00:01:59.480Well, before we delve into the thicket of resource extraction and renewable energy,
00:02:06.240I'd like to ask you about the importance of understanding energy as a concept
00:02:11.660that is deeply connected to production and why we must ground our understanding there
00:02:18.680before we can begin to even think about energy democracy or energy as a right?
00:02:24.540So that's a great question. We currently live under a regime of what we might call
00:02:32.180fossil capitalism, and I'm drawing on lots of other scholars and activists that have used that term.
00:02:38.160And at the center of that are the two parts of that phrase, right? On the one hand is energy that comes from hydrocarbons or fossil fuels, coal, gas, and oil. And on the other is capitalism, a system that is based on profit and private property and competition, right? Among other things, the exploitation of labor, of course.
00:03:04.700And those two pieces have colluded, we might say, to create what is the climate crisis that we're living through today. So that climate crisis is simultaneously about the underlying energy system and the sources that it draws on to power everything that we do, right?
00:03:24.960transit, turning on the light, heavy industry, our housing, everything kind of is powered by
00:03:33.820an energy system rooted in fossil fuels. And then in addition, that whole system is structured by
00:03:41.540these imperatives that generate the forms of social inequality, economic inequality,
00:03:48.460are of course intersected with race and gender inequality, the exploitation of labor, but also
00:03:54.600we're seeing, especially clearly in this COVID moment, the deep precarity and insecurity of
00:04:00.620working people around the world. And I think we can start to get the sense of how those two pieces
00:04:06.480intersect with one another through a long history that's itself kind of rooted in colonial
00:04:12.860relationships, not only between different places on earth, but also perhaps we could say more
00:04:20.640deeply in a sense between humans and nature, between some groups of humans over other groups
00:04:25.720of humans and between humans and nature, right? And so this is kind of the complex. It's an energy
00:04:32.540system, but it's also an economic system. It's also a social system. It's also just the everyday
00:04:37.940life that we all live. And it's that that I think we need to critique and resist and transform
00:04:46.840ultimately. And the challenge of our current moment, and this is going to, I think, circle
00:04:52.440back very hopefully nicely to your question, is that we have an energy transition that is in its
00:04:59.960early stages. It's more and less advanced in different places on earth and different communities
00:05:05.060on earth, meaning a transition away from fossil fuel-based energy to energy that doesn't produce
00:05:11.640emissions, right, to energy that is renewable, that's solar or wind, or in some cases, geothermal.
00:05:18.080And so we're in the midst of this global energy transition, which is meant to address the crisis
00:05:24.640of emissions and global warming. But what I think we should think about and be concerned about as
00:05:30.880activists, as scholars, as environmentalists, you know, multiple types of folks, I'm sure,
00:05:36.240listening to this podcast is the way that we can have a renewable energy transition without the
00:05:43.040deeper transformations that would dismantle and undo and erect something totally different than
00:05:48.900fossil capitalism. So I think, you know, to your question, we absolutely need to think about how
00:05:55.280energy is imbricated in our everyday lives and imbricated in the climate crisis. But I think we
00:06:01.380should also, at the same time, think about how our energy system is structured by forces like
00:06:08.780capitalism, like racism, like patriarchy, and like colonial relations between countries,
00:06:15.560so that we don't replicate those harms as we transition to a different system of energy.
00:06:23.740Well, thank you so much for grounding us in that introduction. And you often reference
00:06:30.640the vast disconnect between utopian futures pushed by clean energy advocates and the reality
00:06:37.880of extractive frontiers and the supply chains that green energy necessitates. Now, in the United
00:06:44.800States, we're seeing electric vehicles being advertised as an accessible product of the near
00:06:51.060future, while we are shielded from the truth of what is required in order to make these products
00:06:57.160accessible, specifically the denial of indigenous sovereignty and the violent desecration of
00:07:03.240ecosystems globally. So I know this is, you know, this is a very vast topic, so I invite you to
00:07:10.240focus on whatever part calls to you, but I wonder if you can share with listeners what a renewable
00:07:16.340energy transition actually looks like from the perspective of the so-called peripheries of
00:07:22.300extraction? The mines, power plants, refineries, and ports. What kind of supply chain has been
00:07:29.660constructed in order to further green energy? That's a great question. I like the framing a lot.
00:07:36.680I want to start with where you began your question, which is these clean, so-called clean
00:07:43.500or green technologies that have been invented and developed and are being deployed precisely in
00:07:51.120order to transition us to a low carbon or renewable energy system, right? The one that I focus on a lot
00:07:59.440in my work are electric vehicles, and particularly the batteries that power those vehicles, the
00:08:05.260lithium batteries, which are, by the way, the same batteries that power, you know, our laptops and
00:08:10.560cell phones, or they're quite similar, right? So we're already familiar with rechargeable batteries,
00:08:14.440but the car versions are much larger. And so I want to just focus in on this label of clean
00:08:21.540technology or green technology. Labels that I, you know, I certainly use myself the idea of green
00:08:27.280technologies, but I think clean is particularly misleading, right? It kind of gives the idea that
00:08:34.280these technologies are somehow just synthesized in a laboratory or printed with a 3D printer,
00:08:41.120right, or like automatically produced in some fully automated factory. It kind of has an idea
00:08:47.840of a modernity totally divorced from nature, right, and from all of the kind of raw materials
00:08:55.600and natural inputs that go into making what we use. And so instead, what I try to do in my work
00:09:01.560in conversation with other scholars and activists is show the very earthly, material, natural
00:09:09.420origins of this technology. And that's to draw a broader point, which is to say these technologies
00:09:16.820are produced currently in the same way that any other commodity under capitalism is produced.
