To most of the rest of the world, the administration has been belligerent and oppressive while doing the same internally to “blue” states and cities by both attempting to cut off federal funding and sending in official terror squads. Trying to follow what is happening on social media, the horrifying evidence of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is now interspersed with videos of anonymous federal agents brutalizing immigrants, people they racially profile as potential immigrants, and anyone doing anything to impede repulsive shadow president Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing campaign. The Lidless Eye of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a source of flagrant injustice since its inception in 2002, has been fully turned inward and is now bulking up with a hiring spree after a massive funding increase from the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol have gone from very bad to full-on Gestapo slave patrol, treating seemingly everyone they encounter with contempt and menace, violating basic laws and judicial rulings on a regular basis with total impunity, and generally acting like an occupying force. They are masked and heavily armed, roving from city to city as MAGA’s secret police, kidnapping landscapers, construction workers, delivery drivers, teachers, and cooks; grandparents, parents, and children; people who have been here for decades and prospective citizens dutifully attending court hearings via the legal process. They target schools, daycares, hospitals, restaurants, and neighborhoods. They beat and snatch people and ship them off to deadly concentration camps. They smash windows, crash cars, blanket neighborhoods in chemical weapons, threaten and beat bystanders, and point and shoot their guns at people with “less-lethal” and maximally lethal ammunition alike.

In one such incident on January 7th, veteran ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good, in Minneapolis around a mile from where George Floyd was killed in 2020. After dropping her son off at school, Good was, alongside her wife and others, trying to help protect her neighbors from a hostile invading force, armed with nothing but whistles and cell phone cameras and presence. She was executed by state agents because she tried to drive away as they threatened her. She was still alive as a physician bystander asked to check on her, but he was refused by the agents, who seemingly did not perform any first aid themselves. When the medics arrived, she barely had a pulse and it was too late.

Good’s murder captured national attention; sports podcasters, fitness influencers, and normally apolitical friends have been decrying it—and even the larger racial terror campaign it spawned from. The Trump administration and its lackeys and remoras have, predictably, doubled down in justifying Ross’s actions through a combination of contradictory lies, victim-blaming, homophobia, and misogyny. She hit him with her car; she tried to run him over; she was a terrorist; she was interfering in law enforcement activities; she was a professional agitator; she was a crazy, communist, liberal, queer woman who had it coming. In Ross’s cell phone footage, immediately after the shots are fired you can hear him call her a “fucking bitch.”

Katie Britt, one of my state’s two terrible US senators, defended the Trump administration’s actions on right-wing network Newsmax by saying, “This is what America voted for.” It is true that Trump ran on conducting mass deportations, and I do not doubt that some portion of his followers, hooked on the “wages of whiteness,” relished the idea of something like this happening. But Trump also constantly said that he was going to be targeting “the worst of the worst” like “murderers, rapists, and gang members,” and the administration continues to repeat this despite its clear and brazen untruthfulness. The idea that there is a large group of violent criminal immigrants roaming around this country is a racist conspiracy theory that now pervades the Republican Party. Unfortunately, it is clear now that many people who voted for Trump, including many immigrants and people of color, believed that not only is this a real and significant population, but that the US government could and would easily target and deport them.

Nonetheless, powerful Democratic elected officials like Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar are still, even now, essentially reinforcing this lie by saying that immigration enforcement is not focusing on violent criminals like they said they would. Many others have blamed poor training. To be clear, the training is quite poor, and they are arresting the most innocent people imaginable, but this is where “tough on immigration” leads. You will not out-reaction the reactionaries, but that would be unacceptable even if you could. Why can’t these ostensible leaders take real moral stands? Why can’t they offer an unconditional defense of immigrants and immigration? What happened to the “No human is illegal” yard signs and the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”?

Our immigration system is clearly quite broken and needs to be fixed, but in ways that provide pathways to citizenship. Immigration is good, and diversity is good. It enriches my life to know and live in community with people of different backgrounds and ethnicities, and I do not give a single fuck if someone came here illegally. But to foment a backlash, Republicans subtly shift between the “violent illegal immigrants” lie and blaming general (Black and brown) immigration for every possible social and economic ill that the (white) public might be facing: unaffordable housing, skyrocketing healthcare costs, difficulty finding a good job, a supposed decline of social cohesion, etc. Of course this is all nonsense, a racist release valve to try to get working-class people to vote for the GOP by accepting a zero-sum worldview and ignoring the fact that the rich are the ones actually immiserating and fleecing them.

Trump’s superpower is that, for some reason, people project all sorts of fantasies on him and hear whatever they want to hear when he talks while ignoring the copious evidence of who he is, what he does, who he surrounds himself with, and what the Republican Party is now. This is facilitated by an endless stream of subtle and overt propaganda and lies, now supercharged by algorithms, AI, and the destruction of journalism. But some people also like at least some of what he is actually selling and maybe compartmentalize the rest, which is now especially true of the ruling class, who, as the late Mike Davis diagnosed, seemingly have a collective brain tumor.

Previously a bulwark against some of the worst impulses of MAGA, many elites in various positions of power across civil society have responded to Trump’s second win by pretending like the entire country is now permanently reactionary. Even many who are critical of Trump have been advocating for politics that meet him halfway, on immigration policy, climate policy, trans rights, and otherwise. But Trump did not even get a majority of the popular vote (49.8%) and edged out Kamala Harris by just 1.48%, one of the closest margins in US history. Harris lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a combined ~230,000 votes, which if swung in her direction would have given her the Electoral College (not to mention that Republicans won the House of Representatives by a mere ~7,500 votes). And this is in a system that is structurally undemocratic in many ways and favors the GOP.

A presidential election, especially one this tight, is a complex event with basically infinite variables that defies monocausal explanations. It is also a snapshot in time; events and conditions start changing the terrain immediately afterwards. People are full of contradictions and do not have a static or coherent set of political beliefs; many who voted for Trump also voted for diametrically opposed democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the same time or Zohran Mamdani a year later.

Nonetheless, the rich and powerful have in general rolled over in Trump 2.0 out of fear or short-term profit motive, or—for those radicalized further rightward by some brain-damaging combination of wealth, insularity, group chats, and/or social media—they are outright collaborating. Not content with merely being wealthy beyond imagination, some of the most Trumpist billionaires have bought up huge media corporations, both legacy and social, seemingly to further their ideological project.

The legendary CBS News is becoming pathetic regime propaganda courtesy of the world’s fifth-wealthiest man. The editorial arm of the once-venerable Washington Post, owned by the fourth-wealthiest man in the world, has embraced MAGA. Musk, currently Earth’s wealthiest man, has completed his transformation of Twitter into X, basically an online Superfund site that, as Max Read recently noted, has become a key piece of infrastructure for the global right. It is where Musk regularly promotes the most flagrant white supremacy and absurd conspiracies, and where official US government accounts are now run by neo-Nazis and hopelessly addicted cabinet members desperately vie for attention by propagating the Mad King’s fantasies and fictions.

Reactionaries lie all the time, about everything. They are first and foremost lying to themselves, scared of everything and furious that nothing can fill the sad void inside, desperate to make everyone else as hateful and fearful as they are. To justify their actions, they must on some level believe that human society is an amoral struggle where might makes right and exploiting anyone weaker than you is not only the natural order, but laudable. They lie because this is not actually normal or inevitable; it takes a great deal of artifice and work and energy to propagate a meaningful constituency for bigotry and terror, a lot of poison streamed into a lot of hearts and minds that must be constantly refilled lest reality or morality make their way in.

There is a common notion that, when faced with natural disasters, humans will resort to base selfishness. We have a massive industry built around selling the idea of doomsday prepping with gold, guns, and bunkers (they run a lot of ads on conservative media). But, contrary to the individualized, hypercompetitive, and exploitative structures of our society, how most people actually act when dealing with broad-based calamity, time and time again, is by cooperating in the most radical ways.

The reign of terror that the Trump administration is inflicting on the Minneapolis area right now is something like an ongoing man-made tornado, chaotic and violent and ruthless, unnaturally hurting the most vulnerable the worst. The thousands of roving bandits are wreaking havoc and basically turning the city into a war zone. Many schools and businesses have been forced to close to protect students, parents, and workers. The videos of abuse and terror are seemingly endless. I just saw one where an agent tackled a kid in the freezing snow as he heartbreakingly repeated “Soy legal,” then they put him in handcuffs and took him away. They abducted a five-year old boy named Liam, tried to use him as bait, and immediately shipped him off to a squalid detention center in Texas with his dad, separating them from Liam’s mom and older brother, despite the family having an ongoing asylum case. Look at these fucking pictures.

It is hard to fathom how you could do what they are doing and still sleep at night, but many seem to even relish it. However, most people are not like Trump or Miller or ICE thugs and that clearly enrages them, because not only does the resistance foil their plans, it is a mirror. Like in Los Angeles and Chicago and DC before it, large swaths of Minneapolis-area residents are responding to catastrophe the way they always do, with selflessness and courage, but on an even greater scale requisite to that of the incursion. Many thousands of regular people are organizing mutual aid systems, rapid response networks, and neighborhood watches. They are volunteering their time and effort and often putting themselves at great risk to help people they may or may not even know. They are standing on street corners in freezing weather, tracking and following the demonic convoys, and running errands for neighbors who can’t go outside for fear of abduction. This flies in the face of every single story that conservatives tell about Minneapolis, this country, and humanity in general.

In some sense, Trump 2.0 is both a continuation and a new mutation. The United States was built on genocide and slavery, its expansive wealth and power facilitated by imperialism to this day. It has long been a source of great misery for many at home and abroad, with stated values full of hypocrisy. This is in fact often a driver of immigration from the countries our policies destabilize, and even the “nation of immigrants” history is riven with racism, exploitation, and nativism. But the actual human beings who live here are capable of so much, and so many have over and over again struggled against injustice. Like they are now.

According to a recent New York Times poll, Trump’s approval on immigration is -18, and ICE is at -27. Even authoritarianism requires a certain level of consent from the governed, and I think that—contrary to the ruling class and despite all the lies and propaganda—ordinary people believe in human rights and dignity, feel outrage at moral transgressions, and will help each other when given the chance. When that happens at scale, the experience can change you in the process. You see yourself differently, you see your neighbors differently, you feel your agency and see what we are capable of. You maybe even see through the cracks a vision of what a different, better arrangement of society might look like.

Today Minneapolis organized a massive general strike and protest of the occupation. The entire city council and a number of unions supported it, and over 50,000 people turned out in subzero weather.

This storm will not blow over on its own, nor will its damage be remedied without heroic effort, but as philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò likes to say, we are going to win.

After making landfall in Florida on the night of September 26th, Hurricane Helene left a wake of destruction through the southeast US. Over 220 people are confirmed dead so far, making Helene the fourth-deadliest storm to hit the US in the last 80 years. Entire towns have been washed away, and many places in North Carolina and Tennessee are not accessible by land because bridges and roads have been destroyed. Millions of people lost power for days (around 200,000 across Georgia and the Carolinas still do not have it). Residents of Asheville, NC, a city often touted as a climate haven, faced severe flooding and may not have running water for weeks. It will probably be awhile before the extent of the damage can be accurately assessed, but initial estimates are as high as $110 billion.

Hurricane Helene is indeed a disaster, but it is anything but natural. Like other such events, the harm caused—the death and destruction and abandonment—are the result of countless contingencies and political choices. Like everything else in our society, the damage plays out along existing lines of social inequality, where the poorest and most marginalized are more likely to lose everything while wealth and power allow for a degree of mobility and insulation.

At an Impact Plastics factory in east Tennessee, workers were reportedly forced to stay on the job as conditions worsened and floodwaters approached. Once the power went out and they were sent home, it was too late. Eleven people were swept away by the flood. Five were rescued, four are confirmed dead, and two are still unaccounted for.

There is a notion sometimes espoused by people across the entire political spectrum that the US will mostly be spared by the climate crisis. This can be a comforting and useful story, but it is not true, even if many of the countries least responsible will be hit harder. We are already seeing more severe hurricanes, wildfires, and heatwaves at 1.3ºC of warming, and this will only get worse as long as fossil fuels continue to be burned. A study published last week found that the average long-term deaths caused by US hurricanes are in the 7,000-11,000 range as the devastating secondary and tertiary effects ripple through communities for years.

We live in complex webs of ecological and economic interdependency. And a disaster in one place might not directly and immediately harm you, but you might feel its effects many miles away because of our globalized society. Hurricane Helene hit the small town of Spruce Pines, NC, which produces almost all of the world’s high-purity quartz, a vital component in semiconductors, solar panels, and other high-tech machinery. The mining operation only sustained minor damage, but it still lacks electricity and nearby transportation infrastructure may be significantly affected. It remains to be seen if this will have any noticeable upstream effects.

This is a new climatic era, where the unprecedented, the once-in-a-millenium, have and will become more and more normal. Every decision to perpetuate the fossil fuel system or clear-cut a rainforest makes a contribution. But that is only part of the story; a number of political and ecological bills are coming due.

In North Carolina, the Republican Party oversaw a regime of lax building rules, allowing for construction on place where it should not occur like steep slopes, floodplains, and wetlands, rejecting proposed limits. Of course, this is at the behest of the construction industry, which wants to build things for the lowest cost possible in order to maximize their profits. This is more the norm than not throughout the US, where development is permitted to drain and pave over natural water and carbon sinks and build in the areas at highest risk of wildfires and flooding.

Our insurance system is clearly not up to the task of mitigating these risks. Less than 1% of inland homes hit by Helene had flood insurance. Private insurers are increasingly pulling out of many high-risk areas, but without a managed retreat this often leaves the working class in the dust. We need to socialize the costs and benefits while simultaneously planning a comprehensive transition towards more just and ecologically sustainable land use. This would allow for a collective freedom decidedly at odds with the twisted conservative version where wealth makes health and might makes right that helped get us here.

Many people are predicting that the increasingly clear and destabilizing ecological breakdown will cause the US Right to soon turn from outright climate denial to “ecofascism,” using the crisis as an excuse to further militarize borders and hoard resources. But they are already espousing and enacting these evil policies, and they are not invoking climate change—and I do not think the conservative powers-that-be will anytime soon. There is little “eco” to be found in the increasingly fascist GOP, a party structurally enmeshed with oil barons, car dealership owners, and the corporate freedom to pollute with impunity.

Not satisfied with despoiling the air, water, and soil, they are increasingly polluting the information ecosystem, a trend that accelerated during the height of the pandemic. In the wake of Helene, a network of far-right influencers, politicians, and media figures have sown chaos with a firehose of terrible lies and misinformation. Donald Trump has claimed that the Biden administration diverted disaster relief funding to illegal immigrants. Images made by generative “AI” programs are being viewed by millions of people, shared as ostensible photographic evidence of the lack of Biden administration disaster response.

US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said “they can control the weather” on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Twitter used to be a key information source during disasters, but now it is a key source of misinformation. Not only is its search function useless as it fills with bots and spam, owner Elon Musk has used the site he ran into the ground to spread lies about FEMA, causing their workers to receive death threats on the platform. FEMA has a long history as a favored subject of conspiracy theories, which have now crawled out of the darkest corners of the internet and into the shameless and addled brains of some of the most powerful people in the world.

It has gotten so bad that North Carolina politicians from both parties have had to denounce the lies, and FEMA added a rumor debunking page to their website. No, the government did not create Hurricane Helene in order to remove the residents of North Carolina so they could access the state’s lithium reserves.

Republicans might outright deny climate change, or the human contribution to it, or the government response to its effects, or any number of other aspects of reality, but the Democratic Party has its own forms of denial. Vice President Kamala Harris, like Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama before her, has on the campaign trail been simultaneously espousing the necessity of climate action while also touting record domestic oil and gas production. Even the ostensible climate action is in and of itself a decidedly mixed bag, mostly based on incentives for renewable energy and electric vehicle consumption and production.

The Biden-Harris administration is also embracing harsher immigration policy and rhetoric and a new cold war with China while supplying the bombs and political support for a genocide in Gaza. During her Democratic National Convention speech, Harris said, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Even beyond the direct death and destruction in the present, it is easy to see how these extrapolate into a horrifying future when climatalogical and ecological conditions worsen.

There is not really an alternative agenda of global cooperation or valuing life instead of profit on offer. This is denial in a more abstract sense than the angry, childish conservative version. Denial that the business-as-usual of capitalism and imperialism can continue if this is a crisis you actually want to solve, and denial that the powerful have the means and responsibility to take requisite action. Carbon reductionist tax credits for 9,000 lb electric Hummers and massive “climate-smart” factory farms are certainly not it. Neither are sanctions and bombs on the Global South. Fracking every last drop of fossil fuels with hardened borders and a globe-spanning, ecocidal military-industrial complex is a politics of death and violence that will collapse on itself no matter how many solar panels you manufacture and install in the US.

This is not a vision for caring for and repairing the biosphere, which each day becomes more urgent than ever. In a journal article published today, a group of climate scientists bluntly stated,

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.

Also today, Hurricane Milton is quickly gathering steam in the Gulf of Mexico and was recently upgraded to a Category 5, the highest designation for hurricane wind speed. Meteorologist Noah Bergen said, “This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.” Large swaths of Florida—many of which were just battered by Hurricane Helene—are in mandatory or encouraged evacuation zones, with Milton poised to make landfall in the Tampa area within the next day or so.

Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that removed all mentions of “climate change” from state statutes. During his failed campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination last year, DeSantis said he has “always rejected the politization of the weather.” Any politics that hopes to truly tackle the accelerating global crises of fascism and climate change will have to explicitly and intentionally reject this obfuscation—and act accordingly.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

MH: How did you get involved in climate policy?

JB: After college, I worked for an environmental nonprofit, and honestly, that was my radicalization moment. Our organization was funded by Wells Fargo, Southwest, and Toyota. Those were our three biggest funders. So as you can imagine, it was a real “come to Jesus” moment that very ineffective climate advocacy exists and, in fact, it can be greenwashing and harmful. That was a moment where I thought, This is not the world that I want to be building. So I decided to switch gears, go back to school. My family is part Dutch, so I decided maybe I just need to get out of the United States and maybe I will go to some greener, more sustainable pastures where there's more of an understanding of what the green economy could be. So I went over to the Netherlands, and what did I find? I found Royal Dutch Shell.

Shell was so enmeshed in my public university that they actually sponsored my grad program’s career services. I was in this do-gooder sustainability grad program, and here is Shell setting the pace and setting the agenda. So that sent me into the world of divestment and into the anti-fossil fuel organizing movement. I did a lot of anti-Shell organizing. I did work on Shell’s influence on the culture in the Netherlands and trying to eliminate their social license. I also worked on organizing to shut down a coal port in Amsterdam. Shell in many ways was seen as a positive force in the Netherlands, providing good jobs and funding big museum wings. But of course, it is actually one of the biggest companies driving the climate crisis and the driver of so much of the colonial history of the Netherlands, too. Part of my family history takes place in Dutch-colonized Indonesia, so my organizing, in part, was me reckoning with that history and my relationship to Shell, to the Netherlands and places like Indonesia, Nigeria and the Ogoni people, and so many other places.

From there, I became far more involved in climate activism, far more involved in a more radical politic. What I still was looking for and became the focus of my research and my grad program was: what's the world we're building? What replaces the broken system that we currently have? Which got me really thinking about energy justice and energy democracy, and that's really built out into a larger framework of ecosocialism in my everyday work at Climate and Community Project.

How does your organizing background inform the policy and research work that you got into? 

I saw a very ineffective climate organization that was not doing the work. And I saw a bunch of incredible organizing on the ground in the Netherlands, in Europe. I was very focused on direct action at the time, but I am a wonk at heart; I am a nerd at heart. So it felt like entering into the policy and research space and bringing that organizing was this marriage of two parts of myself. 

When within more academic circles and within the technocratic ethos that can occupy climate spaces, I found there were two things that were often happening when policy development and research were untethered from organizing—and both of them are because they didn't have an analysis of power. One is that you get the perfect policy that's developed in an ivory tower, but it's left there to wither on the vine because it's too perfect, it can't be adapted. And then the second one, it's the policy that gives up the fight before the fight has happened. Because you haven't done your analysis, you don't know what you can actually fight for.

Those two outcomes speak to the necessity of connecting policy and organizing so that we can use research to do the power-building, and how power-building actually allows us to be more aggressive in the types of policies we put forward.

How do you see the role of the Climate and Community Project, as a left climate think tank, in driving the sorts of positive changes you're talking about?

Some of our strategy emerges from what the Right has very effectively been able to do, which is conduct intellectual production and develop policies. They provide the research that then becomes the lingua franca, or the common sense of academia, the common sense of politicians. They have an ecosystem of people with “PhD” behind their name that say that something is true, and that has gained them a huge amount of power. I think what we are interested in doing at Climate and Community Project is being able to create a new type of common sense when it comes to issues of climate and economy. 

There are a few ways that we can do that. One is we can help to shape the agenda. We have incredible academics and researchers that are out there—yourself included, Matt—who have been thinking about the types of large systemic changes we need. I’ll draw from Thea Riofrancos’s work, where she has been thinking about the new extractive economy in the energy transition. Many organizers were finding themselves pit against one another: people who have been doing anti-extractives work for decades—including the fossil fuel industry—and then people who are fighting for electrification of transportation. By being able to coalesce and create a new assessment of that ecosystem, I think the report that we put out—led by Thea, that you worked on—shows that that can be a false choice and creates a new potential common sense of saying we can actually both decarbonize transportation and limit the amount of extraction necessary in the future. So I think that's the agenda-setting component of what Climate and Community Project has the ability to do.

The second is to be the research workhorses for the movement. In many situations, it does not make sense for movement organizations, grassroots groups, to have a research team. But we have so much data that's out there that could actually be helping them either define their campaigns or back up their campaigns. That's something that we've been doing a lot of, like can we model how many jobs this policy that you're putting forward can actually create? For instance, we did this for folks who were fighting for the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) in New York State to show that there was going to be this economic benefit. So two things that we can often do are ideation and packing the punch with research so that we can actually start to win some of these campaigns.

