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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 existence of those threats is a manmade crisis that naturalizes and justifies that hierarchy once it’s been created.
On the flip side, solar power and wind power are decentralized. You knock a couple wind turbines off the grid and it doesn’t have any effect. Those are some of the things I think about. And even the fossil fuel industry is thinking about this. They want to recentralize those decentralized green technologies. It’s like the internet: everybody thought it was going to democratize everything, and now it’s been totally privatized and commodified. That’s something we have to fight in this energy transition.
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 reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico with the support of the Navajo Tribal Council.
The one where the workers went on strike for better working conditions and then Fairchild shut it down?
Yes. Presumably, the Navajo Tribal Council wanted to bring jobs to the reservation. You’ve written about the tradeoffs that tribal governments navigate in deciding whether to participate in coal production or chip production or even solar power production on Native land. Do you think it’s fair to talk about that within the context of a Red Deal, or do you think the question is more about why tribal governments even have to think about those tradeoffs?
There are a lot of examples of this. There’s a Raytheon facility right outside of Farmington, New Mexico on Navajo land, where the workforce is 90 percent Navajo. That facility makes the microchips for the Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. The Alaska Native Corporation employs a lot of the private security forces who work at the child and family detention centers on the US-Mexico border. They also have contracts building what are essentially military bases in the Pacific. The Cherokee Nation has contracts to build State Department facilities in the Green Zone in Baghdad. There’s also a federal law that gives preference to Native businesses for lucrative defense contracts. These are the opportunities we get, and we have to take them because our subsistence economies have been annihilated.
People say the Navajo Nation is dependent on coal and oil and gas, but I would actually say that the Southwest is dependent on the Navajo Nation producing coal and oil and gas because no one else wants to do it. No one else will have the generating station on their land because it’s one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country. So Navajo lands have been sacrificed — whether it’s been for coal, oil, and gas, or something like uranium. The same is true of Pueblo lands: the first atomic bomb was created on Pueblo land. And the nuclear waste that resulted was buried in Pueblo sacred sites because US government agencies knew Pueblo people would never tell anyone because they won’t say where their sacred sites are.
The reality is that Native nations have a longstanding intimacy with these kinds of economies, whether it’s nuclear economies or fossil fuel economies. Understanding the historical conditions that force Native nations to participate in these economies is important, but I don’t think it’s a conversation about tradeoffs. It’s about the fact that participating in these economies further entrenches us into the settler-colonial system — not just for our own dispossession, but also the dispossession of other people. The Red Deal presents an alternative: a shift away from the military-industrial complex and these extractive economies.
damn this is dark
[...] 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 have an ethical relationship to land. Some of them will turn into fascists — many already have — and some of them will follow us. If we’re decentering whiteness, and we’re decentering settler ontologies, and we’re actually advocating for their abolition, what does that new world look like? What does ending the colonial relation look like?
Ultimately, we’re trying to center what good relations to the land means. Instead of talking about car batteries, I think the real conversation should be: why are we working more than twenty hours per week? Why are there jobs that require air travel? Why don’t we have a universal basic income across the globe so people don’t have to leave their hometowns to find work? How do we end border imperialism so capital doesn’t have an endless supply of cheap labor? Those are some of the things that I’m thinking about.
[...] A world buzzing with hundreds of millions of Teslas (or worse, e-Escalades), made with materials rapaciously extracted without the consent of local communities, manufactured under a repressive labor regime in polluting factories — in other words, a world not unlike our own, but powered by wind and sun — is not an inevitability.
Other futures are also possible. The already unfolding energy transition offers a historic opportunity to dismantle the American lifestyle of privatized and segregated suburban affluence and build something better in its place. This lifestyle has always been a nightmare, ecologically and politically. The less energy we consume, the fewer raw materials we will need. This is not a call for eco-austerity: currently, energy consumption is highly unequal and wasteful. We can construct a society that is both low-carbon and plentiful in the ways that matter for most of us.
In the twentieth century, our capacity to create substitutes grew immensely. Many synthetic products were invented to take the place of natural ones. Declining soil nutrients could be replaced with artificial fertilizer; aluminum could replace copper; plastic could replace just about everything — wood, stone, metal, glass. Nuclear power appeared poised to offer cheap, near-limitless energy supplies in place of fossil fuels extracted from the earth.
