The response rolled in like a tidal wave. 

Unexpected and overwhelming…

Growing until it would crash across the entire country.

People marched in every city. On every highway. 

They took over roads. Shut down traffic.

And promised to stay in the streets until their voices were heard.

And it was not a small sliver of society. 

It was everyone…  students, teachers, workers, environmentalists… Indigenous communities. 

But also the middle class and even the wealthy. Businessmen and bankers. 

They marched. They chanted. A resounding choir echoed “No” across the country, their voices bouncing from shore to shore. Refusing to cave or to be silenced.

The focus of their rage? A new government contract with a mine—the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America. 300,000 metric tons of copper a year. More than half of Panamanian exports. It had been under operation for a few years, but never under a legal contract. The Panamanian Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional. The president Laurentino Cortizo vowed to renegotiate the deal.

When they were done, the president announced the news to huge fanfare, heralding the windfall profits, the jobs and the benefits the Canadian mining company—First Quantum—would bestow on the country. Congress approved the contract the same day.

But Panamanians were not having it.

They and their ancestors had lived through a century of US invasions and occupation. The area around the Panama Canal was known as the Canal Zone and for a hundred years it had belonged to Uncle Sam. A segregated apartheid zone, roughly half the size of Rhode Island, smack dab in the middle of their country. Off limits to Panamanians except for those working for, and serving the whims of the military personnel and the families living under the Stars and Stripes.

And this new contract smelled very similar. It ceded land and sovereign rights to the Canadian company for extended periods of time.

Panama’s president promised the profits would strengthen the country’s Social Security fund and increase pensions. He cheered for the jobs.

Panamanians did not care. They were not going to hand over a piece of their country to a foreign nation EVER AGAIN. 

“The sovereignty of our country is in danger. That’s why I’m here,” said one protester in a yellow raincoat, marching under a thick downpour. That sentiment, echoed the voices of thousands — millions — across the country. And they kept their promises to stay in the streets, despite everything.

Days turned to weeks, which turned into month. The roadblocks shut down the country. Gas ran out at filling stations. Supermarket shelves grew empty. And still the protests continued…. Until. November 28, 2023. The day that celebrates Panama’s independence from Spain. 

That morning, the country’s Supreme Court of Justice ruled the new mining contract unconstitutional.

Protesters waved the red, white, and blue Panamanian flag. They danced in the streets in front of the Supreme Court. They sang the national anthem.

The people had done what the president and Congress would not. They had defended their country against the interests of a foreign nation, which had promised money and development—-but at what cost? The destruction of their environment. The loss of a chunk of Panamanian land in the hands of a foreign entity… again?

Not happening.

The US occupation of Panama is not ancient history, here. It is still in the forefront of everyone’s mind. So are the decades of blood, sweat, and tears that it took to finally win back the region of the Panama Canal from the United States in 1999.

They remember the 1989 US invasion. They remember the thousands killed. They remember what it was like to have a US enclave in the middle of their country. And Panamanians are not going back there again.

Not at the hands of a Canadian copper mine. And certainly not at the order of Donald Trump.

This is episode 12 of Stories of Resistance — a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Michael Fox reported from the ground in Panama throughout the months-long protests. You can see his reporting for The Real News here.  You can see his pictures of the protests, here on his Patreon, where you can also support his work: www.patreon.com/mfox.

From East Palestine, Ohio, to South Baltimore and beyond, we’ve been connecting you with residents living in the toxic wastelands left by private and government-run industry—ordinary working people who have been thrust into extraordinary fights for their lives. In the latest installment of our ongoing Sacrificed series, we go to Toledo, Ohio, a city that, in 2014, lost access to its water supply for three days straight due to a massive, toxic algal bloom caused by runoff from industrial animal farming.

We speak with filmmaker Mike Balonek and welcome back Chris Albright, a resident of East Palestine, to discuss the connections between the Norfolk Southern train derailment disaster and the Toledo Water Crisis. We also talk about an upcoming conference in Toledo on Saturday, August 3, hosted by the Justice for East Palestine Residents & Workers coalition: “Is your community a sacrifice zone? A conference on corporate-caused disasters.” The conference will focus on the Toledo Water Crisis, the derailment in East Palestine and the need for better railroad safety, and the radioactive poisoning of residents living near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio. The conference will also feature the world premiere of filmmaker Mike Balonek’s new documentary The Big Problem In The Great Lakes, a film about the Toledo Water Crisis of 2014.

Additional links/info below…

• Toledo conference details: Saturday, Aug. 3, 9:30AM
• Mike Balonek, The Big Problem In The Great Lakes
• WTOL 11, “Timeline | Looking back at the 2014 Toledo water crisis“
• Maximillian Alvarez, Cameron Granadino, & Hannah Faris, The Real News Network, “Factory farms pose an ‘existential threat’ for rural Wisconsin communities“
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Before East Palestine, there was Portsmouth“
• Stephanie Elverd, The Pakersburg News & Sentinel, “East Palestine residents express frustration with settlement from train derailment“

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Chris Albright:

I’m Chris Albright. I am a resident of East Palestine, Ohio. I’ve lived here for about 11 years now or so. I live actually less than a half a mile away from where on February 3rd we had a toxic train derailment and it has completely altered our lives here.

Mike Balonek:

So, my name is Mike Balonek. I’m from Toledo, Ohio. I’m a filmmaker here, been working on a documentary on the Toledo Water Crisis that happened just about 10 years ago exactly. And then, also on the Train Derailment in East Palestine, which is how I met Chris here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out all the other great shows in our network.

And please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Lead positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the realnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

And today we’ve got another important installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed where we’ve been going into the heart of America’s many sacrifice zones and talking to the people who are living, working, and fighting there from East Palestine, Ohio, to South Baltimore and beyond. We’ve been connecting you with residents living in the toxic wastelands left by private and government run industry, ordinary working people like you and me who have been thrust into the extraordinary fight for their lives. And a sacrifice zone can look just like any other ZIP Code. You’ve probably stood in the middle of one without even knowing it. I mean, you and your family might even be living in one right now.

Your health may have already been forfeited by some suits in a boardroom in another state. Your lives written off as collateral damage during some routine legislative session years ago. If you’re listening to this now, for instance, there’s a near statistical certainty that you have at least one of 3M and DuPont’s forever chemicals swimming in your blood right now, and so do I. And if you happen to currently live in an area that is in the direct path of the life-threatening effects of the climate emergency, then you already know that our society has resigned itself to abandoning you, sacrificing you and your neighbors to the elements, whether they’d be wildfires, rising sea levels, extreme flooding, extreme heat, and so on. More and more of us are finding out what it means to be sacrificed.

And unless we band together and fight back, the problem is only going to get worse. And that is why it is so important that folks from different sacrifice zones and folks from unions, environmental justice groups, community organizations and concerned citizens of all stripes are connecting with each other, working together and fighting to save our communities from the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires who were poisoning us and our planet. And this Saturday, August 3rd, the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition will be hosting a conference in Toledo, Ohio at the Kent Branch Library.

And the top of the flyer for the event reads, “Is Your Community a Sacrifice Zone? A Conference on Corporate Cause Disasters.” Now, the conference will focus on the Toledo water crisis of 2014, the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, and the need for better railroad safety and the radioactive poisoning of residents living near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio.

I, myself will be speaking at the conference alongside other incredible folks like Chris Albright from East Palestine, Vina Colley, a nuclear safety activist from Piketon, Ohio, Matt Weaver from Railroad Workers United, Kim Axe from Lake Erie Advocates and Sean Nestor of Toledo Winds for safe Water. The conference will also feature the world premiere of filmmaker Mike Balonek’s new documentary, the Big Problem in The Great Lakes, a film about the Toledo water crisis in 2014 when a toxic algal bloom formed over the city of Toledo’s water intake in Lake Erie, causing the city to lose access to its water supply for three hold days. And I am very grateful to have Mike Balonek and Chris Albright on the show today to tell you all about this conference, why it’s important and how you can get involved in the fight.

All right. Well, Brother Chris, Brother Mike, it is so great to be back in conversation with you guys. To everyone listening, you guys of course know Chris Albright well. We’ve spoken with Chris and his family numerous times on this podcast. You know the horrific story of what they and their family and their community have been going through since that catastrophic and catastrophically avoidable train derailment by Norfolk Southern happened in their backyard less than two years ago.

And Mike, I’ve been working with Brother Mike a lot this year, although you guys haven’t got to hear him on the pod until now. But Mike was right there in the thick of it with us when I was in East Palestine for the conference that was hosted and by the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition. Mike and I were running around filming pieces in East Palestine that are going to be coming out for the Real News Network very soon.

But we were also there participating in the conference, talking to residents like Chris from East Palestine in the surrounding area, and also connecting with so many other incredible folks, residents of other sacrifice zones, some of whom you’ve heard on this show as well, like Vina Colley from Pike County, Ohio, who’s been fighting the toxic radioactive pollution from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant there for the past 40 years. Right? And it was out of this important gathering that we had in East Palestine in March that more of us were able to connect personally and see the real tangible connections between these different sacrificed communities across the country.

I mean, even though the conditions that create sacrifice zones around this country are always unique and different in many ways the playbook is the same. The struggles that working people go through in these sacrifice zones are the same. The hoops and impossible barriers that they face when dealing with the government, when trying to find legal recourse, when trying to get media attention for their plight and financial assistance.

So, many folks in so many different sacrifice zones have told us different versions of the same sad story. And that is why it is incumbent upon all of us to join this fight and fight back against this because these sacrifice zones are cropping up all over the country. The conditions for our collective sacrifice are being laid in state legislatures and corporate boardrooms every day.

And so, if we working people don’t band together to do something about this, then sadly places like East Palestine are not going to be these horrific outliers, but in fact, they are a window into the future that lies in store for many of us. And that is what we’re here to talk about today because the coalition that brought us all together in East Palestine just a few months ago has been busy putting together more events like the one we’re going to talk about. Today, the conference that is taking place in Toledo, Ohio this Saturday, August 3rd.

I, myself will be participating and I’ll be video conferencing in… Chris from East Palestine will be participating, Mike will be participating, and we will also have the world premiere of Mike’s incredible and important new documentary, the Big Problem in The Great Lakes. So, we’re going to talk about all of that now to make sure you guys know what’s going on. And if you are in the Toledo area, we strongly encourage you to attend this conference this Saturday.

Help us spread the word. Details about it are in the show notes for this episode. So, guys, I wanted to just turn things over to you all and ask if you could, A… and Chris, I know our listeners are always curious to know how you’re doing and how folks in East Palestine are doing.

I was wondering if we could start with you and just give a little update on how things are going over there since we were all together for the conference in March. And then, yeah, Mike, I was wondering if you could pick it up from there and tell us about this conference this Saturday and what folks need to know and what we’re going to be discussing there.

Chris Albright:

Well, for us here in East Palestine, there’s been a lot that has happened since March, obviously. We’ve had the settlement offered by Norfolk Southern, which I believe a lot of people hear just from the things, are reading, from talking to people. We’re not a 100% agreement with. They’re offering us a $600 million settlement, which sounds like a lot of money. It really does.

That’s great. But it’s also being widened out to a 20-mile radius. So, there’s been numbers thrown around. One of them is like $70,000. But you also have to pay back what it is that you used whenever for like relocation, everything.

We stayed at a hotel. We ran up a $35,000 bill at a hotel. They want us to pay that back. This is nothing for the future. If you sign up for it, then you’re losing rights for later on.

Not a lot of good things about it. We’re still trying to fight it and see what happens. But the cleanup zones here and everything, they’re saying everything’s safe, yet you still can walk down to the creeks, poke a stick in the water and the silt underneath the water and still bring up an oily sheen. It’s still happening. It’s still here.

Vinyl chloride is a forever chemical. It is not going to go away. We had the report from Jennifer Homendy and everything from the NTSB and she pretty much blasted Norfolk Southern for the way that they’ve handled this and the EPA, which you’ll find there’s going to be a correlation between what happened here in East Palestine and what is happening up in Toledo. The EPA has lied to us, tried to sweep everything underneath the rug to make everybody here feel good and safe and it’s not true. So, I’ll turn it over to Mike, let him talk about the conference.

Mike Balonek:

So, on Saturday, we’re going to try to replicate what we did in March back in East Palestine with a new conference here in Toledo. The idea here, I would like to try to showcase three different sacrifice zones. Toledo, we’re coming up on our 10-year anniversary of our water crisis that we had because of algal blooms, basically infecting our drinking water and making it completely unusable.

Obviously what Chris is going through, we would like to highlight that and the other struggles that East Palestinians are going through as well. And then, Vina Colley as well, and her fight for nuclear safety in Southern Ohio. So, these are all three good examples that we would like to showcase that these aren’t isolated things, that there’s a pattern here going on.

There’s a pattern going on in the response specifically with the EPA. And there’s a pattern also with the way that these companies are regulated as well. A lot of them are allowed to do whatever they want in terms of safety and health for the communities that they’re based in.

And so, we feel like this is something really important to keep fighting for and to bring to people’s attention. We’re also fighting to get the people of East Palestine healthcare either via the Stafford Act or any other measure that we can. And hopefully this is just one step forward to our conference in October in Washington DC.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell, yeah. And just to underline that in red pen for everyone listening, right, from the Christmas 12-hour live stream fundraiser that we did last year for the folks in East Palestine, to the conference that we were part of in March, to the podcast interviews that we’ve done with Chris and his family and his neighbors. East Palestinians still need help, right?

I mean, they still need healthcare, right? They are still suffering the effects of this catastrophic industrial accident that Norfolk Southern is responsible for, that they did not ask for in East Palestine, that they had no responsibility for themselves. And yet they have been dealing with the fallout from it for the past year and a half while so much of the country has forgotten about them.

And so, I urge you all, please to not forget about them, don’t stop talking about East Palestine. Don’t stop talking about Flint, Michigan. Don’t stop talking about Toledo and its water crisis. Don’t stop talking about the communities in South Baltimore that continue to be poisoned by CSX railroad among many other industrial polluters because it is in the shadow of our own collective forgetfulness that communities like East Palestine get swallowed into this darkness. And so, it’s going to take all of us refusing to let these companies get away with what they have done.

And it’s going to be from us demanding of our government and any entity that can help that they do something to help these people, that anything is actually going to change. So, I just wanted to urge everyone out there not to give up on this fight. And Mike, I wanted to follow up with you on that because a lot of folks, as I mentioned in the intro, they might not know that they are living in or passing through a sacrifice zone, but there are many across this country.

And I think when folks hear that Toledo is a sacrifice zone, then their ears perk up, but they may not have heard about the water crisis that your documentary is really exploring. So, I was wondering if you could give us some background on this, talk a bit about the Toledo water crisis itself and the process of putting this documentary together that you’re going to premiere at the conference that we’re holding in Toledo this Saturday.

Mike Balonek:

Yeah, so this is a long-running issue, and it’s not something that’s necessarily exclusive to Toledo. Algal blooms, in fact, fresh water and salt water sources all over the world, climate change is something that’s exacerbating the issue. And particularly here in Toledo, we are dealing with that. We’re like the canary in the coal mine. Western Lake Erie is the shallowest part of all of the Great Lakes.

And because of that, it’s more prone to the effects of climate change. And so, basically the issue that we’re dealing with is these algal blooms. And this is an issue that’s been ongoing for decades actually, and started to clear up through the ’90s because of good regulation. And then, over time new issues cropped up, particularly factory farming in the area. And that caused the problem to get out of control.

So, on August 2, 2014, we had what we call the Toledo water crisis. It lasted for three days where we couldn’t use the water at all. You couldn’t bathe in it, you couldn’t drink it, you couldn’t brush your teeth, nothing at all. People would have skin irritations and whatnot if they came into contact with it, and you could potentially get sick and have liver damage if you drank too much of it. So, there was a concerted effort throughout the community to let people know, especially elderly people and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that may not have heard about it and not had any way to know about it.

And so, basically at this point, the city was scrambling because they had been bugging the state for years on any kind of safety standards on how to deal with the toxins from these algae. And so, that’s an important part of this is that the algae, it produces these toxins and the toxins can’t be boiled from the water. In fact, when you boil the water, it actually increases the concentration because the toxins don’t boil out with the water. It just evaporates the water. And so, this issue with the toxins, they actually got into our water intake, and so it flooded into our water system.

They had to shut everything down and figure out how to clean it up basically. They had no process put in place by the state or otherwise to deal with this. And so, there was a scramble for three days. And they sent testing samples off to multiple different labs to try to figure out what’s safe and what is not safe and how much is what’s actually there. And they literally had no protocol put in place whatsoever for this.

And this isn’t the fault of the people who deal with the water here in Toledo with the water department. They were screaming about this all along, trying to get help and not getting anything from the state. And so, after three days, we finally got some resolution to it. There was obviously a lot of distrust in the community for a long time, rightfully so, I would say. And so, a lot of people still drink bottled water.

And this is an issue I know Chris deals with every day. He doesn’t drink the tap water in East Palestine, and I don’t blame him at all. I’ve never drank it when I’ve been there either. And this is something ongoing for 10 years here in Toledo that you have people that will not drink the tap water. Now, according to our mayor and the city as a whole, the tap water is safe.

We put in a half a billion dollars into our water treatment plant in order to be able to process these toxins. And more or less, as I understand it, the issue has been solved on the processing side. We’ve literally had no help whatsoever on the actual environmental side. So, as I mentioned, this is a very complex issue. And so, more or less, the simple story of it is that we have these factory farms.

They’re called CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Farming… or Feeding Operations, and they produce massive amounts of waste, as you would imagine. I mean, you have a facility with 3,000 cows, every cow puts out as much waste as maybe 10 human beings. And so, that multiplies very, very quickly. There was a time period where there was no regulation as to how these farms would deal with it, and a lot of it just ended up straight into rivers. Later on.

More recently, the state came up with a program where farmers are paid $60 an acre in order to spread this on their fields. There is no limit though as to how much they can spread. So, as a farmer, you can just basically spread unlimited quantities on a field any time of year that you want. And so, tomorrow there could be a massive thunderstorm and wash all of that extra manure that you just put onto your field, right into the water systems. And so, all of these extra nutrients basically feeds these algal blooms and causes them to grow out of hand to massive sizes that would never occur naturally without these farms in our area.

And so, scientists have been studying this really hard. One of the people that I had talked to in my documentary, Dr. Greg Dick, who is a University of Michigan scientist, he basically states that this is 90% of the problem here. There are a few other sources of this issue, including sewer discharge from cities and stuff like that, golf course runoff, fertilizer, that sort of thing from people’s yards, but that’s minimal. That’s 10% or less of the total amount of phosphorus and stuff like that going into the water system. And so, there are many different ideas on how you could regulate this.

The current idea that the state’s pushing is this thing called H2Ohio and H2Ohio is basically to promote building or rebuilding wetlands in areas that were naturally wetlands and then had been turned into farmland later on. And so, restoring these wetlands will act as a buffer zone before any of these nutrients get to Lake Erie and help absorb it. However, the issue is that these CAFOs produce so much manure and waste to going into the water system that you would have to basically replace the whole shoreline with wetlands in order to make it work if that would even work.

So, it’s unmanageable as it stands. The issue continues to get worse. Every year these algal blooms form earlier, and they last longer. This year has been one of the most toxic years that we’ve had in a long time. The levels are considerably higher than they’ve been in the last couple of years, both because it’s started off as a really warm and wet spring and also persisted being warm throughout the year.

So, it seems like at this point, whatever minimal measures that they throw at this, because they don’t want to regulate the CAFOs, doesn’t seem to be having much effect on the issue. And so, a year ago I started working on this documentary, as you mentioned, it’s called The Big Problem in The Great Lakes, which is this is a big problem in the Great Lakes that we’re having, and it’s going to expand to other Great Lakes. They’re already starting to have this issue in Saginaw Bay. Green Bay is having this issue as well, not to the extent that we have, but it could get there one day. And so, my thought in this process was we need to discuss this.

And there’s other documentaries that are coming out about this as well this, this is the 10-year anniversary, so it makes sense. People are going to be talking about it. And that conversation I think is really important to have because not everybody’s talking about the CAFO issue. And CAFOs are a massive, massive part of this. And they have a massive influence in this state.

Agriculture is huge in Ohio. They have a lot of lobbyists and they fund their candidates well, and that shows when you look at the state house’s response to this issue and the fact that the Ohio EPA has been completely captured by the agricultural industry in Ohio. And so, nothing’s been done about this and just throwing my 2 cents into the arena with my own film, hoping that maybe I could further the discussion a little bit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I mean, it’s such important work, man. And this is part of the process that I’m going through myself doing this series on sacrificed communities, that I’m seeing the connections all over the place. And I’m realizing how many other sacrifice zones there are out there, even if we don’t call them that. But I mean, two years ago I was in Wisconsin, Western Wisconsin and in Polk, Burnett, and Crawford Counties reporting for the Real News Network. And in these times, we produced a documentary ourself on the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation or CAFO crisis that is happening there in that part of the Midwest, right?

And we were talking to residents who have seen the environmental impacts of these massive hog, cow, and chicken CAFOs. We’ve got massive chicken CAFOs here in Maryland. There are massive like cow CAFOs in North Carolina, which if folks recall when there was a flooding in that area a few years back, we saw horrendous stories of just these massive lagoons of animal waste being washed down into the streets, into people’s homes, entire warehouses full of animals that are just treated under horrific conditions, just all getting drowned, and then their carcasses floating out into the environment as well.

And so, folks in Western Wisconsin, they had seen the impacts of these other CAFOs. They knew the threat that they posed to the air quality, to the water, to property values. Everyone had a different reason for not wanting those CAFOs in their community. And we spoke to residents, farmers and advocates in those areas who were trying to stop the construction of these new CAFOs. And I’m sad to say those communities lost those fights.

Those CAFOs are coming in. And what they realized in the midst of that fight is that their ability to regulate these CAFOs was actually stripped from them by their own state government years prior. And so, I really want to underline this for people listening. If you remember those interviews, we did a couple seasons back from Wisconsin. We were talking about the conditions for sacrifice, right?

We were talking in the midst of the process by which these communities are being sacrificed for the profits of big agriculture and the corollary environmental effects that come from this massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, including these giant algae blooms. There was one in Wisconsin while we were there in Madison, there was an algae bloom. And they said, “Don’t touch the water.”

And so, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about living somewhere where you can’t drink the goddamn water coming out of your faucet. You can’t step into the water that’s washing up on your shores. And Chris, I wanted to bring you in here and ask, first of all, if you could say a little bit about what that’s like as someone who is living through this. I don’t think people out there fully grasp all of the happiness and security and all the things that are lost and stolen from people when they can no longer trust the air that they’re breathing or the water coming out of their faucets.

And I just wanted to ask if you could talk to us about what that has been like for you and your family after the derailment. And also, what connections you are seeing between what your community’s going through and what Toledo’s going through.

Chris Albright:

There’s a lot of things that it’s a whole new different way of living basically is what it is. Like Mike previously said, we don’t drink the water here. We don’t do it. We’ve got filters on all of our stuff, the shower, everything like that has charcoal filters on it just so we can take a bath in the shower. We’ve had the air.

The air is something different. I’m like, how do you avoid the air? I have… I’m looking at two purifiers right here in my dining room that I’m looking at, that we run constantly 24 hours a day trying to keep the air clean. We’ve experienced the nosebleeds. We’ve experienced rashes.

We’ve experienced different changes in people that we know are directly attributed to what we’re breathing and what we’re smelling and everything else that’s going on in this area. It’s really weird. We stayed in a hotel for four months. When we came back, we ripped up flooring, got rid of carpeting, got rid of bedding, got rid of clothes, got rid of anything that chemical could have possibly permeated. And we still don’t feel safe here.

It’s still not right. It still isn’t how I want to live. It’s not how I worry when people come here. I don’t want them getting sick. It’s taking a toll on us in a number of ways.

Financially has been devastating, emotionally, spiritually, everything has been completely altered by what happened here. And like you said, Max, this was not our fault. We didn’t do this. We didn’t cause this. We didn’t want this.

I’ve told people this a million times. If I could go back to February 2nd of last year and get out, and if I knew it was coming in a heartbeat, I would’ve kept living my life the way it should have been going. Instead, we’ve had, like I said, the nosebleeds and then rashes and high blood pressure, and I’ve experienced severe heart failure and everything from it, and it’s not right. And they’re letting it happen to us. And our hands are tied.

What do we do? How do we handle this? How do we go up against these corporate giants that are doing this to us? Talking about Toledo and tying in with the EPA. The EPA has blatantly lied to us and everything here, and telling us everything is fine.

And up there, they’re doing the same thing. They’re saying, “No, go ahead and do this. It’s okay. It’s under these levels,” or whatever they’re saying up there and it’s not, people don’t feel safe. This is a country where, no, we should have to feel like that.

We have the resources. We have the means to fix this, to correct this problem, these issues that we’re having and all these different sacrifice towns and cities all across the nation, there are ways we can fix this. But too often, at least in my belief, corporations are throwing money at different government officials and they’re not doing anything about it. And that there is why they’re called sacrifice zones. They’re sacrificing us.

They’re literally sacrificing us so they can make a profit. It still completely baffles me on how they’re allowed to do that in this country. It is not right. Like Mike was talking about Lake Erie and everything, we go up to Erie all the time when I used to, whenever we could. It’s nice to go up there and just wait in the water and sit on the beach and just have a family day.

You look at the people in Toledo, they can’t do that. They can’t do it. You’re stripping that away from them in all for profit over people. It’s got to change and it has to happen now. It has to happen now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man, well, as always, I thought that was beautifully and powerfully put, brother. And I just hope people out there listen to what you’re saying because sadly too few of us do listen until it happens to us. And what I just hope folks out there understand is that one, it’s already happening to you, baby. Like I said, you got those forever chemicals in your blood. You got the microplastics in your body, you’re breathing in a lot of the shit that we are too.

Two, if it’s not directly happening to you, that does not mean it is not a crime against humanity that we as fellow human beings have a moral duty to oppose. And so, please, yeah, do not just forget about this. Do not just shrug it off and say, “Well, good luck to these other sacrifice communities.” Really, we’ve got to do something about this. Otherwise, it’s going to happen more and more.

And guys, I wanted to just round out by asking if, yeah, you could tell our listeners like any other key details they need to know about the conference that’s going to be taking place this weekend in Toledo, what they can expect there. And yeah, any other final wrap up messages that you wanted to get in before we close here?

Chris Albright:

I would say we’re going to have a lot of different panel speakers up there. All of them are going to have something different to offer to educate everybody on. And it would be great if you could come out and show the support and be there, listen to it, educate yourself, because like Max just said, the things that are happening, everybody thinks you’re isolated. They’re not. This is going to… not will or could.

This is going to happen to you when you are… in your town. There’s nothing stopping these people, these corporations from doing this kind of stuff, from overlooking the safety of the people. You guys need to come out and hear about this, listen to it, listen to us, and prepare yourselves and be proactive, not retroactive. Be proactive about things to avoid what’s happened to us, Toledo, a hunter’s point, all kinds of places in the country, and take the steps you can to alleviate that, that you’re not dealing with everything we’ve been dealing with. Mike?

Mike Balonek:

So, yeah, I think that’s a really good point there. And I think to add to that and emphasize, Chris and I are just regular guys. I worked retail in factories before I started doing this. And Chris, as a lot of you guys already know, worked at Miller Pipeline, laying pipeline. So, we’re not special in what we’re doing.

And I think it’s important to recognize that anybody can do what we’re doing. You have your own way of doing it, your own way of using your voice to speak out against things like this. And you can organize your own conference in your own community for things going on. I’m willing to bet that pretty much every community in this country is a sacrifice zone because of basically a century’s worth of industry where nobody cared and basically dump stuff everywhere. Toledo’s got a long history of that.

I know Eastern Ohio, same thing with the coal mining and all sorts of other stuff over there. And so, chances are wherever you live has been affected in some way or another and investigate that, and get that out. It’s important that getting all of this stuff to light educates people because then we know better what we’re fighting against. And we can hold corporations accountable for the stuff that they’re doing either legally or by withholding money from them, by boycotts or whatever. There’s a lot of measures that we as regular citizens can take, and they don’t all have to revolve around voting for people, especially the presidential candidates.

I think the one last point that I want to say is that Toledo is super close to Detroit. It’s only two hours away from Cleveland, only an hour away from Fort Wayne, only an hour… about two hours away from Columbus. So, all of those sacrifice zones. You’re willing to make the drive, you’re welcome to join us and share your story if you have one. Otherwise, just sit and listen to everybody else’s stories.

It’ll be a great time. Hopefully educational and heartwarming as well as something that will piss you off. And so, with that, I appreciate Max for having us on here to talk about this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Chris Albright and Mike Balonek for talking with me and for all the important work that they’re doing. If you are in driving distance to Toledo, then come on out this Saturday for this important conference and documentary screening. The conference again will be held at the Kent Branch Library in Toledo, Ohio, and it begins at 9:30 AM this Saturday, August 3rd. And if you can’t make it out to Toledo, you can still watch Mike’s important documentary on the Toledo Water Crisis on YouTube, and you absolutely should watch it.

We’ve included links to that and to the event page for the conference in the show notes of this episode. And as always, I want to thank you all out there for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

In Northern Alberta, Canada, sit the Athabasca tar sands—the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen, and a major driver of Canada’s economy. The vast majority of Canadian oil production comes from the extraction and processing of the crude bitumen found in the tar sands. But while Canada prospers off the tar sands industry, Indigenous communities downstream are in the grips of its toxic impact. It is well documented that the people of Fort Chipewyan, in northern Alberta, have been struck by disproportionately high rates of cancer, and their proximity to the tar sands has long been the suspected dominant factor contributing to their sickness. 

In a new feature documentary, Killer Water, award-winning journalist Brandi Morin and award-winning filmmaker/director Geordie Day delve deep into the heart of the environmental crisis plaguing the Alberta oil sands, uncovering the hidden truths that have long been ignored. The film exposes the detrimental impact of toxic tailings ponds leakage on the delicate ecosystems, water sources, and human life in and around Fort Chipewyan. Through stunning visuals and compelling narratives, Morin and Day take viewers on a journey that highlights the injustices faced by the Indigenous community living in the shadow of this industrial development.

Killer Water was produced in partnership with The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

Pre-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Studio Production: Geordie Day

Post-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

TRANSCRIPT

Brandi Morin:  This is a stretch of Lake Athabasca, in northern Alberta, Canada. Jason Castor is going as fast as he can, but the waters here are shallow, too shallow. If he slows down, his boat could get stuck in the mud, or even flip over. The water here is low due to industries drawing out water like the WAC Bennett Dam in British Columbia. The other culprits are climate change and the relentless industrial mining of the Alberta tar sands.

The Peace-Athabasca Delta is the second largest freshwater delta in the world. And under the delta is the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen. A black, viscus, semi-solid form of petroleum, [bitumen] is the main component of Canadian oil production, growing from 48% of total production in 2008 to 73% in 2021 according to the Canada Energy Regulator. In 2021, crude bitumen production totaled about 3.3 million barrels per day, and in 2020, it was worth $42.7 billion in sales value.

But while Canada prospers off the oil sands industry, Indigenous communities downstream are in the grips of its toxic impact.

Jason Castor:  On the riverways, there’s this slurry of foam that looks like oil, or some kind of chemical in there. And they said it’s supposed to be safe to drink. So, I don’t know, would you feed your family this? I look at this stuff and most of the time, I find this substance in it, mixed with the foam itself. And once it dries, it doesn’t come off. You pressure wash it, it won’t come off.

Back in the day, elders used to take water, a cup in their boat, and they used to drink it. Nowadays, I wouldn’t want to drink this.

Brandi Morin:  Jason is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, ACFN for short, located in Fort Chipewyan. He’s been a traditional hunter, trapper, and fisherman for nearly 20 years. Over that time, he has documented strange changes in the water, the land, and even in the animals.

Jason Pastor:  And they say that it’s natural. Well, I know that that’s not natural, because I’ve been on the river my whole life.

Brandi Morin:  Jason worked as a heavy equipment operator for a major oil extraction company in the oil sands for several years. But over time, he says, being that close to the site of extraction gave him reasons to be unnerved.

Jason Pastor:  I was working out on site, and then, there’s so much things going on on site. There’s oil trucks moving around, and all the spills, and there’s always the smell of bitumen. I just felt sick to my stomach when I went to work [inaudible]. And in my mind, what am I doing to my land, or what I’m doing to our water?

Brandi Morin:  Jason was raised in the foster care system, away from Fort Chipewyan, after both of his parents died while ice fishing on Lake Athabasca when he was young. Then, nearly 20 years ago, Jason moved his wife and children back to Fort Chipewyan, and did the hard work of learning a traditional lifestyle, the lifestyle his ancestors created over countless generations. But those traditions are now at risk.

When you were a kid, did you swim in the lake?

Jason Pastor:  Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  And now…?

Jason Pastor:  Now I don’t go in the water. I just don’t.

Brandi Morin:  What about your kids? Do you tell them not to?

Jason Pastor:  I don’t take them on the lake over there. I take them elsewhere. I tell them, ‘You don’t go swimming at the dock, you don’t go swimming at the beach park, you don’t go swimming anywhere around here. You want to go, we go to Inland Lake, or I’ll take you way up the lake to the beaches.’

Brandi Morin:  That life-giving, life-sustaining river is now a little more than a transportation route. When he travels the river to pick up supplies or visit friends in Fort McMurray, Jason doesn’t take his hunting or fishing equipment anymore.

Jason Pastor:  From this area, I usually hunt for another… about 40 minutes, and I won’t go any further. That’s my area of hunting. Even though my reserve is still up here, ACFN Reserve, I choose not to go hunting in that area because the oil plants are getting closer. When we get so close to the oil and gas, we have animals, they’ll be just walking right along the bank. And it seems like they just know that we’re not going to hunt them, because we already passed our buffer zone and put our guns away, and we decided we’re not hunting in that area because there’s too much contaminants. They know, because they know we’re not going to hunt them.

Brandi Morin:  Jason and other local residents have suspected pollution from the oil sands has been affecting them for years. Their fears aren’t unfounded. It is well documented that the people of Fort Chipewyan have been struck by disproportionately high rates of cancer, and their proximity to the tar sands has long been the suspected dominant factor contributing to their sickness. And a recent tailings pond spill reiterated their concerns.

In February, Indigenous communities downstream from Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine, about 75 kilometers upstream of Fort Chipewyan, learned of a massive spill of 5.3 million liters, or 1.4 million gallons, from the mine’s tailing area. Oil sands tailings are where the mining companies store the byproducts of the oil sands mining and extraction process, including water, sand, clay, residual bitumen, and various chemicals.

Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine spill was one of the largest releases of toxic tailings in Alberta’s history. However, Fort Chipewyan’s leadership was only made aware of the toxic spill through an environmental protection order, issued by the Alberta Energy Regulator, that called on the company to immediately contain and remediate the spill on Feb. 6. Then, in March, the Canadian press obtained a document that showed the province stalled the initiation of an emergency response for a month.

Meanwhile, Indigenous leaders found out that another tailings pond at the same Kearl Mine site had been leaking for at least nine months prior to the major incident in February.

Soon after the incident, Environment and Climate Change Canada launched a formal investigation into potential violations of the Fisheries Act by Imperial Oil.

Speaker 1:  …An official investigation into the Imperial Oil Kearl Facility.

Chief Allan Adam:  For some reason, it has become my job to come to this place in order to remind this government and its duties and its responsibilities. Your responsibility for properly regulating massive industry projects that potentially threaten the health and safety of Fort Chipewyan and other downstream communities. For 10 months, this leak went unreported, despite the Alberta Regulator and the oil sands operators being fully aware of what was going on.

Brandi Morin:  But the nightmare didn’t end there. Just one month after the Kearl Mine spill, Suncor reported 6 million liters of tailings water that exceeded sediment guidelines were released into the Athabasca River from its Fort Hills oil sands mine. Imperial Oil maintains its spill did not affect nearby waterways or wildlife.

Brad Corson:  Monitoring continues to show there have been no impacts to local drinking water sources, and there is no indication of impact to wildlife.

Brandi Morin:  But the AAR’s own tests indicated the presence of industrial wastewater in a fish-bearing waterbody near the mine, and subsequent testing detected F2 hydrocarbons at levels exceeding the surface water quality guidelines for the protection of freshwater aquatic life. Still, the AER claimed in April there was no indication of a change in drinking water, and no adverse impacts to fish or wildlife had been observed.

Laurie Pushor:  …We have had no test results that suggest any of those compounds have left Waterbody Three.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam doesn’t buy that, and he’s not alone.

Francis Scarpaleggia:  The lake, which feeds into a tributary of the Firebag River, also contains naphthenic acids, which are formed from the breakdown of petrochemicals, et cetera.

Heather McPherson:  You are finding toxins outside of the Kearl site, there is an impacted area, and you are continuing to allow Imperial Oil to put tailings into that system.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam says his band is preparing a lawsuit against the company in the provincial and federal governments.

Chief Allan Adam:  Regardless of what government forms, or what government’s in place, when your back is up against a circle of a wall, try to find the curve, and I’ll put you there. But right now, that’s where they’re at, and there’s nowhere for them to go.

From ACFN’s point of view, how the justice scale goes, we will find out, because that’s where we’re going. And this is going to court.

Brandi Morin:  Is there a lawsuit launched, or —

Chief Allan Adam:  It’s going to happen, yeah. And it’s not going to look good for anybody, and it’s not going to look good for Canada, and it’s not going to look good for Alberta. But Alberta will fight. But Canada will buckle. And we can’t allow our water to be tainted.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam has been fighting this fight for decades. He’s been ACFN’s elected chief for almost 16 consecutive years, and he became internationally recognized for speaking out about the adverse impacts of the oil sands.

Chief Allan Adam:  Climate change has affected our people in more ways than one, with the depletion of our water, the drying up of our ecosystem in regards to one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world.

Brandi Morin:  Celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Neil Young, Jane Fonda, James Cameron, Desmond Tutu, and Greta Thunberg have visited Fort Chipewyan to help amplify the concerns.

Greta Thunberg:  Yeah, we continue the struggle, and yeah, we won’t give up.

Chief Allan Adam:  And neither will we.

Brandi Morin:  Then, in 2018, chief Adam announced he wanted to either buy a stake in Canada’s federally-owned Trans Mountain pipeline, or partner to build another future line.

Chief Allan Adam:  We want to be owners of a pipeline. We think that the pipeline is the most critical component to the oil and gas sector, especially from this region, and if Fort McMurray and Alberta wants to survive, the Athabasca Tribal Council has to be alongside both Alberta and Canada to make it run.

Brandi Morin:  He was labeled a sellout by some people, who claimed he abandoned the cause. But Adam said he couldn’t stop the oil industry, and he was tired of fighting against it, so he switched tactics to ensure his community at least receives long-overdue financial compensation.

Chief Allan Adam:  The sad scenario is that I would have loved to fight, and I still love to fight today, but there has to be a time when you have to draw the line.

Brandi Morin:  Then in 2020, Chief Adam again made international headlines when he was brutally arrested and beaten by RCMP officers in Fort McMurray for an expired license plate. Several months later, charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer were dropped against him, following public backlash when footage of the incident was released [muffled shouting].

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:  We have all now seen the shocking video of Chief Adam’s arrest, and we must get to the bottom of this.

Chief Allan Adam:  If I had my way, in five years, the RCMP should be gone from all Native reserves across the country.

Brandi Morin:  Amidst all this, the chief never gave up caring about what happens to his homelands.

Chief Allan Adam:  Regardless of what and who we say we are, we have to work together as a community to stand as one, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to survive here in this community. How you say it, [speaking Dene]?

[Speaking Dene] means, I love you. I love you. That’s what that means. [Speaking Dene], I love you with all my heart, I guess the old timers would say, back in the day.

They could be giants and walk over us and everything, but you take out their knees, they will fall. Because our treaty trumps everything. We have legal rights, we have legal position, we have legal title, and we never, ever surrendered anything.

Brandi Morin:  What about Premier Smith? Have you ever had any convos with her? Because from what I understand, she was downplaying the seriousness of these spills, and the impacts, and she’s very, very pro-industry.

Premier Danielle Smith:  Nobody wants to feel like they have potentially been drinking water that has been exposed, and I’m pleased to report that none of this spill got into the tributaries.

Chief Allan Adam:  She hasn’t answered my text message that I sent to her when she was running for the Premier’s office and everything, and until today, she hasn’t answered my text. But I know she’s got it, because I have her cell number that goes right to the Premier’s office.

Brandi Morin:  What did you say in the text?

Chief Allan Adam:  I just told her straight out, ‘You want to continue this to go on? Well, then, give us 10% of all revenue sharing within Treaty Eight territory. That’s within a fair reason, and you don’t even have to back pay us. Just pay us up today.’ When times like this are happening, where homes are being destroyed by wildfire and everything and stuff like that because of climate change of development and everything. I raised the alarm years ago when I said that one day we’ll become environmental refugees. Where are we now?

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam is growing frustrated with the encroaching threats to his community, threats that he believes are linked to industrial development. Like a wildfire that forced the entire community of Fort Chipewyan to be evacuated in May.

Premier Danielle Smith:  The fire danger level remains extreme in the North.

Speaker 8:  Smoke is seen billowing over the horizon as an out-of-control wildfire inches closer to the community. Residents of Fort Chipewyan forced to evacuate.

Speaker 9:  There are only two ways out of Fort Chipewyan: the first by plane. The Canadian Armed forces provided a Hercules aircraft and a convoy of flights took more than 500 people to nearby Fort McMurray. The second way out, by boat. Volunteers shuttled residents late into the night to hotel rooms once they got to safety.

Chief Allan Adam:  I’m Chief Allan Adam, and it’s 4:34. This is the last of the evacuees, and as you see in the background, we got the fire burning. We’re going to stay behind, and we’re going to help protect the community in ways that we can. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything. We got this. You guys take care.

Brandi Morin:  The CEO of Imperial Oil apologized for the toxic spills to Canadian lawmakers in Ottawa last April.

Brad Corson:  I am deeply apologetic for what has happened at Kearl. We are committed to correcting this situation and ensuring it does not happen again.

Brandi Morin:  The president of the AER also issued an apology.

Laurie Pushor:  It is clear that neither Imperial nor the AER met community expectations to ensure they’re fully aware of what is and what was happening, and for that, I am truly sorry.

Brandi Morin:  [Drum beating] But the damage is done, and Chief Adam has lost trust in all stakeholders involved.

Chief Allan Adam:  When you look at your grandchildren and everything, and you say, ‘Is that my legacy that’s going to continue to happen?’ And yet, we’re watching our own grandchildren, our own kids, pass away with diseases of cancer and everything, and we can’t do nothing.

15 years ago and everything, when we first brought it out to the public about what was going on here, just because nobody talks about it? It’s still going on, it’s still happening. People are still being diagnosed with cancer, but we live it because it’s our normal.

Brandi Morin:  Back in April, when Chief Adam testified in Ottawa, he learned his father-in-law had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

Chief Allan Adam:  My father-in-law today is going to get his results back. Because they found a big growth in his liver last week, of cancer. And I’m supposed to be with my wife, to be with her, to comfort her when she hears this news. But I’m here giving testimony to all of everybody across Canada about the issue, about what’s going on in our community.

Brandi Morin:  I watched when you were testifying to the Environmental Committee in Ottawa, you were talking about the cancers, and you said, nobody ever brings this up anymore. And you said, my own father-in-law is being tested.

Chief Allan Adam:  Well, we got the results back then. But yesterday, because my wife don’t fly, and the water being low—because BC Hydro Site C is filling up right now and reducing our water level—we have a hard time traveling. My wife has to make a decision now, because yesterday, the doctor told us, ‘Expect one month to one year.’

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam is familiar with the pain of losing loved ones, including his own father, to cancer.

Chief Allan Adam:  I went through that moment, and my dad went through this process. I had to make a decision as a Chief back then. What do I do? Do I run the Nation, or do I step aside? I stepped aside for six months and spent time with my dad.

Everything inside, everything that’s here, will affect people, regardless of what. And my father-in-law lived off the land all his life. He still goes out in the bush today. He’s 88 years old. He just came back yesterday from the bush. Can’t stop him. His love for the land is who he is. And like I said, it all connects together, everything connects. The water, the land, and the people.

[Drumming and singing]

Water’s everything, water’s life. It gives life to everything that we thrive on, everything that we believe the Creator gave to us.

When we were young, when we were growing up, when my mother and dad took us out in the land, we didn’t have a deep freeze, but our deep freeze was right here, and it was fresh. Within the year, I probably take, probably about, maybe four fish. And yet, fish is the healthiest thing that you could eat.

