puts it: “If those companies can make a lot of money and improve their life from oil palm in our land, why should we only watch? While we were here from the start?” (CIFOR, 2017c).

As we reflect on these stories together, we note the forms of coloniality that re-emerge when green actions in the Global North are taken without careful regard to the nuances of everyday lives in communities in the Global South that are themselves under threat from extractivism. Superficial understandings of community experiences mean green consumer actions originating in the Global North risk extending injustices when communities get swept up in broad-brush actions, and where political actions are not targeted at the extractivist systems that are doing harm. Specifically, what this can mean is a foreclosure of more sustainable, reciprocal ways of relating to animals through the ecosystems of pastoralism, and to the land and forest, through smallholder oil palm cultivation that presents possibilities for replenishing rather than depleting lives and landscapes.

Extractivism’s Other: Concluding Reflections on Alternatives

Mai Verse

Verse While the durian falls or is picked, transported by wooden boats brought to the house, neighbours, and local market

Verse

Verse When the ‘tanah air’ is extracted, transported by iron barges, taken somewhere unknown (In between spaces, Despite Extractivism exhibition 2022)

I imagine the durian, a forest tree that reaches 30–50 m high, with its thorny fruit skin and soft, fragrant flesh of the fruit. Kalimantan Island is the centre of Durian biodiversity. Biologists found 30 species of durian grow in Kalimantan, with various skin fruit colours, some are yellow, called Lay fruit, and Keruntungan is red. Durian tree mark out land tenure in Indigenous communities, telling the story of a family’s lineage and connection to land. Durian fruit is also a source of cash for education fees (Maimunah & Agustiorini, 2021).

In Sungai Lalang, Central Kalimantan, the durian season is a joy, marking the arrival of the fruit season. Durian trees are planted along with other fruit crops scattered in people’s yards, tree-gardens and forests along the river. The aroma of the fruit invites wild animals such as wild boars, Mawat (fruit bats), binturong (weasels), and various types of birds and nectar-eating beetles to approach. For the Murung people, this is the time to hunt—while waiting to harvest the swidden. Men and some women hunt pigs and other animals in the forest in the group. The durian season means the season of collectivity. The activity in the village can move to the durian forest until harvest time arrives. I saw small boats full of durian fruit going back and forth on the Lalang river in the afternoon and evening.

Consuming and processing durian fruit also requires communality. We can eat fresh durian or consume it after it is processed into lempok and tempoyak. Lempok is a durian lunkhead that can be stored for a long time, while tempoyak is fermented durian flesh. In fermentation, microbes break down the sugar and fat compounds to produce a healthier food. Fermentation reduces the harmful effects of durian and diminishes harm to our bodies, others, and the world around us (Fournier, 2020).

The durian season is a sign of inter-species relations, in contrast to the extractivist relations that govern mining of coal in Kalimantan since the colonial period-relations that harm and extract from old forests, rubber plantations, fields, and orchards, including durian trees. Mining removes topsoil, revealing solid black rock with a strong odour and combustion smell. The black rock is taken and transported via hauling roads before finally being sent on the rivers out of Kalimantan Island.

Alice

On a paved road, under the flight path of Gatwick airport, on the edges of suburbia, in the heart of empire, outside an oil extraction site, is it possible to imagine alternatives to extractivism? An alternative to fossil fuel extraction is to ‘leave it in the ground’ and to instead pursue renewable energy sources, but as we have seen it is often not enough to replace extractivism with green extractivism—the resources required for renewable infrastructure and the corporate nature of the industry often come with environmental injustices. Perhaps less pragmatic but more critical are the alternatives to the logics of extractivism, an abusive and dominating way of seeing the Other as a resource to serve goals of accumulation.

