Resource Extraction, Commodity Cycles, and Environmentalism in Africa
Industrialised mining and oil drilling have caused extreme and lethal environmental transformation across Africa in the twentieth century. Air, water, and soil pollution, dead fish in the rivers, pulmonary diseases, and wilted vegetation are only some of the most apparent environmental ills in places such as Johannesburg, the Zambian Copperbelt, and the Niger Delta. But when and why do concerns over pollution and damaged environments translate into forms of environmentalism? Why do some people seemingly learn to live with pollution, while others sue multinationals and mobilise neighbours on the streets? The rise of environmentalism at commodity frontiers has been linked to economic factors from two radically different perspectives. While post-materialism postulates that environmentalism arises once people’s material needs are met, the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997) argues that those who depend on natural resources for their livelihoods are more likely to address issues of pollution when it threatens subsistence production.
This paper proposes to examine the relationship between commodity cycles and environmentalism in three African localities of resource extraction (gold mining in Johannesburg, copper mining in Zambia, and oil drilling in the Niger Delta). By historicising the relationship between economic boom and bust and environmental movements in the second half of the twentieth century, we can gain a better understanding of when environmentalism emerges. This paper examines three different commodities (oil, copper, and gold), three national and political settings (one-party rule, Apartheid, and democratisation), as well as periods of economic prosperity and those of decline. By doing so, I attempt to tease out the relationship between commodity cycles, environmental change, and popular responses. As African localities have been important sites of global extraction, and as some of these resources are crucial for enabling a ‘green transition’, forms of environmentalism (and how these do or do not fit into global trends) deserve more attention.