I am grateful for the comments, patience and support offered by the editors, Matthew Archer and Filipe Calvão. This chapter benefited greatly from the edits and comments of, and discussions with, Philippe Le Billon and Sage. The time, energy and suggestions of the two reviewers contributed to the text of this chapter, especially their in-text comments, which proved constructive and productively stimulating—a luxurious benefit to have during a review process, thank you. Lastly, I am grateful for Sabo’s companionship and care that makes its way into this chapter.

1. Introduction

2. Extractivism: Recognising the Depth of Socio-ecological Destruction

4Energy demand is rising. According to Our World in Data (OWD), the amount of mined material has only grown exponentially. In 1880, approximately 43.2 million metric tons of minerals were consumed. By 2013 this figure had increased to 2.64 billion metric tons of iron ore, tungsten, bauxite, copper, and so on (OWD, 2021a), a figure projected to grow as the rapid roll-out of low-carbon infrastructures for the ‘green energy transition’ (Hickel, 2020; EC, 2020, 4) and economic growth continues. Low-carbon infrastructures, the World Bank recognises (Hund et al., 2020, xi), ‘are in fact significantly more material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems’. This includes expansive spatial demands, consuming large swaths of land and hillsides (Mulvaney, 2019). ‘The global population doubled between 1970 and 2017, yet the extraction of materials (including fossil fuels for energy) tripled, from 27.1 billion tonnes to 92.1 billion tonnes per year,’ explains Meadhbh Bolger and colleagues (2021, 6). The increase of material consumption coincides with a rising energy consumption, totalling 171,240 terawatts in 2019, with oil accounting for 53,181, coal 44,109, and gas 38,517 terawatt-hours (TWh). (OWD, 2021b). Meanwhile, ‘75% of the terrestrial environment and 40% of the marine environment are already severely altered, combined with an alarming and rapid loss of biodiversity, with close to one million species facing extinction’ (Bolgher et al., 2021). Despite all the enchantments of capitalism and modernity (Alexander, 2008; Harvey and Knox, 2012), current modes of extractivism, infrastructural development and urbanisation are far from being ecologically sustainable. This places greater importance on the debates and existing gaps within the literature on extractivism.

5Given increasing rates of material and energy consumption across all sectors, claims of an energy transition are unjustified (Bell, Daggett and Labuski, 2020). While there is a socio-technical energy transition currently in action that is restructuring infrastructural organisation, development and capital accumulation, there is only one long-term energy transition, or continuity—it points in the direction of industrialisation and mass consumption (Dunlap, 2021a). This trajectory should raise concerns for all the inhabitants of the planet. The green capitalist solutions—such as market-based conservation, carbon capture and storage, offsetting, and low-carbon infrastructures—promoted by governments at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are inadequate (Böhm and Sullivan, 2021; Stoddard et al., 2021). The responsibility for socio-ecological catastrophe rests with governments, corporations and international bodies. Meanwhile, governments and companies systematically work to repress environmental, Indigenous and anti-capitalist movements attempting to mitigate socio-ecological crises and defend ecosystems. While Indigenous groups and other land defenders continue to protect their territories from mines, pipelines and wind turbines, the responses from (mainstream) environmentalists celebrating low-carbon infrastructures and, implicitly, so-called ‘green mining’ appears painfully inadequate. On the 14 November 2021 Wet’suwet’en issued an eviction order against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, demonstrating an example of enforcing treaty rights and protecting ecosystems (IGD, 2021). This, however, has resulted in the intensification of police, security and paramilitary occupation of Wet’suwet’en land (Temper, 2019), policing Indigenous and other bodies challenging extractive and infrastructure projects (Simpson and Le Billon, 2021). While committed resistance to socio-ecological destruction continues, there remains a general lack of confrontation and commitment from policy makers and established movements alike.