Brandi Morin:  How has your community, the people here, how have they responded to the news of the tailing spills? Are they scared?

Chief Allan Adam:  Yeah, we’re scared. Well, I’ll say that for a fact.

Brandi Morin:  How do you [crosstalk]?

Chief Allan Adam:  My name is Allan Adam. I’m the chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. When it comes to the water issue, I am very scared, because it has never been resolved, and it has never been talked about ever since we raised the issue. But it’s still there. The innocent killer. Looks so beautiful, but yet, it’s a killer.

Well, good afternoon, everyone. I just want to pass on a message. My wife lost her father today.

Brandi Morin:  Dr. John O’Connor, who worked as a physician in Fort Chipewyan for nearly 16 years, alerted officials years ago about the disproportionately high rates of both rare and common cancers among community members.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Within the first couple of years, it was sort of plain to me that this community of 1,200 people, had a lot of illness. And then, as I got to know the community more, and trust was established, it dawned on me. It was quite a shock.

Cancer and autoimmune diseases, of a type and number that I really wasn’t seeing in my large practice in Fort McMurray. They hunt, they trapped, and gathered. They were very well established, very self-contained and contented. This made it all the more sort of alarming for me.

As the years went by, it dawned on me that this was probably preconceived. I thought this was something that was already in the vocabulary, in their lexicon, and I just happened to touch a raw nerve with them, because there was no undue alarm. The facts were there for all to see, documented. And not just by me, by the Provincial Health Authority. They were obviously hiding something. They were protecting Big Oil, Big Fossil.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. When you learned of this big leak that Imperial Oil had covered up for nine months, and then this huge leak that it had earlier this year, and then Suncor a month later, what did you think when you learned that?

Dr. John O’Connor:  My first thought when I heard about these leaks that weren’t reported or were covered up was, ‘Who’d be surprised at this?’ It set me thinking and looking back to the late ’90s. Back then, they had public hearings. And at one of them, Suncor admitted that their oldest pond had been leaking at an alarming rate, for years, directly into the water table.

There are carcinogenic chemicals in these tailings ponds that, individually, are Class One carcinogens for humans and animals. There are chemicals science is unsure of the impact of when they’re mixed, the soup that’s created by these tailings ponds. There’s also, even more alarming, endocrine disruptors that are leaching directly into the environment, into the water, that are impacting fish. And, of course, fish [are] a staple diet in Fort Chip. And, of course, these fish are being caught with missing parts and growths and stuff.

Brandi Morin:  What do you think about children being diagnosed with cancer? You hear of adults and things being diagnosed, but when it’s kids, it’s like, wow.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Cancer in children in a setting like that, Brandi, represents the canary in the mine. The other health issues that are in Fort Chip are red flags. Children getting cancer should be a siren. It should be a four-alarm fire siren. And I don’t hear any concern being expressed by anyone in a position of authority, either federally or provincially.

Brandi Morin:  Do you think that that is to protect the interests of industry?

Dr. John O’Connor:  I think industry is untouchable. It owns this province, controls everything.

Calvin Waquan:  I see this lake as something that teaches me a lot of lessons. It’s my fridge, it’s my classroom, it’s my history book. It’s my solitude.

Brandi Morin:  Mikisew Cree member Calvin Waquan utilizes Lake Athabasca and its river systems on a regular basis. Calvin moved home to Fort Chipewyan after his father was murdered in Edmonton in 2014, because he wanted to reconnect with his ancestral homeland.

Calvin Waquan:  You see the beauty of our community, but that all comes with a cost. And it all comes with the thought of being sick one day.

Brandi Morin:  And even kids are getting cancer?

Calvin Waquan:  Oh yeah, for sure. My son had two friends who recently had cancer, and the same age, 10 years old.

Brandi Morin:  From here?

Calvin Waquan:  From here, yeah, and people recently dying of cancers. And that scares me. It scares my wife.

Brandi Morin:  The rates are incredibly high because of how small this community is.

Calvin Waquan:  It is. It’s astronomical. When someone like Dr. O’Connor or somebody blows the whistle, they get threatened to take their job away, or to silence them because of the almighty dollar, but where’s our share? Where’s the royalties? Where’s something that’s going to create sustainability, something that’s going to create sovereignty for our people?

My wife wanted to move away from here, and me not wanting to be here anymore, but I want to be here with my people and with my granny, and beside my father that I buried nine and a half years ago. Yeah, I could see him out my backyard in my window.

But it’s getting to a point where I don’t know if I want to stick around because young guys like me are dying from cancers, and older people are passing away, and it’s sad to see. And is it the meat? Is it the fish? Is it the air? Is it the plants? It’s everything. It’s the medicines. It’s everything—everything that we trusted in before we are guessing at now. When I’m burying my papa and my uncle and cousins and seeing other people die from rare cancers, bile duct cancers, you can’t tell me there’s something not wrong here.

Brandi Morin:  Does it bother you when you’re out here and you’re trying to enjoy that, and you’re thinking, well, it’s being poisoned?

Calvin Waquan:  Yeah, it gets me sometimes, I guess, when I’m seeing the slicks in different bays and coves. And it shouldn’t be on our minds to second guess if we’re going to eat the fish out of the water.

Brandi Morin:  After he learned of the Kearl tailing spill, Calvin showed up to a town hall held by Imperial Oil holding a water bottle tainted with motor oil and presented it to Jamie Long, Imperial Oil’s vice president of mining.

Calvin Waquan:  Now my kids that are in the back have to live with this for the next generation to come. You know what? I was going to pour this all over the projector so it would leak down the screen. That screen and that lens that I was going to pour the oil on? That fits our traditional way of life, and how you’ve tarnished it. No thanks [applause].

I was pretty riled up, as you can see. And I walked in there pretty calm, and I just told them how I felt, and I guess how my ancestors have been trying to tell people from the beginning. Just like my granny and my kôkom [grandma], Mary Rose said, enough is enough, and I just had enough. I saw my little girl there, my boy. Once industry is affecting the serenity of that and the beauty of this water and these lands, I’m going to stand up and be a warrior for my people today and tomorrow, and for every day to come.

Brandi Morin:  It’s just heartbreaking, though, at the same time.

Calvin Waquan:  Yup.

Brandi Morin:  My God, this is your traditional land. Chief Adam has told me more than once that you’ll be climate refugees.

Calvin Waquan:  Yeah, we will. Yeah. We’re going to lose the way that our ancestors left for us. And they meant for us to walk on the land and the water farther than they did, but not to this extent, to move away from home.

Brandi Morin:  Tân’si [hello]. Hi, Ian.

Ian Peace:  Tân’si [hello].

Brandi Morin:  Ian Peace, an environmental scientist who lived and worked in northern Alberta, including Fort Chipewyan for several years, wrote a thesis about leaking tailings in the oil sands in 2019.

Ian Peace:  We found results from the experiment that we did that would suggest there was process-affected water making its way from the tails impoundment area down to the river. It’s pretty widely agreed that naphthenic acids are the main toxicant of concern. And I did a little bit of number crunching on this, and between Suncor and Syncrude, there is at least 200,000 kilograms per day of naphthenic acids being discharged to tailing ponds. And that is a substance that’s been shown to kill fish in concentrations as low as 20 milligrams per liter.

So here goes all those tailings into the tailings pond, and most of the water drained out the bottom, leaving behind the sludge accumulation. The main contaminant is naphthenic acids, the one that everybody agrees is the biggest concern. It’s expressing to the river in almost the same amounts that are already dissolved into the tailings water.

Brandi Morin:  Do you think that the Alberta government and industry, do you think that they downplay the impacts, specifically, I guess, on the river, and with these leaking tailings?

Ian Peace:  Yeah. Yeah, I think that that’s very clear. You can see that it’s downplayed tactically and strategically. There’s no doubt. They don’t look for a number of compounds, and they don’t look in the areas where they might find it. And it’s been an effective strategy.

Brandi Morin:  There’s a big void when it comes to the knowledge of the combination of the chemicals in tailings, and how those chemicals affect human health.

Mandy Olsgard:  Hello?

Brandi Morin:  Tân’si [hello], Mandy, this is Brandi. How are you?

Mandy Olsgard:  Hi, I am good. Just got a little delayed on my drive, so sorry. I’m going to be in my car.

Brandi Morin:  No, it’s no problem.

Mandy Olsgard is an environmental toxicologist. She studies how chemicals affect people and the environment. She’s worked to assess water contamination for the AER and various First Nation communities throughout her career, including Fort Chipewyan.

Mandy Olsgard:  When they do an assessment so that they can approve an oil sands mine, they assess the risks to human health. There is then no regulatory body that is responsible for community or human health once that project is approved. We only manage human health through the environment —

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  …And environmental quality monitoring. So there’s this gap between what we predicted as a risk to human or Indigenous community health, and then how we monitor that during the life of a project. So it’s not shocking that communities are bringing these concerns forward, whether it’s odors from air emissions, deposition of dust, changes to wildlife and plants.

Brandi Morin:  The issue at hand is proving whether the higher rates of cancer are linked to the oil sands. The provincial and federal governments have said multiple water tests they conducted found no evidence of contamination of waterways near the Kearl mine.

Laurie Pushor:  There has been no evidence presented that this reached the waterway.

Brandi Morin:  But the ACFN, the Mikisew Cree, and Meti governments in Fort Chipewyan don’t trust those findings. So they’ve been conducting their own tests at their water treatment plant. Yet, Mandy said those standard water inspections are inadequate because tests for certain chemicals are not conducted.

Mandy Olsgard:  But we’ve never really linked that to how it changed human health and the condition of human health. There’s studies that have shown chemical concentrations are elevated. So that’s why when people come at anyone and say, ‘Oh, but we’re cleaning up the world’s largest oil spill,’ that’s all bunk.

So they’re not. They process the oil sands, and they release different types of chemicals, different forms of those chemicals, and sometimes novel chemicals. They have introduced polyacrylamide and acrylamide into the environment there as use for flocculants in tailings ponds, for things that make the tailings come together and sink to the bottom to clarify the water cap.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  So there’s novel chemicals, there’s increased concentrations. They change the oxidation state of metals — and that’s important, because how bioavailable, how easily a human can absorb something, depends on the oxidation state. So when people are saying, ‘This was natural,’ no, it’s not.

Brandi Morin:  Tar does naturally exist along the Athabasca’s rivers, banks, and tributaries. Its black goo seeping from the shores, has been recorded by local Indigenous tribes for millennia, and as early as the 1700s by settler explorers. But the naturally-occurring tar isn’t what these issues are about.

Mandy Olsgard:  Development changed it fundamentally, and that’s what we need to focus on. Did it change it to the point enough that it’s affected human health? Those increased rates of cancer, mental health? That’s all in there. But I’ve never seen Alberta Health or the provincial government do anything for communities based on that report, or try and figure out why.

Brandi Morin:  I don’t even trust them. Look at what the AER has done, and…

Mandy Olsgard:  I know. I worked there. I don’t anymore. I get it.

Margo Vermillion:  [Singing].

Brandi Morin:  Marco Vermilion is a Dene Cree elder who grew up in Fort Chipewyan. She was shattered to learn of the tailing spills.

Margo Vermillion:  When I heard, actually, about the oil spill, my heart was so sore. When I was little, I used to come down to the waters with pails of water to bring home to drink. It was clean water back then. Everything was so much more healthier.

Today, you look at our water, and it’s sad. You can feel the sadness from them. You can feel that they’re crying for… Sorry, I just get so emotional, because I really believe that our waters are crying for us to help them, like everything else. Everything else that’s connected to the waters, it’s our plants and our trees and our insects. They’re also crying.

I went down to the lake, and as I was walking down the shore, what a beautiful eagle feather that I had found, on my birthday—I was gifted with a feather. Then I thought, well, I’m just going to walk over the hill, so I walked over the hill. Brandi, you wouldn’t believe… You could almost feel that the trees and the plants were in mourning. They were mourning because of the burnt, them being burnt, right?

And I sang for them. I sang, because I really felt their sadness too. So I felt their sadness of the destruction that’s happening to our earth. I think that, you know what? Again, it’s men, it’s human beings that are making all of this destruction happen.

[Drumming and singing] I don’t have no faith whatsoever in industry. How can we in the community have faith in them? They’ve broken promises, their words mean nothing. If they came and they decided to live here in the community and to be amongst us, to experience what it is that we experience, maybe I’ll listen to them.

Brandi Morin:  Exactly. But they were already covering up that spill for months or more before. They didn’t even tell you.

Margo Vermillion:  Yeah, and they didn’t say a word to the community. I don’t know anymore. I mean, you know what? When they investigate their own self like that, nothing really happens. We don’t need scientists to tell us. We have the proof here. We have our elders that talk about the changes that they see. That’s our scientists. But now, today, nowadays, if you don’t have your papers in being a scientist, nothing else is true, right?

Brandi Morin:  Meanwhile, Chief Adam isn’t convinced Imperial Oil has fully contained the Kearl mine leak, and the AER absolved itself of any wrongdoing when it released its report of its internal investigation into the spills in late September. Now, Chief Adam is determined to keep the pressure on industry, the AER, and governments to ensure they rectify their shortfalls.

Chief Allan Adam:  This is a wakeup call for Canada, and this is a wakeup call for Alberta. And this is a downfall for the AER, because they failed to uphold the protection of this community. They created a big mess, and the big mess is going to be, one day, revealed in the courts, and this is where it’s all going to, regardless of… The Alberta government can’t continue to run the AER as its own, what you’d call the gunslinger of the West.

Brandi Morin:  But even the fact that the feds are even considering allowing them to release so-called “treated” tailings into the river, that is unacceptable, as well, you’ve said.

Chief Allan Adam:  It is unacceptable, and we’re not going to accept it. Turn the tap on and find out.

Brandi Morin:  Despite all this, the feds are actually considering adopting regulations for the release of so-called “treated oil sands mining wastewater” into the Athabasca River. The new regulations are expected to be finalized by 2025.

It’s so crazy, because they don’t even know how to deal with the tailings and stuff that they already have. They’re scrambling. ‘What do we do? How do we get rid of this?’ Now, they’re proposing to the government to let them release it, because they say it’s safe and treated now, into the river. They can’t even contain what they have.

It’s astonishing that in such a small, isolated community, pretty much everyone I’ve talked to here has a loved one that’s died from cancer.

Jason Pastor:  Our people don’t really die of old age no more, more of a cancer. People don’t die naturally as they used to. I can’t speak for everybody, but I know on my side of my family, I had about four or five people, my own personal loved ones, that passed away from some cancers, and that made me have mixed feelings about this area.

Brandi Morin:  Water, the life giver, the one necessity Jason and others here make sure to stock up on in bottled form when out on the territory.

Jason Pastor:  You see [inaudible], there’s a whole story I was told, you see, about water. When you’re out of supplies, you usually go home from the bush. If you go berry picking or you go in the bushes, usually, you run out of supplies, you go home. Nowadays, if you run out of water, you have no choice to go home.

Brandi Morin:  The AER declined an interview request, citing the ongoing investigation into the tailing spills. Imperial Oil did not respond to requests for an interview.

I’m Brandi Morin, reporting in the unceded territories of the Athabasca Chipewyan, Mikisew Cree, and Metis nations, for The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug 31, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

An under-the-radar report by U.S. President Joe Biden’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council should not go unnoticed, said the national watchdog Food & Water Watch on Thursday, as buried in the document is a call for the privatization of U.S. water systems, which progressive lawmakers and civil society groups have long opposed.

On page 15 of the 38-page report, the advisory council said the federal government should “remove barriers to privatization, concessions, and other nontraditional models of funding community water systems in conjunction with each state’s development of best practice.”

Food & Water Watch (FWW) suggested that the recommendation goes hand in hand with the panel chairmanship of Adebayo Ogunlesi, who is the chairman and CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

GIP is “an infrastructure investment bank with an estimated $100 billion in assets under management that targets energy, transportation, digital, and water infrastructure,” said FWW, making the takeover of public water and wastewater utilities by a private corporation—often under the guise of improving aging systems and lowering costs—financially beneficial for the bank.

Mary Grant, Public Water for All campaign director at FWW, called the recommendation “a terrible idea.”

“President Biden should have never appointed an investment banker to chair an advisory council for the nation’s infrastructure,” said Grant. “Wall Street wants to take control of the nation’s public water systems to wring profits from communities that are already struggling with unaffordable water bills and toxic water.”

FWW has analyzed water privatization schemes for years, finding that they it often leave communities “with higher water bills, worse service, job losses, and little control to fix these problems.”

A 2018 report by the group titled America’s Secret Water Crisis found that out of 11 privatized water utilities across the U.S., all but one refused to provide data about shutoffs for nonpayment. The group’s 2011 brief Water = Life showed that low-income households are disproportionately affected by water price hikes by private owners, as privatization turns a resource recognized by the United Nations as an “essential human right” into a commodity.

“Privatization would deepen the nation’s water crises, leading to higher water bills and less accountable and transparent services,” said Grant. “Privately owned water systems charge 59% more than local government systems, and private ownership is the single largest factor associated with higher water bills—more than aging infrastructure or drought.”

Grant noted that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 was “a step forward” as it invested $55 billion to expand water infrastructure, but pointed out that “it provided only about 7% of the identified needs of our water systems.”

“Instead of relying on Wall Street advisers, President Biden should support policies that will truly help communities by asking Congress to pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability (WATER) Act (H.R. 1729, S. 938),” she added.

Introduced in 2021 by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) in the U.S. House and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Senate, the WATER Act would expand funding to small, rural, and Indigenous communities; create a water trust fund; fund projects to eliminate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, contamination; and require the Environmental Protection Agency to analyze water affordability, shutoffs, and civil rights violations by water utilities, among other steps to improve public water access.

“The WATER Act,” said Grant, “would fully restore the federal commitment to safe water by providing a permanent source of federal funding at the level that our water and wastewater systems need to ensure safe, clean, and affordable public water for all.”

This story was produced by Ricochet Media and IndigiNews, and is being co-published by The Real News.

Not long past the break of dawn, along a remote road deep in the unceded, forested mountains of southern Vancouver Island, the steady blaring of a conch shell sends a warning through the trees. 

A raid is coming. 

In the Savage Patch camp, a new front in a years-long struggle over the fate of some of the country’s oldest trees, a small group of forest defenders scurry to pack sleeping bags and douse the fire that kept them warm through the night. 

Uncle Rico, a Cree land defender, streaks her face with red warpaint. A young, broad-shouldered settler land defender, known as Sandstorm, beats a drum gifted to him by a Native ally. He sings an ancestral Viking warrior song, the reverb of his voice echoing through the quiet of the woodland morning. In this camp, everyone goes by a pseudonym.

Uncle Rico begins to sing the Women’s Warrior Song as the group forms a circle and joins the call to battle. 

This fight is for the ancient forest of the Fairy Creek Watershed, which is being systematically cut down by the largest privately-owned logging company in the province.

For over three years, settler activists and Indigenous land defenders have fought to save some of the last and largest old growth trees on the planet. Thousands of forest defenders once occupied the 1,189-hectare watershed, spread across isolated camps and blockades where they chained themselves to hard blocks, set up tree sits and perched under handmade tripods dozens of feet in the air. 

Their desperate attempts to stop the harvesting of majestic red and yellow cedars, trees up to 2,000 years old, have been met with force by both the RCMP and the Teal-Jones Group. 

Teal-Jones owns the rights to Tree Farm License 46 in the Fairy Creek Watershed, which it purchased 20 years ago. Those rights allow the company to cut stands of old growth that have not been specifically protected by the provincial government. The company produces shingles and shake from the coveted cedar wood. 

These cedars are some of the oldest in the world, and their habitat is the last unprotected, relatively intact watershed on southwest Vancouver Island. Little wonder then that it has drawn so many passionate defenders. 

The problem is that Teal-Jones stands to make an estimated $20 million in profits from logging 200 hectares (494 acres) of old-growth trees in the licence area, and the elected chief and council for the local First Nation would lose out on a significant source of revenue if old growth logging were to come to an end. 

Land Defenders have said the forest is endangered and should be left intact, as logging threatens the fragile watershed. In April of 2021, Teal-Jones was granted a court injunction against persons unknown blocking access to their logging sites. The RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) has spent two years and $20 million arresting protesters en masse for defying the court order. 

Those protests have been called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, with almost 1,200 arrests being made over a roughly eight-month period. Almost all of the charges were eventually withdrawn or dismissed, with 146 cases dismissed earlier this month over RCMP errors. 

“This is going to be that time that changes the entire future,” says Uncle Rico, moments before an RCMP raid that will end with three arrests, including her own. 

“We’re no longer asking for (our) rights, we’re telling them what those rights are.

“You have a thousand ancestors standing behind you,” she tells her campmates. “Your own, and my own.

I make sure I call them everywhere I go. As Crees, we ride together. I’ll lead you on. All the brave to the front. Today is a good day to die.”

Uncle Rico stops to chuckle and wink, “but you don’t have to die.”

RCMP operating with impunity 

C-IRG was formed in 2017, reportedly following the massive anti-pipeline resistance led by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, and amid concerns similar uprisings could occur around resource extraction projects in Canada. 

As the name suggests, the unit is responsible for managing conflicts between industry and communities. Unfortunately for those (overwhelmingly Indigenous) communities, conflicts have more often been managed by militarized commando raids than good faith negotiation. 

The unit exists to flatten opposition to natural resource projects, and has sought to do so, with mixed results, in places like Wet’suwet’en territory and Fairy Creek. 

Wherever Indigenous Peoples are halting the flow of profits, the C-IRG will show up, lock down the area, exclude journalists and then arrest everyone — far from the prying eyes of the public. 

Earlier this year, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, the RCMP’s civilian oversight body, announced they would be launching an investigation into systemic misconduct by C-IRG. Almost 500 formal complaints over violence and violations of Charter and Indigenous rights have been reported to the CRCC. Allegations include excessive force, harassment, illegal tactics, unprofessional behaviour, racism and discrimination. 

Many of those complaints stem from the force’s actions at Fairy Creek. 

C-IRG’s presence at Fairy Creek has been minimal since June of 2021, when the province issued a deferral of some old-growth logging permits at the request of the Pacheedaht First Nation, whose traditional territories encompass the watershed. However, in late July of this year, Indigenous forest defenders set up a new blockade, naming it the Savage Patch, on Trunk Road 11, leading to a stand of old growth near Edinburgh Mountain. It’s above Eden Grove, a sanctuary of temperate rainforest, where some trees measure ten feet thick. Despite the deferral, the group had said the Fairy Creek Watershed was still being logged. 

They constructed a giant effigy of a native, endangered screech owl, built from recovered wood, on a bridge leading to the old growth. 

‘Stand in strength together’

Pacing, Uncle Rico tells the forest defenders to hold their ground. C-IRG is on its way. 

She’s wearing camo pants, a black t-shirt printed with white text reading ‘STOP PIPELINES, SAVE FORESTS’ and a green vest. Her thick, long brown hair is tucked behind a black bandana. 

“They’re (RCMP) gonna test you, they’re gonna try to get into your head, they’re gonna try to get into your knees and make them shake. And you’re just gonna sit here, and you’re gonna know in your heart that what you’re doing is right.” 

She beats her drum and continues, “They want you to be violent… But it’s our job to keep everybody safe. So, remember when your feet feel like running, that the group is standing. Stand in strength together.”

She tells them not to be afraid, but even if they are, to know they’re helping to save future generations. 

“It’s always when you tremble the most that you’re making the biggest change in the world. Whether it’s your voice, your knees, your soul. And right now, we’re making a huge change for the next seven (generations). We’re making it so our babies won’t cry themselves to sleep.”

In unison, they sing a warrior song and raise their fists to the sky. 

From the north side of the roadway, we hear the gravel rumble under truck wheels. A fog of dust fills the air before parting to reveal a convoy of at least 13 RCMP and C-IRG cars, trucks and paddy wagons.

They pull up along the road in front of the blockaders. 

A sacred fire surrounded with stones smoulders quietly in front of the land defenders as traditional medicines of sage and sweetgrass burn on top of a piece of red fabric. 

Dozens of RCMP officers line up in front of the entrance to Trunk Road 11, just meters from the resistance group, who continue to sing and drum. 

We’re the only journalists present, the only observers as the two sides prepare to square off on a remote road in the shadow of giant trees. It’s important to be there to document this, the first raid in over two years. 

During the arrest of Uncle Rico, an RCMP sergeant grabs me and threatens me with arrest when I refuse to follow their media exclusion zones. I remind him that the RCMP have been ordered by the courts to respect media rights. In 2021, a coalition of media outlets, including Ricochet, took the RCMP to court over access restrictions at Fairy Creek, and won. 

A lone young woman from the Pacheedaht First Nation noses her pickup truck past the yellow line of police tape and throttles it, disappearing behind a cloud of dust. Known as Wee-One, she is helping lead the protection of her territories. But it’s risky for her to stay. She’s been arrested and charged with obstruction at previous blockades, more than once.

During one of her arrests in October of 2021, this journalist witnessed the RCMP use chainsaws to cut logs piled over her vehicle in a makeshift barrier. She and an Anishinaabe land defender known as gaagaagi were barricaded inside. The RCMP smashed the windows of the car and dragged them out. The two were attached at the arms to a hard lock inside a PVC pipe. Both were held down by multiple officers as they began cutting the pipe with a small hand saw. 

Wee-One screamed out in pain multiple times. Then she passed out. An officer who identified himself as a medic assured onlookers that Wee-One was “fine.” Other forest defenders shouted in horror as they watched from behind another barricade. Her limp and motionless body was then turned over and handcuffed. The RCMP carried her to the paddy wagon and shut the door. 

She doesn’t want to be caught in their hands again. 

For Pacheedaht, it’s complicated

Wee-One’s presence in the fight to save her territories is complicated. As a member of the Pacheedaht Nation, her elected Chief and Council have a partnership with Teal-Jones and the forestry industry. In fact, the Pacheedaht manage or co-manage a forest area with 140,000 cubic meters of annual cut, run a sawmill and log-sorting plant and have more forestry projects in the works. 

“We’ve been pushed out of the forestry industry for hundreds of years,” Pacheedaht Chief Jeff Jones told the Narwhal in 2021. “And now we’re at a point where we’re actually benefiting from forestry resources in the territory.” 

The nation, made up of approximately 300 members with around 120 living on reserve, created a cedar conservation strategy in 2005 to identify areas to protect. It takes 400 years for cedar to grow to the appropriate size for traditional activities like canoe-making. 

Ricochet reached out to Teal-Jones to request an interview. They declined.

We also reached out to Pacheedaht First Nation leadership but did not receive a response by press time.  

Even though the Pacheedaht elected leadership supports Teal-Jones logging activities and in the past has asked forest defenders to pack up and leave, Wee-One doesn’t accept the colonial band government’s decision to allow it. 

There is also a dispute over who the legitimate Pacheedaht traditional hereditary chief is. The elected leadership recognizes Frank Jones as the hereditary leader, and Frank has given the green light to logging. However, Pacheedaht elder Bill Jones, 82, who is against logging old growth, disputes Frank’s legitimacy as the rightful hereditary leader. 

Elder Bill says Frank, who was adopted into the Pacheedaht and grew up with Chief Jeff Jones, has created an allyship of sorts with the chief that serves the two well when making deals with industry. 

He attributes his community’s disconnection from their culture and spirituality to residential schools and other acts of colonial violence. He says he’s tired of mourning everything that has been lost and does not want the last of his peoples’ lands to be pillaged.

The true hereditary chief, says Bill, is 20-year-old Victor Peters. 

“Jasper Peters was the true hereditary chief, and his son Harry followed him, and his son Michael and then Victor, Michael’s son,” explained Bill from his long-term care home in Sooke, British Columbia. 

Victor publicly claimed hereditary leadership in a YouTube video posted in March, 2021. 

“I want to keep them (the trees) standing,” he said in the video. “I think I’d probably feel like I’d lost a loved one… I’d feel sad… and kind of more depressed if that happened.”

But Bill claims Victor and his family have been subject to political bullying from Pacheedaht elected leadership, which has led to Victor pulling back from, rather than stepping into, his hereditary role. 

‘They want the truth to be hidden’

Bill is a survivor of the Alberni Indian Residential School, where he endured beatings alongside mental, spiritual, and sexual abuse. He went on to work in the logging industry and lived on the reserve up until six months ago when health complications required him to move to an assisted living facility. He’s been an unwavering voice of opposition to the old-growth logging industry for years and fully supports land defenders protecting what’s left of his territories. 

He says the Pacheedaht chief and council are operating under oppressive systems of colonial law designed to assimilate Indigenous tribes, using economic incentives to force them into doing the bidding of colonial governments and industry. Chief Jeff Jones, who is Bill’s second cousin, and his leadership team, says Bill, “are pawns to industry and the provincial government.”

“In other words, it’s coercion. You know, the Truth and Reconciliation Act, the oppressors are living in a world of ‘let’s pretend.’ And they want the truth to be (hidden from) those that they oppress. Our (Pacheedaht) government operates much the same as the federal and provincial governments. They operate in secrecy. They don’t inform people, and they don’t account to people.”

The colonial agenda to divide, conquer, and consume has infiltrated the hearts and minds of greater society, he goes on to say. And many are too overcome with oppression and fear of economic uncertainty to realize the harm being done to themselves, others and Mother Nature. 

“There’s a basic structural part of the oppressive system — they do not want people everywhere in this world to recognize themselves… They do not want to have, in particular, First Nations people become aware that they have to be sensitive to their surroundings, so that they can know what to do in their lives, and to keep their life going in this part of the world.”

Wearing blue jeans held up by suspenders, and a t-shirt depicting a tall tree standing alone in a forest bed, Elder Bill’s long, thin white hair is tied back in a ponytail. His brown eyes, outlined with rings of blue, are amplified through his prescription glasses as he gestures with weathered hands.

He’s in full support of forest defenders and happily welcomes them to his traditional territory. 

“And that’s where we come in, you know, our hopes and dreams are in our hearts, and our souls, our values are given to us by our Great Mother, and that is always reborn in our children. Now we have to continue our fight, and yes, I do approve of anyone going up to the forest to protect it.”

He’s especially proud of Wee-One, from his own nation, for putting herself on the line to save their ancestral home. 

“She’s a valiant and courageous young woman who actually wants to live by the truth. She is a warrior looking after our Great Mother’s great gift to us.”

But he’s familiar with the C-IRG unit and their many, often notorious, raids on the forest defenders. He knows they will be coming for those on the frontlines of the new blockade.

“They invent brutal, oppressive tactics at the spur of the moment. It’s simple as that, you know, there’s nothing nice about it. It’s a brutal attack on our sovereignty… and personal integrity. They don’t look upon First Nations as persons. They look upon us as criminals, or as what the government once called us, ‘agitators’ and you know, ‘troublemakers’ and ‘shit disturbers.’”

“The RCMP have been given that authority to treat us like that.”

Elder Bill has tasked Tla’amin Nation Elder Rose Henry, affectionately called Grandma Losah by land defenders, to lead their fight to save the forest on the territory. She is a fiery, unyielding mover and shaker who has been involved in social justice initiatives since she was a teenager. 

She regularly visits land defenders to provide pep talks and advise on cultural protocols. 

“My message for the people from other countries is that behind every beautiful scene, there’s always a dark side,” she says while sitting in Eden Grove, an unprotected, old-growth forest within the Fairy Creek watershed. 

​​Listening carefully, we notice the sounds of the forest come alive. Hidden beneath the woodland floor, the constant thrumming and buzzing of wasp colonies fill the air. Rays of light break through the canopy, scattering across the trunks of towering trees coated with soft moss. As the birds sing us their songs overhead, Grandma Losah sits on a bench, drum in hand, and continues.

She shares how when visitors come to appreciate and enjoy what makes the surrounding landscape beautiful, we often don’t see the extractive nature behind some of these industries harvesting natural resources. While the industries disturb these “perfect spots because they see the beauty,” they contribute to reducing biodiversity, disrupting ecosystems and releasing stored carbon from the soil, which is a key player in helping mitigate the harsh effects of climate change. 

“Our brothers, the trees are few and far between. When you look around here, you see our most sacred medicine, the cedar,” she continues. 

Her hand-woven traditional cedar hat covers her greying long hair that falls at her shoulders as she continues to keep the beat of her drum. 

“So, when I sing some of the songs… I’m letting the spirits of our brothers know that we’re here, we hear you, and we love you.”  

She begins speaking of the prophecy of the Eighth Fire, which speaks of a fork in the road that divides into two directions. One direction speaks of materialism and destruction, and the other leads to a period of harmony where “the destruction of the past will be healed.” 

“The Eighth Fire is saying it’s time. Wake up, people. It’s time for us to come together and act as one. We are all one.”

She breaks out into the Women’s Warrior Song, and the beat of her drum reverberates through the dense, untamed oasis of the grove surrounding her. 

‘Even the animals are upset’

The day before the C-IRG raid on the blockade, several land defenders bathe naked in the Gordon River nearby. It’s a clear and gentle flowing refuge where they go to cleanse, read, sing and pray. Afterward, they take a break from the scorching 39-degree heat beneath the forest’s canopy, napping on the moss-covered earth. 

Getting a deep, full night’s sleep here is rare. They’re always on high alert for potential enforcement from RCMP and prepared to face the wrath of angry industry workers who want to run them out. Land defenders take turns keeping watch to guard the barricade they’ve constructed. 

This barrier, adorned with hand-printed signs of resistance and red dresses, represents and honours the Indigenous women and girls who were murdered or have disappeared across the country, victims of “Canada’s” genocide. 

Beneath a tarp, they’ve created a makeshift kitchen using a propane cooking stove. A cook named Dragonfly, a woman in her 50s who has been arrested more than once at previous Fairy Creek demonstrations, is creating a communal meal of donated vegetables, pasta and canned tomatoes. 

Later, they share stories and jokes before switching the tone to something more serious, the topic of what’s to come. “Even the animals are upset by what’s happening,”  Uncle Rico says. 

They’ve heard frightening sounds from the bushes on more than one occasion as a mother bear on the other side of the Gordon bridge asserts her territory and, to the land defenders’ ears, expresses her anger over the ravaging of her home by these loggers. 

But Uncle Rico encourages them never to bow to fear and reminds them of why they’re there.

“This is a worldwide problem… The government doesn’t want [blockades] because that stops money. But with the amount of old growth that were losing worldwide, things will never be the same. Everything is so connected.”

“Taking away these ecosystems, taking away our ancestors. It’s definitely not going to fix anything.”

Now, as C-IRG is closing in, the officers play a pre-recorded reading of the injunction over an echoing speaker. The land defenders, led by Uncle Rico, continue to drum and sing the Women’s Warrior Song. The police move in, wielding yellow tape, demanding the land defenders move back or face arrest. 

‘No matter what we do, you’re going to brutalize us!’

The front line slowly shifts as the land defenders are walked all the way back to a wooden gate they now lock from the inside with a chain and padlock. A C-IRG officer tells them to get behind the barricade, or they will be arrested. 

“But we can’t!” yells Uncle Rico. “Don’t you see? You either want us to move out of the way, or you want us behind the gate, but right now, you’re giving us instructions that no matter what we do, you’re going to brutalize us.”

An RCMP helicopter that has been circling nearby eventually lands in a cut block where old growth cedars were logged just three years earlier. Drones dart about overhead, buzzing back and forth over the clearing as a sea of blue-uniformed police swarm the road. 

“We’re not going to brutalize you,” the officer responds. “Get on the other side of the gate, or you’ll be arrested for obstruction.” 

“But I don’t want you blocking us in so you can brutalize us…” pleads Uncle Rico. 

RCMP officers approach Uncle Rico, who is now sheltering behind Sandstorm. The two continue to beat their drums as they are separated by the RCMP, and Sandstorm is dragged away. 

As Uncle Rico screams at the officers not to touch her drum, that it is a sacred object, a First Nations C-IRG Liaison Officer named Ben Smith steps in, directing the two officers holding Uncle Rico at each arm to stop. He asks if someone can take her drum. 

“No, this has spiritual significance, and I can’t just give it to anyone,” she yells back. 

The two had an exchange the day before when he arrived at the camp with two other liaison officers, one of them also Indigenous. She told him colonial law had no relevance there.

She tells Smith what he’s doing is wrong. 

“What happened, Neech? You just don’t respect our own laws. Your ancestors see you; you know how sick you are in your heart.”

He steps slightly away and says nothing. The other officers holding her attempt to drag her forward. 

Smith steps in again.  

“Ok, she’s going to resist, so stop.” 

He says his job is to avoid escalation in these often-traumatic experiences and to be a liaison with Indigenous peoples as they’re being arrested. He notes that his job is hard, dealing with the legacy of colonial violence against his own people. But he believes what he is doing is good. 

Uncle Rico is laid on the ground, and officers attempt to place a drag bag underneath her to pull her to their paddy wagon. She kicks it off, and four officers grab her by each limb and carry her toward the waiting vehicle. Meanwhile, an excavator is clearing some rocks and logs from the road.

When the land defenders are cleared away and one other woman is arrested, the excavator roars in, and demolishes the wooden barricade in minutes. The sounds of the machine rumble through the forest. 

The remaining land defenders who haven’t been arrested are silent. 

They follow police to the Gordon River bridge and discover the screech owl effigy has been torn apart by officers dressed in military fatigues that hiked in through a back path. The remnants of the structure were thrown into the river below. 

After being taken to Lake Cowichan, a town about an hour drive from the former Savage Patch camp, the three land defenders are released without charges. Uncle Rico says it’s the first time she has ever been arrested. 

Wee-One, her companion gaagaagi, and other land defenders embrace their comrades and smoke cigarettes outside the RCMP station. Uncle Rico gives the middle finger to an officer driving out of the parking lot.

With a smile on her face,  she says this fight is far from over. 

“This is just the start of the next seven generations. We are nothing but a prayer standing here until the next prayers step up and take our place. This is forever. We’re never going away. And even when Savage Patch is old, and we become the ground, our children will be Savage Patch. Savage Patch will never die. They can’t break us.”

The Canadian oil company Enbridge has been ordered to pay the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa $5 million in damages for trespassing and to gradually shut down part of its Line 5 pipeline in Wisconsin after a federal judge found that the company has placed the tribe’s sacred land at risk of an environmental disaster.

U.S. District Judge William Conley of the Western District of Wisconsin handed down the ruling on Friday after the Bad River Band argued in court that there are now fewer than 15 feet between parts of Line 5 and the Bad River following the partial erosion of the riverbank in recent months.

The tribe said its land is in imminent danger of a potential pipeline rupture as roughly 12 miles of Line 5 run through the Bad River Band’s reservation, carrying up to 23 million gallons of oil and liquefied natural gas each day through Michigan and Wisconsin to Ontario.

Line 5 has been the site of about 30 oil spills in its 70-year history, and another of Enbridge’s pipelines ruptured in 2010, spilling more than 840,000 gallons of oil into a creek and the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

In addition to ordering Enbridge to pay the tribe, Conley on Friday gave the company three years to wind down its operations on the Bad River Band’s land, ordering it to “cease operation of Line 5 on any parcel within the band’s tribal territory on which defendants lack a valid right of way and to arrange reasonable remediation at those sites.”

The judge denied, however, that the pipeline’s presence has put the tribe in imminent danger. He said an oil spill “would unquestionably be a public nuisance” but claimed an immediate shutdown of a portion of the pipeline would disrupt energy security and cause fuel costs to soar for locals.

Bad River Band Chairman Mike Wiggins said the tribe does not see the ruling as “cause for unqualified celebration” but expressed appreciation for the judge “putting an end to Enbridge’s flagrant trespass and disregard for our rights.”

“Tribal sovereignty prevailed over corporate profits,” Wiggins said, adding that the tribe expects Enbridge “to fight this order with all of their corporate might.”

“We are under no illusion that Enbridge will do the right thing,” he added.

Enbridge said over the weekend that it plans to appeal the ruling.

Erick Arnold, an attorney for the Bad River Band, said the three-year timeline leaves the tribe “vulnerable to catastrophe.”

“While the band’s motivations have never been about money,” said Arnold, “such a small award for a decadelong trespass during which Enbridge earned over a billion dollars in net profits from Line 5 will not sufficiently deter trespassers like Enbridge, but will instead create an incentive for corporations to violate the sovereignty of the band.”

Environmental lawyer and activist Steven Donziger called the order a “victory” overall.

“But for the theft of Indigenous lands,” he said, “this pipeline would not even exist.”

The 2020 protests that took place in the immediate wake of Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd were a historic call for America to reckon with its racist, oppressive system of state-sanctioned police violence. Three years later, rather than a reckoning, that same system, along with the political and business elites propping it up, are giving us “Cop City” (ie, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, the Atlanta Police Foundation’s 85-acre, $90-million police militarization and training complex where law enforcement from around the US and beyond will, among other things, train for urban warfare scenarios). Plans to build Cop City have been mired in controversy and civil rights violations from the beginning—from the city government’s attempts to ignore residents’ and activists’ objections and force through the construction of Cop City in Atlanta’s ecologically vital Weelaunee Forest, to police raiding an encampment of peaceful protestors and murdering one of them, Manuel (“Tortuguita”) Esteban Paez Terán, who was shot 57 times, to the truly Orwellian crackdown on protestors and advocates, dozens of whom are being arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism.”

As Micah Herskind writes, “The struggle to Stop Cop City is not just a battle over the creation of a $90 million police urban warfare center. It’s not just a fight to protect the 381 acres of forest land, known as one of the “four lungs” of Atlanta, currently under threat of destruction. It’s not just a conflict over how the city invests the over $30 million it has pledged to the project, to be supplemented by at least $60 million in private funding. The movement is all of those things. But even more fundamentally, the struggle to Stop Cop City is a battle for the future of Atlanta. It’s a struggle over who the city is for: the city’s corporate and state ruling class actors who have demanded that Cop City be built, or the people of Atlanta who have consistently voiced their opposition and demanded a different vision for the city.” Make no mistake, though, the fight to Stop Cop City is all of our fight, and that very much includes the labor movement. In this mini-cast, we speak with Kamau Franklin and Mariah Parker about Cop City, the fight to stop it, and why labor needs to get off the sidelines and join that fight.

Kamau Franklin has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years, beginning in New York City and now based in Atlanta. He is also a lawyer, writer, and the founder of Community Movement Builders, Inc. Mariah Parker is labor and community organizer, a rapper (known by the stage name Linqua Franqa), and recently served as District 2 County Commissioner for Athens-Clarke County in Athens, Georgia, from 2018 – 2022.

Additional links/info below…

• Kamau’s Twitter page
• Community Movement Builders website, Facebook page, Twitter page, and Instagram
• Mariah’s Twitter page and LinkTree
• Stop Cop City
• Micah Herskind, Scalawag, “This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City“
• Candace Bernd, Truthout, “Cop City Protesters Face Felonies for Flyering as Police Repress Student Sit-Ins“
• Candace Bernd, Truthout, “Atlanta Was a Constitution-Free Zone During “Stop Cop City” Week of Action“
• Stephen Janis & Taya Graham, The Real News Network, “Atlanta’s ‘Cop City’ Is a Blueprint for America’s Future“
• Frances Madeson, Truthout, “Domestic Terrorism Charges Against Cop City Demonstrators Spur Further Protests“
• Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, “Atlanta Police Arrest Organizers of Bail Fund for Cop City Protestors“
• Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, “Police Shot Atlanta Cop City Protestor 57 Times, Autopsy Finds“
• Fair Fight Action Releases Statement Condemning Anti-Democratic Criminalization of Legal Aid Group Ahead of Vote on ‘Cop City’ Funding
• Jimmy Williams (General President of IUPAT) statement on Cop City
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Three Years Later, George Floyd’s Family Members Are Still Fighting for Justice“
• Morgan Simon, Forbes, “The Corporations Funding Cop City In Atlanta“

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Post-production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Kamau Franklin:  Hi, my name is Kamau Franklin. I am the founder of a new grassroots organization called Community Movement Builders, where we do a combination of things: organizing against the issue of gentrification, and we also do a lot of organizing against police violence which is what led us into the struggle against Cop City. We also do what we call sustainable development, which is to provide resources to people in southwest Atlanta, a working class, poor, Black community; one of the last of such communities still intact. But we also do cooperatives, mutual aid, and so forth. So we’re a power-building organization that’s meant to support building institutions that the Black community controls and fighting against institutions that we feel oppress and control our community to its detriment.