00:09:24.140Raw materials are wrested from the earth. They are extracted. If they're agricultural materials,
00:09:29.960they are harvested, right? They are refined and processed, often using toxic chemicals and through
00:09:37.460polluting processes themselves. They are shipped to other parts of the world often to be further
00:09:44.000refined and then to be manufactured. We could look at that manufacturing and look at the exploitation
00:09:49.420of labor, look at whether that itself produces also emissions and other environmental impacts,
00:09:55.360what are the safety conditions, right? And then at the end of that process of manufacturing and
00:10:00.000that long chain of relationships and different geographic sites, those technologies head to
00:10:06.240places of mass consumption. And what I think this kind of shows us is that if we ignore,
00:10:15.260if we just think of the clean technology or the green tech at the end of this whole
00:10:19.880chain of events, then we really miss out on a lot of where the environmental and social injustices
00:10:27.200might occur, right? And so I just advocate in general that we take what some call a kind of
00:10:34.360planetary perspective, meaning a perspective that can apprehend this spatially dispersed process
00:10:41.020that happens in all different parts of the world, from Chile to Indonesia, from the Philippines to
00:10:46.300China. And I'm just talking there about lithium ion batteries and only talking about a subset of the
00:10:50.720places that are involved, right? And zoom in on what's actually happening in those places. And
00:10:56.080is that the kind of low carbon future that we want to build as, let's say, climate justice activists?
00:11:01.520Is that the kind of low-carbon future that those workers and communities want to be a part of? Were they asked to be a part of it? Did they consent to the forms of extraction and exploitation that take place in their communities?
00:11:14.740And I think usually the answer is no, because of what I said earlier about the way capitalism functions. We aren't really asked. We don't have democratic participation that kind of governs the economy. And that is, I think, even more stark and apparent and dramatic in the places in the world that have been systematically and historically subject to forms of what we might call colonial or imperial relationships.
00:11:42.740right? And I'll just say a couple of more words to get more palpable and concrete. So what I
00:11:49.680learned studying, just tracing the supply chains of lithium ion batteries, is that the lithium
00:11:58.820that is extracted has pretty, I think, concerning environmental impacts in the immediate sites of
00:12:07.280extraction. I did my field work in Chile and spent several months there, and I will be returning as
00:12:14.740soon as the pandemic allows me to. And I traveled around the country, both in the capital where a
00:12:20.620lot of important decisions are made, right, policymakers and corporations. But I also went
00:12:26.180to the zones of extraction in the north of Chile, in the Atacama Desert, which is a just beautiful
00:12:34.260landscape. It is also the home of indigenous communities that have lived there for thousands
00:12:38.880of years, well before the Spanish conquered Latin America or before the Chilean state existed. So
00:12:46.520you have indigenous communities, you have a beautiful landscape that they have developed
00:12:51.040all sorts of practices of cultural exchange and socio-natural kind of relation with that landscape.
00:12:57.540Then you have more recent, we could call them settlers, migrants, internal migrants. You also
00:13:03.120so have tourists, right? So you have all sorts of people living in this space. And what is
00:13:08.900concerning about the lithium extraction process, which is extracted from these underground brine
00:13:17.840deposits, salty water deposits, in other words, from these beautiful expansive salt flats,
00:13:23.880it actually has the effect of making fresh water, the water that humans rely on for consumption
00:13:31.940and agriculture, and that of course is also water that other species rely on as well,
00:13:38.420that water is directly impacted by the rapid and rapacious extraction of brine.
00:13:45.040There's a whole complex water system that actually indigenous people know quite well,
00:13:51.400but scientists are just beginning to actually understand because it's such a complicated,
00:13:55.680an unusual water system that involves both brine and freshwater and is in the second driest place
00:14:03.240on earth after Antarctica. So you can just imagine the complexity, but also the vulnerability of this
00:14:08.120water system. Lithium is being, I should say this brine is being extracted and then arrayed on these
00:14:17.840huge evaporation ponds in the desert so that the water evaporates into the air and you're left with
00:14:25.040a more concentrated lithium concentrate, which is then further refined elsewhere. That whole
00:14:31.860process is very inexpensive for lithium companies because actually the sun and the wind do a lot of
00:14:39.200the evaporation work for them, which is free. So it's another kind of gift of nature. But it's
00:14:45.020very concerning because it draws down the freshwater table at the same time. And this is
00:14:51.500compounded by two other processes impacting the region. One is climate change itself. So a bit
00:14:58.920ironic that this extractive frontier of technologies meant to combat climate change is also suffering
00:15:04.100severe consequences of drought and further desertification. And then on the other hand,
00:15:12.020copper, which is also extracted in this region and requires also a lot of water to be for
00:15:18.640processing in particular. And ironically, again, copper extremely needed for green technologies
00:15:25.640like EVs because of all of the electric wiring. So you have this place on earth that is a home
00:15:33.720to ecosystems and human communities that is being triply impacted in this way by climate change and
00:15:41.620by lithium and copper, which all are, you know, again, the attractive frontiers of technologies
00:15:47.280that are actually needed to combat climate change though and just to close out here how we produce
00:15:54.500those technologies um who uses them who controls their production and how much extraction they
00:16:00.960require these are all political and social questions that we should think about because
00:16:06.400it's not preordained actually how much extraction is required uh in order to produce technologies
00:16:12.080needed to combat climate change. Wow. Just thank you for explaining all of that and connecting
00:16:23.100some of the dots that I think some of us are having an intuition about. I think many of us
00:16:28.940are starting to question what it actually takes to do this green energy transition. And it was
00:16:39.560really helpful to hear so much of what you just brought up. And I'm wondering if you could
00:16:44.820highlight the connections between renewable energy development and state deployment of
00:16:49.860the military and police in the name of extraction. And I know we can't generalize South America's
00:16:55.600approach to resource extraction, but I do think listeners would be interested in hearing about
00:17:00.420the correlation between the green energy boom and state violence to the extent that you're
00:17:05.380willing to speak about it? Sure, it's an excellent question, both because there's a lot to say
00:17:11.920historically and currently about it, but I also think that some of answering this will require
00:17:17.900actually a bit of speculation, which I think can be an interesting, you know, creative kind of
00:17:21.860activity, mental activity to engage in. So I'll come to that speculative piece at the end, but
00:17:27.080let me tell you what I think we do know empirically already. One is that extractive sectors around the
00:17:35.060world, not only in the global South or in Latin America or Chile, including in the US and Canada,
00:17:43.200for example, which have major extractive sectors, particularly in oil and gas and coal,
00:17:51.020we see that around the world, extractive sectors often are marked by particular levels of violence,
00:17:58.600repression and conflict, right? The state is often one key actor there. States often deploy
00:18:06.600repressive force, whether that's police or military or security or intelligence agents,
00:18:12.540there are different types of state repression, but they often deploy direct repressive force
00:18:18.100to protect such projects against resistance or conflict, or even sometimes when there's no
00:18:24.860actual resistance, you will see armed guards protecting sites of extraction, right, to kind
00:18:30.920of project the authority of the state. States often label these sectors as quote-unquote
00:18:36.660strategic. Sometimes that's written into the very constitution of a given state, and what that means
00:18:42.260is that the state, you know, thinks these sectors are extra important, right, to sort of protect,
00:18:47.700and that sort of carries also that indication of the potential for state violence. We've seen this
00:18:53.340this type of violence in the fight over Standing Rock, Keystone, we have just seen this time and
00:18:58.840again, right? It's not something that just happens in other places. In Latin America, this takes
00:19:05.360additional forms. You often also see in certain contexts paramilitary violence. So it's not
00:19:12.560official state violence, but often there are nebulous connections to the state in some way.
