Ethnoscaping Green Resistance: Heritage and the Fight Against Fracking

This chapter explores specific instances where environmentalist resistance to fossil fuel extraction mobilizes definitions of ‘heritage’ connected to colonial histories and ethnocentric visions for the future. Through discourse analysis of Facebook groups of the most successful campaigns to prevent hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa, national ‘ethnoscapes’ that bind activists together are exposed as wrapped up in attempts to secure the nation as a white possession. Pre-enclosure Britain, the Australia of the Eureka Stockade, and white colonial expansion in South Africa are produced as Golden Ages, which must be inoculated against the histories of genocide and repression of autochthonous populations. The consistent discursive work needed to whitewash heritage in the metropole, and to legitimize present land control in the colonies, is presented as a major obstacle to building the kinds of coalitions that are necessary for environmental protection on a global scale.