Mariah Parker:  My name is Mariah Parker. I’m an alumni of the United Campus Workers of Georgia 3265 at the University of Georgia, where I was a PhD student. I also, from 2018 to 2022, served as an Athens-Clarke County commissioner. I was very focused on worker empowerment from living wages for city employees to developing worker ownership models that we could back with public funds and things of that sort. But these days I am down in Atlanta organizing low-wage workers in the fast food industry and stopping Cop City.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, well welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. So if you’re hungry for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, go check out the other great shows in our network. And of course, please support the work that we are doing here on Working People by sharing these episodes with your friends, your coworkers, and your family members. Please leave us positive reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

And of course, the single best thing you can do to support our work is to become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/working people, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/workingpeople. Smash that subscribe button and you’ll immediately get access to all of our great bonus episodes. We’ve published some really great ones as of late, including most recently an interview that I got to do with the industrial correspondent Taj Ali at the Tribune in the UK. Taj is doing great work covering the strike wave going on across the UK, so you guys don’t want to miss that great conversation. 

So my name is Maximilian Alvarez, and as y’all heard, we’ve got a really special and urgent episode for y’all today. This is an episode that we’ve been wanting to record for a while. It’s one that touches on a subject that folks have been asking us about, especially after we posted the recording of our live show that we recorded down in Atlanta, which I started by mentioning the issue of Cop City and the draconian repression of all those who are standing up and fighting against it.

And we wanted to bring Mariah and Kamau on the show, two true working-class warriors, folks fighting the good fight in their communities, standing up for poor, Black, working, oppressed people all across the South and beyond. And they are on the front lines along with others in this incredible and necessary fight against Cop City. And so we wanted to bring them on to answer our listeners’ questions about what the fuck is Cop City? Why is this massive thing called Cop City being rammed through against the wishes of working communities in the area? Who is supporting this move to build Cop City? And especially, what the hell is going on with these Orwellian, draconian crackdowns on protestors? Charging them with terrorism for standing up against Cop City? I’m sure you guys have been seeing the headlines about this, and we’re going to link to more coverage about it, but things are getting really, really dark down there in Atlanta, and we ultimately want to make sure that people know about this struggle, why they should care about it, how they can get involved in the fight against it. 

And also, given that we’re having this conversation on this show – Mariah and I were talking about this in Atlanta – We need to have a serious conversation about why labor needs to get its ass off the sideline and get involved in this fight and what that could look like. We’ve seen occasional hopeful signs with workers and union members joining the protest against Cop City. We’ve even occasionally seen statements from union leadership like Jimmy Williams of the Painters Union speaking out against the crackdown on protestors against Cop City. But so much more is needed, and that’s really where we are. That’s why we wanted to bring Kamau and Mariah on the show today because as I said, they’re right there on the front lines. I know that they’ve got answers to all of your guys’ questions. 

And so without further ado, let’s dig into this, because I know you guys are super busy and I don’t want to keep you for too long. So I was wondering if we could go around the table and give each of your takes on, if you’re sitting down across from someone who just heard about Cop City and the crackdown against protestors, what do they most need to know about what Cop City is, where it’s come from, and what’s been going on down there in Atlanta these past few months? So Kamau, why don’t I turn it back over to you?

Kamau Franklin:  When I talk about Cop City, I try to make sure that folks understand this is not some benign police training center that’s being built up because the police’s current training center is dilapidated or they need a new area to train in. It’s really important to situate the idea of Cop City within the 2020 uprisings against the police murders of people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and here in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks. It was after these uprisings that took place across the country that Atlanta, in particular, felt flatfooted. Like it didn’t have a proper response to the organizing that was happening across the city.

And as part of that response, they decided to initiate the idea of a 265-acre training center, what we call Cop City, basically a militarized/paramilitary training center where they practice such things as urban warfare, where they’re going to have over a dozen firing ranges, where they’re going to have – Well, at least originally in their plans, they’re claiming they took this out, but we shall soon see – A station for a Black Hawk helicopter to land where they’re going to be doing training with dozens of forces across the country, including internationally training with Israeli police. And for us, this was a clear sign that the building of this training center via the Atlanta Police Foundation with funds of over $60 million pledged from private corporations, $30 million at the very least, numbers are starting to tick up as we speak, that the city was supposed to give. 

And so we see this as a response to when people were calling for the abolition of the police or defunding the police or finding alternatives to public safety. Atlanta, the corporate class, and the Atlanta Police Foundation decided to double down on militarized policing, which would be targeted not only towards movements and organizing, but continue the over-policing of Black communities. Here in Atlanta, 90% of the arrests that take place in Atlanta/Fulton County are of Black people, even though Black folks now represent less than 50% of the proper population of Atlanta. So it’s really important for folks to understand that, again, in response to our organizing against Cop City, what the city of Atlanta decided to do was to double down on the militarized police and to continue with the over-policing which caused the uprisings in the first place, in response to the police killing innocent people.

Mariah Parker:  To that I would add – And that’s a perfect explanation of how we got here and what we’re dealing with – This facility is set to replace large swaths of the largest urban forest in North America, what they call one of the four lungs of Atlanta. As you know, the Muscogee people originally named the river along which the forest runs, the Weelaunee river. Now we call it the Weelaunee forest in their honor, that air we breathe is cleaned by the trees that are currently being cut down in the forest. So this is not only an issue of police brutality – Of, honestly, the rise of fascism  as Kamau said – This is going to be training a paramilitary force that will be able to put down uprisings and control Black neighborhoods.

But this is also an environmental justice issue, an environmental racism issue. This area surrounding the forests are overwhelmingly neighborhoods of color. Black people are the ones that are living near the aquifer that’s being poisoned by the lead in the soil from the bullets that the police have been shooting already at this site. Already environmental protections have been neglected along this aquifer. And even in the construction of this site, the Atlanta Police Foundation and others who are conspiring with them have been able to get away with getting around standards for construction that anyone else would have to follow to ensure that the environment is being minimally disrupted. And so one thing that’s very interesting about this movement is it has brought together police abolitionists, prison abolitionists, folks that are not about the cops generally, as well as folks from the environmental movement who see this as a climate change issue, who see this as an issue of environmental degradation.

Another thing I would add about how we got here is that in response to the uprisings that have come out, liberals were able to co-opt the demand to defund the police and argue that what the cops need is more training, even though studies have found that more training does not decrease police violence. In fact, officers that killed Rayshard Brooks had recently been involved in advanced training. It doesn’t actually help anything. But they’ve then used that argument to push through this facility because they’re aiming to train officers better. And I bring this up because we want to talk about fascism, we want to talk about government repression. These are Democrats, these are liberals that are trying to push this project forward who have co-opted the movement to say that training is what we need, when we know that we need affordable housing. We know that we need better access to healthcare. We know we need access to healthy food systems in order to keep our community safe. 

Now, the last thing I want to say on this, bringing it back around to why this is important to labor. As Kamau also brought up, the Atlanta Police Foundation had pledged $60 million to help fund this project. Now, where is that money coming from? That money is coming from the corporate elite across the city of Atlanta and across the South. We’re talking about Delta, we’re talking about Waffle House, Chick-Fil-A, we’re talking about Inspire Brands – That is the parent company of Dunkin’ Donuts – We’re talking about the who’s who of the corporate elite in the city and across the South. Now, where are they getting their money from? If it’s Chick-Fil-A, they’re getting that money from wage theft and abusing child labor, if they’re getting it from Waffle House, they have wage theft written into their employee handbook. They’re taking that money from the workers that are creating all this profit and they’re reinvesting it into their oppression. And even Delta, which right now they’re having a big union fight with the Delta workers here in Atlanta, they recently fought for three years to get cost-of-living increases in their contract. Now, Delta doesn’t have money for that and wants to fight all day about that, but somehow, all this cash can lavish the Atlanta Police Foundation in order to build this facility.

And so that to me is part of why this project is really nefarious and unites labor as well as folks that are liberation-minded and want to get people free from cops. It’s that a lot of the money that’s been promised to put into this paramilitary facility is thieved straight out of the pockets of working people through these corporations that are funding the Atlanta Police Foundation and funding this facility.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to circle back to the point that, Kamau, you started with, because this was not lost on me and it’s so indicative of this perverse American psychosis when it comes to policing. The three of us are recording this episode on Friday, May 26. Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of Minneapolis Police murdering George Floyd. And at The Real News Network, we released an interview that I was honored to do with George’s brother Philonise and his wife, Keeta, talking about that horrific event that changed their family and, in many ways, changed the country forever. We talked about how they wanted George to be remembered, what they hoped change would look like, so that what happened to George would never happen to another person again.

And we saw the uprisings that hit all 50 states in the wake of George Floyd’s murder three years ago. We saw how much that movement spread around the world. And for a moment it did feel like we were at the brink of a reckoning in this country. And here we fucking are three years later and saying, okay, the institutions, the establishment’s response is to construct an 85-acre, $90 million to $100 million facility where militarized police can come and do training operations; simulating urban warfare with the very same people who were protesting against their abuse three years later. That’s where we are. We’re in America, of course that’s where we are.

But I don’t want that ridiculousness and Orwellian nature of the situation to be lost on people because it does highlight, as you were both saying, that there is a fundamental class warfare component to all of this. There is a top-down pressure to stamp out the resistance that scared the establishment three years ago. The capital always relies on this increasingly militarized arm of the police to push poor and working people back into subservience, to push us into jails and prisons, to kill us as the surplus of the system that they categorize us to be. So even from the fundamental beginnings, we can see how and why working class people have a stake in this fight, because this is a fight that is being directed back at us. That’s what’s going to be happening not just with the construction of Cop City, with the crackdown on protestors, but ultimately what is going to be produced at this fucking massive facility. Pardon my language.

And to build on what you were saying, Mariah, I want to talk about that element of the forces that are arraying here to push this Cop City into reality, even if it means bulldozing this massive necessary forest, even if it means bulldozing the people trying to stand in the way of it. Can we talk a bit about over the past year what that fight has looked like on the ground to you all? What forces are involved here and what has the resistance looked like to the construction of Cop City?

Kamau Franklin:  Sure. When we go back, this fight has been going on for over two years. When we heard about Cop City – After the uprisings – Organizers, activists, environmentalists, and other folks understood right away what this meant. And at first, the organizing was what you would consider standard campaign politics where we were doing everything from petition drives, to demonstrations, to call your city councilperson, call the mayor, town halls. This was before the City Council took a vote, and we were doing those things to try to pressure the City Council and the mayor, who thought that this was a done deal. They didn’t think that they would have to do any explaining to the public, that they were just going to push this through. And even at that time, the police were violent in their tactics in terms of targeting organizers and activists.

So even in the early parts of the fight against Cop City, the police would come to the demonstrations, they would make arrests on people who were standing on sidewalks. People would get pepper sprayed, they’d get thrown to the ground, after they were arrested they’d have their paperwork threatened to be lost if they complained about the food and the conditions. So that was happening early on. At that time, they weren’t charging people with domestic terrorism, they were charging people with things like disorderly conduct, obstruction of governmental administration. As we moved past the vote, when the City Council decided to give the Atlanta Police Foundation this gift of over 265 acres of land for, if I’m not mistaken, $10 a year in terms of a lease payment, part of the movement broke off and started doing forest defense.

Particularly – And we should always call out and compliment – Young anarchist kids who decided that part of the struggle was to actually go in the Weelaunee forest, as Mariah mentioned earlier, and take up camp there. And they packed up in trees, they created tree huts. They did everything they could to put this into a space where you could see that the forest needed to be defended and where you can see that people needed to understand what was happening, in terms of the reaction to these young people doing it. It was shortly after that, and some of the tactics and tactics that we accept as fighting back to make sure the trees weren’t burnt down, that the Atlanta Police Department joined in a task force with the DeKalb County Police Department, with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with Homeland Security, to form a task force. And they began discussing the idea of charging organizers, activists, and forced offenders with domestic terrorism. And so last year in December, the first raid in the force resulted in approximately 6 people being charged with domestic terrorism.

Then we had another raid in the force, and not only another 6 people were charged, but that is when, for the first time in American history, an overt environmental activist was killed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and various SWAT teams in Atlanta, and the Atlanta police. That young activist, Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, was murdered by the police, having 57 bullet holes which include entrance and exit holes. That was as much as they could count. And then after that, there were another 6 or 7 folks arrested in a demonstration downtown. And then later on doing a music festival, doing a week of action, another 23 organizers are arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. And so the tactics of the state have been to intimidate, to criminalize, and to scare people out of being supportive of this movement. 

But during that time, this movement has only grown. This movement has grown from one of a local issue to one where people were coming from outside and joining with those local protestors to one which took on a national significance. One that’s now taken on an international significance and one that now at this time is probably the preeminent issue amongst folks who are fighting against police terror and violence in this country.

And so that struggle continues. It’s been a long struggle. Many different factions, as Mariah has mentioned earlier, have come into this struggle and played a great role in forwarding, adding resources, adding nuance to it, putting word out to their particular constituencies, that has kept this movement building and going. Even as the city continues to push to build this, the movement is pushing back. And that’s one of the things that we have to remember – Again, particularly over the last year – That this movement has not been run-down under the heel of oppressive corporate interlockers, the city government, the state government with federal helpers of all political stripes themselves, both Democrats and Republicans joining together to fight this fight against organizers and activists who are fighting against police violence. As that’s been happening, folks have continued to fight back and to try to stop Cop City from being built.

Mariah Parker:  To that I would add, I’m really glad that Kamau spoke to the nature of phase-building in the movement in its early years, it’s a ton of canvassing, community outreach, and to this day, it’s a very important part of that. As well as forest events, people taking up space in the forest to physically stop the construction from happening. But in this iteration of the movement with the forest now cleared under the violence of police that have taken the life of a protestor, folks have been leaning back upon typical civic engagement strategies like showing up to City Hall. And most recently, when the legislation was first introduced to give $30 million of taxpayer money to support this project, there was a record-breaking 7 hours of public comment of 300 Atlantans who came out and unanimously spoke against this project; folks who have been lobbying their city councilperson, trying to use these formal legal organs and political organs to ensure that their voices are heard by their supposed representatives.

I say this because we have tons of folks trying to do this, “the right way,” but ultimately if folks are unheard through these channels where we are supposed to have a voice, where we are told that these folks are supposed to represent the public, people have become really frustrated. And that’s when we see things like folks taking to the streets and extra legal means of making sure that they are heard and that the construction and the forces that are coming together to destroy this forest are stopped.

Maximillian Alvarez:  They’re so upfront with their bare contempt for what the public wants, what people say they want. They want to squash us into silence or comfortably put us in those little protest zones where they can comfortably ignore us. It’s so obvious what they’re doing and it’s so infuriating, which is why we need increasing public pressure around the country and beyond to make sure that they know that this is not an issue that is just going to go away. And I’m going to circle back in a second to that crackdown on free speech, on dissent, on the draconian use of anti-terrorism laws to silence people standing up against Cop City. 

But I wanted to hover really quickly since I’ve got two seasoned community and labor organizers on the call right now, and this is a show where we talk to workers every single week about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles. Where we try to hear out what they are going through in their workplaces and make the connections with them between their lives, their struggles, and the struggles that we talk about with other workers around the country and beyond. I wanted to ask in the day-to-day conversations that y’all have been getting into with other folks down there, could you maybe share a little bit of that with our listeners? How are working people talking about this and seeing this as an issue that concerns them? Those of us who are organizing in our workplaces in other parts of the country, what can we do better to talk to our coworkers about why this is such an important issue that all of us should care about?

Mariah Parker:  One thing I’ll say from being out in the streets talking to a lot of fast food workers, retail workers, folks in low-wage jobs is, first of all, not everyone has heard that this is going on. Which speaks to a failure of public engagement on the part of the government that wants to see this happen. And that is partially by design. You want to have a City Council meeting in the middle of the day when people are either picking their kids up from school or they’re themselves working and they can’t come and be part of that public comment? The paper of record for the city of Atlanta and state of Georgia is also owned by folks that are fundraising for Cop City. And so it’s very hard to get messages out about what the public is saying, that the public is engaged in this project.

I am finding that a lot of the initial conversations we’re having work with people introducing the idea that this is happening in the first place, but do you know what people do bring up and what people do know about and know needs to change? The fact that so many of the workers I talked to are living out of their cars or in hotels because they can’t afford housing in the city of Atlanta right now. Folks that have experienced premature deaths of people in their family because they don’t have access to healthcare. And I bring this up because folks recognize that these needs: housing, healthcare, et cetera, are not being invested in. They live that day in and day out firsthand. And so when you bring up the fact that they don’t have money to make sure that you have affordable housing – Well, I’m sorry I don’t have money so that your friend that passed away suddenly from a stroke in his 30s, sorry that he didn’t have any healthcare – But they did somehow find $90 million to fund this facility. 

It really, really strikes people in a way that they’re getting as infuriated as I am pretty quickly, to know that if they had a magic wand and could spend $30 million of taxpayer money anywhere they wanted. Nobody you meet at a McDonald’s, at Arby’s, at a Dollar General, is going to say, we should have a small army here in the city of Atlanta. That’s what I would pay for. So that’s what I would really notice in conversations with people. Not everybody is like, we’re still doing a ton of outreach to get people involved and get people up to speed on this issue, but if you approach a conversation from, yo, what’s going on in your life, ad learn about the issues people are facing, nobody wants Cop City, people want housing. People want the things that actually make communities safe, and that starts with investing in the neighborhoods where these people live.

Kamau Franklin:  I’ll back that up completely, Mariah’s completely correct. When we speak to folks in the community, there are folks who are informed, but there are a good amount of people who don’t know about it. And there are other folks who are carrying on with their day-to-day lives trying to survive, trying to make it out of here. But once you start talking about it, the innate reaction based on the conditions that people live in is, well, why do we need that? We know that that means they’re going to be flooding our neighborhoods and communities, arresting more people, taking away our young people. Instead of providing centers for our folks to go to, providing other things and activities or improving the education system, that they would rather spend not only the $30 million that the city is supposed to be giving – And that number is increasingly going higher once we do further investigation into how the money is actually getting to the Atlanta Police Foundation – But the same corporations who several years ago were saying that they were on the side of Black Lives Matter, have now given close to $60 million to fund a project like this.

People see it on their face that these same corporations which underpay us, or have enough money like Mariah mentioned earlier, can give to a project like this. So it’s not hard to make it clear to folks what the purpose of Cop City is and what the role of police is in their lives. And so when folks understand that and hear that, for the most part they have questions and they are opposed to the idea that this is the way the city should spend its money. I will also say, for the people who are working class, people who live adjacent to the forest – And it is mostly a working-class Black community that lives adjacent to the Weelaunee forest – Those folks were promised that the forest would stay intact and that it would be used for nature trails, for parks, for places for their kids to enjoy and understand nature and, again, to continue to serve as a preventer of climate change. That area is prone to flooding. The clearcutting that’s already happening in that forest will only add to the flooding in that neighborhood which will impact working-class Black communities.

Those communities overwhelmingly have said that they are opposed to the building of Cop City. That was not what the promise was. The promise was for them to have an area where they can bring their kids to, where they can have a park, and so forth. It was not to build a militarized training center which is going to have shooting ranges, where cops are practicing how to shoot day and night in that forest next to this working-class community. People understand that this is a targeted approach to dealing with working-class communities as opposed to giving resources to these communities. They’re going to flood these communities with more cops.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’m going to lose my shit, man.

Mariah Parker:  Does it not make you feel insane? It makes me feel so insane.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’m losing it.

Mariah Parker:  It makes you feel so insane. And particularly they started clearcutting the forest a little bit earlier this year, and photography and drone footage is coming out where there’s this scar on the earth where this beautiful forest used to be where I was at a music festival. Where there are people out there doing capoeira, there are people vibing, enjoying music. There’s folks camping out, there are families, there’s children. They used to take children here to do field trips, to study the ecology of the forest. And you see footage come out, they’re giving some journalists a tour of the forest today or what used to be the forest, and it drives me totally insane to see this. And speaking of common reactions of working-class folks, that same shit of being mind-boggled and infuriated instantly is something I get all the time when I’m talking to people about this who haven’t heard about it before.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And our task is to turn that into action, which is why I’m so grateful to folks like yourselves and everyone else out there doing that unsung work. Everyone listening to this who is also doing that work day in, day out, we need you guys always, and we need more folks doing that work to make sure that people know this is happening in the first place, let alone building on that and talking about why we should be invested in the fight against it, what the future looks like if we don’t fight. And the point you both made is so poignant and I really want folks listening to sit with it because, in many ways, you guys know this, but it does really bear repeating: the safest communities are not the ones with the most police. They’re the ones with the most resources and the most shared wealth, access to things like drinkable water and a bed to sleep in, a house to live in, schools to send your kids to, not only dollar stores, but grocery stores, and so on and so forth. Throwing more police at poor and working-class neighborhoods is not going to somehow magically make those neighborhoods safer. How do I know that? Because that’s what we’ve been fucking doing for the past half century or more and it hasn’t worked, at least by the supposed goals of that approach to policing. But anyway, I digress.

I only have you guys for about 10 more minutes. We’ve done a great job of communicating to people why the push to build Cop City, the construction thereof, the shadowy government and industry forces behind it, why all of those are already an issue for working people that we should care about. But then there’s also the draconian crackdown on the protestors against Cop City. And it’s a fundamentally connected issue, but it is an issue within itself that we and the labor movement needs to have a serious discussion about because that is also going to directly impact us. It’s not that they’re all the other aspects to labor, workers’ relationship to the police, that we already know about when we’re on strike. Who are the ones beating picketers and clearing way for scabs to come through the picket lines? It’s the cops, right?

So when coal miners in Brookwood, Alabama, at Warrior Met Coal were on strike for two years, who was it who was escorting scabs past their picket lines? Who was it who was enforcing these business-friendly rulings by local judges, these injunctions limiting the amount of people who could picket, how far away from the entrance they could picket? It was the police. We already know that, in terms of limiting workers’ ability to exercise their right to free speech, their right to assemble, their right to go on strike and to withhold their labor, the criminal justice system has a historically antagonistic relationship to working people expressing those rights. But it goes even deeper than that. And I hope that folks listening to this can hear the resonances with the interviews that we’ve done with workers in different industries over the past 6 seasons. 

Think about the railroad workers. They had their right to strike stripped from them by the most pro-labor union president that the US has ever seen and a Congress that happily went with that decision. And they gave the bosses, the rail carriers, everything that they wanted. And so when workers have our rights to withhold our labor, to speak up, and to exercise those basic fundamental rights, the bosses win. And also most people in this country can be fired without just cause. So it’s not even a question of do I have these rights at work? Most people fucking don’t. We already know that they don’t, you can’t speak up for shit without losing your job and potentially thus losing your home. And if you lose your home, we live in a society that criminalizes poverty, so you’re going to get beat up by the police and shuttled into prison. So are you guys seeing the connections here?

Mariah Parker:  A couple months ago I was helping organize a labor action in downtown Atlanta. They hadn’t even started yet when the police rolled up and told us to leave. And when we got to the target location, somehow there’s just people. So there was security there waiting for us when we got there. But we have to plan how we’re going to go about actions? It’s a huge factor that we’re not only dealing with the police, we’re dealing with the Atlanta Police Department. Because we know what frenzy they’re in right now, because they fear progressive social movements of all kinds rising up against them, even some liberal orgs have joined in the chorus of folks saying, stop Cop City. I’ve seen firsthand that they are here to break up any working-class movement. Labor isn’t excluded.

In fact, yesterday the Atlanta Police Department moved into the building across the street from where all the major labor unions in the state of Georgia are headquartered. And that, to me, is not any coincidence or anything like that. It’s keeping an eye on the folks that could be the missing piece to the movement puzzle of really stopping this. If labor unions came out in support of the movement, if they were leveraging their power within institutions like Southern Company, like some of these businesses that are giving money to Cop City like Delta, to make this demand on the bosses, these employees who are stakeholders in these companies, that would be their worst nightmare. And we are already seeing intimidation taking place. Not only out on the strike line, but in the very physical proximity of police departments to try to keep an eye on actors like this that could be very game changing in the movement.

So yeah, we know. Including Atlanta, there’s a robust history being made now of police repression, of labor movements as well, which is why this is also an issue that labor unions have a personal stake in. That, in order to have those robust rights to withhold our labor and to disrupt these businesses, to get what we are owed, we have to be a part of this movement to fight back on the people that would put down our movements as well. In my opinion.

Kamau Franklin:  I’ll only add, you mentioned what’s happening now around the police in the intimidation tactics, and I’ve already talked about the fact that over 40 folks have domestic terrorism charges. There have been well over 70 to 80 arrests in a total movement against Cop City by the police. And again, this is being done in conjunction or together with folks who have right-wing white conservatives, i.e. the governor of Georgia, with folks who claim to be moderate and/or progressives, i.e. talking about the Democratic Black mayor of Atlanta. And so it doesn’t matter what their so-called political stripes are in terms of these elected officials, they are all about having a strong police force, a militarized police force that they can call out at a moment’s notice to protect property, to stop movements and to over-police communities. They know what they want, they know how they want to deploy them.

The idea of Cop City is an idea that lets them have other police forces, as mentioned earlier, come down and train with them, basically having common tactics and strategies as if it was a national police force, as well as international players who are coming in and training on tactics that they use to oppress their own or people or land that they stole from. Those tactics are being imported here, i.e. the Israelis in terms of their work, their tactics and strategies oppressing Palestinians, that’s all being brought here. So we understand that the policing that’s happening is something that’s controlled by the elites for the purposes of supporting corporations, supporting developers in Atlanta.

This is around pushing out poor working-class people, particularly poor working-class Black people, and turning Atlanta further into a playground of the rich, making Atlanta akin to a San Francisco in terms of a city where all you see is a vast amount of differences in wealth from the most poor to the richest, who are the only ones who can afford to live here, and the poor folks are the homeless ones that people are trying to kick out and continue to criminalize. This is the city that they’re creating, the so-called Black Mecca that they’re creating as they empty out Black people from the actual city. And they’re using the police as the tip of the spear, as their forward force in which they are going to push people out, control movements, and stop Atlanta from having any sense of having a working-class population that can afford to live here and prosper here.

And they’re doing it knowingly, no matter what they say. You can’t have 40 years of gentrification under majority Black City Councils and under Black leadership and suggest that somehow it’s a fluke, it’s a mistake. We don’t know how we got here. It is under this leadership that we got here because in terms of the class issue, the Black bourgeois leadership has sided with the corporations and the developers again to empty out the city of working-class and poor people, particularly working-class and poor Black people.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So powerfully put by both of you, and I’m so grateful for you for the time that you’ve given us to break this all down. And I want to round things out. I’m going to ask y’all both in a second if you have any final words about how people listening can get involved in this struggle or where they can find you all and the work that you and your orgs are doing, and then we’ll round out there. 

But by way of getting there I wanted to read for folks listening, there has been some support from the organized labor movement, not nearly enough, but it was encouraging to see Jimmy Williams – The general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades – Make a statement which we will link to so y’all can check it out. It was short, but Jimmy did say, and I quote, “The right to speak up and peaceful protest is fundamental to our union and to all working people. Since the protests began, we’ve seen violence, including the death of one protester, as well as dozens of arrests and incredulous charges of domestic terrorism in some cases stemming from the ‘Defend the Atlanta Forest’ movement. I believe that these tactics are designed more to quell dissent and to dissuade working people from exercising their rights to protest and demonstrate than they are to legitimately uphold the law. It has to stop. Our rights as working people must be upheld, and we deserve to live in a society free from police violence.” So shout out to Jimmy, shout out to the painters. But again, we need more. 

And on that note, Kamau, Mariah, I wanted to thank you both once again for joining me and ask if you could close us out with any final words that you have to working people out there listening to the labor movement in general, and where can folks find you, and what can they do to get involved in this struggle?

Kamau Franklin:  I’ll go really quickly. So to find us, our organization is Community Movement Builders, the website, communitymovementbuilders.org. We have a Stop Cop City page there where folks can learn a whole bunch of different ways in which they can be involved. Very important coming up is June 5, which is going to be another day of action at City Hall where they’re going to take the vote to allocate over $33 million to the Atlanta Police Foundation. So we definitely want people to call in if they’re not in Atlanta. If they are in Atlanta, we want people to come down to City Hall from 11:00AM EST to protest, to organize, to speak out.

And my message to working-class people is that we won’t win until we continue to get out into these streets, organize, push back, and fight back. This is not a time period where we’re going to be able to bargain our way out of fascism. We can only win against fascism if we fight back, if a large part of that fight back is organizing, being involved in the struggle, fighting in the streets, and winning victories for our people and challenging the oligarchs and the corporations which are trying to divide and conquer us.

Mariah Parker:  Hallelujah. Amen. Only thing that I would add is that stakeholders in some of these companies are funding this project: Delta, Southern Company, a lot of these fast food restaurants, Inspire Brands. You can find out who is giving money to or somehow financially implicated in Cop City by going to stopcopcitysolidarity.org. And if you live in a city, no matter where you live, you might be able to find a target, someone like Cadence Bank that’s giving the insurance for the project.

Maybe you find a Wells Fargo, or maybe you work at a Wells Fargo and you and a couple of the clerks behind the window want to have an action to demonstrate to the overlords that y’all not happy with the complicity in this project. Anyone anywhere can take these kinds of actions. They’ve been very helpful for us for helping erode the power of capital and supporting this project for yanking some of this corporate support away from the project and ultimately undermining their ability to put that private money into Cop City. So if you go to copcitysolidarity.org, you can look up somewhere near you that is financially tied to this project and mobilize some folks, take some action to let them know that their actions to support Cop City will not stand, not in your community, not anywhere.

From the defeat of the coup government in Bolivia, the election of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, and the rise of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, to the historic election of Gustavo Petro in Colombia and the return of Lula in Brazil, left-leaning governments are changing the political landscape of Latin America. However, even more progressive parties and ruling coalitions have failed to rein in the violence of the resource extraction economy and the domineering power of international capital flowing through mining, drilling, and deforestation operations across the hemisphere. Indigenous and environmental activists from Ecuador to Bolivia say that today’s extractivist economy perpetuates the violence of colonial domination, and warn that things are only going to get worse over the course of the 21st century. 

In the latest installment of The Marc Steiner Show‘s special collaborative series with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), we speak with a panel of Indigenous leaders, environmental activists, and scholars about how extractivism has come to dominate the politics and economics of Latin America, and what forms the anti-extractivist resistance is taking at the local and international level.

Patricia Gualinga is an Indigenous Kichwa leader and lifelong defender of the Amazon rainforest in her community of Sarayaku, Ecuador. 

Pablo Poveda is a radical economist who works at the Center for Studies of Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA), a non-profit think tank in La Paz, Bolivia.

Teresa A. Velásquez is an associate professor of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino, and the author of Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador. 

Studio Production: Kayla Rivara
Post-Production: Tom Lattanand, Bret Gustafson, Marc Steiner 
Audio Post-Production: Tom Lattanand
Translation by: Bret Gustasfson, Adriana Garriga-López, Maria Haro Sly
Voiceover Readers: Adriana Garriga-López, Rael Mora 

Read NACLA: nacla.org
Get updates from NACLA: nacla.org/newsletter
Follow NACLA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NACLA
Donate to NACLA: nacla.org/donate

For more in-depth coverage of Ecuador and Bolivia from NACLA, please visit nacla.org.

Transcript

Marc Steiner:  Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us. The Real News and the North American Congress on Latin America, known as NACLA, have launched a podcast series to probe the contemporary issues in Latin America that affect Latin America and the entire planet. In our opening segment, we saw the emergence of the pink tide in the early 2000s, with left-leaning presidents winning in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina. And now we’re in the midst of another pink tide. We saw Lula freed from prison, which we just talked about, coming back to power in Brazil, and then the election of young progressives like Gabriel Boric in Chile. In Mexico, Lopez Obrador. The amazing victory of the former revolutionary fighter, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and the ongoing dominance of the socialist MAS party in Bolivia, first with the Indigenous Evo Morales and now with Luis Arce.

Now, despite the victories of the left, South America remains deeply divided, and the new governments of the left must address serious economic challenges that a legacy of imperialism and the intervention of the US over these last 120-plus years. And today it continues. The exploitation of natural resources created a dependence on what we now call “extractive economies.” Whether it’s mining for minerals, drilling for oil or gas, or destroying forests – Like the Amazon being turned into pastures for cattle, and fuels for soy that bring with it a total social environmental destruction, devastating many people in these countries and the environment around them – It threatens the entire planet. 

These resources extracted from the earth are usually exported without any processing. So when global prices are high, things can look pretty good, but if the price of commodities drop, economies can go into a tailspin like what happened in Venezuela when the price of oil plummeted. So the effect of extractionism and extraction is really far-reaching. Mines produce toxic waste, contaminating water supplies. Oil and gas do the exact same thing, and they don’t even create any widespread employment. Deforestation exacerbates climate change, creates inequality that pushes small farmers off their land. On top of that, extractive industries create social conflicts that are often experienced most severely by women, who are marginalized from their labor opportunities that do exist, and also at the moment, as always, have to confront sexual violence. 

So how is the second wave of left and progressive governments confronting their dependence on extractivism? How does that affect the economies? Can they change the dynamic and obtain control? Can they avoid the negative environmental and social impacts? And how are the social movements and activists responding to all of this? What are the alternatives, if any, and what would a real progressive government look like?

Well, that’s what we’re going to explore today. And to help us wrestle all of this, my co-host is Brett Gustafson. He’s co-executive editor of NACLA. He’s a political anthropologist, professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. And his latest book is Bolivia in the Age of Gas, that traces the struggles of natural gas in Bolivia under the 14 years of Evo Morales. And he’s done extensive work with Indigenous people in Bolivia as well. So welcome, Bret, great to have you with us.

Bret Gustafson:  Thank you, Marc. It’s great to be here. I’ll introduce our guests today. We’re very happy to have guests from Ecuador and Bolivia with us. In Ecuador, the left-leaning president, Raphael Correa, led the country for a decade. While many celebrated his efforts to redistribute wealth, he also expanded mining and oil activities, and he often attacked and criticized, even criminalized, the environmentalists and Indigenous organizations who questioned these activities. And now the country has shifted back to the right with a new president. 

Today our guests include Patricia Gualinga, who is an Indigenous leader of the Kichwa people of Sarayaku Ecuador. She’s also the international relations director for the Kichwa First People of Sarayaku, a region that has been fighting for rights and for the environment for many years. We also have Teresa Velasquez, an anthropologist and professor at Cal State Santa Barbara, who has studied anti-mining movements in Ecuador and the Andes, and is the author of Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador. Welcome to you both. And from Bolivia, we have Pablo Poveda, who is an economist who works for CSLA, the Center for Studies of Labor in La Paz, Bolivia. Welcome, Pablo.

Marc, you were thinking about the longer colonial history and the colonial legacies behind extractivism. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about what you were talking about?

Marc Steiner:  As I was thinking about the crisis with extractivism in Latin America, I thought about how this really is a 400-year legacy. It begins with the Spanish and the Portuguese and the exploitation of the land, and the genocide against Indigenous people, and the mining for gold and silver, and all that comes with that. It is important to think through that, including the 120-plus years of US imperialism throughout Latin America and the effect that has had. So there’s a historical root that gave rise to what we’re facing today with all these issues. And I thought that I’d like everybody to jump in on this and give their thoughts on what this means. But I want to start with Patricia to talk about what that historical legacy means and how it affects this moment.

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] Well, for Indigenous peoples, the issue of extractivism has been terrible, fatal. It has violated the people’s rights, it has destroyed our nature. And really, in some ways, the states and the companies have not followed the law, the constitution, or even the court rulings that we have been able to achieve in response to these violations. For us, extractivism is lethal. It implies the disappearance of the peoples, and it implies the violation of all our human rights.

Marc Steiner:  Pablo, if you want to leap in on this as well, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Pablo Poveda:  [Translated from Spanish] Extractivism is a historical consequence in Bolivia. First, capitalism was not born from the internal contradictions of the Bolivian economy, but rather came from the outside. Therefore, there was no development of a strong internal economy, and there was no mass expropriation of land for campesinos, which led to the rise of capital. And now these forms of backward production, which the ruling mass party refers to as the “plural economy,” are functional to both capitalism, exploitation of labor, and exploitation of nature. That’s why, from this perspective, we define Bolivia as a backward country with a mixed economy that lives largely off the rents, or the revenues, generated from the exploitation of natural resources.

This history sets the foundation for present-day extractivism and the cycle of gas extraction from 2000 to 2022. And this is under the complete hegemony of transnational capital. There’s no local bourgeois involved. Nonetheless, the economy entered into an accelerated downturn beginning in 2015. At its highest point, exports were over $6 billion per year, and now the income from gas is only around $2 billion per year.

We’re also experiencing a cycle of gold extraction from 2011-present under the control of private mining cooperatives, which is a form of backward production that the current government is promoting in alliance with capital from China and other countries in the region. Compared to the sale of gas, which at least leaves 50% revenues to the national government, this mining cycle does nothing for the state. Gold mining largely operates through illegal means, and it has a major environmental impact because it uses mercury for processing the gold. Bolivia has become the main global importer of mercury in the world since 2020. In conclusion, Bolivia cannot overcome its primary position as a country dependent on revenues from exporting unprocessed raw materials in a framework of capitalist relations of production. And now, Bolivia is waiting for the renewable energy transition to exploit new raw materials, like lithium.

Bret Gustafson:  Thanks, Pablo. That was a really great historical overview of Bolivia with parallels in Ecuador. It really helps us to think about these cycles of extraction; from silver to tins, to oil to gas, now to gold, maybe to lithium next, and also that relationship with foreign capital. This is a theme we definitely want to come back to, Marc. So thanks so much for that historical overview. We’ll circle back to Bolivia in just a moment, but I’d like to turn to Patricia now to tell us a little bit more about the current relationship with the government in Ecuador.

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] The Indigenous people and the Indigenous Movement have not had any government that really listens to their proposals. There has always been confrontation over the topic of extractivism. In this part of the Amazon, it’s the extraction of oil. In the south of the Amazon, it’s mining and the issue of water. This government is no different from the previous government or the one before that. This government is also extractivist, and it is right-wing. There have been strong Indigenous mobilizations where people have lost their lives. 

The problem is that the entire economic model in Ecuador is based on extractivism: whether it’s oil, mining, forestry, the list goes on. In this sense, there is a very strong struggle. We are waging in our territories. In the north, we have weekly reports of oil spills in the Amazon, mostly from pipeline failures that are contaminating water sources. And in the south, where our Shuar brothers and sisters are, we know that there is open-pit mining where there are all kinds of rights violations.

The tactics are always the same. They try to divide the local people with promises that are never upheld. The government stigmatizes the leaders who protest, persecutes, and criminalizes them. This has intensified in recent years. There has always been repression, but with the previous government of Correa this became much more visible, and the new government has followed the same recipe. So for us, whether governments of the left or the right come into power, we have not seen great changes, because the model is always built the same way. Some of them let us speak, some of them prohibit us from speaking, but they always violate our rights.

Bret Gustafson:  Well, that’s a wake-up call to many people on the progressive side of things. You sometimes celebrate the election of left governments. Might we say that the arrival of the left changed anything at all in relation to this longer history of extractivism, whether in Ecuador or Bolivia?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] I don’t doubt that the governments receive funds, but this entire extractivist practice has generated corruption at all levels. We cannot say that we are living in a country where these returns are reaching the most needy. There is an overwhelming level of corruption that has led to Ecuador being in a profound crisis – A total crisis – And things have become very polarized. In recent years, there has been terrible polarization. Either they want to put us on the right or they want to put us on the left, and they have forgotten that we Indigenous people are not one or the other. I don’t consider myself of the left or of the right. We are people who demand social justice, respect for the rights of nature, and the real implementation of a plurinational state.

Everybody knows that corruption in these governments has also penetrated the justice system. So if we try to work through the justice system, we don’t know if we are going to achieve justice. As we have seen over time, those who have power, regardless of what political line they come from, also control the justice system. So we are in a situation in which extractivism has led us to a state of corruption of the government and the multinational corporations know this. They are interested in that because this facilitates their extraction of resources from the Indigenous territories and from the peoples in resistance. It is very sad to have to say these things about our country, but we have to tell the truth.

People sometimes say, oh no, we’re on the left, and capitalism is the problem. But my question is, which capitalism? Because many times they refer to the US, but I see that many of the mining companies are Chinese, or they come from Russia, and also from the US and other moneyed countries. So what capitalist are we really talking about? From my perspective, we have to say that there has to be social justice, transparency, and that we have to battle corruption so that the benefits, whatever they are, reach the people that really need them in the [foreign language], the campesinos, the Indigenous people that really need them.

Marc Steiner:  So I’d like to jump in for just a second. I’d like to hear what both Teresa and Pablo have to say, and jump in a bit to talk and respond to what Patricia was saying in terms of the left and right divide. It raises all kinds of questions about the power of capital across the globe, how it affects everything. No matter if it’s the left or the right in power, it seems to hit almost every country. So I’d like to explore that first. And let’s go, Teresa, why don’t you start?

Teresa Velásquez:  Well, yes, of course. I completely agree with Patricia when she says that the government of Correa followed the same pattern as the previous governments. Both neoliberal government and the so-called socialist government bet on mining as a tool of development, as a model of development to “reduce poverty.” And this puts at risk the watersheds and the territories of Indigenous people, Ecuadorians, and small farmers. And of course there’s some minor differences between the past or current neoliberal government right now and the Correas government. 

Both have opened the doors to foreign mining companies, but there is still a difference at the very beginning of Correa’s political project when it was still a broad-based coalition movement and people like Alberto Acosta were part of the government. We saw an openness to the demands of the anti-mining movement in the early years. For example, in April 2008, the constituent assembly admitted a decree that reverted those mining concessions that were granted without having had prior and informed consultation with communities, or that were located in an ecologically insensitive zone.

This was known as the Mining Mandate, and it should have been applied to the most contentious projects in the region such as the Quimsacocha Project, which is now known as the Loma Larga Project, Rio Blanco, which is also in Azuay, and other ones that were located in Intag and in the southeastern areas of the Amazon. But because Correa did bet on mining, he never implemented the Mining Mandate. This decree has been completely violated, and was substituted by a mining law that sought a developmental extraction with a little bit more participation from the state. So the government created a national mining company to seek greater participation in the profits generated by mining activities, rather than completely end or overturn those mining concessions that were causing so many problems.

Of course, for the anti-mining movement, the contradictions of the Correa government were obvious. On one hand, there was this government that was supposed to be a progressive government of the so-called “Citizens Revolution” leading an agenda for political and economic change. And while the constitution that came from this process did incorporate some important advances that support the Indigenous and environmental agendas, changes like recognizing Ecuador as a plurinational country reflected the longstanding demand of the Indigenous movement. The constitution also recognized the right of what is called the “good living” or “buen vivir” or the “sumak kawsay” as well as the rights of the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. They were also called the Rights of Nature. However, this did not fundamentally resolve the problem of the economic model. The economic model continued to be based on extractivism.

Marc Steiner:  That was really interesting. Now Pablo, could you talk briefly from your perspective about what’s happening in Bolivia?

Pablo Poveda: [Translated from Spanish] Yes, of course. This progressive government of the MAS in Bolivia emerged from a political crisis of neoliberalism, and, of course, accompanied by the social movement. The MAS party represents itself to the movements as a savior, the party that is going to overcome the extractive model of exporting raw materials of the Bolivian economy. In reality, what has happened is that it has made itself functional to capitalism so that the exploitation of natural resources continues. Of course, we have livable [inaudible] with regards to the prices of gas and other export products that permitted the government to somewhat avoid social conflicts. When the situation changed and the prices fell, the government showed itself as almost fascist, repressing the social movements.

This is the current situation: This government promised to overcome the extractive model of the economy and lead us to live well, and that there will be industrialization. However, economically, the results are terrible. The cycle of gas is coming to an end. Traditional mining is in a downturn. The total nationalization of mining was proposed, but that did not happen. There has been a proposal for two big projects. 

One is the extraction and industrialization of lithium by the government, and the other is the industrialization of iron with investments of millions of dollars. But they’re not profitable, and it has not happened. They say they’re progressive, but it is with capitalist content. When it comes to employment, 80% of the Bolivian population works in the informal economy, meaning they create their own jobs. And of that 80%, 87% are women. Therefore, we don’t see any results for the future. In fact, we see that extractivism is going to be intensified with the energy transition, which requires new materials to develop new technologies.

Marc Steiner:  Bret, can you pick up on that a little bit?

Bret Gustafson:  Yes, thanks Marc. And thanks, Pablo. That’s really eye-opening for us to hear, that in many ways the governments of the left, while they may have redistributed some of the money from extractivism in new ways, that the overall system does not really appear to have changed very much.

