I Fight, Therefore I Am: Sacrifice Zones: A Contribution to the Geo-social Dimension of Environmental Struggles

Abstract

Sacrifice territories. This is the allegation of more than 100 environmental collectives in Argentina, whose emergence began just as they stopped seeing their territories as immobile surfaces with bodies and objects embedded in them, ready to be sacrificed at the first promise of “progress” and (mis)development. The term sacrifice zones has been coined by these assemblies to describe what is happening in their territories, but they stress promptly that their lands are not empty, dead, or silent.Contrary to what might be expected, in sacrifice zones there are subjects and movements, there are alchemies, there is noise. Specifically: there are political struggles whose outcome holds a geological force in those territories. And along this path runs what we from the sacrifice zones want to show in this essay: Why is today’s notion of sacrifice zones one of the most stinging contributions of environmental struggles to narratives from Global South territories? Five elements are introduced and explained in this article.