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11. Conclusions
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CHAPTER 11 Conclusions Anthony bEbbington, JEffrEy bury, And Emily gAllAghEr In Chapter 1 of this book we made several strong claims regarding the relationships between the subsoil and Latin American political economy as well as the relationships between the subsoil and political ecology. We argued that since the early 1990s, the extraction of subsoil resources in Latin America has taken on forms that are fundamentally different from those of earlier periods , notwithstanding the long histories of mining and hydrocarbon investment within which contemporary extraction is rooted. We also claimed that extraction has become central to the region’s more general political economy. At the same time, we argued that a close look at extraction in Latin America would support the claim that the subsoil has a special significance for political ecology, one that has thus far been undervalued. Ultimately, we believe that these claims have been amply demonstrated. The purpose of this concluding chapter is to support this assertion. First, we summarize why it is fitting to talk of “new geographies of extraction.” We point to newness in simple spatial form, the ways in which extraction bundles nature and society, the socio-spatial processes that produce these geographies, the nature of struggle that surrounds contemporary extraction, and the imagined and material frontiers produced by the expansion of extractive industry. As we make these points, we also note different ways in which the authors demonstrate the centrality of extraction to contemporary processes of territorial , national, and continental transformation. Second, we summarize how and why the chapter contents, taken as a whole, suggest interesting avenues for political ecology. In particular, they draw attention to the importance of material flows across frontiers and boundaries. They also reiterate but complicate the significance of the state and social struggle to political ecology.While the state is a prominent actor in all cases discussed in the chapters, it has many faces that do not always look in the same direction. And while the authors 268 Bebbington, Bury, and Gallagher consistently reveal causal interactions between struggle and extraction, they are not quite as consistent in endorsing any easy association of struggle with notions of subaltern or progressive alternatives. Indeed, the authors challenge scholars to be nuanced in how they speak of and categorize struggle and conflict . Third, on the basis of these arguments, we identify areas for further research in the political ecology of extraction. New Geographies of Latin American Extraction and Transformation Caveats on Novelty When presenting versions of several of these chapters, we have often been asked very directly, “So what’s new? Latin America has a long history of struggles over access to resources and control over rents; isn’t this just more of the same?”1 The question makes a serious point: it is easy to overstate novelty and lose sight of the historical continuities that should be part of any explanation of the phenomena being framed as new. And indeed, history looms large in many of the chapters in this book. The case of Bolivian struggles over gas (Chapter 3 by Perreault) shows how contemporary politics around natural gas in Bolivia have to be understood in terms of historical memories of war, long-standing regional and racial inequalities, and prior separatist tendencies in the eastern lowlands. In a similar vein, the dynamics in northeast Peruvian Amazonia (Chapter 7 by Bebbington and Scurrah, and Chapter 9 by Postigo, Montoya, and Young) suggest that the intensity of struggle over pollution in the region only makes sense when seen in terms of four decades of oil development and the more or less systematic undervaluation of indigenous rights and bodies throughout that whole period (see also Smith 2009). Meanwhile, the evocative discussion of El Pangui’s new mining frontier in southeast Ecuador (Chapter 6 by Warnaars) shows how the dynamics and fault lines of contemporary protest find part of their explanation in a long-sedimented history of different constructions of territory and conflicts over land in the region. In a slightly different register, the experience in Cordillera Huayhuash (Chapter 4 by Bury and Norris) shows the histories that can keep certain territories off the map of extractive investment flows—in this case, because the conflict of Peru’s long civil war had made the area relatively inaccessible to mining companies. These examples make clear that many of the dynamics of the current round of expanded investment in the extractive sector intersect with territorialized and national histories that are either real or imagined and almost always deep...