Marc Steiner:  So this has been a really important part of our discussion. It has unveiled a lot of contradictions, and they’re really important to explore even more deeply. I’d like all of you to comment on this. Pablo, then Patricia and Teresa come back in, explore what all this means. If there’s people listening to our podcast at the moment, many of them would be on the left. 

And I want to be clear about what we’re talking about. And we’re talking, it seems to me, in some ways about the huge power of capital across the globe, and even in Latin America, that affects the political life and the economy of those countries, no matter who’s in charge, no matter which party wins. So are we saying we’re not seeing any difference at all? I’d like to explore what that means, and I parse that out because it’s a very complicated and important subject.

Teresa Velásquez:  So it’s more about how do we re-envision socialism? How do we re-envision the left? And from the perspective of the anti-mining movement, what’s more important is that whoever’s elected is moving away from the extractive economy, and that includes oil, mining, gas, extraction of forest, and things like that. Their alternatives would be agroecology, community-based tourism, redistribution of land, redistribution of water. So some of those coincide with the socialist or progressive principles, but it’s not the left that we have seen necessarily in Ecuador and other parts of Latin America, because they’ve stayed within the same model of extractive development. 

So what people are asking and pushing for is a redistribution of resources and of power and a truly democratic system that’s going to consider the voices of communities, of women, of Indigenous peoples, of Afro-Ecuadorians; the people who really have borne those effects of the extractive industry and everything that’s come with it, the pollution and the struggles over territory and water.

Marc Steiner:  So Patricia, what do you think about this? Is there no difference at all between the left and the right and the governments that they run when it comes to extraction? Is it all the same?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] There is a difference in discourse. Some come with a beautiful way of speaking. So outside of the country, they are very much loved. But within the country they apply the same formula when it comes to extractivism, whether they are of the right wing or the left wing, they have all used the extractivism economic model, or they come with very strange proposals. But no government has known the state and the people that they govern. In Ecuador we are so diverse. They come to impose an ideology and a way of governing that does not correspond with what we are really living. And in the era of Correa there was an oil bonanza. They say right now we are in an oil bonanza, but they spend and spend and spend. And the whole time we are in crisis.

The issue of healthcare, for example, is in a total state of crisis in the country. Many people complain that they go to the hospitals and there is no medicine, there are no supplies to provide care. It’s a huge crisis. This is the basic level. In Ecuador, we don’t have universal social security. Only people who put in years of formal work have social security. Therefore, it’s a country that has been in an economic downturn, and it’s not doing well.

Yet, there is always talk about all the resources. Right now we’re talking about extractivism, and then there’s the environmental issue. All of the forests that we Indigenous people are protecting are now becoming a business; green business. And who’s receiving the benefits of that? It’s the government. And with a new discourse, oh no, we’re not going to destroy nature, but you have to be part of this green business. So for us, as Indigenous peoples, each millimeter of rights has been fought for with deaths, with struggle, with so much struggle. But I do believe that we have a holistic vision that could transform the vision of our country and make it more equitable with greater solidarity.

Bret Gustafson:  Thanks Patricia. And for those in our audience who may not be familiar with these names, Rafael Correa, who Patricia mentioned, was generally considered to be on the left, but as Patricia is saying, was fairly unfriendly to the positions of Indigenous peoples and others who were opposed to more extraction. The current president of Ecuador is a fellow named Guillermo Lasso, and he is definitively on the right, so things aren’t getting better there. Patricia, did you want to go on?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] That is not happening because the government of Correa, what it did is actually weakened the Indigenous peoples through personal attacks. They imprisoned various leaders, especially from Morona Santiago, especially from the mining areas. They were locked up as if they were the biggest crime busts. Two Indigenous leaders were put in maximum security prisons, and then the government tried to get all of the Indigenous people to speak in their favor. There could not be a critical voice without repression. We’re talking about a government that enjoyed credibility at the international level because it was said to be of the left, but it actually repressed Indigenous people. The Indigenous people were good as long as they supported the government. We were the bad ones because we were saying we did not want oil to be extracted. We wanted our rights and, therefore, we were the bad ones.

Under the current government, the government of Lasso, we have mining decrees and the expansion of extractivist economic activities. The government has not taken decisions to generate social justice in the country. There’s great amounts of crime. This government entered office with its hands tied with many promises, and it cannot act. Therefore, in these years we have lived government after government, the misery that has been generated towards Indigenous people. And overall, the persecution of Indigenous people has never ended since the colonial period. This is our reality.

Marc Steiner:  This has been really fascinating. So let me come back to you, Bret, for just a minute here, because in terms of what we’ve covered in this conversation so far, which always happens in great discussions, they don’t always go where you think they’re going to go. So let me ask you where you’d like to take this now.

Bret Gustafson:  Well, Marc, we’ve hit on a lot of points that we were hoping to. The big one being that this is the challenge of confronting the power of capital. And obviously, we see a lot of similarities between left and right governments when it comes to extractivism, even if there are some significant differences in government support for the poor, and we can’t forget about that. We’ve also talked about the corruption that comes with extractivism, as Patricia mentioned. 

Pablo draws our attention to the global crisis that capitalism appears to be in. So listening to Pablo, we have the potential for some revolutionary change, but as Pablo was saying, he doesn’t really see that we have revolutionary subjects anymore. But listening to Patricia, it does sound like Indigenous peoples have continued to struggle to carve out their own political spaces, some types of limited autonomy to chart their own futures. So we don’t want to be too pessimistic about the current moment.

Marc Steiner:  Now, you’re right, Bret. All we’re talking about here is the intense power of international capital. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. How do we build another future is the question. It’d be interesting from all of you, from your perspectives, from the places you live in, the places you struggle in: what do you think about what you’re fighting for and how different it is in terms of each of your struggles and how things could change? Could they be different? What would it look like?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] The situation is very complex. We have attended several United Nations conferences, for example, the Climate Conference. And since the Paris Conference, the ones that have doubled or tripled their participation in these spaces are the extractive companies like oil and mining. They try to prevent any forward movement in climate negotiations for the benefit of the environment. And that’s terrible, because we have very minimal influence in those conventions. Those companies also fund the meetings and they are in constant communications with governments. If things continue in this way, there really won’t be a real possibility of change.

We try to build up from the grassroots to propose different visions that are friendly to the environment and that have social justice at the center in terms of a relationship with nature that is completely different from the one that exists now. Sometimes people ask me why I participate in these conferences, and I say, really it’s to bother them, it’s to interrupt, to tell them that we are here, we’re not going to allow them to continue to work in this way as though we don’t exist. We’re going to continue to be in resistance. 

The solution really comes from strong communities that have autonomy, that have a vision of conservation. But that conservation must connect with the global level, with global benefits. The benefit of environmental conservation, but also equilibrium; eco-systemic balance. I dream. I belong to a nation of 1,350 people. That isn’t even as big as a school in a Western country. However, we are fighting so that our people can live well, that we can live sustainably, and that our vision can transform the vision of the Western world that is based on fossil fuels. You might say that this is a utopian vision, but this is our utopian vision.

Marc Steiner:  No, no, no. Patricia, that was good. It’s important. We have to have those utopian visions for the future, what the future could be like. Pablo, come in for a minute. And then Teresa, please jump in after that. Pablo, you as a Marxist and a Marxist activist and theoretician, how do you see these contradictions that Patricia raised? It’s really important to probe into that. I’m curious from your perspective on that, and then I want Teresa to round it out. Pablo.

Pablo Poveda: [Translated from Spanish] Yes, we are in a moment after the composition of capitalism. And if we do not overcome capitalism, I don’t think it’s a technology problem. Technology is good. We’re in the fourth industrial revolution, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for the hope of humanity. The problem isn’t that; the problems are the social relationships of production. These debates that are about the overcoming of extractivism are taking place within the frameworks of capitalism, and we have to overcome that. Unfortunately, these populist governments have taken backwards steps and have damaged the perception of the left and of Marxist movements at the international level. And they have been based in an ideological discourse.

It is about generating an enemy in whoever questions their proposals, and that leads to polarization, racism, confrontations between the communities, between the people in the countryside and the people in the city. It’s a very arduous task. And with regard to the social subject, the revolutionary subject, the Bolivian working class and mining and oil are well paid. These are not the same conditions that led to the revolution of 1952 in Bolivia. We should bring together the different sectors of society in the search to save the planet and really seek an energy transition that stops climate change, that overcomes capitalism, and brings together different parts of society. But I see it is very difficult to use this panorama, especially because after the pandemic, everybody wants to reactivate the economy, and they want to reactivate by exploiting even more nature and workers. It is a very hard and a very long task for a society that wants to liberate humanity from capitalism.

Bret Gustafson:  Those are really amazing observations. I just want to jump in quickly, Marc. As it often seems to happen, sometimes here in the US, we often look to Latin America for the solutions that we want. We want there to be a progressive transformation. I really appreciate it, Patricia, talking about the contradictions of the international climate negotiations. The fact that the wealthier countries are to blame. Maybe we shouldn’t always be looking for solutions in other countries here in the US. We need to also be a little more militant in our opposition to extractive economies that we live under and that our consumption maintains elsewhere.

Marc Steiner:  That’s a really strong point. Teresa, do you want to pick up on that for a moment?

Teresa Velásquez:  Yeah, I’m thinking of my students right now. We can educate them, help them make the connections around extractivism, water contamination, climate change, racism in both North and South America, and empower them to take action. From my perspective, I believe that this vision of the future also comes from Indigenous people in the US and in Latin America. So this vision is for a more sustainable future. It also has to be anti-racist. The future has to be anti-genocidal. It has to support the life of human beings and also non-human beings. 

And especially in Ecuador and in the US, it has to include the right to protest. The Ecuadorian constitution protects the right to protest, but despite that, we see how the most visible leaders are insulted and criminalized. So this future also has to include the right to protest and the right to have a much more profound democracy and support for more sustainable projects like agroecology, farming, community-based tourism, and other economic priorities that have been put forward by the Indigenous movements in both North and South America.

Marc Steiner:  Let me jump in for a second here. A little sidebar that I was just thinking about and listening to what everybody was saying when we think about where the future might take us and you all think it might take us. I realize under my shirt is a Che Guevara shirt I’m wearing today. Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution was, in some ways, a really different time, a different era. It was many years back, it was in my youth. I’m 76 now, so it’s a different time. So to pick up on that, and Bret please jump in here, I want to jump in and talk about where you all think the future will take us now. Where would it take us? How can we get there? What does it look like?

Bret Gustafson:  Those are tough questions, Marc. I wish I had the answer to that myself because you’re right, it is a different generation, and now we’re seeing more militants and more aggression from the right wing. And it seems like in some ways, the left is not sure what direction to go in. And there’s some, at least in the Latin American context, there’s a tension between an older school of left thought and newer concerns largely tied to the environment. And our guests have all made some great points. We want a future that’s not racist. We want a more egalitarian future. We want a future that’s not about ecological destruction. How do we get there? That’s a question that I don’t think I have an easy answer for.

Marc Steiner:  I don’t think any of us do at the moment.

Bret Gustafson:  I know that it’s going to take organization. I know that it’s going to take a shift. I see a lot of hope in young people in the working class in the US. I see a lot of hope in the connections being made between anti-racist movements and environmental movements. No, it’s not the big green movements that are now on center stage. We see all kinds of movements on the front lines all over our country, connections between the movement for the climate, movements against police violence. This is definitely the key way forward, making more connections between different kinds of movements.

Marc Steiner:  I agree. The motions internationally and nationally here in the US are just erupting, and how they will turn out and how they will mold, what they’ll say to the future, is something we’re going to see develop. We just don’t know. But it looks good.

Bret Gustafson:  And Patricia wanted to say something else, Patricia?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] I don’t know if this is possible, but we have to keep trying because we can’t just keep simply accepting what they’re doing. If we talk about progressive governments, Lula just came into power in Brazil. We’re very happy about this because we did not want Bolsonaro by any means. And Pedro won the presidency in Colombia, and we are also happy about that because, for the same reason, we did not want the other candidate.

These governments have seen what happens when you do the wrong things. Let’s hope that they do the right things. In their hands is the task to look for transformations in these countries, to respect rights, to make the changes that people want. In their hands is the possibility that the left can maintain a bit of dignity, and we keep looking for solutions. I and my people are in resistance because we are sure that in our context we can look for those alternatives. We can seek those sustainable approaches because we are so few. But if we’re talking at the global level, we’re talking about the global economy, then the people with the money have to invest in things that do not continue on this path of destruction.

Marc Steiner:  Bret.

Bret Gustafson: That’s great. Picking up on that, it’s clear that it’s going to take more organization, more mobilization, more reflection, more understanding of what’s happening at different levels. And at the end of the day, it’s going to take putting pressure on governments and putting pressure on industries. I don’t think there’s any other way around it.

[Long pause]

Marc Steiner:  So we’re adding this addendum to our conversation because, Bret, a lot has happened since our recording and you’ve been following this fairly closely. So why don’t you update us on what’s happened since we recorded this earlier conversation.

Bret Gustafson:  Yeah, Marc. That’s right. In Ecuador, things have gotten a little bit disturbing. The Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement, CONAIE, has demanded the resignation of President Guillermo Lasso. He’s actually in the process of potentially undergoing an impeachment in the Congress. In addition, sadly, an Ecuadorian Cofan Indigenous leader named Eduardo Mendua was assassinated in February. Eduardo was the director of the international relations arm of the National Indigenous Movement CONAIE. He was also an outspoken opponent of continued oil development in his territory. Some observers suspect that conflicts tied to oil drilling and, potentially, to the state oil company, led to his killing.

So very troubling indeed. In Bolivia, the new MAS government led by Luis Arce continues to confront right-wing efforts to destabilize the government. Plans to develop lithium and steel are still at the forefront of government visions of the future. But because natural gas exports are declining, that means less revenues coming into the country. The international reserves, which were once the envy of Latin America, have dwindled. And to stave off a potential currency crisis, Arce’s government has moved to start buying more gold from gold miners in Bolivia. Meaning, of course, that, once again, the dependence on extractivism, particularly in the Amazon region of the country, continues.

Marc Steiner:  This has been a fascinating discussion. It really has been. We were looking at extractivism, but we end up plumbing the depths of what our political future might be in Latin America and here. And it’s really important and wonderful. And what you’ve added to this conversation at the end means we have to take a deeper look into this and take another journey with these guests, and maybe some other guests, to look at where the future may take us and what’s actually happening on the ground. It’s really important, because what happens in Latin America affects policies, lives, and the world we live in. They can’t be separated. Never have been.

Bret Gustafson:  That’s right, Marc. I agree. Thanks so much for letting me join you today.

Marc Steiner:  And so as we go out, I do want to thank all of our guests today: Patricia Gualinga from Ecuador who joined us. Teresa Velásquez, who’s a professor of Anthropology at Cal State University in San Bernardino. And from Bolivia, Pablo Poveda Avila, who’s a radical economist, working with a think tank, the Center for Studies of Labor and Agrarian Development. Of course, Bret Gustafson, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

230 bright blue dots are plotted on an official gray map plainly labeled “Michigan PFAS Sites.” Innocuous in appearance, the majority of dots designate military bases, airports, and landfills, where PFAS—per- or polyfluorinated substances, often referred to as “forever chemicals,” which are found in fire retardants, lubricants, and coatings like Scotchgard™ and Teflon™—are used, or were dumped. The contaminants have become somewhat better known to Americans through the 2019 Hollywood film Dark Waters. These blue dots are markers of tragedy; sites of either profound ignorance or nihilistic callousness. One of them is less than two miles from Mary Burks’ home on the south side of Pellston, Michigan. 

I spoke with Mary in September 2022. An elder of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Mary was diagnosed in December 2021 with stage 4 liver cancer, a disease associated with PFAS contamination. By January it had metastasized to her lungs and she was told she had three months to live. Her blue dot was the Pellston Regional Airport, where firefighting foams chock full of PFAS chemicals were routinely used. No one’s sure how long the airport used these chemicals, but it was long enough to contaminate Mary’s own well a couple of miles away, and the wells of both her sisters, Shirley and Alice. Shirley’s husband dug the well 84 feet down—extra deep “because he didn’t want to run into anything down there.” He died of leukemia in recent years, a disease which is also associated with PFAS contamination.

PFAS were first detected in Pellston in early 2020 at the tribe’s Head Start center, one block over from Mary’s house. High school students, including Shirley’s own granddaughter, conducted the testing with Fresh Water Futures, a nonprofit that catalyzes community efforts to safeguard the waters of the Great Lakes. “I don’t know why Katy’s class decided to check it,” Shirley said. “At first they didn’t find anything, but the class wanted to go a little bit farther and see what happens next, and that’s when they found the PFAS. You know, you just wonder how long this has been going on, probably a long time, because no one thought to check it.”

Mary had come back to Emmet County in 2004 to be with her extended family after putting in 30 years at Stroh’s Brewery in Detroit. “I’ve had a good life, I went to a lot of dances, a lot of powwows, I just had a wonderful life,” she said. “I worked all the time, but I had a good time with my sisters especially. I told my great grandson, who loves me, ‘Don’t feel bad for me. Think of me as finally being able to rest.’”

As we spoke about her life, there were plenty of hearty laughs, but also a few moments when her words would wither to ash on her tongue and her eyes would drain of all sparkle. When I asked her to describe the pain, she said only, “It’s chronic.” About receiving her diagnosis, she remarked, “I think I took it okay, considering, but it’s never good news to get. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t want to go, but we all have to, so get your mind fixed for it,’ and that’s basically what I did.” 

Mary’s eldest daughter, Andrea Pierce, thanked her mother for outliving her prognosis by at least six months. “My mother is ‘Odawa strong,’” she said. But a few moments later, Mary said, “I’m getting weaker and weaker. Some days I can’t get out from under the blanket [because] it’s so heavy.” 

The scourge of fatal cancer has run rampant through Mary’s community. Mary, her brother-in-law, and their cousins, two brothers who lived on Shirley’s block, also had fatal cancers. Their neighbor across the street was only 54 when they died of cancer, and Roseanne, another neighbor down the block, died of lung cancer. Pelston’s population is only 755; similarly, tribal members living in Emmet County number only in the hundreds, and every loss is deeply felt.

“It’s like in the war-torn countries that have all the land mines,” said Mary’s younger daughter, Marisa Graves, who left her husband behind in the Northwest to be her mother’s everyday caretaker. “You can see the people of all ages with their limbs that have been blown off. And most of them don’t even have a prosthesis, or they have homemade crutches of sticks and things… that’s going to be our commonplace here.” 

In 2020, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) issued rules for the maximum limit of seven PFAS contaminants in our drinking water. In 2023, the EPA expanded those rules, setting the maximum limits at 4 parts per trillion. These rules apply to 2,700 public drinking water systems—but private drinking water wells and systems are not regulated. The drinking water in Mary’s house was filtered by under-the-sink filters provided by Emmet County, but their daily shower is taken in contaminated water. “I was a little freaked out when I first got here, I was thinking, yikes, it could be me next. This could be a thing that I go through, and I’m watching her, and I’m watching my future,” Graves said.

For four consecutive years, Jannan Cornstalk, a member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, has coordinated the Water Is Life Festival in Mackinaw City, held on Labor Day weekend. The annual event is timed to attract some of the 26,000 or so bridge-walkers who flood into the tourist town every year to traverse the five-mile suspension bridge that connects the state’s upper and lower peninsulas. The free outdoor festival has been devoted to educating the public about the imminent hazard to the Great Lakes posed by the continued operation of Enbridge Corporation’s 69-year-old twin pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac, and the existential threat to the 12 “fishing tribes,” including Cornstalk’s own.

But lately, Cornstalk, who is based in Petoskey, had been hearing about a spate of serious cancer diagnoses, illnesses, and deaths of tribal members living in nearby Pellston. She began wondering if this epidemic could be related to the discovery of PFAS contamination, traced back to the Pellston Regional Airport, in homeowners’ private wells. 

Realizing the community had more questions than answers, Cornstalk, and the festival’s steering committee, changed their focus. The 2022 festival would be devoted to educating themselves and attendees about the threat to clean water in Michigan posed by PFAS. A panel of experts and impacted community members (which by virtue of necessity have become overlapping categories) presented information and insights at the 2022 festival.

“PFAS is a family of chemicals that have been in use since around 1940, initially developed for industrial processes like water repellents, stain resistance, heat resistance and lubrication, and also consumer products such as fireproofing, GORE-TEX products, shoes, fabrics, food containers, Teflon cookware and food wrappers,” Charlie Schlinger, a Traverse City-based engineer and scientist, said at the festival. “PFAS compounds… tend to last in your body and in the environment for a very long time, [and] the health impacts are not very well understood.”

“Industries that create [PFAS compounds] undermined the regulatory agency and regulatory processes that otherwise would have been in place to protect the public from these chemicals, so the EPA was hamstrung for decades, and did little to protect against PFAS,” Schlinger continued. “They are taking more action recently in the past few years but in the meantime it’s been over 70 years since these compounds were introduced, and there’s been widespread use around the globe.”

In July 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine publicly urged doctors to pursue testing for their patients. But insurance won’t pay, the test is absurdly costly, and polluter pay laws—though introduced on several occasions by Sen. Jeff Irwin of Ann Arbor—have not yet advanced in the Michigan legislature. “I would like more testing,” said Pierce, who is both chair and founder of the Anishinaabe caucus of the Democratic Party. “I think [Mary] has PFAS poisoning because we’re so close to the contamination side, and it’s her liver. But the blood testing costs so much and I don’t know if we’d be able to afford it.”

By Irwin’s own admission, because of the strictures of what was possible and not possible as a member of the minority party, some of his past legislative initiatives have been “nibbling around the edges” of protections against chemical contamination. But now that the Democrats have regained control of the legislature for the first time in 40 years, that will most certainly change. Irwin credited Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer with creating a “maximum contamination limit” for PFAS chemicals to try and protect the health of Michigan residents, but thinks those rules could be tighter. “The two biggest things that were left on the cutting room floor were a more cumulative sense of exposure and a child receptor rule, rules that are really focused on protecting the most vulnerable people—little people, children,” he said.

Sandy Wynn-Stelt, of the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network, has had her life ravaged by PFAS contamination. A former therapist turned full-time advocate, she spoke at the Water is Life Festival in 2022. After living in the area for over 20 years, her husband was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2016, and died three weeks later. “It was devastating to me,” she said. “It was like losing a limb. I still miss him every day.” 

The following year, the Department of Environmental Quality [DEQ] came and asked if they could test her groundwater because they thought that there may be contamination. “It was the first time I heard of PFAS,” she said at the festival. “They tested my water, and three weeks later they had a team come to my house to give me results. If you’ve ever worked in government you know that if there’s a team coming to your house, it’s not to deliver good news. It wasn’t the Publishers Clearinghouse. My well tested at 24,000 parts per trillion. The EPA guidelines at that time were 70 parts per trillion, and my well was tested over and over, and it tested as high as 80,000 parts per trillion.”

According to Wynn-Stelt, the Christmas tree farm that they lived across the street from had been a dump site for Wolverine Worldwide, a global footwear company based in Michigan. “They had dumped tannery waste throughout the ’70s there by the truckload, and contaminated 28 feet deep and about 30 acres wide,” she said. “That contaminated the groundwater, which spread 25 square miles, and it’s heading to the Grand River, and, as we know, the Grand River heads to Lake Michigan.” 

She described how, concerned for her health, she got her blood tested for PFAS chemicals. The results were shocking: 5,000,000 parts per trillion, more than 750 times the national average. Her battle with thyroid cancer in 2000, initially thought to be an anomaly, suddenly made sense. “You know, I wish I could say that my story was the worst, but you’re going to hear other stories that are just like this,” she said. “So if I have any word of advice for people it would be—don’t assume your drinking water is safe.”

Tobyn McNaughton, a mother who lives in Belmont, also spoke at the Water is Life Festival in 2022. Everyone in her family—herself, her husband, and her children—has experienced symptoms and complications from exposure to high levels of PFAS compounds. “Wolverine Worldwide illegally dumped dangerous forever chemicals that leached into our groundwater, into our drinking water,” she said at the festival. According to McNaughton, Wolverine Worldwide downplayed the severity of the contamination to the DEQ, resulting in delayed testing of the community’s groundwater and extra months of unnecessary exposure to the chemicals. “Instead of our water being tested in April 2017, we were not made aware until August 2017,” she said. “[The water] was not actually tested until September.”

The family has been devastated by the effects of the poisoned water. “There are no medications, no procedures to safely remove these chemicals, only time, and that is only what is in our blood. We can never measure what is stored in our tissues or organs,” she said. “We can’t escape PFAS.”

At the festival, Pierce heard the speakers from Rockford/Belmont say how they got whole-house filters, and noted the disparity in her county’s response to the crisis. “I don’t see any signs out there saying ‘no fishing in the Maple River because it’s been contaminated.’ I talked to an Emmet County Commissioner about PFAS at a meeting [in August 2022], and I said, ‘What in the world lets you guys okay this, and give the people only one under-the-counter water filter to use, and that’s the only thing they have? Why can’t you give them a whole-house filter?’ He said, ‘Well, you know, the government is slow,’ and I said, ‘Well, you know my mother’s dying, right?’”

Later, at her mother’s home, Pierce elaborated. “The under-the-counter filters that Emmet County gave us only work on the cold water in the kitchen sink,” she said. “So when you wash your dishes, everyone’s washing with hot water. My mother is fighting with everything she’s got, she’s not letting anything go, but she’s being stolen from us.”

Calling over from her lounger, Mary said her piece. “Test before you do this stuff, you’re causing all these people all this intense pain. It would be different if you could take an antibiotic and be rid of it, but you can’t. It’s going to take you down. Just one side of town we don’t know how many of us are all going to be sick, and how far back and if these kids could get it from being up here [for] so many years… I might’ve lived another 10, 20 years. Longevity is in my family.”

“The whole town needs full filters in every building, not one sink in the whole house. You can’t eat your vegetables watered with PFAS,” Mary continued. “Our trees are all dying; when the guy at the hardware store, Andrea said she wanted one for the bathroom so I could brush my teeth, and he said, ‘You don’t need it for your teeth. Just spit it out. Do you tell your family that, just spit it out?’”

Three days after I visited with Mary Angela Burks and her family, on September 7, 2022, she “walked on”.

This story originally appeared in Richochet on May 2, 2023, and is shared with permission. This article is originally co-published with Indiginews Media, and can be read on their site as well.

I blew a tire on my Jeep driving the rough roads up to visit the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory back in late March. With no cell service in the area, I was surrounded by forest and mountains a 45-minute drive away from any main roads.

I knew I wouldn’t be stranded there, thanks to the Coastal Gas Link security truck that had been following me ever since I left the main roads. Sure enough, a man wearing a balaclava and dressed in dark, navy-coloured clothing reading “security,” pulled up a few metres behind me. For a second I felt afraid — an Indigenous woman, alone, in a remote area parallel to the murderous Highway of Tears — anything could happen. This man had swerved dangerously towards me, almost running me off the road, about 15 minutes earlier when I attempted to pass his extremely slow-moving vehicle.

But I calmed myself when I thought of the near-constant industry traffic that travels these roads. No one could hurt me and attempt to hide it that fast, or so I prayed.

I got out of my Jeep to assess the damage and saw my tire deflated almost to the ground. The idea of asking the CGL security guard for help, who was staring me down from the inside of his truck, filled me with dread. But I gathered the nerve to approach him.

“Hi, look, I’ve got a flat. Can you please help?” I asked, looking into the two slits of eyes squinting at me through his mask. He was probably assessing who I was and what I was doing there — and if I was a protestor.

“I’m a journalist. And I’m headed up to Unis’tot’en,” I said.

He then nodded and rolled down his window.

“I’ll come take a look,” he said flatly, calling on his radio to a colleague.

CGL keeps tabs on everything that goes on in the area. After all, it’s the contentious territory where Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and land defenders have been opposing a multi-billion dollar liquified natural gas pipeline for the last several years — where multiple, violent police raids and arrests have made headlines in Canada and around the world. And, where the RCMP are continually patrolling to enforce a Supreme Court injunction obtained by CGL to stop anyone attempting to impede the pipeline’s construction.

His colleague soon pulled up, in another white pickup truck, CGL’s standard vehicles, and the two attempted to remove my tire and put on the spare. They didn’t have the right tools, so his colleague offered to drive me the rest of the way to Unis’tot’en.

Just then, another white pickup truck came around the corner. The driver started to slow down. I saw it was an RCMP officer — when the CGL security waved them off (signalling it was ok and I was not impeding anything) the cop waved back, grinning ear to ear. I thought it was strange the two had such a friendly rapport, but they are working together to keep order (and suppress dissent) along these isolated roads.

What made me shiver was the thought of these lands being unjustly controlled — it was just like the old days, when the colonizers first arrived. They showed up, herded our people onto tracks of land called reserves, then stole the land and did what they wanted with it. If any Indigenous person stood in their way, they were arrested and jailed.

I snapped back to the present day, but realized the forced, militarized colonization of Indigenous lands and people is still alive and well. And what a shuttering, sad situation, given we are supposedly in an era of reconciliation.

The security worker dropped me off at the end of the driveway and I walked to the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre. I was greeted with a smile and inquiry from Dr. Karla Tait, a Wet’suwet’en matriarch and program director at the centre. She’d been expecting me.

“Brandi, I was worried about you. Where is your car? What happened?”

I explained to her how I’d popped my tire and hitched a ride with CGL security. She asked a male supporter who lives at the centre to take a Unis’tot’en truck to put on my spare.

It was near dark by the time we returned. I was served steaming nettle tea, harvested from the yintah (Wet’suwet’en for land) — it’s loaded with iron, antioxidants and just overall good for you.

It was quiet at the centre as Tait’s nine-year-old daughter Oyate and Tait’s mother Helen Mitchell, who also lives there, were out visiting family in the Wiset reserve for the weekend. Freda Huson, another matriarch, and Tait’s aunt, who started the healing centre about a decade ago, was visiting her daughter and new twin grandchildren.

I asked Tait how she’s been doing since the drilling under Wedzin’ Kwa started.

Wedzin’ Kwa is the sacred river system parallel to the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre and the community’s sole source of drinking water. It’s the river the Unis’tot’en matriarchs and other land defenders have battled so hard to protect from the pipeline. Tait, her mother and Huson have all been arrested for standing in its way.

“Honestly,” she sighs, then adjusts her eyeglasses. “It’s really hard to confront that reality. And I think we’ve been focused on maintaining our space and trying to maintain our wellness and our health. And realizing the vision of this space and the work we want to do here. So, if anything, I’ve probably been trying to avoid a lot of updates [about the drilling] and following in depth because it’s distressing and hard to confront.”

Earlier that morning, Tait took me on a tour of the healing centre grounds. We walked a narrow path through the snow to the banks of Wedzin’ Kwa and drank the ice-cold fresh water. Tait, Freda and others believe the water has healing properties because it is uncontaminated and carries essential minerals from the glaciers.

While standing on the rocky shoreline, Tait fixed her gaze on a truck crossing a bridge that connects Unis’tot’en territory to Gidimt’en, another Wet’suwet’en clan. The truck stops alongside a CGL security truck that’s parked at the end of the bridge to the south, facing Unis’tot’en, 24/7. Tait looks annoyed.

“We deserve to exist here. We deserve to be undisturbed and at peace and to live as our ancestors did and to protect what’s left for future generations,” she said, while shaking her head in frustration.

“As Indigenous people, when our rights are eroded in this way, over what are our sacred responsibilities to protect and steward our territory, we need to stand together on those things and push for justice.”

She kneels on the rocky shoreline, cups her hand, and sips more from Wedzin’ Kwa. A peaceful expression appears across her face.

Tait usually spends her days applying for grants, developing Indigenous-based counselling, land therapy programs, and helps to keep the centre running. She wants more community members to come to Unis’tot’en to utilize the healing sessions, but she knows there are barriers.

“People are reluctant to send folks to our space on the land to heal when they know the police are going to come and harass and re-traumatize folks. That we’re going to be watched by CGL security, which is disgusting and abhorrent.”

The truck parked across the bridge is aimed toward the healing centre. It can be seen through a break in the trees. Several months ago the matriarchs put up a few tarps to block its view. Sometimes the wind blows them away.

“It’s a huge problem. And it doesn’t feel good for me knowing whenever my daughter goes outside to play, somebody’s probably watching, right? So, I keep very close tabs on her,” Tait said.

When young mothers with children fleeing domestic violence or individuals struggling with trauma come to stay at Unis’tot’en, the staff let them know they’re being surveilled.

“And there’s no one to hold them (CGL) accountable because the bodies that are supposed to protect us, we’re never designed to protect us in the first place,” said Tait, adding that in the past couple of months, they’ve noticed multiple drones in the sky surrounding the healing center at night.

Tait gifted Oyate a telescope on her ninth birthday recently.

“We’re trying to go stargazing at night and are surrounded by drones, so, It’s really sad and laughable in some ways. Like some nights we’ll go and see if it’s a good night to see the moon and it’s like, oh, well the brightest objects in the sky right now (are the drones).”

I asked to spend the night in the guest quarters of the healing center as I wanted to see the drones for myself. Around 9 p.m., Tait and I went outside.

It used to be pitch black out at night other than the stars and moon in the sky — now a massive dome of unnatural light illuminates the horizon. It’s from the drill zone.

“There’s constant noise (from the drill), there’s constant light,” shrugged Tait. “We used to have perfect starry lights out here with zero light pollution, now look at it. And we have security parked aiming their headlights at our center much of the time.”

This night was foggy but the moon and stars were still visible. Within 15 minutes Tait found a drone far off in the sky and then another not long afterward. I looked through the telescope and saw a small, multi-coloured object moving around.

“That’s it. That’s one of them,” said Tait.

Again, I was shocked. That this was happening in so-called Canada in 2023. That unarmed, peaceful Indigenous citizens were being stalked and surveilled in their own lands.

After leaving Unis’tot’en, I inquired with CGL as to if it was operating drones to spy on Unis’tot’en, which it denied. The RCMP did admit to using drones, but only during daylight hours and during active police enforcement.

Tait, meanwhile, is saddened her daughter is being raised under dystopian conditions, but believes Oyate will grow to be strong, understand her rights and powerfully fulfill her role as a future matriarch.

“It feels like a sacred and important responsibility (raising Oyate). But also, I’m glad that this veil of equality and justice and fairness in Canada has never been in front of her eyes, clouding her perceptions about the reality that we live in as Indigenous people,” she said.

“She’s so sharp and she sees it, right? And I think about the way that she’ll be able to walk and work to protect the land as she grows up, like with that clarity from the start. We’re going to continue and this is not going to shake us from our course.”

In March 2023, U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Oaxaca, Mexico, to discuss U.S.-Mexico collaboration over renewable energy. It was announced that the United States would commit to invest in at least 10 new wind and solar parks in the region — already one of Latin America’s top wind power hot spots.

But there’s a problem. These wind farms there have been largely constructed and run by foreign transnational corporations. Residents say that while on the surface these wind turbines are generating clean energy, they have been disrespecting communal land rights, stiffing local residents money owed for renting their land, and refusing to benefit the local community with discounted or subsidized utility rates. There are also major concerns for the local environment.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Michael Fox
Photos by: Michael Fox & Rosa Fox

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Narrator

Celestino Bartolomé walks his fields in the shadows of wind turbines.

His land is surrounded by them. For Celestino, that’s a problem. 

He steps past a row of corn, bends over and picks up a broken piece of plastic debris.

Celestino Bartolomé, Indigenous Farmer

“See this? Look at all of this. No way. No way. They fell from the turbine. Someone could have been hurt. They’ve been here for two years.”

Narrator

He speaks half in Spanish, half in his native Zapotec language.

His fields are littered with the debris. He says he asked the company to clean it up, but they never came. 

Mexico’s Tehuantepec Isthmus is one of the largest centers of wind farms in all of Latin America. Thousands of wind turbines dot the horizon. And in March, the U.S. government promised to invest in creating and installing even more. See this? Look at all of this

But while the energy produced from the wind here may be clean, the farms themselves have been plagued by labor, human rights and environmental abuses. 

The wind farms here are mostly constructed and run by foreign transnational corporations: Spanish, French. Japanese. American. 

The first companies began to arrive a few decades ago, with big promises. 

Carlos Sánchez, Community Radio & Anti-Wind Farm Activist

“When the wind companies came to the Tehuantepec Isthmus they came saying they would bring work. That they would create a lot of jobs. That the Indigenous peoples here would make a lot of money.”

Narrator

For some, the promises these companies made came true. For most, they did not. 

Residents say the transnational wind companies have disrespected communal land rights, stiffed residents money owed for renting their land, and refused to benefit the local community with discounted or subsidized utility rates.

The Zapotec Indigenous town of Juchitán is in the heart of the wind industry here. 

Jose de Jesus, electrician

“You don’t see any benefit from the companies, here. They’re just making money for themselves.”

Narrator

There are also serious environmental concerns. Residents say the wind turbines are often leaking oil and could be contaminating groundwater.

Carlos Sánchez

“Just yesterday, I went to an area of Juchitán and I saw a wind turbine that was black from oil being spilt. I asked the local residents, and they said the company wasn’t doing any maintenance on the turbines. The rainy season is coming. And this could carry the oil into Oaxaca’s Lake Superior, contaminating it. And it’s the place where we get much of our food and our fish.”

Narrator

Farmer Celestino says he’s also losing his hearing, because of the constant hum from the turbines surrounding his farm.

He was one of the only neighbors at the time who didn’t want the wind farms. He says the company tried to force him to accept turbines on his land. When he refused, he was attacked. 

Celestino Bartolomé

“One morning, I came to check on my land. They shot at me.”

Narrator

He’s not the only one who has received an attack on his life. 

Opponents of the wind farms here have faced serious intimidation. Human rights lawyers say death threats are common. Criminal impunity is rampant.

Last year, engineer Edgar Martín Regalado was traveling back from speaking out against a new wind farm that a French power company has been trying to install near his home in the town of Union Hidalgo.

Edgar Martín Regalado, Engineer

“I was coming back from a meeting against the wind farm. I was in a moto-taxi. A car pulled alongside us and fired three shots.” 

Narrator

He wasn’t hurt, but the attempt on his life shook the community group he’d been working with to fight the wind project.

Edgar Martín Regalado, Engineer

“It was an act of intimidation that affected everyone. A lot of people left the group. They don’t go to meetings, because they’re afraid of what they might do to us.”

Narrator

The developers and companies behind these wind farm projects in the region say they have a firm commitment to respecting human rights and that wind energy is their greatest hope for the future. But others say they have reaped all the benefits for themselves, while dividing communities.

Carlos Sánchez

“The population has handed over more than 74,000 acres of land to these transnational companies. And they have dismantled the local economy, unleashing a whole chain of conflicts, because of the lack of work.” 

Narrator

Amid all of this, U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry met with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Oaxaca, in March, to discuss U.S.-Mexico collaboration over renewable energy.

It was announced that the United States would commit to invest in at least 10 new wind and solar parks in the region. 

Residents fear that unless there are drastic changes in the implementation, development and relationship with the local community, these new wind farms are destined to repeat the same abuses, in the name of clean and renewable energy.

For The Real News, this is Mike Fox. Before you go, be sure to head over to therealnews.com/support and support the work we do so we can keep bringing you important on-the-ground coverage of people and struggles around the world…. just like this. Thanks for listening.

Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of UN scientists, delivered a “final warning” to drastically cut global emissions in order to prevent the heating of the planet past 1.5 degrees Celsius. As the exponentially accelerating effects of the climate crisis have become more apparent in recent years, so too has activism to demand urgent action from governments. In the UK, a movement known as Extinction Rebellion (XR) first emerged in 2018, and then proliferated around the globe. XR has helped popularize the spread of civil disobedience tactics in the contemporary environmental movement. But what is the movement’s theory of change? How does XR seek to proceed from direct action tactics to systems change on a timescale that matches the rapidly degrading state of our the earth’s ecological systems? Roger Hallam, co-founder of XR and leader of the activist organization Just Stop Oil, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a conversation on tactics and strategy to save the planet, which ultimately requires transforming the system.

Just Stop Oil will be staging civil resistance actions around the streets of London on April 24th.

Studio Production: Dwayne Gladden, Adam Coley
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron

Transcript

Chris Hedges:  Roger Hallam, the co-founder in 2018 of Extinction Rebellion, was recently released after nearly four months in jail. He was in prison for making a 20-minute speech on Zoom. He was arrested and jailed because he called for civil disobedience by climate activists, specifically the blocking of major road networks in London.

Hallam is one of the most important and fearless leaders in the climate movement. He was arrested in 2017 after spray painting King’s College London’s Great Hall. He was charged with criminal damage and fined £500. He was later cleared after a court ruled his actions were an appropriate response to the climate crisis. He led the occupation of a number of public sites in London in April 2019, and sit-down protests on major UK highways in the fall of 2021.

Activists from his group Just Stop Oil glued their hands to the wall after throwing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which was covered by protective glass, at the National Gallery in London. Just Stop Oil activists have also spray painted a number of landmarks, including the Home Office, the Bank of England, an Aston Martin showroom, and the rotating sign outside Scotland Yard. Two supporters of Just Stop Oil were arrested recently at the Herbert Museum in Coventry, demanding that the government stop all new UK fossil fuel projects and calling on employees and directors of UK cultural institutions to join in civil resistance against the government’s genocidal policies.

Hallam has carried out two hunger strikes and been in prison three times in the past three years. The Metropolitan Police in his latest arrest accused Hallam and Just Stop Oil of planning “reckless and serious public disruption.” The British High Court, in an effort to prevent further acts of civil disobedience, has issued an injunction to prevent Just Stop Oil protestors disrupting the flow of traffic. Blocking traffic, or assisting anyone who blocks traffic, now means activists can be held in contempt of court and face imprisonment, an unlimited fine, and the seizure of assets.

But as Hallam and Just Stop Oil warns, “Humanity is at risk of extinction and so is everything we have ever created: our works of art, our favorite novels, our historical buildings and artifacts, our traditions. We’re terrifyingly close to losing everything we value and love. We cannot rely on our criminal government or our cherished institutions to save us. Our government knows that new oil and gas means a death sentence for billions. Yet, they are continuing with plans to license over one hundred new fossil fuel projects. This means more heat waves, more crop failure, and more death. It is criminal, an act of genocide against billions of people in the poorest countries on Earth and an act of war against the young. Either you are actively supporting civil resistance,” Hallam goes on, “fighting for life, or you are complicit with genocide.”

Joining me to discuss the climate emergency and what we must do to save our species and most other species on the planet is Roger Hallam.

So, Roger, I don’t want to tick off climate statistics, but just briefly, you have often made the point that since the first COP was convened in 1992, carbon emissions have steadily gone up, I think, by over 40%. The statistical evidence is clear that the ruling elites have failed to address the climate crisis. So before we go into our discussion, just lay out where we are.

Roger Hallam:  Well, thanks for having a chat with me, and hello, everyone. Yes, I think we’re 30 years down the line, aren’t we? Those of us who are in our 50s have known this all our adult lives, that scientists told us in, what, 1990 in no uncertain terms that civilization was going to collapse if we carried on putting carbon into the atmosphere. Since 1990, it’s actually over a 60% increase in carbon emissions globally, and every year that goes by, we get more and more information on it. So at this stage of the game in 2023, we now have locked in catastrophic social unrest and suffering on an unimaginable scale. We can have a rather obscene intellectual argument about exactly how much suffering and when and where. But, as we were just saying before, I think at this stage, the issue is what we need to do about it as human beings and as members of our communities and of our traditions, and we know enough to make some serious decisions, I suppose.

Chris Hedges:  Before we begin with what we should do, let’s talk a little bit about the ruling elites and their response, because it really breaks down into two camps: one, climate denial, that there is a crisis, or that we can somehow adapt.

Roger Hallam:  Well, I think actually the division is between, to put it classically, between reformism and revolution. To give a precise definition of that, reformism believes that you can make changes in an existing social and political system to ensure that life carries on in a reasonable way. The revolutionary position is that the system itself is incapable of fulfilling the most basic requirements of human society, and it’s either going to collapse and/or it needs to be changed as a system in itself.

I think it’s important at this stage to make clear that it’s not a project about the climate. The whole framing of this around the climate is really a way of being duped by the corporate class. The corporate class invented this phrase “climate change,” “global warming,” and all the rest of it. This framing has led the progressive class and the radical left and all the rest of it down this rabbit hole of thinking, we’re dealing here with some technicality. We’re not. What we’re dealing with here is a project of murder by the elites of the most vulnerable and marginalized people on the planet, and the nature of that murder is that they believe that they have a right to continue the enactment of their power and their privilege. If millions and potentially billions of people die, then that’s an acceptable cost in order for them to maintain the status quo. As we all know, elites throughout history have engaged in this gambit, as it were, and they regularly kill people en masse in order to maintain their regime and their power.