One third piece I would throw in here is growing the number of academics and researchers who understand movement politics and understand policy development so that—just like the Right has had the economists that they can pull in for any congressional hearing—the Left also has that ability: “I know that I can call CCP, and they can get me an expert that can speak elegantly about this issue that backs up with data the thing that I am saying through my lived experience.” I think that's a very powerful combination when it comes to shifting and winning policies.

What I hear you saying is that CCP is really serving as this connection point between these different areas that are often really isolated and separate but need to be informing each other. 

Exactly. Also, we work with a bunch of grad students that are going to be within academia for a long time, so it's also about that next generation that's coming up. When we look at how the Biden administration brought in people to run different positions in the Department of Energy or the Treasury, they're often picking from think tanks and from academia. What if we had people who understood movements and were far more equipped to do so? I think you would see more radical implementation and the development of people within the system that we can actually draw upon and help to push from the outside, too. So I think that's another piece of the strategy, that next generation. As you were saying, building that tissue between policymaker, researcher, and grassroots advocate.

In doing that work you described, what are some of the biggest successes you've had with CCP, and what are some of the challenges you've encountered or adjustments you've had to make in navigating that terrain? 

One success story I'll give is that of working with Senator Nikil Saval on his Whole-Homes Repair bill. This is a bill that provides a massive amount of weatherization support to Pennsylvania homeowners with strong tenant protections. A couple of our CCP fellows, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Nick Graetz, conducted mapping analysis to find that there is alignment and potential for power-building between low-income communities in the cities—in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh—as well as folks who are in rural areas of Pennsylvania because both of them have extremely high energy burdens. There's actually a powerful coalition that can be built from that orientation. The Whole-Homes Repair bill passed with bipartisan support, and now we're seeing different states try to take it up and deploy.

So I think that speaks to being able to conduct analysis at the outset can set up a campaign to make really strategic decisions about how to build and where to build. For instance, that rural and urban relationship-building is particularly important when we're talking about climate and these two communities that have often been pitted against one another, to see themselves as holding similar issues in their lives.

Another example, which I've already mentioned, is the report that you worked on, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining. It was able to shift the narrative, it was able to get beyond more left-leaning press and get into some of the more technical coverage. It got coverage in a wide range of different outlets. I think it shows that we provided an answer to a question that people were smashing their heads against their desk about. That really speaks to the effect of being able to use modeling as a political tool to envision the future. Too often, those are in the wrong people's hands. This was an example of how we can actually set the assumptions ourselves, and those assumptions are for a better world. 

CCP was built out of the power of the Green New Deal, and we got the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). There are some big wins in the IRA, but it shows that we're still pretty far away from winning the suite of policies that actually do what Climate and Community Project takes really seriously, which is changing people's material realities. I was just reading Kate Aronoff’s piece about how we need more pool parties; basically, we should be investing in the type of infrastructure that people can feel and see.

That’s the thing that we didn't squarely get in the Inflation Reduction Act. It's relatively technocratic, it barely touches tenants’ lives, and that's a failure in a lot of ways for our ability to power-build off of it. We've adapted by going down to the state level to consider how, with what we're given, we can try to explode the possibility and set up for the next win. Because the IRA just doesn't do it on its own. A lot of our internal shifts in thinking reflects the fact that we can't only be working at the federal level. We still very much believe in a Green New Deal, and we also need to be doing that at the localized level, build the example and build the base.

I want to talk to you about public power, something you have a lot of expertise in and that I've worked with you a little bit on. Actually, this reminded me of something you talked about with our mining report and how that broke through. I’ve been thinking about this with The Price is Wrong, the Brett Christophers book I’m reading, and how that's broken through in the mainstream. And public power is getting more popular and mainstream. What do you think about that and how ideas break through? 

I think Brett Christophers articulated a frustration—wait, prices are so low, why isn't this shifting?—and he gave a new answer to that that helps people have that “aha” moment in a similar way. He does a great explanation of the problem, and then at the end gesticulates to what the solution could be, but I think gives that tangibility of: I'm not crazy, there is something that isn't going right here, and we need an answer to it. That's one piece of the breaking through. 

Hopefully, another piece that we've always been talking about, the stuff that actually changes people's lives are the things that are going to break through. If someone gets a new heat pump in their home—a la Daniel Aldana Cohen’s concept of heat pump populism. I've been working on this piece on a Green New Deal for low carbon leisure. People will see when their pool is open in the summer and they get access to it. Being able to name that and claim that as a climate policy helps us to break through.

On public power, when I started working on public power, basically nobody paid attention to it [laughs]. Seven or eight years ago, I wrote something and there was basically just Boulder, Colorado, and it felt to everyone like a 100 year old fight. We hit a wall where everyone was trying to liberalize their electricity market to get more renewables on board, they were fighting in the public utility commissions (PUCs) or fighting at the state level to get an RPS—a renewable portfolio standard—and shit just still wasn't happening. Then you add in massive bills increasing and people not being able to pay their bills and going into debt or being shut off from electricity. I think that really came to a head in the past few years in a way that people were like, Screw it, I'm not doing this incrementalism anymore; we need something that is more systemic. Especially as we started to see more extreme weather come through.

PG&E1 is probably when the idea felt like it really exploded in a new way because it was so obvious who the villain was. PG&E did not invest in their transmission and the climate crisis bit them in the butt because of that. The combination of negligence and the climate crisis, and the fact that they did it—people were outraged. I remember, having written about public power for a few years at that point and advocating for it and trying to organize around it, everyone being like, Ooh, that's a little too spicy for me, I think I’m going to stay away from it; I'm just going to work on my community solar program. Then this happened, and I remember Jigar Shah2 even, on his podcast—he was on The Energy Gang at the time—said, “I really just think this thing needs to be taken over by the state; they obviously don't have the social license to operate anymore and I think it could be run by California.” I double-took—Jigar Shah is saying that we should actually nationalize PG&E? 

As you know, PG&E is not currently nationalized or in public ownership, but I think it got a lot of people thinking about what they wanted their future energy system to look like and why we saw more people having conversations about public power. In some ways, we saw the biggest critical mass on public power probably in 2022. We had a huge number of campaigns, DSA had put this on their platform as the big thing, Maine was gearing up for its fight, BPRA was at its height.

Right now we're in a moment in which we've seen a couple of losses for public power. And what it tells me is that we're up against a very formidable opponent. In the case of Maine, it was, I think, 35 to one spending—we barely had a million dollars, they had like $40 million. It was just such a radical difference in our capacities. A lot of people are figuring out how even to talk about public power, how to organize around it. We have to try things out, and they're really hard campaigns. I think we have to figure out what the steps are that get us to that full transformation.

That's my assessment of where we are in public power. I think that public power remains a strategy and opportunity moving forward. The Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay that actually puts public entities on the same playing level as private is an opportunity. We're just seeing people reckon with how to use that tool to build public ownership in the energy sector.

Over 80% of US energy infrastructure is privately owned, and over 70% of electricity customers are served by investor-owned utilities (IOUs), and they wield enormous political power. And there are two very distinct things we have to deal with: there's existing public power that we have to improve—people talk about the TVA a lot—and then taking private infrastructure into public ownership. How do you think about navigating that terrain right now?

The US is actually an anomaly, at least historically, in terms of the fact that the energy sector largely emerged as privately owned. In many other places, the public sector operates energy just like they do water—with the recent exception, of course, of the wave of privatizations that have happened since Thatcherism and the onset of neoliberalism. We are still dominated by private industry here; it's been a pretty coordinated effort to keep it that way. A story I like to tell is that investor-owned utilities are the reason that we have PUCs instead of public power. In fact, there was this drive for municipal utilities back in the early 1910s or so when electricity had become more ubiquitous and the investor-owned utilities were charging exorbitant rates. This catalyzed a wave of municipalizations across the country. The precursor to the Edison Electric Institute3 decided they would rather be regulated than be taken over and compromised with politicians– allowing themselves to be regulated monopolies to take the wind out of the sails of municipalization. It's nice when you can also use your political influence to regulate yourselves.

Why do I say all of that? We have a history of fighting for public power in the United States. That was one moment that it happened. The other really huge moment, of course, was the New Deal. A cornerstone of FDR’s New Deal was the development of municipal utilities, the TVA, some of these power marketing agencies, and the Rural Electrification Administration to provide universal access and to create a counterweight to the highly consolidated private utilities.

We're reaching the next precipice of systemic change in the electricity system because we're running up against the problem of private industry incentives here in a couple of different ways. One is the grid: how do we keep this stuff resilient when industry is incentivized to extract profit over reinvestment and grid hardening? If we believe energy is a human right, do we keep people's utility costs low and universal when shareholders are more important? On the energy production side, the generation, even though we've opened up markets in an attempt to allow renewables to compete, the market design and private financing mechanisms are such that renewables aren’t breaking through to the extent that we need to transition to clean electricity.

That’s why the BPRA-style development of renewable generation really could be a breakthrough when taking over the entirety of a utility’s grid and infrastructure is so hard; us being able to enter into the generation market and prove the alternative seems really exciting to me. That's been some of my recent thinking on this. The long game is the grid; we have to own the grid. It is so clearly a public asset, and it is so clearly one that is failing right now. So it is a question of the road to acquisition.

That idea that IOUs created PUCs, that's very important in understanding how the system operates and how it came to be.

I think it speaks to the feeling that people were having in trying to organize around the PUC as your core point of intervention, too. I think there's a lot of benefit to PUCs. [laughs] To be clear, regulation should exist. In fact, I think we should have more regulatory infrastructure for existing publicly owned utilities. But it's the combination of ownership plus regulation that is core when it comes to public services. And right now, we only have one part of the puzzle—regulation—which means that corporations are able to influence this regulatory body far too discreetly.

Investor-owned utilities’ influence is especially obvious at the state level. I think an important fact of how the US grid works is that utilities have aggressively tried to keep regulations to the state level because it's much cheaper to capture or influence your state legislators or regulators than playing national politics. It's a very disconnected and messy grid because of that, and it means that federal action is harder. For instance, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission only has jurisdiction if you're going across state lines. We don't have a national grid system in the United States. The electricity system right now is made in the image of an investor-owned utility, not made for the service of people and the climate crisis we're in, and that's what we're trying to solve.

You talked about BPRA, which is very exciting. What other sorts of interventions do you think are good strategic opportunities to advance public power?

It’s another New York example, but I'm excited about the proposal of distributed rooftop solar deployed by a public entity. This is a New York City pilot that's happening right now. I think it's really smart. It actually does help to take on some of the equity issues that are associated with rooftop solar. One of the biggest things is that if you're a low income homeowner, how the heck are you going to get solar on your roof? Usually it requires you to take on debt but you might not have a high enough credit rating, and so you can’t get rooftop solar. That means rooftop solar is more accessible to richer people who then get access to cheaper energy. So I think having a public entity that is thinking about how we provide access to this asset to other people is a really exciting thing. 

Also, I don't really agree that we should see rooftop solar as asset-building. I think that we need an assessment of distributed renewables as a mechanism for resiliency. That's different from how it's usually talked about. It's nice that people can own rooftop solar, but I care more about systemically shifting our concepts of resilience in a city and also lowering bills at a far bigger level. I don't want to create islands of resilience in high income neighborhoods.

By having a public entity that's involved in the planning and deployment of distributed renewables, you have a much higher likelihood of that resilience coming to the top and the public good framework, as compared to a private person trying to increase their equity and lower their costs with their personal renewable energy plus Tesla battery. This is one thing we started to get into a little bit in a report that we wrote, Building Public Renewables in the United States, where we tried to talk about the deployment of distributed renewables from that orientation instead of the one that we've consistently seen from even distributed renewable advocates sometimes. 

That’s really cool, and not something you hear in the mainstream framing.

I don't know if it has a huge amount of potential in this moment, but Matt, can I tell you one of my dreams?

Please. 

I want to take over all of the RTOs and ISOs. For people who don't know what RTOs or ISOs are, they are these bonkers, supposedly nonprofit entities that manage our wholesale energy system. When you have to sell power, you go in there. It has a lot to do with how you're interconnected and transmission access, all this stuff. It is a freaking black box that's absolutely not publicly run and should be. It's one of the biggest things that’s failing to do long-term planning where we need the most long-term planning, and it makes me a little bit crazy. 

Anything that's working on these RTOs and ISOs is extremely technocratic and not structurally changing these entities. Why do we allow them to exist? We need to get rid of them and create something far more strategic that does large-scale, coordinated planning that thinks about where we should be putting renewables and what we should be winding down. We need to do that level and scale of planning, and we, in part, don't have access to the entities that are doing it. I don't know if it's a big power-building opportunity right now, but it is one of those things that I think we need to take down.

This is an idea that we need out there that can be taken up.

With the Green New Deal, we have to make some enormous changes to our society in many ways, and the crises are very urgent. But, as you talked about before, we lack the political power to implement those changes, in the federal government or otherwise. So how are you thinking about the present political moment and navigating that challenge?

Easy question [laughs]. I think one part of the strategy has to be moving out of the insular feeling of the climate arena and really start thinking about those intersections. Of course, we always talk about intersectional organizing, but I think we increasingly need to see that as concrete. There are people who are doing this work, and we just need to ramp that up in scale. 

The thing that I've been seeing since the Inflation Reduction Act passed is a bit of retreat from some climate groups from some of that type of organizing because “we just need to get the renewables online, we need to cut down the amount of time it takes to get a permit for solar.” I think there's a bigger opportunity that's being left on the table of how you are building the political will and power in that community, and building and designing your solar array in a way that actually means that people see that it’s going to help them in their community. Instead of climate people just pushing their shit through, which, particularly in rural areas, I think means we lose more and more of our constituency and the Right wins more and more and can vilify us. So I think that's a very bad short-term potential gain for long-term losses.

In comparison, building with, for instance, housing organizers who are dealing with the realities that rent is too damn high and connecting that to the vision of things like green social housing. What are the tenant protections as all this building or retrofitting is going to be happening? That's where you're going to be building your new power base.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but thinking more strategically about labor than sometimes the climate movement has in the past where it's treated as a black box, and figuring out what those interventions are. I think we are seeing this with UAW organizing and their commitment to thinking about just transitions. How do we build with the emerging political power that new labor gives us? That means we have to be there now and support the teachers who are demanding that the school district get rid of black mold in their buildings; support the UAW rank-and-file crews that are trying to consider EV transitions. Working with the electrical workers.

I think that we can also understand that we are going to hold tension with the building trades and it's not going to always be rosy; it's not always going to be easy to build. But I think finding our allies within that movement and being there for the transformation of labor is also one of those pieces that will make our climate power just so much stronger.

So I think a lot of the fight on climate is a fight for the new coalition of leftists and progressives and the reformulations I feel we're seeing right now. Climate folks are right that we have a time crunch on so much of this stuff, but shortcuts can also hurt our decarbonization efforts. I think it's important to hold onto that reality while also holding the urgency.

• There are a variety of powerful forces—with a variety of motivations—ostensibly putting a lot hope on mechanical carbon capture becoming viable at scale. As Kate Aronoff writes, this technology is still more hype than savior, and debating the correct amount of hope to have for our planet’s future is a waste of energy that tends to belie political economy and the power struggles at hand. Or, as the late Mike Davis put it, “Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.”

• It can be easy to forget that digital technology has a material basis—and therefore an ecological impact. Computers are made from minerals mined from the earth and use water and energy (which of course also requires minerals mined from the earth). The internet is connected by a vast network of cables laid across the sea floor that require regular physical maintenance:

  The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks

  And the push for so-called AI, which requires large buildings full of computers running particularly intensive data processing, is hampering Microsoft’s goal of being carbon negative by 2030: according to Bloomberg, the computing giant’s greenhouse gas emissions are now 30% higher than when they set that goal in 2020.

• The Farm Bill is the most important legislation you probably do not know much about. Every five years or so, this omnibus food legislation that covers everything from agriculture subsidies to SNAP funding is passed, and the next one is coming up soon. Right now, the Farm Bill is full of terrible policies that form the basis of our unjust and ecologically devastating agriculture system. For the Climate and Community Project, Ryan Ackett wrote an excellent post about the Farm Bill and why we need something radically different.

• The loss of ridership from the pandemic dealt a devastating blow to US public transit systems—which, outside of a handful of places, were not that great to begin with—and most have struggled to recover. However, the DC area’s Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), led by General Manager and CEO Randy Clarke, has been a great success. They utilized federal aid to expand and improve service, which not only brought back riders but created stronger constituencies to demand permanent funding for this level of service.

• This is fantastic reporting on tech oligarch Marc Benioff quietly buying up tons of land in Hawaii, a case study in the undemocratic power and hollow, self-interested philanthropy of thin-skinned billionaires (even “conscientious” ones):

  A couple of days before the interview, Benioff texted the same NPR colleague again, asking for intel on my story. Then he called me and demanded to know the title of this piece. During that call, he also mentioned he knew the exact area where I was staying. Unnerved, I asked how he knew, and he said, "It's my job. You have a job and I have a job." During the interview, he brings up more personal details about me and my family.

• China has just installed the first grid-scale sodium-ion battery, which could be a game-changer for renewable energy. One way to deal with the intermittency (i.e. the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow) of renewable energy is to utilize large batteries to store energy for later use. Right now, the lithium-ion battery (LIB) is the dominant technology, but lithium is costly and extracting it has significant social and ecological costs. Sodium-ion batteries are a much cheaper and less environmentally damaging alternative, but they cannot store as much energy as LIBs, so equivalent battery capacities weight more. This is a problem for mobile, disconnected applications like electric vehicles, but not as much for stationary batteries on the grid.

• When it comes to pollution, we typically think of toxic substances in the air, soil, and water, not sounds. But noise pollution is not just an annoyance, it has devastating health impacts by inducing stress responses from our bodies. The EPA used to have an Office of Noise Abatement and Control, but it was defunded by the Reagan administration in 1982.

Thanks for reading!

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity. 

What is a political ecology of desire, and how does desire and the unconscious structure human-plant relations?

So I articulate this need for a political ecology of desire, and one of the things that I'm trying to do as an intervention in this book is say that there was something that exceeded the traditional frameworks of Marxian political economy that structured my dissertation research on human-wildlife conflicts. There was something in excess of economy in what was moving people into relationships with these plants, but in turn transforming species futures either towards abundance in proliferation—or flourishing, as I also tried to develop some theory around—or various forms of diminution; at the most extreme form, extinction.

I think it's really important to share that, especially for folks who may read this or are thinking about their own research, I did not go into this looking for a project through which I could theorize a more-than-human desire. I did not come to this project with a Lacanian psychoanalytic background—for better and worse. It emerged through trying to take seriously the work of studying and learning with plants and the people that care for them and desire them; I realized I was lacking a theoretical framework to understand that sense of desire. I was aware enough that there was this force operating and it felt to me like a kind of desire, but I needed the help of other scholarship. What is desire? That means something more than what we want, right? And so I found Freudian and Lacanian approaches to the unconscious and desire really helpful—in particular, the work of Lacan. Not exclusively, but that is definitely the theorist in psychoanalysis I draw on the most.

So for me, a political ecology of desire is a political ecology that takes seriously the space of the unconscious. And I use the word “space” intentionally, because I actually think—and this is drawing on a variety of scholars’ works in psychoanalytic geographies, which is this really wonderful and burgeoning subfield of geography—there is a real spaciality to the unconscious, that the unconscious isn't just a sort of shadowy cave that we don't have access to in the recesses of our conscious selves. It is actually something that we see before us, to riff on Merleau-Ponty, that we interrogate and move through in the realm of fantasy.

You talk about the contradictions of collecting succulents, between desire and extinction. Can you explain that?

Something that was really interesting to observe was how collectors framed the idea of collecting at times as the work of saving species or saving plants, so I had to do a lot of thinking to try to unpack what that word “saving” was doing. Here we're talking about a very specific band of collectors who still engage in wild harvesting of plants, which it's important to note is not the majority of people in this space—and I think it's changing day by day as well, in a good way. This idea that taking plants out of the place where they live somehow represents an act of preservation or saving has this long historical tail. Of course, immediately we should be thinking about relationships between natural history and imperialism and colonialism, and in the intertwinement of botany and natural history collections with empire and empire building. But also this very Western idea of the act of saving, especially when that act involves people from the Global North going to the Global South, taking things, then putting them in various kinds of collections, whether they're museums—so this relates to salvage anthropology as well—or natural history collections or living botanical gardens.

There's this idea that there's this imminent threat out in these places where these plants, which are very exoticized in the imagination, come from. And also this idea that saving operates as a way of moving these desirable objects into the realm of immortality, both in the imagination, but through, for instance, moving them into the greenhouse then propagating them, reproducing them, giving them to friends, passing them down from one collector to the next with our name appended to them on a little label. So it's both the immortality of the plant and the immortality of the collector themselves, moving through the embodiment of the plant at the same time.

And then one of the things I try to argue in the book—which will make me no friends in any sector other than maybe niche academic ones—is I saw a lot of the same impulses happening in the world of conservation, too. In terms of: what does it mean to save species from a more professional conservation standpoint? Maybe that encourages us to set more ambitious scales when we think about the exclusionary protected area, or something like that. I was trying to build a dialectical relationship between these ideas of saving, in part to say that I actually see a lot of the same dynamics at play with these collectors and these conservationists. Obviously leading towards different outcomes, maybe, for the species; so not trying to say one is one. But maybe that helps us to build a dialogue about what we're actually doing out there in the world and how we might live better with these plants.

In the book, you talk about species categorizations, and how it's a bit less cut and dry for plants than it is for animals. How do you think about the utility of the species concept? Especially the political utility. 

This was something that was new to me going into this work having not really worked on plants before. Disagreements abound; to be sure, there will be plant botanists out there who say, “No, the species concept is great.” Here, we're talking about the Linnaean species concept of genus and species within the broader taxonomic system. A lot of people will tell you that it doesn't work particularly well for plants. Cacti will hybridize with one another. People will oftentimes talk about things like species complexes, these assemblages even, of what we call a species.

