Anthropology and the Environment

Dr Andrea Pia

Book:
China is experiencing climate whiplash: extreme fluctuations between drought and flooding that threaten the health and autonomy of millions of people. Set against mounting anxiety over the future of global water supplies, Andrea E. Pia’s Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) investigates the enduring political, technical, and ethical project of making water available to human communities and ecosystems in a time of drought, infrastructural disrepair, and environmental breakdown. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival materials, and statistical data, Pia brings readers into the inner workings of China’s complex water supply ecosystem and demonstrates how citizens’ efforts to keep access to local water sources and flourish in their communities redraw the political possibilities of climate and environmental collective action in unforeseen directions. 

You can read about the book here or listen to this New Books Network interview. 

Research Projects:
Extraordinary Responsibilities is an ongoing anthropology project conducted among the climate activist youth of Europe and Asia. It studies the prefigurative social, scientific, and juridical ‘worlding’ practices brought forward by young activists during global climate fora and disruptive collective action. What does it mean to take on the single biggest collective problem humanity has ever faced? How do activists make sense and articulate their own political agency and ideas of the future? What world do they aspire to build in the wake of climate change? 

PHOSSILIZED: Phasing Out Fossil Fuels, Energizing Epistemic Decolonization

In its most dire assessment yet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that "it's now or never." Only "rapid, deep, and immediate" cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions can prevent runaway warming and "the collapse of civilization." So far, proposed mitigation strategies for global warming have failed to coherently address the issue of rapid and deep adaptation. Only large-scale fossil fuel substitution and carbon capture projects—involving the coordinated halting of projected fossil fuel power plants, the dismantling or decommissioning of existing ones, the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere, and the installation of new clean energy sources—appear to satisfy these conditions and accommodate diverging views. 

Yet, a clean energy transition is nonetheless underway, led by China. As the world's second-largest economy, largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and leading producer and user of renewable energy, China is shaping the direction and affecting the pace of all global transition trajectories. PHOSSILIZED examines the capacity-building and the societal and cultural impact of mega-energy substitution and carbon-capture projects proposed, financed, and built by Chinese companies, engineers, and labour in four different locations. It provides a critical investigation of the sociotechnical imaginaries underpinning these projects and uncovers the fractious social histories of energy consumption in host countries that underline the prospects and perils of transformative energy systems during the climate crisis. Specifically, it explores the affective and aspirational responses to energy sources that motivate the discontinuation of fossil fuels or, conversely, the refusal of renewable energy solutions in cross-cultural decarbonization initiatives of global significance. It asks: How do we make sense of decarbonization if we look at it from China's perspective? What other changes will occur in society alongside energy sources? How do Chinese principles and ideas influence visions of the global post-carbon society to come? How does the social project of decolonization intersect with the technical one of decarbonisation?

Dr Gisa Weszkalnys

A Doubtful Hope: Oil, Time, and Ethnography in Atlantic Africa.

In São Tomé and Príncipe, recent aspirations for oil wealth offer compelling insight into the ways resource imaginaries shape material and social landscapes, even in the absence of commercial extraction. The research examines the entangled processes of oil exploration, postcolonial governance, and the legacies of a plantation economy. Here, speculative practices mobilise a notion of resource potentiality in ways that both stabilise uncertainty and reveal the contingent and contested nature of resource production. Challenging deterministic accounts of the “resource curse”, the research highlights the anticipatory politics of hydrocarbon exploration, where the promise of material betterment and transformation is entwined with historical fears of failure and abandonment. This affective horizon of doubtful hope also underscores how resource politics increasingly revolve around the management of emotional dissonances, positioning hope, greed, and suspicion as a set of racialised affective liabilities, which become focal points for intervention by corporate, governmental, and non-governmental actors.