In other words, how we need to frame this is not some unique episode which has a technical solution, as the NGOs would like to say. How we need to frame this is, in a 2,000-year history, maybe longer than that, of elites manipulating societies to extract power and materials and prestige, and as a byproduct of that, enslaving, killing, raping, all the rest of it, millions of people in order to maintain their system. As we know, this is a big cycle. At the beginning of an elite cycle, the elites are arguably quite good at ruling. Then they get lazy, and then they get arrogant, and then they become suicidally stupid. Then there’s a big revolutionary episode, a series of wars, social breakdown, and then the process starts again.

The big uniqueness of this situation we’re in today is not that this is something unique in the sense that the elites are trying to destroy civilization. It’s that this is now global. In other words, that’s not situated in America or in Africa or in the Middle East. It’s the whole world. If we get this wrong and we allow the elites to continue, then we are looking at effective human extinction or absolute human extinction. We really, I think, do not need to enter into this obscene discussion, intellectual discussion about at what point and what the probability is that we’re heading for extinction. All we need to know is that it’s a real and substantive possibility. And as I say, the next question is, how do we actually respond to this on many different levels?

Chris Hedges:  You’ve been very critical of environmental GEOs and nonprofits that have confronted this issue, climate activists. I think you started out as part of a mainstream climate activist. Explain your critique of the traditional groups, Greenpeace and all these other groups, that purport to deal with this issue.

Roger Hallam:  Well, let me say first of all, I’m primarily a scholar and an analyst. I’m not particularly ideologically pro- or anti-revolution or reform. I’m trying to make a structural argument that for certain periods of history, the reformist logic makes sense. The 1990s, arguably, there wasn’t a chance in hell of there being a revolution in the Western world because this system was sustaining itself, for all intents and purposes, quite well in its own terms. But in the 2020s, we’re in a fundamentally different structural situation that we’re looking at a coincidence of massive ecological crises all coming together and compounding together. And that the system itself is not moving fast enough and is incapable of moving fast enough because it has a reformist logic.

Now, once you’ve made that analysis, then it becomes clear that the whole environmentalist frame is rooted in a reformist logic. In other words, what the environmentalist orientation is saying is there’s an environment out there which is separate from society, and it’s got a few problems and a few issues, and we should have a campaign about it. We’ll remove this bit of pollution, or we’ll remove these people killing a species or what have you. That’s all well and good in a reformist period. But in a revolutionary period that we’re in now, the whole approach is at best deluded, and at worst a complete betrayal of the moral emergency that we’re in. It’s analytically stupid, if you see what I mean. It’s like, this is no longer the issue. The center of our analysis has to be the political structures which have enabled this catastrophe to happen and how we’re going to remove that.

This is why I’ve never called myself an environmentalist, and I’m not involved in a campaign as such. What we’re involved with here is a series of collective moves that are going to come together to produce a completely new physical and social regime. Not because we’re mad idealists or romantic revolutionaries, because we’re realists and we know that if we don’t sort this out in a holistic sense – Politically, socially, spiritually, we’re simply not going to sort anything out. I think this is a realization that is exponentially increasing around the Western world and globally, which is there’s no point doing a little thing here and a little thing there because it’s all fucked. It has to all change, otherwise nothing’s going to change. People were saying this 10, 20 years ago, but it’s self-evidently obvious at this moment in time.

Chris Hedges:  Let’s talk about confronting this system, and I want you to address two points. When you are effective, and I think many of the actions you’ve taken have been effective at disrupting the system, the system becomes more draconian in terms of its forms of repression, which is why you were put in jail for about four months for a Zoom meeting. Then talk about the tactics themselves, what works.

Roger Hallam:  Well, the first thing to understand in my view is that the state always responds to a challenge, I mean a real material challenge with repression. This is the logic of the state. It’s not an ideological point, it’s not if it’s a liberal state or an authoritarian state. All states have a regime, and that regime will move towards repression if it’s materially challenged. This comes as a surprise to many people, because they have this rather naïve idea that in a liberal democratic state, the state won’t move towards an authoritarian orientation when the shit hits the fan, as you might say.

We see this very clearly in the UK at the present time, that the British government has now been structurally challenged by mass civil disobedience now, since 2019. In the last year, there’s been over 2,000 arrests. This is in a country of 50 million population, so if you’re thinking about the US, you’re looking at 10,000 arrests or something like that, and 150 people have been to prison. More people have been to prison for political activities, you might say, than any time since the suffragettes in the early 20th century.

In response to that, the government has introduced legislation which is not dissimilar to Belarus. You can’t have a demonstration in the UK now without permission, and they’re not going to give permission a lot of the time, so they can arrest you just for having a march. If you go on a Zoom call and say you’re going to organize a march, you can be arrested for conspiracy. If you stand up in court and say, I want to mention the words “climate change”, then you can be accused and convicted of contempt of court.

A colleague of mine was imprisoned for 10 weeks for saying to the jury that he wanted to tell them about the climate. A woman the other day was sent to the Old Bailey, the biggest court in the UK, simply for having a placard telling a jury that they have a constitutional right to overrule the judge, which is a fundamental characteristic of a liberal judiciary. She is being referred up to one of the top courts in the country and will be potentially given a jail sentence. All of that has changed in four years. What we know, of course, is that the state will engage in even more draconian activity. So that’s the first analytical point to make.

The second point to make is that this is not necessarily, on an analytical level, a bad thing. Obviously, morally and politically it’s an outrage. But in terms of designing social change, radical social change, we have to understand that political change works because of repression, not despite it. In other words, what repression does is radicalizes a population. For instance, since I’ve got out, I’ve become a lot more well-known, I’ve been on some chat shows, and there’s been hundreds of people getting involved. It’s not putting people off. If anything, it’s making it more clear to people that there’s a binary choice. You’re either going to sit there waiting to die and be miserable, or you’re going to enter into resistance space and what will be will be. You just need to look at the history of resistance struggles to see this dynamic happening again and again.

Now, I want to be clear that it doesn’t mean that it’s deterministically the case that we’re going to win. That’s simply not the case. What we’re saying is that repression itself is a key mechanism through which political change often happens – Not always, because it’s a complex system out there. So we should be more nuanced in our analysis of the dynamics of repression. The critical challenge is not to just sit there and be miserable about it or criticize it, important as criticism is. What we have to do is design how we can create this backfiring effect whereby more and more people make that decision that they won’t stand by and allow ourselves to descend into authoritarianism.

Chris Hedges:  Yet, under totalitarian systems: Stalinism, fascism, you can employ mechanisms of oppression that effectively quash all attempts at dissent.

Roger Hallam:  Well, that’s not historically accurate.

Chris Hedges:  Okay.

Roger Hallam:  The key word in your sentence is “all”. If you want to be historically accurate, you can say “often.” There’s a big difference between often and all. This is the point I’m making is we should not fall into this rather self-serving leftist defeatism that the state and the capitalist regime is all-powerful. No, it’s powerful. You shouldn’t put the “all” word in, because that’s not how human societies work. Human societies are fundamentally indeterministic in the sense that you simply don’t know. You simply don’t know what’s going to happen, which means you simply don’t know you’re going to win, but you simply also don’t know you’re going to lose.

As I said to Aaron in my Novara interview – Which you might want to watch – Is the name of the game is to shake the dice. The more often that you can confront the state and the repression of the state, the more often that the state has to shake the dice on whether it’s going to win or lose. And that’s the project. As we all well know, authoritarian regimes regularly are subjected to uprisings and civil resistance and revolutions. So it’s just basically historically inaccurate to say all authoritarian regimes make civil resistance impossible, because it simply isn’t the case.

Chris Hedges:  Okay, I stand corrected. That’s a good point [Roger laughs]. Let’s talk about tactics. What do we have to do?

Roger Hallam:  Well, as I said, I’ve sort of reframed this discussion a bit, but what we’re looking at here is a fusion of the democratic critique, the social critique, and the ecological critique. Over the last 30 years, there’s been various different elements of the progressive left space, and they’ve tended to be siloed into those three areas. Some people criticize how undemocratic the regime is, some people are concerned about the tremendous inequality that’s developed, and other people obviously are pointing to the climate catastrophe.

Now, analytically, at this point in time, it’s no longer useful or analytically correct to separate those three different things, because they’re massively coincidental. In other words, for instance, the reason why we’re not dealing with the climate catastrophe is primarily because we don’t have effective democracies. The reason we don’t have effective democracies is because we have elites, and one of the reasons we have suicidal elites is because we have extreme inequality. You can spend all day making connections between those three elements. It’s not like one is foundational, necessarily.

But in terms of creating a revolutionary coalition, as it were, the framing of the project has to synthesize those three different elements into a single program and a single logic and a single vision. That’s not really my area of expertise, as you might say, but it’s a project that people like yourself, Chris, and other people that frame the problems need to move towards. I know you’ve done a lot of that yourself, and other individuals have. Well, this needs to become the new common sense of the left and ordinary people, as you might say.

In terms of what I am more of an expert in, in so much as I’m an expert in anything, is in the mobilization design. Now, the big issue here, Chris, as we were talking before I came on, is that the left generally is concerned about things which have very little practical relevance. All successful radical structural social change projects are based upon the notion of praxis. In other words, our theoretical discussion has to be rooted in the dynamics of mobilization, the practical struggle.

We don’t want to be talking about China. We don’t want to be talking about what happened in 1970. What we need to be talking about is, how do we get a hundred thousand people on the street in a disciplined, revolutionary, non-violent, ease of access way in the US to make a substantial, organized confrontation with the American regime? I’m not saying for me that’s the end of the story, but it’s like a project. It’s concrete. It has different elements in it.

The interesting thing is that, across the Western world now, there’s been a transition from a horizontalist dogma towards what you might call a functional hierarchy. In other words, organizational forms, which hark back to what you might call the democratic socialism before 1989. What we’ve done in the UK, growing out of Extinction Rebellion, is create civil disobedience projects that have central teams which are self-consciously ethical and also have executive power of mobilization.

Now, this is one of the biggest design challenges we have in Western society at the moment, is to make this transition. What I would argue is this new form of organizational model, which doesn’t revert to some archaic Leninist nonsense, but doesn’t endlessly regress into the chaos of horizontalist confusion, is the best of all worlds. No one’s pretending it’s perfect. If someone’s got a perfect organizational model, I’d love to hear from it. But what this has produced, interestingly, over the last 24 months, is the biggest civil resistance episodes, the biggest climate campaigns, as you might call them, in Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and Sweden, and substantial campaigns in several of the Western democracies. All this has been produced over 12 months.

Now, I’m not saying for a moment that these are the campaigns that are going to lead this transformation, but they’re interesting iterations because they point to solving probably the single biggest problem, which is how to create a coherent, strategic formation in a postmodernist, individualized, depressed, alienated society that we have in the Western world. The good news is – And this is the good news, Chris – Is we now have concrete methodologies to do this. No doubt they can be improved, and what have you. What I would suggest is we need to build upon these social formations and create more of them and have synergistic relationships between them, and learning relationships, so that they can piggy-jump over each other, and sooner or later one of them will be in a position to actually challenge a Western regime in the next two or three years. That’s the project.

Chris Hedges:  Just to close, the goal is to carry out acts of civil disobedience that disrupt the system enough – That’s why you block roads – To essentially weaken and cripple it. Is that correct?

Roger Hallam:  That’s an initial iteration. What we have to reinvestigate is the classical mechanism of revolutionary episodes in Western societies over the last 200 years, not because we want to replicate them exactly, because obviously history never exactly repeats itself, but because there’s certain patterns of strategy and organization which can be learned from. The key learning, I think, is the synergy between a street movement and alternative governmental organizations. In other words, like an assembly structure and a street movement that protects that assembly.

What we’re moving towards, I think, in several Western democracies at the moment is instead of asking the state to set up a citizens’ assembly to deal with the climate or social questions, is to say to the regime, we are going to set up our own citizens’ assembly as a permanent parallel institution selected by sortition, randomly from the population. The demands of that assembly will become the program for a civil resistance organization that has people’s strikes and labor strikes around, so that we’re not at this point moving towards a single issue. What we’re looking at is a programmatic approach. That program hasn’t been put together by some small group of activists. It’s come bottom-up from ordinary people in a well-organized citizens’ assembly.

There’s variations on the theme, of course, but you can see this is a major move towards what you might call more serious revolutionary politics. There’s many, many details to be sorted out, but that’s what I believe is the next step in the Western world, is moving away from the climate corporate agenda, as it were, and moving towards this fusion of street movements, civil resistance, and the assemblies.

Chris Hedges:  Great. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on April 19, 2023. Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

At a time when the world is close to irreversible climate breakdown, fossil fuel energy is growing, with oil being the biggest contributor to primary energy supply. Globally, approximately 33 percent of our energy comes from oil, followed by coal, gas and hydroelectric power. Indeed, oil companies are bringing in staggering profits, and oil production may even continue to increase through 2050. Why is it so hard to quit oil, and what would it take to defeat Big Oil? Progressive economist Gregor Semieniuk tackles exasperating questions like those in this exclusive interview for Truthout.

On March 29, Semieniuk testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget during a hearing on “The Cost of Oil Dependence in a Low-Carbon World.” In his testimony, he discussed his 2022 research that found that current oil and gas assets may be overvalued by more than $1 trillion, a figure that exceeds the subprime housing mispricing that triggered the 2007 financial crisis.

Semieniuk is assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and the department of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on the energy and resource requirements of global economic growth and on the political economy of rapid, policy-induced structural change that is required for the transition to a low-carbon economy. He has published on these topics and served as consultant for the United Nations Environmental Program, the European Commission and the U.K. government.

C.J. Polychroniou: Big Oil more than doubled its profits in 2022 and plans to stick to business-as-usual for decades to come. Why is it so hard to stop oil production?

Gregor Semieniuk: There are two aspects keeping up oil production. One is demand: As long as there is no ambitious turn away from fossil-fuel reliant transport, power, heat and industrial processes, it’s easy to blame oil producers. But in some way, they just supply a necessary input into the reproduction of society. In fact, at the moment, we’re seeing investments in supply not keeping up with demand.

The other aspect however is that — unsurprisingly — oil and gas companies are doing everything they can to maintain demand for their product. So, they aren’t just passive suppliers of what is exogenously determined by “markets” is the demand. There is now ample evidence of the substantial efforts by fossil fuel companies to defeat policy proposals and laws that would destroy demand for fossil fuels. Problematically, the high 2022 profits in the sector, which came partly about as a result of voluntarily not producing more and thereby driving up prices, enable the continued funding of precisely this kind of lobbying.

Individuals and financial institutions in rich countries like the U.S. will face huge financial losses if the value of fossil fuel assets experiences huge drops due to strong climate action, according to your own studies. Can you talk a bit about why this is a major issue and what the implications may be as demands for a shift away from fossil fuels to renewable and clean energy sources intensify? Indeed, who are really the owners of oil and gas companies in rich countries?

First, we should acknowledge that capitalist economies on the whole are pretty good at adapting to changing circumstances. So, just because an industry goes down — a so-called sunset industry — doesn’t mean there are big losses at the societal level. Of course, specific communities that are specialized in this industry are hard-hit, and a few companies and their owners lose out. But at the societal or aggregate level, the gains from “sunrise” industries, that replace the industries existing, typically more than cancel out much of the losses. Think of digital computers having swept aside human computers, the typewriter industry, etc.

The worry with fossil fuels is that there is no far superior industry coming to sweep it aside and deliver vastly higher productivity. Instead, it’s deliberate policy trying to mitigate climate change with substitutes, notably renewable energy, that have some advantages (e.g., better energy conversion efficiencies) and some disadvantages (e.g., intermittency). If that’s coupled with surprising technological improvements — e.g., the dramatic fall in the cost of solar photovoltaics — this creates a lot of uncertainty about future demand.

Since the United States is now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, this uncertainty about the future market matters. If U.S. producers bet on having a strong export market even as the Inflation Reduction Act and the recent EPA guidance diminish domestic gasoline consumption, then they could be disappointed if other countries move away quickly from fossil fuels. In our research we show that, indeed, big importers in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world have every incentive to quickly jettison fossil fuels. As my co-authors and I calculate in our research, producing energy from domestic renewable sources not only creates energy security, but today and in the future, often a cost advantage. That’s so because the money paid for imported fossil fuels goes abroad and depletes foreign currency reserves.

As you say, behind these fossil fuel producers are their financial owners. That is, shareholders who have a claim to the profits the companies make but are also financially hurt if they invest in what turn out to be stranded assets. We calculate that some $400 billion in potentially stranded assets could be sitting on U.S. financial business balance sheets. That’s 30 percent of the global total, and $100 billion more than the stranded assets at production sites in the U.S., because both U.S. oil companies and their financial investors invest in oil and gas production and oil and gas companies abroad. And they invest on behalf of ultimate owners: holders of retirement plans, often invested via pension funds, and the affluent at the top of the distribution, that have a lot of financial wealth to invest. We don’t know exactly what the consequences of asset stranding could be beyond wealth loss, but as the recent troubles in the banking system show, having this potential loss sit in the investment fund industry is not something one should simply dismiss. That’s why financial regulators are engaging with so-called transition risks: that is, financial risks that could arise from the transition away from fossil fuels.

Divestment has been somewhat successful in reducing new capital flows into the oil and gas sector, but research shows that it doesn’t achieve the goal of decarbonization. Are there other ways to defeat Big Oil?

Big enough of a divestment would destabilize the sector, but it does not seem to happen, certainly not since oil and gas companies made the astonishing profits of 2022. Too many investors are dependent on these shareholder distributions to simply walk away. Of course, that also highlights the risk of stranded assets down the road.

But we must also ask whether massive divestment now would really be what’s needed for decarbonization. Clearly, as mentioned earlier, oil and gas are still needed today, and so are the producers who deliver it. What might be effective is first a very ambitious and enduring government decarbonization policy aimed at reducing demand for fossil fuels with all the positive spillovers it has for business investments and scale economies and learning by doing (in fact, the Inflation Reduction Act is a step in that direction). Second, this could be complemented with financial investors actually pressuring oil and gas companies to lay out proper decarbonization plans. That means not so much divesting as using the shareholding to affect change. There are some activist investors that have installed more transition-oriented directors on major company boards or forced these companies to produce more ambitious decarbonization roadmaps. If such initiatives garner enough support from the big asset managers, pension funds etc., to pass, this could add to the drive away from oil and gas on the supply side.

Climate change seems to be reinforcing inequalities. How does it do that, and shouldn’t this be an extra incentive for policymakers to push harder on policies that reduce reliance on fossil fuels and lead to a green transition?

There are good reasons to believe that climate change increases existing inequalities. Here it is useful to distinguish between inter-country inequality and interpersonal and group inequalities, whether within a country or globally. Just like in the current COVID-19 crisis, rich countries can mount more sophisticated responses, and rich or otherwise privileged people everywhere can protect themselves better and face lower rates of mortality than their poorer counterparts, so climate change tends to hit people already in lower-income countries and on the lower rungs of the wealth and privilege distribution harder. For instance, as mentioned in my previous answer, U.S. responses to flooding are likely to rely much more on protection, while in Bangladesh, more people could lose their livelihoods and be left with no choice but to retreat. And richer people can pay higher prices for food and other amenities or invest in adaptive measures (like insulation and air conditioning), while poorer people may not be able to do so.

Interestingly, climate change mitigation is also sometimes criticized for exacerbating inequality. Between countries, the worry is that if developing countries curtail their expansion of fossil fuel-powered electricity in order to install (more costly or less effective) renewables supply instead, that harms their economic growth and hampers the important task of improving the material conditions of the vast majority of the global population living in these countries. Encouragingly, renewable power from new power plants, like wind farms, is now increasingly cheaper than continuing to operate existing coal power plants so that trade-off looks less painful by the day.

Of course, these renewables have to be integrated into an electricity grid, and appropriate and affordable end-use devices, like electric cars, also have to be available, but overall, the falling costs make this a more and more feasible proposition.

Between people, the biggest worry is that policies penalizing emission-intensive activities disproportionately hurt the poor. The “yellow vest” movement in France is pointed to as an example that interpersonal inequality even in rich countries would be exacerbated and made unbearable by carbon taxes. For instance, if you can’t afford to rent in a city and you move to the lower-rent countryside, you are more reliant on a greenhouse gas emitting car, and so would be harder hit by a tax. That was the case in France for many people. However, it is entirely feasible to design policies that make them less unequal or even progressive. For instance, if affordable electric transport was provided alongside taxes that increase fossil fuel prices, then it would be easier to switch by swapping your old car for a new electric one at a subsidized price + availability of charging infrastructure. And my colleague Jim Boyce has shown that when combined with progressive (i.e., income inequality-reducing) rebates financed by at least part of the money accruing to the government, carbon taxes or auctioned-off emissions permits can contribute to progressive redistribution. Key is that richer people will pay much more for consuming carbon in absolute terms, which is money that can be redistributed, it just amounts to a lower share of their income. Examples, such as the carbon tax in British Columbia, show that it can be done, and that people come to accept the carbon tax.

Overall, it seems to me that it’s much more straightforward to deal with inequality resulting from climate change mitigation, than with inequality that results from climate change itself.

I want to point out one more, perhaps less obvious dimension of inequality between countries. Someone needs to produce all of these new technologies, and there is good evidence that the green technology leaders are concentrated in high-income countries and — increasingly — in China. The economic development discourse emphasizes the need for industrial upgrading and acquiring capabilities. So far, the low-carbon transition does not look to be a leveler of the inequalities, but rather to reinforce them. For instance, among the top wind and solar panel manufacturers, only a few countries are represented. And more advanced technologies such as low-carbon steel making tend to be developed in rich countries. Unless a green transition can be shown to offer good economic opportunities for all world regions, coherent, effective climate change mitigation policy could be complicated also by inequality in this dimension, and risk increasing exposure of people to climate change in the unequal ways discussed above.

A decade ago, the so-called “Pink Tide” of leftist governments in Latin America seemed to be heading towards a tragic end. However, events in the past few years have raised questions about whether a new Pink Tide has emerged. The defeat of the coup government in Bolivia, the election of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, the rise of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, the historic election of Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and now the return of Lula in Brazil suggests a new age may be dawning in the region. Yet for all the successes, there have also been setbacks—the coup against Pedro Castillo in Peru last fall, and the failure of the Gabriel Boric government to pass a new constitution stand out as the sharpest examples. In the first of a four-part series of special collaboration episodes between NACLA and The Marc Steiner Show, we turn to a panel of regional experts to discuss the context and prospects of the ‘New Pink Tide’ to steer the region towards a more prosperous and just future. This episode is co-hosted with Dr. Hilary Goodfriend.

Hilary Goodfriend is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Latino and Latin American Studies Research Center at the University of California, Riverside. She is a contributing editor for Jacobin and Jacobin América Latina. She is also on the editorial board of NACLA.

Thea Riofrancos is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, and a member of the Climate + Community Project. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador from Duke University Press.

Sabrina Fernandes is a sociologist and ecosocialist organizer from Brazil. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with CALAS at the University of Guadalajara where she is working on just transitions and Latin America.

René Rojas, a professor at Binghamton University’s College of Community and Public Affairs and a member of the editorial board of the left journal Catalyst.

Studio Production: Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Read NACLA: nacla.org
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For more in-depth coverage of Peru from NACLA, please visit nacla.org.

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Hello, and welcome everybody to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. It’s good to have you all with us.

And we’re initiating here a special series in collaboration with the North American Congress on Latin America, popularly known as NACLA. And I’ll be your host, Marc Steiner, with co-host from NACLA.

Now, since 1966, NACLA has been at the forefront of covering and critiquing US imperialism and the political economic military intervention in the Western hemisphere. They carry this out in solidarity with the nations in the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, in their fight against oppression, injustice, economic and political subordination.

So today, we are really truly excited to bring you this first part of our four-part series of conversations with NACLA. Today, we’re going to talk about the resurgence of the Latin American left in elected office and the intense struggle with a powerfully, deeply-rooted right-wing power that exists.

But through this series of cross-border discussions, we’ll take stock of struggles for democracy, dignity, and livable planet is taking shape in the face of rising fascism, ecocide, and reactionary social control. We’ll also examine the international dimensions of those struggles, including American influence and intervention. And each episode will be co-hosted by one of our collaborators from NACLA. So I’m delighted to introduce my co-host today, Dr. Hilary Goodfriend.

Hilary is a member of the NACLA editorial board, contributing editor to Jacobin and Jacobin America Latina. And she’s currently a postdoctoral fellow in Latino and Latin American Studies Research Center at the University of California Riverside. And welcome, Hilary, it’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Hilary Goodfriend:

Thanks, Marc. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Marc Steiner:

And before we start, let me just tell you one thing. It’s also a pleasure to have Hilary here who did the lion share of the work, getting all this put together and is done a brilliant job. So I’m just peddling behind. Go ahead, Hilary.

Hilary Goodfriend:

To the contrary Marc, it is my pleasure. In the early 21st century, a series of left-wing governments were elected across Latin America with promises to undo a generation of disastrous neoliberal economic policies and build up national and regional sovereignty against US domination.

With the commodities balloon fueling social investments, governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, lifted millions out of poverty while forging alternative forms of regional integration to counter Washington’s outside influence.

Left parties also took power in El Salvador and Nicaragua and Honduran President Mel Zelaya divide expectations, steering his liberal government left once an office. As the impacts of the global economic crisis spread to Latin America however, a right-wing backlash drove many of these administrations from office, sometimes at the ballot box, sometimes through parliamentary coups and so-called lawfare, and sometimes at the barrel of a gun.

But reports of the death of the so-called pink tide proved premature and a new generation of left governments are now taking power across the region, including in countries left out of the earlier left turn.

Marc Steiner:

In the midst of this, we’re in a moment where our planet is boiling, right-wing fascism is rising, the power of international capital is intensifying and corporate plunder continues to seek out to support left Latin American countries, the governments, their territories, their people.

So in our series we’ll be discussing the political movements, not only struggling against that, but proposing alternative ways to the current conversions of these multiple crises. We’ll look at the histories animating those struggles and what it will take for them to win. How are grassroots movements engaging new left states and mobilizing to hold them accountable? What are the stakes for the left successes and failures in this time? And what does success even look like? What practical lessons can the left, United States and around the world learn from what’s happening in Latin America?

So in this episode, we bring together an amazing panel of Latin American scholar activists to unpack what’s really going on. Talk about what the state of leftist is in Latin America. What does a recent Brazilian election tell us about the depth of the struggle between the left and the right for the future?

We’ll look at who and what comprised the left in Latin America today. What is it about this moment in Latin America’s history that it defines this new left as well as the nature of the right-wing opposition in an international context?

Hilary Goodfriend:

So let’s welcome our guests. We’re joined today by Thea Riofrancos. Thea is an Andrew Carnegie fellow, associate professor of political science at Providence College and a member of the Climate Plus Community Project. She is the author of Resource Radicals from Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador from Duke University Press. Welcome, Thea.

We’re also joined by Sabrina Fernandes. Sabrina is a post-doctoral fellow at the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation. She’s a member of the Foundation’s International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin. Hi Sabrina.

And finally we welcome, Rene Rojas. Rene is a professor at Binghamton University’s College of Community and Public Affairs and a member of the editorial board of the left journal, Catalyst.

Marc Steiner:

Here we are recording on this close victory just happened in Brazil with Lula. So it makes, I think, sense for us to turn to Sabrina first here, but please all kind of jump in.

Now, I want to kind of think about how this election, what it meant. It was so closely watched internationally, it was a close margin in Brazil and it seems many ways be really emblematic of the divide throughout Latin America, throughout the world.

So let’s begin to talk about what’s going on here and what does it mean for, what people call this pink tide and for the left and the reality of where the most Latin American governments are and now with this resilient victory. So Sabrina, why don’t you just, I mean you were in the middle of it, you saw it, you’re there, you were there. So take it away.

Sabrina Fernandes:

Yes, Marc. Yeah, it was very, very intense. It was very close. So a difference of just over two and 3 million votes and what we’re talking here is that we knew from the beginning of the second round that Lula needed to get at least the 2 million votes. So getting the 2 million just a little bit more is good news, but it also means that the country’s still very much divided.

The fact that Lula came in right after the results and he gave a speech saying that, “Well, I’m the president of 215 million Brazilians.” That’s very different from what Bolsonaro said when he got elected in 2018 saying that the minorities will have to bow down to the majority. So Lula already set the tone for a very different type of presidency, talking about dialogue, talking about negotiating and reunifying the country.

This is really important in terms of how the polarization around Bolsonaro he is buoying Brazil has led to a lot of political violence and we know that the far-right is getting more and more extreme in their actions. So ever since the results, there are clusters of Bolsonaristas in the streets and they’ve been blocking roads. There was looting involved, murders because one of the things that Bolsonaro did in the past years was actually very much help people get their hands on guns and then lost control of it. And we know that they’re not going to stop now.

They’ve been looking basically for conspiracies to try to explain that it was fraud or we had this video actually showing that some of this Bolsonaristas were just camping on the street, claiming it was fraud and asking for military intervention. Somebody just told them that the minister for the elector Supreme Court had been arrested, which is a lie, and they just start celebrating all together and it is sort of like a trance. The way that they’re behaving it reminds us very much of this sectarian looking scenario.

So we are dealing with this, but at the same time would know that Lula made it in because there was popular support, there were social movements involved, but he also made it in because he was able to negotiate with the traditional rights from the beginning. So now we are going to run into a period of big contradictions.

We have a kind of economic politics are going to come out from the government because while we have banks and financial institutions backing Lula up as well. And at the same time, what do we do now in terms of fighting not just Bolsonaro, we need to fight Bolsonarismo. We might even have to call it something else in terms of the new right, the outright, because some of them are even willing to throw Bolsonaro under the bus just to ensure that they can keep their project and their ideology going.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. You going to say something Hilary? You going to jump in?

Hilary Goodfriend:

Well, I think this leads us a little bit into some of our next question and I’d like, feel free everybody to jump in on this, but in that sense, I’m curious about these continuities and ruptures from the previous cycle of left governments, the pink tide in the region.

What we’re seeing is that, like the previous cycle of electoral victories, a lot of the governments elected in the last five years, Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, Colombia, they were all buoyed to different degrees by cycles of mass protest movements or popular uprisings against authoritarian neoliberal regimes. And some of them in the case of Brazil represent restorations of prior left expressions, and some of them are really unprecedented in the case of Colombia or Mexico.

So I’m interested in what you all think about what distinguishes this new phase of the left and does it make sense to talk about a new pink tide? So Sabrina, I don’t know if you want to think about this a little bit in the context of Brazil and then everyone else can jump in or.

Sabrina Fernandes:

Well there’s been a lot of conversations around this new pink tide, tied to Lula’s election because we also know that Lula plays a major role in terms of leadership in the region. Lula is actually able to unify forces that are associated with the new pink tide with this progressive wave. They usually don’t come together. So one of the expectations that we have is, can Lula for example get Boric and Maduro in the same room? Can this happen?

Now, that is a question that would help us determine whether there is some sort of unifying project for the region in terms of not just Latin American integration, but thinking in terms of what are the progressive policies that we’re building together and how are we fighting together against the rise of the right in our continent as well, because there are many similarities in the way that the Bolsonaristas behave in Brazil with the far-right in Argentina, the far-right in Chile. And we can see that they actually share techniques, they know each other, they do events together. So having these unified front with the leadership will be important.

I get the sense that there are some tensions, especially when I think in terms of Chile and Venezuela for example, that were not as big last time if we were thinking in terms of Chavez, Bachelet like the previous area.

Thea Riofrancos:

So I kind of want to compliment Sabrina’s really interesting comments on this sort of geopolitical or kind of regional coordination front and how these different governments might or might not align and the role of particular presidents perhaps in playing kind of a role of encouraging collaboration amongst them, with maybe a sort of domestic political economy set of ruptures with the prior pink tide.

So two things that come to mind and I’m very interested, I’ve read a lot of Rene’s work on this topic, so I’m super interested in what he has to add to this, but I see two points of contrast with the prior pink tide. One, more properly political we might say, and one more properly economic.

So on the political front for all of the contradictions and tensions, and maybe we’ll get into that of pink tide one, let’s say in terms of domestic politics, I think it’s clear that the level of what we might call political hegemony internally was much higher.

So if we just compare for example, what happened in Chile’s recent constitutional referendum with the constitutional referenda of Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela in the first round, it’s actually you flip what the left did in Chile was what the right did and we can actually just flip. So it was 60, 70% approval ratings for those constitutions in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela in the first pink tide and that was what the Rechazo got in Chile this time.

So we obviously have faltering political hegemony and it’s not just the constitutional vote, it’s also in terms of we don’t have unified government in any of these cases. We have divided government, we have congress full of the right-wing or centrist opposition, so there’s limits to the political agenda and the legislative agenda. And then as Sabrina already said, we have this very embolden and even more savvy right-wing compared to the kind of fragmented and in its period of decline right-wing of the first pink tide.

So I think that we’re going to see limitations in the left being able to advance its agenda through legislatures, but also limitations in terms of where the popular support and pushing forward might come, because we also have low approval ratings in all of these cases, which is a big contrast to the first pink tide, where those governments were year after year, the most popular governments in those countries histories.

And now we have very steep declines of 50 to 20% of 50 to 40% if we’re looking at Chile at Colombia already. And I’m very curious how Lula does a different figure, but he may too, face the headwinds of inflation and fake news and all the things that are undermining popular support for left-wing government. So we have much less political hegemony or political control or unity. That’s one.

The second and I’ll be briefer here and I know Rene has worked on this topic too, is the kind of commodity boom or the global economic conjunction. And there’s so much to say here, but I’ll be very brief, we’re not in the same kind of commodity supercycle that benefits on the economic front, putting aside climate, putting aside environment and putting aside indigenous sovereignty, there was clear economic benefit that translated into political support due to the supercycle driven largely by Chinese industrialization but also by other demand and other emerging economies.

We have some commodities booming now, others not, but it’s much more chaotic. It’s much more geopolitically driven and it’s much more subject to this kind of supply side and demand side shocks that are unpredictable. So we don’t have a clear sense that these governments will have stable revenues and that’s extremely important for whether they will survive politically. So I’ll just kind of pause there.

Marc Steiner:

No, that was important.

Rene Rojas:

Yeah. If I could add to that, I echo what Sabrina started off with and all of Thea’s comments just now. I kind of work backward. The region is confronting now strong headwinds economically speaking and it’s very challenging moment. No government in power, right, left center will enjoy the kind of commodity bonanza that occurred in the first decade of the new century.

What’s interesting is that for me that cause for radical new development models, but those radical new development models themselves require the political force and the social force to push them through. And I think as Thea was describing, the left is much weaker in this current conjuncture in many ways than it was 20, 15 years ago. And so the social power required to push through these new development models I fear, won’t materialize as strongly as is required.

Another comment I’ll add, just going back to the broader regional scope from a political lens. I actually was never convinced that beginning around 2015, the region moved into a kind of period of right-wing restoration or neo-authoritarianism. I thought rather and it had everything to do with the decline of the commodity cycle and the commodity boom. The region was entering a period of turmoil and uncertainty that could go in many different directions, and in fact it has gone I think in many directions and that’s what we’re seeing.

And I think now, this new cycle of new pink tied governments are actually more of the same. More of the same instability, more of the same uncertainty. And overall I would say the upshot of this is that many cases will move into rebalancing of a equilibrium of what was established in the first 15 years of the new century. And I think that’s happening in Brazil, certainly happened in Argentina and other countries.

And then you have some other cases like Chile, like Colombia, like Mexico, even though Mexico’s quite different where popular movements and mass organizations are trying to move things in a new progressive direction, but meeting all kinds of challenges.

Marc Steiner:

What you all raised here, raises a lot of questions about, for me how we define the left in throughout Latin America and what does that mean? I mean if on a couple levels, one that you all mentioned the external factors that could affect the economies of countries and also that means the consciousness of people in those countries.

What could happen because of that? Whether it’s right or left in charge, whoever’s in charge, but especially now with the left-wing government in charge. And it also seems to me that it really kind of begs the question of, how these left governments are really organized.

One of the things that I think Hilary and I talked about before we went on and did this program together, was the kind of divide that takes place between left governments and movements on the ground inside these countries and how that plays into this. So it seems to me this moment is a really lot more complex than just these victories taking place.

I mean, it is wonderful the Lula one, I mean that’s a huge chunk, but it seems to me that we’re in a very complex moment here. And am I reading that wrong? The four of you, including my co-host here, Hilary are kind of the people who know this land the best. Everything I’ve read from your articles and what you’re saying now, says that we’re in a very undefined moment that is still full of danger.

Sabrina Fernandes:

Let’s take Brazil, Colombia and Chile as three very different examples of the makeup of the government here. So Brazil comes in with this extremely broad coalition. The VP for Lula comes from the traditional right. You have to really expand the alliances and once we get into the second round, they grow even more, so the right is ever more present.

So these contradictions are already there and the leadership question that Dilma Rousseff raised a couple of years ago are reflecting on the process of the coup against our government in Brazil, which is the fact that workers’ party needs to learn to differentiate the role of the party and the role of the government, because the government is part of this really broad coalition and the government is filled with the institutional contradictions of it, but the party needs to keep mobilizing.

So this is a lesson that she says has to be learned by the Brazilian left in general because a lot of the mobilizations against the coup back in 2015, in 2016, they didn’t go as far precisely because people couldn’t dissociate the two things. The PT got way too institutional.

Then we get into the point of Colombia where the Pacto Historico, the coalition behind the Petro-Francia government had to actually, well it’s in the name, create the pacts from the beginning. If we compare it to Brazil, there was a lot more negotiation with union leaders, with movement leaders than we had in the case of Brazil when it was just no party leadership talking to each other.

So there’s more of a popular element coming with Pacto Historico so much that Francia being the VP is part of the win because she was not positive to be the VP, but she does so well with the primaries that she basically imposes her name on this.

When you look into the situation in Chile coming from the Estallido Social from 2019. Nowadays, you kind of see a rupture even October 18th, now when the anniversary of one of the big dates from the Estallido, there were people in the streets, students, but still very much in the sense of anti-politics. The Boric’s government doesn’t represent us. So the people in the streets don’t identify themselves with the government that God elect us sort of as a result of the mobilization by claiming well, now they’re too institutional.

So there are a lot of divides there, the fact that you have this government that really had to bank on pushing the constitution forward wasn’t able to do so and then the alliances is not just about Frente Amplio in the case of Chile. What is the role for example of the ex-Concertacion in sustaining elements of the Boric government.

So what we understand here is that these makeups of what is the left, in general, they’re actually very, very different from place to place. But we tend to extract certain policies that around extractisvism, developmentalism, social policies for fighting hunger, for lifting people out of poverty and say that, “Oh look, these governments, they have sort of a common agenda, but their historical makeup is quite different.”

When we’re talking about the party that is represented by Boric’s Comprehensive Social is a very new party, younger people who are newcomers to institutional politics. Whereas in the PT you have this old guard that tends to be kind of suspicious of new voices unless they can be completely assimilated into the party structure.

So we are dealing here with these different histories for the parties, for the movements, and that’s going to help us understand what’s coming later on in terms of how they behave with each other as well, not just domestically.

Hilary Goodfriend:

I think this question of who comprises these coalitions and what are their social bases is really critical. And I think there’s also this question of what lessons could be learned from the past experience in power, in terms of navigating both from the part of movements but also from the part of political parties and folks in office navigating these relationships. And I think a big question is are those lessons, will those lessons be learned?

Rene Rojas:

Yeah. I think the focusing on the social bases, the constituency supporting these new left governments is critical in particular and I think both Thea and Sabrina have already raised it, thinking about the state of mass movements, of mass mobilization. And I think there are two dimensions there.

One, as was mentioned earlier, is how mass mobilization, mass movements are relating to left governments in power. But the other thing is to just look at the nature of mass movements themselves and what kind of social force they can bring to the table. And I think that’s critical for understanding the prospects for this new generation of the foreign governments.

In the Brazilian case, I’m far more pessimistic. My view is that the early pit dig governments and realismo was actually all about consolidating a political system coming out in a delayed form out of the dictatorship, but stabilizing a party system that was based on elite brokerage and bargaining and the demobilization of the historic movements labor in particular, but others as well that backed the PT on its rise since the late ’70s and ’80s.

And I think that led to many of the problems under Dilma, which were exacerbated after her impeachment and four years under Bolsonaro. And now we’re in a situation in which, and I think largely due to the PTs strategy for governance, the PT lacks the mass movements, strong mass movements and therefore will be forced to govern the way it did in the past, which was again reaching these fairly obscure and unsavory packs with the central, these right-wing kingmaker parties, but also with economic and business elites. In that sense, I think what I expect from Lula’s return to power is a movement further to the right than we had even under the first PT terms and that’s concerning. I don’t see a way out of that.

The Chilean case, and I’ll stop after my remarks on Chile, have turned out to be disappointing, but I thought there were elements in this equation that were more promising to begin with. Boric comes to power not only three years after the great uprising, that rebelling Estallido, but really after a 10-year period in upsurge in mass mobilization that included more sectoral if you will, movements around students and their demands, women and feminism and its demands, the elderly pensioners and its demands, but also a 10-year cycle of labor insurgency that gave, I thought would give Boric much more leverage to push through the reforms.

But I think one of the things that occurred is that the new government, the new left, both in the constituent assembly but also in power, made a lot of mistakes and did not really calibrate its relationship with these new movements in a way to best leverage their social bases and their social power. And that led to the disastrous outcome of the second plebiscite and the mass rejection.

I think, the emphasis was on more particularistic issues, more identity-based issues, all of which the left needs to get behind. But it forgot to really focus on the main demands of the mass mobilizations as 10-year cycle, but also of the rebellion itself, which were a basic set of universalist reforms around education, wages and labor protections, healthcare and pensions. So that coalition and its strength started to break down and ultimately it was a lost opportunity.

Sabrina Fernandes:

The difference in the second round between Boric and Kast was 55, 45 sort of. So it is much better than what we had with Lula and Bolsonaro. Yet it showed Kast was someone that was very associated as being far-right and one of the issues that we’ve been raising with friends in Chile around building the left there, is that many times when you’re naming the enemy in Chile you say, “Oh, it’s neoliberalism.” But it’s about time you call it fascism because those elements were present in Kast campaigning and they’re becoming stronger and stronger, especially now that the Rechazo got such a big mandate. So naming the enemy as something that’s actually very, very dangerous, not the enemy that we’ve had for all this time.

Hilary Goodfriend:

Returning to this question of the development model, I’m wondering if maybe we can talk a little bit about this question of extractivism and this question of extractive industry for export as the engine driving growth, generating government revenue, which was very contentious under the first pink tide and it remains this critical side of debate over questions about not just dependency and development but ecology and democracy more broadly.

So maybe Thea, you could start us off by explaining what we mean when we talk about extractivism and sort of what the critique is, that is being put forward by movements and whether or not we are seeing any kind of break with this model of accumulation or development in the region.

Thea Riofrancos:

Yeah. It’s a great and big question that the other panelists also have a lot to say about. I mean, I’ll start by saying, no, we’re not seeing a break. Latin American economies remain as externally dependent and as dependent on particular commodity exports as in prior moments. What’s different as we discussed earlier is that the global market conjuncture for those exports is less good.

So when extractivismo or extractivism I see as a sort of critical concept developed by the Latin American left, by different segments of the Latin American left and I trace its origins to dependency theory to thinking in the ’60s and ’70s to revolutionary third world Marxism, that was really thinking about, what is the world system? What is the role for whether it’s more recently decolonized Africans, South Asian or earlier decolonized in Latin America, you emerge out of formal colonial control, yet your economic situation really remains the same.

Whatever industries were developed in the colonial period, mining, large scale agriculture, those sorts of things that are very export oriented, oriented towards the industrial needs of the metro pole, whoever is occupying that position at the moment. So we have a very externally, oriented economy that doesn’t lend itself to national development. You have kind of enclave situations where there’s a disarticulation between the extractive sector and again the rest of the national economy.

This gets much worse actually. Much worse than the ’60s and ’70s kind of leftist we’re thinking at the moment because when we have neoliberalism and full market integration, not only are you externally dependent and that’s a hundreds year long history, but you are now in very volatile and integrated and increasingly financialized commodity market and you have basically no control over prices. There’s never been a repeat of OPEC in another sector, so there isn’t coordination among producers.