The species concept for plants oftentimes tells us more in many ways about human desires than anything else. There are tens of thousands of species of named orchids in the world, and they're one of the most charismatic plants that people have been obsessed with for hundreds of years; it's not a coincidence. In groups of plants that are really heavily coveted and desired, we tend to find more species, because when you have more species, there's new things to collect and desire and want. One way of noting that is there are about 1,500 recognized species of cacti within the Cactaceae taxonomic family, and there are about 12,000 to 15,000 different names of cactus species that have existed historically. So, constantly, collectors and amateur botanists and horticulturists were going out and being like, “Aha, a new species!” And it’s just the same species, but it has a slightly different color or form, or the spines are more curved or longer.

I feel like that's us wading into the kiddie pool of this conversation because there's deeper questions about epistemology here, too. A lot of people recognize that the reason we continue to use the Linnaean system, especially in relationship to plants, is because it's what we have. It's how herbarium are labeled, categorized, and indexed. It's how we make decisions about whether or not a species is endangered.

I attended an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red Listing workshop—the Red List is the most widely recognized list of categorizing species endangerment—for agave plants in Mexico. It's a really challenging thing. First of all, the Red List only considers wild species. So if it's seen as a domesticated plant or animal, it's not on the Red List. Well, agave have basically evolved and moved along with people for millennia as this extraordinarily important cultural plant in North America and Central America and South America. So trying to distinguish sometimes the difference between what is a true species versus a cultivar is really a hot mess.

There was a moment in the workshop where a botanist said, “Well, it's either a species complex or a really complex species.” That was in relationship to this idea that it wasn't so easy to say this is definitely a wild species and this is a landrace or an agricultural varietal. They all hybridize and they mess around with each other.  One botanist friend of mine described the species concept for plants as being like tidal pools at the ocean, and each species is like a small indent in the coast. As the tide comes up, it fills in with new genetic material, and then it's its own little thing for a while, but then every so often, another wave comes in. I thought that was a really nice metaphor for thinking about that, so shout out to Michael McKain at the University of Alabama.

How species get split up matters politically, in terms of conservation because it might be a stable species within the Red List, but then suddenly botanists decide based on genetic analysis or molecular analysis that it's actually two species, but one is only an isolated subpopulation. In moving from a subpopulation to a separate population, it becomes critically endangered overnight. Then suddenly there's all these things that have to happen. Do we have a conservation plan for this species? Is it protected? Alternatively, a plant that is seen as critically endangered suddenly gets reclassified as just a sub-varietal of another species, and suddenly this thing that has been considered critically imperiled is stable. So these species categories do really matter in the space of conservation. 

How do you think desire can be used as a force for positive outcomes, or what you call a flourishing horizon?

Lacan says something along the lines of: the only thing we shouldn't betray is our own desires. I write about this in the last chapter of the book; I wanted to sit with that a little bit because I think it's often misunderstood. It's easy to imagine that meaning something weird, like people should just do whatever they want and not be concerned about other people or consequences and things like that. That's not what Lacan means; he writes about this in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which should be some indication. Getting with desire is about getting with this sense of lack that sits at the core of the desiring subject always on the search for the thing that we might imagine will satisfy that desire, but never will. It's that thing that keeps us always on the move as desiring subjects. Not betraying that desire, to me, means getting with and accepting that sense of repetition and the futility in imagining that we're ever going to be this completely satisfied subject, and embracing that as part of the beautiful thing about being human. 

What I see in that and how I try to connect it to thinking about flourishing is trying to orient our desires in a way that can support as much as possible the flourishing of all kinds of life. That may involve reorientations in contending with what we imagined those desires to be but is, in fact, something that's just operating within the realm of fantasy or the structures of capitalism. Actually, we aren't going to be satisfied subjects if we buy the 40 year old, wild-harvested Copiapoa that we imagine is the only thing missing from our collection and once we have it, our collection will be complete or something. Sitting with that question of: what is it there that I want? What is the next thing? And thinking about how that can reorient our relationships to these plants. To embrace the beauty and radical difference of the temporalities of plants, and the ways that they grow and die simultaneously and reproduce in these dizzyingly different ways than ourselves, and to enact politics that beget flourishing. This is flourishing as an approach that's underpinned by a desire for radical abundance—an earworm dropped into my head by my friend Nicholas Anderson. 

I realize that that all might sound quite abstract, but I see it as quite different than how we often talk about saving species and preserving species. That feels to me oftentimes like there's an emphasis on curtailing our desires or resisting these impulses. I want to find ways of moving beyond that where we see a stronger mapping of desire that begets that flourishing of plants in the world, but also just more generally. The answer is not going to be found by barcoding plants and buying and selling them. That simply ties into—and this is thinking with Todd McGowan's really brilliant work on desire and capitalism—the pernicious ways in which capitalism so brilliantly taps into human desires and senses of repetition. There's always going to be this new thing that we want, and capitalism is always going to be there to present us with an option to buy it and obtain it. All the while, we know on some level it will never actually provide us the satisfaction we seek. So we have to find routes out of that trap. For me, a way of articulating that is flourishing. 

What would multispecies justice, a concept you bring up in the book, look like to you?

It’s such a good question. There's an uneven terrain that we sit on in terms of thinking about what justice means for human communities, especially those most marginalized and often disenfranchised and dispossessed, and inequalities reproduced through, for instance, natural resource management, access, all the usual stuff. What happens when we open up that box of justice and try to expand the tent and think about what it means to talk about justice for non-human life? Are there ways of doing that that don't produce a flattening of terrains of power, or a sense that we're moving human concerns about justice into the same level as the concerns about plant conservation, which I think leads us down some troubling roads? Then the question becomes: how do we attend to these things at the same time, rather than just focusing on one or the other?

So for me, the project of multispecies justice is trying to sit with that tension and the entanglements that questions about justice have in recognizing that we live within ecologies. We, as people, have relations that extend beyond the human, so questions about environmental justice always will also concern non-human species. It's just that we often don't attend to them; or, alternatively, we attend to them at the cost of attending to human concerns. I think there's a way that this tension that we see—and sometimes you see it reflected in conflicts and debates within political ecology and allied fields—seems to reproduce nature-culture binaries within the Euro-Western philosophical canon that so many of us purportedly are trying to work to undo and upend because of the violence that they produce. When we start talking about justice, oftentimes people say, “Wait a second, are you saying that we should be talking about justice for animals or plants at the same time that we're talking about justice for people?” And I think we should be able to say yes; that doesn't mean that they have to mean the same thing.

It's interesting to me that this seems to stretch the imagination a little bit for some folks. Not to say it doesn't stretch mine. But I think that that is a space to lean into rather than to back away from. I recognize I'm not a philosopher, and maybe that's part of the problem [laughs], finding language to talk about this. How can we fight for these different modes of justice recognizing that they're related to one another rather than simply different things? To sit with that mess.

What lessons do you think we can take from this about what we can do about the extinction crisis and biodiversity loss and these massive problems we're facing with ecological and climate crisis?

Yeah, let me solve this once and for all [laughs]. Finally, someone asked me the big question. No, it's important; I didn't spend six years writing this just to dither in theory or something like that. This research changed a lot for me. Now I'm doing all this work on plants and I'm on a bunch of different IUCN groups, which take a lot of time, to think about how we actually respond to issues of illegal trade. But one of the things that I want to pause on for a second is this thing that happens when we entangle with the illicit, that there's something extraordinarily alluring about the illegal and the illicit; desire rears its ugly head. Both for the folks I encountered but also for the researcher. Why are people enraptured or interested in media stories about illegal plant trade?

In this book, I'm definitely focused in on the illicit trade realm, but climate change is a big part of the story. Ongoing issues of habitat degradation and habitat loss, development, urbanization are a big part of the story. And I think about how much less sexy that is for people. In part, I think it's less sexy to read about because it's so overwhelming. It feels so much harder to actually respond to, rather than when it feels like we have a scenario where there's a few bad actors, and if only we can stop them or nab them or orient them in a different direction... That's something I'm constantly reminding myself of, because this is just one thing that's having an impact on these species. So much more of this is about the mundane plotting of the fact that we have these ongoing, intersecting, enormous environmental challenges that face not just cacti and succulents, but so much of biodiversity, and also human wellbeing.

Obviously, in the book, I point fingers a lot at capitalism [laughs]. Shocker. I am a good political ecologist, or wanting to be a good political ecologist. Thinking with desire and capitalism is really important. What happens when we're able to start stepping away and seeing that overconsumption, at the end of the day, is a huge part of what underpins these problems. Overconsumption by some, which is linked to underconsumption by others. That's part of the reason I geographically focused the book largely on collectors in the Global North, because it's unsurprising that these are spaces in which we have already ongoing issues of overconsumption that span the web of life. That includes, for instance, the desire for these plants that are seen as exotic. Am I allowed to just blame capitalism [laughs] and talk about how we need socialist revolution to come?

Of course [laughs].

These are all intersecting issues. There's a great paper on the Lacanian political horizon by Erik Swyngedouw and Lucas Pohl that came out a year or two ago that I think really does a nice job of enunciating how it is that we can think with desire in leading towards more emancipatory political futures. Not a tactic towards repression, but this embrace of the strangeness of being in a world full of desire, and letting that desire lead us towards more liberatory futures.

The capitalist state seemed to promise all of that through everything becoming private and enclosed. The more that happens, the more we see how unhappy that makes us. And yet, structurally, that's so much of how society orients us. So we have to find ways of resisting that, and we have to find ways of building collective power and organizing that attends to justice in a multispecies valence.

What examples have you seen around cacti and succulents? Or maybe conservation more broadly?

I'll talk about this current research project I have where we're going to be looking at the transnational illicit trade in succulents from South Africa going around the world. These plants can be cultivated in greenhouses, and they can be grown sustainably; these species do not need to go extinct because people want them—and yet they are. In South Africa last summer, I saw literally the entire populations of some species rotting away in cardboard boxes that had been confiscated after illegal collectors or harvesters had been apprehended. It makes you really angry. It's really sad. And the lack of resources was really profound; these plants were rotting and dying in boxes because they simply didn't have enough staff to be able to handle caring for them properly. They knew that, and they were really frustrated. So whole species may no longer exist in the world because of people just wanting to have the newest fashionable succulent.

Part of the thing that makes the response challenging relates to economies of scale: the ability to anticipate the rapidity with which these desires cycle and circulate in a world full of social media and internet medias that reproduce different kinds of desires and are always presenting new things to us to want faster and faster than ever before. The answer, I feel, has to be that there are these people who have been living with these plants and acting as stewards of these landscapes for very, very long periods of time, and they need to be the beneficiaries of sustainable orientations towards cultivating these plants with care, to enable sustainable cultivation and sharing of this material.

I don't think the answer is repression. I think people want these plants and there should be ways in which people around the world can love these plants and celebrate them and have them in their houses or greenhouses, but it needs to be within this broader multispecies justice framework. There are so many barriers at a very deep level to overcoming inequalities. For instance, the fact that some of the greatest growers of these plants are not in the countries in which they are from. There needs to be opportunities for knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange and financial support. I hate to just focus in on this very pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts level, but I actually think that there are things that could be done and it's frustrating to see how few resources are being provided to make those things happen. 

I think a lot of people are frustrated. Unfortunately, one of the knee-jerk responses, therefore, is more law enforcement, more militarization. This is the new poaching crisis; back to the barricades and bring out the automatic weapons and all this kind of stuff that is not good and causes so much harm, including environmental harm. As seductive as that direction might be for some people in more old school conservation areas—because they see this crisis unfolding before their eyes and they want to do something, anything—we can do better than that.

Throughout this project, and I can see the succulents behind you, you fell in love with succulents. What is it about these plants? Why did you fall in love with them?

I'm a social scientist. If it wasn't for the people, I don't think I would have fallen in love with these plants in the way that I have. Much like the collectors that I write about, these plants all have stories, and they extend beyond the vegetal or the plant; they're human stories. They're stories of particular species or genera that I was introduced to by specific collectors or smugglers or conservationists, or geographies or places that they remind me of. They become imbued with all these memories that get carried on through the plants themselves.

I tried to take seriously, as a social scientist, really trying to learn the botany as well. I thought it was really important, as part of the research process, for these folks to take me seriously. To not seem like I actually don't care about the plants themselves, but also because I really wanted to forefront thinking: what does it mean if I put the plants more central to the story, rather than just the people moving them around the world? The study of the botany of these plants was, for me, a route into caring. The more I learn and the more I study, the more I find more and more fascinating about these different kinds of plants.

A really basic, silly example is this cactus [holds up a cactus]. It's actually got some flowers and now has a bunch of pups. I was given this cactus by a friend in 2016. When I first got it, it was this erect, upright, single, kind of tall cactus. And slowly, it started to just fall over. I was really fretting about this. So for two years, I had it propped up with chopsticks set into it. At one point, I was hanging a rock off one side trying to counterbalance it. It's in the Mammillaria genus, and I was reading about different kinds of Mammillaria. And there's a set of species in the Mammillaria genus that are known as procumbent species, which means that they reach a certain maturity and they basically lay down and they get lazy. Also, part of what happens is they start to propagate and proliferate. 

So what I think is fun about this singular cactus is thinking about vegetal otherness. I could cut these pups off and give you one, and then you would have a cactus, and I would still have my cactus, but now my cactus is two cacti. Whereas right now, I would still call it a cactus. There's something interesting about thinking with propagation and thinking with the ways in which their reproduction is really different than our own.

This plant has now also been with me throughout this entire research project, and it's grown and changed in really dramatic ways. When I first had it it never flowered, and one of the reasons it never flowered was because I didn't really know that much about how to take care of cacti. Now it flowers every year and puts out this really beautiful crown of pink flowers. 

That's cool. What did you do differently? What were you doing wrong that it wasn't flowering? 

Many of us are taught that succulents and cacti are impossible to kill, and they are the best plants for people who don't know how to take care of plants. Nothing could be further from the truth; that’s a story capitalism has sold us because they want you to buy them. They're actually extraordinarily particular. Sometimes the answer is that they want neglect, but not all the time. I was under-watering my cactus, because if you give them too much water, they'll die. That can be true, but also they do need water. Also, it wasn't getting enough light. I think that was the main thing. And I had it in a miserably inappropriate substrate. That's about it.

More than five months after Hamas’s surprise attack, Israel is not only continuing to bombard the beleaguered Gaza population, but is blocking food and medical aid from getting in—a war crime that is putting over a million people on the precipice of famine. Over 30,000 Palestinians have died already, nearly half of which were children. Around 17,000 other children have been orphaned or separated from their parents, and around 1,000 have lost limbs—“the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history.” Imagine how traumatized all of the children in Gaza are. I have read descriptions from doctors about amputating children’s limbs without anesthesia, seen photographs of impossibly emaciated children slowly starving to death, and watched videos of grieving parents saying final goodbyes to the bodies of their swaddled children. Nick Maynard, an Oxford surgeon who went to Gaza, recounted his harrowing experience:

"One child I'll never forget had burns so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving that but there was no morphine to give her. So not only was she inevitably going to die, but she would die in agony. What made it even worse was that there was nowhere for her to go and die. So she was just left on the floor of the emergency department to die."

Babies are so malnourished they ”don't even have the energy to cry” and many are already dying from starvation.

I cannot comprehend how anyone can defend this. It is the most transparently evil thing I have witnessed in my lifetime, and nothing could possibly justify it. There is a permanent moral stain on everyone involved in perpetrating and allowing these atrocities, which are unfolding in full view of the entire world. This is not something we are reading about in history books, it is an ongoing political choice being aided and abetted by my government. Despite some tepid hand-wringing, the Biden administration has continued to support and defend what Israel is doing by providing billions of dollars in munitions and the robust political protection that the most powerful nation in the world can offer. They have resorted to providing aid via tiny airdrops and constructing a temporary port rather than doing anything to materially challenge or hinder Netanyahu’s government, which is rarely even disguising its intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza anymore.

Israel is the subject of two cases at the International Court of Justice accusing it of genocide and apartheid. The IDF is gleefully and openly documenting all manner of war crimes for the world to see on social media, and dispatches from on the ground reveal horrific human rights violations and unfathomable horrors like children murdered by snipers. Humanitarian aid trucks are shot at by the IDF and blocked from getting into Gaza, where the population currently accounts for around 80% of all people in the world facing famine or catastrophic hunger and is experiencing a “medical apocalypse.” The subtext, and often explicit text, of this genocide is that Palestinians are subhuman: their lives and pain do not matter, and they have no rights, dreams, or feelings of any intrinsic value.

All human beings deserve dignity and care, but the unambiguous innocence and vulnerability of children means that their outsized suffering reveals in stark clarity the abject cruelty of Israel’s campaign of barbarism. Witnessing the pain and misery of the children of Gaza was disgusting and heartbreaking to me before my son was born, but now it hits a little different. I have broken down crying on multiple occasions thinking about it. I can now viscerally imagine what it would be like if that baby was my baby. What if his mother could not produce milk because she was malnourished and we could not get baby formula? What if we had to cradle his lifeless body after a thermobaric bomb sucked the oxygen from his lungs? 

It is startlingly easy in this world for violence and cruelty to be perpetuated and justified against certain groups of people deemed disposable by the powerful; our humanity is contingent on circumstance. Where we are born, the conditions we encounter, and the threats that we face are the subject of forces beyond our control. If we do not build something different, more and more people will be vulnerable to violent abandonment as the planet warms, ecosystems degrade, and the physical and political terrain of our world destabilizes. The tactics, policies, and weapons might be used on other people over there at first, but it never stays that way. 

My son was relatively lucky to be born in a state controlled by Christofascist corporate cronies and gentry who just banned IVF and teaching about “divisive concepts” (i.e. racism) as they refuse federal funding for low-income families to buy groceries and Medicaid expansion, attack public libraries, defund public schools, and wield state power against labor union organizing. He deserves a much more caring and just world, as do all the babies in Palestine and everywhere else with their entire lives ahead of them. For now, I count my blessings that he cries. 

Last month, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of ending the US embargo on Cuba for the 31st year in a row. The only countries that voted against it were the US and Israel. 

Because of how financially and economically powerful the US is, this unilateral embargo—el bloqueo in Cuba—is quite damaging. It does not just inhibit trade with the US, it makes accessing the global financial system very difficult for Cuba through both direct restrictions and hegemonic soft power. Merchant ships that visit Cuba are banned from docking in the US for 180 days afterwards—which substantially increases the cost of maritime trade—and Cuba cannot import goods composed of more than 10% US-made components. 

The blockade has been in place in some form since 1960, shortly after the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara ousted the US-backed Batista dictatorship. The explicit intention was to immiserate the Cuban people so much that they would revolt out of desperation. The Castro government actually wanted friendly relations with the US, but during the Cold War, a socialist foothold merely 90 miles from Florida would not be tolerated.

While the embargo undoubtedly hurt, substantial aid from the Soviet Union was enough to keep Cuba relatively afloat until the former collapsed in 1991, leading to a brutal decade of hardship in the latter—referred to as the Special Period—only ending when Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution allowed for a new source of oil. This was a particularly difficult time for Cuba, which had to deal with these onerous conditions of swiftly diminished access to resources the country had been built to run on. The US also added new measures to the embargo during this period, perhaps intended to strike a killing blow to the government in a time of newfound weakness. 

For many years, Cuba was a colony of Spain (and briefly the US) and essentially used as an industrial sugar plantation. Sugar has remained a primary, albeit less central, export (and a necessary component for its rum industry) during Cuba’s post-colonial period, even after the revolution. The Castro government essentially traded it to the Soviet Union for oil. But industrial agriculture requires enormous external inputs—fertilizer, pesticides, fossil fuels—to function. So during the Special Period, Cuban agriculture adapted by adopting and pioneering agroecological methods, especially in urban areas, with diversified cropping systems that are more ecologically sustainable and require substantially fewer resources, which were suddenly much more difficult to access. Cuba’s sugar production has necessarily fallen significantly, but still remains substantial given its economic importance to a country with few alternatives. 

Consequently, while Cuba has made progress on food sovereignty, it still imports most of the food it consumes, so it has a long way to go. The government provides a “basic family food basket” in the form of ration booklets, which will keep you from starving but—especially with shortages—are not by themselves enough to thrive on. This is a challenge because of Cuba’s increasing exposure to extreme weather events that can destroy crops along with a blockade that hinders their ability to import both food and the materials for a more comprehensive overhaul of their agricultural system.

The Obama administration relaxed the US blockade of Cuba somewhat, including re-establishing relations, easing travel restrictions, and removing the country from the official “State Sponsors of Terror” list. Then the Trump administration not only reversed this progress but added hundreds of new restrictions. The Biden administration has thus far maintained Trump’s harsher status quo and not reversed any of his Cuba policies despite promises to do so; they have apparently even lied to Congress about it. Combined with the accelerant of the pandemic and resulting global economic pressures, this has resulted in over 400,000 people fleeing the island in just the last two years—a loss of around 4% of the population—and increasing shortages of food and medical supplies. 

To see the effects of the embargo firsthand, I recently visited Havana, the capital of Cuba, as part of a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) delegation. We toured various facilities and met with a number of civil servants and public officials to learn about Cuban society and the embargo in particular (for a more detailed report on our trip, check out Danny Valdes’s Cuba Diaries). Blackouts are common, foods and consumer goods we take for granted in the US are often in short supply, and the concrete-heavy infrastructure is often cracked and crumbling. Many public offices are located in upscale homes seized during the revolution and now in need of repair. 

However, what Cuba accomplishes under these circumstances is remarkable. Despite the embargo, it is the fifth-ranked country on the Sustainable Development Index, a measure that combines life expectancy, years of schooling, income, and ecological impact. Cuba’s life expectancy is approximately the same as that of the US with 86% lower income, 83% lower CO2 emissions, and 76% lower material footprint (all per capita). Their literacy rate hovers between 99 and 100%. From the beginning of its socialist experiment, Cuba has emphasized health and education as the cornerstones of its societal well-being.

Unlike the exploitative and expensive hodgepodge we have in the US, Cuba’s renowned healthcare system is universal and highly structured. The pride that Cubans, particularly health workers, take in this system was evident in our conversations with them; we heard repeatedly about the five COVID-19 vaccines they developed. Cubans have a neighborhood doctor who they see regularly (it helps to have the most doctors per capita in the entire world), with many small clinics at the local level followed by hospitals then more specialized centers for when more serious medical care is needed. Out of both design and necessity, they take a holistic view of health that focuses on prevention above treatment, which produces better results and requires less resources. It is easier for them to do this because there are no insurance or pharmaceutical companies looking to profit off of ailing patients, and their society intentionally fosters and guarantees social determinants of health like community and housing. There are supposedly no homeless people in Cuba (I did not see anyone living on the street during our trip). 