00:19:17.060you might see corporations that actually hire their own private security guards.
00:19:22.240So when I did research in Ecuador, which might come up later in this conversation for an earlier
00:19:27.800project, I researched a copper mining company that hired private guards, right? And they inflicted
00:19:37.040quite intense violence on community members that were in protest of the mine. So this just gives
00:19:42.600you a sense. This is a correlation that many scholars have drawn out around the world. And
00:19:48.260we can link this already to the renewable energy transition. So I already mentioned copper, and I'm
00:19:55.220just going to bring it up again. It's hard to overstate how important copper is to renewable
00:20:01.020energy. And those two words, copper and renewable energy, might not be words that listeners have
00:20:06.460thought about side by side. But just to remind folks that in order to transition to renewable
00:20:12.020energy system, we need to electrify economic processes that are not currently electrified.
00:20:18.940So we need, and we can just use the car example, right? So an electric vehicle, the word electric,
00:20:24.620right, needs to be able to be plugged in to the grid and needs energy conducted through copper
00:20:32.020wiring within the car and in the broader energy system, right? And that's the case for any device
00:20:39.860or activity that we want to power with renewable energy, we need to be able to plug it into the
00:20:44.700grid, so to speak, unless we have our own little solar panel on that, whatever that thing is. But
00:20:49.300you need to be able to connect to the grid. That means a lot of copper wiring. And that means an
00:20:53.680enormous amount of copper will be extracted in order to allow us to use renewable energy
00:20:59.040technologies. We've seen around Latin America, particularly in the Andean region, so in Chile,
00:21:05.920in Peru, in Ecuador, just to name a few places. Copper mining caused a lot of conflict, a lot of
00:21:13.780social protest, and also be the site of a lot of state and corporate forms of repression, right?
00:21:20.120So that's just one angle to take on it, just through the lens of copper. I want to kind of
00:21:25.400go to that speculative piece that I was saying earlier. As I noted in the beginning of this
00:21:30.360conversation, we're in a nascent stage of the energy transition. It is globally uneven. Some
00:21:37.240places have transitioned more than others. We still have a lot of work to do to really move
00:21:42.560away from an energy system that's based on fossil fuels. So I think at early stages, you can start
00:21:48.580to detect trends that might take hold and take root and be more predominant once a fuller
00:21:56.760transition occurs. And what I'm starting to get concerned about in my research is the way that
00:22:02.340states, and not only in the global South, I'm talking about in what I'm about to say about the
00:22:07.900U.S. and the European Union, actually specifically, are starting to designate the minerals needed for
00:22:15.620renewable energy technologies as quote-unquote critical or strategic or crucial. They use
00:22:21.980different words. And that should give listeners pause. When a state actor says this natural
00:22:28.600resource is strategic or quote unquote critical, it means that oftentimes states will use
00:22:35.080additional forms of repression in order to protect its extraction. And so the EU has done this and
00:22:42.300added lithium to its list of critical minerals. The US first under Trump, but actually more
00:22:48.240recently, again under Biden, has designated lithium as well as several other minerals as
00:22:53.580critical. And sometimes it's directly said that it's not just about the green technology, but that
00:22:59.000military technologies in general rely on these minerals as well. So you get this ominous sense
00:23:05.300that states and perhaps corporations as well might respond with additional forms of repression
00:23:11.640around protest against, let's say, or conflict around these types of sectors. And
00:23:17.160And it's speculative. We don't know this yet, but I just want to sort of put that there because I think there's a long history of state repression and extraction going hand in hand. And I hope we don't repeat that history, but I think it helps to be aware of that at the outset of a process rather than, you know, unfortunately when it's too late.
00:23:47.160The drive I need to go, further than they said I'd go.
00:24:00.160He only loves me when there's a means he means to end.
00:24:09.160Oh, I miss when we first met, he pinched on the edge.
00:24:39.160yeah that's very interesting and yeah I think it should give all of us pause to realize that there
00:24:53.320are multiple systems being set up to extract these resources and yeah it is frightening to
00:25:03.980hear those kinds of words because in a sense they're like they're like warlike terminology
00:25:08.560and that is something to really consider yeah in latin america's green new deal you
00:25:15.320co-authored with daniel aldana cohen you write quote while the green new deal idea massively
00:25:22.180expanded the scope of climate action from carbon pricing to rewriting the united states entire
00:25:27.860social and ecological contract it said little about the rest of the world its chief historical
00:25:34.740referent the new deal invokes u.s history alone and yet the project's edges have been internationalist
00:25:42.500leave aside the phrasing and the substance of the project has everything to do with the
00:25:47.660contemporary political economic struggles all over the world including in latin america end quote
00:25:54.340yeah and i i think about my previous questions and how they've sort of alluded to what a green
00:26:01.860New Deal might mean for resource rich countries in South America. But I'd like to ask you to
00:26:07.840elaborate a bit further on the global dimensions of a Green New Deal, or perhaps talk about what
00:26:14.400a globally accountable Green New Deal would look like instead. Yeah, that's a great question. And
00:26:21.500it's tricky because there's many ways to unpack it, both on a level of sort of, I guess, you know,
00:26:27.720three kind of levels that occur to me immediately. One would be kind of what are the, if we just
00:26:34.420implemented a Green New Deal right now in the U.S. without much attention to those global0.83
00:26:40.460ramifications, how would it affect the rest of the world, right? So that's one kind of question
00:26:44.420to ask. Another two sets of other related questions are what kind of policies could we implement as
00:26:52.680part of a Green New Deal kind of transformative moment that would have more beneficial effects
00:26:58.560for the rest of the world, right? Rather than potentially harmful ones. And then a third and
00:27:03.600perhaps even thornier question is how can we, let's say U.S. activists kind of reconstruct what
00:27:10.320I see as very lost and weakened relationships of solidarity with groups and communities and
00:27:17.760movements around the world. Relationships that I think at other moments in political history
00:27:23.500were stronger than they are now. I think we've lost a lot of the habit and ethos and kind of
00:27:29.280orientation of solidarity and internationalism and sort of a global perspective in movements in the
00:27:34.560U.S. So let me go back to the beginning of where I framed that. What I worry about, despite I should
00:27:43.300say, being on record as an extreme advocate of the Green New Deal, right? I think it's a wonderful
00:27:49.000paradigm shift in climate policy. It connects the crisis of inequality to the crisis of global
00:27:55.080warming. It focuses on real material improvements in ordinary people's lives. And it sees, I think,
00:28:01.340a really vigorous role for the public sector and also for creative forms of public ownership and
00:28:08.620community ownership and cooperatives and, you know, just a different way to organize our economy.
