Formal land ownership masks massive subterranean resource dispossession

Evidence

The half million Ogoni retain nominal ownership of most of their densely populated territory. But since oil extraction began over sixty years ago, they have suffered massive subterranean dispossession. Shell, Chevron, and successive Nigerian regimes have siphoned $30 billion worth of oil from beneath Ogoni earth. Yet the locals still find themselves lacking a hospital, electricity, piped water, basic roads, housing, and schools. The community has found itself, in the fullest sense of the word, utterly undermined. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 307

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the extraction-dispossession theme bridging to the Ch14 resource-curse material and Ch4 displacement-without-movement claims already noted in this book. — connects to: Abuse of land stems from regarding it as owned commodity rather than community — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 10; Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 246; Periphery nations cannot develop because resource outflow locks them into dependency — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 297

Broader Connections

• Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 246
• Periphery nations cannot develop because resource outflow locks them into dependency #expands (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 297