Multispecies slavery–environment nexus in resource extraction and animals' ecological politics: Coercive donkey labour in Indian river sand mining

AbstractCoercive animal labour is central to capitalism, based on anthropocentric environmental ideologies that often regard animal bodies as solutions or fixes for often human‐caused environmental crises, even as, incrementally, it causes extreme ecological destruction. However, geographers and others have yet to focus on the ways in which coercive animal labour shapes, and is impacted by, environmental degradation and damage, despite growing critical work on the human slavery–environment nexus. Bringing animal labour and critical resource geographies together, this paper exposes the vulnerabilities and lived experiences of donkeys entrapped in river sand mining in regional Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, India, to probe the slavery–environment nexus through a multispecies approach. It expands the nascent work on animal capitalism in informal/grey economies of the Global South, to demonstrate how criminal economies organise the multispecies slavery–environment nexus through the maintenance of ‘low‐value’ human–animal labour relations in difficult environmental conditions, where precarious human labour relies on extreme extractions from animal bodies for survival. This paper calls for environmental, labour and critical resource geographers to extend existing work on the links between slavery and environmental destruction, through anti‐anthropocentric analyses that politically recognise (other) animals, and their vulnerabilities, specifically in being animal, a colonial‐anthropocentric ideology of animality as pejorative. Taking hope from radical (re)makings of worlds otherwise for these animals—empirical, political, even opportunistic—and however fleeting or frail, this paper proposes the articulation and development of an animals' ecological politics that refuses environmental anthropocentrism, and safeguards animal–nature relations in their fullest scope, specifically from human exploitation, as foundational to multispecies liberatory praxis.<p></p>