Special Event – The Andrea Mitchell Center Graduate Panel on Environmental Studies
RESOURCES, RESISTANCE, AND THE RIGHTS OF NATURE

Wed. April 10, 5:00-6:30 pm
Hybrid: In-person and online. Link and papers sent to registered attendees.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Recycling Bodies: Plastics and Social Mobility in Mumbai, India

Adwaita Banerjee (Anthropology, Penn)

PLASTIC WASTE HAS BECOME A PERVASIVE ENVIRONMENTAL and social challenge, with detrimental impacts on ecosystems and public health. Simultaneously, Mumbai's lower caste communities face numerous socio-economic hurdles, including social stigmatization, and limited access to formal employment opportunities. ADWAITA BANERJEE presents an ethnographic study that investigates the multifaceted question of plastic recycling, registers of citizenship and degrees of social mobility amongst lower caste communities in Mumbai. Drawing on a qualitative approach rooted in participant observation and in-depth interviews in Mumbai’s Deonar Dumping Ground, his research delves into the lived experiences, perspectives, and strategies of lower caste individuals engaged in the plastic waste recovery and recycling sector. By exploring their involvement in this informal industry, he asks what is the extent to which plastic recycling can provide mobility to lower caste communities economically, politically, socially, and environmentally? The findings of his research aim to understand the futures and opportunities for lower caste communities in Mumbai connected to plastic waste, while acknowledging several challenges faced by lower caste individuals in the plastic recycling sector. These include limited access to resources, inadequate infrastructure, exploitative labor practices, and stigmatization due to the association with waste management.
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Spirituality and Protest in New Environmental Movements

Rebecca Marwege (Political Science, Columbia)

REBECCA MARWEGE EXPLORES THE POLITICAL ROLE OF SPIRITUAL REFERENCES by new environmental movements such as Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement. She demonstrates that these movements refer to spirituality in a plethora of different ways, but that references to spirituality, broadly defined, help to exceed scientific references and emphasize a transcendental value of nature in relation to humans, connect individual grief with collective action, and contribute to coalition building and countering movements on the right side of the political spectrum. Marwege discusses some normative pitfalls such as the political appropriation of complex belief systems into a protest-oriented idea of spirituality. While these questions have been explored to some extent in the context of Christian evangelicals and their highly varied commitment to environmental protection (see Veldman 2019, Veldman et al. 2021, Hempel and Smith 2020 for example), Marwege contributes a critical assessment of how new environmental movements that are situated mostly on the left utilize spiritual references.
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The Nuclear Option: Politics of the Past, West German Energy Policy, and the Quest for Energy Independence, 1973-1986

Nicholas Misukanis (History, University of Maryland)

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NECESSITY TO REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS has dominated political conversations, but activists continue to remain divided on one question: What role should nuclear energy play? Different countries have pursued different policies. France relies on nuclear energy for almost 70% of its domestic need. In contrast, Germany has shut down its last reactor this past April. In the 1980’s, nuclear energy provided almost 35% of West Germany’s energy needs, but after an arduous anti-nuclear campaign, political party leaders and voters eventually came to oppose nuclear energy. The question of why support for nuclear energy faded to such a degree that by 1986, all the major German political parties abandoned nuclear energy has not yet been answered. NICHOLAS MISUKANIS explores the role nuclear energy played in the politics of West Germany from the first OPEC oil crisis in 1973 to the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. At the core of his analysis lie two questions: Why did West German political leaders seek to develop nuclear energy during this time? Second, why did arguments against nuclear energy successfully overwhelm pro-nuclear messaging? The nuclear energy debate during Helmut Schmidt’s chancellorship reveals insight into the complexities liberal democracies face in promoting experts’ opinions and communicating to the public while also allowing public debate on these policies among the voting base.
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Oil, Land, and State Building in Iran

Bita Mousavi (History / Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, NYU)

OIL HAS MIRACULOUS POWERS. As revenue, it has lifted nations across the Middle East into unprecedented prosperity. As gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, it moves commodities and labor at a world scale to realize utopic dreams of ease and connectivity. But our global dependence on fossil fuels also causes unmitigated environmental damage and feeds despotic regimes. That oil emancipates as much as it devastates is one of its central paradoxes. BITA MOUSAVI focuses on the antimonies of one particular oil state: Iran. Whereas the Qajar empire (1789-1925) was characterized by administrative devolution and a fiscal system that lacked a “conscious or targeted policy to bring about economic growth,” the first Pahlavi state, following the 1908 discovery of oil in southwestern Iran, sought to regularize the collection of oil royalties, agricultural taxes, and other ground rents. This meant challenging the validity of the contracts that the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) secured for oil exploration from tribal authorities in southwestern Iran. Thus, before a discourse of resource sovereignty could take hold in Iran, it was necessary that the nascent Pahlavi state validate and have validated by others, not least of all APOC, its territorial sovereignty. The anti-democratic tendencies ascribed to oil states, Mousavi argues, thus derive not from the abstract quality of economic rents but, in part, from the historical abolition of the customary rights of tribes to oil-bearing land. Moreover, the oil industry cemented land reform as a central nexus of political reform and economic action, and with it, a dialectic of specialization and dependence that animated much of Iran’s subsequent history. The state continued to assume the role of managing the nation’s natural wealth, but in doing so abetted its dependence on oil revenues and stifled democratic approaches to the question of land reform.