Coal Frontiers and the Production of Socionatural Extractive Peripheries in the US and Indonesia

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Coal

Abstract

This paper compares the historical political economy of coal in two peripheries, one within the periphery of Indonesia and the other within the core of the United States. Rejecting banal assumptions of ‘pure’ ecological limits, this paper examines how booms and down cycles or busts have been socially and historically produced in the two regions. From there, the paper moves to compare the politics of extraction, including the accompanying legal instruments that legitimize and facilitate extraction. The key contrast is between an ongoing boom in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia from the 1990s, shaped by economic nationalist politics and significant decline in the US with coal production dropping in Appalachia but this regional decline in economic importance tempered by a political-cum-ideological ‘hangover’ of power of the coal industry in the US. However, both extractive peripheries have experienced environmental degradation, as well social dislocation including destruction of labor union powers. Finally, these two extractive peripheries are connected by the increased importance of global coal markets, especially China and India, in the last two decades and by geo-political interests and anti-union activities in both regions.

Author

• Paul K. Gellert, University of Tennessee