State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

Linking land displacement and environmental dispossession to Mi'kmaw health and well‐being: Culturally relevant place‐based interpretive frameworks matter

For over five decades, Pictou Landing First Nation, a small Mi'kmaw community on the northern shore of Nova Scotia, has been told that the health of its community is not impacted by a pulp and paper mill pouring 85 million litres of effluent per day into a lagoon that was once a culturally significant place known as “A'se'k,” and which borders the community. Based on lived experience, the community knows otherwise. Despite countless government‐ and industry‐sponsored studies indicating the mill's pollutants are merely “nuisance” impacts and harmless, the community's concerns have not gone away. Using a “Piktukowaq” (Mi'kmaw) environmental health research framework to guide the interpretation of oral histories coming from the Knowledge Holders in Pictou Landing First Nation, we convey the deep, health‐enhancing relationship with A'se'k that the Piktukowaq enjoyed before it was destroyed, and the health suppression that has occurred since then. Conducting the research using a culturally relevant place‐based interpretive framework has demonstrated the absolute necessity of this kind of approach where Indigenous communities are concerned, particularly those facing health impacts vis‐à‐vis land displacement and environmental dispossession.     

Threads: Collecting Cloth in the North American French Colonies

Trade of European-produced cloth and clothing enabled indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of colonial New France to rethink the “hand-woven”, impacting how self could be presented through dress. At the same time, objects were being collected in New France for cabinets of curiosities and museums. These different collections resonated in different ways through history, subsequently influencing modern understandings of colonial cloth and clothing. This paper examines colonial experiences of cloth by looking at archaeological remnants of cloth and cloth production as compared to how indigenous and non-indigenous colonial peoples were and are being represented by cloth and clothing in museum collections.     

Brutes, beasts and empire: veterinary medicine and environmental policy in French North Africa and British India

The deep, and persistent, colonial roots of many contemporary environmental policies around the world have been increasingly recognized over the last decade. Research in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, human medicine, and public health has illuminated how environmental policies were constructed and utilized during the colonial period, as well as how many of these policies remain influential today. This paper examines the as yet little explored contribution of colonial veterinary medicine to the development and implementation of environmental policy. By comparing the experiences of the French in North Africa and the British in India, it demonstrates that some colonial veterinarians had a great deal of influence on environmental policy while others had very little. In French North Africa veterinarians played a significant role in developing rangeland management policies that impacted large swaths of these three territories, policies that can still be felt today. In British India, by contrast, the role of colonial veterinarians in developing environmental policy was much more circumscribed and, in the end, largely inconsequential. The paper suggests that three primary factors account for most of this dissimilarity: the differences in animal diseases present in India and the Maghreb; the differences between French and British veterinary education before the twentieth century; and the differences in colonial administration between the two European powers.     

Dietary change in Fijian prehistory: isotopic analyses of human and animal skeletal material

We examine evidence for prehistoric diet in the Fiji Islands through the analysis of stable isotope ratios (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) for 26 samples of human and animal bones from various archaeological sites, time periods, and local environments. The oldest individuals in this study, dating to about 2700 BP and living on the small island of Waya, consumed a predominantly marine-based diet. Subsequent populations on this island showed reduced consumption of marine resources, with greater reliance on terrestrial ones, throughout the cultural sequence. In contrast, populations of humans and pigs living inland on Viti Levu, the largest island, relied on terrestrial resources since at least 1500 BP. Thus, our results suggest that human and pig diets throughout Fijian prehistory relied variably on marine or terrestrial resources, and this distinction is largely a product of geography. This finding and our analyses provide a model for understanding ancient diets in Remote Oceania.     

Conventions of climate change: constructions of danger and the dispossession of the atmosphere

Climate change has emerged as one of the key issues of the early years of the twenty-first century, bringing together concerns about human relations to nature, the responsibility of rich nations to poorer, the links from local activities to global conditions, and the obligations of present to future generations. This paper focuses on three key ‘narratives’ that are enshrined in international climate policy – asserting that ‘dangerous climate change’ is to be avoided; that the responsibility for climate change is common but differentiated; and that the market (in the form of carbon trading) is the best way to reduce the danger. The goal of the paper is to analyse the origins of these narratives, the power relations they reflect and promote, and some of the concepts and images used to support them, including those of climate determinism, climate stabilisation, ‘burning embers’, ‘tipping points’, Global Warming Potentials, targets and timetables, and carbon credits. I argue that by choosing the market solution of trading carbon we have created a new and surreal commodity, unfairly allocated pollution rights to nation states based on 1990 emission levels, and established a new set north–south relations and carbon transactions in the name of sustainable development.