These advances gave rise to a way of thinking that we might call “substitution optimism”: the belief that humans can find substitutes for anything that nature does. But substitution optimists tend to neglect two problems. First, the development of substitutes assumes that the price of scarce goods will rise. What about scarce goods that don’t have a price? In particular, what about the services freely provided by nature? The services of atmospheric cycles and pollution-absorbing forests cost nothing — which mean that as they grow scarcer they do not get more expensive, and do not spur the development of technological replacements. Today, those resources — what we might think of as the earth’s reproductive rather than productive functions — are the ones most under threat. Like human reproductive work, they operate in the background of economic production, providing the basic functions necessary for life.
But it’s also an open question as to whether those kinds of resources actually have substitutes. Plastic chairs can substitute for wooden ones, or plastic bags for paper — but can you build a substitute for an entire forest? Can human technologies or human labor substitute for the nonhuman work done by other organisms? Or are there certain kinds of work that only nature can do?
It is not due to tactics, though, that I refer to today’s troublemakers as “radicals.” I use the word here to mean those who seek to understand and change problems at their root. As civil rights icon and organizer Ella Baker put it, to think in radical terms “means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” For really changing a society where a small elite controls most of the power and resources will not be easy. There will be a lot of resistance, and tinkering at the surface is unlikely to last. It is that understanding that drives the people I spoke to for this book, and that gives me hope that they might have an effect.
saving for the ella baker quote
The financial sector had grown exponentially in the decades leading up to the crisis—to the point where it accounted for about 40 percent of all corporate profits in the early 2000s, and rebounded from the crash to around 30 percent. And yet it was not very good at doing what it was supposed to do, which is to direct capital toward the best possible investments. Stock trading had little to do with raising money to keep businesses flowing, and more to do with fattening the pockets of the already-wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Keeping the stock price of a company high was more important to the people who ran it than keeping its factories producing or its workforce paid. A J. P. Morgan executive admitted in a 2011 letter to clients that “reductions in wages and benefits explain[ed] the majority” of the increase in profits.
Just as the TARP vote worked to get Congress’s imprimatur on public bailouts for the banks in 2008, the public’s participation in the stock market gave ideological cover to whatever the stock market did: if “the people” supported it, it must be democratic and just. Yet the public’s involvement with Wall Street, while it did grow, has always been overstated: stock ownership is concentrated at the top, with 81 percent of stocks owned by the top 10 percent, and 38 percent of stocks owned by the top 1 percent. Half of all households own no stock whatsoever. Mostly, their entanglement with finance is through debt.
Outside the Walmart in Secaucus, New Jersey, on Black Friday 2013, Harris sat down in the street, a boilermaker on one side of him, a postal worker on the other, behind a banner reading “WALMART = POVERTY.” Joining the rally were Occupy activists from New York and New Jersey; fast-food workers who had also been organizing with the Fight for $15; restaurant workers; and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra marching band. Thirteen people were arrested in front of that Walmart for civil disobedience; nearly a hundred more were arrested around the country. As the police cuffed Harris’s hands behind his back, he shot me a giant grin through the crowd.
“I’ve never felt more complete in my life,” he told me later. “I’m glad that I’m here, because now I have twenty-four hours a day, and weekends if I choose to work them, to go out and organize. And not against Walmart, but for the workers. There’s a difference, because this is not an ‘Us Against Walmart’ thing; this is ‘Walmart Against Us,’ and we’re trying our best to protect ourselves.” As for his dismissal, he shrugged, saying, “We knew that was a possibility, but we didn’t care, because change had to happen. Major change only happens as a result of someone losing something. Just like in the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. People lost their lives and were imprisoned, but all those negative things actually transitioned into positive changes.”
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Near the railroad, an army base, and a prison, the warehouse was a terrifying place to work. Despite the fact that she had arrived at the job along with her boyfriend, she said, her supervisor asked her out three times before her first lunch break. The packages were covered with dust—“We called it ‘China death dust,’” she said, because it left them constantly coughing—but the gloves they were given would rip and never be replaced. Without shin guards, workers would cut themselves on pallets while unloading. And all the while, the temps were pushed to get their cases-per-hour rate up in order to be considered for direct hire so they could stay on past the holidays. “You were treated like a machine,” Hoffman said.
elwood illinois distribution center (walmart)