And so you’re competing with your neighbors, there’s a race to the bottom, there’s a divide and conquer strategy and you are just continually reliant on something that has dramatic price fluctuations. And if you’re lucky enough to be president when the prices are good, again you can fund social programs, but if you’re not, there are very limited avenues other than really a deep transformation that would require a tremendous amount of political will and actually class confrontation, that’s what it would require. And confrontation at a regional and global scale as well. Each country is not really an island here, there’s a regional and global system kind of at stake.

So extractivism again, kind of names this situation and critiques it. And more recently kind of building on the dependency theory roots, we have much more interest in what are the environmental harms here, integrating concepts like unequal ecological exchange, thinking about how resources are sucked out and environmental harm and also resource drain are left behind. So you get kind of the losing end of not just an economic exchange but an ecological exchange. And then of course with the rise of more politically mobilized indigenous peoples around the America starting in the ’90s you have also a forceful indigenous and kind of anti-colonial as well in the moment kind of critique of these sectors.

So that’s kind of extractivism and as I said, I don’t see that changing and I’m going to say something brief and then turn it over to my panelists. What I do see changing, so I don’t see the economics of that changing in the currently. None of these left governments has yet escaped that condition. And we might say some have not tried to, but even the ones that are trying to have not yet reached that outcome. So I think economically we see a lot of continuity.

Politically though, there are some shifts and I do think that the current crop of left leaders with some important exceptions, so I would not apply this to AMLO or to Fernandez in Argentina. So putting aside Mexico and Argentina, I do think that actually in Bolivia too at which we don’t maybe talk about enough, Arce has changed his rhetoric at least around some of these issues. In Chile for sure. Lula to some extent though I’ll defer to Sabrina there in Honduras, which we haven’t talked about yet.

Absolutely, there has been a big integration of environment climate and also indigenous rights kind of, and Colombia, I’m sorry, that was the one, the top one I was going to mention. So the Petro-Francia campaign really centered these issues, a lot of wanting to depart from extractivism and also thinking in an environmentalist and indigenous framework of doing so.

Anyway, so you have a political shift. Absolutely, and I think that speaks to our prior conversation around who the protestors have been, who the social bases are. You have some reflection of these grassroots environmentalists and indigenous kind of demands in the kind of halls of power but I think that is actually pointing to its own tension, which is the tension between some new ideas, policy programs and political kind of rhetoric around this.

On the other hand, the remaining two economic and political blockages to that transformation that we talked about, which is the continued dependency on this for revenues to fund the social programs that these governments also have promised to do. And then the political blockage, which is not, they don’t even have majorities in the Congress, so it’s kind of hard to imagine how politically you would push something through except through an antagonistic, confrontational mass mobilization, but we’ve seen limitations there in terms of their willingness to go that route.

So I don’t want to sound pessimistic because I think it’s important that the dialogue around this has shifted and that there’s also more pointing to regional coordination around a new development model, but I see there those two structural blockages kind of quite in place.

Rene Rojas:

I’ll jump in here. I’m glad Thea ended by situating this within the political or against the political backdrop. I think all the concerns with extractivism are correct and its harmful consequences and also the logic within it that tends to corner countries and states into certain economic policies.

On the other hand, sometimes I think we might go too far in the direction of a natural determinism or fatalism. You say, once you start depending on natural resources, then you’re stuck. It’s all over. And clearly these things can move in different directions, compare the Saudi dependence on oil to, Danish dependence on totally different social outcomes and results.

And I don’t see any other way to move into a different greener more sustainable and egalitarian developed model if it doesn’t start from point A, which is our current extractivism. In the case of Chile for instance, I don’t see how we can move toward a better development model, more democratic development model, a less elitist one without starting off depending a lot on lithium.

I think it’s going to be key, it’s a strategic mineral asset that Chile has that will provide not just the revenue for social programs, so potentially the capital to invest in new green sustainable industries. So I’m a little more optimistic.

My pessimism comes in again from a political perspective, if we don’t have the social forces that can press in that direction, like say, “Okay, let’s start here with resource dependency, but let’s move into a higher order political economy.” Then we’re doomed. But my comment is just to say I don’t see another way out because it threatens to place the brunt on a transition away from extractivism, the main cost on ordinary pouring working people if you don’t have another alternative in place.

That in my opinion would lead to further strengthening of these new forms of reaction, these new kind of quasi-fascist right-wing movements because it will tell ordinary, poor, marginalized, and working populations that the left doesn’t have an answer.

Marc Steiner:

So what would those alternatives be? What does that mean alternatives? In terms of what will strengthen this, quote, unquote, “pink tide” to stop the exploitation of extractivism, to stop the power of the right to blunt what the United States and in the corporate world’s doing in Latin America. So what does that mean? How would you all define that?

Thea Riofrancos:

I think it depends on what your main problem with extractivism is. If you primarily see the problem with extractivismo in developmentalist terms, there’s a developmentalist critique of extractivism, right? Which is that it keeps you in the primary export first node of supply chain, always least value added, most volatile pricing, sector of the global economy.

So if your vision of the alternative is a developmentalist one, then what you want to do is upgrading. You want to move up the supply chain, you want to use industrial policy, maybe green industrial policy in order to not just be, let’s say the lithium exporter to stick with Rene’s example, but you want to make higher grade lithium chemicals. You want to get into cathodes and cells, you want to get into EVs, right?

So you want to have an industrialization where a lot of the primary product stays within your borders, gets industrialized locally, and then you either serve the domestic market with that consumer facing good or you export a way higher value added more profitable and less volatile in terms of its pricing kind of export.

So we have the industrial policy alternative. I’ll just name one, a second one for maximum contrast. I think the other one is a more firmly kind of antique extractivist, which also would say the industrial policy still reproduces extractivism, it just kind of nationalizes it or something, or links it to other nodes, but it continues with the problems of environmental degradation of loss of primary forest land too.

So there’s climate effects, there’s effects on indigenous and Campesino communities. We don’t have consultation or consent. So if your critique is more ecological and or indigenous, then you might imagine this kind of buen vivir economy that is not per se green industrial policy that we could talk.

Maybe there’s a way to make those compatible, but it’s maybe more about forms of regenerative agriculture, maybe it’s about ecotourism, maybe it’s about some marrying of scientific research and ancestral knowledge. So there are these kind of not about extraction or industry, but maybe kind of thinking of nature as a form of livelihood and of cohabitation with nature and a very different type of alternative.

The first might lend itself more potentially to Rene’s point, to the mass popular support, fuller employment, boosting revenues. The second which I think is worth considering, it’s sometimes harder to tell how would that support the masses of urban and peri urban masses?

Sabrina Fernandes:

I think this is a really good contrast because we both we’re going to find sort of a romantic world view. Lula has been talking about reindustrializing Brazil sort of being in the terms of the first critique and a lot of people are happy because it means job creation but also means creating certain device.

For example, what is good mining? What is bad mining? So you get rid of the bad mining that’s associated with garimpo in Brazil, that’s illegal, that’s going within the indigenous territory and poisoning rivers with mercury and things like that and working together with organized crime. And then there’s the other proper mining and there’s the other proper agri-business.

Lula has been talking about responsible sustainable agri-business. And I think one of the things that should be quite key for us in this contrast of what Thea brought in, is the issue of property here. Who holds property here? How a Nico is property of land, what are the rights to the territory?

So in the end when we’re talking about alternative in Latin America, we’re always talking about sovereignty of some kind and these different perspectives of sovereignty that permeate the left for some of the left sovereignties about being very anti-imperialist in the sense of opposing the United States or the European Union and more of that traditional campus approach to things.

And sometimes we’ll buy into contradictions coming from China and Russia, but as long as we’re not with the US on this. Or it could be sovereignty in the sense of radical sustainability as a way of thinking about sovereignty in the sense that, yes, we could have economic policies right now, they’re going to bring in this new wave of industrialization and development and great jobs and our GDP is going to grow, but at what cost?

Because at the same time we need to talk about mitigation, adaptation and how much of climate change is actually affecting our possibility to execute the things that we promised in terms of policies with this money that’s coming in from this new wave of both extracting these minerals are key in the green transition and also creating this industrial output.

This is a really important question because it never remains just within borders. So it requires you for you to think of sovereignty within your borders, but also how you integrate with your neighbors because you’re sharing biomes, you share ecosystems. When we’re talking about migration issues related to extreme water events, this is still part of what we’re dealing with right now.

People will be going across these borders in Latin America and the fact that climate change is a global issue. It’s not just regional or just national. So it requires you for you to think that, “Yes, maybe we are going to export our lithium, but we cannot just take for granted that these communities are going to be sacrifice zones.” So how do we change the way that we are going to mind this so we’re not just talking about compensation, financial compensation to these communities because well, can you financially compensate also the rivers and the aquifers? I don’t think so.

So you get into the much, much harder questions that in the end they require that we move past the romantic world view of what’s going to be the ideal situation here. I don’t think we’re ever going to get into an ideal situation, but I think we need to negotiate better, what people are willing to give up and what kind of livelihoods that we can provide to people along the way.

Thea Riofrancos:

One final thought here with extractivism and its alternatives is I said before, none of these nations are islands. Can we have socialism in one country alone? That’s an age-old question. Can we have post extractivism in one country alone? Is I think our question for a moment or one of them.

I do think that, it is extremely difficult to make this transition domestically without some kind of redistribution or support at the global level. As difficult as that sounds, it’s even more difficult for a country like Colombia to suddenly say, “We’re not exporting oil anymore.” Because the second they say, “We’re not going to explore.” Which is not even the same as saying, I mean they still have the current concessions, but the minute they say, “We’re going to ban new exploration and try to have a post oil economy.” Or the beginnings of it, their currency is suffering, their debt becomes very concerning. What are their revenues going to be?

And so I just want to resurrect this idea from Ecuadorian civil society that was picked up by Rafael Correa when he was in office of the Yasuni Initiative. What would it look like for the global community to compensate or to redistribute in order to transition to non-extractive sectors?

Because I think given the debt loads and the currency volatilities, it’s extremely hard for these governments to do that even if they really want to and even if a plan and an alternative is in place. They just face an immediate capital flight risk and immediate debt repayment risk and an immediate currency risk all at once.

Hilary Goodfriend:

We’ve seen the sort of first iteration of the pink tide cut short by these right-wing expressions that took the form of electoral movements like we saw in El Salvador with Nayib Bukele. We saw parliamentary coups and law fair and outright military coups, that’s the case of Honduras with Mel Zelaya.

So how would we characterize these current right-wing formations? What are their social bases? What fractions of capital do they represent? And to what degree are they reassertions of prior reactionary expressions, technocratic neoliberals or religious fundamentalists or military authoritarians? To what degree do they represent something new?

Marc Steiner:

Rene, go ahead.

Rene Rojas:

Sure. This is a very tough question.

Marc Steiner:

Yes. An important one, but a tough one.

Rene Rojas:

Obviously, there’s enormous variation across the region in terms of the composition and the origins of this new very hard revanchist right that is undoubtedly on the rise. I think, they’re two, very schematically speaking, two ways of approaching it.

One is to say that these kind of elements are there, just waiting for the opportunity to emerge and compete for power. In Brazil, you’ve heard a lot of talk about the beef, Bible and bullets coalition as if there’s a static, social composition that’s always been there just waiting for the moment to pounce.

Brazilians are, there’s a segment that is just racist and they couldn’t countenance the affirmative action programs of Lulismo. There’s this evangelical bloc and there’s just reactionary on social and cultural issues. And then there’s the hard on crime law and order type bloc also that’s just there and just waiting to come together and competing for an exercise power. And the Chilean case, there’d be something similar.

There’s this idea that there’s a fascist vein running deep throughout Chilean society. That’s always been there, that has been kept in check, but now they see an opportunity and they’ve come out in the form of Kast and the movement. But I think there’s another way of thinking of it that I find more compelling, which is that the right realigns in these ways. In many ways responding to the failures of the left and the failures of the left have been significant for ordinary poor working and marginalized people.

My view of the growth of the right has been that, has been people disappointed at hopes for reform that were cut short and that were disappointed. And the left in power, what it did is in many ways exacerbate the disaffection, exacerbate the mistrust and the humiliation that neoliberalism made people experience over since the ’80s in the region.

In that sense, if that’s what’s going on, then what we’re seeing is a convergence of forces toward the right looking for an alternative. They’re the wrong alternatives for sure. They will only make things worse. They will lead to a polarization which will undermine any kind of social and civil fabric for our societies. But I think what’s fueling it is popular mass frustration with attempts at reform.

When that occurs, then I think elites start to flirt with the Bolsonaros with the Kast. Otherwise, my reading is that business elites much prefer the stability, the mild reformism of a center-left Concertacion in Chile of Lula and Dilma in Brazil. But when politically those options start to crumble for the reasons that I described, then they start looking for other political vehicles. And as a last resort, I don’t think that it’s been elites pushing reaction.

I think as a last resort, they experiment with Bolsonarismo with Kast and other similar expressions throughout the region. But from that perspective, I think what’s happening is that neo-fasc, I’m very careful with that word.

Let’s just say these new forms of reaction and revanchism in our countries are not produced by elites. They’re not an elite project. I think it’s the other way around. They drag elites toward them, but they emerge for a number of reasons having to do with the mass constituencies and the mass basis of reform parties and efforts.

Sabrina Fernandes:

The case of Brazil, we have a huge increase in the number of Nazi cells in the country. We’re talking proper Nazi cells. It’s not kids wearing swastikas and things like that. Organized, we’ve had more cases of political violence against random people associated with being anti-Bolsonaro not even being PT or anything.

In the past years, the past two months we had hundreds of cases murders. We are dealing with a situation that’s not just the semiotics anymore. So when Bolsonaro had a secretary that was basically using go was kind of imagery and then okay, “We get the guy out.” But Bolsonaro is very directly using mottos from the past. So talking about family, land and God and liberty. So talking the same terms as in the past.

So I think I disagree slightly with any here in the case of Brazil that I think that we spent the past four years being very careful with the word fascism. And I think that led us nowhere when it just keeps smashing us in the face. Whether we going to add proto-fascism, neo-fascism, 21st centuries fascism or something to the first part of it to qualify it, to deal with these differences because obviously there are economic differences from the way it was in the past century in Europe.

But I think what the main difference that we get here is actually that it’s fascism in Latin America. It’s fascism in places that were affected by colonialism, that were very much impacted by these dependent capitalist approaches to the economic structure that also are affected by imperialism. So in the sense that, yes, our nationalism in Brazil is going to come with the flags of the US and Israel.

So when you have this ultranationalism that promotes all these fascist approaches, it’s going to be some level of subordinated nationalism no matter what, but I think what’s at the core of this is that political violence becomes very normalized and obviously Colombia is a completely different situation because political violence has been ingrained in the history before the left finally comes to power now.

But for Brazil, we’re seeing a new wave of political violence and absolutely no empathy around it and the police joining. So the fact that we had the reactionary forces and obviously the police in Brazil has been reactionary for a really long time, but absolutely unafraid of acting on trying, voters suppression on Sunday in Brazil and then later on helping with the blockades.

We are quite aware that something that there was present before, is still opening up new ground. And I think this is why a lot of the movements in Brazil kind of started making the point in the past few years. You use the word fascism, especially because when you use the word fascism, you can also talk about anti-fascist action because whether it is properly fascist or not, we still have to have anti-fascist action all the time.

Rene Rojas:

Yeah. I would agree. Totally. I wasn’t at all trying to downplay the threat that is there. It’s out. And I agree it needs to be confronted whether we call the problem fascism or the solution, anti-fascism. I think secondary, I totally agree that there are these very noxious, dangerous political forces that have been unleashed in our countries and we have to confront them.

My fear is that if the left emphasizes the anti-fascism aspect of it, rather than changes to its own program, its own political strategies, in power, because we are, we have fought for and Chile, the left was in the political desert for decades. Now, it’s in positions of power.

And I would prefer to see alongside a checking of this new right, I would prefer to see the left to use its power, both political power in the state and also the social power of its backing to transform its own program and its own strategies of governance. And I think that’s the best way to check the growth of neo-fascism, neo-authoritarianism, whatever it is that, whatever label we choose to pin on it.

Sabrina Fernandes:

Yes, I agree with that.

Hilary Goodfriend:

I think it’s really critical to situate, as you did Rene in an earlier comment to situate this current moment in a context of crisis of profound and multiple converging crises to which the left has offered a certain response, and these new far-right and research and far-right formations are offering alternative and much more sinister responses. And there’s contest in which the exit from this, the current crisis is well to be redundant, deeply contested right now.

We’ve talked about how the current economic context is a lot less favorable in many ways than it was for the first iteration of the pink tide, but at the same time there’s a way in which this increasing multipolarity and potentially relative weakening of US hegemony opens up certain space for the kinds of sovereignties that we’ve been talking about and regional initiatives.

So I’m wondering what possibilities do you see in this new moment, but also what are the threats in terms of the kinds of interventions and limits that we’ve seen US power and the power of international capital more broadly to put on these popular projects?

Sabrina Fernandes:

Well, I think we need to go back to this point around extractivism, right? So if there’s actually a proper push to blockade access to certain minerals or to certain commodities, they create more priorities, more domestic priorities, that’s definitely going to lead into conflict, that could come both in terms of challenges around trade agreements, challenges, the WTO, things like that or even working directly with elites in each country to top our government or not.

When we are looking in the case of Colombia and Petro with talking about fossil fuel phase out and having to deal with some of the contracts around oil exploitation that were put together in the past years by Duque that we already found a lot of irregularities connected to those contracts. This actually creates a vulnerability. So the more radical the project is in terms of dealing with these economic interests in the region, the more vulnerable these projects is going to get.

It was the same thing when Xiomara Castro in Honduras started talking about reviewing the mining contracts. That was the first big alert for the international community and say, “Well no, she can’t do that. She’s going to be violating this and this and that.” And obviously that comes with the approach from the center, from the liberals together with the far-right of just naming these people as dangerous, as communists, they’re taking over the region and how is afraid of the coast of Venezuela and the way that they put it. Are you going to nationalize things? This is very dangerous.

And one of the things that we saw the week before Lula got elected, and now in the past days after the actual election, a lot of the editorials in Brazil have been talking about, “Don’t put the state on everything. Don’t go spending everything.” I know Lula promised to spend, spend, spend. You can’t go ahead and spend things, it’s going to create more economic instability. And it’s already a way of pushing things in a certain direction that we know are connected as well to these economic agreements and interests from outside. And obviously I think we need to talk about the role of China in the region here.

If a lot of the movements creating parts like elements of the Lula program, they’re movements involved in the No New Cold War campaign as well. So trying to reject this polarity between the US and China, but also the fact that for example, Venezuela has been able to handle things throughout the crisis because of the help of China. So you can’t just go and claim that China is not a big player in the region.

It is a big player in the region. It is a player even for those lithium mines that people are looking to. So you have German companies, you have US companies, but we also have the Chinese involved in this process. So I guess in terms of the issues around US imperialism, it also has to deal with how these governments handle China here.

And talking in the sense of Brazil, we know that Lula is really big on bricks, so China is already one of the main partners here. But I always recall something that happened right after Biden got elected and when they sent Biden, sent some invoice into to Brazil to talk to Bolsonaro and Bolsonaro sat down with them and he still said, “Yeah, but I still don’t acknowledge that Biden won this election. It was stolen from Trump.” Yet, Biden normalized Bolsonaro either way because one of the main deals, “We should make sure that the 5G network in Brazil wouldn’t be going through with China.” So they’re willing, the US is willing to work with these governments.

Hilary Goodfriend:

Sure, I mean look at Juan Orlando Hernandez in Honduras. Both parties were happy to cooperate and legitimize that regime until it was no longer useful.

Sabrina Fernandes:

Yes.

Rene Rojas:

The way you framed the question, Hilary, I thought was really, really useful. On the one hand, this is kind of a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the global economic climate is very unfavorable, but the geostrategic climate I think is more favorable than it has been in a long time, and that has to do with the factors you mentioned.

The first is I think the Washington’s grip on the hemisphere has weakened. Washington no longer has the ability to call the shots the way it used to in the region. It’s got too much to worry about and it cannot prioritize. Now, of course, it will intervene in a country like Honduras if it has to, but it won’t intervene in a country like Brazil or even Chile.

I think it has no capacity nor the desire to do so. I mean, you might say, “Well what about Colombia?” I mean, sure, it intervened for over a decade with billions of dollars in military aid and training, et cetera, but they achieved their goal, which was to defeat FARC, in my view. And I don’t think they want to continue that form of interventionism, even in a country as volatile as Colombia.

And the other factor, which you mentioned is the rise of a rival to the US, which is the China as a superpower. And that does open up some space to explore domestic policy alternatives, whether it’s a thing within the hemispheric US designs for the region or using the Chinese presence to gain some leverage.

So I think in that sense, we are better positioned than we have been in previous periods in other eras, which to me indicates that the decisive factors will be domestic in terms of where things move. It’s not at all to say that imperial meddling is no longer a threat, but I feel at this juncture does not have the capacity that it once did to even try to call the shots.

Marc Steiner:

It’s in some ways a interesting way to kind of conclude who we are. It sounds like Latin America and the left governments are facing a great uncertainty about where this all could lead and maybe lays bare all the contradictions of the past coming to the fore at this moment, and that’s part of what I gleaned from all this being said and kind of sets us up, I think, for an interesting series of discussions about what happens next and where do we go.

Hilary Goodfriend:

I think that’s right. I think this has been a really excellent discussion and really brings out a lot of the threads that I hope the rest of this series will be picking up on and really diving into. So just a big thank you, to our guests for their time and for this thoughtful conversation.

Sabrina Fernandes:

Oh, thanks for having us. I’m really looking forward to the series. Also, hoping that some of the questions that get to be addressed can help us with this question of alternatives that we raised earlier on, because yes, the challenges are quite big right now, but there’s a project being built at the same time and we’re part of it.

Marc Steiner:

A good way to end it. That’s good. We need that. That was a good way to conclude this conversation. And I just want to thank all of you, Thea Riofrancos who was here earlier with us, Sabrina Fernandes, Rene Rojas, and my being co-host here Hilary Goodfriend, it’s been a pleasure to really kind of get to know you at least on this project and have you kind of outline all this and make it work for all of our listeners.

And I want you all to stay tuned for coming installments in this series. Our next conversation will bring more Latin American activists to focus on struggles around resource extraction and exploitation. And the third installment, we are planning a discussion around the struggle of sexual reproductive rights across the region, and finally looking at land-based movements and what they say for these new Latin American left governments and where this all takes us and takes Latin America and takes us all.

So I want to thank all of you for being, this has been a great discussion. It’s been just a pleasure to co-host with you, Hilary, and I want to thank you all for all your insightful views today as we look at what’s happening next in Latin America.

Once again, thank you all for joining us today, and I want to thank our co-host, Hilary Goodfriend for making this such a successful podcast and the may thank our guests while we’re at it here. Thea Riofrancos, Sabrina Fernandes and Rene Rojas, and to our friends at the North American Congress and Latin America, NACLA for this collaboration.

So please let me know what you think about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. And you can find NACLA at nacla.org and on Twitter @NACLA and on Instagram, @nacla_report. And we’ll have at least three more episodes of our collaboration coming up with NACLA. So stay tuned for those.

And if you have an extra minute, please go to www.therealnews.com/support. Become a monthly donor and become part of the future with us. So for Dwayne Gladden, Kayla Rivara and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening and take care.

From the minute it became clear that US media were going to offer little more than lackluster, largely uncritical coverage of the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio, it was only a matter of time before the greasiest operators in Republican messaging would start cynically exploiting the outpouring of genuine concern, fueled largely by organic outrage on social media, to promote the most insipid and racist possible interpretation of events. 

Fox News didn’t disappoint. It ignored the February 3 derailment almost entirely until roughly the same time all other major media—including MSNBC—were finally shamed into covering it, around 10 days later. In fact, MSNBC and Fox News pundits finally began mentioning the Ohio derailment at exactly the same time: the 8:00pm EST time slot on Feb 13.

While Mehdi Hassan’s coverage for MSNBC was correctly critical of both political parties for the roles they have played in creating the conditions for disasters like this to occur on the nation’s railroads with greater frequency and destructive magnitude, it was only a matter of time before the narrative mutated into a partisan pissing match between the two major cable networks arguing with each other about which party screwed up more and when.

And what a waste of 10 days it was for supposed progressives in US media. Think about how easily major Democratic figures such as Pete Buttigieg, liberal networks like MSNBC, or potential 2024 primary challengers could have seized upon this obvious case of corporate negligence and greed to make a clear, passionate case for strengthening unions, curtailing Wall Street malfeasance, implementing better (and more strictly enforced) safety regulations, and a host of other things Republicans oppose. Even setting aside the moral argument about how events like the derailment in East Palestine are indicative of a larger regime that pollutes the poor and institutionalizes sacrifice zones just for profit and cynical political gain, one would think Democrats may want to use this opportunity to show how Republicans’ white-knuckled opposition to such things demonstrates, especially in times like these, that they don’t have the public’s interests at heart.  

But, of course, Democrats cannot do that, because they too are captured by these same corporate interests, and they have also been complicit in facilitating the corporate destruction of the railroads—albeit, in fairness, less so than Republicans. But captured they are. As reporting in The Lever has made clear, federal regulators from both parties weakened regulations. The Trump White House repealed a law requiring trains carrying hazardous materials to replace their Civil War-era braking systems with new Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brake technology, and the Biden administration, fearing delays in the “post-COVID” supply chains, did nothing to reverse this disastrous decision. 

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett, modern-day rail tycoon, once famously said (Buffet owns Berkshire Hathaway, which owns BNSF Railway, the most profitable of the Class 1 freight rail companies), “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” When the rich continue to make war on our working class, and when they find virtually endless bipartisan support for their war effort, it opens up the door for the worst, most craven hucksters in the media to play the “outsider” card. You’ve seen this playbook before: it’s a large reason Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Democrats abandoned the working class with deeply unpopular, corporate-written trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); they support union-busting charter schools; they want to make union busters the head of the Department of Labor; and they currently have a man who cut his teeth working for McKinsey & Company running the Department of Transportation. 

It’s true the Biden era has seen a modest shift in tone—the President often speaks to the pride of unions and the value of working people. And there is some substance behind the rhetoric: Biden has abandoned talk of the TPP and charter schools, for example. But on the biggest test of his pro-labor bonafides—the potential railroad strike of late 2022—Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress openly and viciously sided with management over the worker, blocking the right of workers to strike and effectively giving the rail companies the green light to continue the same cost-cutting, profit-maximizing practices that workers were prepared to strike over—practices, many workers have said, that are the root cause of the hazardous, untenable situation on the railroads, and that will lead to more accidents, more derailments, more catastrophes.   

Just the same, in the immediate aftermath of the controlled explosion that understandably left thousands of nearby residents frightened and outraged, PR-wise, the White House, Congressional Democrats, the Department of Transportation, and Democrat-aligned media were a total no-show.  

As The Nation’s Jeet Heer noted in his column expanding on this point, 

On February 5, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine warned, “Everyone in Pennsylvania and Ohio who’s in this area, you know, you need to leave. You just need to leave. We’re ordering you to leave. This is a matter of life and death.” 

On the very day that DeWine was uttering these dire words, Buttigieg appeared on three Sunday news shows: CNN’s State of the Union, NBC’s Meet the Press, and ABC’s This Week. Remarkably, on none of these programs was Buttigieg asked about the ongoing East Palestine disaster—despite the fact that, as transportation secretary, regulating train safety is one of his responsibilities. Nor did Buttigieg feel it incumbent on himself to raise the issue and offer what guidance and assurances he could. Instead, Buttigieg’s ubiquitous TV appearances were taken up with the transparently hyped-up issue of a Chinese weather balloon that entered USA airspace—quite possibly as a result of unpredictable wind patterns.

Cue the demagogues. For the past week, Fox News has turned the disaster into an election campaign for rustbelt Republicans, namely for J.D. Vance, former fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that’s little more than a lobbying arm for Corporate America. (Ironically enough, AEI was shut down by President Truman in 1949 for being a clandestine lobbying arm of the railroad industry.)

The narrative Fox News went with was classic right-wing populism: vaguely gesture to corporate greed, but ultimately blame Democrats––and Democrats only––while trafficking in “white genocide” subtext. It’s a similar gambit to the one Tucker Carlson and Vance have employed when discussing the fentanyl crisis:

And their anti-immigrant racism: 

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade heavily implied that the Democrats’ lackluster response to the derailment is because the victims were largely Republican (see: white):

It goes without saying that the White House’s response has been lackluster because the victims are poor, not because they are Republican; their party affiliation is entirely incidental. As the blasé response to the poisoning of Black children throughout the country with lead pipes makes clear, indifference to environmental poisoning of poor people is both multiracial and bipartisan. 

One must be careful not to overstate how much the corporate capture of Democrats is responsible for Republicans and rightwing media exploiting the East Palestine disaster for political gain and use it as an excuse to push Great Replacement narratives to their viewers. These reactionary currents of racism, anti-Semitism, anger, and conspiratorial thinking would exist regardless of what Democrats do. But liberal absence from the initial narrative, the White House largely ignoring the issue in the press, Democrats’ inability to articulate a counter-vision—all of this makes these reactionary appeals more attractive. 

Norman Solomon’s definition of neoliberalism as “a worldview with victims but no victimizers” resonates more than ever. In the event that tens of millions are watching a chemical plume of smoke and watching a torrent of media reports largely repeating, without pushback, Norfolk Southern’s claims that everything is hunky dory, they correctly surmise something is fishy, something isn’t quite right. We have victims but no victimizers. In this moral vacuum, demagogues sweep in and give you a Victimizer—in this case, Woke Democrats—bashing them for all the wrong reasons and ignoring all the good reasons, because the good reasons very much apply to both parties. The crime is not the runaway corporate capture of the state’s regulatory apparatus, not greed, not union-busting—because Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance very much like these things—but a conspiracy to harm white people for the crime of being white. Why? What sense does that make? It doesn’t have to make sense; it’s appealing to the lizard brain. The point is to have two sets of images side by side on the TV screen: a plume of chemical smoke and J.D.’s large head insisting it’s because East Palestine residents are god-fearing Real Americans. 

Humans are pattern-seeking mammals, our brains want narrative, an author to the harm we see around us. And in the absence of Democrats being able to articulate a real one—in this case, union-busting, regulation-repealing corporations—the worst people on earth will fill in the blank with a dark, racist pseudo-narrative. 

After five months of the Texas Campaign for the Environment (TCE) not recognizing their union, members of the Texas Environmental Workers Union unanimously agreed to a one-day strike, which took place on February 6, 2023. Working People producer Jules Taylor sat down with Brandon Marks and Chloe Torres for an in-person interview ahead of the strike to discuss the struggle Texas Environmental Workers Union members are facing in their workplace. Union members are requesting that listeners sign on their letter urging the TCE to recognize their union, and consider donating to their strike fund. The Texas Environmental Workers Union is proudly represented by the Communications Workers of America.

Additional links/info below

• Brandon Marks – Twitter, Facebook
• Chloe Torres – Facebook
• Updog – South Texas Emo/Ska Bandcamp, Twitter
• Texas Environmental Workers Union – Twitter, Website
• Communications Workers of America – Website
• Texas Campaign for the Environment
• DONATE TO THE TEXAS ENVIRONMENTAL WORKERS UNION STRIKE FUND
• Video for this episode

Permanent Links below

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)

• Jules Taylor, “Working People Theme Song”
• Updog – “Burned Out”

Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Brandon Marks:  Hey y’all. My name is Brandon Marks. I use he/him pronouns. The regional coordinator at the Texas Campaign for the Environment, right here living in Corpus Christi, Texas. We have been fighting for our union for about six months now.

Chloe Torres:  Hi everyone. My name is Chloe Torres. I use they/she pronouns, and I am the fossil fuel exports organizer for the Coastal Bend region. Same as Brandon, our union started in a living room conversation, kind of as a joke, but not really. Here we are now fighting to be recognized.

Jules Taylor:  All right. Well, Brandon and Chloe, thank you so much for sitting down, talking to me today and welcome, Working People listeners, to another episode of the podcast Working People, the podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and hosted by the one and only Maximillian Alvarez.

As you can see or hear, Max is not with us today. It is your intrepid producer coming to you from Corpus Christi. Long story short, I moved to Texas, as some of y’all may know, I moved to Texas from New York back in May, and I’ve been getting around to some of the different clubs and music venues in the area, and I’ve taken up some photography in the last few months and really enjoying that. But I went to take photos of a band called Up Dog, which by the way, for listeners, I’m about to open my pearl snap shirt and show my Up Dog T-shirt. Wearing the T-shirt, man.

I went to the show last Saturday night, and it was just completely… How did I not know that A, there was a union being formed that wasn’t being recognized and was going on strike, and B, how did I not know that that band’s proceeds from their merch booth was going towards the union fund, towards the strike fund? Everyone I know that night came… Everyone left with a new T-shirt and photographs and stuff, but I realized I was like, I got to follow up with these folks to get an interview and talk about this on the podcast.

Because as you guys know, we’ve interviewed several different unions. We do this all the time. Max has been on road trips to Alabama to support the mine workers on strike down there. We’ve covered a lot of the strikes in the past of Frito-Lay and John Deere,, and all sorts of stuff, man. The way that we start out, though, is we start out by asking you about what life is like for you, where’d you grow up? Maybe Chloe, we’ll start with you. Are you a Corpus Christi native?

Chloe Torres:  I am, born and raised. My great-grandparents on my maternal side came from Mexico to Corpus Christi, and my paternal grandparents dawdled in Brownsville and then eventually made their way up to Corpus Christi. But yeah, I’ve grown up here. And I think one of the things that I love to share with people about why I do organizing work, both paid and unpaid, is the fact that, growing up here, people really hated it. My peers really, really hated it. We just made an analysis without really realizing it, that there are no opportunities for us here outside of working in an oil and gas refinery or working at the military base, or you go to college and you get out. That’s the goal.

And so, going through high school, I had that same mindset of just get out as soon as you can. But then I started hearing about actual people in my community who are talking about these really big issues that you, as a kid, think about as just things that happen far away on a national scale, even people talking about immigration, talking about feminism, talking about labor rights. I knew that I couldn’t just walk away because everyone I love is here, and they deserve so much better than what is given to them, the choices that are given to them. And if there are people who are fighting to expand those choices, then I have an obligation to join them.

And so, that’s what I did. I got to the university here, started looking around different school clubs, but eventually found my way into this space called the Solidarity Network, and we started organizing around issues of police brutality, started working around specifically environmental justice in terms of water boils and bans. We had so many in the year 2016, and not just advisories, but full on bans. You can’t even shower with this, you can’t brush your teeth with this or you’re going to get sick. It was there that I started forming a real rigorous power analysis, because I have so many mentors here in what is seen as a conservative city and state because of our voting record, but there have always been Southern radicals here. And I’m so lucky that I ended up with them, because they’ve really, then, in the past, propelled me to move forward, but now are supporting us in our efforts to be unionized. So yeah, I have them to thank.

Brandon Marks:  All right. I guess it’s my turn. It’s interesting, I have a similar story to Chloe that’s almost a corollary, where my great-grandpa also was the one who migrated here to this area in the Coastal Bends. My family’s been here for generations. But then my dad was the generation that left, and he left for college and didn’t come back until he was in his adulthood. I was born in Dallas and grew up in South Florida, where my mom is from.

I moved here about two years ago to join the organization I work for now, the Texas Campaign for the Environment. It was an incredible opportunity to do this important environmental justice organizing work in the middle of oil and gas country. It also happened to be where my dad, my grandma, and all of the rest of my family lived. I’ve been so grateful to be welcomed into the community here, to be able to spend time with my family. It’s the first time that, as an adult, I’m actually living near family. And being able to be with Chloe and others who’ve been doing this fight for a lot longer than I have, for fighting for justice here in Corpus Christi, and South Texas more broadly. I’m just so happy to be a part.

Jules Taylor:  Did y’all meet in the Solidarity Network?

Chloe Torres:  We actually met at the Corpus Christi DSA event.

Jules Taylor:  Oh, wow. Cool.

Chloe Torres:  It was at actually a benefit show that we had for our mutual aid program –

Jules Taylor:  Sweet.

Chloe Torres:  …That we started at the beginning of the pandemic, and Brandon just got there. I was working the table, and he was just like, I just came down from Chicago, thought I’d come check you guys out. I was like, oh, that’s crazy.

Jules Taylor:  Wow.

Chloe Torres:  Eventually he told me about TCE and then saw that the fossil fuel exports organizer position was open. After some encouragement, again, from those mentors that I mentioned earlier, I applied.

Jules Taylor:  That’s super cool. Man, I grew up an hour and a half south of here in the Rio Grande Valley. To me, Corpus was like an island outside of a black hole in a way, because it was like the Valley… South Texas in general, even if you’re not Latino, there’s a very tight-knit family cultural aspect to being Latino. And so, your family, it’s very difficult to move away from them. I grew up in the Valley, and like yourself, had a lot of peers that just couldn’t wait to get out. I was one of those that was like, I’m getting out. I’m going, I’m leaving.

My first little skip out of the Valley was to Corpus, but Corpus was still not quite enough to soothe the hunger of a young and ambitious person of that mindset. So I left, and I’ve been delighted to return to find that… I didn’t know what I was going to come back to, because when I was in New York, I was part of a music scene there, which to my knowledge, I mean, when I was here, there wasn’t a brewery scene you’d go play music at. Maybe the surf club was here, but there weren’t other venues like House of Rock or other common places. This is a terrain where, as a songwriter, if you’re performing and that’s how you make your living, it is possible to work year-round here because of the climate and the number of venues, and the number of venues available in a three-hour radius. So that I’ve returned and found that there was a thriving singer-songwriter scene was something that was wonderful.

But in such a heavily conservative refinery town, I did not imagine that I’d find a thriving DSA club down here as well. I did not expect to find a whole lot of environmental activism, and actions on behalf of Indigenous people as well. All of these various communities, music or activism, et cetera, it’s super exciting to get here and find this stuff. Because I feel like, I think there was a Che Guevara quote or something that he said, I envy y’all as you live in the heart of empire, you can strike at the heart of it.

Like you, when you were speaking, Chloe, about having a moral obligation to the people that you love, that you grew up with, that are deserving of these opportunities, and how you just couldn’t leave, I felt like a latent sense of that as I was away for a long time. I was like, wait a second, what about my family? What about my people? What about the people that I…

Coming back, it’s like, okay, so now maybe this is where the real battle starts. Maybe it’s being in Texas and fighting for trans rights, environmental justice, like you all. For me, I knew that when I was weighing the decision whether to move back to Texas, the activism or the issues that were nearest and dearest to my heart were women’s bodily autonomy, trans rights, and some environmental justice as well. To get here and see all of this taking shape, to see you all going on a one-day strike, to see that there’s a community of activists that are fighting for environmental justice, I’m talking about this now, and it’s hard to even get over it.

Even driving back to Corpus, man, it’s like there’s just skylines of refineries, black smoke coming out of these refineries. This is a refinery town. I’ve had a couple friends who were in the business of selling solar power in Corpus Christi, and even those people talked about the resistance on doormats that they received from people who were like, no, we don’t want solar. We are a refinery family.

But it’s wild to even be talking to y’all here now. Just tell me how, and I guess Brandon, we’ll go to you first, and then we’ll go Chloe, but tell me how… I’ve made the case before in the past where I’m like, if you grew up around a military base in Florida or South Texas or your pathway was either go work at the refineries or go work for a prison… South of here, Willacy County, all these people, all they have to work at is at the Willacy County prison complex there. How in the world do you find yourself, however impervious you happen to be to the propaganda, to the life paths that are carved out for you, that are offered up as if this is the way you are supposed to be, how do you shun that and say, no, no, no, I have moral obligations for commitments to equality, economic justice, things that you really have to go out of your way to find cases that support this stuff. How did you do that, Brandon?

Brandon Marks:  I guess for me, it’s important to set the scene. My great-grandfather moved here fleeing the persecution of Jews in Europe, and moved to a small town near Corpus called Refugio here, which means refuge.

Jules Taylor:  Right. Refuge.

Brandon Marks:  This is the refuge it’s turned into.

Jules Taylor:  Wow.

Brandon Marks:  A 10-mile stretch of refineries and the active expansion of the oil and gas industry in this area. Because there’s a list at least eight companies long of people that are actively trying to move here right now, not to mention the current facilities that are already expanding, and the people that are already breathing in the pollution who live near Refinery Row or the other oil and gas exports in San Patricio County. And so, for me, it’s like my family was looking for a refuge, and this is what the community’s turned into. I have no other option than to be a part of this fight.

Chloe Torres:  Totally. I guess mine would go back to family. But on my maternal side, my grandfather owned a restaurant, and in the restaurant, he had framed portraits of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. I remember –

Jules Taylor:  [inaudible] interrupt for a sec, because your family, do they ever say something like, hey, we’re actually very, very distant relatives of Emiliano, or something like that? Because my family does that. Did they do that?

Chloe Torres:  I mean, they did say they were from Morelos, which is where [all laugh]… They never said they were directly related. I guess they didn’t want to… They were like, oh, she likes history. She’s going to research it [all laugh]. But I just remember him telling me stories of why so many people fled during the Mexican revolution. I think my key takeaway is that so much human suffering that has taken place since the development of colonialism and slavery and capitalism is so incredibly unnecessary. From then on, I think that was a real radicalizing point for me that it doesn’t have to be this way, and it takes people coming together to resist that notion and to demand that they be treated with dignity.

And so, I feel, again, my family really prepared me to have this automatic questioning of if things are unfair, who is making them that way, and what do we have to do to make it just? I think, again, just having people around me who were pushing me to have this wider political imagination was absolutely instrumental, because I was a typical liberal in high school. I was like, yeah, go Hillary or whatever, first woman president. They were like, well, have you read about this? I think people constantly pushing me to demand exactly what I want and make people in power explain why they won’t give it to me, and then make it impossible for them to not give into that demand or take power yourself. And so, mentorship, I could not have developed this by myself, this political trajectory of my life. It was definitely a collective effort.

Jules Taylor:  I just want to touch on something that you said about escaping persecution in Europe. My family history is that we were Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition, ended up in Mexico, and became a Catholic anyway.

Brandon Marks:  That’s really interesting you say that, because immigration rights is really important to me, because when my great-grandpa arrived in the US, he was deported. In the middle of the Holocaust, was deported, and he ended up living in Mexico City for a decade before coming back and getting legal citizenship in Texas.

Jules Taylor:  Wow. I want to go back to Chloe, to what you said about how… I think listeners should understand that I think that there is, when you mention about growing up and every one of your peers just wanting to leave, this is the epitome of a town where you grow up and you want to leave. This entire area is like that. One thing, when you’re growing up that way and you’re like, when those questions are like, I need to leave, turns to well, why are my parents even here, dude? You start to wonder about that.

The story is that my grandfather also fled the revolution. This is a story that will be funny to some, but apparently he had a pet chicken, and they came over in a covered wagon. As they were eating dinner that night, he goes to look for his chicken. They’re like, your chicken was dinner, bro. That’s a story that was told to me about my great-grandfather, whose last name was Zapata, which is why the whole Zapata thing happens. But my thoughts when I was a kid was like, we’re living in the Rio Grande Valley, we’re not too far from the border. I was like, so would y’all come over in the covered wagon and just stop, bro. You just cross the river, and that’s where you just decide to set up camp for generations or something.

But yeah, man, family is super important. Coming back here to fight and discover that all this is going on, part of me feels like there’s a little bit of time to make up. Part of me feels like this battle’s being fought, and I want to know how I can contribute. It’s important to show solidarity. Part of the reason why we are here right now is because y’all formed a union. You’re going on strike. Chills just even talking about it, man. Cool.

Tell me about where you work, and we’ll start with you now, Chloe. Tell me about where you work, what started out like, how long you’ve been there, what it was like when you started, if things deteriorated to the point they are now, or if things have always just been that way, or what’s the whole story there?

Chloe Torres:  That’s a great question. Like I said, I’m the fossil fuel exports organizer for Texas Campaign for the Environment. I started… I think it’s coming up on two years now. I started when I was still in my senior semester of college, so that was late 2021. When I started, I was like, well, I’m doing this work already, unpaid, and now I get to do it with resources, and there are so many people that I already know, again, who are doing this work, and I can be a resource to them. And so, I was really excited to start, and I still love what I do. I will say it feels really important, feels very purposeful, and that’s exactly why we’re fighting to make it better, because this community deserves better.