00:28:13.300And so I'm like, you know, just want to frame this by saying I'm a big advocate of the Green New Deal. But I also think there are different versions of the Green New Deal. And that, you know, we should be intentional, especially about this international piece from the from the get go.
00:28:25.180I worry that a Green New Deal that doesn't attend to global supply chains and to the extraction required by green technologies could just neglect the forms of social and environmental injustice that those technologies currently require to produce, to be produced.
00:28:46.460But I emphasize currently, because I don't think it's inevitable that these technologies, whether it's solar panels or electric buses, right, these technologies could be produced quite differently than they are. And I think it's important to keep that in mind.
00:29:01.180But if we don't attend to global supply chains, then we just use the normal methods of production and consumption and extraction, the ones that we've already talked about, right? And we might reinforce them. And we might reinforce them dramatically because when we look at major changes, major and aggressive and fast changes in our whole, you know, kind of energy system, there might be a huge rush to secure these minerals around the world and to ramp up production for these technologies in ways that are
00:29:31.140just not attentive to the issues of labor exploitation or contamination or local waterways
00:29:37.160or indigenous rights, just to name a few, you know, I think important issues to attend to.
00:29:42.240So I worry about that. But I don't think it's inevitable. And now I'm going to go to the second
00:29:47.180piece that I said, like what kind of policies and frameworks might a Green New Deal employ0.79
00:29:53.980in order to avoid exacerbating resource conflict and extraction around the world,
00:30:01.460but instead actually reduce extraction, reduce the resource requirements,
00:30:06.860reduce how much is pulled out of the earth in the name of more production of these technologies.
00:30:15.760One is, I think, that the worst way to do the energy transition,
00:30:20.520in, especially when we're talking about transportation, right, which is a place where
00:30:26.940we're seeing a lot of change already, right? The people buying electric vehicles, these auto
00:30:32.840companies producing new electric vehicles, et cetera. That's an area where we're seeing, you
00:30:37.380know, in the current moment, the energy transition unfolding. What worries me is this paradigm that's
00:30:42.960become very popular with politicians and corporations, which is that the way to combat
00:30:47.840climate change is for everyone to have an electric vehicle in their garage. Now, first of all,
00:30:52.400that's just not economically accessible. And you actually asked at the very top of this show,
00:30:57.580like, you know, is this really accessible? Is this even an accessible kind of solution? And I would
00:31:02.180say, no, not for poor and working class people that can't afford, you know, without a lot of
00:31:08.100government help, and maybe there will be government help, but anyway, can't afford a new car. And
00:31:12.380actually the poorer you are, the more likely you are to drive a car that is less energy efficient,
00:31:18.700that produces more emissions, or maybe to not be able to afford a car at all, right? And so there's
00:31:22.960some equity issues, first and foremost, with a car-centric approach to our energy transition.
00:31:28.740And then I think, second of all, everyone owning their own car is very resource intensive. I think
00:31:35.620that just might make sense. I'm just going to let that kind of land there, because I think it's
00:31:39.660clear that if everyone has their own thing, a lot more things need to be produced. And so what if
00:31:45.980instead we had an economy that was focused on public services, on collective consumption,
00:31:53.660on forms of sharing with one another and in forms of caring for what we have and not always
00:32:01.220getting a new thing? What would that look like? And so what I advocate for along with others is
00:32:07.240an energy, excuse me, is a transit system that focuses on public transit and mass transit. I
00:32:14.780know there are challenges in rural areas. So I also think there's a lot of interesting creative
00:32:18.620solutions for rural areas to have public transit systems. So on mass and public transit, a single
00:32:25.020bus with its lithium battery can maybe ferry around thousands of people a day versus a car
00:32:31.620that sits in the garage most of the day. So it's a much better use of those resources.
00:32:35.120But also, you know, maybe in some spaces of, especially in urban areas, eliminates private cars, passenger cars altogether, right? And there are fascinating movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world to have car-free cities.
00:32:49.300Of course, we always need to take into account that there are differences in folks' mobility, right? So not everyone is going to walk and cycle, but there can definitely be provisions made for fully equitable and accessible transit systems that are a mix of public transit and walking and cycling and electrify all transit, don't rely on individual ownership of electric vehicles.
00:33:15.100So that's the second piece, policies, thinking about policies that require less resources and actually change the way we consume, rather than just like a kind of green capitalist situation where we consume the same exact way, but with renewable energy.
00:33:31.100And then the final piece, and I'll be a bit shorter here, but I think it's worth mentioning, and it resonates a lot with that excerpt you read out loud from Daniel and my essay, which is beyond the level of policy.