In a handful of small but intentional ways, those opposed to oil production at Horse Hill have thought and practised together some alternatives to extractivism. By staging protests, picnics and ceremonies at the gates of the site, activists not only draw attention and bear witness to local and climate impacts of the operations but also subvert extractivist logics by physically occupying the space with our own sets of logics. Poignantly, the Faith at the Gate events involve the sharing of readings, reflections and silent meditation or prayer. These are occasions to celebrate the abundance of nature and observe the changing seasons and to stand in solidarity with others fighting climate, environmental and social injustices here and elsewhere. Through these expressions of reverence and care, a powerful juxtaposition is staged between the peaceful gathering at the gates and the sacrilege of the disregard for the Other being perpetrated on the other side of the gates.

Near the Horse Hill site are deposits of clay, historically used in the area for brickmaking. Local potter Xanthe Maggs was inspired to find ways to use this clay to support the Horse Hill campaign, such as through community outreach workshops and the creation of ceramic badges. Joining in with these experiments with clay, I was struck by the question of what distinguishes our extraction of this material from the extraction of the oil, and this in turn opened an invitation to consider what other, more reciprocal kinds of relationship could be had with this land. Extractivism is not only about the scale or the consequences of the extraction, but also about the intent: extracting a resource for personal gain is inherently distinct from extracting a material for the purpose of creatively inspiring care for the land and climate. Clay creations have been auctioned to fundraise for the legal case, and a clay bead travelled from Horse Hill to Glasgow with an activist joining the ‘Camino to COP26’ pilgrimage, walking across the UK to bring messages from communities to the COP.

Care for the land through walking and being in the landscape seems to be capturing the popular imagination in England at a time of increased recognition of the physical and mental health benefits of being in nature that emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns, and the increased awareness of nature’s vulnerability as the climate breaks down. New campaigns for the Right to Roam, including days of peaceful Mass Trespass, have been supported by some Horse Hill campaigners and draw attention to the lack of public access to the English countryside and the controversial history of private land ownership and inheritance by elites. This includes land acquired by slave owners through the publicly funded compensation they received as a result of the abolition of slavery. Access to nature in England remains intimately tied to colonialism in such ways, and the campaign seeks to encourage responsible access to nature to counter disconnection and exclusion from the land. This campaign goes hand in hand with campaigns against the industrialisation of the countryside through extractive projects and has the potential to bring care for local nature and land rights into conversation with care for global climate impacts, injustices and extractivisms.

We began this chapter with our reflections from COP26, refracted through our different positionalities and rooted networks within the coloniality of contrasting extractive contexts around the world. As we have woven the threads of our stories together, our dialogues have been knotted around the root causes of climate change—extractivism, injustice and disconnection from nature. When we draw the coloniality of extractivism more closely into the weave, we see how extractive injustices are being reproduced in green economy ‘false solutions’ and are perpetuated in broad-brush green actions emanating from the Global North, where insufficient regard is paid to nuanced community perspectives. Our reflections and stories connect with the efforts of activist movements to decolonise climate and environmental justice and to mount a robust challenge to the simplifications that arise from fixating on carbon emissions without addressing systemic issues that derange human and more-than-human relationships on and with land and water. Feminist political ecology provides us with the tools to create a closer weave, threading through an analysis of extractivism with lived experience, of communities and of ourselves as researchers and activists. Through FPE, we attend to situated knowledges that shape storytelling in all its forms, from the climate vocabularies of corporate and state actors to the languages mobilised to tell stories of extractive harms.

We have closed our chapter with reflections on the possibilities for what Sultana (2022) evocatively refers to as the restructuring of relationships to ecologies, waters, lands and communities to which we are intimately, materially and politically connected. As we juxtapose our reflections and stories, we listen for ways to recover or amplify sustainable alternatives to the logics of extractivism. In closing the chapter, we open up the possibilities within FPE, which provides a convening space for exploring the opposite of extractivism: relationships between humans and more-than-human natures based around stewardship, reciprocity, regeneration and ensuring life for future generations through healthier ways of relating to the land.