6This lack of commitment from policy makers, however, is rather unsurprising. Governments are intended to facilitate (and expand) territorial control, infrastructural development and economic growth (e.g. profiteering) no matter the consequences, as it appears. The European Green Deal (EGD) remains an exemplar in the energy sector (Dunlap and Laratte, 2022, 2), where the extractive realities related to the ‘rapid rollout of renewable energy deployment’ remain either ignored or only acknowledged in the matter related to supply-chain bottlenecks and critical raw material insecurity (in terms of foreign dependence). The rapid roll-out of low-carbon infrastructures is leading to land grabbing via expulsion orders (including Declarations of Public Utility or Projects of Common Interest), which reinforce the neo-liberalisation of the European energy market through the EGD. The EGD, moreover, seeks to expand energy markets, high-voltage power line (HVPL) infrastructures, (extractive-intensive) digitalisation and ‘smart’ censor schemes, and the rapid expansion of wind, solar and other low-carbon infrastructures (Dunlap and Laratte, 2022). The EGD, we must remember, was heavily influenced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—specifically in the energy sector—and will replicate similar problems of socio-ecological dispossession (Larsen, Haller and Kothari, 2022). Policy reactions to climate change have resulted in efforts to ‘decarbonise’ hydrocarbon and mineral extraction companies by employing carbon capture schemes and natural gas and powering resource extraction via low-carbon infrastructures (E&M, 2022; Equinor, 2022), which ignores the hydrocarbon-dependent and mineral-intensive realities of low-carbon infrastructures themselves (Dunlap and Marin, 2022). While policy frontiers remain limited, or disappointing, political and environmental movements—especially the younger ones (e.g. Extinction Rebellion)—could benefit from learning from longstanding struggles and committed land defenders. With the struggle in Lützerath fighting the open-pit Garzweiler lignite coal mine (Brock, 2023), it appears the climate justice movement is learning through the harsh lessons of green political party betrayal, police repression and, inversely, the importance of embracing a diversity of tactics in their struggles.

8This raises the issue of calling ‘everything extractivism’ (see EXALT, 2020; Gudynas, 2021; Chagnon et al., 2022). The primary concern of calling everything extractivism, as Gudynas (2021, 4) warns, is that ‘almost any activity could be considered extractivism’ and ‘rigour and precision [will be] lost’. A lack of rigor and precision generates ‘ambiguity’, which—Gudynas (2021, 4) explains—allows advocates of mineral and oil companies ‘to insist that any use or abuse of Nature was ultimately extractivism, and therefore it should be tolerated and protected as a fundamental condition for humanity [sic] survival’. An example of this, as illustrated by Ben Mckay (2020, 106), is Evo Morales’ ex-Vice President García Linera, who justifies extractive operations this way. On the contrary, the misuse and manipulation of information by mining companies and politicians should never temper our criticisms or assessments. Otherwise, like the concerns with environmental justice discussed below, the ecological is sacrificed in the name of the ‘social’, the ‘industrial’ or the ‘good’ of the nation, perpetuating socio-ecological imbalance and crisis.

9Gudynas’s points, then, raise a central question at the core of calling ‘everything’ extractivism: How can industrial capitalist operations not be extractivism? (Dunlap, 2021b, 4). What is not extractivism within an industrial capitalist system? Important criteria for judging whether something is extractivist, Dunlap and Jakobsen (2020, 14–15) contend, is assessing what development initiatives or operations produce or leave in their wake and how they structure the future. This implies assessing development based on the product and end result of socio-ecological conditions. This resonates with Markus Kröger’s (2022) ‘political economy of existences’, which examines the process of landscape change, or, more accurately, exterminations and reconfigurations that transform rainforests into soy monocrop plantations or wetlands into strip malls. Is the soil, water, food, non-human, climate and relational qualities being improved or degraded by development operations? Maybe the outcome is variegated, yet this asks whether particular activities—developments, constructions, forms of organisation and relationships—are socio-ecologically sustainable or renewable.

