Extraction: The Cost of Development
Extraction: The Cost of Development
Unit 3: Development, Land, and Climate — Lesson 12
Unit 3: Development, Land, and Climate — Lesson 12
Learning Goal: I can describe how resource extraction projects such as pipelines, dams, mining, and deforestation have harmed Indigenous communities in multiple parts of the world.
The Wet'suwet'en Nation holds 22,000 square kilometres of territory in northern British Columbia. In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia that the Wet'suwet'en and Gitxsan nations had never given up title to this land. The ruling did not settle the question of title outright, but it confirmed the Wet'suwet'en had never surrendered their claim.
Wet'suwet'en governance runs on two tracks. An elected band council, created under the Indian Act, governs each reserve. Hereditary chiefs, called Dinï ze' and Tsakë'ze, hold authority over the wider traditional territory under Wet'suwet'en law, known as Anuc'nu'at'en. Coastal GasLink, a company building a 670-kilometre natural gas pipeline, signed agreements with several elected band councils. It never got consent from the hereditary chiefs, whose authority covers the land the pipeline actually crosses.
The pipeline runs through 190 kilometres of Wet'suwet'en territory, including the Wedzin Kwa, also called the Morice River, one of the last clean salmon-spawning rivers left in the territory. In 2020, the hereditary chiefs ordered Coastal GasLink workers off the land. The RCMP enforced a court injunction and removed land defenders instead, which set off solidarity blockades of rail lines across Canada. In 2021, Gidimt'en Checkpoint organizers occupied a drill site on the Wedzin Kwa to block construction under the river. The pipeline was completed in 2023.
Shell began drilling for oil in Ogoniland, in Nigeria's Niger Delta, in 1958. Over the following decades, spills contaminated farmland, killed fish, and made parts of Ogoniland unfarmable. In 1990, writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, known as MOSOP, which organized more than 700,000 Ogoni people in nonviolent protest against Shell and the Nigerian government.
In 1995, Nigeria's military government arrested Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders, now known as the Ogoni Nine, and charged them with the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. Witnesses later said they had been bribed to give false testimony. On November 10, 1995, the government executed all nine men by hanging. In 2025, thirty years later, the Nigerian government issued the men a pardon, though MOSOP and human rights groups continue to call for full exoneration, since a pardon still implies guilt.
The environmental damage did not end with the executions. A 2011 United Nations Environment Programme study found groundwater in parts of Ogoniland contaminated with benzene at levels far above what is safe to drink, and estimated a full cleanup could take 25 to 30 years. In 2021, a Dutch court ruled that Shell's parent company could be held directly responsible for spill damage in the Niger Delta community of Goi, part of Ogoniland, and in 2022 Shell agreed to pay affected communities 15 million euros in compensation.
The Belo Monte Dam sits on the Xingu River in the Brazilian state of Pará. Construction began in 2011 and the dam began generating power in 2016. Building it displaced somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and diverted most of the Xingu's flow away from a stretch of river known as the Volta Grande, the Big Bend, where the Juruna and Arara peoples live alongside more than a dozen other Indigenous and traditional communities.
Cutting the river's flow by as much as 80 percent at the Volta Grande collapsed fish populations that Juruna and Arara families depend on for food, and disrupted the nesting of turtles the fish once fed on. Kayapo leader Raoni Metuktire became one of the dam's most visible international opponents, campaigning against it for years before construction even began. Brazilian federal courts have repeatedly intervened since, halting the project's operating license in 2016 over inadequate housing for displaced families, and suspending a 2021 permit that would have let the dam's operator divert even more water away from the Volta Grande.
Each of these projects went ahead despite clear, organized Indigenous opposition. In each case, some form of formal government approval existed, whether an elected band council's agreement, a government oil concession, or an environmental license. In each case, courts eventually intervened, though the intervention came after most of the harm was already done. None of these projects stopped once building started. The Wet'suwet'en pipeline was completed, Shell's compensation came decades after the spills, and Belo Monte still stands on the Xingu today.
Key Idea: A government's approval of a project does not mean the people living on that land agreed to it. In all three cases, the communities most affected by the project were not the ones who got the final say.
Hereditary chief
A leader whose authority comes from Indigenous law and tradition, distinct from an elected band council chief whose authority comes from the Indian Act.
Unceded territory
Land that Indigenous peoples never surrendered or signed away through treaty.
MOSOP
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, founded by Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1990 to organize Ogoni resistance to Shell's oil operations.
Volta Grande
The "Big Bend" of the Xingu River, where the Belo Monte Dam diverts most of the river's water away from Juruna and Arara territory.
Extractivism
An economic model built around removing raw materials such as oil, gas, or minerals from the land and selling them, usually with little processing done locally.
Amnesty International. "Canada: Construction of Pipeline on Indigenous Territory Endangers Land Defenders." 2022. amnesty.org
Wikipedia. "Ogoni Nine." Overview of the trial and execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other MOSOP leaders. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogoni_Nine (Flag: verify against a primary or news source before treating specific trial details as final.)
Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands). "Milieudefensie and Nigerian Farmers Win Landmark Court Case Against Shell." 2021. en.milieudefensie.nl
Mongabay. "Belo Monte Legacy: Harm from Amazon Dam Didn't End with Construction." 2018. news.mongabay.com
AIDA (Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense). "The Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River: 10 Years of Impacts in the Amazon and the Search for Reparations." aida-americas.org