Extract, exchange, prevent. Turning environments into resources

In 1933, the economist Erich Zimmermann wrote "resources are not, they become", in his study of raw materials and industry (Zimmermann 1933:3). His quote underscores the dynamic nature of resources, which are the result of operations on natural elements rather than natural objects by themselves. Almost a century later, works on the industrial exploitation of fossil and mineral materials (Mitchell 2013; Hecht 2016), wood and water (Casciarri & Van Aken, 2013; Lorrain & Poupeau 2014), as well as plant and animal orders (Cronon 1983) reveal the multiplicity of mechanisms by which this becoming of a resource takes place. From then on, this constructivist approach exposes a tension central to the resource, being at once the process of designation for exploitation, and the result of this process. Numerous works also show the violence through which these operations unfold and those that result from them: local socio-economic reconfigurations (Buu-Sao 2023), armed conflicts (Dunlap 2019), land predations (Hall, Hirsh & Murray Li 2011). The aim of this seminar is thus to examine the networks of actors, operations and contradictions through which the resource is formed and exploited.

The legal (formal and informal), political, scientific and technical orders play a central role in the exploitation of materials. They ensure the continuity of the production chain from extraction to use, while stabilizing the sequences of transformation and exchange (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Oiry-Varacca and Tricoire 2016). At the origin of this vast articulation is always a physical space which, in light of the process of resource creation, is also redefined as a medium of extraction - mining enclaves for example. While many studies decipher the resource's chain of operations, fewer link this chain to the extraction site. The aim of this seminar is twofold: on the one hand, we'll be looking at the actors and processes involved in turning materials and spaces into resources, based on a variety of field studies. On the other hand, we will attempt to analyze the effects of this process on the social and political relationships that inhabitants maintain with their environment.

In line with the studies dedicated to the relationship between nature and culture (Descola & Pálsson, 1996; Charbonnier 2015), this seminar considers the environment as the result of relationships between multiple entities. In this sense, the term "environment" refers to the spaces and materialities traversing the processes of resourcing. In this way, movements relating to the rights of nature and the environment will also be addressed. From contexts in which nature is a common environment in which humans and non-humans cannot be dissociated, to contexts in which it is considered in a globalized perspective as an object to be "well controlled" in order to remedy the climate crisis, the aim will be to interrogate the way in which resources and environments are reciprocally worked (Chen & Gilmore 2015; Guha & Alier 1997).

The seminar therefore aims to describe the ways in which environments and their materials are put to use as resources, and to apprehend the effects (representations, tensions, relationships, etc.) that emerge from these processes. Sessions will be devoted to the presentation of field data or documentary studies, following a multidisciplinary and comparative approach, aiming to multiply the types of data, conceptual tools and analyses. The challenge will be to grasp the commonalities and singularities of international resourcing processes. 

The research will be conducted along three axes. The first, "Extract", will examine the operations and actors involved in turning materials and environments into resources. It also looks at the definitions and representations that emerge from this process.   "Exchang", the second axis, focuses on the spaces and times of transformation and exchange of the object that has become a resource. These moments are considered in their material aspects (the mineral becoming a precious stone, for example) and ideals (politicization, representations, etc., defining the image of the object through different exchanges). The final theme, "Prevent", looks at the many forms of contradiction within resource development processes. The aim is to focus on the social movements of opposition and on the environmental or technical elements that themselves alter the process of resource creation, as well as on the violence generated by these processes (land predation, competition between players in the face of capitalization, economic and armed violence, etc.). Thus, from the angles of "extracting, exchanging and preventing", we intend to identify the mechanisms that preside over the creation of resources, while leaving room for the frictions (Tsing 2020) that persist or emerge from this movement.

Picture: South of Greenland, September 2019. Copyright: Pia Bailleul