We also visited the Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment (MSTE) and the Ministry of Civil Defense (MCD), which is tasked with coordinating Cuba’s response to natural disasters and epidemics. At the MCD, I was reminded of Cuba’s health system—it is a highly structured organization that focuses heavily on prevention. In a quite literal sense, reducing disaster harm is healthcare. When a hurricane is forecast, they spring into action to move people and resources around to minimize the damage. The type of abandonment we see in the US (e.g. Katrina) is unthinkable in Cuba. 

At the MSTE, we heard about Cuba's climate plan, called Tarea Vida (Life Task), which was adopted in 2017. Eschewing carbon reductionism, they focus on five crises: soil, water, pollution, biodiversity, and climate change. Their plans stretch all the way out to 2100, but their goals in the near term are quite modest—e.g. 30% renewable energy by 2030—which is perhaps a reflection of their particularly challenging conditions. After her presentation, I asked the Deputy Minister about the specific effects of the blockade on their efforts. She briefly mentioned the difficulty of securing financing, then—like basically every official we spoke with—pivoted to talking about Cuba’s COVID-19 vaccines. I genuinely admire the messaging discipline, but I was hoping for more specific answers.  

Nonetheless, my observations align with my research. Solar panels are sparse in Cuba, especially for a country so sun-soaked. Rain barrels can be seen on most residential roofs, a vital water source. The bus stops are overflowing with people, reflecting a lack of needed transit capacity. Cuba is famous for its classic cars, but during the Special Period, they imported vast quantities of bicycles because of the newfound lack of gasoline. Since then, the number of bicycles in Havana has decreased by an estimated 90% due to a return to car-centric transportation policies and planning. In an effort to chart a different path, Cuban architecture and urbanism expert Julio César Pérez Hernández drafted A Master Plan for 21st Century Havana, a holistic design for revitalizing the capital city for social and ecological well-being with human-centric mobility, green spaces, and polycentric design. Unfortunately, Cuba simply does not have the resources to implement a transformation like this even if it wanted to due to the embargo. 

The US justifies el bloqueo by claiming that Cuba is an authoritarian country. It did not seem like one to me, especially coming from a place with such unequal democratic rights and so lacking in positive freedoms that also exerts its will on other countries with impunity (and is facilitating a genocide in Palestine). Whatever the faults of the Cuban government are, they have to be seen in the context of being under constant threat from the US—as Valdes wrote, it should be understood as essentially a wartime government. We even have a military base and torture prison on their island (Guantanamo Bay). The most powerful country in the world has been trying to sabotage Cuba in myriad overt and covert ways for over 60 years now, and it is hard to take seriously the idea that the Cuban project is a failure when the US works so hard to strangle it. 

Right now, it is difficult to totally parse out how much of Cuba’s failures are due to the embargo and its successes to socialism. But the people of Cuba, and the rest of the world looking for examples of how to build more just and sustainable societies, deserve the chance to find out. On the heels of yet another underwhelming UN climate summit amidst still-increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecological degradation, the world’s top producer of both fossil fuels and weapons can take a lesson from its island neighbor and chart a path towards cooperation and humanity instead. The Biden administration should start by ending the embargo. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

MH: Obviously, our present conditions are rife with all sorts of contradictions. But perhaps none of them are greater than the fact that we have to urgently transform our society to maintain a habitable biosphere, but we're nowhere near powerful enough or organized enough to effect that sort of change. So how do you think we should approach navigating this terrain and those contradictions?

AS: I think part of it has to come with a really compelling, mid-to-longer term vision of what we're doing here in DSA or on the Left. What is the purpose of what we're doing? I feel like there's been a very short-term thinking that's imposed on us by capitalism and this very individualized, neoliberal society. But also, our structure of government is very short-term. People fixate on what happens in Congress, there's turnover every two years. That's a problem, that it’s so short-term. People just think about their election cycles, and that's not a structure for long-term thinking.

As socialists, we should be all about planning. Anytime there's been a socialist government that actually manages to win and start transforming society, the long-term planning begins—five-year plans, ten-year plans, whatever. There's a reason for that: there's a lot of work to do after a revolution to very quickly both avoid the reaction that might exist in parts of society but also bring about the changes that activated people to join the revolution. You have to very quickly redistribute material gains and rebuild the actual infrastructure of society; it's a huge building project. Putting the question of revolution aside, which I don't think any of us are equipped to meaningfully predict or anticipate in the United States, I do think we need to think about material transformation of our society because of climate change.

What got me out of being a climate doomer is meeting and collaborating with enough people across this organization who have been through that period of engaging with how bad things are and reckoning with that doomer aspect, and then are like, No, we just have to build something better and that's the only alternative, because otherwise we are fucked. But we have to figure out what that alternative is and how to make it happen at whatever cost because that's our collective and individual survival. Those actually are the stakes and we can build it together—there are all these reasons to think we can build it together—but we have to keep articulating that in a way that people can actually believe, that we can actually believe and also convince other people of.

What we've coalesced around in DSA for ecosocialist organizing is a compelling vision for transforming society through material changes that people can see and experience in their communities. We're organizing for things like public services, public power, green social housing, public transit. These are all felt demands; working class people experience in their day-to-day lives how bad these things are right now in this very under-invested public infrastructure system, and also everything being privatized. We can organize campaigns that show what the alternative is and then actually start to win them—which is happening in parts of the country, especially when DSA chapters really throw down—and show that it's possible and these aren't one-off things. That is going to be part of that collective survival project.

I'm increasingly thinking longer term. We're used to organizing in cycles of campaigns that are a few months or a year or two based on what might happen in government. We're in a more reflective period in DSA. A lot of us have been here for five years or more now, and a lot of the big things that we were engaged with—like the Bernie campaign—are not possible right now. I'm thinking more long-term about what it's going to take over the course of the rest of this decade and then beyond that.

Before I joined DSA or became a socialist, there was climate alarmism that was like, “This decade, everything has to change by 2030 or we’re totally fucked.” That's not going to happen on that time scale, or not at the scale of transformation that we thought might be possible. That has serious consequences for how the broader breakdown happens. It's punctuated equilibrium, that's the biological concept. Some things can happen slowly, and then they can happen really fast and change things very quickly. It happens in fits and starts, and you can't fully predict it. I think socially that’s the case, and we just have to be ready for that.

And as the reality of the climate crisis and the really bad stuff starts to sink in across society, there is the hyper-capitalist and fascist side of that. There's an increasing mainstreaming of the idea that serious climate adaptation will have to happen in the sense that some parts of the country will just have to be abandoned. Plenty of us who have been engaged with the reality of the implications have been aware of that, but I think that is becoming more and more mainstream. And I think the Right is increasingly developing its own pretty scary narratives around it that are anti-immigrant. The “armed lifeboat” thing is becoming more mainstream on the Right, where people have this idea of gated communities or closing borders and then just hoarding whatever you have and keeping other people out of it. There has to be a socialist alternative to that. That is increasingly clear in my mind. We can organize parts of the country to become socialist hubs or something.

Thinking back to how development happened in cities in the past century or two, there was this period of huge industrialization and urbanization. There was huge social upheaval that happened as part of that and all these social movements and industrial labor organizing. All these things happened to shape how it played out in different places at different times. There's a reason that people to this day talk about Red Vienna and its social housing that happened. That infrastructure was built before the Nazis took over, but that had lasting implications for what was possible after the war and during the period after that. The New Deal in the United States, all this infrastructure that was built from the 1930s to the 1950s has carried over for 70, 80 years—a lot of our infrastructure in the United States still is from the New Deal or the post-war expansion of the 50s.

There were all sorts of political considerations at the time that shaped how that happened. Earlier on, there was mass militant labor organizing that made a lot of public works possible through the New Deal. And then the labor peace that was secured by capitalists to stifle some of the more militant stuff happened at a time when there was this huge expansion in the 50s of car culture and suburbia and all these things that ultimately atomized people and workers in ways that were built into the infrastructure of the country to basically keep people apart. A lot of racial segregation was entrenched during that time. That wasn't inevitable. Those were all political decisions that were made based on who was organized or not at the time, and there were places where people were organized for different kinds of development in the US.

We're now in a period where a lot of that infrastructure is breaking down because of under-investment and being more vulnerable to climate disasters. It's the disinvestment and privatization that's put us in this position, but that's also an opportunity to rebuild something entirely different, with the understanding that there are going to be these longer term changes within the US over the next few years that are already happening. Basically, a next great migration with really huge historical consequences is already starting in the US. That movement is happening both because of the pressures of climate crises—the coasts are vulnerable to floods and entire towns are being burned down and people have to move—but also because of the forces of the market. Hyper-gentrification in huge cities is pricing people out of places like New York City or San Francisco or other big cities. 

That's a pattern I'm seeing in a lot of the country right now, where there's very quick growth and development happening in small and midsize cities in totally haphazard ways that's totally market-based. All the same shitty housing development and condo buildings are going up everywhere. But that rapid but chaotic development also is potentially a basis for class formation and organizing in ways that can change the power structure.

There are huge felt needs around affordable housing, transit, and public space that are core parts of what we would consider a Green New Deal. If we're able to start winning those things, in places that are already big cities but are also growing cities, that could determine whether they become more attractive to young and working class people. And then that could build a cycle of working class formation. Basically, I feel like we need a 21st century sewer socialism that is going to make more parts of the country that are urban or urbanizing livable for the long haul and attractive places to be. And I feel more and more that this is something for DSA to focus on. If I had to develop a five-year or ten-year plan for DSA, I would say it's really doubling down on a political program that combines electoral and base-building work to that end, to organize more cities as the base of socialism in the US in the time of climate crisis.

We have to contest state power, especially at the local level, and that's the basis for bigger transformations. Looking back to the New Deal, it wasn't just FDR’s government coming in and quickly changing everything. They took examples from states that already had some things going on. California and New York State had already done some proto-New-Deal-type things with the public sector and public works, and then those things starting to work became the basis to experiment more at the national level. So I feel the more we start to focus on and win those things at local and state levels, that can be the basis for more to come.

Which is why the Build Public Renewables Act is so exciting in New York State, because that's showing what is possible at the state level, one of the biggest economies in the world, and opening up that whole lane of possibility to have the public sector control the energy transition. That is a model. There's still a lot of work to do to enact it now, but DSA did that; that wouldn't have happened without DSA, and a lot of people associate it with DSA. That's why everyone in DSA should feel invested in that. This is a historic win—something we can all build from that shows what's possible and what we have to do. That doesn't mean everybody has to be working on that or something exactly like it, but it's part of a whole vision that we can start to build out and convince people is possible.

Sometimes people think that Green New Deal organizing can only work in places like New York or California. Why and how do you think it can work in the South, where you and I both now live? And how does it look different? 

The question is: how can we organize effectively enough on the Left to contest the actual structures of power? There's a reason that right-wing people have been targeting local offices like school boards for many years. They've had a long-term vision for that and enough of them have gotten organized to do it because they’re filling a void. That's a really exciting thing to me from the DSA convention this year: there was a proposal for DSA to seriously invest in organizing school boards. It just seems like there’s a void to fill, and it can help us build our bench electorally in a more long-term way from the lowest levels of government. And it's a very significant one, because education is how you reproduce society. There's a reason why socialists have been so serious about education in the past, and why the Right is so serious about it now. If you can shape how people are educated, then that has huge implications for their entire lifetime and what becomes politically possible. So I think DSA engaging more in that is, I hope, a sign of growing maturity. Public schools are one of the few institutions left in the country that working class people engage in, so that is something to contest and politicize. Also more of our members are becoming parents, and we should consider how we organize in ways that build and reinforce a more multi-generational membership.

Ultimately, a Green New Deal is not just about a far-off climate crisis in the future. At this point, it's really about how to transform our communities that we live and work in now. More and more parts of the country are experiencing this infrastructure breakdown in real time, and it's about how we rebuild. How we build back better, if you will. I think it is a meaningful shift in climate politics that it's no longer this future thing. Recently, we saw all this insane flooding happening in New York City and the trains breaking down and stuff. If you're a person in the United States who's not already really rich or comfortable, you're on the front lines of the climate crisis. Your life has already been or is being impacted by climate-fueled disasters and disinvestment and attacks on public infrastructure.

What we're trying to do is emphasize that all these historical systems of injustice—capitalism, colonialism, and everything like that—have disproportionately extracted from and exploited whole sets of people that have been left out of the gains that have accrued to people who have profited most or benefited from it. Rebuilding in a more just and ecologically sound way has to involve transforming those systems. So there's a sense of reparation—we are repairing what has happened for decades and centuries. We have to rebuild and repair society for the long haul. 

How do we deal with the more difficult political conditions? 

I think there's a lot of possibility for organizing around housing and transit, in particular, in already more densely populated parts of the South. Organizing for more controls over how housing works and more public transit at a baseline. In most places, there's very little to no public transit. At a certain point, you just can't have more cars [laughs]. We can keep building more highways or expanding the roads, but that just makes it more congested. So I think those types of urban planning things can be felt needs. This can be the basis of a meaningful working class politics that resonates with a lot of people.

That's my theory; I think we need to organize to see what's possible. Across the entire country, housing is one of the main issues that people feel, but it's not really clear how to organize for it in a sustained, long-term way. A lot of members of DSA are interested in tenant organizing but also housing policy, and there's a lot of potential continuity there to connect it all. And I think places in the South are as good as any part of the country to see what works, but there has to be a focus on testing out strategies. This is why campaigns are important: they give you the chance to strategize and lay out a timeline. Try things, then assess whether they work or not, and then decide at a certain point if you should adjust and try something different, not just keep plugging away without ever assessing things. We have to be scientific about this.

I started to go on another thread on the question of reparation. Thinking about Bangladesh and the longer term viability of places like Bangladesh across the Global South, part of why they're so vulnerable to climate change now is because of colonialism and because they've been extracted from for many decades and centuries by global imperialism, which the US has led for almost a century now. More and more global climate policy talk, at least on the Left, is using the language of reparations, which I think is really important but feels hard to imagine. Especially in the US, because there's already been this long-standing discourse about reparations for slavery, and it just feels politically impossible.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has written a lot about this in very compelling ways, making these connections in the context of climate change. Any talk of reparations, ultimately, is connected to the future as well as the past; we have to have a world-building project for the future, and I think that it's very hard to imagine what it would actually take on a global scale is the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth from the United States and other wealthy countries to half of the world's population or more. I think It's worth people on the Left seriously thinking about what that looks in the longer term. I've been thinking more and more about what would be the social base in the United States if there's going to be this huge wealth transfer from the richest country ever in the world to the places that it has extracted from. What would it take politically and socially to make that happen? I take some hope and inspiration from the successful examples of DSA engaging with the state. Like New York City DSA now having this whole bloc of elected members who have significant social bases in working class, immigrant, and racialized communities is potentially a model for what could be a longer term international politics that DSA helps develop.

When I was growing up, my family was one of very few who were not white; I was one of three or four kids in my class who were not Irish or Italian. But now, because of all the displacement happening there and all these economic forces, there's a huge diaspora of millions of people from Bangladesh going to other parts of the world. And New York City is one of the biggest hubs now, to the point where if you take the subway in New York, the signs are in English, and then Spanish, Chinese, and Bangla. That's a pretty recent development, where my first language is one of the top three languages that the government feels they have to translate for, and to me is constantly shocking, but exciting. There’s this huge Bangladeshi diaspora population that’s a huge working class base of people who have connections to this part of the world. I think that it’s a basis for longer term politicization if people on the Left are organizing in ways that have as core parts of their political program improving your situation as a person, as a worker, here where you're living now, with these demands around housing and transit and energy and all the things that New York City DSA is campaigning on, and in some cases winning. You feel your life can improve here, and your working conditions can improve, and that expands the sense of what is politically possible.

You also have social connections to your family or people back in Bangladesh. Remittances are a huge part of the economy. Immigrants send money back, so they still care, but I've talked to plenty of people in my extended family from Bangladesh who have this fatalistic view that it's going to be underwater eventually or soon, and that’s messed up, but all you can do is protect your own. It's this black-pilling that happens that's pretty stark, but it's just based on knowledge of current conditions and a realistic assessment that there is not organized power to change these awful conditions on a scale that would matter. But I feel it's possible to organize enough people in their own interest to be part of a collective political project, as part of an organization that is really going to advance and commit to following through on demands for massive redistribution of wealth and power.

I think it could be possible if we eventually contest enough state power to advance these demands, to help people imagine how collective survival could really happen at the scale of global climate justice, for governments of the Global North to be compelled to pay what is owed. I feel like organizing immigrant diasporas as part of a broader working class formation in the US is at least a precondition to a demand for a major transfer of global wealth for climate reparations for planetary survival. So we have the prospects in DSA to make these connections from local to global around the climate crisis and rebuilding our society, and I feel like that has to be our project.

To that point, a persistent conversation and challenge on the Left in recent years has been the role of identity politics and how to organize a working class for itself across differences and inequalities of race, gender, etc. How do you think about and approach those questions?

As I closed my last thought, I was starting to think in those terms. If I'm talking about Bangladeshi immigrants and running for elected office, there's a way of thinking that you can just find somebody who has that set of identities to run for office and they can talk about it and center their lived experience. Plenty of people will relate to that and vote for them on that basis. That has worked, but I think it is a basically liberal mode of politics.

What I think is good and encouraging in the way that DSA increasingly recruits candidates in places like New York City is there's this understanding that people's lived experience based on their identity is really important to shaping them politically and it's very good when there are representatives who can do that, but the point has to be that their identity is the vehicle for what the politics are. Rashida Tlaib is such a good example; a lot of people love her. Yes, she's a Palestinian woman who represents those identities very powerfully on their own terms, but she also is a daughter of an auto worker who talks about that experience growing up in the Detroit area and her dad being part of UAW decades ago. That is her working class experience that she can talk about very authentically and relate to Black working class people in the area in a way that's based on the common experience that they share based on their class. And how she communicates solidarity from that class experience makes her an even more powerful advocate for Palestinian liberation.

I think some of the best leaders that we've had can really make those connections across identity differences. Their own identity powerfully informs their whole deal, but they're able to connect with people across those factors. To me, that's the entire point of socialism and socialist politics: it's about cohering a shared working class identity across many types of difference. Capitalism and people who are in power—elites—very intentionally use identity differences to keep people apart. The entire concept of race was crafted for economic purposes, basically. The whole racecraft thing is really important for people on the Left to understand because it was ultimately an economic project. The idea of Black people as separate was crafted for economic reasons, for slavery, which was an economic arrangement to exploit labor. Imperialism and colonialism created all these racialized concepts to justify European people extracting resources and labor from other people.

The liberal establishment for decades now, in the United States at least, has created all these discourses around identity that have been more and more divorced from class in ways that I think at this point have become harmful and have reinforced this identity essentialism. Within DSA, I was involved in the Multiracial Organizing Committee, which is really informed a lot by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s work. He talks about how there's class reductionism on the one hand and identity essentialism on the other, and they're both not good if your thinking or orientation—especially in organizations—is too based on one or the other. But there is a secret third thing [laughs], which is understanding how identity experiences, especially racialized ones, inform people's experience, but that is not their whole being. There's all sorts of differences across people who share certain identities, and those are contingent on all sorts of factors, especially economic ones. So you can’t essentialize people based on their identity. He calls it constructive politics—the construction of a shared vision for what has to change and how to change it.

I think that's something we need to grapple with and figure out. He's very open-ended about what that can mean. It can mean all sorts of things, from revolutions that have happened where people across identities just decided that their common interest was in overthrowing the existing economic and political order; that was the constructive politics. It can be in a community organizing for public services. So that's where the Green New Deal’s politics is pretty central because that, to me, is a very compelling example of a constructive politics.

The identity stuff, I think about that a lot, because I think social media especially amplifies negative emotions or framings of things. It's all about building your own personal brand, ultimately. This is where Naomi Klein's new book is so good, because she talks about how you're basically encouraged to build this alternate version of yourself that you're putting out into the world, and it's just more and more about maintaining that. There's every incentive to craft some easily digestible version of yourself for the consumption of others. And that's where centering your own identity experiences or your personal experiences just becomes a story you're encouraged to tell and retell, and there can be a social capital that develops around it that I think is a pretty bad incentive. 

The Femi Táíwò essay, Being-in-the-Room Privilege, was really an important intervention for me and plenty of other people in DSA, especially people of color. What he laid out there was what a lot of us had been feeling for a long time and struggled to articulate: the problems with the kinds of identity discourse that have developed across society and especially on the Left, that have become sort of essentializing. People are encouraged to talk about their identity and especially their trauma in ways that are ultimately pretty harmful, both for the individual doing it and for the collective project or the organization. It creates this weird incentive for people to lead with pretty fucked-up stuff that happened to them or to others. It feels bad for everybody, and it's not a strong basis to then figure out what to do together.

There are examples people point to in DSA. At a past convention, there was some proposal about disability rights or accessibility that was being argued. I forgot exactly what the thing was, but there were significant differences among people in the room about whether that would accomplish the stated goals. And the people who started to line up for and against were mostly people talking about their disabilities, either for or against it. People who were for it were just like, “I'm disabled, and you have to support this because if you don't support it, you're harming people like me and you’re ableist.” And then on the other side, people felt compelled to talk about their own disability: “Well, I'm disabled, and I don't think this is going to help for this reason.” It was hard to engage on the merits of the proposal if you weren't claiming some kind of disability, and that felt bad for everyone. Another example, there was a resolution about sex work where someone started talking about their sexual trauma in ways that were really triggering for lots of people in the room who had experienced something similar. Whether they were for or against the thing being debated, it was just not helpful for people to talk about their trauma in that way.