00:33:47.200It's also, I think, important and incumbent upon movements in the United States, climate
00:33:52.560movements, social justice movements, racial justice movements, to see themselves in global
00:33:57.380perspective, to see themselves as part of struggles that transcend borders, as impacted
00:34:03.600by processes of oppression and exploitation that also, of course, transcend borders, and
00:34:08.920sort of re-stitch together relationships with movements elsewhere in the world that, despite
00:34:15.940our very global media systems and Twitter and X, Y, and Z, I think a lot of those relationships,
00:34:22.940like despite the fact that we can at any moment with our smartphones figure out what's happening
00:34:27.120elsewhere in the world, I think the relationships between movements have really suffered. And it's
00:34:31.980a longer question as to why that's the case, but it has been the case. And I think that it would
00:34:38.380be positive for our projects like the Green New Deal to kind of re-solidify and shore up those0.58
00:34:43.800relationships, both so that we're attentive to what some of the negative impacts are elsewhere
00:34:48.880in the world. And we can stand in solidarity with, let's say, indigenous communities in Chile if they
00:34:54.180resist lithium mining, both for those types of campaigns and issues, but also to learn from
00:34:59.840elsewhere in the world, right? It's not just about being a good ally. It's also about learning what
00:35:05.780has worked well, you know, in terms of more socially just energy transitions in the places
00:35:11.180that have embarked on that. So I think there's a tremendous amount to be gained from a more
00:35:16.100international and solidarity-based perspective. Well, one of the largest questions that I've
00:35:25.540read that you tackle is whether or not we can improve well-being without an extractive model
00:35:30.760of development. And I think we'd both agree that we absolutely can live well without extraction.
00:35:36.620But this question becomes much more complex when we ask if we can have leftist systems of care under capitalism without extraction of some sort, because so often countries have nationalized their resources so they can improve the social conditions of their own country to compete with what the so-called West has defined as a decent quality of life.
00:36:02.580So I'm wondering if you could speak to the dilemma and whether or not it's possible to have national governments without extractive development. And if so, what does it look like to center social care and economic security in the immediate future without extraction?
00:36:19.860Yeah, this is probably one of the thornier questions that we'll talk about today, which is a high bar because you've already raised a number of obviously complex questions and nuanced questions.
00:36:32.020But this one gets at the heart of so many different issues, and I think your framing, which is one that I've also used of dilemmas, is very apt, right? A dilemma is where you confront a situation where the sort of pros and cons of different ways forward are very fraught, and it's not clear what the best approach is, right?
00:36:55.580But that's one way to think about a dilemma. And that's the way that I think of one. You know, dilemmas kind of make us paralyzed because it's not clear how to move forward. And I feel like this is a set of issues that can result in that kind of orientation.
00:37:08.520I guess that what I would say, just to kind of frame a little bit, and then I'll get into the more specific substantive questions that you ask about progressive governments, let's say in the global south, and how they can provide for their people without reinforcing an extractive model of development.
00:37:29.360And I would say that over many years of thinking about this, and my thinking continues to evolve, so maybe in a year from now I'll have a different way of thinking about it. But this is kind of how I've come around to it. I think that it's important to disentangle extraction from extractivism is one way to think about it.
00:37:50.180and maybe we actually just need a different word than extraction altogether. But I want to put a
00:37:55.540little space between the words extraction and extractivism. I don't think that there is a way
00:38:01.980to build even the best society, the most utopian society that we could think of, that is socially
00:38:09.040just, egalitarian, low carbon, right? Doesn't have racism or patriarchy or exploitation, right? I'm
00:38:15.160just imagining a society, that society would still need in some way to appropriate resources,
00:38:25.700though maybe they'd be called something else, because that already kind of commodifies nature
00:38:29.980a bit. But anyway, would have to interact with nature in some way, right? The solar panels that
00:38:35.040that society uses in its, you know, perfectly democratically owned energy system, those solar
00:38:41.240panels would need to be made from minerals that are extracted from the earth. They would need to
00:38:46.400be manufactured with machines and factories. And so I think that it sometimes is an easy way out
00:38:53.240that I myself have also taken this easy way out this route to say, there's, you know, we want a0.57
00:38:58.840society with no extraction. But I don't think that that is possible, though, maybe we just need a
00:39:05.340different word from extraction, because maybe in our ideal society, the real, the way in which we
00:39:10.560interact with nature would be so fundamentally different that we wouldn't call it extraction
00:39:14.200anymore. But I think that we will use nature's bounty in order to produce what we, you know,
00:39:20.860to sort of produce what we need to survive and to, and to do more than survive, to flourish, right?
00:39:26.560So, you know, I think even in our, my ideal, let's say, eco-socialist utopia, lithium would
00:39:32.440be needed, right? I would want there to be electric buses. And right now we don't have another way to
00:39:36.960power them. And even if we create another way, it would still come from the earth because everything
00:39:40.480comes from the earth, like at some point. But the question is like, how much extraction? Under what
00:39:46.000terms? Who has to consent to it? And those are the real political questions that I think we should
00:39:52.160address head on and that don't have easy answers. But I think that, you know, a system, a social
00:39:58.040system that uses things from nature is different than, or doesn't have to be, this sort of
00:40:04.280pathological system of extractivism, where everything, nature and humans, are subordinated
00:40:11.400to economic growth, to constant consumerism, to production without end, aside from profit.
00:40:19.480Right. So, you know, that's why I kind of put a little distance between extraction and extractivism.
00:40:23.420And then to get to the kind of crux of your question, are there ways to improve well-being without an extractive model of development? And I think you say, you asked this question particularly in contexts that are resource-rich, that have historically extracted and exported those resources, a relationship that can often be traced hundreds of years to a colonial period, but really the basic relations have not fundamentally changed.
00:40:50.000So a place like Ecuador, where I mentioned earlier, I've done a lot of field work and wrote a book about, is a place that a lot of its state's budget comes from oil-related revenues and now increasingly mining-related revenues as well.
00:41:06.580And earlier in sort of Ecuador's recent history, when a left government first came to power in 2007, the government of Rafael Correa, his name, of the president, committed to using those resources, the revenues that the state gained from extracting those resources,
00:41:30.220in order to fund social services and public infrastructure projects, which, by the way,
00:41:37.020as your question very much, I think, is attuned to, were exactly the types of demands that
00:41:42.780social movements, popular movements, labor unions, indigenous movements included,
00:41:47.580had made for a long time. They had said, we live amongst this natural wealth, and it is
00:41:53.660expropriated by foreign capitalists, and we never see the benefits of it. And so Correa said,
00:41:58.700for the first time in Ecuador's history, you know, from all the way from when Ecuador was a colony
00:42:03.640to independence, to military dictatorships, to other democratically elected governments,
00:42:09.240my government is going to address social needs, and it's going to do so with the revenues generated
00:42:15.200by extraction. And that put the Korea government in this fundamental dilemma, to use that word
00:42:21.760again, which is that that made short and even, you know, to some extent, medium term economic
00:42:27.780and social sense. And it made a lot of political sense. He was a very popular president. And he
00:42:32.740did the things he said he was going to do. He decreased poverty dramatically, almost cut it in
00:42:37.320half. He expanded dramatically people's access to health, education, transit, and housing.
