In the summer of 2009, a young Appalachian activist we'll call Sara, just hired to work on the Sierra Club's “Beyond Coal” campaign, met with the president of Colombia's largest coal mining union, Jairo Quiroz. Jairo described the workers’ struggles in one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines, stretching more than thirty miles long near Colombia's northern coast. Labor's issues, as he conceptualized them, were intimately tied to empire and environment. Work-related injuries and illnesses were caused by coal dust and other toxic materials, as well as the extraordinarily heavy machinery involved in the operation. The foreign corporations that owned the mine exported its profits while looting and destroying Colombian land. Afro-Colombian and indigenous farming communities were being displaced. The region was one of Colombia's poorest, and the company’s cozy relationship with the Colombian government allowed it to pay low taxes and royalties, few of which made it back to the region. Right-wing paramilitaries, which also enjoyed virtual impunity from the US-supported Colombian government of President Álvaro Uribe, threatened union organizers and were responsible for the deaths of thousands, including three mining union officials from the next department over.

“Don't you agree that coal is just inherently dirty, and we have to stop using it?” Sara asked him. The union leader stopped short. When he finally responded, he took the analysis of empire and environment to an even deeper level. “You are asking the wrong person,” he replied slowly. “We don't use coal here in Colombia. We export 100 percent of the coal that we mine. We're mining it for you!”

Before Sara could protest that her organization was working to stop the burning of coal in the United States, he continued. “And if you think that you're going to find some kind of alternative energy that doesn't rely on mining, think again. Where do you think the materials for the solar panels come from? For the wind turbines? For the batteries, storage, and transmission infrastructure? And do you really think that those sources can produce enough electricity for you in the United States to keep using more than anyone else in the world?” US consumption, he implied, is at the root of social and environmental destruction both in the Colombian mining region and at the global level.

Jairo was articulating a growing Latin American analysis that challenges the imperial and industrial order from an anticapitalist, environmental perspective. He drew on a long Latin American anti-imperialist and Marxist tradition that decries the greedy north for siphoning off Latin America's resources. But his analysis also resonates with local and continental rural and indigenous movements that offer an environmental critique of both capitalism and imperialism.

Latin America's rural and indigenous people have a lengthy history of resistance to incorporation into global capitalism. As James Scott and others have noted, many rural peoples carried with them a set of cultural attributes—sometimes called the “moral economy of the peasant” or a “subsistence ethic” based on “patterns of reciprocity, forced generosity, communal land, and work-sharing”—that were averse to capitalism itself, that formed the basis of significant revolutionary challenge to the industrial and imperial thrust of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹ For Joan Martínez Alier, this was an “environmentalism of the poor” that valued collectivity and sustainability. This set of ideas was central to survival in the agrarian world and, when challenged, could prove to be a powerful political force. For much of the industrial era, these collective, agrarian values have been central to countercultural, even revolutionary, challenges to the industrial order.Footnote ²

In the contemporary context of environmental crisis and neoliberalism, rural peoples, and particularly indigenous peoples, have mobilized these traditional cultures and values in the public sphere. In Latin America, their claims have resonated with the leftist tradition evoked by the Colombian union leader above, opposing foreign looting of the continent's resources. This type of analysis has become a key force in landless workers’ and food security movements, in environmental justice movements, and among twenty-first century populist-revolutionary leaders such as Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Hugo Chávez. A wide range of groups are now placing indigenous-inspired calls for protecting the environment at the center of leftist challenges to empire and capitalism. In so doing, they draw on a Latin American leftist analysis that argues that redistribution, rather than just increased production, is central to constructing a more just society and planet. They propose a new vision of economic development that prioritizes the rights of the poor and the rights of nature, rather than increasing production.

The idea that the redistribution of resources, nationally and globally, must be central to a model of economic justice is a central tenet of Latin American leftist thought. From the 1930s on, Latin Americans proposed different models of economic development that were based on breaking from imperial structures, from Import Substitution Industrialization to more revolutionary models. Dependency theorists and other critics of dependent development in the 1980s emphasized that economic growth alone was an inadequate measure of wellbeing. E. Bradford Burns counterpoised growth to development, which he defined as “the utilization of any nation's potential for the greatest benefit of the largest number of the inhabitants” and furthermore distinguished development from growth “by its concern with consumption levels, rather than the traditional emphasis on production.”Footnote ³

