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Re-claiming Control of Natural Resources: Theory and Practice of Alternative Local Economies in Appalachian Coal Communities and Southern African Farming
Type of Session
Individual Paper Presentation
Abstract
This study suggests that the narrow emphasis on liquid assets, namely finance capital, only serves to undermine the welfare of the vast majority of the world’s people and the biosphere. Whereas both mainstream and Marxist economics stress land (natural resources as manufacturing inputs), labor (workers), and capital (machinery) as the principal factors of production, grassroots activists are moving beyond the “silo-ized” focus on manufacturing and finance to alternative forms of capital as critically important assets to facilitate transformation for creating sustainable communities, whose members collectively re-claim control over resources, from water to seeds and local food systems.
First, theoretically, 1) the study is grounded in ecological economic concepts of social, intellectual, human, and natural capital. Second 2), the theory provides explanations for how grassroots organizing apprehends the interests of labor and peasants in their goals for sustaining local ecologies, their very sustenance. They both engage alternative forms of production that do not deplete natural capital, the basis of all social and economic systems.
Grounded in extensive field work in Central Appalachia and Southern Africa (participatory action research and interviews--several years in total), unique in this study is a transnational comparison of labor engagement in both regions. In stark contrast to condescending characterizations of Appalachian grassroots activists as “backward hillbillies” and of African smallholder farmers as “subsistence” farmers, these two groups of people are actively engaged in transforming local economies. These two examples inform theories of ecological economics and extend analysis of resistance beyond labor to the broader communities in which workers live.