geopolitical ecology

In Canada, intensive resource extraction has long been baked into the country’s political economy and, arguably, to nation-building itself. Resource booms and policy choices have opened landscapes and livelihoods to large-scale mining and fossil fuel extraction, producing harms that are inseparable from the country’s colonial history.
Today, as supply chains are restructured around critical minerals and trade regimes are overhauled, Canada faces urgent questions about sovereignty, consent, and justice: can extraction be reimagined in ways that respect Indigenous rights and ecological limits? Or will new geopolitical pressures and rising tensions with countries like the United States simply deepen old harms? 
To explore these questions, we spoke with Jess Dempsey, a professor at UBC, and Jamie Kneen of MiningWatch to get to grips with the state of Canada’s extractive industries. Later, we were joined by Tara Marsden, an independent consultant from the Lax Ganeda (Frog) Clan of the Gitksan peoples, who has spent 30 years advancing sustainable development and operationalizing free, prior and informed consent, and who spoke to us about how the history and shifting terrain of extraction in Canada has been shaped by the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty.
Continental Shift is made possible by support from the Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

The ratification of NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—in 1994 transformed Mexico in profound ways. Over the next thirty years it deepened and expanded the resource frontier across the country, disproportionately benefiting national and global elites. Mining activity exploded, and with it the socio‑ecological violence that follows large‑scale extraction. Anti‑extractivist struggles cannot be ignored—especially as Morena, the self-proclaimed progressive political party that holds power in Mexico after breaking seven decades of political duopoly in 2018, tries to navigate competing pressures. 
Morena’s landmark program—the so-called “Fourth Transformation"—frames greater state involvement and control over strategic resources and royalties as a means to fund social programs and reclaim national sovereignty, though its policies and outcomes remain uncertain.
This episode offers a closer look at extractivism in Mexico, tracing developments from the colonial silver boom to state‑led industrialization and from neoliberal open‑pit expansion to present-day state-led extractivism. Darcy Tetreault and Sol Pérez Jiménez join us from Mexico to offer granular historical knowledge and field‑based evidence, mapping how policy and capital have reshaped labor, land and water regimes. We discuss the deepening of resource frontiers, the persistence of elite mining interests, and the complex, contested forms of resistance—from legal reforms to grassroots refusal and struggle for territorial autonomy. 
Continental Shift is made possible by support from the Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

The term “critical minerals" suddenly seems to be all over the headlines. Securing access to this group of commodities, from familiar metals like lithium and copper to more obscure “rare earth elements” like yttrium, appears to be a growing priority of world leaders—particularly for those who consider China, currently the world's main producer of most critical minerals, a threat.
But what exactly what makes these commodities so “critical” in the first place? Who defines them as such, and who benefits from that decision?
In fact, whether a mineral is “critical” depends on who you ask, and what their strategic priorities are—whether that's producing electric vehicles, fighter jets, or AI infrastructure.
Importantly, extracting these minerals has profound human and ecological impact. This is what makes their governance so challenging: because even in many green utopian visions of the future, with a world powered by renewables and running zero carbon transit, there’s no side-stepping either the need for these minerals, or some of the harms involved in their extraction. What, then, can be done?
How should we understand the sudden push to control critical mineral supply chains? What is their role in competing visions of the future? How might we reduce the harms of extraction? And can there ever be an approach to extraction that is genuinely just or “sustainable”? 
To answer these questions, in this episode we're joined by Thea Riofrancos and Emily Iona-Stewart. Thea is Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Emily is Head of Policy and Advocacy at Global Witness. 

Continental Shift is made possible by support from the Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

Welcome to Continential Shift, a series from The Break—Down and Geopolitical Ecology, where we examine the global rush for critical minerals and the struggle for resource dominance on the North American continent.

The phrase "trade regimes" may sound dry, but these rules and agreements are a defining architecture of the global economy. They determine who gets to exploit a country’s resources, and who profits from it. They determine whether states can be sued by private investors and corporations, or whether domestic sovereignty—of the state, or of Indigenous peoples, for example—is protected.

In our first episode we’re joined by historian Quinn Slobodian and economist Isabel Estevez to unpack how longstanding trade rules, investor protections and liberalization have shaped how resources are extracted and governed in North America. 

After the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement entered limbo last week when negotiators failed to make the July 1st deadline for agreeing a new deal, those same rules and institutions are suddenly more shaky than they’ve been for years, raising big questions about how, and in whose interest, the global race to dominate critical minerals will be run.

Continental Shift is made possible by support from the Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia.

In this episode we speak with Alyssa Battistoni about her most recent book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature published back in August 2025 by Princeton University Press.

Alyssa is a political theorist with research interests in environmental and climate politics, feminism, Marxist thought, political economy, and the history of political thought. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal published by Verso in 2019. We highly recommend reading both of these books, found here: 
Free Gifts
A Planet to Win 
Battistoni writes frequently for publications including the Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, n+1, and Boston Review, and is on the editorial boards of Jacobin and Dissent. She received her PhD from Yale in 2019 and previously held the position of Environmental Fellow at Harvard University. 
This episode explores the political work done by the idea that nature is either “inside” or “outside” the production process. We unpack how nature can function as a so-called free gift to capital, how it is sometimes strategically left alone in order to remain cheap or undervalued, and how it is, at other times, simply resistant to capture—unruly, uneven, and not fully governable by capitalist logics. 
Drawing on feminist political economy and eco-feminist thought, Alyssa reflects on what these traditions make visible—and where they fall short. We talk about how capitalism defines economic value, what counts as productive activity, and how vast realms of work are rendered invisible or treated as “free,” whether implicitly or explicitly. This leads us into a discussion of externalities, not only as technical economic categories, but as deeply political mechanisms that displace responsibility, undermine democratic decision-making, and fracture possibilities for collective action.
A key thread running through the conversation is the insistence that nature works. It labors. It is not a passive backdrop or inert input, but a dynamic ensemble of living beings, processes, and labor the fruits of which are routinely appropriated by capital. While capital recognizes only waged labour as work, Alyssa draws a careful parallel between feminist critiques of unwaged reproductive labour and the unwaged labour performed by nature while also pushing against some of the limits of these analogies, and asking what they obscure as much as what they reveal.
This conversation only scratches the surface of the richness and density of Free Gifts. It’s important to mention this as we live through content overload and informational overstimulation, we want to be clear that this episode is an entry point, not a substitute. If you’re able to, we strongly encourage you to read the book and support Alyssa’s work. 

I am joined by my colleague Nick Gottlieb. Thanks for being part of this, Nick! :) 
If this episode resonates, please share it with others who might find it generative as well.