If you live on a piece of land -if you own a piece of land- if you consume the flesh that is on that land, you are now responsible for the continuation of that land and its health. You are now responsible for the health of all the various communities who share that land with you. And because members of this community will consume your flesh, too, they will be just as responsible for the continuation and health of your community. At that point you will own the land, and it will own you. (Jensen, 2006, 197)

11This conceptualises how to organise systems based on care and renewability, as opposed to plunder and extractivism. Moreover, it is a reminder that we share our habitats with other peoples, which also stresses that if people damage or destroy their habitats, they are destroying themselves. The anarchist slogan, ‘destroy what destroys you’, obtains greater significance from this perspective. The carelessness of and the destruction wrought by modernist development have gone on so long that they are resulting in climate change and weather extremes (Hickel, 2020). This understanding, then, adds to our conceptualisation of renewability as well as of extractivism. Extractivism is thus defined as cutting, fracturing, taking, usurping and disregarding humans and non-humans without intention or plan to fully and adequately redress the resulting violence and harm.

13Coming to terms with the reality that ‘everything is extractivism’ within the dominant development paradigm is important to any effort to resituate the present planetary situation—and the action that should follow. This extractive reality should also allow people to resituate how they conceive of politics, conflict, political organisation and, consequently, ‘justice’ the last of which is discussed in the next section. Academically, if not practically, the imperative exists to take the socio-ecological damage and harm created by industrial, bureaucratic and capitalist systems seriously. Non-humans, the Indigenous, the marginalised, peoples that consume little materials and energy, moreover, are the least responsible for this socio-ecological catastrophe (Bolger et al., 2021), which is not to forget the psychosocial decay and discontent emanating from modernist affluence of high-income countries and neighborhoods (Lane, 2000; Alexander, 2008). Properly recognising the scope of this problem is the first step. Technologies and infrastructures, however, can be appropriated. This appropriation indicates the importance of taking the ‘best’ innovations from this global development process. If socio-ecological transformation is to take place, it will require serious and committed efforts to redress the violence done by technocapitalism and to build new types of (post)developmental infrastructures.

14Finding a way between industrialism and extractivism, Markus Kröger (2022, 47–49) views extractivism through different intensities across a seven-point scale from -1 to 5. This is instructive to, first, create greater specificity within the extractivisms’ debate and, second, to resituate our understanding of industrial activities so that we may re-conceptualise our productive relationships with our ecosystems and the planet.

5 = hyperextractivist

4 = very extractivist

3 = notably extractivist

2 = partially extractivist

1 = limitedly extractivist

0 = non extractivist

−1 = anti-extractivist

3. The Dilemmas of Extractivism and Infrastructure: Environmental Justice?

16Avoidance of considering industrialisation as inherently extractivist has similarities within the environmental justice and, to a degree, decolonial studies (see Dunlap, 2022). Environmental conflicts—whether they are struggles against mines, infrastructure, or plantations—differ from one another, but there are archetypal political positions that also surface (see Hall et al., (2015); Geenen and Verweijen (2017); Dunlap (2019b; 2021d); Prause and Le Billon (2021)). First (see table 1) there are the people who are in favour of large-scale development projects, viewing them as opportunities, pathways towards material well-being and modernity. The land deal, then, is received positively by all parties involved. Second is the position in which people are in favour of the development project, but are adversely incorporated into the project and subjected to various and unequal forms of exploitation and deteriorating labour conditions in the service of national or transnational capital accumulation. The third position is representative of people who are indifferent to and/or opportunistic with regard to the project, ‘flip-flopping’ between whatever position will serve their personal material and social interest. Fourth, people are against—and even resent—the project but actively collaborate with the companies and/or political representatives involved in order to gain access to work and various political, economic, and material benefits. This position recognises the large socio-ecological problems that lead to resistance but whether due to poverty, obligation or ambition people (often begrudgingly) choose to collaborate with extractivist projects and their representatives. Fifth, is a general acceptance of the conceptual idea (e.g. mines, wind turbines, plantations), but profound concerns regarding the terms of project incorporation and benefits, revenue sharing, social development funds and who bares the socio-ecological impacts of the project (Jakobsen, 2022). The next position blurs into position six, where people who are against the project but want differentiated forms of social development. For example, they may not want a field of corporate wind turbines, but would like a community-scale wind factory or micro-scale projects to provide them with the energy they need (Dunlap, 2018). There is a spectrum of alternative or post-development positions related to self-organised grassroots, or ‘do-it-yourself’ initiatives, which are either completely autonomous or supported by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), municipalities or state funds. State, and to a lesser degree NGO, funding can create intense internal political debate, controversy and divisions within political movements and networks (see Dunlap and Correa-Arce, 2022). Finally, overlapping with the previous point, the seventh archetypal position is the total rejection of the imposed project. This position is typically cultivated by previous experiences with political parties or development projects or through existing commitments to livelihood or cultural–spiritual practices (Blaser, 2013; Conde and Le Billon, 2017; Dunlap, 2019b; Escobar, 2020). This general, seven-point spectrum of positions within environmental conflicts blurs and mutates between armed and criminal organisations, yet what is significant here is that the more recalcitrant positions of total rejection tend to be erased, minimised, or blurred with more liberal positions within the academic literature.