This keeps coming up. There are plenty of other more recent examples that we could get into. The way that I think Femi Táíwò put it in his essay and in the book, Elite Capture, is as somebody who had experienced various kinds of trauma or messed-up experiences, his conclusion is that those experiences didn't lead him to any particular conclusion, they just felt bad. Often, your trauma or your lived experience doesn't give you some inherent wisdom or something; it can just fuck you up. And it can even lead to bad conclusions and, maybe even more often than not, limit your own ability to think beyond how bad the trauma was.

So it's a collective challenge in an organization that wants to have space for people who've experienced all sorts of harm based on the systems that we're against to be able to talk about that or not talk about it, but still feel they're part of this project and are experiencing some kind of collective care, that people care about you enough to take you seriously and validate you as a person without feeling like you have to perform your trauma to be valid or to be heard. And to have space for other people who maybe don't have the same identity-based experience or whatever, to validate them emotionally, but also be like, “Well, I have a different approach” or “I think maybe you're wrong about this; not to take away from what you've experienced, which is terrible and really messed up, but what you're expressing about what you went through does not necessarily follow to what you're saying we should do now about the thing that we're agreeing is fucked-up.” That's really hard when people feel very intensely emotional about the thing and have identity-based claims about their experience and why it should be taken more seriously.

We talk about “neoliberal individualism” in DSA. There's also a lot of guilt that people have from their own ideas of their privilege or whiteness or whatever. And it can become easy in those conditions for that guilt to be manipulated or even weaponized in ways that don't help achieve a collective solution and can create their own pretty bad, counterproductive dynamics in organizations. I think that more and more is a challenge that, to me, is at least as serious and necessary to challenge as actual racism or chauvinism, which is a long-standing and still-existing problem that we have much more coherent language to address.

Going back to the class reductionism versus identity essentialism spectrum, it's much easier for us to challenge class reductionism or actual racism when we see it because our whole liberal culture has developed a lot of language to address it or identify it. But it's harder to challenge the identity essentialism and reductionism that can happen. It's a collective challenge to figure out how we do the constructive politics thing of having room for people to understand and express their own identity experiences, but in a way that's channeled toward the collective project.

Social media does not help that [laughs]. There are a lot of analytical and organizing discourse tools that I feel like we have to develop to help people recognize when these dynamics are becoming a problem, and how to counter them or reframe them. I have a lot of conversations about this with other people of color and queer people in DSA. If you're an organizer on the Left long enough, you definitely start to see recurring patterns. It's being exploited very effectively by elites; that's what Elite Capture is all about. Elites in the United States and globally have really effectively absorbed identity language and people on the Left have to grapple with this. A lot of the language we've been using around race and identity for years and decades is now being used by Eric Adams, the cop-in-chief of New York.

We have to develop more people of color as organizers and leaders, but also we have to help white people get over this paralyzing guilt to be able to challenge these narratives that are being used against us by elites. It can be true for example that it's mostly white organizers organizing a building of tenants who are Black and Latino, but if they're good at it, then they should do it.

This is something that the Metro DC DSA chapter learned through Stomp Out Slumlords (SOS), which has been this very effective tenant organizing program that's one of the most long-standing campaigns in the chapter and a model for other DSA chapters interested in housing organizing, with regular self-assessments and informative report-backs that are very readable and easy to follow. For a while, they were part of this coalition of other housing organizations that was organizing for rent control in the city, but then there were strategic differences. The SOS people were more willing to be confrontational against landlords, but some of these other nonprofit orgs were ultimately like, “Oh no, we want to work with small business owners, or even people who might own buildings” or something. So there are basic strategic differences that caused a rift. But, eventually, it got to the point where some of these other nonprofit leaders, some of whom were people of color, just started to attack SOS and DSA as racist and white supremacist and put out this long call-out statement that became a flashpoint in the chapter. 

But then it became a uniting factor, with most DSA members seeing how people who are ultimately part of a power structure can weaponize race in bullshit ways. This was at a time where DSA’s newly elected member on the DC city council was a Black woman—Janeese Lewis George was identifying as a socialist and advancing demands around housing and other stuff for pandemic relief. So as our political program was cohering as a chapter, we were facing these really cynical attacks. That was a learning experience that we have class enemies who are weaponizing these identity discourses against us. And I think it wasn't even true at this point; our chapter leadership already had plenty of people of color and Black leaders—and I think might even have been a majority people of color steering committee—through the intentional organizing that we had done to develop that leadership. We were the ones willing, as an organization, to go out and knock doors in the mostly Black wards of DC for campaigns like vaccine relief. Some other local organizations were like, “You can't do that; it's racist for white people or non-Black people to go out and knock doors in Black neighborhoods.” But then once we started doing it, they started to join us and they wanted some of the clout that we got for doing that because it was effective.

All that is to say, there are many examples like that of people figuring out what ways it might be useful to actually organize to address problems, and then working with people across identity differences to do them and just getting over that guilt or feeling of separation, like there are right kinds of people who can do this or not. Because, ultimately, if it's going to be something that benefits the whole working class across differences of identity, then that is what is worth doing—and we should be the ones to do that and figure out how to do it effectively. That is the constructive politics that we have to be building. Getting off the internet and not screaming at each other about things that are not actually material, but working together to do the things in real life, to take power and change the conditions of our lives.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages. 2023.

More than 10,000 Palestinians and counting—including thousands of children and dozens of journalists—have already been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since the shocking October 7th Hamas attacks into Israel. An Israeli blockade is starving Gaza of food, water, and energy while the IDF pummels it with bombs and artillery fire, including strikes on hospitals, apartment buildings, refugee camps, universities, bakeries, and civilian convoys, sometimes massacring hundreds of people at a time. Documentation and discussion of these atrocities has been accompanied by discourse and meta-discourse so contradictory and divorced from morality or reality that it can make you feel like you are going insane. Desperate cries for help and heart-wrenching humanity show up alongside chilling justifications for slaughter. 

Watching a genocide unfold over social media is a horrifying and disorienting modern experience. In this context, Naomi Klein’s latest book—released less than a month before the routine daily violence of Israeli apartheid exploded to newfound levels—is, unfortunately, perhaps even more timely than anticipated. In Doppelganger, Klein (partially) turns away from her normal focus on climate justice and corporate malfeasance towards a semi-biographical examination of the dangerous and distorting political and technological mirrors of our modern world. After being confused with the liberal feminist writer turned anti-vaccine crusader Naomi Wolf for years, Klein draws on history, politics, art, and psychology to figure out what exactly happened to her personal doppelganger and follows those threads to their systemic roots.

Wolf has become a regular guest on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast, which Klein spent many hours listening to and analyzing for Doppelganger. This early part of the book dragged a little to me, perhaps because I am skeptical that Bannon is particularly talented despite being a popular figure in the “mirror world,” which Klein defines as “a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped” where people like Wolf end up after mixing slivers of populist truth—such as pharmaceutical companies valuing profits over people—with ruling class ideology to form poisonous concoctions. She refers to this fusion of the Far Right and the ostensibly apolitical woo-woo as diagonalism, which is an “alliance…of convenience…with increasingly explicit shared beliefs.” Diagonalism is on the rise, fueled by the morbid symptoms of a decaying empire experienced without class consciousness. 

While Doppelganger mostly targets the reactionaries underpinning diagonalism and the structural forces that feed them, Klein does include some gentle critiques of the Left. I think some of them are a little unfair—e.g. the Left will get censored regardless of our position on deplatforming reactionaries—but they are mostly clarifying and useful. In particular, Klein discusses the ways in which the perverse incentives of a privatized internet combine with our society’s liberal, individualist conditioning. She astutely describes how social media inherently forces us to create doppelgangers of ourselves for public consumption. Politics then becomes just another exercise in self-branding as we attempt to curate perfect ideological identities for clout and post our way to transforming society instead of investing in the slow and unglamorous work of building collective power with other people. As Klein details, no matter how meticulously we curate our “digital doubles,” once they exist they are out of our control, subject to the cruel projections of others and profit-seeking algorithms.

While not a new phenomenon by any means, corporate-owned social media also accelerates our incentives to magnify and fixate on small differences instead of commonalities, which sows damaging conflict and, as Klein puts it, “short-circuit[s] potential solidarities.” Unacknowledged guilt and shame gets weaponized and projected in ways we are often not consciously aware of. Dealing with the messy contradictions of our present reality in service of changing it requires deep wells of empathy, seriousness, and adaptability that personal branding politics precludes: “Brands are not built to contain our multitudes.” People are malleable and moveable, and politics is not something we are, it is something we do.

In order to create transformative political change, mass movements need to be harnessed and directed via organization. Being in an organization often requires subsuming our individual will to the collective and going along with democratic decisions we disagree with, which is a particularly difficult learning process in a society where, at every turn, we are incentivized and taught to value our egos above all else. So the forces of disorganization abound, not only from the external threat of a ruling class who wants you to fail, but also from within. Modern history is littered with organizations that fell apart from splitting and infighting, but we have a duty to ourselves and the rest of the world to align our actions with the seriousness of what we say we want to build.

As US-built bombs massacre the residents of Gaza and the IDF ground invasion rolls in, the importance of making progressive change here comes into the starkest relief. Doppelganger builds up to the subject of Israel-Palestine in the powerful penultimate chapter, The Unshakeable Ethnic Double. Klein draws on her Jewish background to recount the history of Israeli settler-colonialism and illuminate how the victims of genocide can then become oppressors: “Jewish victimization and vulnerability” became the basis for “the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine.” Palestinians became the imagined “eternal enemy” of the Jewish people, incapable of reconciliation or solidarity and inherently violent and criminal, to justify the crimes of Israel’s founding and the brutal treatment thereafter. Gaza is an open-air prison where Palestinians are not permitted to leave and inflows of resources and food are controlled by Israel, and residents of the West Bank face constant military attacks, police suppression, and settler incursions.

Long before October 7th, this was an untenable situation of apartheid that could really only be resolved in two ways: a pluralistic state with equal rights for all or the complete removal of Palestinians from their historic lands. The Israeli government is obviously choosing the latter. To riff on a term that Klein popularized, we might think of what Israel is now doing as disaster colonialism. The Hamas attacks are being used as an excuse to kill or displace Palestinians with complete abandon and accelerate this process, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank as well.

The only way to justify this is to not see Palestinians as human, which has been on full display with the genocidal rhetoric that many Zionists have been using. I have never seen so many people so openly support such wanton and horrific violence. But the thing about dehumanizing others is that in the process you dehumanize yourself and actually make yourself less secure by creating enemies. The Israeli government has complete disregard for their citizens who are being held hostage, many of whom have been killed by IDF bombs, and has refused offers to negotiate their release. To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” 

At the same time, millions of people—across differences of religion, race, and gender—around the world are speaking up and taking to the streets in support of Palestine and demanding a ceasefire. The tidal waves of solidarity on display inspire faith in humanity as they generate a vicious backlash in turn. Publicly supporting the cause of Palestine has always carried serious risks—harassment, intimidation, job security—but these have ratcheted up in the last few weeks to new levels. People are being attacked, doxxed, and fired for expressing anything but total support for Israel, as speech advocating for Palestinian freedom is treated as somehow more harmful than killing, maiming, poisoning, and permanently traumatizing an entire population—pure projection and cynicism. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian and a DSA member, is facing a bipartisan onslaught of criticism and censure. Her response says it all:

"It’s a shame my colleagues are more focused on silencing me than they are on saving lives, as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000. Many of them have shown that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them."

In this climate, I feel scared to speak too publicly about what is happening, especially since I am unemployed and looking for work and I am going to become a father in a few months. But as a relatively privileged citizen of the country that is funding, supplying, and supporting these atrocities, how can I not? How could I live with myself if I stood idly and just watched this happen? What kind of world am I building for my child to grow up in? The fact that they will be born here in the US and not in Hell on Earth is simply a matter of luck, the same as it was for me.

This understanding forms the foundation of my politics. In Doppelganger, Klein says, “...we are all surrounded by evidence of the different people we might have been, and might still become, under slightly different circumstances.” How do we create the best conditions for everyone to thrive and not be a victim or perpetrator of unnecessary, politically created suffering? How can we foster collective well-being? As Klein notes, there is an inherent mismatch between the ways that our capitalist society creates conditions of precarity and competition and our fundamental dependence on each other and on the biosphere we inhabit. As these contradictions heighten amidst ecological and political breakdown, the abhorrent cruelty on display in Palestine is a terrible glimpse at what the future for more and more of the world will be if we do not radically change course through solidarity. 

Anti-Zionist Jews like my friend and comrade Thea Riofrancos have forcefully rejected the atrocities committed in their name: “never again must mean never again for anyone.” And the families of the Jewish hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th have adopted a simple demand to trade all of the Palestinians in Israeli custody for all of the Israelis in Hamas custody: “Everyone for everyone.” This is a beautiful slogan that can have multiple meanings, like all of us standing for—and fighting for—the collective well-being of the entire world. An empathetic politics that recognizes our interconnectedness and shared humanity. Or, as Klein writes towards the end of Doppelganger: ‘It will not be enough to protect “our” people; we will need to have the stamina of true solidarity, which defines “our people” as “all people.”’ Everyone for everyone.

The Luddites were a group of 19th century English textile workers who famously smashed machines with hammers. Hence, in common parlance, Luddite is a term with a negative connotation referring to someone who stubbornly rejects modern technology, in particular or broad ways. But there has been a growing movement to positive reframe the Luddites in recent years, with scholars and activists challenging the popular understanding of these misunderstood workers. The Luddites were not actually technophobic per se, they were rebelling against deteriorating conditions and valuation of their labor. And they were met with severe state repression for it, including execution.

Luddism is particularly relevant today when it comes to so-called AI, a topic that has seen a recent resurgence of interest, funding, and propaganda. Software like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard supposedly will evolve to be either the cause of or solution to all of humanity’s problems. But these programs are, as writer Evgeny Morozov put it, “neither artificial nor intelligent.” This generative “AI" is based on large language models that predict what words should come next and thereby produce humanesque text; they are not, and will never be, self-aware. Such models are trained on mountains of human-produced work and require increasingly copious energy, water, raw materials, and labor to build and generate the computers they run on. And these programs also require a “vast underclass” of poorly paid, traumatized, and exploited workers to label and sort vast quantities of data. 

ChatGPT is good at generating content, but what is the actual utility of that? The way Silicon Valley guys talk about “AI'' reveals stunning levels of spiritual hollowness and self-interested vacuousness. The idea of ubiquitous “AI” “art” is a nightmare only a capitalist could conjure, and it reflects a deep misunderstanding of both the purpose of art and the limitations of the technology. Such programs, even if dramatically improved, could only ever offer digital high fructose corn syrup because there is no creative expression; a computer program has nothing to say and no truths to reveal. 

Signal president and AI scholar Meredith Whittaker has noted that “AI” is really a marketing term rather than an accurate description of the technologies in question. Venture capitalists have a vested interest in selling us on both extreme promise and peril to attract funding, sell products, charm regulators, and discipline labor. The specter of AI is similar to hiring consultants in that it diffuses responsibility and provides a reverse justification for bosses to do what they wanted to do in the first place. Actually existing “AI” cannot write quality articles or scripts; whatever text it generates would need to be reshaped by a human hand in order for it to be even semi-useful. But this provides the perfect excuse to pay your workers less to be AI content editors rather than staff writers.

The idea of producing monetizable media without all those pesky labor costs is obviously enticing to CEOs and investors, perhaps best exemplified in the ongoing Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) strikes. The topic of “AI” has loomed large over this labor dispute, after what was thought to be a minor bargaining item turned into a major flashpoint. The studios are aiming to scan and record actors’ likenesses and voices for unlimited digital reproduction and utilize generative “AI” in the script production process, all just to pay workers less so the shareholders and executives can theoretically make even more money.

Relatedly, the main place that we do see technological skepticism represented in the mainstream—especially around AI—is in stories created by these very same writers: Black Mirror, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ex Machina, The Matrix, and many more. When people discuss fears about the AI they almost always reference SkyNet from the Terminator series. And in the universe of Dune, there are no computers because of the Butlerian Jihad, a movement that destroyed all “thinking machines” thousands of years before the events of the story: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. The function of computers was replaced by highly specialized and augmented humans. The Butlerian Jihad went so far as to destroy calculators.

I have no beef with calculators, but seeing the trajectory we are on, I can understand getting carried away. Generative “AI” is allowing people to churn out fraudulent and dangerously misinformative books and further exacerbating existing axes of oppression. It writes horrible articles. And if these “AI” programs start training on the sludge they produce, it could turn into a feedback loop doom spiral of compounding defects—a model can only ever be as good as its inputs.

The internet, which holds the promise of universally connecting all of humanity and allowing us to access all of our collective knowledge, seems like it is getting worse. Algorithmically generated garbage used to game the search algorithm has already drastically reduced the functionality of Google. Nowadays, when you type something into a search engine, one of the top suggestions is almost always your query with “Reddit” added to it, evidence of fellow web surfers trying to be directed towards useful information that actually comes from humans (Google is well aware of this). Elon Musk’s Twitter continues to deteriorate in its owner’s image, and a mere 18 months after Facebook changed its name to Meta in an ostensible demonstration of its commitment to the transparently ridiculous idea of the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg has apparently already pivoted to “AI”, the next desperate hope for growth.

Zuckerberg and Musk joined a closed summit about on the topic at the US Senate last week alongside some other obscenely rich AI evangelists (the total wealth represented was approximately $550 billion) and a few actual experts. The contradictions were apparently on full display: 

Mr. Musk, who has called for a moratorium on the development of some A.I. systems even as he has pushed forward with his own A.I. initiatives, was among the most vocal about the risks. He painted an existential crisis posed by the technology.

“If someone takes us out as a civilization, all bets are off,” he said, according to a person who was in the room. Mr. Musk said he had told the Chinese authorities, “If you have exceptionally smart A.I., the Communist Party will no longer be in charge of China.”

Deborah Raji, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, responded to Mr. Musk by questioning the safety of driverless cars, which are powered by A.I., according to a person who was in the room. She specifically noted the autopilot technology of Tesla, the electric carmaker, which Mr. Musk leads and which has been under scrutiny after the deaths of some drivers.

Mr. Musk didn’t respond, according to a person who was in the room.

I do not know whether these guys are lying to us or themselves (or both), but it does not really matter. It seems quite clear that, unless you are a capitalist, the utility of generative “AI” is limited at best  (and downright negative in many cases) for the foreseeable future, and there is no reason to think that we are heading towards some sort of transcendental leap forward. Rather than being the birth of a digital deity and a new epoch, the current fervor around “AI” is perhaps best understood as merely more of the same. More junk search results and enshittification of the internet, more precarity and gigification of work, and more pollution and destruction of our biosphere to serve the whims of the profit motive. 

Capitalism systemically fosters mystification of the labor and nature involved in production and is structurally biased towards increasingly new and complex high technology prioritized for its exchange value rather than use value. But newer and more complex is not necessarily better, and in fact is often demonstrably worse—perhaps best exemplified in how unsustainable and unjust industrial agriculture is prioritized over agroecology. Our society is not collectively better off with factory farming, “smart” toothbrushes, electric Hummers, or news articles poorly written by a computer program instead of a journalist.

The most important thing to understand about the current wave of “AI” speculation is that, beneath the hype and sheen, everything is a labor story and everything is an ecological story. Technology is not magic, it is a product of the material world and therefore has inputs and outputs like anything else. In a time of escalating climate and environmental crisis, who gets to decide whether we should be using copious resources—and all the consequent greenhouse gas emissions and ecological degradation—to train and run more large language models? And who is getting exploited for it? What, where, when, and how technology is researched and deployed should be determined democratically—by and for people—rather than by billionaires’ whims.

That is the real lesson of the Luddites, which we should take to heart for our collective dignity and wellbeing. Technology is never inevitable, and the future is unwritten. Personally, I would much rather it be written by the workers of the world than a corporate chatbot.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the US in decades, and it is the place to be if you are on the political Left and want to engage in mass politics. DSA is quite unique among ostensibly similar organizations in that it is member-funded and member-run. I am one of said members, and we held our biennial national convention from August 4-6 to chart our course for the next two years. Around a thousand elected delegates from across the country (including myself) gathered in Chicago to deliberate resolutions and amendments as well as elect the next National Political Committee (NPC), the organization’s highest governing body between conventions and its board of directors. 

The outgoing NPC decided to try to focus this convention on important political questions by having eight national committees draft resolutions that would be automatically considered by the convention around prioritized areas of work: electoral, Green New Deal, growth and development, housing, internationalism, labor, multiracial organizing, and YDSA (DSA’s youth section). Members could then submit amendments to these consensus resolutions, in addition to submitting their own standalone resolutions and constitution/bylaws amendments (and amendments to these proposals as well). The NPC also submitted several of their own proposals for delegates to take up.

In order to be considered by the convention, all submissions (except those from the NPC or the priority committees) required at least 300 signatures in support from DSA members in good standing. Resolutions also required work plans to provide a better chance of follow-through if passed; simply declaring a campaign does not actually make it happen. A survey was then sent out to all delegates to gauge the levels of support for the various proposals and create an agenda because there was not enough time for the convention to consider all qualifying proposals. So the deliberation that went into this convention has actually been going on for many months before the actual event. 

Much of the discourse centered around DSA’s decreasing membership levels, down to around 78,000 from a 2021 peak of around 95,000. This has been portrayed as a crisis—as a member-funded organization, it does present potential financial issues—and wielded as a factional cudgel. However, aggregate DSA membership, whether increasing or decreasing, is far more dependent on external conditions (e.g., presidential elections and pandemics) than any political decisions made by organizational leadership. It also obscures the uneven growth and development of individual DSA chapters; some are thriving, and some have collapsed. So while leadership matters and intentional membership recruitment and retention should be emphasized over passivity, this has to be placed in proper context. Most DSA members do not really pay attention to national controversies and generally just interact with their local chapter, if they participate at all. And DSA is a mere drop in an ocean of non-socialists who are politically disengaged (or hostile) and do not know anything about democratic socialism or what we (or AOC) are doing.

