"Pesca Sí! Petróleo No!" (Fishing yes! Oil no!): A Gramscian Analysis of Climate Justice Activism in Peru

Apollonya Porcelli, Bucknell University

For this presentation, which is one chapter in a larger book project on the evolution of environmental activism in Peru’s industrial fishing industry (1972-present), I examine the ways in which activists combat climate change and the encroachment of oil exploitation into coastal fishing grounds. Drawing from a year of archival data collection in Peru (2016-2017, 2024) and interviews with social movement organizations (SMOs), fishers, and scientists, I show how activist groups within the marine fishing community, including Pesca Sí! Petróleo No! (Fishing yes! Oil no!), ally with other mobilizations throughout Peru, especially in Amazonia, to construct a heterogeneous constellation of working-class actors fighting against, what I define as, a threat of expansion. By increasingly de-localizing the fishery into ever expanding global markets for fishmeal, corporate and state actors make the fishery evermore vulnerable to climatic shifts related to El Niño and oil exploration into fishing grounds. Thus, Peru’s fisher-activists are at the frontlines of climate justice—combating both the drivers and impacts of climate change. I show how these groups re-localize the fishery into communities along the Peru shoreline as a core social movement strategy. I integrate Gramscian scholarship on the sociology of knowledge, and literature on environmental justice and critical ocean studies, to show how the capitalist exploitation of the sea, on the one hand, is facilitated by the materiality of the ocean, but on the other hand, also creates the material, political, and economic conditions for climate justice activism. Working-class coalitions construct a counter-hegemonic “good sense” that challenges industry-backed logic justifying expansion into the sea and an exploitation of sea resources—be they fish or oil. The embodiment of environmental problems, in this case the contamination from oil spills, lays the foundation for a climate-justice “good sense” that draws upon the lived experience of fishers and integrates professional “expertise.”

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 54. Environmental Crises and Transitions