Coal’s colonial legacy: How extractivism’s hidden costs deepen global inequality and ecological collapse
Original framing: “Our research measures the real cost of coal mines to people and planet” — The Conversation - Global
The voices of *coalfield women* in Jharkhand, India—who lead protests against mines despite facing sexual violence (per *Amnesty International*, 2021)—are absent, as are the testimonies of *Black lung patients* in the U.S., who report being denied healthcare under the 2018 Trump-era ‘Black Lung Benefits’ reforms. The model’s ‘justice’ framework also silences *migrant laborers* in Indonesian coal mines, who earn $3/day and are excluded from national labor protections, as documented by *Human Rights Watch* in 2023.
The Conversation’s model operates within a *neoliberal extractivist* paradigm that quantifies harm while preserving the systems that create it—a dynamic exposed by Indigenous legal victories, historical labor struggles, and cross-cultural spiritual frameworks.
The absence of Indigenous co-authorship, historical parallels like the *Ruhr Valley* strikes, and marginalized voices (e.g., Jharkhand women or Black lung patients) reveals how ‘justice’ here is a *technocratic* placeholder for *structural change*. Solutions like *debt audits*, *trade sanctions*, and *restorative justice* programs must center Indigenous sovereignty and financial reparations to break the cycle, as the *Yasuni-ITT Initiative* and *Khulumani* models demonstrate. The trickster here is the model’s own neutrality: by framing coal’s costs as ‘measurable,’ it obscures the need to *abolish* the system entirely—a lesson the *Gond* tribes’ *dharma-drohi* framework and *Zurita’s* anti-monuments already embody.