Most people in this country have no experience being in any sort of member-run organization. Democracy is hard work and messy, and tensions often run high. This was my fourth DSA convention in a row and it was probably the most comradely and mature, although I still saw and heard about people getting way out of line, both leading up to and during the convention. We all care a great deal about changing the world, and—back to those external conditions—we bring all sorts of trauma, biases, and individualist conditioning to this work that will take a lifetime to unlearn and heal. Tensions also run high because DSA is important; failure or fracture would be a colossal setback for the US Left and, consequently, the global working class writ large. In other words, what DSA does matters. To that end, this is my rundown of the most noteworthy takeaways from the 2023 DSA National Convention.

Recommitments and Prioritization

All eight of the consensus resolutions passed, some with amendments, reflecting continued commitments to ongoing work like militant rank-and-file labor organizing (via reforming existing unions and helping establish new ones), strengthening and establishing local tenant unions, and deliberately anti-racist and multiracial growth and organizational development. 

Of particular note is reestablishing the Green New Deal (GND) campaign as one of the organization’s highest national priorities (alongside electoral and labor), to be carried out by the GND Campaign Commission (GNDCC) via the Building for Power campaign with a dedicated staffer in support. I currently serve on the GNDCC because this is important strategic terrain to not only stop the ecological crisis and win a just transition, but to de-silo and unite our work and develop our positive political program in action. Building for Power coordinates and coheres local campaigns around four key areas: public power, public transit, green social housing, and green public spaces (e.g., schools). These can be structured as legislative or ballot measure campaigns or union contract fights. The idea is for chapters to establish DSA-led coalitions with local unions and environmental justice organizations to fight for and win concrete reforms that “that shift structural power to the working class by synergistically building public sector capacity and the labor movement.” A prime example of this is the recent Build Power Renewables Act, a historic victory won by New York DSA chapters. 

Additionally, DSA recommitted to (and fleshed out a bit) the “party surrogate” electoral strategy of strategically running campaigns on the Democratic Party ballot line where necessary while creating the infrastructure for a mass working class party “capable of winning and wielding state power with a strategy for social transformation.” Hard-line, sectarian (and, I would argue, unstrategic and idealist) orientations towards our elected officials were rejected. The National Electoral Commission will also continue working with chapters to help build Socialists in Office committees so DSA electeds are more integrated into the organization. And the rise of the Far Right loomed large, with amendments to run candidates for school boards and defend abortion rights, trans people, and electoral democracy passing with broad support (along with standalone campaign resolutions as well).

The direction of DSA’s International Committee (IC) was also reaffirmed, and it will continue building relationships with “foreign governments, political parties, and social movements” and apply to join the Progressive International. Additionally, an NPC recommendation to move the previously autonomous Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Working Group into the IC passed, including an amendment committing DSA to a positive program fighting for Palestinian liberation. The BDS Working Group has been one of the biggest flashpoints and sources of conflict for DSA nationally over the last couple years, and this result seems to reflect a maturing organization focused on structural coherence where national bodies serve the membership. 

Organizational Structure

Overall, DSA still has basically the same national structure that it did in 2016 despite being a vastly larger and different organization: a confederation of local chapters governed by the 16-member elected NPC at the national level (along with two YDSA representatives with a half vote each). Attempts to change this at previous conventions failed, and this one was no different. Despite some last minute on-the-floor maneuvering to secure more support, a proposal to increase the size of the NPC (and ostensibly reduce the ungodly per-member workload) narrowly failed with 62% in favor—constitution/bylaws amendments require a two-thirds majority, as opposed to a simple majority for resolutions. 

However, a proposal to establish a Democracy Commission did pass. This 21-member body will be elected by the 2023 convention delegates and is tasked with studying other political organizations and parties around the world and investigating DSA’s structure to come up with proposals for organizational restructuring to be voted on at the 2025 convention. Hopefully they can finally thread this needle.

Paid Leadership

DSA will now have four full-time paid political leaders: two national co-chairs and two National Labor Commission (NLC) co-chairs. Until now, DSA has been entirely volunteer-led (with dozens of staff hired to support our work), while paid leadership is a normal feature of Left parties around the world. The NPC Steering Committee has received monthly $2,000 stipends since 2021, but that is not enough to live on alone. The national co-chairs will be elected by the 2023 convention delegates out of the pool of newly elected NPC members and will serve as the outward-facing political leadership of the organization. The decision to pay NLC co-chairs to organize full-time reflects an unsurprising commitment to labor as a central site of struggle for DSA. The method of their election was not specified in the resolution, so it will be democratically important for the new NPC to ensure they are elected by the 2023 convention delegates as well rather than the limited membership of the NLC.  

Additionally, the convention voted to increase the stipends for the nine-member elected leadership body of YDSA from $2,000 per semester to $1,000 per month. In terms of value, this makes sense considering that college students typically go to class full-time and work part-time, so this frees them up to organize more instead. 

NPC

Only one member of the newly elected NPC is an incumbent, a reflection of the difficulty of this role and the toll it takes. Much of the discourse around this NPC election focused on “left” and “right” wings, which I think tends to obscure much more than it reveals. The largest bloc comes from the Groundwork slate with four members, followed by three members each from the Red Star and Bread and Roses caucuses, two each from the Socialist Majority Caucus and the Marxist Unity Group caucus, one from the Anti-Zionist Slate, and one unaffiliated with any caucus or slate. One of the YDSA NPC representatives is from the Constellation caucus and the other is unaffiliated. 

I am not going to analyze what these caucuses or their representatives believe because that could be the subject of an entire article and, frankly, is sometimes difficult to parse and often exemplifies the narcissism of small differences (at least when it comes to actual political practice in the present). But suffice it to say that this NPC will be multipolar, with different majorities emerging on different issues. It is vital that they avoid sectarianism and personal beefs and work together constructively to carry out the will of the convention and guide DSA forward in a positive direction. The forces of structural and individual disorganization abound, and consistently turning towards durable mass organization and building DSA is a mighty challenge.

Despite stagnating paper membership levels, DSA has more elected officials than ever and is a political force to be reckoned with in many areas across the US. My unscientific assessment is that, coming out of this convention, a lot of DSA members are more energized than ever to get to work. A proposal to focus a national dues drive around signing people up for 1% income-based dues written by the Groundwork slate not only passed overwhelmingly, but hundreds of members have gotten a jump start by proactively making this solidarity dues commitment to help fund all of the big spending approved at the convention.

This is a great example of what makes DSA so special. There are very few places in US life where we can truly experience democracy and collectively shape our destinies, and we deserve a whole lot more of them. We will have to work for it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

MH: So Brazil is now six months into Lula’s presidency. How do you think he's doing so far? How’s it going?

SF: First of all, I think Lula has quite the impossible task on his hands in the sense that he barely got elected. This has to be recognized. The second round was a very tough race; the difference between him and Bolsonaro was really small. It means that he took over a much more divided and polarized country than would have been better for him to implement a lot of the things that he promised during the campaign. So as soon as the government started, we knew that the battle to get some of those promises going would be way harder.

Also, Congress is quite right-wing right now. Congress is basically in the hands of Arthur Lira from the Chamber of Deputies, who is holding pieces of legislation and other things ransom to try to get Lula to give away ministries and other pieces of the executive to the parties in his right-wing allied base. So there's a lot of issues around governability.

There's a lot of issues around the way Lula has learned to do things in the past. This six months shows us that one of the issues that we have is the old way of doing things where Lula could just negotiate with different parties and different forces within the institutions is already failing, right from the beginning. He doesn't really have the proper institutional correlation of forces for that. It's not like he had that so much in the past; the Workers’ Party always had to deal with governability in that sense. But we already have a governability crisis in the first six months.

We're hoping that this is teaching somewhat of a lesson around having to mobilize from the base, building from social movements, not being afraid of taking to the streets if necessary. Something that, for example, Gustavo Petro is doing in Colombia right now. Being attacked on all fronts, his answer was to call on people to go to the streets to support the government, support the workers’ rights reform, support the health reform, and other things.

You tweeted recently: “A can of worms of climate denialism has been opened again in Brazil… by the Left.” Can you say more about that and what's going on?

So let’s talk about the other side of the challenges. It's not just the Right wing; we have a lot of old vices within the Brazilian Left. It’s a regional issue. It comes from different perspectives around what development means. We're discussing a region that has been plagued by centuries of colonialism and ecological imperialism. Extractivism is the norm and the basis for the economy in so many of these countries. We call this dependent capitalism for a reason—there's a lot of influence from outside. And sometimes in the Left, the answer to this is to say that they're taking away our resources and privatizing them and the resources are going to the imperialists, so our answer is for us to do this ourselves. That way, we will have funds to develop and then we can industrialize for real and we won't be as dependent.

It's part of the ideology behind developmentalism, but nationalist developmentalism. The word sovereignty gets thrown around a lot because of this, and it's usually understood as an anti-imperialist stance. My main point around this is that the climate crisis and the ecological crisis at-large show us that this way of thinking around sovereignty is absolutely outdated. What does that mean in the actual long run? Sovereignty for three, four years is not really sovereignty in my opinion. It's been one of my problems with the way that debate is going. I feel like the debate is stuck in around 20/30 years ago.

I believe that anti-imperialism in the 21st century under a state of multiple crises or a polycrisis has to be a very ecological anti-imperialism. It has to look into these contradictions and find proper alternatives to development. The type of arguments that they've been bringing forward also fail because they talk about getting income and royalties from these large extractivist projects and using those to develop the regions that have been abandoned for a really long time, where we have high levels of poverty. But, historically, it never worked this way, not even when we're talking about proper nationalist development projects—unless you're considering governments that have been a little bit more rigid around this.

It’s a traditional way of thinking around development that gets in the way of some basic scientific understandings around biodiversity, around ecological health, around social-ecological conflicts as well. So when I'm talking about scientific denialism here, it’s not in the sense of saying there's no climate change. But it's in the same way that we have climate denialism in green capitalism. And, obviously, that's actually delaying the action we need. This is a type of nihilism because it's not taking it seriously enough. We are actually at this really odd situation in Brazil—there's some level of this in Chile as well—where you understand the problem and you talk about transition and you talk about fighting climate change, but only up to a certain point where it really doesn't hurt the other economic prospects and these very old ideas around development.

So Lula's government is actually trying to make two very strange things coexist: this old nationalist developmentalism that is supposedly more critical of capitalism because it's using state power as a way of extracting resources and getting funds and, at the same time, embracing a lot of green capitalist norms that engage with a lot of the private sector and commodify nature. And sometimes it just creates public-private partnerships as a way of driving development. All of those are very problematic, and they end up becoming this really odd amalgamation of the huge paradox called sustainable development.

There's been a left resurgence in South and Central America. And, at least rhetorically, it seems like the leaders have been more attuned to ecological concerns. I've seen Lula talking a lot about protecting Indigenous rights, protecting the Amazon. Do you feel like that's been mostly rhetorical or are they limited by structural forces they come up against?

I wouldn't say that in the case of Lula it is a rhetorical issue. I think the problem goes back to the strategy of trying to reconcile things that you can't just go around reconciling; they're very antagonistic. So there's been an embracement of Indigenous communities and conversation around Indigenous rights within the government, but it's not radical enough. And when we come out and say it's not radical enough, a lot of people just say, “Well, look, he's dealing with a terrible Far Right, and he's dealing with all of these threats.” I think that explains some of the challenges up to a certain point. Everything else is about building collective will to support Indigenous rights to really make it work. 

Congress decided to go after environmental issues and Indigenous issues as a way of basically standing up to Lula and trying to make Lula look weak. For example, on the Indigenous situation right now in Brazil, the biggest challenge is what we call the temporal mark—marco temporal. The temporal mark is a really awful judicial thesis and legislative thesis that would ensure that if an Indigenous community could not prove its direct claim and presence in a territory around 1988, which is the time of the latest constitution in Brazil, then the community cannot claim the territory anymore. This is a way of legalizing the previous centuries of colonization and dispossession and expulsion. They were expelling Indigenous communities from their territories. It's a way of justifying this forced urbanization of Indigenous communities and also reducing their claims to territory to smaller portions.

This is something that's been going on in the Supreme Court for a really long time. The Supreme Court is stalling the debate on this. Every time there's a new judgment, one of the Supreme Court justices comes out and says, “I need more time.” This is very frustrating for mobilization efforts because everybody mobilizes around this judgment day. We do crowdfunding, we get people to go to the capital, Brasilia. They get there and then, ta-da, you're not going to have a judgment today anymore, so just go back home. It's been going on for years now. You could put an end to this right now, yet you won't. 

And there's been critique coming from the Indigenous movement that Lula hasn't been vocal enough on this. Very vocal to the outside! I made some angry tweets a couple of weeks ago [laughs] around this because it's very frustrating to see all the speeches that make it look like we're making huge progress on fighting deforestation in the Amazon and we're making huge progress about land settlement for Indigenous peoples. The reality on the ground is not quite so. We can't just rest and wait and think that at some point the ability to negotiate with the Right wing is going to help us out in this. We need to find a way to build other forces.

So Lula’s speeches to the rest of the world will become—at some level—hypocritical over the years unless he finds other ways to make sure that these politics actually go forward. This strategy for negotiation is definitely not working. It doesn't matter if we're going to hold COP30 in Brazil in an Amazonian city if we're not actually able to show that we have the internal correlation of forces building power, properly fighting climate change, and protecting Indigenous rights.

What does ecosocialism mean to you?

Ecosocialism, for me, is the big horizon. I was actually reading a little bit of poetry the other day that was dealing with this notion of the protests and the earth, and talking about how the horizon is actually the earth drawing the line. We need to cross the line if we are actually able to survive. Ecosocialism is the goal, and the task of ecosocialists today is to better manage this huge gray area of contradictions that we find around multiple transitions. If we have multiple crises, we also have multiple transitions. This means that, for fighting climate change, we can't wait for a big global revolution to happen and then we take state power and everything's going to become socialized property and then we can finally make huge elements of the energy transition happen or that de-fossilization of the economy happen and integrate with other areas—an agroecological revolution and other things like that.

We just can't wait; a lot of these things have to get done today. But this is obviously creating contradictions because the people in power don't want things to happen in the most radical way, where you’re also building power. So they're always appropriating things. This is a big challenge for ecosocialists because I feel like every time we’re making advancements around sustainability issues or fighting climate change, things get appropriated by green capitalists very fast. We need to find ways of building power at the same time that we're mediating in negotiation with these tensions around how capitalists are still around the things that we need to do. We're not going to get rid of them immediately, but we need to get rid of them eventually. And we need to have this strategy that I've been trying to talk about for a few years now in terms of different tides. So we have a tide around our emergency plan, a tide around a prevention project like David Schwartzman would call it, and at the same time, think of long-term ways of building power to actually overcome this so people won't settle for little non-reformist reforms, to borrow from André Gorz.

I think there are certain places where we can put our energy that are very worthwhile. For example, the reduction of the workweek is something that ecosocialists should prioritize. because we're not only dealing with creating alternatives in the way we manage production and labor, but also in actually affecting the rate of exploitation, going back to basic Marxist theory here. It's something that we can manage, and divert people's time and attention towards organizing and towards low-carbon collective activities or—something that my friend, Daniel Aldana Cohen, likes to emphasize a lot—towards public luxuries.

Creating time is very important for us. The way I approach these multiple transitions, where ecosocialism would be at the horizon, is that this is a fight against time and for time. It is against time in the sense that we are running out of it. It's the middle of 2023. This decade is supposed to be crucial for the kind of action we need to limit [global warming] to 1.5°C, or at least stay below 2.0°C. And the current policies—and the implementation of the current policies are even worse than the words on paper—are putting us way over.

We're already really behind. So we're fighting time in that sense, but it should also be a struggle for time in the sense of creating time for people to organize, creating time for people to live their lives, addressing health issues, addressing this crisis of care that we have around the world. This will obviously show the transversality of the struggle here, that this is about socialism, but it's also about ecology and it's also about feminism and anti-racism and fighting neocolonialism. And it is about LGBTQ+ rights. All these things are very enmeshed, and I think ecosocialism as a horizon gives us the opportunity to look at this more deeply because transversality is really at the core of the way that we understand this tension, but also the quite possibly freeing relationship that we can have, between humanity and nature.

You wrote a 2020 article called Ecosocialism from the Margins, and you say, “Ecological connections foster not only solidarity, but deep syntheses between struggles.” Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that?

An example that I have for this—I mention it really lightly in the article, but this has developed through the years—is that, as an ecosocialist organizer in Brazil, people thought I was quite odd to argue that every time there was anything involving the national oil company and the oil workers, ecosocialists should be their first allies. You need to be with the oil workers; it really shouldn't be something we postpone because just transition conversations have been happening in Brazil for a really long time. The CUT—the federation for labor unions in Brazil—they go to the COPs, and they go to the People’s Summits, all of those things. But work stoppages and strikes should always be a principle of solidarity even if those workers are involved in areas where you want their job to not exist anymore.

So my point with the oil workers and Petrobras is that if I don't want your job to exist anymore, a precondition for this is for me to keep your job. That way, you can organize and we can strengthen a mandate for a national oil company that can actually transition. Because if we leave these in the hands of fossil capital and external investors, it’s going to be about the same thing; it's not going to change very much. 

There was a an opportunity for us in the past few years when, unfortunately, the Bolsonaro government went after the biofuel section of Petrobras, really attacking the workers, selling assets like a privatization project. That kickstarted a conversation around transition, as controversial as it can be within the environmental movement. There are different types of biofuels; some are worse than others. The biofuels from monocrops are really, really bad. But rather than shying away from these contradictions, coming from the standpoint of workers and workers rights and jobs guarantees, we could find ways of taking advantage of already set infrastructures of labor organizing. And from that, build and strengthen the transition conversation so much that the main national oil workers federation came out two years ago with a whole clause on just transition out of their congress. They delivered a letter to Lula including the clause. I believe that was quite important for Lula to incorporate things around energy transition in his own campaign. It's something that I think is quite advanced coming from an oil workers union.

But, obviously, there's still a lot of work to be done there. We are in lots of disagreements around the timing. [laughs] Do we drill for more oil? No, we shouldn't drill for more oil, we should work with what we have. We should be actually attaching this certain level of oil exploitation to this certain level of investment in transitions. So there's a lot of little things to work around, but I think the main principle is there. If we're actually going to talk about just transition and jobs guarantees—we're going to create new climate jobs and some sectors will have to degrow or disappear completely—we also need to be there when these people are fighting for their jobs for the next six months outside of the transition framework. Because this is how you actually build proper trusting relationships and show that you actually care about people's livelihoods. 

We shouldn't be talking about jobs guarantees and alliances with unions or having the unions be at the forefront of our struggle only when we're already dealing with renewables or only when we're dealing with power utilities or the areas that look greener from the outside. We should always be doing that. But our principle of jobs guarantees and good jobs—with workers’ rights, with workers’ benefits, with healthy and safe workplaces—should be there no matter what. Because from this, we're actually creating the type of environment and infrastructure to keep this conversation going towards transitioning these jobs properly.

This will also include, for example, being together with strikes at universities and supporting students. Because how are we going to have a proper transition without a huge change in curriculum? We're not, because a lot of the engineers are being farmed into oil and gas, so they think that the jobs of the future are still oil and gas. We're not going to be able to convince them otherwise unless we have a different curriculum basis and actual jobs we should build these people into. If these jobs are just in the private sector with these really precarious jobs—compared to oil and gas jobs—around solar and wind, they're not going to want to go into that.

I do agree that we need more strategies around labor to make it appealing. I don't necessarily think that, to make it appealing, we need to tell them that you have lots of money and you buy electric vehicles, because that’s creating sacrifice zones and sometimes it's kind of destructive towards internationalist solidarity. So we need to tell people that you can't have these shiny things here that capitalism is promising you in the socialist version because the planet cannot bear it. But you can have these other really nice things here, and you can trust me because we've been together fighting for good livelihoods from the beginning, not just when we're talking green subjects.

A lot of leftists in the US—and I've seen this increasingly lately—find inspiration in the MST in Brazil. What do you think we can learn from their success, and what has been going on with the MST lately under the new Lula administration?

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the MST is facing a criminalization process coming from Congress right now. It’s this investigative parliamentary inquiry into the MST occupations to try to criminalize occupying an unproductive piece of land, even though we actually have it in the Brazilian Constitution that we need to promote agrarian reform. It's one of those things that on paper is not very radical of a demand, but because reality is so oppressive, is very radical. And that makes the MST and other agrarian reform movements in Brazil quite crucial for changing the way we plant and grow our food, to changing the way we deal with private and public property, to actually protecting ecosystems and fighting a long-term tendency of capital: forced urbanization so you can have more surplus population and exploitation in precarious settings.

So movements like the MST are very important because of this. And because the institutions are not willing to actually do their job of looking at a huge piece of land and saying it's not socially productive. We have something called the social function of property in the Brazilian Constitution. It is one of the most progressive elements of the Constitution. It's probably the one thing that these people would love to take away from the Constitution. The institution should actually abide by that. They don't, so the MST occupies land. Basically, it works. If the MST occupies land or the Homeless Workers’ Movement occupies abandoned buildings and abandoned pieces of land within urban settings, it tends to help with the judicial processes to actually expropriate the land. And when the MST occupies an unproductive farm, it’s not like the owner will just walk away empty-handed; the government has to compensate during the expropriation. This is absurd because we know that a lot of those big farms were just inheritance from centuries of colonization or basically land grabs, and they still get to be compensated. 

There's this inquiry in Congress right now trying to criminalize them. Leftist, and actually ecosocialist, parliamentarians have been quite vocal to defend the MST there. But we need to understand that this is the most significant mass movement in Brazil that has its own contradictions as well. Throughout the years, there's been infighting and people leaving and then people coming back. There are issues around how the MST approaches the Workers’ Party. Participation within the Workers Party helps you get certain demands driven directly into the government, but also causes some level of demobilization or cooptation. You shouldn't occupy or you shouldn't march on the streets because you can just set up a meeting with a Minister or something. So there's a lot of critiques around this.

I think what's interesting right now is that, under Lula 3—this third government—the MST has been forced to really look at itself as a movement and think about all of these past years and what worked, what didn't work. One of the main coordinators from the movement, João Paulo Rodrigues, was actually quite clear about a month ago in an interview, saying that the government can't just hold the MST and say, “Wait, wait for us to do things.” A social movement's job is not to wait for a government to do things or for a political party in government to do things. A social movement has the prerogative to be autonomous, to work on its own timing. 