Like others in the dependency school, Burns did not address the environmental aspect of production and consumption. That was left to a group of renegade economists, beginning with E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly in the 1970s, and continuing with the sustainable degrowth school today.Footnote ⁴ But while isolated voices in the global north have challenged capitalism from the perspective of critiquing the environmental costs of economic growth, the challenge has been taken up in both Ecuador and Bolivia as having its roots more in indigenous Latin America than among northern intellectuals and activists. In Latin America, it is articulated in a much more pointed challenge to global inequality and North-South relations.Footnote ⁵

Northern Colombia's coal mining region exemplifies the ways that different sectors are articulating this challenge to the process of industrial capitalism and empire based at least in part on their ideas of a more harmonious and reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Large-scale mining has long been central to sustaining industrialization, imperial expansion, and overconsumption in the global North. Mining has connected the global North and South in particularly exploitative ways and has depended heavily on the conspicuous destruction of humans and the environment. It has been a key site where anticapitalist environmental challenges have emerged, including alternative projects that critique the human and environmental destruction wrought by this system.

The expansion of coal mining into Colombia exemplifies several aspects of empire and environmental destruction in the neoliberal era: increased demand for coal worldwide, capital-friendly policies in Colombia's new “democratic security” state, new technological capacities, and industry's mobility and search for lower costs, especially labor costs.Footnote ⁶ In La Guajira, Colombia, the Cerrejón mine began in the 1970s as a joint venture between Exxon and the Colombian government but was later privatized. Colombia's mines are only beginning to exploit what they expect will offer seventy-five years of future reserves.

From the perspective of the mines, which recruit their workforce from regional cities, the mostly indigenous and Afro-Colombian rural communities that occupy the coal lands are primarily seen as obstacles to progress. Yet the protests these communities have increasingly framed since the 1990s have incorporated elements that resonate broadly in Latin America, including with the mine's workers. They have mobilized ethnic identities, the subsistence ethos, anti-imperialism, and environmentalism in support of their claim to both traditional lands and lifestyles and access to jobs and basic consumer necessities.

Colombia's mining unions do not share the moral economy of the peasant or subsistence ethic described above. They do, like activists elsewhere in Latin America, see the wanton physical destruction of their homelands by foreign extractive corporations in nationalist and anti-imperialist terms. As Jairo suggested, they offer an anti-imperialist critique of northern overconsumption. And they consider the local peasant communities to be their natural allies.

During the past decade, the union at the mine has taken a radical stance for the social and environmental rights of the communities in the region. When the union called a strike in late 2012, it listed as its priority demands that the mine address “occupational health and risks, the dignity of its workers, equity for subcontracted workers, protection of the environment of La Guajira and respect for the communities in the region.” In particular, the union demanded that the company abandon its proposal to divert the Ranchería River in order to access coal deposits underneath it, and that “its social responsibility programs live up to their name, especially with respect to the communities that are displaced by the mine and lose their source of income and their customs.”Footnote ⁷

When asked what future they seek for the coal mining regions, Colombian unionists say that they want the mines operated for the benefit of local populations—possibly through nationalization. “We need some kind of a balance,” a union leader informed yet another anticoal activist in an event in Boston in 2011. “In my country we have a 12% unemployment rate and a 40% poverty rate. We need jobs and economic development. But we also need to take into account the needs of the planet, and of the future.” While not explicitly challenging northern consumption the way Jairo Quiroz did, this comment also chides northerners who enjoy the benefits of the industrial and consumer economy but romanticize “traditional” life in the Third World.

In this stance, Colombia's unions are joining the twenty-first century socialists who swept Latin America at the end of the last century and have tried to elaborate an alternative economic development model. A new environmentally oriented and anti-imperialist socialism—tied to the rise of powerful indigenous movements—emerged from the Latin American left. Elected socialist leaders—in particular, Bolivia's Evo Morales, who comes from indigenous leftist movements, and Ecuador's Rafael Correa—have committed to the concept of “buen vivir,” understood as a direct challenge to neoliberalism and incorporated in their new constitutions (in Ecuador in 2008, in Bolivia in 2009).

Ecuador's National Plan for Buen Vivir describes the concept this way:

Its proponents argue that Buen Vivir offers a radical alternative to the concept of economic development.Footnote ⁸ It seeks a postextractivist and postcapitalist economy.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Andes, for centuries a center of the labor and environmental abuses inherent to colonial mining, has given birth to the first state-level challenges to the very core of industrial society, the idea that through the application of technology, endless economic growth can create a rising tide that will lift all ships. Now, the idea that economic growth must be challenged is becoming increasingly mainstream in Latin America.

