The anti-fracking movement and the politics of rural marginalization in Lithuania: intersectionality in environmental justice

ABSTRACT

While the environmental justice perspective focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits across different groups based on race, class, or gender, intersectionality approaches avoid the use of a priori categories to examine marginalization. We argue that intersectionality can broaden the scope of environmental justice studies by examining interactive, historically grounded processes through which categories of difference are produced. To support this argument, we present an illustrative case of the movement in Lithuania that challenged Chevron’s plans to prospect shale resources for potential fracking. We conduct a narrative analysis of public discourses surrounding the formation of the movement and track the creation of a particular category of difference: the rural community, represented in opposition to the urban. We show how the public debate in Lithuania culminated in questioning the legitimacy of the anti-fracking movement and devaluing the rural population more broadly. We also show how both media accounts and anti-fracking movement leaders ignored social inequalities in rural villages. We conclude with a discussion of how the intersectionality approach provides an analytical lens to consider geopolitical tensions as part of the matrix of power relations that can be understood as expressions of ontological insecurity in global borderlands.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• intersectionality
• hydraulic fracturing
• rural development
• Baltic states
• Lithuania

Acknowledgements

We thank Guntra Aistara, Anthony Bebbington, Karen Hébert, Stewart Lockie, Mariana Lyra, Troy Vettese, and three anonymous reviewers for thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We gratefully acknowledge comments we received at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in 2015; the STS Underground workshop funded by the National Science Foundation in 2017; and the Energy Politics workshop at New York University in 2018. This project would not be possible without the input from the members of local communities and employees at the Tauragė district municipality. We are deeply thankful for their time and generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Geological surveys estimate that Lithuania may be sitting on about 12 million barrels of oil reserves, not including the resources under the Baltic Sea (Ministry of Energy 2013). This places Lithuania nearly at the bottom of the list of countries with confirmed conventional oil reserves.

2. Until 2016, Lithuania was considered as one of the most isolated energy islands in Europe with about 75% of its domestic energy consumption coming from Russia. Other sources include biomass or wood (15%), hydropower (6%), and coal (3%). In 2009, following the EU accession agreements, Lithuania decommissioned its Chernobyl-style Ignalina nuclear power station, leaving it fully reliant on its neighbors for electricity. This situation has recently changed in 2016 when a floating regasification unit leased from a Norwegian company started processing liquefied gas delivered from Texas. Called Independence, the terminal has the capacity to process 30 billion square meters of natural gas, enough to meet current demand in Lithuania.

3. In June 2014, public comments by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rassmussen sparked another round of heated debates that reverberated across Lithuania. Rassmussen claimed to have evidence that anti-fracking movements in the region were supported by Gazprom, and accused environmental groups of promoting Russia’s political and economic interests (Harvey 2014; Higgins 2014). To Lithuanian audiences, Rassmussen’s pronouncement served as a powerful manifestation of Russia’s unwillingness to lose its economic and political influence in the region.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the European Union Structural Funds project ‘Postdoctoral Fellowship Implementation in Lithuania’ within the framework of the Measure for Enhancing Mobility of Scholars and Other Researchers and the Promotion of Student Research of the Program of Human Resources Development Action Plan [VP1-3.1-ŠMM-01].

Notes on contributors

Diana Mincyte

Diana Mincyte is an associate professor in the Department of Social Science at the City University of New York-New York City College of Technology. Her research focuses on environmental and social dimensions of food and agriculture, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Aiste Bartkiene

Aiste Bartkiene is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical History and Ethics in the Institute of Public Health at the Medical Faculty at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research focuses on the ethics of care and its relationship to local and global environmental issues.