Table 1 Land control archetypes

Land contracting	Mutually agreed upon transfer of land with little to no controversy within the community. An ideal business transaction with full information on market values and socio-ecological costs, and, more importantly, general agreement from all involved and surrounding parties.
Deceptive land deal	Land transfers or contractual deals based on manipulation, deception, and lies. This generates (minor) community discord and resentment when the terms agreed to are more unfavourable than expected and the levels of incorporation and benefit sharing are more unequal than originally imagined. Benefits are limited and/or concentrated around selected actors (often reinforcing power and gender disparities). Political mobilisations can begin, or fail to get off the ground.
Land deal opportunism	The land deal and/or project remains exploitative and unequal with regard to benefit sharing and ecological impact, yet people use the arrival of land deals, and resistance to them, as opportunities for negotiation and (adverse) inclusion into the projects.
Land deal panic	The land deal is more akin to a land grab with noticeable economic exploitation, ecological impacts, unequal benefit sharing and a local concentration of wealth, but people choose to submit—‘give up’—at some point in the process and collaborate with the companies and/or their representatives or local intermediaries. Land deal panic represents the successful dividing and pacification of resistance.
Land deal injustice	Acceptance of the development project, but local representatives, towns, or communities take an active stance in order to secure greater inclusion in project planning and (re)negotiation of the terms of the project. Desires for project inclusion and greater benefit sharing can manifest in larger contestations and conflicts. Manifestations and uprisings are used by actors to (re)negotiate terms and conditions.
Land grabbing contestation	The land deal is land grabbing (i.e. deception, coercion, and dispossession), generates mass mobilisations and concerted resistance, and attracts the attention of NGOs. Despite ardent opposition, the desire for development and inclusion results in protesting for environmental justice to balance local socio-ecological and developmental concerns.
Land grabbing rejection	This is the ardent rejection of land grabbing, reflecting a political maturity, or cynicism, that does not believe that projects from state, national or transnational actors will ever respect the land, culture or bring development. In fact, this position believes that particular development projects will bring (greater) exploitation. The total rejection of the project remains the trajectory for residents and land defenders. This position overlaps with aspirations of political autonomy, resulting in combative direct-action strategies, legal strategies, and political mobilisation. This position overlaps, and at times clashes, with the ‘Land grabbing contestation’ position.

Source: Author.

