'Leaving no one unscathed' in sustainability transitions: The life purging agro-extractivism of corporate renewables

Amid the growing interest on renewables to fight back the current ecological and social crises, crops like oil palm and trees like eucalyptus, with ever-growing and flexibly interchangeable uses as carbon sinks and sources of renewable energy and biomaterials, are praised as climate stewards and vehicles of transition to sustainable development. Hence, flex crops and commodities complexes consolidate within former strongholds and set off to new territories to take down today's crises. Bridging critical and intersectional political economy, ecology and sociology perspectives, and grounded in Guatemala from 2005 onwards, I discuss the implications of the rise of the flex crops and commodities complexes in transitions to sustainability for jobs, labor regimes, and socioecological reproduction. Specifically, the operations of the flex (sugar)cane and (oil) palm complexes in Guatemala involve a predatory form of agrarian extractivism which is driving a process of 'impairing destruction'. This works by means of a job-poor, culturally insensitive, toilsome and unpaid labor-based 'productive' model, and the manufacturing of environmentally and socially toxic landscapes, to fuel a purge of the countryside that leaves nothing and no one, neither friend nor foe, unscathed. However, the purge hits harder on the many working families (and especially on women) who are deemed redundant for the new renewables-led corporate model of sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Many struggle to avoid falling into this outcast condition. But the life purging agro-extractivism of the cane and palm companies both increases and stagnates the reserve army of labor, while simultaneously pushing the relative surplus population to the limits of subsistence. These findings about 'renewable but unlivable' futures call into question business as usual, non-transformative climate stewardship and sustainable development initiatives that constrain the (re)production of fairer and more climate-proof, culturally-sound, and youth-friendly life projects.