No Planet B

by Lucy Diavolo

  Antonio told Teen Vogue that AOC gives her hope and she admires the congresswoman’s strength, but that “she could do better. We can all do better.”

  How Does It Move Forward?

  The Green New Deal will remain a proposal, barring Democratic takeovers of the Senate and White House in 2020, and even then, there’s no guarantee the proposal would become policy or even look the same. But Antonio and Yazzie believe that whatever happens with the Green New Deal, the Red Deal is a first step in centering Native people and offering ways for non-Native people to hold themselves and those around them accountable.

  Understand how you’re “accountable for the violence that’s happening,” Yazzie said, or “find out whose land you’re living on,” Antonio said, explaining, “Wherever you’re at, you’re on Native territory.”

  Native people face violence every day, Antonio said, and it will be people power, community organizing, and uplifting marginalized voices that help to build toward a future that respects the climate and those who have pushed for its protection.

  “Ours is the oldest class struggle in the Americas; centuries-long resistance for a world in which many worlds fit. Indigenous peoples are best suited to lead this important movement,” the Red Deal reads. Or, as Antonio put it, “[Indigenous peoples] have been at the forefront and on the front lines in holding the United States accountable. [We’ve] been fighting for five hundred years.”

  How Plastic Is a Function of Colonialism

  DR. MAX LIBOIRON

  August 22, 2019

  Nain is the most northern Inuit community in Nunatsiavut, Canada. It was one of the first places in Newfoundland and Labrador to ban plastic grocery bags in 2009 after villagers saw hundreds of plastic bags snagged on rocks underwater when they went out to fish. The bag ban has appeared to reduce the number of grocery bags in the water, but many of other types of plastic bags, as well as food packaging, ropes, building insulation, and tiny unidentifiable fragments, line the shores and waters of the area.

  None of these plastics are created in Nain. But since plastics have been found in the Arctic, government and scientific projects are looking to find ways to reduce plastic pollution coming from Arctic communities with initiatives like recycling and treating sewage. But these solutions look at the end of the pipeline—the point after plastics have already arrived, thousands of miles from their point of production, to the Arctic. These types of solutions assume that plastics can and will continue to be produced and imported to the North, and northerners are supposed to deal with this import of pollution.

  “Colonialism” refers to a system of domination that grants a colonizer access to land for the colonizer’s goals. This does not always mean property for settlement or water for extraction. It can also mean access to land-based cultural designs and culturally appropriated symbols for fashion. It can mean access to Indigenous land for scientific research. It can also mean using land as a resource, which may generate pollution through pipelines, landfills, and recycling plants.

  Lloyd Stouffer, editor of Modern Packaging magazine, declared in 1956 that “the future of plastics is in the trash can.” This call for the “plastics industry to stop thinking about ‘reuse’ packages and concentrate on single use” came at the start of a new era of mass consumption of plastics in the form of packaging, which now accounts for the largest category of plastic products produced worldwide. He saw that disposables were a way to create new markets for the fledgling plastics industry.

  This idea assumes access to land. It assumes that household waste will be picked up and taken to landfills or recycling plants that allow plastic disposables to go “away.” Without this infrastructure and access to land, Indigenous land, there is no disposability.

  Nain does not have an “away.” Neither do many other places whose lands are colonized as places to ship disposables or are used for landfills. Nor do many extractive zones that provide the oil and gas feedstock for producing plastics. They’re in the far North, Southeast Asia, and western Africa, among many other places. Some of these same places serve as an “away” for wealthier regions that export their waste. In fact, the term “waste colonialism” was coined in 1989 at the United Nations Environmental Programme Basel Convention when several African nations articulated concerns about the disposal of hazardous wastes by wealthy countries into their territories.

  China has been the place where nearly half the world’s plastic waste has been sent to go “away.” This ended in January 2018 when China banned the import of scrap plastics and other materials, which will leave an estimated 111 million metric tons of plastic waste displaced. Recycling programs in the United States and around the world that depend on using other countries’ land for waste have slowed down, shut down, or are stockpiling plastics as new solutions are sought. Currently, this next round of waste colonization is headed for Southeast Asia.

  Perhaps you’ve heard that the top five countries responsible for most marine plastics are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. Some of these countries are also the ones receiving a disproportionate amount of plastic waste from other regions. They also happen to be places where waste systems do not mimic American curb-to-landfill systems. These regions are framed in scientific articles, the media, and policy papers as “mismanaging” their waste. This is a perpetuation of colonialist mind-set, discourses that have long associated some uses of land as civilized and moral and other uses as savage and deficient. As Cole Harris writes in his book Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia, historically, when local people were not using land “properly,” colonizers would come and take it away to use it “better.” In 1876 a white Indian reserve commissioner on Vancouver Island in the region currently known as Canada addressed members of “a Native audience” (nation unspecified) who were being moved to reserves that were a fraction of the size of their previous land bases. He explained, “The Land was of no value to you. The trees were of no value to you. The Coal was of no value to you. The white man came. He improved the land. You can follow his example.” Similar mind-sets still exist today.