17These positions are, however, largely movable and changeable in every direction. Mining and infrastructure companies work diligently, usually after effective opposition, to gain the ‘social acceptance’ from locals necessary to commence and operate extractivist projects. The ‘social engineering of extraction’ documents how companies, whether building wind turbines (Dunlap, 2018), mining gold (Geenen and Verweijen, 2017) or operating coal mines (Brock and Dunlap, 2018), work by any means to persuade people to accept resource extraction projects (see also Le Billon and Sommverville, 2017). This entails constructing local interests as the same as company objectives, meanwhile sending the message that resistance to project development is futile, using legal regimes, police, the military and private security companies (Dunlap, 2020; Verweijen and Dunlap, 2021). The social engineering of extraction has been discussed in the context of deep-sea mining in the Pacific (Childs, 2019) copper mining in Peru (Dunlap, 2019a) and Ecuador (Leifsen, 2020), coal mining in Mozambique (Wiegink, 2020) and Colombia (Jakobsen, 2020), hydraulic fracturing in the UK (Brock, 2020), ilmenite mining and conservation enclosures in Madagascar (Huff and Orengo, 2020) and nuclear development in India (Kaur, 2021). Social engineering and counter-insurgency, Alleen Brown and colleagues show (2017), are also instrumental to the development of hydrocarbon pipelines on multiple sites (Brown, 2021). The efforts of extraction companies to shape the perceptions, interests and, even, the subjectivities of inhabitants (Frederiksen and Himley, 2020) are nothing new, but the persistence of these activities and the lack of institutional opposition should raise serious concerns. Company-led manipulation and coercion to enforce infrastructure and extractivist projects are institutionally normalised, if always contested and negotiated (Rajak, 2011; Dunlap, 2019b; Ulloa, 2020; Kröger, 2021; 2022), and deserve greater consideration within environmental justice studies.

18Environmental justice, as a term, emerges from struggles against environmental racism and waste incinerators in the United States in the 1980s (Pulido and De Lara, 2018). ‘Mainstream’ environmental justice, as it has been called (Menton et al., 2020, 3), adheres to roughly five dimensions. Distributional justice focuses on the distribution of environmental ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ from a particular development project, such as revenue sharing, material benefits, land-use changes and so on. Recognition justice seeks to establish social equity and dignity by respecting socio-cultural difference and collectivities. Procedural justice examines the procedural aspects of development projects, seeking to advance popular participation in project design, siting, and implementation. Capabilities seeks to establish and ensure people have the capacity to engage and participate in development projects. While environmental justice has experienced conceptual expansion (Pellow, 2016; Ulloa, 2017; Pulido, 2017; Temper, 2019; Rodriquez, 2020), it has emerged as an umbrella term, encompassing various political tendencies and struggles that relate to the environment. Environmental justice is synonymous with all ecological and territorial struggles (see Akbulut et al. (2019); Scheidel et al. (2020); Temper et al. (2020)). This has led to adapting the concept to more expansive understandings, for example making it applicable to Indigenous groups. ‘[E]nvironmental self-determination’, Astrid Ulloa (2017, 176) explains, ‘refers to Indigenous notions of environmental justice that come from a sense of responsibility and interrelations between human and nonhumans’ and is ‘based on other valuations and rights relating to territory, culture, and the nonhumans’. Recognising the shortcomings of mainstream environmental justice (EJ), Leah Temper (2019) proposes a decolonial environmental justice to better represent Indigenous self-governance, socio-ecological relationships and epistemologies (see also Menton et al. (2020); Rodriquez (2020)). The term justice, while rightly interrogated by decolonial EJ scholars, mostly for its limited Western or singular connotations, is preserved or augmented to suite Indigenous struggles.

19Branding all socio-ecological and territorial struggles as ‘environmental justice struggles’ necessitates further consideration. Discussing the issue of “popular justice’ with French Maoists, Michel Foucault ([1972]1980) reminds us that justice tends to conjure up specific spatial infrastructures (e.g. the court and tables) and ideologies (e.g. liberalism). Justice is a loaded term with different histories and meanings, yet simultaneously enacts claims of ‘neutrality’ in relation to each litigant, no prejudgment before a trial, dominant epistemological conceptions of justice, and the necessity of authority to enforce decisions. People ‘do not rely on an abstract universal idea of justice’ explains Foucault 1980, 8) referring to acts of popular justice. Instead, people rely only on their own experience, that of the injuries they have suffered, that of the way in which they have been wronged, in which they have been oppressed; and finally, their decision is not an authoritative one, that is, they are not backed up by a state apparatus which has the power to enforce their decisions, they purely and simply carry them out.

