Cutting carbon from the ground up! A comparative ethnography of anti-coal activism in India and Australia
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2021
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The failure of the 2009 Copenhagen United Nations Climate Summit prompted a shift in global climate activism towards a direct politics of stopping fossil fuel extraction at source. Based on ethnographic research into anti-coal resistances in Australia and India during this time period, this thesis investigates whether this strategic turn signals the emergence of a new environmentalism. The thesis seeks to understand how and whether earlier environmentalisms have been transformed through new activisms to ‘keep coal in ground’, and whether a common ground can be conceptualised across two disparate contexts of environmentalism such as Australia and India through this new approach.
The thesis finds that Australian environmentalism was re-constituted as an anti-coal climate movement through a decade-long build-up in regions affected by coal mining. Alliances between environmentalists, farmers and indigenous native titleholders now hold the potential to recast environmental narratives through new relational politics. From 2014, the Carmichael coalmine in Queensland was opposed by a strategic alliance between the Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners, the Stop Adani environmental movement, and farmers. Although they could not stop the coalmine they exposed coal’s power over politics.
In India, the narrative of the environmentalism of the poor, of a rightful share of natural resources, has been recast in a new language of rights over forests through progressive legislations passed in 2006. From 2012, an alliance of forest-dependent communities and Greenpeace resisted coalmining in Singrauli in central India, a region with the highest national concentration of coalmines and power plants in the country. The movement’s narrative of forest rights and success in stopping the coalmine signified a form of ‘democracy on the ground’ for ecosystems dependent communities, and against the history of Singrauli’s industrial development, which dispossessed local communities. The proposed coalmine had been at the centre of ‘Coalgate’, a large government corruption scandal that exposed ‘crony-capitalism’ in India. When the state sought to define Greenpeace as a national security threat for seeking to halt the coalmine, a civil society solidarity campaign supported the anti-coal activism as a critical assertion of democracy.
The Indian and Australian cases demonstrate socio-political differences characteristic of a North-South divide, and distinct modes of activism characteristic of North-South differences in environmentalism. But they also indicate similar patterns of power of coal over governments. Common ground between can be achieved by finding solidarity between the varieties of human and environmental justice concerns that now find common cause with climate justice.
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