Fraying ties? Networks, territory and transformation in the UK oil sector

In the context of climate change, shifting global demands for oil and gas, and the urgent push for a low-carbon transition, the UK oil and gas industry stands at a critical juncture. As Co-Investigator on this ESRC-funded interdisciplinary project (ES/S011080/1), Dr Weszkalnys has examined the complex issue of how to phase down oil and gas production in a just and equitable way. This research, in collaboration with Prof. Gavin Bridge (Durham University), underscores the pressing need to rethink the role of the UK oil and gas regulator and raises profound questions about the future of the North Sea and its capacity to sustain collective well-being.

A complementary strand of this research, in collaboration with Dr William Otchere-Darko (Newcastle University), interrogates Aberdeen’s ambition to redefine itself from a European hub for the oil and gas industry to a post-carbon city. Focusing on the contested development of St. Fittick’s Park—an important biodiversity space on Aberdeen’s southern edge—this research highlights the complexities of energy transition. The proposal to transform part of the park into an ‘Energy Transition Zone’ reveals tensions between ecological preservation, community well-being, and corporate-driven narratives of progress. The research challenges assumptions of inevitability and commonality often underlying energy transition efforts. Instead, it sheds light on the fraught temporalities, epistemic inequities, and power dynamics shaping such projects. By foregrounding the perspectives of local campaigners, it explores alternative approaches that prioritize care, equity, and justice, offering a fresh perspective on how energy transitions might be reimagined for the public good.

The results of these specific studies and the larger research project are discussed in the 4-part podcast series Tides of Transformation.

Living with Energy Transition

Living with Energy Transition is a creative collaboration between anthropologist Gisa Weszkalnys, artist Maja Zećo, curator Rachel Grant, and urbanist William Otchere-Darko. Through soundwalks led by Maja Zećo, the project encouraged forms of attentive listening and explored how sound travels through, occupies, and encloses space, focusing on St. Fittick’s Park, an important biodiversity space on the southern edge of Aberdeen, now partially earmarked for development as an ‘Energy Transition Zone’. Participants engaged in an ‘undisciplined’ intervention walking, generating, and absorbing sound to reimagine the park—and sound—as a matter of social and political importance.

Dr Mareike Winchell

Climate Politics, Race and Land in Bolivia

Mareike Winchell is currently at work on two new research projects. The first, "Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire," focuses on the racialization of climate politics in Bolivia. Drawing from fieldwork preceding and since Bolivia's 2019 coup, the research traces the authoritarian tendencies of environmentalisms that preserve nature's purity and reproduce narratives of racialized guilt and responsibility. Conversely, the project reveals the grounded collaborations—feminist horticultural projects, anti-imperialist environmental organizing, and land “restoration” efforts—emerging in the gaps of a divisive nationalist environmental politics. Such collaborations instruct scholars and activists about crucial alternatives to the conventional divide of standard conservation (with the separation of people and nature) and statist approaches that often see Indigenous land redistribution and ecological protection as antithetical. Preliminary thinking around this collaborative project has appeared as an essay on the relationship between climate mitigation efforts and race, an article focused on critical ontologies of climate as a scene of relational loss, and an edited volume (with Cymene Howe), titled "Unsettling Extractivism," about how Indigenous projects of spatial and relational emplacement challenge monolithic ideas of environmental extraction.

Another research project, "The Servant’s Properties: Materiality, Gender, and More-than-Human Landscapes in 20th Century Bolivia," examines the legal claims of out-of-wedlock children born to indentured labourers after 1953. Based on archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and collaborative media work, the project asks how incommensurate approaches to land and place came to be cemented within institutional knowledges, and what that process reveals about the remaking of property by non-secular orientations to landscapes and/as kin. More broadly, the project highlights how Indigenous Quechua labourers in this region have sought to embed land in other-than-human relations through practices of legal and bureaucratic manoeuvre in company with lawyers, saints, Apus, the Pachamama, and the dead. Preliminary work on this project includes an article examining the ways that geographies of violence and dispossession are altered and remade through a set of other-than-human relations, an afterward to a Special Issue concerned with how religious and spiritual appeals shape Latin American environmental movements, and an article asking what embedded orientations to minerals can teach us about the limits to commodification in precious gem mining.