Something in organizational theory that's really important when we're dealing with social movements and labor unions instead of political parties is that social movements and labor unions tend to have more urgency for the demands that they're dealing with because the composition of these organizations is a composition of people going through a more homogeneous experience of exploitation. That sometimes means being out of a job or not having enough to eat. This level of urgency, you can't just turn to the government and say, “Okay, I know Congress is giving you a really hard time right now, Lula, we will wait another three months.” Guess what? Congress is also giving the MST a hard time.

So the movement is faced with these challenges of trying to organize and mobilize. I think one of the big triumphs of MST tactics in the past years was actually during the pandemic when the Bolsonaro government abandoned people. Not only in the sense of letting people die from COVID-19, but also the level of precarity and hunger. This was a government that at first wasn't even willing to provide some emergency financial support to the most needy in Brazil. But the MST was out in the streets giving away good organic food to communities living under poverty. I thought that was beautiful in the sense of this power of solidarity.

I'm a granddaughter of campesinos; I’ve had a connection to the land for a really long time. And I remember growing up and seeing how the MST was always so criminalized in Brazilian media. I would see working class people calling them terrorists and criminals because of this ideological influence. Some of these very working class people who had such a bad image of the MST were able to have food on their plates during the pandemic because of the MST. This is way more powerful than the campaign to show that the MST is a legitimate social movement; this is building concrete relationships. This solidarity across movements and on different types of struggles is so important because it is about agrarian reform, but it's also about fighting hunger, and it’s also about food sovereignty. And if it’s about food sovereignty, it’s also about fighting climate change.

I spoke to Christina about her new book, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond. This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

California is this place that’s associated with the whole gamut of beautiful natural landscapes, and also progressive environmental attitudes, climate action, and things like that. But as you write about, petroleum is directly and indirectly interwoven in the San Pedro Bay ports, the state of California, and obviously the entire global trade system. Why is that critical to understanding what a better trade system based on what you call transspecies supply chain justice could look like? 

You've hit on a few really worthwhile things to unpack for a moment. One: from the outside, California has this reputation for environmentalism. To some degree, that's warranted in that California sets emission standards for automobiles. It's such a big market that, to sell in the US market at all, you'll wind up having to meet the California emission standards.

California has unique challenges with air quality. The sunshine and emissions supercharge the conditions for making ozone, and the geography can trap particulates. So Greater Los Angeles, going east into the Inland Empire, has really bad air. A lot of that is freight emissions. And the Central Valley also has really bad air. Those two regions have some of the worst air in the country. That's agricultural dust, a bit of oil actually extracted, and the sunshine plus the valleys between mountains that trap air.

So, on the one hand, California has this reputation for environmentalism. But what's not clear from outside of the state, or even probably certain places in the state, is that that’s in this sort of dialectic with these sacrifice zones. Since the Clean Air Act was adopted as law of the land, they've never been in compliance with that legislation. And then the factor of California having the fifth biggest economy in the world if it were broken out as its own economy; of course that's underwritten by this history of oil production. Oil underwrites the ability to have all these other industries and trade and cheap energy. Even before the US became more of an exporter of fossil fuels, which it has become recently, it's just supercharging wealth accumulation, which gets rolled into other kinds of capital projects. In 1940, California only had about 5% of the population of the US, but it got 10% of federal investment—so it’s this engine of wealth. But fossil fuel is this substrate that underwrote a lot of that wealth accumulation. 

The port story is directly tied to that. They were initiated as the seaports meant to capitalize on the western edge of the US and the Pacific arena. But very, very quickly, they turn into petroleum handling spaces, and then that wealth gets poured back into the ports themselves. So with the ascension of trade, and particularly the 1960s onward, there's new regimes of maritime trade and way more goods moving all around the world. Those ports are positioned to import goods from Asia and also handle this volume, which is really, really significant for all of the United States economy. What I wound up doing with this book is juxtaposing that time period—the super stratospheric rise of trade in this space—with the environmental legislation which happens at about exactly the same time. So trying to look at the site as this extreme puzzle. But it's more than a local story, because those patterns exist elsewhere, too.

As you write about, wildlife management and conservation is sort of focused on maintaining the status quo of the port complex and keeping the engine running, and in some cases is actually funded by the very interests doing it. Can you say a little bit more about that?

The more I was digging, the more I would find sites like the local aquarium and this organization that does rehabilitation and rescue of birds. There's a direct line where I think a visitor at these sites might think: this is a conservation story, they're helping wildlife, and they solicit donations from the public. You wouldn't necessarily realize that a significant source of funding for these places is petroleum.

Undoubtedly these organizations are doing good for these creatures. But there's also this other layer of a conflict of interest of greenwashing. Some of that's voluntary by the organizations. One of them has a history where it was initially decided that the founder was going to take money from the petroleum industry and try to work with them. Others, it's a little bit more obscured and an artifact of legislation in California. Around 1990, after some spills, they put a tax on handling and sale of petroleum that has to be there in the event of spills. 

But what I'm really trying to draw out is that they wind up not being conflictual enterprises. It winds up that conservation sort of sits within this systemic thing that cannot be questioned, and even relies on the goodwill of the petroleum industry, or at least the cooperation and participation for the funding of the enterprise. So it becomes naturalized in this really overwhelming way, the inevitability that there will be this industrial harm and industrial accidents and there will be rescue or rehabilitation. But it's not possible to imagine a world where harm at that scale isn't a creeping possibility or spectacular possibility. There's just no way to think of life living without that either slow or spectacular violence always looming over it.

You chose four things as lenses to look at the port: cetaceans, bananas, seabirds, and otters. Why did you do it that way, and why did you choose those four?

A few reasons. One was methodological. I have tended in the past to do ethnographic research. That’s embedding with communities and talking to people and getting to a deep familiarity with belief systems and writing about that. And I think I needed a break from that work. But also I was new in a place, and I didn't feel necessarily oriented enough. I didn't know who I was responsible to in this new place. You want to do this work in a way that's careful and respectful and trusting; trust is cultivated on both sides. And so I didn't feel responsibly able or up for building long-term community relationships yet to write about this site. 

I had also been reading a lot of things in the vein of needing to broaden social and humanistic inquiry to think about multispecies lenses, and thinking about the climate and the so-called Anthropocene. The things I wound up writing about are what we would call charismatic. So they're already in news stories and they're already things that people are familiar with and know. It’s not a stretch to try to get a reader to care about the otter as a conservation story. It's definitely the case that you could write a so-called natural history of the site a bunch of different ways. And I chose to look at some things that were more familiar. My goal is to get them to leap off the page in new angles and lights than people might know before.

Three of them are animals that are found in the natural history of this place. Bananas are a way of trying to get at some of the other things in the book that are what make it not a natural history—it's also about labor and consumption. So thinking about the commodity chain of this food product and the history of refrigeration, and how it rests on the consumption of fossil fuel energy to move it and to cool it. But also it gave me a way to illuminate the patterns of goods handling in the ports. That included some automation or mechanization of labor, and then also the prehistory before it's a consumer product—the conditions of production and shipping on the origin. That's also something that I wanted to do. So it's not just about wildlife or animals in the ports, but it's really a story about how the ports and lifeforms do some dance or dialectic to move commodities in and around life.

Bananas are an interesting case study. First of all, I didn't realize that bananas needed special infrastructure at the ports—ripening rooms and things like that. Also how the increasing scale of the ports basically pushed them out. You write towards the end that maybe they'll come back, but maybe not. I really liked that as a way of highlighting that uncertainty of needing to figure out what justice and sustainability might look like.

And trade. I'm not someone who's arguing for completely local or regional supply chains, nor am I some sort of nationalist protectionist. But obviously what we're doing is unsustainable and harmful, even if there are certain beneficiaries of the system. I'm not trying to argue for some restoration to an Edenic past; that's not possible, and not realistic. But what would more sovereignty and assertion of control over these goods and processes all along the way look like? What would they look like for workers? What would they look like for consumers? What would they look like for the lifeforms that we’re enmeshed with?

It's this really familiar commodity that we might not think too much about. But it’s also really significant. Working on this book, something I read said that bananas are the most trafficked agricultural product on the ocean, which is a very strong warrant for thinking about their past, present, and future. I don't think we think of that most of the time when we're having lunch.

What is infrastructure vitalism?

That is something kind of playful, but kind of serious. It's really, really complicated, this site. Who's actually in control of it is fascinating, because there are local, regional, state, and national regulations that run through it and also that will affect this or that part of operations. Like the port was supposed to have this target for air quality or that target for water quality, or this deregulation in the transportation system will have this effect on labor. So there are lots of threads of interest groups and governments running through it. 

Local officials are always saying, “We need to modernize the port, we need to scale up operations, we need to support operations at scale.” They are doing that because entrenched interests make money off it, and because they think it's a winning economic strategy for the region to have all this goods movement and goods handling. But on some level, I also think they're not in control of it because they're responding to currents of global capital. If Los Angeles and Long Beach lose market share, then it'll go to Tacoma or it'll go to Savannah. There's an anxiety there where they're trying to chase the tail of something that's moving them in a way that they don't totally understand. I'm actually sympathetic to that. 

So the argument about infrastructural vitalism is a claim that they're subject to almost an animistic belief that they have to keep this stuff alive and stirring and moving and growing. Language like, “Trade is the lifeblood of America,” or “The 710 freeway is the spine of Southern California.” It looks at those somatic and economic metaphors and takes them seriously, as there’s a real emphasis on corporeal health or sanguinity that they're trying to manage. The argument is that, in focusing so myopically on the infrastructure and keeping it humming and keeping it fed and happy, they're losing the plot with a wider range of lively and ecological relations that are being harmed and being maimed and being killed because they're pursuing life for the infrastructure. 

While it's not one of the four areas that you explicitly focus on, the military looms large and is a consistent undercurrent throughout the entire book in myriad ways. What role has the military-industrial complex played in producing the violence and the harm in the San Pedro Bay ports?

A huge one. Even though the Navy mostly pulled out of San Pedro Bay in the 90’s, there's still military fueling and there's a weapon station. Also, in the neighborhood of San Pedro—which is part of LA—there's a huge battleship museum called the Battleship Iowa. People go and take pictures; it's a tourist destination. Cruise ships dock there. I think if you're docked for the afternoon, you might go to this battleship.

So there's this militarism that suffuses the entire site. And California being the western edge of the continent and the endpoint of Manifest Destiny, except then looking westward over the Pacific and the US empire and its claiming of territories and testing of weapons and all these things. California is really the base—in all senses—for a lot of that activity. 

Another thing to uncover here is the relationship between fuel, goods movement, planning of logistics, even having a certain predictable order of maritime operations. The security of commercial shipping is underwritten by an international order that is in the background: military preparedness and willingness to engage actors who violate that agreed-upon order. I was actually just reading someone who was arguing for more foregrounding of the military of the sea, saying, “Do you like Walmart? You should love the US Navy.”

That’s outside the scope of the book. But to the extent that the topic is the shifting land and water of this bay, the way that the land has been managed and the oil has been managed and hardened into refineries and docks and stuff, all of that is—even after the Navy has mostly consolidated itself in San Diego—a literal concretized infrastructural support for the US military, which is still the biggest consumer of fossil fuel on on the planet. All of that geopolitical security order is running through this site in ways that wouldn't be necessarily immediately apparent, I think.

In the book, you talk a lot about logistics, specifically the way that the “annihilative power of logistics” enables the damage and growth of the port. Do you think large-scale, highly complex logistics—the likes of which are on display here—could be harnessed for positive ends, or is this inherently a destructive force?

I think that's a wonderful question, and I don't have a simple answer. I will say that I'm interested in denaturalizing this to think about how it could be otherwise. And I think there is something potentially anti-democratic—maybe inherently anti-democratic—about certain scale and complexity of operations. You're inviting, and maybe underwriting by necessity, technocratic relations that aren't as amenable to democratic governance. That's as far as I would go.

But I'm certainly inviting this whole system to be thought of as up for grabs to be made to be more democratic and less violent. And I do think that the scale of complexity probably requires a command structure that might have antipathy towards more democratic governance and sovereignty than I would like to see brought to bear here. I'm generally comfortable saying, at a certain point, scale becomes its own force, and if we care about less violent and more democratic systems, that's something we should think about.

You write, “given that a port is not a destination but a site to hand off goods, it is well positioned to connect goods to struggle, not only sever them.” Can you say more about that?

In the simplest terms, a lot of our goods come with, but are also essentially alienated from, histories of struggle. Whether there's contestation over extraction of a resource, whether it's metal or clearcutting a forest or working in a sweatshop, there's struggle in the prehistory before it's a consumer good. But the port as it currently exists is a place to hand off the good. If the good has made it to the port, it often means it's been violently severed from its origin. And so the concept of transspecies supply chain justice is about: what if we actually thought about these things as connected all the way across and thought about local sovereignty flowing through and accompanying goods and processes all the way along? That's not a fancy way of saying fair trade or something. But what we think of as certified Fair Trade might be one component of it. The point is a lot of things that we consume have these violent origins that have been mystified—and often violent post-use lives, too—and thinking about this as a place to animate and have connections made between origins and supply chains and handoffs as a goal.

As you write about, ports as this site of interconnection of so many different things and at different scales is both a challenge and an opportunity—especially nowadays with how globalized everything is. How do you think we can make those connections across space and time through the lens of the port? Have you seen any good examples of that in practice?

There's a really neat site that documents ports as a site of struggle, Contested Ports. And here’s an LA-specific example. One of the first steps is to bring forward and document this site that's ticking along in the background, but is a space that’s made to be forgotten and invisibilized. Drawing something that's invisible out of the shadows and naming it, and naming the dynamics that it perpetuates and engenders.

There are different levels. In Greater LA, making the port accountable to residents and, moving into the Inland Empire, making this shipping and distribution infrastructure accountable to the people who live there and who are breathing toxic air and being subjected to this sacrifice zone so that the economy can function as it has. That would be one place to assert accountability. But that's still a very local project, and I am interested in the ways that this really connects.

There are some interesting things where the ports themselves are signing memoranda of agreement with each other and competing on the basis of greenness or something. It's very easy to be cynical about this, but global shipping is a huge, huge polluter, and I think that there are industry forces, as well as local ones, trying to force this to be cleaner.

I would also like to see a scale that's not pushing past planetary boundaries. And most of all, I would like to see the sovereignty of the people who make goods or have the places where they live be the sites of extraction. In that sense, the port is the place where it hands off and the supply chain is more of the action as things move along. There are calls to audit these and make them more transparent, but I think the profit system is always going to be working very, very strongly against that. Therefore, the economic system and the violent superpower in the room have to be rethought. I assume you and I would agree, just tinkering with the supply chain and shining some sunlight on it [laughs] is probably not as far as we would want to go. But, at the very least, these are really important sites.

My answer, honestly, is something more like degrowth—not pursuing growth for growth's sake. This may be wildly impractical, but I would love it if Los Angeles said, “We've been pursuing year-over-year growth in container shipping for decades. We're going to next set our sights on winding some of that down. We're going to call it a successful year if there's 3% less volume every year for 10 years; we're going to plan for that.” To me, that would be a meaningful local development and also it would be something that starts to unwind this unsustainable system. I don't have a lot of hope of that happening. What they're actually arguing for is zero-emission freight, but still more of it. To me, that's not going to work out as they hope.

You wrote in the concluding chapter about imagining a port in San Pedro Bay that could “allow many worlds to transit through it” that are “infrastructurally accommodated.” Can you explain that?

That’s riffing on the Zapatismo slogan. I’m thinking about it as a place where goods can flow, people can live, plants and animals can live. So it's not that single-minded pursuit of profit and global security that's achieved through violent energy extraction and pollution and severing people and natural systems from places. That's what's traveling through the port now, and that's annihilative. Doing things in a way that's more responsible and at scales that have accountability being possible.

So it's not an argument against trade of some kind; it's an argument against the systems that we have that are basically run on exploitation—ineluctably so. Reimagining the site as one for recreation, and use of the coastline in many modern and more traditional ways, and to have accountable ways of doing things both locally and further afield built in. It might still be a port, but it might not only be a port. And it would hopefully not be an absolutely mind-blowingly toxic mess, which it currently is. 

The coastline now is also vulnerable to flooding. We're going to have storm surges and such as sea level rises. This coastal area, as toxic as it is now, if that all became flooded that would result in really bad poisons getting pushed inland and contaminating all kinds of things, and then also back out into the sea. So there are all these reasons to unwind the scale of harm here, to both live with it better now and think of the future that's coming or is upon us.

Here is Dayton’s recent article on de-extinction that we mention during the episode.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about the fight for the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), legislation in New York that would allow the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to build renewable energy with robust labor provisions. On May 2nd, it passed in the state budget despite the New York political establishment’s efforts to ignore and co-opt the proposal.

This is the most significant public power victory in the US since the 1930s. The largest state-owned utility company in the country will be able to roll out new, publicly owned renewable energy with the strongest labor standards around. 

The main reason that BPRA passed was the Public Power NY organizers who wrote the bill and campaigned for years using a variety of tactics and adjusting to—and changing—the political conditions. For example, New York Governor Kathy Hochul initially tried to include a watered-down version of BPRA in the budget, which actually helped them by creating a new floor. But the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration’s signature omnibus bill signed into law last year, also provided a boost. 

The IRA’s primary climate policy mechanism is the extension and expansion of the same renewable energy tax credits that have been the foundation of federal renewable energy policy in the US for many years. This has favored large-scale, privately owned projects: because they do not have tax liabilities to deduct from, public or nonprofit entities could only indirectly benefit through power purchase agreements with private entities. As geographer Sarah Knuth has shown, these subsidies have created billions of dollars in tax havens for the firms that provide financing for renewable energy projects, mostly large banks. Knuth’s analysis reveals that because the amount of tax equity investors are looking to offset is significantly more limited than the projects seeking it, financiers have leverage to extract more favorable terms and act as gatekeepers for what projects get developed. Essentially what this means is that the government pays big banks to provide loans for renewable energy projects and reap enormous windfalls in the process. 

But the IRA has a subtle but potentially monumental change: it also allows for tax-exempt entities—like the NYPA—to get direct payments in lieu of tax credits, allowing them to directly take advantage of these renewable energy subsidies for the first time. These payments are uncapped, too—the much-publicized $370 billion figure for climate spending in the IRA is merely an estimate. This is a huge deal for public power, and it strengthened the case for BPRA. But direct pay could also be a boon for the public sector more broadly, because the policy does not only apply to utilities. For example, public schools could take advantage by building solar panels on their buildings.  

However, in a recent New York Times op-ed, geographer Brett Christophers wrote, “The I.R.A. will help accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure and, in particular, its concentration among a handful of global asset managers.” The first example he cites is a private asset management firm buying private wind and solar developers, which is an example of the latter, not the former. The trend of these companies buying up large swaths of the economy is concerning and worth examining, but it does not help to muddy the waters by conflating privatization with consolidation.  

Christophers compares Biden’s industrial policy approach of mostly private sector carrots unfavorably to FDR’s massive public sector build-out in the New Deal, and rightly so—our infrastructure should be owned by, and work for, the people. But he goes on to state: “Public ownership of major infrastructure has been an American mainstay ever since [the New Deal]. Mr. Biden’s laws will radically overhaul this culture.” That ship actually sailed decades ago. Half a century of neoliberalism has hollowed out the capacity of the public sector in the US via privatization and defunding, which was not even that great at its Rooseveltian apex; at present, over 80% of US energy infrastructure is privately owned. Far from being a Green New Deal, the IRA is mostly a continuation of the status quo—with some perhaps under-appreciated tools to fight back.

Rather than debating whether the IRA is good or bad, we should be thinking about how it affects our political economic conditions and what the strategic implications of that are for effecting a more just and sustainable world. It will likely help entrench some undesirable things, like financialization and car dominance, and it is wholly inadequate to the task of caring for and repairing our biosphere. But at the same time, some of the IRA’s subsidies—especially the direct payments for public entities—improve the terrain for certain forms of worker-driven climate organizing and public sector capacity-building in a real way.  

Christophers does acknowledge the IRA’s direct pay provisions, but correctly notes that “public entities [must be] actually willing and institutionally capable of taking advantage of those provisions, which is anything but a given.” The fact that opportunities need to be seized of in order to actualize their potential is just politics. The same can be said of any potentially useful policy, condition, or structure. Advocates for public power—like the socialists responsible for the BPRA victory—understand  that public (or cooperative) ownership in and of itself is not a panacea. It makes energy democracy possible in a way that private ownership simply does not allow for, but it still has to be fought for and built. Public Power NY has now shifted its focus to stopping the confirmation of NYPA Acting President and CEO Justin Driscoll, who has softened his stance on BPRA considerably in the wake of its passage.

In terms of the scale of what needs to be done to stop the ecological crisis, Christophers is correct to call BPRA a “relatively modest win.” The fact that it took years of arduous work is a reflection of the difficult terrain we find ourselves in. Similarly, the IRA reflects the balance of political forces right now: the private sector remains dominant, but support for going outside of the profit motive is emerging. How the new conditions of the IRA will unfold—where those direct pay dollars flow and what they are used for—is undetermined.

Sober, clear-eyed political analysis in the US usually means grasping how difficult it is to do anything good and viewing even ostensible progress through a pessimistic lens, which applies to the IRA as much as anything. However, it also means vigilantly looking for potential openings and opportunities, however small, and not being fatalistic or overly deterministic—the BPRA victory is a prime example of this. You probably will not go broke anytime soon betting on pessimistic predictions and interpretations of the US political terrain. But that is only true until it isn’t.

Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral said, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” This is vital wisdom, especially given prevalent incentives to overstate the impact of and/or contribution to ostensible wins. But there is a flipside to that coin. Winning often comes with deep suspicion for those of us in the US Left, and losing nobly can sometimes feel more comfortable. In a system as broken and exploitative as this, how could we ever hope to wield power? And even if we do, the contradictions are fraught and dangerous. However, the right types of wins that shift power and resources to the working class are not only ends in and of themselves, but means of building and sustaining movements.