20Foucault raises structural concerns regarding the concept of justice, specifically around processes of deliberation, institutional arrangements and enforcement, which have consequences for the meaning but also how environmental justice brands or directs struggles. What political frameworks govern or represent struggles and what actors does this framework empower? And, like Laura Pulido (2017, 524) contends in the United States, it is questionable over the last 35 years of environmental justice struggles ‘if the environments of vulnerable communities have actually improved.’

21Similar to extractivism debates, mainstream environmental justice tends to favour industrial capitalism and its corresponding statist infrastructures. Justice presupposes situations that necessitate a mediator or an authority to dispense justice—whether it be environmental, energy, climate, or other varieties of justice (Jenkins et al. 2016). Highlighting this issue, Lina Álvarez and Brendan Coolsaet (2020, 55) explain how solutions to environmental injustice are conceived within the realm of the state, which delimits political autonomy, implies epistemic valuations (and devaluations), and imposes a rights-based framework wedded to bureaucratic administration that affirms statist control (Dunlap, 2021c). The managing of Indigenous territories in North America through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the United States and Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in Canada remain notable examples of (neo)colonial control mechanisms (Churchill, 2003; Coulthard, 2014). All political issues intersect within state governance frameworks (Dunlap, 2021c). Recognising this issue, Temper (2019, 104) explains that ‘justice must include self-governing authority; that rather than distribution (of nature), environmental justice calls for breaking down the dualism between humans and nature, and beyond recognition, what is needed is epistemic justice and self-affirmation’. While this expansive version of EJ is highly welcomed, it also refashions the concept of EJ to signify anything related to ecological struggle and environmental liberation. Self-government speaks to autonomous and anarchistic struggle. With the exception of efforts to decolonise (Ulloa, 2017; Pulido, 2017; Temper, 2019; Álvarez and Coolsaet, 2020), environmental justice studies depend on and celebrate the state as a framework of justice or, at the least, EJ is theoretically assuming or systematically ambiguous on the matter of statism.

24The state, decolonial or otherwise (Anthias, 2018; Vela-Almeida, 2018; Dunlap, 2022), is an extractivist system dependent on particular infrastructural and political forms that, to varying degrees, exemplify resource and energy intensive statist bureaucracies. This presents two substantial barriers to environmental justice. First, the past and present extractivist foundations and evolution of the state, which daily celebrates ecologically unfriendly infrastructures, logistics, and energy use. Second, the problem of ‘reason of state’ (raison d’état), where the state as an entity prioritises its own existence and survival above anything else (Agamben, 2005; Dunlap, 2014). The state, and its reason, is currently threatening the biosphere and climate through its existence and its maintenance and protection of economic actors (Hickel, 2020; Whyte, 2020; Dunlap and Brock, 2022). The problem with environmental justice is the implicit belief that the state is neutral and capable of administering justice, when in reality it is just the opposite (or remains complicit, in areas of ‘weak states’), spreading extractivism and material and energy-intensive infrastructures—the imperative of industrial market economies. This is manifest by governments selectively (or under political pressure) administering social justice. Recognising the problem of ‘coloniality’, Temper (2019, 98)—along with so many others—asserts with (normative) postcolonial logics that ‘physical control of territories has ended, the cultural logic of colonialism still operates, and silences other ways of doing, being and knowing’. This standard phrase from decolonial theory, while true, underestimates how modernist infrastructures continue coloniality through the physical control of territories, landscapes, habitats and ecosystems (Dunlap, 2021a, 6)—alluding to ‘infrastructural coloniality’ and statist hang-ups, reproduced through ‘academic decolonial theory’, that accept statist and infrastructural domination as acceptable if they are ‘non-Western’ or ‘pluri-national’ (Dunlap, 2022, 3, 10–11). This raises issues regarding how people self-identify (Dunlap, 2020). Do people identify with colonial/statist institutions or their infrastructures—‘our nation’, ‘democratic’ decisions (via voting) and infrastructure—or are they understood as structures of conquest, domestication and ecocidal processes inherited and imposed on one’s life? How people relate to, understand and view bureaucracies, modern infrastructures and economies will have significant political consequences.