00:42:44.340But he did so on a model, using a model that was environmentally devastating. That wasn't new.
00:42:52.320That had been the case previously in Ecuador's history. But he reaffirmed that model.
00:42:56.860that violated indigenous rights, and that also was economically precarious, because it depended a lot
00:43:03.720on the global prices for those commodities and how high they were, right? And so he was caught
00:43:08.400in those dilemmas, and those eventually really undermined the transformative project that he
00:43:14.360sought to pursue, in addition to his government's own repression, and that's worth mentioning,
00:43:20.440of movements that contested extractivism, that resisted it. But I think that doesn't answer
00:43:27.320the question. Could he have done otherwise? Was there another route to social and economic
00:43:31.560well-being in Ecuador, for example, other than relying on oil and mining revenues? And I think
00:43:37.560that's a very hard question to answer. And what I've kind of come around to recently, even since
00:43:43.340writing the book in a way, is that that question can't be answered at the scale of Ecuador.
00:43:48.920That question can't be answered in one country on the peripheries of the global economy that has historically extracted these resources, and it is a just pillar of the national economy.
00:44:02.460That is not a transition that Ecuador can just make on its own, so to speak, because if it was just Ecuador and they decided, okay, we're going to leave the oil on the ground and that's it, it would actually be quite difficult to address people's needs.
00:44:16.880Which is not to say that Ecuador shouldn't leave the oil on the ground, they should. But I think it immediately raises responsibility, complicity at other levels of global governance, right?
00:44:28.840So whether we look at the region of Latin America, the hemisphere, all the Americas, the U.S. included, or the globe, I think that it's incumbent on more powerful, affluent, and well-resourced places and institutions and economic groups and companies in the world who have historically benefited and profited from the extraction and the environmental devastation that it causes.
00:44:55.380I think it's incumbent on them to alleviate the kind of economic straits that Ecuador, for example, finds itself in to, for example, reduce or cancel the debt that Ecuador owes to all these financial institutions, debt that was contracted under very illegitimate circumstances, I think, and is part of what forces a country like Ecuador to extract resources because you have to pay this debt to the IMF, to private creditors, to whoever it is.
00:45:23.280And so I'm just giving listeners a sense that I think these questions have to be answered at broader scales in some part, that it's hard for one low-income country whose primary economic sectors are extractive to just sort of get off the extractive grid and at the same time care for, feed, clothe, and house, and hopefully much more than that, the people that live there.
00:45:50.040And it, I think, involves other forms of global, regional and global redistribution, debt cancellation, and maybe new regional economies that in concert with one another, countries in concert with one another, shift away from an attractive model of development towards one that centers social and natural care.
00:47:18.320yeah i want to go a bit deeper into this and as a follow-up ask what does a post-extractive
00:47:28.460just transition look like in the so-called global south versus the global north
00:47:33.300yeah it's it's such a good question that i think a lot of interesting thinkers and activists
00:47:38.460in the americas and i'm sure many other places in the world are grappling with right now you know
00:47:44.940So I think that there's a lot that can be done to use forms of public investment in Global South countries to shift away from extractive sectors and instead kind of transition towards renewable energy.
00:48:04.660In fact, renewable energy is a very undertapped resource in Latin America.
00:48:10.700There's a lot of potential for renewable energy.
00:48:13.080it's such a climactically ecologically diverse region and so you could get the idea that there
00:48:20.320are places that are extremely well situated for solar energy places very well situated for wind
00:48:26.100energy and then actually due to the volcanic activity in in the andean region and and probably
00:48:32.160elsewhere that's just the region i'm familiar with there's also a lot of geothermal potential
00:48:36.160as well so there's a lot of untapped renewable energy potential that you know again in in my
00:48:42.160ideal world could also be coordinated, involving forms of community ownership, making sure that
00:48:48.840communities get real economic benefits from these projects, that they can actually manage
00:48:53.940these projects, right, and make sure that they fit in well with other livelihoods, with local
00:48:59.780ecosystems, and what the community's desires are for how they are designed, even on an aesthetic
00:49:05.400level, right? There's a lot of evidence around from research around the world that when communities
00:49:10.280take part in the renewable energy transition. When they have a real role, a real stake, real power,
00:49:16.960they like the transition much more. They benefit from it. They feel positively about it and they
00:49:22.360embrace it. And that's very different than a top down imposition of renewable energy with a green
00:49:29.520capitalist corporation that swoops in and says, we're going to dispossess you of your land,
00:49:34.480which has happened in many places in Latin America. And there's a lot of unfortunate
00:49:38.580examples of this in Mexico, for example, of indigenous people actually being dispossessed by
00:49:43.400mega wind developments. But if those same communities, you know, owned the wind developments
00:49:49.060themselves, right, designed them themselves, you get the idea, right? So I think that there's a
00:49:53.200really interesting path forward for Latin America to pivot to renewable energy and do so in a way
00:49:59.920that's different than what we've seen in a lot of the world so far. And I think that, you know,
00:50:05.900given also the natural resources such as lithium that exist in the region, if there was much more
00:50:13.580regional coordination and supply chains that were less about serving global markets and foreign
00:50:19.560consumers and more about serving the sort of region and its people, right, and needs, then,
00:50:26.960you know, you might be able to get some green technology development and manufacturing that
00:50:32.580just was fundamentally different in its character right because it wasn't to be exported far away
00:50:38.020but rather to build kind of local or regional forms of manufacturing and create dignified jobs
00:50:44.800for people in the region right so there's all sorts of different ways i think that you could
00:50:49.740transition um to a different type of economy that's that's i don't know if i could say totally
00:50:54.240non-extractive but but post extractivist right no longer centered on extractivism as it's as
00:51:00.560its guiding principle. And just one other thing I would say since the word has come up a couple of
00:51:05.520times is that there are a lot of interesting ideas from a feminist perspective and an Indigenous
00:51:11.280perspective in the Americas about a care-centered economy. Like what would it look like instead of0.95
00:51:17.120the economy to sort of run on extraction for it to be oriented around healthcare, education, elder
00:51:24.540care, the creation of vibrant communities, the arts, you know, and these, these are the same
00:51:31.020things I would endeavor for in the United States. They're not specific to Latin America, except that
00:51:35.560Latin America, and in particular, you know, in some countries in particular, has a very vibrant0.91
00:51:40.360feminist movement. I'm thinking of Chile and Argentina stand out a lot, as well as Mexico,
00:51:46.200just really militant, vibrant, creative feminist movements that have thought a lot about care as
00:51:50.300a concept to sort of reclaim and think about as actually a foundation for the whole economy.
