Omolade Adunbi

Omolade Adunbi is a political and environmental anthropologist and an Associate Professor at the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), and Program in the Environment (Pite). He is a Faculty Associate, Donia Human Rights Center (DHRC) and the Energy Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His areas of research explore issues related to governance, infrastructures of extraction, environmental politics and rights, power, violence, culture, transnational institutions, multinational corporations and the postcolonial state. In 2016, he received The Class of 1923 Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. His book, Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2015) won the 2017 The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland’s Amaury Talbot Book Award for the best book in Anthropology of Africa. His new book, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria, (Indiana University Press, 2022) interrogates the idea of Free Trade Zones and its interrelatedness to oil refining practices and infrastructure. His new project is at the intersection of social media, climate change and the politics of the environment.

Title and abstract:

“They Just Want Us to Die a Slow Death”: Energy Practices, Climate Crisis and the Social Death of the Environment in Nigeria 

In December 2021, several images appeared on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, depicting a cloudy atmosphere supposedly caused by the presence of soot in many Niger Delta communities. Soot is a particle pollution that results from burning of fossil fuels, makes the atmosphere to be cloudy and produces acidic rain that can cause diseases of the lungs such as aggravated asthma, acute bronchitis etc. The post created a buzz online with many commentators putting the blame on the devastating effect of many years of oil exploration in Nigeria. In this talk, I put these online commentaries in conversation with energy practices by paying particular attention to how artisanal refineries and other special economic zones’ extractive practices in Nigeria have resulted in what I call the social death of the environment. As I show, for many in Nigeria, the consequences of crude oil---considered to be sweet for some and bitter for many--- have been environmental degradation and loss of livelihood.