[...] 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?