Settler Ecologies, “Natural Resources,” and Unruly Responses to Extraction

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

The panelists on this roundtable examine how settler-colonizers have come to delineate parts of ecosystems as “natural resources” in ways that, at best, differ from and, at worst, extract, harm, or dispossess longer-standing communities (humans and otherwise) who depend on them. At the same time, “natural resources” challenge the very efforts that seek their categorization and control. Drawing from our respective studies on air, peat, and the creosote bush, we ask: what happens when we categorize species to colonial and capitalist ends? And, what role does boundary-making and classification play in the ownership, transfer, and marketing of natural resources?

Drawing on cases from across North America, this panel reveals the unintended consequences of parsing ecosystems into natural resources and the ways in which their unruly nature challenges colonial control. As scientists developed the atomic bomb, their need to tame the atmosphere as a radioactive sink provoked a scramble to measure wind and air at Los Alamos. At the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina, Euroamericans draped their agricultural fantasies over what they perceived as a “desert wasteland,” whose ecology resisted settler fantasies. And as Europeans invaded what became the U.S.-Mexico Border, Larrea tridentata (creosote) was transformed from a “useless” plant into a resource, albeit an unruly one that evaded scientific control.

As settler-colonists selected certain species and places for profit, conservation, research, and/or extraction, they established ecological and cultural hierarchies. These hierarchies, which continue to frame present-day conceptions of “natural resources,” are evident in the ecological degradation and environmental racism that characterize the places addressed by our panelists. Mired by uneven power relations, settler ecologies structure both ideological and material entanglements between human and other-than-human communities.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Swamp on Fire: Cultural and Ecological Resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp - Perri Meldon, Boston University

• Wind, Radioactivity, and the Subversive Nature of Atmosphere at Los Alamos - Alyssa J Kreikemeier, University of New Mexico

• Nation-Building and Creosote Knowledge at the U.S.-Mexico Border - Ligia Arguilez, University of Texas, El Paso

Chair

• Scott Erich, CUNY Graduate Center