  In September 2015, an American-based environmental NGO called the Ocean Conservancy released a report looking for solutions to marine plastic pollution. One of the core recommendations was for countries in Southeast Asia to work with foreign-funded industries to build incinerators to burn plastic waste. This recommendation follows a long line of colonial acts from various entities, from access to Indigenous land to extract oil and gas to make plastics, to the production of disposable plastics that requires land to store and contain them, to pointing the finger at local and Indigenous peoples for “mismanaging” imported waste, and then gaining access to land to solve their uncivilized approach to waste management.

  The Philippines arm of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), a grassroots environmental-justice coalition, rejected the Ocean Conservancy recommendation for incineration. They argued against the health and environmental impacts of burning waste, particularly in countries that struggle with air pollution, such as China, where increasing protests against waste-to-energy incinerators occur in a context where 69 percent of current incinerators have records of violating environmental air pollution standards. They talked about the costs of building and maintaining this infrastructure and what it means for debt to foreign bodies. They wrote about how burning waste and plastic perpetuates climate-changing fossil fuel extraction. In short, they argued against the entire system that assumes access to land for come-from-away industry and environmentalists. GAIA’s efforts have been uneven. They’ve helped to successfully block some incinerators, such as one that was planned in Wellington, South Africa, and continue to battle on other fronts.

  Disposability is not the result of the bad behavior of some individuals choosing to buy some things and not others. Consumer choice as a concept makes no sense in many places. In Nain, there is one store. There is one kind of ketchup you can buy. There is one type
of lettuce. Both are in plastic packaging because the producers assume that there is a place for that packaging to go. It goes into the dump, where it is usually burned so bears aren’t attracted to town, and then the scraps blow into the water. There is no way to behave differently. Bag bans don’t eliminate the problem. Degradable plastics made of corn would move the problem onto someone else’s land. Shipping Nain’s plastics to a recycling plant in Vietnam or even elsewhere in Canada produces pollution and plastic leakage on other lands still. Disposable plastics are simply not possible without colonizer access to land. The end of colonialism will result in the end of plastic disposability.

  Climate Disaster Is a Labor Issue: Here’s Why

  KIM KELLY

  May 23, 2019

  The climate crisis is the greatest threat facing humanity. Given the number of imperialistic wars, white supremacist terrorist attacks, mass extinctions, concentration camps, genocides, and brutal government repression with which we as a species are currently occupying ourselves, that is truly saying something.

  A widely cited report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2018, warned that, unless a massive effort is undertaken to curtail the climate emergency, Earth has only a few short years before it enters an irreversibly apocalyptic scenario. According to a 2015 World Bank report, the planet only has until 2030 before the climate crisis forces 100 million more people into poverty.

  The effects of climate disaster are already here: cyclones, tsunamis, wildfires, toxic air, disappearing islands. These increasingly common events have had a disproportionate effect on poor people, who have less access to crucial infrastructure and resources when catastrophe strikes; these events will continue to hit the hardest those living in poverty, while the rich continue to profit off the suffering of the poor.

  For this and many other reasons, the breakdown of our climate is not only a looming peril—it’s a labor issue.

  The Green New Deal, a proposal introduced by Democratic lawmakers Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey and galvanized by an engaged youth movement, is perhaps the U.S. government’s most robust attempt to make a dent in the country’s outsized carbon emissions and end its reliance on fossil fuels, both of which propel the ongoing climate disaster when in use (burning them releases harmful chemicals into the atmosphere) and during extraction (via methods like oil drilling and coal mining, which cause irreparable damage to the environment). The Green New Deal also seeks to address the dire income inequality that has existed since European colonizers stepped foot on this native land, and has only been exacerbated by climate change, both here and on global terms. This policy proposal isn’t a fix-all, but it is an ambitious program that, if implemented, has the potential to enact real, much-needed change, especially if other entities (for example, New York City, whose city council recently passed a Climate Mobilization Act) are inspired to take action on a local level.

  At a glance, the proposal seems extremely union-friendly. A core component of the package focuses on workers like coal miners and oil riggers, whose jobs have been and will continue to be impacted by a national pivot away from extractive industries, and promises to create “high-quality union jobs” while protecting the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain. The program also seeks to guarantee health care, housing, and a job with “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States”; an enticing proposal in a nation where approximately thirteen million children are living under the poverty line. But the Green New Deal has gotten a surprising amount of pushback from certain sectors of the labor movement. In March, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) energy committee released a statement against the proposal, written on behalf of a number of manufacturing unions like the United Steelworkers and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which said the provisions it made for potentially impacted workers were not detailed enough, arguing that its goal to transition away from fossil fuels would immediately kill off jobs. Other labor leaders are skeptical of the proposal’s promises to transition workers and “green jobs” guarantees. As Phil Smith, a spokesman for UMWA, told Reuters, “We’ve heard words like ‘just transition’ before, but what does that really mean? Our members are worried about putting food on the table.”