26Environmental justice is about inclusion into the project of modernist development (Temper, 2019), necessitating and expanding extractivism and modernist infrastructures. These distributional and inclusive reforms are obviously welcomed and fought-for social additions, but at the same time they do not adequately challenge the structure of industrial capitalism or the ‘Worldeater’ (Dunlap and Jakobsen, 2020). Technocapitalism is the elephant in the climate catastrophe room. As Irina Velicu and Stefania Barca (2020, 267) explain, the emphasis EJ places on compensation, distribution, and procedure, ‘tend[s] to lock the working class within a political horizon limited to maintaining the same system, accepting its exploitation and structural inequalities’. Justice theory ‘reproduces a paternalistic and inequalitarian logic of emancipation’, Velicu and Barca (2020, 268) contend following Jacques Rancière, ‘verifying, confirming, and thus, reifying inequalities while setting the ideal of equality in a future that never seems to arrive’. Justice theories tend towards reformism (Brock and Stephens-Griffin, 2021), meanwhile luring people into believing that courts will legislate against extractivism and ‘leave it in the ground’ so that habitats remain undisturbed and waters uncontaminated. The more common result, however, is that infrastructures of inequality and extractive development are frequently affirmed by courts. The piecemeal and retributive reforms—often fought for militantly—and that keeping mines closed or preventing them from ever (re)opening remains a long-term and continuous struggle, a truth to which the Tía Maria project in Peru (Dunlap, 2019a) and the numerous cases referenced above or documented in the Environmental Justice Atlas can attest (Scheidel et al., 2020). Reforms, when placed next to the coercive violence of riot police, paramilitaries and long prison sentences (Gelderloos, 2022), appear better than the alternatives—and understandably so. This, however, does not change the harsh reality that political violence maintains the present socio-ecological situation (Dunlap and Brock, 2022). Political pacification is constantly hiding behind a veil, changing its clothes, and feeding on our productive energies to perpetuate political economy and its extractive activities.

27This issue, as with the debates on extractivism, represents a failure to adequately question the roots of the capitalist machine that is responsible for systematic ecological destruction and inequality. Environmental justice reforms and social development, combined with the political violence of the military, police, and extrajudicial forces, have a way of enticing people to ‘sell out’ or stop fighting for their habitats and culture, leaving larger technocapitalist structures intact. This acknowledges the psychosocial trap—a sort of ‘Stockholm syndrome’—that infrastructures and politics create (Dunlap and Correa-Arce, 2022). The psychosocial trap avoids challenging modernist progress itself and stifles the difficult academic debates around the civilisational, societal or post-developmental transformations necessary to sustain the planet. Infrastructural development, or colonisation (Dunlap, 2020; Dunlap and Correa-Arce, 2022), is an apparatus of social warfare designed to reinforce extractivism, exploitation and planetary ecological conquest.

29Environmental conflicts have movable positions, as already mentioned—subjectivities are influenced, people persuaded and regions shaped to accept extractivist projects (see Verweijen and Dunlap, 2021). Environmental justice, for all its popularity, frequently avoids the difficult questions of challenging the state and its corresponding infrastructural regimes outside individual projects or the global problem and extractive reality of modernity itself. The by-product of this political preference is omitting autonomist and anarchistic land defenders, either Indigenous or non-Indigenous from the political or academic conversation (Dunlap, 2021d; 2022; Gelderloos, 2022). This presumably is because they reject the existing regime of modernist development, which is conferred an inherently elevated status by industrialised societies and is familiar to the habitus of researchers. Even when environmental justice scholars rightfully reject the state, for example: “[W]e should help expose the fraudulent nature of the state, how it has sought to co-opt EJ communities, its support of racial capitalism and its willingness to forsake poisoned communities” (Pulido, 2017: 530). Anarchists—Indigenous (Dunlap, 2022), black (see Ervin, 2021 [1979]; Anderson, 2021) or otherwise—who have been at war with the state for centuries are omitted, which extends to enduring anarchist anti-colonial action and solidarity (Ó Donghaile, 2010; Ferretti, 2018; Dunlap, 2022). Autonomist and anarchist positions are legitimate, yet frequently mined selectively or buried within environmental justice research.

