Rivers of resistance: resource conflict and rural organizing in the Americas

Abstract

In the last half of the twentieth-century, historians of every specialization framed their studies by national boundaries, and environmental historians of the so-called "global north" separated the domain of human culture from the domain of physical nature. For decades, scholars widely accepted and repeated these arrangements, but the lines of separation and division turned out to be far more effective as obstructions to understanding than as paths to insight. This transnational research sets a consequential example by removing those obstructions and by mapping those paths. This is an environmental history of two river basins in the Americas. The following chapters unpack parallels between these places, specifically, how people along the Rio Lempa in El Salvador and the Tongue River in Montana used their local knowledge of the land to successfully prevent mining projects in the late twentieth and early-twenty first centuries. I examine the environmental, societal, and cultural factors that led to these successes from different scales--the global to the local--and highlight common themes they shared. Both movements focused on defending their watersheds from mining projects that would have damaged water quality and altered locals' ways of life. The leaders of both movements were not traditional environmentalists and did not consider themselves to be; rather, they were ordinary people who were fighting for what they valued--a life of dignity and respect for their surroundings. By examining two distinct case studies, I show that "success" stories are not singular anomalies. They serve as models for future action.