  That some workers are feeling left behind and have already witnessed firsthand how institutional neglect can ravage working-class communities is a familiar concept to me. When the then New Jersey governor Chris Christie approved a new natural gas pipeline project that would snake through the pristine wilderness of the Pine Barrens, the South Jersey nature preserve where I grew up and my entire family still lives, my first thought was of my dad: he’s been a union construction worker since he was eighteen, and chances were he’d be called to work on the pipeline, if it ever made it out of the courts.

  The thought of him digging up his beloved Pinelands broke my heart, but he remained stoic at the prospect. After all, he needed the money to cover bills and care for my disabled mother; as much as he loves those woods, his hands would be tied.

  Make no mistake: the coal miner and pipeline worker know about the environmental costs of their labor, but when faced with the choice of feeding their kids or putting down their tools in the name of saving the planet, the pressures of capitalism tend to win; their choice is made for them. That is why it’s so important to dismantle the structures that force these impossible decisions and offer instead real, equitable alternatives to those whose livelihoods depend on industries that harm the earth.

  While many in the labor movement were disappointed in the AFL-CIO energy committee’s stance, and many individual unions have endorsed the Green New Deal, it’s not hard to see why some union members in certain industries would be wary of any big shifts. Job-retraining programs have had mixed success in areas like Ap-palachia, where coal miners have found new lines of work, thanks to grassroots community efforts, but have also been the victims of botched schemes like “coding boot camps” run by clueless outsiders. Studies have shown that retraining miners to work in the renewable energy industry would be both cost-effective and financially viable for the workers themselves, but efforts like these require institutional support (and funding) to really make an impact. Theoretically, the Green New Deal would supply said resources, but what if we didn’t have to wait for the government to finally, fitfully pass an inevitably watered-down version of someone else’s vision?

  What if, instead, the labor movement took matters into its own hands, and we seized control of our future?

  Here’s the thing: the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S., has a lot of money. In 2018, the organization spent over $4 million in donations to various politicians and lobbying groups. I’m not proposing that it drop everything and pour its resources into job-training programs, but what if the organization launched its own large-scale, nationwide program offering job training specifically to the workers whose continuing careers the energy committee was justifiably concerned about in its statement?

  The union can’t take on this entire burden alone—that’s the kind of heavy lift that only the government has billions of dollars available to address in a meaningful way. However, if the AFL-CIO threw its weight—financially, but more importantly, politically—behind a government-sponsored job-training program, like the one proposed in the Green New Deal, it would make a huge difference. And on their own terms.

  The AFL-CIO already offers a robust number of apprenticeship programs in manufacturing, building, and construction trades, and represents over twelve million workers in fifty-five national and international labor unions. That’s a lot of people power, and a lot of opportunities to act. As a member of an AFL-CIO affiliate, the Writers Guild of America, East, I would be thrilled to see my union dues help fund an expansion and retooling of programs aimed at preparing fellow workers in the oil, gas, and coal indus
tries for new employment in the renewable energy sector (or other sectors—there’s a dire shortage of home health care workers, for example).

  Some International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) locals have already started experimenting with these kinds of programs in California, and the AFL-CIO itself has a long-running relationship with the environmentally focused Sierra Club. Even AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, a former coal miner, has spoken about the need to take “bold, comprehensive action to fight climate change,” and advocated for funding investments in technology to help workers build a more sustainable economy.

  Few labor leaders deny that some kind of action needs to be taken, but it’s time to pick up the pace.

  The framework is there, should we choose to use it. By funneling resources to local union affiliates in coal- and oil-producing areas like Appalachia, Texas, North Dakota, Alaska, and New Mexico, and engaging with frontline communities, the AFL-CIO could get ahead of whatever’s coming next—whether that’s the passage of the Green New Deal, or, perhaps more likely, the continuing death of the coal industry. The union leaders were right to worry about the future, but their vision is too clouded by oil to see the burning forest.

  Others in the movement have already stepped up. The Labor Network for Sustainability was launched by labor veterans (including former AFL-CIO employees) to support workers and communities in building “a just transition to a climate-safe and equitable economy”; its current project, Making a Living on a Living Planet, seeks to strengthen the relationship between labor and environ-mentalism.

  The BlueGreen Alliance, a group of labor unions and environmental organizations, advocates for “clean jobs, clean infrastructure, and fair trade” via research, public policy, advocacy campaigns, and education. Its membership combines union heavyweights like the United Steelworkers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters (UAPP), and the American Federation of Teachers, with venerated environmental institutions like the National Wildlife Federation, making it clear that many unions want to make climate change action a priority.