Extractivism and Survival: Community Resistance through Integral Ecology

Community Resistance through Integral Ecology

Abstract

Extractive industries, which remove natural resources for global markets, impose severe health and environmental burdens on marginalized communities, producing “sacrifice zones”. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological framework alongside integral ecology, this paper shows how extractivism operates across interconnected ecological systems, linking effects on individual bodies with wider economic and political structures. Communities respond to extractivism through educational efforts that cultivate critical awareness, collective action such as land defense initiatives, and legal and electoral strategies that have enabled grassroots actors to enter formal politics. This paper examines how integral ecology, which understands human health and ecological conditions as deeply intertwined, offers a framework for interpreting and confronting extractivism’s impacts. Drawing on cases from the Philippines and other countries, the analysis illustrates how community-led resistance, context-specific environmental education, and policy- oriented interventions can reconfigure sacrifice zones as sites of renewal. The paper concludes by proposing recommendations that foreground marginalized voices and advance justice-centered sustainability while recognizing affected communities as active agents who organize resistance and shape their environments.