I credit the title of this blog to Bob Lovelace, who, in his closing remarks at a conference called “Rethinking the Extractive Industries,” spoke about the dangers of trying to engage with corporations on critical issues of rights, resources and responsibility when those same corporations that publish glossy annual sustainability reports are mowing down forests for fibre, tearing open the earth for minerals, and dumping toxic waste in the lakes. He said, it’s like going home to your cabin in the woods and finding a bear in the house. You don’t try to talk to the bear; you don’t reason with it. No, you get your rifle and you fire a shot in the air. You get it the hell out of there, and then you figure out a way to keep it out.

Lovelace talked about academic obligation to human rights, and about how stronger action is necessary from the people who have the power and knowledge to do something. I took it that he meant me, directly. Of course he didn’t, not knowing me from the next dewy-eyed young scholar-activist in the room, but he easily could have.

Needless to say, the image stuck with me, not least because I’ve made it my academic project to talk to the bears, to understand their underlying ideologies and their mechanisms of power. Because it seems to me that the only way to truly counter that power is to understand, in intricate detail, how and why it works.

Perhaps it’s naive, but I feel that studying bear behaviour and habitat might reveal insights about how to keep it out of the house, how to deactivate its capacity for destruction and, perhaps, even learn to live with it.

But that’s where the metaphor falls apart, because multinational extractive corporations are not bears. They do not have a natural habitat apart from accumulation by dispossession and exploitation. And once they smell profit, a rifle shot in the air will not scare them off.

This blog is a space for me to reflect on my academic interests, on what I’m learning about power and privilege and the bloody trajectory of the history of capitalism. It will start with reflections on my reading for comprehensive exams, but I hope it will extend beyond that and become a space for conversation and action.

Lovelace is right: we who occupy a space of privilege have obligations to act upon. Reading, thinking and learning is just the beginning of that — the point, after all, is to change the world.