The Role of Place-Lore in Environmental Conflict Discourse: The Case of Paluküla Sacred Hill in Estonia

This article is a critical study of how local place-related narratives, i.e. place-lore, is integrated into environmental discussion and how it has significant potential to illustrate local and public, as well as vernacular and institutional, meanings concerned with the environment. Combining the frameworks of ecosemiotics, environmental communication studies, and place-lore research, the article explores how a new storytelling context, ideological selection, and the logic of conflict communication influence the re-contextualisation and interpretation of place-lore. The theory is applied to an empirical examination of public discussion of Paluküla sacred hill in Central Estonia. Tracking references to previous place-lore about Paluküla Hill in the media coverage of the conflict allows a demonstration of how the contextuality and referentiality towards an extra-narrative environment that are originally present in place-lore are often overlooked or ignored in conflict discourse. This, in turn, leads to socially and ecologically disconnected discussion.

Environment-Conflict Nexus: The Relevance of Thomas Homer-Dixons Environmental Conflict Theory in Africa

Using practical examples, the paper examines the relevance of Thomas Homer-Dixons Environmental Conflict Theory within an African context. It outlines that Homer-Dixon’s Environmental Conflict Theory is to some extent valid, but it suffers significant shortfalls that make its applicability and generalizability questionable. The paper has shown that the abundance of resources in Africa contributes more to violent conflicts than their scarcity. Resources in Africa are vast, and so are environmental conflicts. The paper underscores factors that aggravate environmental conflicts such as depletion, degradation, social cleavages, population growth and environmental scarcity and recommend solutions on how they can be redressed.

Intersectionality in a sacrifice zone of capital: the experience of black women, quilombolas and gleaners, on Ilha de Maré, in Todos os Santos Bay (Bahia, Brazil)

This article, based on an empirical research project, aims to analyze, from an intersectional perspective, how Black women, quilombolas and gleaners, from two communities on Ilha de Maré (in Todos os Santos Bay, Salvador, Bahia) have been affected with the occupation of their territory by a petroleum supply chain. Understanding the complexity of the experience that these women have come up against in the territory where they live, due to a context of environmental conflict, may only be achieved by considering the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, and through what we have termed as a way of life linked to the environment.

The grass versus the people: sacred roots of environmental conflict in the Chilonga communal lands in Zimbabwe

This article analyses a conflict that erupted in 2021 between the government of Zimbabwe and the people of Chilonga in the south of the country over the expropriation of their ancestral for the production of lucerne grass. The people of Chilonga resisted being displaced from land to which they are deeply attached and have a sacred connection. This conflict provides a rare opportunity to analyze the often marginalized, muted and misunderstood sacred roots of the environmental conflict that shape collective agency. The article uses the concepts of emplacement and disemplacement to comprehend the deeper and more intangible impacts of displacing people from their grazing lands, sources of water and traditional herbs and medicines, and sacred sites—natural resources they claim to be sacred. Thus, while disemplacement has been used to explain why people find themselves moving, the article uses it to show the opposite: why they resist moving and demonstrate the not easily measured losses upon which resistance to moving hinges.