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[...] there are a lot of people in this country who are under-consuming, like Native people who live in dire poverty. But, by and large, the average North American middle-class and upper-middle-class person consumes way too much.

I don’t dwell too much on settlers and whether they will ever hav…

In the vein of concrete questions about Red Deal implementation, I want to ask you about tradeoffs that tribal governments have made over the years. In the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor, a microchip manufacturer that was one of the first major firms in Silicon Valley, built a factory on a Navajo…

If you turn off the hydroelectric dam, the impact is catastrophic. The same goes for a nuclear power plant: if you’re not cooling your nuclear rods, there are disastrous downstream — literally, down the stream — consequences. You need hierarchical management built in, to keep people safe. But the e…

That balancing act reminds me of something engineer and professor Deb Chachra wrote in one of her newsletters. She wrote, “Sustainability always looks like underutilization when compared to resource extraction.”

That’s beautiful. Deb also writes about infrastructure as being care at scale, whi…

There’s license in the arts to question very normative assumptions. The engineering approach of designing infrastructures as living systems does still give me hope for how we might rethink human systems more broadly. But I continue to feel quite frustrated with the way that engineering as a discipl…