What this ecologically informed anti-imperialism means in practice is less clear. In most of South America, the new leftist governments have followed a policy that critics have termed “neo-extractivism,” continuing to rely on and even expand extractive industries, using the profits to fund the expansion of social programs. They reverse neoliberal policies by increasing regulation, state participation, and redistribution, but their challenge to the extractive model remains more at the level of rhetoric than of reality.Footnote ⁹ They have little leverage within the global economic system and few allies in the North to support their vision of global redistribution based on degrowth in the overdeveloped countries.

Nationalist sentiment serves leftist purposes when used against foreign multinationals, and to insure that Latin American governments rather than foreign capital retain the right to exploit the region's natural resources. That same nationalist sentiment, though, can be turned against foreign environmentalists, or anyone, including indigenous peoples, who advocates limits on economic development as generally understood. Some argue that to preserve large swaths of nature and leave natural resources in the ground means that large portions of the population will remain impoverished and lack access to basic health care, clean water, and electricity.Footnote ¹⁰

Today's leftist governments in Latin America espouse an anti-imperialist, environmentally sustainable economic model that recognizes indigenous rights while at that same time promoting redistributive and poverty-reduction programs that rely on the old model of exporting natural resources—especially fossil fuels and agro-fuels—to the global North. Despite the rhetorical commitment to challenging growth, consumption, and environmental destruction, they privilege the redistribution of wealth, often funded by state-controlled natural resource extraction and export. Not surprisingly, this contradiction has produced its share of conflict between the new leftist governments, whose social-political projects are partially dependent on natural resource extraction, and indigenous peoples, whose territories often lie on top of those valuable resources.

Still, the fact that Latin American political leaders are publicly voicing a position that is not only anti-imperialist and redistributive in nature, but honors the rights and values of rural-indigenous peoples while questioning unchecked growth, consumption, and environmental destruction, reflects the power of indigenous movements and their success in fusing indigenous rights and an environmentalism of the poor onto traditional leftist politics.

By contrast, such a position is entirely absent from mainstream political circles in the United States. The labor movement and the environmental movement frequently clash over individual campaigns that become framed in terms of jobs versus environment. Sometimes they manage to join forces for “green jobs.” They tacitly agree, though, with the underlying capitalist logic of the need for growth and remain committed to some sort of “American standard of living.”

The idea of degrowth remains only on the fringes of the labor movement and has barely made an appearance within US environmentalism, where campaigns have been quicker to take on issues related to specific hazards of production and disposal than they have to address production and consumption, or global economic inequality, directly. Environmental organizations may oppose the use of coal, but the logic of never-ending growth driven by ever-expanding consumption remains largely hegemonic. Production can be made cleaner, or it can be relocated, but it must continually expand.Footnote ¹¹ Waste can be “recycled,” or disposed of elsewhere, but reducing it by decreasing consumption is off the table. Moreover, environmental campaigns and regulation in the global North have frequently resulted in a shift of toxic production and disposal to the global South, as advocated in Lawrence Summers’ notorious World Bank memo about the “seriously UNDER-polluted” status of Africa.Footnote ¹² Even the environmental justice movement, while emphasizing the disproportionate impact of production and disposal on poor communities and especially communities of color, does not generally challenge the capitalist logic of economic growth.Footnote ¹³

Nevertheless, in coal regions in both the US and Colombia, local residents have often framed protests against coal in terms of indigenous cultural values that rest on their historical relationship to the land. As Ronald Eller notes in a different context, while such formulations often hold a “romantic” appeal for urban outsiders, they can also contribute to a cultural appreciation and revitalization.Footnote ¹⁴ Likewise, in indigenous and Afro-Colombia, outsiders’ attraction to the alternative visions of society and economy, including respect for the natural environment, has meant that this offers an effective political tool, while concurrently contributing to a real cultural reaffirmation within these communities.

In the neoliberal era and the global environmental crisis that accompanies it, capitalism's claims that it can solve the problems of poverty and want through ever-increasing production ring ever more hollow. In both old and new mining areas, this hollowness is particularly vivid. The alternative values proposed by some of the world's few remaining rural peoples—in Latin America, primarily indigenous peoples—have taken on increasing resonance in this context.