But when I started, it did feel chaotic. I was like, I know I have a job description, and I’m doing my onboarding, so it might take a bit to feel like I have my feet on stable ground. But then, six months passed and I was like, wow, I just feel like I’m not settling in, maybe I’m doing something wrong. But my leadership isn’t telling me that I’m doing a bad job per se, but I feel like I’m scrambling, like I have no direction. That worries me because I know how precious time is as a resource, especially when you’re doing environmental justice work. Every single day that we don’t win or that a facility gets closer and closer to being permitted here, that is another day that children, everyone in this community is getting sicker.

And so, I talked to Brandon. We were out with one of our friends and he was looking particularly stressed, and I was like, what’s on your mind? We started talking about our working conditions, and Brandon… And this is what clicked, and this is why I gave all that context of when people tell you that something isn’t right, investigate why isn’t it right. When he told me, this is not how an organization should be run, this is not normal. The way you’re feeling is a result of… Bad leadership. I’ll just say it.

From there, I started thinking, oh my God, there are other people in this organization who have been here for years. What are they feeling? And so, when we were doing this work in the middle of a pandemic, a lot of us were doing remote work. The first time we really had a chance to speak together in person, most of us, was in April. It was eye-opening, to say the least, just how similar we all felt, like we were running around directionless. It not only personally on an individual level felt bad, but we knew that our mission was to help people escape this fossil fuel apparatus. We can’t do that with the way this organization is structured now. It’s untenable.

Brandon Marks:  Every single day, we are fighting toxic pollution that makes people sick, and it causes climate change. There’s no reason that we should also be having to fight a toxic work environment. Honestly, props to Chloe for when we were all together and hanging out one night in my living room with some coworkers who were in town because we have offices around the state, looked around, and was like, so when are we starting a union? That was it. Listeners, you too can start a union from the comfort of your living room, just bring your coworkers over [laughs]. That was really what started it all.

Jules Taylor:  That’s why I think Christian Smalls, man, I think his method was he threw a couple barbecues, gave some people some literature, talked to them for a while, and eventually got enough people on his side that were willing to sign off on stuff. That process is different and unique for every workplace, I would imagine, in terms of length, duration, degree of intensity, all that other stuff. But for y’all, I mean, when you say it started in your front room, was it like, did y’all dispense to your various places around the state to recruit enough people in their workplaces, or is that how it went down?

Brandon Marks:  It sounds probably like a normal union drive in a sense of, okay, we had our core group that had all signed on, and we needed to take a look at everyone else in the organization and intentionally have conversations with everyone, organizing conversations, to see where people were at, have they ever thought or had feelings about unions, and what their feelings were about work, and what issues they were experiencing. And let them know that we were already starting to form a union, and asked if they wanted to sign on and get involved. Let me tell you, our issues were so deeply and widely felt that we had 100% sign on.

Jules Taylor:  Whoa! Wait, you’re talking about literally 100% of your people?

Brandon Marks:  100%.

Jules Taylor:  How many people total is that?

Brandon Marks:  Right now, 12. In total, probably 18, because we had such a high turnover rate that we started with 12 and are now at a new set of 12.

Jules Taylor:  Oh, wow.

Brandon Marks:  And so, we had people that at the beginning of this had signed on and were excited, and then left for a better job. It kept happening. Time and again, people kept leaving, and the organization kept hiring on new people who immediately signed on to be a part of our union drive. We remain at 100%. We started there, and we’re still there, no matter the high degree of turnover that’s going on in this organization for people that are fleeing the working conditions and the poor pay.

Jules Taylor:  Max had said something on a recent Breaking Points Art of Class War segment that he did. He said something about how most people in a job feel they have one of two options, which is stay and put up with it or leave and find something else. But there’s a secret third thing, which is basically stay and fight. More and more of us are discovering that option. There are various, obviously, things that employers can do to subvert that, mainly turnover. That’s part of the reason why grad school organizing is so difficult, because it cycles out every few years.

You’re with a whole new group of 12, which means that during the time that you’ve formed the union that you had a dozen people, and out of those dozen people, I’m assuming y’all two are still members of that same original 12. There’s been at least 10 that have come and gone over what length of time?

Brandon Marks:  I would say… I don’t know the exact number of how many, what the turnover is, probably somewhere between six to eight, and in nine months.

Jules Taylor:  Chloe, what’s your typical day at your job like?

Chloe Torres:  Well, before we opened our office, it was going to Zoom meetings with all of these statewide and national orgs. Again, these are very well-funded orgs. It’s a very professional space. I think a lot of, especially environmentally oriented nonprofits, are starting to get the hint that change doesn’t start from funders and nonprofit, very professional people, that they need to be more integrated in the communities they’re trying to organize with. But I will say, those spaces just felt very like we’re just talking in circles. We all know what the problem is, but it’s like who has the best analysis, and then never apply it on frontline organizing.

And so, I’m there, I am ready to get out and start organizing people for renewable energy, for unionized, green jobs. I’m ready to get the just transition going. What are y’all doing? Why are we just talking to each other back and forth and sending all of these emails that go nowhere? I feel like that remote work was really draining because, again, it felt very directionless, less purposeful. But thankfully, once the office opened up and we started to have a larger team with our field organizers, it was like, okay, what kind of organizers do we want to be? How can we best serve this community? We were sharing our life stories or stories of self, and we were so excited, because we had all of these ideas of, let’s start doing strategy charts around how we’re going to take down the port of Corpus Christi.

We’re like, sky’s the limit. We need radical intervention. That is the only thing that is going to get us out of facing the worst of the worst of climate crises. Again, we are a coastal community, so we are already experiencing those effects. Then, you have to constantly be reminded, I’m having these conversations with my supervisor, and he’s like, yeah, that all sounds amazing and great, and I’m really proud of you guys, but also remember that we have a board and an executive director that can veto your plans at any time.

Again, you feel like you have your footing, but you know it’s a sand trap. It can be taken away from you at any time. And so, I think already dealing with the precarity of, again, living in a coastal community, this could be the winter that we see hundreds of people die because it’s this freeze that our city, our state is not prepared for, or refuses to prepare for because they don’t give a shit whether or not poor people die. Then, trying to work against that, save people that you care about and be told that you don’t know, actually, what you’re talking about, you don’t know the best thing for you and your loved ones. We, the board, who have never… Most of them haven’t stepped foot in Corpus Christi, know better than you. That, to me, is just so, so frustrating, just as a human being, your agency being ripped away from you like that all the time is really, really hard to deal with day-to-day.

Jules Taylor:  I mean, if you are given a certain amount of autonomy within a job, and you are allowed to funnel resources, effort, and time, and sweat into something that aligns with the orders or the directions you’ve been given, and if you develop that project to a point of, I mean, to be knee-capped at the apotheosis of that project over and over again, that is sure to bring up some feelings of resentment towards one’s employer, for god damn sure. I can speak to that, too, in a couple jobs that I’ve had, which is… Anyway. What you’re describing sounds like a graduate philosophy course where they talk about radical intervention and talk about, I don’t know, these discursive parameters that ultimately are for discursive purposes only, that it’s a bunch of theory that never gets turned into praxis.

At a certain point, you’re like, wait a second, talk is cheap. I feel like theory without practice is a bit of advanced liberal performatism or something. It’s all discursive stuff that you guys discussed, and if it never goes into work, then what is… It reminds me of a recent Tweet that says something like the people that encourage you to go through the proper channels encourage you to go through the proper channels because they’re in charge of those channels and they guarantee your shit’s not going to work. I totally get where you’re coming from with that.

Brandon, what’s a typical day in your job and your role like?

Brandon Marks:  Honestly, there is no typical day. Let’s get into some of our issues as workers. I would say the first one is just working conditions. There is substandard pay. There are pitiful benefits with only 10 PTO days, very high deductible health insurance plan, and expectations of overworking. The lack of prioritization of the organization’s leadership means that staff are constantly given new priorities. And so, I could show up any day and have a new thing that I’m working on, and I just have to drop the thing that I used to be working on. And so, we’re talking about low pay, bad benefits, precarity for the first rung of jobs in the organization. We’re talking about excessive expectations of the amount of hours that need to be worked to get the job done, taking advantage of young people who believe so deeply in this work that they’re willing to accept lower pay and work those harder hours because they believe and they want to win.

Jules Taylor:  These people make my blood boil when you’re talking about that stuff, man. To give you benefits, that’s like catastrophic healthcare masquerading as every day sort of stuff, to prey on the twinkle in the eye of youth and the energy and vigor and enthusiasm they show up with, to also play on the passion that one has for anything that translates into expectations of extra passionate work or something, or extra hours. Jesus Christ, man. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, it’s just all those things are just kind of like –

Brandon Marks:  Yeah. We know we are not the only workplace that is experiencing those types of working conditions. You would just hope that a nonprofit that is fighting for environmental justice would also be modeling justice at its workplace. Instead of that, they’re modeling the aggressive behaviors of the very corporations that we are fighting. It’s devastating, and it’s hard. No one told me when I took this job that the person before me quit in absolute anger after being worked to the bone, working what I’ve been told is over 12-hour days, and with a child at home.

Chloe Torres:  With a child at home.

Jules Taylor:  Wow.

Brandon Marks:  No one in the organization intervening. Offering words of support, but no actual intervention, because the campaign came first. But the organization wasn’t providing the resources to match the priorities that they were setting. And so, it was on that individual staff member to fill in the gap. No one told me this. Lo and behold, a year and a half later, I was in the very same situation. We got involved in the local city council elections this past election cycle. And when we were starting off, I was asking again and again for the resources that I needed for us to be successful, and they weren’t provided. For three to four months, I personally was working 12-hour days, almost six days a week. I burnt myself out and ran myself into the ground. And we won. We won two seats on the Corpus Christi City Council for progressive environmentalists.

Jules Taylor:  There we go.

Brandon Marks:  Which is incredible in the heart of oil and gas country, but it should not have to come at the expense of my mental and physical health, or that of the rest of the team that we had.

Jules Taylor:  You want to jump in there?

Chloe Torres:  Yeah. I’ll also mention the canvassing that goes on in Austin, make sure that is represented because I never knew, again, coming in, I’m a grant-funded position.

Jules Taylor:  That’s its own case of anxiety.

Chloe Torres:  Yeah, exactly. I keep getting told, climate change won’t always be a sexy topic for donors, so you know.

Jules Taylor:  Wow.

Chloe Torres:  You do what you can when you can. But our organization has typically been funded through canvassing door to door and asking for donations. What I didn’t know was how… I’ll be honest with you, I’m not cut out for that type of work. I’ll cry on people’s doorsteps. I just can’t [all laugh]. That work is hard enough as it is already, but the model, the structure of that canvass is so unbelievable. Again, you’re taking in college kids who see, oh my God, $15 an hour in Texas. That’s great in Austin – Now it’s not even the living wage in Austin. You get them in the door. You’re telling them you’re going to fight against electronic waste, or you’re going to fight against pollution. You get them out there and you tell them, okay, it’s your day one, no worries, you’re going to do great. They do have people there training them, but what they don’t tell them is if you don’t hit your fundraising goal within seven days –

Brandon Marks:  If you don’t get a donation on day one, you’re fired.

Chloe Torres:  You don’t get a donation on day one, you’re fired.

Jules Taylor:  Wow!

Brandon Marks:  Then, there are more standards to meet.

Chloe Torres:  Yes. You have to constantly meet standard because you are fundraising for your job. You were talking about peak liberal performative nature. We had, for the first time in our organization’s 30 years, an anti-racism workshop. We brought up the fact that the canvassing model, the way it is structured, is set up so that white, cis, able-bodied people are the ones who are going to succeed the most. Because TCE has a priority of promoting from within, which is not, again, inherently a bad thing, but when only white men, typically white cis men are the ones who can survive and keep meeting the canvassing standard, they’re the ones who get promoted. It has led to an entirely white, male dominated leadership team. Honestly, it shows.

Jules Taylor:  I mean, you’re going to go out of your way to find an all white cis male work team.

Chloe Torres:  In Texas.

Jules Taylor:  In Texas, especially in Corpus Christi. I’m teaching at a local college, and I have two different students that have the same Hispanic first and last name. I don’t want to say their name here, but it’s just funny. It’s so Corpus Christi to have two Hugo Hernandezes in your class or something. That’s terrible to hear that, though.

I just want to touch on, so you’re fundraising for your own job, so that seems a little weird to me that you would send the person who you give the job out to fundraise for that job, which, doesn’t that make their job into fundraising at that point? Was there an alternative description other than this person’s job is to go out to the streets and fundraise?

Brandon Marks:  The job is listed as a field organizer, and people go in wanting to organize. We’ve been told that it is a bait and switch. Not only is it a bait and switch, but it is a churn and burn model. It’s get as many people in the door as possible, and we’ll see who makes it.

Jules Taylor:  Well, also, it’s Corpus Christi, so I mean, this is a really sunny place for shady people. This is like, you go out and it’s 90 degrees, 100 degrees. The sun down here is no joke. When I lived in New York, it would be like 85 and people would be sweating talking about the heat that they can’t stand. I’m like, bro, I lived in Arizona. I lived in Texas, I’m not complaining about the heat. But down here, it’s like if you have a person that’s a door to door salesman, you’re like, do you need, I don’t know, electrolyte powder in your stuff? Because it’s brutal.

Brandon Marks:  We currently have an office in Austin, and we also used to have canvassing offices in Dallas and Houston. And so, this was going on all over the state. What’s important to note is that everyone in Dallas has left. We don’t have a Dallas office anymore. We nearly closed the Houston office because almost everyone in Houston left.

Jules Taylor:  That’s not environmental activism, that’s door-to-door fundraising for maybe campaigns that don’t happen, or campaigns that are axed, or rugs that are pulled out from underneath you.

Brandon Marks:  Yeah.

Chloe Torres:  I think that was one of the biggest complaints, is that they would – They being executive leadership, would consult with not even necessarily so much the field organizers, canvassers, but the canvass directors and ask them for their input on campaign ideas. They’d tweak it to where it would still be maybe recognizable, but again, that precarity we’re talking about, it could just be ripped away at any moment. Again, it goes back to how frustrating it is to be working so hard. The canvass directors said that they have never had a year where someone didn’t pass out from heat exhaustion. You have people chasing you off their porch with guns. You have racial slurs, gendered slurs tossed at you, people sicking their dogs on you. They are literally the lifeblood of the organization, and they are treated the worst.

Brandon Marks:  If I can, on top of that, you also have people that get bitten by dogs out in the fields and are pushed to quickly get back out, to not take too many days off. You have people that are pushed to work while they’re sick, to not take days off. On top of that, TCE was bringing its canvassers to Austin for the Texas legislative session and not paying them.

Jules Taylor:  Wow.

Brandon Marks:  And so, unpaid labor, I can’t even believe that that’s what this organization used to do. They may not do it today, but it’s the same people in charge.

Jules Taylor:  Tell me about this strike. Y’all probably voted to do that, I would think. The strike vote, when did it go down, and what was that like?

Brandon Marks:  [Chloe laughs] I don’t even remember. It was unanimous. It was not even a conversation.

Jules Taylor:  Cool.

Brandon Marks:  The reason that we are going on strike is because we are asking the Texas Campaign for the Environment and our executive director, Robin Schneider, and the TCE board to voluntarily recognize our union. The reason for that is because we don’t want to go through an election. We don’t want to worry about the NLRB taking members out of our unit. We just want our full frontline staff to be in this union. Like a progressive organization, they should say, great, we see that 100% of people have signed on, y’all have a union. Let’s start negotiating a contract.

Instead of that, the executive director and the board have fought us, telling us they won’t recognize our union unless we remove people from the union. They want us to make the unit and the union smaller. They specifically want us to take out frontline supervisors, middle management, who have absolutely no power in the organization, but that who our executive director has stated in a letter to us that she wants their sole loyalty to be to TCE, the executive director, and the board, not have a split organizational loyalty with the union and their coworkers.

Jules Taylor:  You’re fighting for the PMCs too. You’re like bringing middle management in on this union of like, hey, you’re not too different from us. You have the same precarity and the same powerlessness in this organization. Wow.

Brandon Marks:  It’s not just the same powerlessness, but we are fighting for an effective organization. Because as Chloe talked about, right now our organization is ineffective; lack of priorities, lack of real plans, and what we want is to win environmental justice. We believe so deeply in this organization’s mission and vision that we want it to be an effective vehicle for these campaigns. The only way to do that is to have a strong union that can fight for not only internal, but also external equity in the way we treat staff and the way we run campaigns. We know the only way for that to happen is to have a strong union that includes the middle management. Because if the middle management is excluded, they’re at the mercy of the senior leadership team, which has shown their willingness to overwork people, mistreat people, and to force them to do their bidding, to fire people when they don’t want to. It really grinds my gears that…

Jules Taylor:  You can curse, bro. It’s okay. You can say it pisses you off and these are…

Brandon Marks:  We know that what this is a fight over is really power, that the executive director and the board know that if middle management continues to exist in precarity, they have more power in this organization than their workers because they can direct the middle management to do whatever they want. They can continue to switch between campaigns willy-nilly, dropping ones that we’d worked so hard on, starting new ones without any clear plan to win. They can force the middle management to mistreat the staff that are on the front lines with them. And so, that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re fighting for an equitable workplace with a union that includes every single person that wants to be in it. Every single person that is on the front lines, myself included. I’m in one of the two middle management titles that the exec director and board are fighting us to exclude.

Jules Taylor:  Well, I think as a key member of that union, they want to exclude you. Wow. It wasn’t really a vote, it was just a conversation. It was like, all right, everybody, cool. We’re going on a one-day strike, right?

Brandon Marks:  We tried to negotiate for five months, and we tried so hard to keep this –

Jules Taylor:  Well, it’s hard to negotiate with somebody who won’t even recognize you though, right? I mean, apparently, the first step towards negotiation is recognition. It’s that they’re like, nah, this is our table you can’t have a seat at, and we notice the chair that you brought, and we want to disallow you from sitting down, kind of thing.

Chloe Torres:  Absolutely.

Jules Taylor:  All this is fucked up, man. I’m glad you guys are taking action towards it. I’m glad y’all have organized and have secured an actual union, then it’s at this final step, and of course they don’t want to recognize that. This one-day strike, when is it happening?

Chloe Torres:  It’s happening Monday, Feb. 6.

Jules Taylor:  Is there an action going on with this? Are y’all picketing or anything like that?

Chloe Torres:  We made a little joke at our union meeting this morning about we’re not working for TCE that day, but we’re working for our union that day.

Brandon Marks:  That’s right.

Chloe Torres:  We’re taking a variety of actions including, we had over almost 600 people sign on a letter of support telling Robin and the board to recognize our union as we have proposed it.

Jules Taylor:  How many people have you had sign that so far?

Chloe Torres:  I think it’s like 596.

Jules Taylor:  It’s like 596, huh? Working People listeners, we’re going to leave a link in the show notes. We need everybody who hears this to go and sign off on that. I’m not sure when we’re going to. Obviously your thing is on Monday, we’re recording this, it’s Friday today. I got this weekend to pull this off and get it published. But even if we publish this on Monday and your one-day strike is going on, Working People listeners, please still go and sign off on that. It’s a way that is free to show solidarity, and we’d really appreciate it if we get a few more hundred on there for you guys to put you over the top of 1,000 by the time you guys present that. Do you present that on Monday? Is that when you’re doing it?

Brandon Marks:  We presented it a week and a half ago.

Jules Taylor:  Presented it a week ago. Great.

Chloe Torres:  But we’ll take sign-on, bring your staff.

Jules Taylor:  Yeah. 

Brandon Marks:  Even if you listen to this on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Jules Taylor:  You in the future, sign up on this thing, all right?

Brandon Marks:  Especially if you work in or know people in the broader environmental justice community, we need y’all’s support, because we are in this work with you and we all need just workplaces so that we can run effective campaigns. Please support us, get your friends to support us, get your executive directors to support us, because this is a fight for all of us and the communities that we work in.

Jules Taylor:  I saw that there was a few hundred dollars raised after Saturday’s show with the merch booth, so I was very happy about that. We’re also going to leave a link to the strike fund donation page in the show notes as well. This will be going out on the main feed as soon as I can get the stuff together to synchronize all these various microphones which we have around here. But it’ll be on the main feed. And by way of closing out, because I don’t want to keep y’all forever, Chloe, do you have any closing remarks? Then, Brandon, we’ll go to you.

Chloe Torres:  Oh, wow. I just hope that everyone listening, I think we all know that the world doesn’t have to be this way and it can be really, really daunting, because you’re always asking yourself, who am I? That imposter syndrome really beats my ass a lot. Who am I to be a part of this historic work? But you have to remember who you came from, and all of the examples throughout human history of it just takes a few of us getting together in a room, or it doesn’t even have to be a room. There’s a June Jordan poem that is like, hey, all you people, we’re meeting outside at this tree. It ain’t even been planted yet. Plant your tree today, however you can, and we love you. We’re in this with you, and thank you for your support.

Brandon Marks:  Y’all, we’re the Texas Environmental Workers Union. We’re the staff union at the –

Jules Taylor:  Woo!

Brandon Marks:  We are the staff union at the Texas Campaign for the Environment. We are proudly represented by the communication workers of America. If you are a supporter, a member, a funder, if you’ve ever heard of the Texas Campaign for the Environment, we are going on strike on Monday, Feb. 6, and we need your support. Check us out. T… T-W-E. Nope [Chloe and Jules laugh]. Let me try again.

Jules Taylor:  It’s okay.

Brandon Marks:  Check us out at www.tewunion.org. Thank you.

The planet we share, the only home we’ve ever known, has its limits. Its resources, its ability to sustain all life, are not infinite—and every day we are bearing witness to the disastrous consequences of mortgaging our collective future on the false belief that they are. The path we are on now is untenable, something’s going to give. Whether it comes from us or for us, change is coming nonetheless.

As an ecologically and civilizationally sustainable alternative to an unsustainable global system driven by the economic necessity of infinite growth, “degrowth“ can mean many things and could take many practical forms. But “degrowth” is perhaps less useful as a prescribed solution, a blueprint for the future, than as a frame for thinking and acting differently in the present. “What does degrowth look like in practice? How are different people, in different parts of the world, already embodying and enacting degrowth in their daily lives?” These questions have no single answer, but posing the questions in the first place, and searching for the numerous potential answers, is an essential process that can help us better diagnose what is off balance in our world and what it would take to heal.

For the past year, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez has had the honor of participating in a fellowship program for The Maintainers, “a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world.” In Part II of our special two-part episode produced in collaboration with The Maintainers, we meet some of the other members of The Maintainers team as well as the 2022 Maintainers Movement Fellows, and we take a deep dive into their cornerstone group project, “Embodying Degrowth.” 

Featuring: Andy Russell, Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Maintainers; Lauren Dapena Fraiz, Project Manager for The Maintainers; Liliana Coelho, Community Outreach and Events Coordinator at The Maintainers; Rheanna Chen, 2022 Maintainers Movement Fellow; Tona Rodriguez-Nikl, 2022 Maintainers Movement Fellow; Sam Bennett, 2022 Maintainers Movement Fellow; Leila D. Behjat, 2022 Maintainers Movement Fellow; Maximillian Alvarez, 2022 Maintainers Movement Fellow.  

Additional links/info below…

• The Maintainers website and Twitter page
• Dec. 15: Embodying Degrowth: An Event with The Maintainers Movement Fellows
• Working People, “What Could a Worker-Focused Just Transition Look Like? (w/ Megan Milliken Biven, James Hiatt, & Clarke)“
• The Maintainers: Andy Russell 
• The Maintainers: Lauren Dapena Fraiz 
• The Maintainers: Liliana Coehlo  
• The Maintainers: Rheanna Chen 
• The Maintainers: Tona Rodriguez-Nikl 
• The Maintainers: Sam Bennett 
• The Maintainers: Leila D. Behjat 
• The Maintainers: Maximillian Alvarez 

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)

• Jules Taylor, “Working People Theme Song

Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I could not be more excited to present to you all today part two of our special episode highlighting the work of the Maintainers, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human built world. As I mentioned in the introduction to the previous episode, for the past year I’ve had the tremendous honor of getting to work with the incredible Maintainers team, including the other members of the 2022 cohort of Maintainers Movement Fellows: Rheanna Chen, Tona Rodriguez, Leila Behjat, and Sam Bennett.

In the last episode, you got to hear one of the interviews that I conducted for the Cornerstone Group project that I and the other Maintainers fellows have been working on all year. And in this episode, you’re going to get to meet the Maintainers team and learn more about the program itself, the fellowship, and about the group project that we worked on together, which ended up bringing our vastly different interests and areas of expertise together to bear on the question of embodying degrowth in the age of climate catastrophe.

Now, as I also mentioned in the introduction to the previous episode, we fully understand that degrowth is a loaded term with many potential meanings, and it was not our mission to try to come up with a single all-encompassing definition, nor do we just take the term degrowth for granted. I mean, we spent all year interrogating it, probing it, talking to different people about what practicing degrowth looks like for them, even if they don’t call it that.

Before we get into the good stuff in today’s episode, though, just to make sure that you all listening have something to grasp onto and something to chew on and interrogate yourselves, I wanted to read this passage about degrowth by Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist and political ecologist working on environmental justice and the limits to growth, and one of the foremost proponents of degrowth. So, Kallis writes, “Sustainable degrowth is defined as an equitable down-scaling of production and consumption that increases human wellbeing and enhances ecological conditions. Those of us who write about degrowth envision a future wherein societies live within their ecological means, with localized economies which distribute resources more equally through new forms of democratic institutions. Such societies will no longer have to ‘grow or die’. Material accumulation will no longer hold a central position in the cultural imagination. The primacy given to efficiency will be substituted by a focus on sufficiency. The organizing principles will be simplicity, conviviality, and sharing. Innovation will no longer be directed to new technology for technology’s sake, but to new social and technical arrangements that will enable a convivial and frugal living.”

Again, I really want to stress that I am not asking you to take Kallis’s or any other vision for a degrowth society at face value. Rather, as I and my fellow Maintainers have done for the past year, take this as an opportunity to think about the current disastrous link between climate change and our global economic order, which is premised upon and fueled by the need for infinite growth. Think about what it would actually take to break that link and to reorganize society around different principles and different needs. Think about what our world could look like if we organize life around those different principles and judge the success of our societies on their ability to meet those different needs. If nothing else, we, the Maintainers Movement Fellows of 2022, hope that our work for this fellowship will at least help others realize that imagining such alternative futures is more necessary, and building them is more possible, than we think.

The planet we share, the only home we’ve ever known, has its limits. Its resources, its ability to sustain all life are not infinite, and every day we are bearing witness to the disastrous consequences of mortgaging our collective future on the false belief that they are. The path we are on now is untenable, and something’s going to give. Whether it comes from us or for us, change is coming nonetheless. As an ecologically and civilizationally sustainable alternative to an unsustainable global system driven by the economic necessity of infinite growth, degrowth can mean many things and could take many practical forms, but degrowth is perhaps less useful as a prescribed solution, a blueprint for the future, than as a frame for thinking and acting differently in the present.

What does degrowth look like in practice? How are different people in different parts of the world already embodying and enacting degrowth in their daily lives? These questions have no single answer, but posing the questions in the first place and searching for the numerous potential answers is an essential process that can help us better diagnose what is off balance in our world and what it would take to heal.

As we have realized again and again over the course of this group project for the Maintainers fellowship, to even consider the practical possibilities of degrowth requires working with the acknowledgement that life on this planet is a complex web of inter-being in which the conditions for our ability to live are fundamentally intertwined. No model for planetary coexistence, growth-based or otherwise, can sustain itself if it does not attend to that sacred fact. Putting degrowth into practice, moreover, does not necessarily involve sudden, drastic changes on the individual or societal level to the way things are, nor does it require a robust, concerted, or even shared conviction about degrowth as such.

One may, and many do, embody degrowth by practicing traditional farming techniques and non-capitalistic approaches to commerce. Some may develop more ecologically conscientious approaches to engineering and maintaining the infrastructure of our built world, while others may find themselves engaging in sustainable practices just by laboring diligently to preserve what’s around us with care and minimal waste. Others still may be working in whatever capacity to make the transition away from the fossil fuel economy and the transition toward a planetarily sustainable economic system that more equitably distributes resources to serve the needs of all possibilities.

All of these, we think, are examples of embodying degrowth, and we’d like to introduce you to a number of incredible people we spoke to about what doing the work of degrowth, or whatever you want to call it, looks like and means to them. We’d also like to leave you with this thought: none of these examples, of course, are enough on their own to bring about the total changes we need to see in the world in order to survive and thrive, but each one makes those changes more possible. The more we act and the more of us who act as if a better world is possible, the more possible a better world becomes.

Before we check in with the other Maintainers Movement Fellows and explore our Embodying Degrowth project, let’s get to know a little bit more about the Maintainers as such. I want to introduce you all to some of the amazing folks who hold the Maintainers organization up behind the scenes, and who provided us fellows with a truly heroic amount of support and encouragement over the past year.

Andy Russell:  Hi, my name’s Andy Russell. I’m the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, New York. I’m also a co-founder of the Maintainers, and my background is in the history of technology, where I write about boring things like standards in infrastructure and maintenance.

Lauren Dapena Fraiz:  My name’s Lauren Dapena Fraiz. I’ve been a part of the Maintainers since August 2020. I’m a project manager, and I support the team in an organizational capacity of development, community coordination, and I work very closely with the fellows, and my background is in nonprofit development. I worked in feminist education, also community health programs and research.

Andy Russell:  I’d like to tell you a little bit about the Maintainers, where it came from and where we’re headed. We started in 2015 with skepticism about the term “innovation”. You can’t see me, but I’m using scare quotes. One of the predominant and really oppressive terms of our time, it had become overwhelming the way that people were using it, not only in contemporary technology and business, but in my subfields of the history of business and the history of technology. So, one day I got irritated with a new book called The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, and I expressed that irritation to my friends, Lee Vincellin and Brad Fiddler, in a joke. I said, hey guys, we’re going to be rich. We should write a book called The Maintainers, and it got some laughs. Then Lee was blogging in those days, so he blogged about it, and it landed. It really resonated with a group of scholars who we interact with in the history and sociology of technology and computing and related fields.

We got going with a happy hour, as one does, which we held at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Albuquerque in 2015. Then Lee and I held conferences at Stevens Institute of Technology, where we worked at the time in 2016 and 2017. Not to put too fine a point on it, in the meantime Stevens decided to brand itself as the innovation university. The things that stand out to me from those early meetings are the collegiality and good humor of the gatherings, as well as the fact that it was mostly but not entirely people from academia. We were thrilled to get proposals from architects, from people who work in urban infrastructure, and from a guy who I had never heard of at the time, Kyle Wiens, who is the CEO of iFixit, a leader in the Right to Repair movement.

And these principles remain foundational for us: collegiality; kindness; care for one another; openness to different perspectives; eclecticism, because maintenance is everywhere; humor; and an appreciation for the challenges and profound importance of maintenance, care, and infrastructure. And to really make a difference, this requires us to reach outside of our typical roles, disciplines, and professional communities, and comfort zones.

So, we’ve kept that momentum going in our current Maintainers work since those early meetings include virtual events, we’re ramping up the content production machine and blog posts, Instagram, which Liliana does a great job at managing, social media and more, and we’re building alliances with like-minded people in groups, and notably, and most exciting for me, developing programming beyond our conferences such as fellowships.

Lauren Dapena Fraiz:  The Maintainers Movement Fellowship is a year-long fellowship that centers maintenance, thinking, and action. This year we granted four fellow awards. We had three individual fellows and one duo, and they’re all practitioners whose maintenance, repair, and care work have substantial connections to the environment. We understand the environment in a very flexible, in a very broad way, from addressing the climate crisis to built environments to the way that these practitioners work in their local environments.

The fellowship started as an effort to decentralize the research coming from the Maintainers team or conference spaces and to translate that into public programs that centers practitioners. By practitioners we mean either people that are on the ground carrying out maintenance practices or community repair networks. We’re also interested in being accessible and inclusive of people that are public communicators, educators, and also inclusive of academics that bridge research and practice. Throughout the fellowship, we really want to honor and highlight the work of people that are already out there carrying maintenance-related work, and people that are exploring different ways to bring maintenance and care in their communities.

The fellowship is created as a space for convening. This is something that we’ve seen over and over again through the conferences. There’s value in putting people together in conversation that otherwise would not be, and we have seen how maintenance, or other concepts that are related such as infrastructure, repair, and care, take on very different meanings, and it always is contingent on people’s backgrounds and experiences. It is challenging to put people together in the same space when they don’t come from similar fields, but when we do so, we see that powerful ideas and actions often arise.

The fellowship is very intentionally interdisciplinary, but we want it to be interdisciplinary in a meaningful way. Our fellows are coming from different experiences, completely different fields, different personalities, different geographies, and have their own unique maintenance interests, but the richness of this fellowship precisely lies in the particular chemistry of the group. And we see that you have all taken a challenge, which is to find the common ground. In your case, it comes from the very complicated concept of degrowth, and it’s been really interesting and inspiring to see how you’ve taken on this term and connected to other themes, such as web of inter-being, local practices such as permaculture, or tying it to the idea of solidarity.

Through the fellowship, we see that there’s been a space of mutual care, honesty, and understanding that was generated and cultivated by the fellows. I think that is the number one characteristic of this group. In almost every meeting there’s been an acknowledgement or an understanding of the collective burnout due to hard political, social, and personal realities, and I think the fellows have always brought care for each other. They gave space to each other, and in every single meeting there’s been a check-in to see how everybody was showing up. And this happened in a very spontaneous way, and it incidentally served to shape the work that you all have been doing in your writings and also in this degrowth project. You’ve made something that is meaningful, that inspires you, and we are excited to see how it will inspire others, and hopefully bring people to explore degrowth practices and principles in their lives.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, speaking from experience, if you are looking to collaborate with a truly unique and intellectually exciting organization with lots of lovely, dedicated people doing important work, I highly recommend that you connect with Lauren, Andy, and the good folks over at the Maintainers. I mean, sure, I’m very obviously biased here, but to be honest, this past year being a Maintainers Movement Fellow has been a truly remarkable experience, a challenge in the best way possible, and I will always cherish the opportunity the Maintainers gave me to work with my awesome cohort of movement fellows: Rheanna, Tona, Leila, and Sam. I’ve learned so much over the past year from these brilliant people and from getting to work collaboratively with them on our cornerstone project: Embodying Degrowth.

Rheanna Chen:  My name is Rheanna Chen, coming from the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean, and the Maintainers Movement was really an investigation into myself. I definitely struggled with not feeling like a caring person capable of repairing and maintaining a lot of the levels of my life, external and internal, so this opportunity really was a way to step back, to connect with other people in a way that was meaningful. My life is devoted to ecology, arts, and connection. That’s my lifelong commitment. You can find me in a four and a half acre botanic garden called Ajoupa in central Trinidad, which is a permaculture site for over 200 varieties of trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, really lovely. But on another note, I work as the regenerative project manager for two eco resorts: Asa Wright Nature Center and [inaudible], known for leatherback turtle conservation, and also working with birds along the tropical rainforest.

And then I work with what’s called Nudge Caribbean, a social enterprise, as their consultant in social innovation and food security of how we can help small and micro food and beverage businesses across the Caribbean in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Saint Lucia to access the next step in their business product lifecycle. So, that’s who I am in a nutshell. You can find me hiding in a hammock reading a [inaudible], oftentimes questioning the larger existential questions of life or what truly matters and why are we here and how can we make the world a better place.

Getting accepted into this program, I really did not have any expectations. It was my first fellowship I’ve ever done, but my hopes were to connect with some incredible human beings from different parts of the world to gain a glimpse into these other realities. So, it’s been a pleasure through Max, Tona, Leila, and Sam to really challenge the work that I do in a different multidimensional approach. I wanted to hold myself accountable, to almost have a barometer of checking back as to these three questions of care, repair, and maintenance. I felt it was like a personal and professional journey, as every time we came back together in a meeting, the hope really was the check-in with myself of where am I falling short, how can I show up with a little bit more presence, and hold myself in a light that I can be more caring. Or how can I bring a sense of repair and maintenance into the world of environmental conservation that I do, because sometimes these realms of activism aren’t always the most regenerative. So, this fellowship has been a way to anchor me in a way, to grow in the way that I need to to be of greatest service to this world.

Tona Rodriguez-Nikl:  So, my name’s Tona Rodriguez. I’m a professor of Civil Engineering at Cal State LA, and I wear two hats, one of them technical, one non-technical. I always find that the technical hat is boring to talk about, so I’ll skip that. Not boring to me, but boring to most other people. The non-technical work revolves around the broader impacts of technology, philosophy of engineering, engineering ethics. I’ve done some work in systems thinking. I recently wrote a chapter in a book on post-work and the climate disaster. So, I like doing a lot of broad thinking about our society, how technology fits in, and where we’re headed.

I think that when I came into this fellowship, the intuition that was driving me was that I see unrestrained growth in our economy ending sooner or later, and I wanted to see what this meant for us as people, more particular to my field, what it meant for us as engineers, as developers of technology. And I feel like it’s an opportunity that we have to revisit our relationship with our things, and I wanted to explore these ideas. And I’m happy to have had, I think as Rheanna said, such a broad range of people to explore these topics with. It’s been fantastic.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, my name is Maximillian Alvarez. I am currently the editor-in-chief of The Real News Network in Baltimore, a nonprofit news network where we cover the stories and struggles of regular people fighting against exploitation in their workplaces, fighting against the terror of the police-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex, fighting on the front lines for a better world as climate catastrophe gets worse, as inequality gets worse, so on and so forth. I’m also the host of the podcast Working People, and in a past life, in my academic life, I earned my dual PhD in history and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, where I focused a lot on media as a form of infrastructure, as a technology that is essential for movement building and world changing. I was particularly looking at the ways that radical movements around the time of the Mexican Revolution harnessed emerging media technologies to grow the movement for revolution and the movement for a more just and equitable Mexican state in the years after the Mexican Revolution.

I’m also the author of a new book that came out this year, which I was actually working on when I decided to apply for the Maintainers Fellowship, and that book is a collection of 10 interviews that I recorded with various workers in the United States, and those interviews were recorded after the first year of COVID-19. I spoke to them about their lives, their jobs, their struggles, their experience of COVID-19 in that first pivotal year when the world itself seemed to break apart.

And so, the experience of applying for, and being a fellow in the Maintainers Fellowship program is, for me, intimately tied to the project of my book, The Work of Living, and the work that I do at The Real News Network and at Working People every week. I had spent so much time during the COVID-19 pandemic interviewing essential workers, both workers who were deemed essential by their employers, by the government, but also so many people who do essential work even if we don’t call it that or recognize it as such. Whether that is domestic labor, parenting, whether that is gig work, whether that is working in warehouses or other areas of the supply chain that we all depended on during COVID-19 and beyond.

So when I applied for this fellowship, I was very much in the mind space of wanting to continue to lift up the flesh and blood human beings upon whom our entire infrastructure depends, our entire economy depends, and so much else that we take for granted in this world depends. I thought it was essential for whatever kinds of discussions we, as a group of fellows, got into about the maintenance of our shared world, the built infrastructure and architecture of that world, the economic systems that drive and shape the world that we all inhabit. I wanted to lift up the voices and struggles and jobs and insight of the people who are actually making the world itself run.

That’s really what I came into this fellowship wanting to do, and I genuinely couldn’t be prouder of the work that we as a group have done together. And I think that I definitely had bigger ambitions for what I wanted to do coming into the fellowship, but it’s actually quite indicative of the work that we’ve all done together to say that, once we started getting into the thick of it, we realized, well, there’s so much here to look at that we should really zero in on one or two topics and really focus on those.

So for me, wanting to think about maintenance and care and infrastructure through the lenses of the lives of the working people upon whom our lives and economy and supply chains depend, I realized very quickly, you can’t just build from that without doing the patient work of talking to people and listening carefully to them, talking amongst our fellows about what we’re hearing from the different folks that we were talking to. So we necessarily had to slow down to focus on what was in front of us instead of trying to achieve more than any group possibly could in the span of a year. I’m incredibly grateful to the Maintainers for offering us that opportunity.

Leila D. Behjat:  My name is Leila Behjat. My background is German-Iranian, and I’m a trained architect that, over the years, has moved into renovation with healthier building materials and a specific interest in circularity. Now we have a term for it. Since 2019, I’ve been a senior researcher at Parsons Healthy Materials Lab where I focus a lot on vetting materials towards their material health. The whole mission is to support the design and architecture fields, to make change and make spaces healthier, simply spoken.

I’m also a mother of two daughters, which is very important, because it is bleeding into my remote work life a lot. At Parsons Healthy Materials Lab is also where I met the most wonderful Sam. Sam Bennett is a designer and also an educator. She teaches at several schools including Parsons School of Design and Pratt. And because she’s not here, I get to say that she’s an extremely talented and devoted maker. She’s specifically an expert in repairing textiles. A shout-out to her Instagram handle is Little French Fry, so you can find her there and see some of her work.

It was really Sam who asked me. She had heard about this fellowship. She asked me whether I’d want to work with her on this topic of maintenance and care. My first impulse was to work with Sam. I really, truly adore this wonderful woman. And so, that was my first impulse. I would’ve said yes to anything. But then, diving into the topic, I realized that this is really something that I also truly am very curious about. Then, I think what we’re all saying at this point, just realizing that this is a fantastic opportunity to tap into different hearts and minds and different viewpoints of people from who knows where. That was such a wealthy opportunity that I didn’t want to miss out.

Then, in terms of the topic at the lab, Parsons Health Materials Lab, but then also within this work that we call… Within the built environment, this is a topic that’s almost orphaned and yet so crucial, the care, and the maintenance, and the upkeep. And to have the opportunity to think more about this, understand it through different eyes and also different occupations, that was one of the main motivations and it’s proving to be so enriching.

Rheanna Chen:  I’m really glad that the group does embody degrowth. On a personal level, I’ve been really touched by somatic therapy, of how do we as individuals feel trauma on a deeper level? That’s also part of a societal, collected trauma too, and the capitalism, this need of an alternative approach. When I think of degrowth, of course, there’s natural limits to everything. At what points do we slow down to rest or to choose another way of living?

I got excited, I’m with three couples, I’m on my island, the first [inaudible] and Tracy that live in a cottage at Ajoupa in the middle of the garden. One of the key pillars in their creative process, both as multidisciplinary artists, was the need to go into a portal. The need that, as much as you come out into the world to give of yourself, it’s the need to cocoon and go within. So whatever rest looks like, staying still, to enjoy nature, to have a quiet moment of solitude, that’s something I felt important, that we need to press the brakes to pause.

There’s no need to keep getting in this trance of busy and doing, and to actually say, what do I need in this moment so that I could show up more authentically? Then I moved down the road to Wa Samaki Permaculture which is a huge 30-acre estate with everything from citrus trees to donkeys to compost, worms.

I met this lovely couple, Malia and Ken, who are only in their 20s, and they’re building a tiny house of their own with natural [inaudible], and straw, and mud, and donkey manure. It’s really inspiring to see another young couple choose this life. But I think the reality is that there’s a lot of hard work, living off of the land. You can be out of the capital in Port of Spain and Trinidad, but still you have to wake up at sunrise to go harvest grass to feed the donkeys. They have a lolly popsicle company that they’re working at, that and working with the land.

How much do you take on, where it seems like too much? And what are the projects that seem to be the priority? So for them, that’s because of a foundation and shared interest of living a more organic lifestyle that they chose to build a house together, but sometimes I wonder, should we only take on that which we can continue to sustain? So being able to sustain something, you have to sacrifice. What will I be doing if I’m working and giving my life to this project, and what do I give up? So long-term sacrifice and short-term gratification.

And then the third couple, I was really excited, as I take you around my island. I was in the foothills of what is called Maracas Valley where you can see the clouds rolling in, after rain it’s a lovely rainbow, and this is Michael and Leia, who are chocolate makers. Not only do they have their own company, they train other farmers in the community. And Michael talked about… There’s two things that really stood out. This giant amoeba too, that, yes, we can keep accumulating all of these things, but what is the point? Things being material, but also be an intrinsic success where you don’t have the role of community to share with?

And when you go to the Latin word of [communitas], to belong, or that shared sense of humanity, it’s such an important role to feel this larger connection to other people, and how can you share those resources. And in the end of that interview, Michael got injured by a tree when he got into this [inaudible] task of to do anything he needs to do things on his own that he actually got injured and he had no choice but to rest and to ask for help from his neighbors.