That is the promise of the Green New Deal, which is not limited to the AOC-Markey resolution, or even just federal legislation: it is an expansive framework for using the state for redistributive climate and environmental justice. What it looks like, what it does or doesn’t do, is contingent and undetermined. We can start imagining and fighting for it in our communities and our workplaces, and enacting it in our cities and states. In BPRA, Public Power NY has provided an inspiring example.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

It seems like housing is in crisis basically everywhere in the country—we have rising unaffordability, homelessness, displacement, etc. Some people say we just need to allow developers to build more and/or change zoning laws, but there's a clear tension between housing as a commodity and being a need that the market can’t always provide. So what should we be doing?

We should be building public and social housing, and acquiring it. This thing where it's progressive to rely predominantly on the market for housing production, that all kicked off in San Francisco and I was around for that. That discourse has taken many forms. Some of it’s moved well to the left of where it was, some of it’s moved to the right; it's all over the place. But I definitely remember being around when YIMBYism and stuff was just getting started. It was more explicitly libertarian back then, I'll put it that way.

What do I think about that? I don't think it makes sense on its face: why would we depend on a cyclical market that's only going to build predominantly at the higher end to solve a housing shortage? I do believe there's a housing shortage; I just don't believe the market will ever solve the housing shortage. Just on the economics of it, you're expecting developers to continue building even when rents are falling, you're expecting their investors to be stupid enough to finance that. There's a lot of reasons why that doesn't work.

We have a 1.2 million unit shortage for low-to-middle income people alone in California. That's a unit shortage that the market is not going to build. Someone put it really well on Twitter the other day: it's true that there's a housing shortage and it's true that some land-use regulations can be a barrier to housing production, and people learned that thing then didn't learn a second or third thing [laughs]. That is really how I think about it, too. Even if you’re not a socialist, it doesn't really make sense to pin all your hopes on the credit cycle or the business cycle or the private market. Folks will say, “Yeah, we support more money and investment in affordable housing, etc.” but saying you support it nominally is completely different than winning it politically at the scale that is required. And when we have 50 years of wage stagnation and racialized income inequality, that makes the affordability challenge so much bigger.

I have seen a lot of different definitions of social housing out there. How do you explain that to people who aren't familiar with what social housing is?

I stick to the core tenets: that it's permanently affordable, that it's permanently de-commodified, that there's community and tenant autonomy—that they actually have power over what happens to the housing that they live in. And, of course, that it's safe and secure and decent. That's the umbrella of what social housing is. I think it's helpful to think about social housing as a spectrum, but to hold those tenets. And not excluding things like existing public housing that has been defunded from the definition of social housing.

I think it's an ongoing debate, and it's coming to the forefront. A lot of people are having those debates—sometimes productively, sometimes unproductively—about what social housing means. It is an umbrella term, but I think that that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I do think that it's important to be specific wherever possible, but it's a useful umbrella term to talk about things like community land trusts or limited equity housing cooperatives in addition to municipally owned housing and existing public housing. I think it's very useful in that sense, but it definitely is vague enough that it can be easily misunderstood or co-opted, and I think that's a big challenge.

So you went to Vienna to check out their legendary social housing. How has that been sustained, and what do you think we can learn from that here? 

People love to nerd out on the different land and funding models. And don't get me wrong, I love to nerd out on that stuff, too. But I think it's really about the political coalition that built Red Vienna, and the political coalition that's maintaining it. Honestly, the coolest part of it for me was two things. One, being able to actually experience Vienna with tenants, not just in private housing, but in NYCHA—New York public housing—and getting to see it through their eyes and hear what they thought about it. And to also meet and get to know some folks who are affiliated with the Austrian Social Democratic Party and their Chamber of Labour, who are basically the political line of defense; politics in Austria writ large is not necessarily going in a positive direction. So to actually see the people who are fighting to defend it, and also experience it through the eyes of tenants who are organizing in the United States and to see how they felt about it.  

When we were touring Karl Marx-Hof—one of the big, famous municipal developments—with the tenants, they were like, “If we won funding for NYCHA, our housing could look like this; this is NYCHA if we cared about it." That was something that I heard a lot of tenants say. They were able to directly make that connection and immediately say, “This is a political challenge—we're organizing for investment, we're organizing for resources.”

And the Social Democratic Party folks are definitely under the gun. Not just from fascism, but also from neoliberalism. Because the EU has really curtailed how much you can spend on municipal housing systems if you're a member country, and that's affected them pretty seriously for the last few decades. Though they are trying to go back to a more direct municipal housing model, the kind that they used to use for all their older housing. There are a lot of lessons, but I was really thinking about: how did they win this as a coalition 100 years ago? How are they defending it now? My mind was really focused. They're still facing a ton of challenges, which I think people forget sometimes; they just think about it as this perfect place with no issues. That's not true. 

We have this idea here of perpetually increasing home values. It's basically sold as a retirement plan, and renters are often treated as an afterthought to politicians. How do you think we can navigate that tension between homeowners and tenants to move towards making housing a human right?

I don't really see homeowners as a political bloc the way that some folks who think about housing do. They're not coordinated in that way. From the tenant side, when we think about coordinated political blocs, we think they're pretty obvious—they have names. They're called the Apartment Association and the realtors and the chambers of commerce, etc. We think about it as our enemy is real estate capital writ large.

It is going to be really hard to disentangle. The US/UK/anglophone model of perpetually appreciating property ownership has also been exported. I was rereading Raquel Rolnik’s amazing book, Urban Warfare, recently and she talks a lot about how that model—through the World Bank and other institutions—has been exported as a solution for the Global South, which is rapidly urbanizing. That’s really frightening. How do we disentangle it is the million dollar question. Even folks on the center left have been saying more and more we have to make renting more secure and more stable for people. I think that's definitely true. But the dream of homeownership—I never thought about this when I was watching HGTV as a kid—we have a whole channel dedicated to this ideology. We have many channels dedicated to this ideology.

But I don't think of homeowners themselves as a political bloc such that they can't be moved in one direction or the other. These models are very small and they need to be scaled up and tested more, but things like limited equity housing coops and community land trusts and those kinds of alternative ownership models, I think about them as strategies to wean people off of the white picket fence. That being said, a lot of the tenants that we organize with, many of whom are victims of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, those folks know. They don't have any illusions about being a temporarily embarrassed homeowner; they know how far out of reach that is. A lot of people do. Not just the people who it's been taken away from, but even the people who might aspire to that.

It's really about security. It's about financial security, it's about wealth building, it's about physical stability. I'm optimistic that we can come up with solutions and policies that offer them that outside of this traditional homeownership model. It has not been working for so long, especially since 2008. There are more people who are disillusioned with it than I think we like to assume. 

What's one weird trick for doing it? [laughs] I don’t know. It is a huge question, and there's a lot of different ways to approach it. There's a lot of discourse about things like rent control—I'm in a rent-controlled apartment right now—being bad because it offers people stability. God forbid somebody gets to live in the same place. It's going to be really uphill, because while there's definitely changing consciousness on the ground, when I go into the Capitol, all those talking points, all that ideology, is still there. There's so much talk about wealth-building. 

I'll just add one more thing that I also think about, that someone observed when we were in Vienna, which is that renting is considered a form of wealth-building there. Because they're not spending that much money on renting their housing, they get to stay, which means they get to build wealth for their families. If you're the kind of person who's susceptible to wealth-building discourse, like a politician, no one ever thinks about stable renting as a form of wealth-building, even though it absolutely can be. But they do over there, and that's also something that I hadn't really thought of pushing before. That's still probably a pretty out-of-left-field thing to be saying in the Capitol, but I have been testing it out.

Do you think that fighting for legislative reforms can be complementary to tenant unions and tenant organizing? Do you think it makes sense to fight directly for better housing policy intertwined with organizing tenants?

I'm biased because I’m the legislative director for an outfit that does primarily build tenant unions and do tenant organizing [laughs]. I'm the policy jockey for a base-building outfit; I do this so that my coworkers can do the important work of organizing. I think about this all the time because it's what I do. Besides the fact that we have to really conserve our capacity, when it comes to reforms, I think it's incumbent on policy people to always be thinking: how are you moving the organizing forward? Does this make the organizing easier? Even if we lose a particular bill, did we build something out of it? And to actually plan that ahead. Before you even try to initiate something, to actually plan out: if I lose, has this built power, has this built infrastructure? What can we get out of this that's going to set us up for more success next time? I think about it as building infrastructure, policies like right to counsel or right to organize. Right to organize is a big one for us at Tenants Together.

It's really about it being a vehicle to movement-building. People can't organize their communities if they get pushed out of them in the first place. So a lot of the work that we do is passing local rent control, because that's a movement infrastructure policy. And I think our enemies in the landlord lobby know that [laughs].

What is right to organize policy?

That's another million dollar question, because I think it will look very different in different places. In 2019, we did a bill called SB 529. It didn't make it, but it would have strengthened certain provisions that allow you to withhold rent over habitability, etc. They're in the penal code or the civil code. We wanted to strengthen those provisions, but there was also anti-retaliation: you're not evicted for belonging to a tenant association or a tenant union. That was what was viable at the state level.

Labor's obviously decades and decades ahead of us, and there's no Wagner Act for tenant organizing, there's no NLRB for tenant organizing. But it's really fascinating to see discussions within labor about different forms of striking and different forms of organizing, and how much does it help or hurt to codify or legalize one form potentially at the expense of another form of organizing. We're at the very beginning of having that debate, I think. Not just in California, but also nationwide.

And last year, San Francisco passed—I believe we are the first city—a right to organize ordinance where there actually is an adjudicating body. It's our rent board, which also oversees our rent control. There is basically legal recognition of a tenant association. You don't have to register, but you do have to meet certain criteria. The law compels your landlord to recognize and negotiate with you, and that's pretty sweet. That one’s flown under the radar; there hasn't been a lot of coverage. My supervisor in my district, whose election I worked on in 2015, passed it in coordination with one of Tenants Together’s member organizations that does a ton of tenant organizing citywide in SF called the Housing Rights Committee. 

I suspect it will look different in different places. You could have as much of a diversity of opinion about legal recognition to organize within the housing justice movement as you have in labor. I wish I could talk more publicly about what people are cooking up, but a lot of our allies in labor—who are very attuned to housing issues because their workers are predominantly tenants who are under the gun—are also very interested in passing right to organize ordinances. Obviously, I love hanging out with labor. They have things they want to learn from us, but we have a lot we want to learn from them, too, because they've been in this organizing debate forever. 

Where does organized labor fit into this? Or where have you seen success and bringing together housing and labor?

I think organized labor is essential; those are our most natural allies. The SF right to organize ordinance was called “A Union at Home.” We've been working with a lot of the University of California unions who have been getting hit really hard by housing costs issues. Not just for their students and their academic workers, but also they care about the gentrification and displacement in the broader communities where UC campuses are. And there was a big letter—other unions and orgs from outside of California signed on, we signed on—demanding that UC divest from Blackstone, enact protections on its housing, and advocate for tenant protections on private housing on its campuses. So rent control, just cause for eviction, things like that, but also that they divest from Blackstone and use that to actually build social housing on their land, of which they have quite a lot. That was like a tenant-labor Voltron [laughs]. I think there were some environmental justice folks, too. So it was a really cool thing to see, and there's been a lot of action around that. It's going to be a divestment campaign, and it's just getting off the ground. 

We have a couple bills that are tenant and housing justice and labor organizations working together, cross-endorsing each other's proposals. There's a bill now, SB 584, that's a tax on short-term rentals across the state to fund social housing, and its sponsors are the state building trades and the California Labor Federation, the AFL-CIO. Their names are on it, and we're supporting it. We have a planning bill to come up with a state grant social housing plan, and they're on our bill now. There's all sorts of different coalitions and work that's being done. Labor has always been our allies on local rent control fights. SEIU is a huge player in housing politics and policy; they’re always with us on state and often local initiatives. UNITE HERE is another one that all over the state is very engaged in housing issues.

To take a step back, definitely the more active labor partners on local and state work are, unsurprisingly, the ones whose workers are predominantly on the lower-income end because they're getting hit the hardest. So it's obvious to them, it's obvious to all of us that we should be working together. There's that segment of labor, but I think that other parts of labor are either getting involved or have been involved or that we're trying to work together more on housing issues. There's a lot of exciting stuff going on. In terms of what we do as tenant organizers, we just think we're doing labor organizing for your house [laughs]. 

You've listed some examples in California you’re very familiar with. Are you seeing other promising housing organizing around the US right now? Are there any recent victories you think are good lessons to draw from?

There's tenant organizing happening everywhere, and it's so exciting to see. It’s not just this coastal blue city thing. Ask Kansas City Tenants [laughs], who are doing incredible. We're all in awe of Kansas City Tenants, we all have a huge crush on them. You see a resurgence of tenant organizing in SF, LA, Seattle, New York, Chicago, etc.—in those big blue cities. But you're also seeing more tenant organizing—and land organizing, too—in more and more areas. If you look at the map of Right to the City member organizations and where it's growing, you can be in rural New Mexico, you can be in the exurbs of the deep south; it's popping off everywhere, and that's really cool to see. There wasn't a renters union in Pittsburgh when I was growing up there, but there is one there. There’s tenant organizing in Rochester and Buffalo and Cleveland and Detroit. It’s been growing in all sorts of different places. You're starting to see this kind of organizing happening in rural areas and exurbs, too. It’s not necessarily places where there's multifamily buildings that you’re organizing, it’s talking about community stewardship and ownership of land. There's so many inspiring examples.

Have you seen good examples—in your own experience or elsewhere—of bringing together electoral and labor and housing, and how these things can be complimentary?

The one I have the most direct experience with, because that's our bread and butter where I work, is local rent control. It is, unfortunately, limited by state preemption that we've been trying to get rid of since 1995 when it passed. It's the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act. It's awful, we’re trying to get rid of it. But besides that, you pass rent control city-by-city in California; that’s how it works. And you can do it two ways: you can go to the ballot, or you can go to your city council. So electing a good city council is pretty important. You see a lot of more electoral-minded folks getting involved in local rent control campaigns for that reason. You need a coalition to go to the ballot, you need money, you need resources. So it's really interesting to see different constellations of different people working in different subject areas.

There's a city called Bell Gardens, part of greater LA, that passed rent control. And the big organization that was organizing tenants in Bell Gardens, mostly working class Latina women, was California Latinas for Reproductive Justice. They make the connection between rent control and women's reproductive autonomy. When we were trying to pass rent control in Sacramento a few years ago, our allies were three different SEIU unions. So it's different in different places. Some of our allies in the East Bay are not housing organizations. We've worked with an early childhood development organization. Environmental justice folks are involved as well.

There was a crop of early cities that passed rent control in the late 70s/early 80s, which was SF, LA, Berkeley, Oakland, Santa Monica, and San Jose. Then nobody passed rent control for about 30 years. And then Richmond, California was the first city to pass it and kicked off this wave that's been continuing now for eight years. Why? Because Richmond was owned by Chevron. And so Richmond's predominant issue and all the organizing that brought their Progressive Alliance to their city council was around environmental justice. They, of course, recognized that the exploitation around housing and habitability and all of those different issues was clearly connected with all of the public health and environmental implications and the electoral implications of Chevron owning their entire city council.

That was the perfect example of rent control as an environmental justice priority coming out of an environmental justice effort and political coalition that also turned into an electoral coalition that still remains here to this day. And they ended up kicking off a wave that has not stopped and has only grown. Seven years later, you have California Latinas for Reproductive Justice passing rent control in Bell Gardens. When it comes to these local rent control efforts, people de-silo themselves in very interesting ways, and it looks different from place to place. It's always really fascinating to me to all see the myriad little coalitions that are built, depending on what the local conditions are and what the challenges are.

Have a nice weekend!

On the origins of Earth Day and DSA’s new Green New Deal campaign phase (by me)

A wonderful piece on how to make friends (by Clare Coffey)

My dream job

Keep your eyes on the South: “Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.” (by Tressie McMillan Cottom)

My favorite city is doing exciting things with social housing (by Katelin Penner)

A fascinating story about the man who beat roulette (by Kit Chellel)

Promising experiments in agroecology in Haiti (by Cantave Jean-Baptiste and Steve Brescia)

The Biden administration approved a massive oil project in Alaska seemingly without a fight. “We ought to approach the administration’s claims of powerlessness with skepticism.” (by Hannah Story Brown)

We need a Federal Public Power program (by Johanna Bozuwa, Sarah Knuth, Grayson Flood, Patrick Robbins, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò)

How a rhino eats a watermelon

A new study found that very small increases in exposure to particulate air pollution (mainly from burning fossil fuels) can lead to large increases in risk of dementia (by Kate Yoder)

My guest is Dharna Noor (@dharnanoor), climate reporter at The Boston Globe. Check out her work here.

I apologize for the lack of posts over the last couple weeks. I have been very busy and also had some scheduling issues.

While this newsletter has always been free, I have now put the paid subscription option on indefinite hiatus. I am incredibly grateful for everyone who has supported this work monetarily, but because of significant new time commitments, my output will be less regular than it has been so I do not feel comfortable charging for it.

Rest assured that Terrain is not going anywhere, and new posts will resume shortly. Thank you all for reading and subscribing! I am truly honored by your time, engagement, and support.

In the meantime, here are some links:

Phosporous Saved Our Way of Life—and Now Threatens to End It by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Devil’s Milkshake by Tarence Ray

Economists’ Obsession With “Efficiency” Is Just an Endorsement of Greed by Jag Bhalla

This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk by Sharon Lerner

‘A national scandal’: how US climate funding could make water pollution worse by Keith Schneider

It Is Happening Again by Erik Baker

10 years ago, we were turning nuclear bombs into nuclear energy. We can do it again. by Irina Wang

On February 3rd, 50 cars from a 150-car Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio and erupted into flames. As has been widely reported, some of these cars were carrying a highly combustible and toxic chemical called vinyl chloride, which came spewing out of the crumpled tankers. 

Vinyl chloride is used to make polyvinyl chloride (PVC). PVC is a plastic used in all sorts of things like wires, packaging, and the eponymous pipes. Everyone in a two mile radius of the crash was ordered to evacuate due to the serious threat of air pollution, both from the leaking tankers and the subsequent fires used by cleanup crews to burn off the vinyl chloride. After the latter and some EPA air and water quality testing, East Palestine residents were told they could return home on Wednesday.

However, the extent of the damage—and long-term danger—is not yet clear. The controlled burn produced a giant plume of dangerous gasses phosgene (which has been used as a chemical weapon) and hydrogen chloride in the air. Prolonged exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with an increased risk of several types of cancer. The chemicals spilled into the Ohio River and there are reports of sick and dead fish, chickens, and pets in the area. And, according to a recent EPA letter sent to Norfolk Southern, some of the cars contained other toxic chemicals not previously reported:

Approximately 20 rail cars were listed as carrying hazardous materials. Cars containing vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether are known to have been and continue to be released to the air, surface soils, and surface waters.  

This calamity was not natural or unavoidable, and we can expect more catastrophic accidents like it if the political choices that produced it remain intact. As reported by The Lever, Norfolk Southern (and other rail industry interests) successfully lobbied against safety regulations for trains carrying hazardous chemicals such as requiring improved braking systems. This particular train was on fire for 20 miles before it derailed, seemingly without detection. 

For years, railroad workers have been calling for increased safety measures and warning about the inevitability of disasters like this due to railroad companies’ deadly focus on maximizing short-term profit. Railroad Workers United has highlighted several glaring safety issues with this particular train—like insufficient inspection and excessive weight and length—that are associated with precision scheduled railroading, which is basically a business euphemism for minimizing “inefficient” labor and safety expenses.

You may remember a couple months ago when Congress and President Biden intervened to break a rail strike by forcing a contract onto unions that had voted it down. These workers do not even get paid sick leave and they have to labor under increasingly onerous and dangerous conditions due to rail companies’ extreme cost-cutting measures. Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern and the other US rail corporations have spent $196 billion dollars on stock buybacks and dividends since 2010. Imagine if they had used that money to pay workers a little more and invest in better safety measures. 

It is a tale as old as time: a corporation runs roughshod over workers and the environment because the people who control it are driven entirely by wealth accumulation while the ostensible regulators are controlled by or subservient to capital. Usually what happens is the corporation gets a fine, somebody cleans it up a bit (to the extent that is even possible), nothing meaningful changes to prevent it from happening again, and no one in power is ever held accountable.

Thus far, there has been a bizarre silence from the federal government; as far as I can tell, no one in the Biden administration has even commented on this situation. This does not bode well for the potential for more stringent regulations or corporate accountability on the near-term horizon. And continuing their long track record of stepping up and doing the right thing, Norfolk Southern has offered a paltry $25,000 donation to support the residents of East Palestine. 

Perhaps sustained, organized pressure can get more significant voluntary changes or even some stronger laws. But freight trains carrying toxic and dangerous substances (whether classified that way or not) crisscross the US on a daily basis, and we also have to dramatically expand passenger capacity (i.e. Amtrak) to build a more just and sustainable transit system. Norfolk Southern and their ilk have shown they cannot be entrusted with overseeing or accommodating these tasks. Because freight and Amtrak share our inadequate and privately owned railroads, the former is typically given preference and passenger service is often slow and undependable—despite the fact that rail corporations promised to prioritize passenger trains. 

Bloated executive salaries and societally useless dividends and stock buybacks are essentially theft from workers and, as this toxic spill shows, from all of us. You might not live in or near East Palestine, but next time it could be your town. The burden of this risk is unnecessary and unevenly distributed; it will always flow downward to workers and to the poor and racialized communities who lack the political power in our society to resist it.

Additionally, this is yet another example of how plastics and the fossil fuels that they are made from have social and ecological costs throughout their entire supply chains, not just from their end usage. The quantity and variety of polluting substances that are produced in this country should not be taken for granted, and neither should the conditions of their transportation.

The rail system is too important for both our present and future health to leave in the hands of corporations and their wealthy executives and shareholders who focus on profit over the health of people and our planet. The disaster in East Palestine shows how labor and environmental justice are fundamentally intertwined, so struggles and policies to materially prioritize workers and to prevent pollution must be combined as well. We can start with the necessary-but-insufficient task of nationalizing the railroad system.