00:51:56.180So these are like the touchstones for me, but I would encourage listeners to also read other
00:52:00.660folks. I'm sure there are many ideas I didn't mention. We could get into regenerative agriculture,
00:52:05.780for example, as opposed to the monocrop agriculture that's destroying the Amazon and
00:52:10.500the cattle ranching that's destroying the Amazon, right? So there's many places to go with the idea
00:52:15.500of a post-extractive economy. But I do want to reiterate that some of these, well, I should say
00:52:23.040many of these economic activities that I've mentioned require some initial public investment
00:52:28.560and would, and also not all of them generate the kind of revenues that oil does. And so I think
00:52:35.880this still brings us back to the question of responsibility at other scales. Right now, Latin1.00
00:52:40.480America, by all accounts, is the region of the world most economically devastated by COVID.
00:52:46.280We could get into why that is in a follow-up if you're interested, but readers easily read
00:52:51.280news stories about this. It has just ravaged the region economically, in large part because of how
00:52:57.380many workers are quote-unquote informal workers and just lack a basic social safety net, and0.81
00:53:02.480therefore have had to choose between starvation if they don't work or the virus if they do,
00:53:08.160And it's just been a very tragic situation in Latin America. So you have this region of economic devastation and governments that have spent every penny that they have on the basics of public health provision and are also in debt by huge quantities to global creditors and international financial institutions.
00:53:29.160And so in that context, is it, you know, can a government, a single government in the global South or in Latin America, invest in this new economic model that's renewable, that's care-centric, et cetera?
00:53:41.760I think that, again, it brings up the issue of the need for redistribution and help and solidarity from other governments and economic entities around the world.
00:53:52.720But I do think there's great ideas for what that model would look like.
00:53:57.280The question is, are there the economic resources within the region to transition to it right now?
00:54:04.000I want to go back to something that you were touching on earlier around collective consumption.
00:54:10.160And, you know, I've heard you talk about in other articles and or interviews about the relationship between solidarity and consumption and how solidarity can, in fact, look like consuming less, but not at the individual level.
00:54:23.760Rather, we can actually consume less and demonstrate solidarity by strengthening our ability to collectively use goods and services.
00:54:32.360So I'd love if you could talk a bit more about the importance of collective consumption and how it guarantees more equity and justice throughout the entire supply chain.
00:54:41.200Thank you for that question. And I've learned, I just want to say, though, his name has already come up, I've learned a lot from my collaborator, Daniel Aldana-Cohen, about the kind of, you know, why collective consumption and public and shared forms of abundance, we might even use the word luxury, are so important, both for improving people's material well-being and simultaneously for addressing the climate crisis.
00:55:10.040And the broader crisis also of ecological devastation. And I think, you know, we so often think of consumption as individual, in individual terms, like I choose to consume this. And so for many environmentalists, that can take the form of like, I'm going to individually consume differently.
00:55:27.400And then immediately we're sort of like, but OK, I'm not going to use a plastic bag, but everyone else is using a plastic bag. There are obvious limitations to an individual understanding of consumption. And we get sort of like in these rabbit holes of like, you know, kind of never ending what what should I be doing differently kind of thing.
00:55:43.260But I want to encourage us to zoom out as your excellent question does, which is to say, even when our consumption appears to us as an individual choice, even when it seems we're just walking to the supermarket using our own money and buying the thing that we want to buy, it's never individual, meaning that consumption is highly socially patterned, right?
00:56:04.360It's highly constrained or and enabled by the social systems that we live in.
00:56:11.140You know, if I live in a suburban enclave in the United States, I have no choice but
00:56:29.100I actually live in a city in Providence, Rhode Island, and it's a decently dense city, a small city, and our public transit is so bad that even though I don't actually live very far from where I work, there's really no way for me to get there other than to drive there.
00:56:48.220In fact, I got a driver's license at kind of an old age of like 33 in order just to get myself to work.
00:56:53.860So the reason I'm bringing this up is because despite the fact that it might seem like an
00:56:58.120individual choice that I drove to work, it really wasn't a choice. It was a social choice
00:57:02.100to not provide me with any other option, right? So we should always think about consumption in
00:57:07.340social terms. And when we zoom out and think that way, it sort of opens up all these other
00:57:12.840possibilities of how we might as a society consume differently. So rather than the system that we
00:57:18.440have, which is individualized and it's like ultimate effects, but really, you know, is designed
00:57:25.020by policy choices, is highly unequal. Some people, you know, consume radically more or less than
00:57:33.220other people, right? It's a very unequal system of consumption. And it is, has all these other
00:57:39.320characteristics, of course, of race and gender as well, in terms of like how much people consume,
00:57:43.800what people's options are. There's a lot of studies that show that, you know, low-income
00:57:48.220communities of color just have far fewer options in terms of what supermarkets or might not have
00:57:53.440supermarkets at all, the so-called sort of food desert phenomena, right? So again, all of these
00:57:58.720are social choices, but at an individual level, we don't have a lot of control over them.