30The task remains—to acknowledge the legitimacy of recalcitrant autonomist positions in permanent conflict, meanwhile theorising and practicing post-development practices that exercise degrowth and convivial infrastructures. Why cling to ‘environmental justice’ when we are talking about anti-colonial, autonomous, socio-ecological struggles or, even, uncompromising citizen initiatives? While reform positions remain a dominant tendency within environmental conflicts—making environmental justice suitable for a wide audience, even ecocidal governments—why impose a concept of justice, with its colonial, liberal and academic baggage, that necessitates constant reformulations (e.g. critical, decolonial, abolitionist)? Why not call the struggles what they are, foregrounding the uncompromising elements concerned with habitats being consumed by extractivism, infrastructure and technocapitalist projects? Addressing ecological and climate catastrophe means struggling where we live and unravelling the difference between industrialisation and extractivism, and the shortcomings or multiplicities of justice(s), in order to create clear visions of how to create real renewability in our habitats in the best ways possible.

4. Conclusion: New Ways of Conceiving Infrastructure

31The socio-ecological impacts of industrialism, capitalism and technological progress are extensive, and the proposed mitigation pathways and discussions—even those proposed by the concept of environmental justice—are either limited or inadequate. This chapter, following Virilio, is a call for greater attention to the daily harms being perpetrated by industrialism and extractive capitalism. Critical approaches, the chapter demonstrates, still suffer from infrastructural coloniality, which underestimates the accumulation and inter-dependence of extractivism(s). This relates to the statism and coloniality of environmental justice frameworks, which tend to enable extractivism and infrastructural domination despite processual and egalitarian concerns. This, moreover, results in subordinating non-human life (including animals, rivers, mountains, trees and habitats) to the desires of various human populations operating under the influence of technocapitalism. Recognising the spaces between extractivism and capitalism remain fundamental for expanding post-development alternatives, while acknowledging the strengths of environmental justice in resisting the expansion of extractivism, but also its discursive and material weak points.

33The alternative is to affirm post-development pathways that reject development or create culturally/locally appropriate and convivial developmental solutions that ensure shelter and access to water and high-quality foods, prevent the spread of toxic waste, and affirm ecologically co-creative modes of production and alternative technologies (Kothari et al., 2019; Gelderloos, 2022). This could also be complemented by (decolonial) degrowth approaches (Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019), which actively seek to re-conceptualise growth and to degrow capitalism, and consequently extractivism (Hickel, 2020; Mastini, Kallis and Hickel, 2021; Trainer, 2019). If public policy has any purpose, thinking of Hickel (2020), it will be to cut back on destructive chemical and extractive industries, eliminate planned obsolescence or ‘desired obsolescence’ (e.g. product upgrade purchases), revamp repair and recycling processes, recentre development on use value, rather than exchange value, cut the advertising budgets that manufacture mass consumption, and expand public goods and direct democracy. In short, to organise policy that promotes collective emotional and social well-being, with the impacts on ecosystems and the climate as a central priority, because—after all—we are our habitats. We must radically change the material, energy and socio-ecological relationships of existing infrastructures. There are numerous ways to cultivate subjective well-being, yet—as has been known for some time—market democracies tend to generate social discontent, dependency and addiction (Lane, 2000; Alexander, 2008). Ecological crisis, social uprisings, depression, anxiety and ill health are opportunities to create socio-technical and ecological change, to use critical knowledge to make genuine social change to remediate harms, restore ecosystems, and create socio-ecological systems and forms of habitation that are genuinely renewable. If these changes are not made—where rebellion, suicide, and cries for help are met with political violence—if we pretend that structural issues do not exist, and if, overall, we intensify matters through the European Green Deal and UN Sustainable Development Goals, then the road to immiseration will be affirmed, and only dystopia awaits.