Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
The Coachella Valley sits at the geographic periphery of Los Angeles. Despite its physical and political marginality, the Coachella Valley is a key site of agricultural production in Southern California. Access to water is essential for ensuring the re…
Water scarcity in the Western US, through the lens of political ecology, can be understood as inextricably shaped by power dynamics, governance structures, and legal practices of resource allocation. Water allocation in the region is determined largely…
Energy colonialism is an essential, yet scarcely theorized concept for understanding how past, present and future energy systems are shaped by colonial or neocolonial power dynamics, imaginaries, discourses, and practices. These perspectives are import…
This article examines how drought intersects with long-standing issues of ecological degradation and social inequity caused by water extraction. I focus on the case of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and its ongoing impacts on communities and ecosystems in th…
The use of tropes is a defining feature of resource regulation and is fundamental to both the way legal theories have evolved and to the practical, localized interpretations and implementations of law. This article offers a discursive study of the “wat…
If constructed as planned, the Sites Reservoir Project will add roughly 1.85 billion m3 (1.5 million acre-feet) of storage capacity to California’s water system. Per project proponents, however, the reservoir complex should be understood as infrastruct…
This article examines the role of working people in the energy transition that played out in Puerto Rico in the 1930s and 1940s – from a private, fossil fuel-based regime to a public, hydroelectric system. It argues that by withholding their labo…
For many, the coal industry in Colombia has been synonymous with progress, economic growth and access to education and housing opportunities on the Caribbean mining frontier. However, little has been said about the slow, dosed and silent violence that …
The most recent Global Mercury Assessment estimates that human-made mercury releases are approximately 2,220 tons per year and that a significant source is artisanal and small-scale gold mining (UNEP 2019). The ubiquity of mercury and its negative effe…
As awareness grows of the catastrophic implications of global environmental change, multiple scholarly fields addressing health-environment relationships have advocated ‘transformative’ educational strategies. Holistic Indigenous health-environment mod…
En este artículo se analizan los procesos de conflictividad frente a las desigualdades para el caso chileno, enfocándose en su dimensióń socioecológica. Muestra resultados de una investigación cualitativa de cuatro años realizada en 5 territorios som…
En Colombia, la expansión de la frontera cocalera y la política antinarcóticos han estado atravesadas por diferentes tipos e intensidades de violencia. Entre la prolífica literatura producida recientemente, menos estudiadas se encuentran las violencias…
This article examines 16 environmental conflicts across the Arctic that demonstrate resistance to both climate and green extractive colonialisms. Resistance movements counter green-labelled developments, such as a 350 km road project in Ambler (Alaska)…
This article examines the different forms of structural, everyday, and symbolic violence brought about by the sweeping expansion of agribusiness in Paraguay over the past few decades. This discussion is framed around the protest slogan of the organized…
Climate crises and other manifestations of environmental degradation are inextricably linked to the universalizing technoscientific paradigm underpinning capitalist industrialization and modernization. This study aimed to problematize the modern/coloni…
The impacts of the coronavirus pandemic in the small central Appalachian town of Rainelle, West Virginia cannot be understood separately from the broader human-environment relationships of this place. These relationships are grounded in landscapes that…
Zinc is a green mineral that is increasingly required for manufacturing low-carbon technology. This demand has been promoted mainly by the Global North-led green policies to mitigate the impacts of climate change. However, simultaneously expanding zinc…
Several governmental and nongovernmental institutions in Guatemala have been tasked with tackling the country’s problem of food insecurity. Although food insecurity has a variety of causes, the issue of climate change is beginning to attract initiative…
Mexico City’s municipal “green” bonds (MGBs), issued in 2016 and 2018, financed two water infrastructure projects embedded in the city’s hydrosocial cycle (the reciprocal transformation of water and society). The issuance of the MGBs created an entangl…
This article describes the ecological accounts of Jñato and Hñähñu (also known as Mazahua and Otomi) people who inhabit a territory that is today the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in México. We draw on their narratives, documented through a multi…
This paper utilizes a Foucauldian approach to shed light on the claim that power relations are complex and dynamic, underlying neoliberal conservation mechanisms. Despite the ascendance of the Foucauldian governmentality lens to deconstruct neoliberal…
The Colombian Amazon has experienced rapid forest loss in the past decades due to growing colonization, infrastructure development, and commercial agriculture expansion. While much of the analyses of deforestation in the Amazon have been in Brazil, the…
Malaysia’s indigenous and rural communities have played a vital role in the growth of the country’s environmental movement. Yet, the ways in which their cultures and ancestral attachments to territory come to underpin their activism has remained unders…
En este artículo planteo que, grosso modo, la industria conservacionista y el correspondiente establecimiento y administración de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, a pesar de sus múltiples intentos de flexibilización y renovación de las últimas décadas, no h…