So there is a value, yes, to pursuing our goals and dreams, but when you can open up to the vulnerability of receiving help, even from our neighbors, even in moments where we can feel alone, and especially coming out of a pandemic where we all struggled with grief, feeling alone, and that tenderhearted experience of sadness, that as we reopen as a human civilization, who can we lean on in those tough times? That as much as we celebrate the victory, soon in this capitalist society and accumulation, what is the point at the end of the day, and who are we choosing to share it with beyond family, friends, and greater geographical watershed?

So the question is what truly matters? And the three interviews really left me feeling a sense that the need for sacred [pause], to prioritize what’s important, and to share with communities in a way that feels meaningful.

Tona Rodriguez-Nikl:  As this project got started, there were several different people that I wanted to reach out to, people from different aspects of my life, and two of them panned out. The first of these is a structural engineer who I know through my professional circles. His name’s Jim [D’aloisio], and his work is in carbon emissions. He works to reduce carbon emissions in the materials that are used in construction as well as building operations.

But what really struck me about him was his personal commitment. He lives in Upstate New York, we were meeting at a conference, I don’t remember where, but it was in the middle of the country, and he had taken a train that took him several days to get there. As you know, passenger rail in this country is really not fast at all. We were working in the sustainability committee of our professional association, and what struck me is that here’s somebody who really actually gets away from any kind of personal dissonance and puts his money where his mouth is and actually walks in his personal life what he’s saying he’s doing in his professional life. Of course, the rest of us had just flown there from who knows where.

This wasn’t a hardship for him. This actually was an opportunity for him to meet new people, to get some relaxed work done on the train, to see the country in a new way. So his commitment and his openness to seeing the alternative as positive, these were both very inspiring. So they led me to get to want to know him better as a person.

The other person that I talked to actually ended up being a family, but a colleague of mine that works at my university in the history department, Choi Chatterjee, has a homestead, just an urban homestead. And we’ve talked about it over the years, and I had a standing invitation to go see it. And I have interest in gardening, although you wouldn’t know that from looking at my garden. I have interest in this idea that everything works together, or everything can be made to work together, and it was interesting for me to see that firsthand.

So Choi and her husband Omer invited us to their homestead. They prepared us a nice home cooked meal with their homegrown ingredients. They served us quiche, nopal with tamarind, Indian style grape jam, pickled grapes, honey, grapefruit wine, and fig liquor. Most of the ingredients, the eggs, the nopal, the grapes, the honey, the grapefruit, the figs were all from their garden. Our kids played with their tortoises, and afterwards we sat down for a nice conversation.

So these are the two folks. One thing that stood out to me with both of them is that they both have a very open and positive approach to an unknown future. Jim is working on an industry effort to reduce CO2 emissions essentially down to zero. Of course there’s low-hanging fruit, things that we know can be done, but then there’s a big unknown out there. But that big unknown really doesn’t bother him. He says, as in any major endeavor, you take one step at a time. 

There’s so much low-hanging fruit, you know you can cut down the carbon emissions of your building by 50% using off-the-shelf technology, without any additional construction costs. But in the future, what are they going to do in 20 or 30 years? I don’t know. Nobody does. But we can move forward in that direction. And his energy in the face of that uncertainty is really neat.

And then Choi and Omer, as they’re working on their garden and learning every year, and every year is different, they say, there was no blueprint. I think that’s the fun part. We’re constantly discovering things. Choi says, I never felt like, oh, I had it figured out. I get something random every day.

So again, this openness to reaching the future where it is, is something that was remarkable in both of them. What I appreciated about the conversation with Choi and Omer is that they pushed back against the idea of degrowth as they see it, and that was really useful. They bring in their perspective, being from India and from Pakistan, and Choi says, to summarize their point of view, Choi says, I don’t know if it’s correct of me to tell them to just keep being a peasant while I enjoy modernity. I think this caution that they bring towards this concept of doing with less is really important because it gets into issues of justice, it gets into the question of degrowth for whom, and it gets to this idea that whatever changes we make have to keep in mind all of the people that the change is going to affect.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Honestly, I’m just so incredibly grateful for having the chance to get to talk to the folks that I talk to for the Embodying Degrowth project. I got to talk to oil and gas industry workers who are former workers in the fossil fuel industry who want to be part of the change, be part of the movement to transition away from the fossil fuel economy, which I thought was really incredible, because normally it’s precisely these kinds of workers who are held up as justifications by politicians and people in the media… They’re held up as the poster children for why we can’t move away from the fossil fuel industry. So I thought that was really powerful hearing the folks that I talked to say something very different.

And I got to talk to David Whiteside of the Tennessee Riverkeeper. He’s the founder of Tennessee Riverkeeper. They do incredible work, not just river cleanup, but they do a lot of legal work to try to hold big polluters accountable, try to keep the Tennessee River and the Cumberland River as clean as possible. David does such incredible work over there, and he’s up against such imposing odds. But I thought it was really, really beautiful to hear him talk about how he sees his environmentalism today as a continuation of his family’s amazing history of fighting for civil rights in the Deep South. Just really, really amazing people that I’ve had the honor to get to chat to for this project.

And of course it’s been tremendous getting to listen to all the great interviews that you guys have done for this project as well. So I just wanted to highlight one portion of one interview that really, really spoke to me. I had the tremendous honor to get to chat with Duane Chili Yazzie. Full disclosure, I’ve actually been able to interview Chili before, and that was for my book, The Work of Living, and when I talked to Chili about what it was like for him and other folks on the Navajo Reservation out there in Shiprock, New Mexico, where Chili lives with his family, what it was like going through COVID over there. Obviously we know that Navajo Nation was hit incredibly hard, as were so many Indigenous communities and reservations that have been under-resourced and deliberately disadvantaged and pushed to the brink of extinction through colonial violence, so on and so forth.

So I wanted this conversation for the Maintainers to be the next chapter in that conversation, because Chili had mentioned some things to me in the interview for the book that I really wanted to follow up on for this group project. Specifically, Chili… The man is just incredible. He’s had such an incredible life. Parts of his life story don’t even seem believable, but when you hear him talk about it, and you realize, oh yeah, this all happened to this guy, it’s really incredible to behold.

He was heavily involved from a young age in the burgeoning American Indian movement, the fight for Indigenous liberation. He toured with the Native American rock band Exit, so he was a rock and roller, badass guy in the ’70s and ’60s too. Then he served decades in the Navajo government, different positions, and serving his community. Then he retired recently. And when COVID hit, he and other local family farmers realized, even though they were incredibly grateful for the aid that was being shipped into Navajo Nation from outside, the food that was being trucked in during the early days of COVID, of course that was so essential for people there.

But they all realized that the quality of this food’s not great. There’s a lot of processed stuff. And also the obvious thing that Chili told me is that, watching this unfold during COVID-19 made him painfully aware of how dependent he and his people were on this supply chain that was bringing food stuffs and essential goods from outside of Navajo Nation into Navajo Nation, and if anything happened to that supply chain, they would be in a really, really awful spot. And that’s on top of being and living and farming in the American Southwest where the waters are drying up, the effects of climate change can be felt every day, and Chili does feel them.

There was a real sense of urgency in the conversations that I’ve gotten to have with Chili because he realized that, in working with other local farmers in the Navajo Nation to band together, collectivize their operations and form what was then called the Shiprock Traditional Farmers Cooperative, they pooled their resources, they helped each other to provide good, nutritious, organic produce for the local schools, for other members of their community, for the Pueblo communities along the border.

So it was this real incredible cooperative, a farming cooperative that grew out of the need that was felt during COVID-19, and it’s had tremendous success in the short time that it’s been around, and I really, really can’t wait to see what Chili and the other farmers over there are able to do with this. But the thing I wanted to highlight in this clip coming up is that Chili also, as he so beautifully and often does, he sees this type of farming, the organic methods that as he says, these are traditional, or they’re more in line with our traditional Navajo farming practices than the industrial farming, like the heavy machinery, the herbicides, the forms of mass production that Chili calls, rightly I think, colonialized farming. And he sees this type of collective, cooperative, more traditional and organic farming practice that he’s involved in over there, this is essential in more ways than one. Both to provide food for his people, and as he says Indigenous people, we can’t claim sovereignty unless we can feed ourselves. So there’s a really crucial imperative there to be self-sustaining, to be able to provide for one’s self and one’s people through these sorts of practices.

But what Chili also said is that the colonialized farming that he references, the industrial farming that has destroyed so many farmlands including in the American Southwest and on the Navajo reservations, this is what happens when capitalism and the priority of profit takes precedence over everything else. So you scale up, you switch to mono crops, you constantly turn over the soil, you really debilitate the earth’s ability to heal and replenish itself year after year. This colonialized type of farming, this farming that is driven by the capitalist need for profit, when that becomes the organizing principle around which everything else is done, then you get really destructive practices that lead to a dead end. Chili will say, we’re going to run out of good soil to use. We’re going to run out of water to use.

And so, this type of farming that is connected to a whole ethos, this whole capitalist mindset is quite literally killing the earth upon which we depend. And so I think that, as Chili puts it really beautifully in this clip that we’re about to play, the regenerative agriculture that they’re practicing down there with the Traditional Farmers Cooperative, the types of irrigation that they’re doing, the types of… Like I said, the organic practices. They’re not using industrial chemicals, all of that stuff. They’re trying to diversify crops. And all of that, there’s a real larger purpose to it. It’s, as Chili would describe it, a responsible stewardship of one’s role in the ecosystem, of one’s role in helping to maintain and preserve the balance of that ecosystem. And so that’s what Chili describes in this clip as part of the regenerative agriculture and the cooperative farming methods that he and his fellow farmers in Navajo Nation are working together on.

Chili Yazzie:  The practice of our region farming, our [inaudible], is actually a return to our traditional practices of farming. It’s a new old kind of situation for us. And the way that I look at it is it goes farther back than just agriculture. It goes back to our roots, and where we maintain our original… To try to put in a modern context, to maintain our beginning, our original relationship with the earth. Where we know, it’s not speculation or anything like that. We know that the earth is alive, it has spirit, and it certainly takes care of every need that we have as human beings, as well as all other life on the planet. Our life comes from the earth. The life of the earth is our life.

And so in our Indigenous view, all things are connected. All of the life systems, all of the ecosystems, certainly, are intertwined with the spirituality of life itself. So there’s a oneness in the whole process of life. You can’t separate out any part of it and expect for it to work the way that it’s supposed to. So the way that we view region ag, is a return to that original design. And in that way, very definitely, we are protecting the life of the earth. We’re assuring the self-sustaining ability that the earth has. So, we look at it as our responsibility.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Again, I can’t say enough good things about Chili Yazzie. Just a truly incredible human being, and I learned so much from him. But yeah, I think the reason that I wanted to highlight that clip is the way that he articulates that sense of balance, that deeply felt sense that he has of our role in a larger ecosystem, our duty to Mother Earth, which Mother Earth can give us everything that we need to survive and thrive. But if we keep taking advantage of the earth, of the resources, if we keep searching for profit at all costs, even if it means destroying those resources, destroying the life giving nature that we are a part of, then we’re going to destroy ourselves.

And so, I think that the way that Chili connected the practices of what we would call degrowth, in this regenerative agriculture and cooperative farming, the way he connected that to this sort of deep, existential sense of connectedness, that oneness he talks about, our connectedness to the spirit of the earth and our duty to participate responsibly in that ecosystem has really, really resonated with me. And I think that any definition of degrowth should include that in it.

Leila D. Behjat:  Coming into this fellowship, Sam and I had obviously framed out what we would like to get from it. And as you were saying earlier, Max, in the course of these months, it felt way too big. And at the same time, in hindsight now I’m realizing that we fed all these questions to some extent. And particularly what I find, what I’m just almost flabbergasted by, is that this topic of embodied degrowth that we all now are hovering around is informing all these questions to some degree. And it’s different than I expected.

One of the things that we were interested in was different cultures and how different cultures approach upkeep, maintenance, and so on. And so, the list of people that we had intended to interview was a wild mix of cultures. We had people from Korea, and from Ireland, and from Albania, and the US, and Germany, Austria, Scandinavia. And it boiled down to three women in very different functions, all within the built environment. That’s where we’re kind of at home, Sam and I.

And so, these three women, one is Nicole De Fio. I pulled a quote from her that I will speak to later. Nicole is the Director of Design and Construction for Governor’s Island in New York City. In talking to her, it was fascinating to hear about the scope of tasks that’s all under her. She spoke in a very calm voice. And there was so much inspiration coming from her. There’s a lot that, it all kept coming together. So, Nicole.

Then there’s Manir Kukash, a superintendent of a 60-unit building in uptown New York. And I used to live in that building, so I knew Manir personally. And I’ve always been in great awe of her, both for her discipline and the way she is running this operation, this building, and also for her incredible gentleness and patience. And obviously also, her being a female super is just something you don’t see so often yet. So, it was of great interest for us to be able to speak to her and learn more about her viewpoints. Also non-academic, just down to earth.

And the third woman was Tahara Holmes, who is an architect and now works in preservation for the Federal State of Bavaria. She’s in Munich, in Germany. And there was an initial conversation with her. Tahara and I, we know each other way back, we did a so-called year of service together in Zambia, so we knew each other back from there. Then we both went through architecture school, and we find ourselves now, I don’t know, 20 years later, being fascinated around the same things of maintenance and circularity and so on. So, it was super interesting to talk to her.

And what I feel is so interesting with all of them is they’re all doing it. They’re all in this theme. They’re in the thick of caring for buildings and influencing the stories around it, around these buildings. And what’s still revolving around in me is this hands-on nature of their work. But so interwoven with what we often these days call emotional intelligence. In these conversations, there were frames or phrases or concepts like patina, and layers, dedication, the nature of time, and then a lot about acceptance. Accepting what is, accepting uncertainty. And then there’s of course these hard facts, budgets and requirements, timelines. But there’s always this gentleness to it when you listen to Tahara, Nicole, and Manir.

And I have to say, listening to everybody’s interviews, that goes for all of them. There’s such deep care in what they’re doing, whether it’s, for example, Tahara talking to the nature of plaster in the past and now, or the way Nicole speaks so lovingly about the different buildings on the island and what will be kept and what will change completely. And in Manir, who has such a high level of discipline and upholds such order and yet is so full of understanding and patience for people moving in and out and students doing laundry in the middle of the night, all these things. And so, that was just something that informed me that this concept of degrowth is, I dare say, so full of emotional intelligence and culture. There’s so much culture in there. And so, I wrote down one thing because I felt that I’m fascinated with the quality of heart I see in all of them. And that there is this serene acceptance, and that this work is hard. And then to see these people’s grit and power.

And just lastly, in terms of the clip that I chose for Nicole, she kind of magically brought it all together. In that clip, she talks about her observation of how the quality of how a building is made, the intention behind it, and then how it is kept and upheld, and how that then is passing onto the future. And that kind of sums it all up, what these three women do.

Nicole De Feo:  This is the first time I’ve really worked in more of a preservation role. And it’s interesting to see how clearly, in a lot of ways, preservation overlaps with this idea of course of maintenance and sustainability and longevity. And if it’s built well from the beginning and you maintain it properly, that is the hardest part of the equation because all of these entities that steward these public assets are always vying for money and staff. And that’s the hardest part, I think, is the maintenance. But like anything, if you maintain it, if you’re on top of it and you don’t have deferred maintenance, you can really extend the life of the material and therefore the building system or whatever else it is a part of. If you don’t paint your wood windows, then they will deteriorate. You need to maintain and paint and scrape and maintain that moisture barrier. And so it’s hard to convey that to people who are seeing quite literally like, this is new, this is old. And they don’t have that framework.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, gang. Well, this is kind of a somber occasion because it feels like one of our final Maintainers Fellows group discussions, of which there have been many over the past year. And again, I just want to really emphasize how incredible it’s been to be doing this work with y’all and to be working with everyone over at the Maintainers team, who folks heard on this recording in the first section: the great Lauren, Liliana, Andy, everyone over there. We really, really appreciate being welcomed into this space and being allowed to do this great collaborative work over the past year.

And so I wanted to offer this final space here on our wrap up podcast, for us to maybe share some final thoughts, impressions, unanswered questions that are going to propel future work after this fellowship is done. Or thoughts that we want to leave listeners with if they are investing in this subject and they want to explore it, if they want to practice degrowth in their own way, what can they pick up from our work? What sorts of issues should they be carrying on, that our work together can help with? So yeah, why don’t we open this up a bit and talk amongst ourselves about how our own thinking and approach to these big questions of care and maintenance and degrowth, how has our own thinking evolved on those topics over the course of the fellowship? And like I was saying, what do you think we can leave people listening to this from the work that we’ve all done together?

Tona Rodriguez-Nikl:  I’d like to build off of two insights that Leila mentioned, because I think they’re very good lessons going forward. And lessons that I can learn from, things that I don’t do well. One thing that Leila mentioned was this idea of emotional intelligence. And I see, in the two people that I talked to, I see a focus on people. So Jim’s an engineer, and you don’t normally think of engineers focusing on people. But to tell you a little bit more about him, one of the things that he works against is what he calls big dumb buildings. Instead of just demolishing an old building and building something in his place, he wants to repurpose them, reuse them, use what’s there. He calls it the carbon burden, use what’s already been invested.

But when you do this, there are many more factors to consider, including knowing what the cultural context of the building is. You now need to move away from just the thing and move out towards a bigger web of people that are affected by the thing. This is a new attitude, really, I think among the engineering type that he embodies. And he shows us that we should be thinking about the problem more broadly. He also is very much into nurturing professional relationships, nurturing his new engineers, seeing the value in their way of seeing the world. Not trying to impose, oh, we’re the old engineers. What are we going to impose on you? You have to do it our way. He’s very open to their new way of seeing things.

Choi and Omer, for them, community is huge. Part of their garden is a community garden that any of the neighbors can come by and pick from their fruit. During the pandemic their place became a place of gathering. They had outdoor wine drinking to maintain community during this isolating time. Their homestead was a place of gathering for their family. It helped them build unity in their family, have an activity that everybody could participate in. Even through the teenage years, their kids’ friends used to like to come hang out at their place because there’s always something interesting going on. And so it’s nice to see how one’s actions can build community. And it was very beautiful to see in their case. And that’s very important, because as we go forward it’s really about what do the people need? What do all the people need? And both of these folks have shown us different ways of how they achieve that in their own context.

The second thing that Leila said is that the people that she talked to are out there doing it. They’re not talking about it, they’re doing it. And in particular, I wanted to mention something that Leila and Omer talked about. We got to talking about big global issues such as climate change, and Choi expressed some frustration. She said, let’s just do something. Let’s not just talk about it. I guess I’m just so tired of talking about climate change. We can do many things right now with our hands. And they are. They’re working in their own little corner, making it a better place for their community. Also working with their agriculture, with their natural system as best as they know how, learning from mistakes.

And they don’t view themselves as the vanguard of a huge movement. They realize they’re working in their own little corner, they’re not at the forefront of a huge movement. But that humble approach, and at the same time humble but also active approach of just getting in there and working on making things better on a given day without worrying too much about how that’s going to fit into the bigger context is also really important. Doing what you can do today and letting tomorrow be what it is and discovering what we do with tomorrow, tomorrow.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think, yeah, that’s so beautifully put. And I wanted to pick up on that, because I feel like this really speaks to how my approach to these questions and my thinking on these questions has changed over the past year. Because the obvious fact is that I imagine most people listening to this, most people who aren’t living under a rock understand that we are in a sustained crisis on this planet. Of course, there are always going to be people who deny it until the very end, but I think by and large a lot of people have recognized that the climate is changing. It’s having disastrous ripple effects that we can’t entirely predict or control. And it feels like the entities, whether those be private corporations, whether those be national governments, whether those be elected political representatives, it feels like the entities with the most power to do something about this are firmly committed to not doing enough while the rest of us sit and deal with the fallout. And so that, of course, prompts a lot of what I guess we call climate despair, eco despair, and I think it’s another thing that’s made me really proud to be a part of this group is doing that work to investigate how we can somehow cut a path out of this suicidal arrangement for humanity’s global civilization, how we can get on some other path and how we could keep the hope alive that we are heading towards a future that’s still worth living in.

I think it’s been, honestly, very great that we can come to these meetings and be open with the fact that I’m really going through it. I don’t really have the strength to make it through this discussion today because I’m feeling very hopeless and I know that all of us have felt that way at multiple points throughout the course of this fellowship. I know I have. And I will say that the work that we’ve done together, conversations that we’ve had, have played a crucial role in helping me get through those moments for reasons that speak to what you were just saying, Tona. What became apparent in the interviews that we did for our collective Embodying Degrowth project, right.

Because when we’re faced with the daunting reality that I just described, when the obstacles in the way of change seem so immovable, it can feel not just hopeless on a day-to-day level, but it can also feel like the only way we’re going to get out of this is through something massive. Through a worldwide revolution, or war, or I don’t know, an asteroid hitting the earth. It feels like something that can actually adequately address the magnitude of the situation is going to have to be unfathomably big.

And I think that that is the cumulative reality. But I think one thing that really spoke to me throughout this project, and it’s become a tagline on my show, Working People, where we say no one can do everything, but everyone can do something, right. And I think that that’s really essential. Like you said, the humble work, Tona, of you don’t have to bring down the oil industry yourself, but you can do what you can where you are with what you’ve got to contribute to the larger effort of creating a more sustainable world for humanity and for human life and non-human life on this planet.

But the last thing I’ll say on that that I think is really, really important and hopeful and that comes through in Rheanna’s amazing interviews, in Leila and Sam’s interviews and Tona’s interviews and my interviews, is that we shouldn’t be so sure to when we say, oh, that’s not enough to fix the world. What folks are doing to practice sustainable farming in this part of the country, that’s great, but it’s not enough.

Of course it’s not enough. Again, none of these things on their own is enough, but we got to think about them first in the aggregate. And also we have to have the humility, to borrow a term, have the humility of recognizing that we can’t actually predict the ripple effects that will come the more people who engage in practices of degrowth. Because just like mutual aid, this is the underlying philosophy of mutual aid, that people practicing mutual aid is never going to be a full-on substitute for, say, the state.

But part of what makes mutual aid so powerful is that when you receive it, when you give it, when you participate in the process of mutual aid, you yourself become a different person. You become more the kind of person who is willing to do more mutual aid. The kind of person who is not just a capitalist subject who gets everything they need at a supermarket. And it breaks that mental vice-grip that our growth-based economy has locked all of us in. And I think that changing who you are by what you do and thus thereby becoming more the kind of person who wants to do more of that and who can bring more people into that struggle, that is the catalytic response that we can’t predict.

But, I mean we’ve seen it in so many instances. We’ve seen how one protest after George Floyd is murdered by the police creates a tidal wave of protest across the United States and even around the world. You can’t predict what that spark is going to do, so we shouldn’t proceed with so much confidence that we know how this is all going to shake out, but we have to do the work.

Leila D. Behjat:  Choi and Omer, Malaya and Ken, and Chili, they all had the sense of very clear reading of reality, I feel, and still some joyfulness to it. What I really appreciated, very sober and still finding joy, finding a sense of beauty, such grace. That’s very inspiring to me.

And when you were just talking, Max, I realized that maybe that is also part of this community effort, that it’s almost service to each other. We all go in waves and the certitude about things rises and falls. But as I’m doing my thing, as I’m shining my little light, when I have an up moment, I can share it with others and get them back on track.

And I loved listening to everybody’s interviews because that’s the sense I got. I don’t even know the people you guys interviewed, but I felt very close because of these qualities and because you get all in identifying them and making that accessible to me, and now soon hopefully to many more people. And so that’s just so gorgeous, I think, and I didn’t see that coming when we started into this fellowship.

Rheanna Chen:  My main takeaway from this project is that at the end of the day, we only have 24 hours. And if there’s anything that the pandemic taught us was that we’re all going to get in touch with our mortality, and how do we choose to live is how we die. And not to end on a sad note there, but there’s a need to take the philosophical to the practical, that as we examine care, repair, and maintenance in this larger humanity, how are we also treating ourself? How can we address climate change or policy design or even to look after our family?

When we look at pillars of health from sleep to the food that we eat to the relationships with our loved ones, it can be easy to be overwhelmed. I know at least I’m guilty of that, that this fellowship has allowed me to have a greater light shine on where we may think that we live in a broken world, but also what are the parts of ourselves that we may be avoiding through chronic anxiety, stress. As we see disease on the rise too, but what’s happening inside of us? So I’ve been really fascinated by the internal landscape just as much as the external right now, of where can there be greater reciprocity, and given that we receive, and how can we widen those circles of compassion and care?

And this is an anecdote, this past year at the same time with this fellowship, I moved into Ajoupa, this 200-year-old house, and it’s been fascinating of what goes into maintaining the electrical, to a door, to termites, and the list goes on. And even with having a four-and-a-half acre garden, it’s not that you just grow a giant tree overnight, but some things take time to tend to. Every beautiful garden takes time. And the couple that own it at Ajoupa, [inaudible], they just celebrated their 50th year anniversary.

And I know for me, at least, I didn’t come from that background at all. So I’ve had this duality of, wow, as we discuss these concepts together as a group and I’m left to simmer on these thoughts, how can I show up to embody? And I know I’ve challenged the term degrowth before because I fundamentally believe we’re all meant to grow towards the light. Yes, there’s the shadow aspects, but how do we embody these interviews and the assignments now within our own everyday in a way that we can each show up with a little bit more humility, with more presence so that we can learn to care first for ourself so that we’re full, so we can best serve the rest of the world. Because I think the world has enough inflammation right now, so how can we tend and soothe and nurture from that place of radical care and acceptance? I think those conversations are what’s checked the way that we exist and most importantly choose to exist.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, as always, Rheanna, your words are beautiful and stunning and very, very true. And I thought that was just so powerfully put. Again, this is a bittersweet occasion as we close out this recording, close out our year together as fellows at the Maintainers. But I wanted to pick up on that in this final round around the table and ask if we had any parting thoughts that we wanted to leave listeners with. Any thoughts about how we ourselves are going to carry on the work that we began here together as part of the Maintainers, or any thoughts we want to leave listeners with for how they can carry on that struggle and how they can contribute to the effort to build a more sustainable world for everybody.

I would just say going back to how I introduced myself in the earlier part of this episode, it became very clear to me interviewing working people during the COVID-19 pandemic, I think what became clear to me, became clear to everyone, was we realized the system was forced to admit how much it needs us. When you’re a working person who’s been told most of your life that you are worthless, that you are replaceable, that you are expendable, and then suddenly when a global pandemic hits and the CEO of your company runs off to hide in their second or third home and says, no, no, I need you out there on the front lines to keep the world from falling apart, that stays with you. You don’t forget that.

And I’ve talked to so many workers who, I think, have carried that understanding of their own essential position in our economy and our society. I think that that has, in a lot of ways, motivated the number of strikes that we’ve been seeing, the unionization efforts, the record numbers of people quitting their jobs or asking for raises.

It’s just confronting your mortality like Rheanna said, and realizing that you are worth more than this system has trained you to believe, that leads you to be a little more confident in asserting yourself and your value and your needs. But where I’m going with this is just by talking to so many folks doing “essential work”, it became so clear. The truth was always there, but it just became clear that it’s people, it’s working people who hold the world up.

And I think that the ways that we are able to do that already in this system, the solidarity that we show with one another, the care that we show our coworkers on the job so that no one gets hurt. The steps we take to ensure that ourselves and our coworkers are safe on the job. That we’re providing the highest quality of service, so on and so forth. The services that we provide that if you’re delivering food to an immunocompromised person, they depend on that.

So there are so many ways that working people already are responsible for the maintenance of our modern world. And I believe that the more that we understand that, the more that we see that and honor that, the more that we can feel empowered to build our way towards a future worth living in. But I think we just need to start by recognizing that it is us. When we talk about changing the system or maintaining this or that, we’re talking about people, we are talking about the people, you and me and everyone around the world who keeps all of this afloat. And so if we are able to hold the world up through all that humanity has experienced up until now, I believe truly that we can do so in the 21st century and beyond.

Tona Rodriguez-Nikl:  I would say that in closing, it’s important to focus on maintaining yourself as well. And this is something that’s come out in what we’ve talked about, about the interviews, but it’s also come out in our fellowship. Most of you’ve striven to meet deadlines and we’ve been tired, I think. We’ve talked about this. And this isn’t selfish. It’s necessary for you to maintain yourself to then be able to take care of others. You can’t take care of others if you’re not first taking care of yourself. It’s a little bit like the oxygen masks on airplanes, right. First put your own on and then put it on your kids.

And this came out in the interview with Choi and Omer, and Omer said about going out in the mornings and taking care of the animals, he said it’s fun. I mean really, it’s almost self-indulgence, he says. I get up at 6:00 and I can’t wait to get out there. The first 45 minutes of my day is essentially with the animals and it’s just something new every day.

Maybe that particular act isn’t for you or for me. But what I take away from this is, I think the lesson is to do good in a way that also maintains you. And the challenge for each of us is to find that thing. I think, if I am honest, I don’t know what that is yet, actually. And it is a big challenge. I mean, I don’t want to come out here saying that I think I have everything figured out, but I really appreciate that point of view and I appreciate the challenge.

Leila D. Behjat:  My heart is really full, Sam. There’s so many things. And I’ve become so curious about this concept of culture and time. In my profession I’ve been challenged by that, Tona, absolutely agree on that. And it’s fascinating to me. For example, that’s something I feel like, Rheanna, you always brought into our spaces so beautifully, the sense of timelessness.

And also, there’s no bottom line right now for me. It’s just that I’m noticing that I keep coming back to that. That there is a different sense of time to these aspects, that as I’m trying to apply many tiny little steps in my own life, that my sense of time and necessity of time changes. And I don’t know where that’s going yet. And yet I enjoy this very much.

And I wanted to just point one thing out, in a completely different context. I had come across two word pairs that I feel like I really appreciated and are helping me with all this. So in this concept there was what today we call possession, was put next to relationships. So relationships instead of possessions. And then the other thing was, today we think about acquisitions, and what was put next to it was responsibility.

And I’m not trying to open a whole new box of Pandora, but that just, as I was listening to us, I was looking through my notes to find this because I felt like, oh yeah. Because again, there’s different priorities in that. And I have to say, I’m really almost heartbroken that we can’t keep learning together.

Rheanna Chen:  I’m so grateful for this fellowship. And the question that comes up for me is when our world feels like it’s fallen apart, what truly matters? Because we all know that feeling of being overwhelmed or stressed, especially in a world of capitalism that prizes productivity and going all the time, that I think the most radical act that we can take is a practice of pause, where there is a sacred art to knowing how to pause. One of my favorite practices is just the saying that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. And when we’re able to recognize that we need to take a long deep breath, nice filling our lungs and a nice inhale and then an exhale, letting it all go with a good sigh, that’s something I find helps me a lot. And while we were doing this recording there was this huge storm that just happened, and I’m watching the sea right now, but it’s a practice I’ve called RAIN. And R, like I said, to recognize. A, to accept. I, to investigate. And N, to nurture.

So in these seemingly hard moments that we all go through, as we stop to pause, then we can proceed from this place of being humbled or more calm, because maybe that’s what the world needs, is for us to be a little bit more caring for ourselves first and then everything else grows outwards in this beautiful mycelium network, that now after the final step that we’re all connected somehow, when we’ve all impacted each other in positive ways. And I think that’s really special.

And I think something Max said, the fact that this conversation is happening, this was a few months ago, that’s the most important. The coming together in that liminal space and learning from each other, to proceed from there. Thank you, everyone.

Liliana Coelho:  Hi all, Liliana Coelho, the Maintainers Community Outreach and Events coordinator here to give you an update on some different ways that you can stay involved with The Movement Fellows as well as with the Maintainers. If you’re curious to keep the conversation going, you’re cordially invited to join the Maintainers Movement Fellows at our upcoming Embodying Degrowth event.

This will celebrate the end-of-year collaborative work together, as well as provide space to reflect on the podcast that you just listened to. The event will be at 2:00 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, Dec. 15, and you can register by checking out the events page on our website, www.themaintainers.org. You can also stay up to date with the Maintainers by checking out our Twitter @the_maintainers, our Instagram @themaintainersnetwork, and make sure to sign up for our quarterly newsletter and community listerv by clicking on the connect tab on our website, www.themaintainers.org/connect.

If this work resonates with you, we also encourage you to submit your perspectives to the Maintainers via our Maintainers Spotlight blog post series, where we invite folks like you to highlight the work of maintainers and maintenance efforts in your community. We’d love to hear from you.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sept. 13, 2022. It is shared here under a Creative Commons license.

Indigenous water defenders and their allies on Tuesday celebrated a Minnesota court ruling protecting a Line 3 protest camp from illegal government repression.

Hubbard County District Judge Jana Austad issued a ruling shielding the Indigenous-led Giniw Collective’s Camp Namewag—where opponents organize resistance to Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline—from local law enforcement’s unlawful blockades and harassment.

The ruling follows months of litigation on behalf of Indigenous water protectors, whose legal team last year secured a temporary restraining order issued by Austad against Hubbard County, Sheriff Cory Aukes, and the local land commissioner for illegally blocking access to Camp Namewag.

“Today David beat Goliath in a legal victory for people protecting the climate from rapacious corporate destruction,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Center for Protest Law & Litigation at the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said in a statement.

“The outrageous blockade and repression of an Indigenous-led water protector camp were fueled by massive sums of money flowing from the Enbridge corporation to the sheriff’s department as it acted against water protectors challenging Enbridge’s destruction of Native lands,” she added.

Indigenous activist and Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, who is a plaintiff in the case, said that “15 months ago, I was woken up at 6:00 am and walked down my driveway to a grinning sheriff holding a notice to vacate my yearslong home.”

“That day turned into 50 squad cars on a dirt road and a riot line blocking my driveway,” she recalled. “Twelve people—guests from all over who came to protect the rivers and wild rice from Line 3 tar sands—were arrested and thrown into the dirt.”

Houska continued:

Today’s ruling is a testament to the lengths Hubbard County was willing to go to criminalize and harass Native women, land defenders, and anyone associated with us—spending unknown amounts of taxpayer dollars and countless hours trying to convince the court that the driveway to Namewag camp wasn’t a driveway. It’s also a testament to steadfast commitment to resisting oppression. This is a piece in the long game and we aren’t afraid. We haven’t forgotten the harms to us and the harms to the Earth. Onward.

Winona LaDuke, co-founder and executive director of Honor the Earth and a former Green Party vice presidential candidate, stated that “we are grateful to Judge Austad for recognizing how Hubbard County exceeded its authority and violated our rights.”

“Today’s ruling shows that Hubbard County cannot repress Native people for the benefit of Enbridge by circumventing the law,” she added. “This is also an important victory for all people of the North reinforcing that a repressive police force should not be able to stop you from accessing your land upon which you hunt or live.”

EarthRights general counsel Marco Simons asserted that “the court’s ruling is a major rebuke to police efforts to unlawfully target water protectors and to interfere with their activities protesting the Line 3 pipeline.”

“Blocking access to the Namewag camp exemplifies a pattern of unlawful and discriminatory police conduct incentivized by an Enbridge-funded account from which the police can seek reimbursement for Line 3-related activities,” he continued.

“Police forces should protect the public interest, not private companies,” Simons added. “Cases like this highlight the dangers of allowing the police to act as a private security arm for pipeline companies.”

The rural landscape in the US is changing drastically: The days of the independent family farm have given way to industrial agriculture and factory animal farms. In states around the country, from Iowa and Minnesota to North Carolina, the expansion of Big Agriculture and the factory farming industry has dramatically altered local economies and communities, using up communal resources while posing serious threats to public health and the environment. Far from halting this trend, governments at the state and federal level have worked with powerful industry groups for years to incentivize large-scale farming operations and to make it increasingly difficult for local governments to adequately regulate these operations. But resistance from within rural communities, stretching across political lines, is mounting.

At this very moment, farmers, residents, and environmental advocates in three rural counties in Wisconsin—Polk, Burnett, and Crawford—are engaged in a battle to protect their communities against the construction of two proposed concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which would collectively house roughly 34,000 hogs. Residents fear that the millions upon millions of gallons of liquid manure produced by these CAFOs every year, along with their many other impacts, could cause irreversible damage to their land, air, water, property values, and ways of life. As part of a special collaboration with In These Times magazine for “The Wisconsin Idea,” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez traveled with Cameron Granadino (TRNN) and Hannah Faris (In These Times) to Crawford, Polk, and Burnett counties to speak with residents about their concerns and about their struggles to defend themselves against Big Agriculture and the factory farming industry.

Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Simon Davis-Cohen, Hannah Faris, Cameron Granadino

Studio: Cameron Granadino, Stephen Frank

Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Stephen Frank, Kayla Rivara

The Wisconsin Idea is an independent reporting project of People’s Action Institute, Citizen Action of Wisconsin and In These Times.

Chuck O’Neal of the Florida Rights of Nature Network and Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights joined TRNN on Election Day to discuss how regulation of environmental destruction isn’t enough to protect ecosystems for future generations.

Studio: Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Adam Coley

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese / Popular Resistance.

Support is growing in the United States for a Green New Deal. Though there are competing visions for what that looks like, essentially, a Green New Deal includes a rapid transition to a clean energy economy, a jobs program and a stronger social safety net.

We need a Green New Deal for many reasons, most obviously the climate crisis and growing economic insecurity. Each new climate report describes the severe consequences of climate change with increasing alarm and the window of opportunity for action is closing. At the same time, wealth inequality is also growing. Paul Bucheit writes that more than half of the population in the United States is suffering from poverty.

The Green New Deal provides an opportunity for transformational changes, not just reform, but changes that fundamentally solve the crises we face. This is the time to be pushing for a Green New Deal at all levels, in our towns and cities, states and nationally.

Growing support for the Green New Deal

The idea of a Green New Deal seems to have arisen in early 2007 when the Green New Deal Group started meeting to discuss it, specifically as a plan for the United Kingdom. They published their report in July 2008. In April 2009, the United Nations Environmental Program also issued a plan for a global Green New Deal.

In the United States, Barack Obama included a Green New Deal in his 2008 presidential campaign and conservative Thomas Friedman started talking about it in 2007. Howie Hawkins, a Green Party gubernatorial candidate in New York, campaigned on a Green New Deal starting in 2010. Listen to our interview with Hawkins about how we win the Green New Deal on Clearing the FOG. Jill Stein campaigned on it during her presidential runs in 2012 and 2016, as have many Green Party candidates.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), who ran for Congress as a Democrat and won in 2018, has made the Green New Deal a major priority. With the backing of the Sunrise Movement, AOC pushed for a congressional committee tasked with developing a Green New Deal and convinced dozens of members of Congress to support it. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sidelined that idea by creating a climate committee headed by Kathy Castor, which has no mandate to do anything and lacks  the power to write legislation and issue subpoenas. Now the Sunrise Movement is planning a tour to build support for the Green New Deal. At each stop they will provide organizing tools to make the Green New Deal a major issue in the 2020 election season.

This week, more than 600 organizations, mostly environmental groups, sent a letter to Congress calling on it to take climate change seriously and design a plan to end dependence on fossil fuels, a transition to 100% clean energy by 2035, create jobs and more. Indigenous leaders are also organizing to urge Congress to pass a Green New Deal that is “Indigenized,” meaning it prioritizes input from and the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples.

YALE UNIVERSITY
Survey data shows the strongest support for a Green New Deal among liberal Democrats.

Defining a transformative Green New Deal

The Green New Deal, as a tool to address climate change and economic insecurity, could be transformative in many ways or it could reinforce current systems. Our political system is inclined towards programs that do the latter, so it is critical that the movement for economic, racial and environmental justice and peace is clear about what we mean by a Green New Deal.

At the heart of the issue is capitalism, a root cause of many of the crises we face today. Capitalism drives growth at all costs including exploitation of people and the planet. It drives competition and individualism instead cooperation and community. It requires militarism as the strong arm for corporations to pillage other countries for their resources and militarized police to suppress dissent at home.

Capitalism was in crisis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when, like today, there was great inequality and a political system that catered to the wealthy. Progressive, populist, labor and socialist movements were pressing for significant changes. This came to a head in the depression when tens of thousands of Bonus Marchers occupied Washington DC during the summer of the 1932 presidential election demanding their bonus pay from World War I. The newly-elected President Roosevelt was forced to act, so he put reforms in place called the New Deal.

While the New Deal brought relief to many people through banking reform, Social Security, jobs programs and greater rights for workers, it was not transformative. Some argue that the New Deal was essential to save capitalism. It relieved suffering enough that dissent quieted but left the capitalist economic system intact. In the decades since the New Deal, monopolization, inequality, and exploitation have again increased with the added crises of climate change and environmental destruction.

This time around, we need a broad Green New Deal that changes the system so there is greater public ownership and democratization of the economy. It can also be used to address theft of wealth from Indigenous, black and brown communities. And it can set us on a path to end US imperialism in the least harmful manner.

Wayne Price discusses this in “A Green New Deal vs Revolutionary Eco-socialism.” He writes,

“…the capitalists’ wealth and power should be taken away from them (expropriated) by the self-organization of the working class and its allies. Capitalism should be replaced by a society which is decentralized and cooperative, producing for use rather than profit, democratically self-managed in the workplace and the community, and federated together from the local level to national and international levels.”

It is interesting that the Yellow Vest movement in France is also seeking transformative change from a representative government to one that uses greater participation through direct democracy. System change is needed to confront these economic and environmental crises. One alternative system gaining traction is ecosocialism which combines the insights of ecology with the necessity for worker’s rights and public control over the economy. We discussed ecosocialism with Victor Wallis, author of “Red Green Revolution: The politics and technology of ecosocialism,” on Clearing the FOG.

The Green Party divides the Green New Deal into four pillars: An economic bill of rights, a green transition, financial reform, and a functioning democracy. The economic bill of rights includes not only a job at a living wage for all who want it but also single payer healthcare, free college education, and affordable housing and utilities. The green transition to renewable energy sources includes building mass transit, “complete streets” that promote walking and biking, local food systems and clean manufacturing. Financial reform includes debt relief, public banks and breaking up the big banks. And the democracy section includes getting money out of politics, guaranteeing the right to vote, strengthening local democracy, democratizing the media and significant changes to the military. We would add to this prioritizing the involvement of Indigenous, black and brown communities. As Jon Olsen writes, ecosocialism is now part of the platform of the Green Party of the United States and has entered the political dialogue.

Join the Green Power Project national call on Thursday, January 17 at 8:00 pm Eastern to learn more about the Green New Deal. Click here for details.

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES – 2018/12/10: Protesters seen holding placards during the Sunrise Movement protest inside the office of US Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to advocate that Democrats support the Green New Deal, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. (Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Uniting to win the Green New Deal

Conditions are ripe for a Green New Deal. Wealth inequality continues to accelerate. As Lawrence Wittner describes, we have a new era of Robber Barons like the Waltons and Jeff Bezos who pay low wages and rake in millions in public subsidies for their new facilities. They use their economic power to influence lawmakers so laws are passed that increase rather than threaten their riches.

A new report shows that 40% of people in the United States have negative wealth; they are in debt. And another 20% have minimal wealth, meaning 60% of people in the US have virtually no assets. The report was focused on millennials finding they are less well off than previous generations.

Anthony DiMaggio, who wrote about the report, also found that the affluent are oblivious to the high degree of inequality in the United States and that without this understanding, they are unlikely to support policies that reduce inequality.

The Democratic Party is starting to get the message. With student loan debt at a record $1.465 trillion, twice the amount in 2009, candidates are starting to talk about this issue. Members of Congress in the House are planning to hold hearings on National Improved Medicare for All and increasing Social Security. Democratic voters strongly support these changes, so the Democrats are feeling compelled to appear to be taking action on them, though this could mostly be for show to keep people from leaving the party in the lead up to the 2020 elections.

To win a Green New Deal, which could include a stronger social safety net, we will need to unite as a movement of movements and make the demand impossible to ignore. Uniting across issues makes sense because the Green New Deal is broad, addressing multiple crises at once. And we will need to push issues that Democrats will not want to discuss, such as nationalization of industries, more democracy, and cuts to the military. Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report urges us to organize not just nationally but at the state level too by introducing plans for state Green New Deals.

We can work at many levels to build the demand for a Green New Deal. Talk to people in your community about it. Start local initiatives for clean energy, local food networks, protecting public schools and water systems, promoting cooperatives and more. Push your state and federal legislators too. This is an opportunity to unite in support of a bold new vision for our society.

Drought, floods and erratic climate phenomena. Developing countries are often have to bear the brunt of climate change. African delegates at COP24 are hoping for guidelines to implement the Paris deal, which aims to keep global temperature rises below a safe level of 1.5 degrees Celcius, and they want richer nations to fulfill their pledges.