Mining transitions

What happens when the world's largest carbon sink becomes the world's most coveted mineral deposit? This is the central tension driving my emerging research program, which sits at the crossroads of extractive frontiers and global energy transitions — viewed through the lens of informal resource governance, or how communities actually govern their own resources often outside the reach of formal institutions.

The Amazon is under mounting pressure. As the global push for "critical minerals" intensifies, Amazonian states find themselves caught between two imperatives: protecting a biome that regulates the planet's climate, and supplying the raw materials that a decarbonizing world increasingly demands. To make sense of this contradiction, I draw on extractive imaginaries — the powerful narratives that redefine entire territories according to the resources buried beneath them, reshaping how land, people, and nature are valued in the process. I first approached imagineraies while researching the unwanted geographies of small-scale mining for my dissertation; I am now extending it to the world of large-scale copper extraction. A forthcoming chapter unpacks what's at stake.

But the Amazon is not only a mineral frontier. It is also a living environment where a quieter energy revolution is already underway. Across indigenous territories, rural settlements, and riverside towns, communities are mounting cheap solar panels on rooftops — not waiting for grid extensions that may never come, but carving out their own path out of energy poverty. Unlike the resistance that large-scale renewable infrastructure so often provokes, these communities are embracing solar's modularity, affordability, and independence from centralized grids. This is energy transition from below: informal, improvisational, and increasingly effective. Understanding why fossil fuels get slowly displaced here — not by policy mandates, but by practical access — is at the heart of this research interest.

The Edna Bailey Sussman Fund (with merit) supported my first approximations into extractives governance and the energy transition.