00:58:03.100And, you know, what would it look like to transition from that type of system of consumption
00:58:06.960to a system in which consumption more often took place with other people, like in literal
00:58:13.580community with others and literal kind of communion with other people. What if instead of
00:58:18.600driving in our individual steel traps, cars, death traps, we were, you know, in a train or a tram or
00:58:27.240a bus or a, or a trolley with other people, right? So that's a form of collective consumption
00:58:32.220because it's many people consuming the same service at once. You know, what if instead of
00:58:39.380streaming Netflix alone in our apartments, we, and I know this is a hard time to say this with COVID,
00:58:45.860but let's just relax that assumption for a moment and presume that at some point we can reenter
00:58:50.380society, right? So, okay. So instead of Netflix in our homes, what if we went to the theater
00:58:56.080with other people? What if we actually saw plays, right? Which are much lower carbon, by the way,
00:59:00.360than anything that requires so much streaming content and huge internet servers and that kind
00:59:05.900of thing. So all I'm saying is that there are always different ways that we can pattern
00:59:10.100consumption socially. And the individualist system that we have in the US is also a very
00:59:16.900unequal one. And it's a very resource intensive one, as we already discussed with the example
00:59:22.020of electric vehicle, individual electric vehicles versus electric buses. And so I think there's a
00:59:28.400lot of benefits to thinking collectively about consumption. It's more equitable because
00:59:33.880everyone's consuming the same service, right? It's not like, you know, you can buy your way
00:59:38.260into like very different consumer categories. Everyone's using the same mass transit system,
00:59:43.260let's say. So it's more equitable. It is less resource intensive because it's just more
00:59:49.680economically efficient. You have these economies of scale with the resources that are extracted
00:59:54.580and more people are making use of them. It also, I think there are other benefits of it that are
01:00:01.080important to attend to, which are on a kind of more social, psychological, emotional relationship
01:00:07.000kind of level, which is that it creates a different type of society when we do things together more.
01:00:13.100When we see one another as part of a shared collectivity or a shared community, when you're
01:00:19.860riding the subway or bus or whatever it is, you have the opportunity to maybe enter into a
01:00:25.560conversation with someone that you don't know, right? Or you say hi to the bus driver that you
01:00:29.600see every day on your route. You can see kind of the different communities that interact with
01:00:35.320and use this infrastructure. Whereas a car is totally isolating and alienating, right? You're
01:00:41.020moving alone through a landscape. And I think it can't be sort of overstated how much the way that
01:00:47.960we consume actually affects our sense of politics and our sense of community. And I think how
01:00:53.160pernicious it's been to have this model of consumption in the U.S. that's highly individualized,
01:00:59.360though again, it's socially designed, but it's very individualized in terms of like the unit
01:01:03.960of the consumer is the individual versus a society that sometimes in places we've had in the U.S.
01:01:11.140and certainly in other places in the world, there are examples of where we have these more
01:01:15.200collective forms of consumption, more public forms of consumption, shared experiences with
01:01:20.380one another, and opportunities to create relationships that get us outside of our
01:01:25.360immediate, you know, selves, our domestic context that allow us to encounter people from different
01:01:31.500backgrounds. And I think that could have a lot of positive political and social and psychological,
01:01:36.940I would say, effects to as much as we can transition to that mode of consumption.
01:01:45.200Yeah, I really love that vision. And I appreciate you putting that out there so we can collectively dream on it a bit more. And yeah, Thea, thank you so much for your time. This has been such an incredible interview. I've learned so much from you.
01:02:03.140And I appreciate your clarity and just how studied you are and how much time you've clearly taken to understand these complex systems.
01:02:12.820And, yeah, as we come to a close, I'd like to read, listeners, a passage from your article, What Green Costs.
01:02:19.640Quote, I might not know the exact shape of the world I want.
01:02:24.160The present weighs heavily and makes imagination difficult.
01:02:27.160But I know it starts with relating to this planet's bounty as mysterious, vital, and nourishing.
01:02:33.140Envisioning abundance as shared flourishing and broadening our solidarities to encompass people we may never meet and places we may never visit, but whose futures are bound up with our own, end quote.
01:02:47.000And as we dream into the future, can I ask you how you define the type of abundance that has existed long before extraction?
01:02:56.740oh that's such a great i think that's your hardest question so far because it involves
01:03:03.560this sort of leap of imagination right i mean and i i think that there is i want to just emphasize
01:03:10.200that like it there is a way in which the world that i would like to create is unknown to me in
01:03:17.700a way it's unknowable to me and and it probably won't be created you know full in any full sense
01:03:24.080in my own lifetime. I always think that one of the most valiant things or aspects of past
01:03:30.480struggles for more equality, for, you know, feminist struggles, civil rights struggles,
01:03:35.660labor struggles, like the struggles that predated us, is that their participants wouldn't always be
01:03:41.600around to see the hopefully better world that their endeavors helped to create, right? I think
01:03:48.200that's such a kind of valiant expression of of in a way solidarity across generations right of
01:03:55.120sort of intergenerational justice of wanting something that maybe honors the past right
01:04:00.220ancestors and and you know ecosystems before uh before capitalism despoiled them but also has
01:04:07.020this sort of future orientation of we're in a collective project to create a world that is more
01:04:12.940abundant, not because of more individual consumption, but because of more meaningful
01:04:17.920lives that feel more fulfilled, that feel more secure and safe, and that interact with nature
01:04:23.960in a non-extractive and fundamentally different way. That project is a collective project. It's
01:04:29.760a global project. It's one that is spatially dispersed. And it's one that unfolds in this
01:04:35.840sort of uneven way over time. And that, you know, we that fight for that right now won't be around
01:04:41.980to see how that project ends up, you know, a hundred years from now, let's say. But I think
01:04:47.280that it's incumbent on us, especially in this moment of just dramatic and severe climate crisis
01:04:53.780to get as quickly involved in that project as we can, right? Even if we won't be around to see all
01:05:01.300of its fruits and its bounties, I do think that we have a responsibility to do everything that
01:05:09.660we can to make sure that we're laying the foundation for that other world that we hope
01:05:15.560others will pick up the process of realizing. That was such a beautiful closure to this
01:05:22.840conversation. Thank you, Thea, so much. I really enjoyed this and was also stretched and learned a
01:05:31.100lot. And I think this information, especially now, is so important and pivotal and really necessary
01:05:38.020for us to understand. So thank you for all of your time today and all of the time and work you've put
01:05:44.180into studying this over the years. Thank you so much for your really nuanced questions. And that
01:05:52.060really made me think. And that last one was, I'm going to sit with it for a minute, but thank you
01:05:56.920so much for the opportunity to talk to you. Thank you for listening to For the Wild
01:06:07.860podcast. The music you heard today was by 40 Million Feet, Mitski, and Alexa Wildish.
01:06:14.180For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.