There is an assumed conflict of interest between labour and environmental concerns, especially relating to jobs in industries with high environmental and/or climate impacts such as fossil industries (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2011). However, the emergent scholarship on environmental labour studies emphasise alliances across labour and environmental movements (Räthzel, Stevis, & Uzzell, 2021). In this tradition, this article is interested in exploring how Nigerian oil workers’ express connections to nature and other social groups through experiences with the environment and climate change. Oil workers in Nigeria is as a critical case. Nigeria is characterised by strong socioeconomic inequalities, socio-political fragmentations and socioecological disconnections. We have argued elsewhere that oil workers’ can be described as alienated from the labour process; their life purpose; nature; and social groups (Jordhus-Lier, Houeland, & Ellingvåg, 2021). However, ‘the geographies of labour alienation [are], partial and contested processes (Jordhus-Lier et al., 2021: 333), and the counter-politics to alienation is de-alienation, or what we call “the politics of reconnection”(Ibid).  Although considered economically and socially privileged, oil workers in Nigeria find themselves under increasingly precarious conditions and in a physical context where petroleum production and contestations have caused environmental degradations and climate change challenging alternative livelihoods, their own health and their children’s’ life chances. This paper seeks to understand the current alienations and the potential for oil workers’ reconnection/s with other social groups through their expressed interests and experiences with nature. The paper is based on four focus group interviews with oil workers (2 trade union organised; community workers; and artisanal refinery workers) in Port Harcourt 2020. We asked about their work, their relation to nature, their experiences with environmental degradation and climate change and how they think about their own and other’s agency and responsibility.

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