Towards Decolonial Climate Justice: an Analysis of Green New Deal and Indigenous Perspectives

Towards Decolonial Climate Justice: An Analysis of Green New Deal and Indigenous Perspectives

Melissa Lynn Crew

Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts In Political Science

Bikrum Gill Cara Daggett Jennifer Lawrence

May 11, 2021 Blacksburg, Virginia keywords: decolonization, climate justice, environmental justice, indigenous sovereignty

Towards Decolonial Climate Justice: An Analysis of Green New Deal and Indigenous Perspectives

Melissa Lynn Crew

ABSTRACT

The Green New Deal has gained international significance as the only prominent climate legislation in the United States. The Green New Deal has also become emblematic of a larger movement for climate justice; however, further analysis of the Green New Deal and its assumptions indicates that it falls short of enacting meaningful justice for those most effected by climate change, but least responsible for causing it. This shortcoming is due to the absence of calls to decolonize. Because of the large role U.S. militarism and imperialism play in contributing to the climate crisis, decolonization must be central to climate justice projects. Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift and the phenomenon of humans’ separation from nature through colonial acts of dispossession and enclosure of land plays an important role in thinking through the ways the Green New Deal recognizes this same phenomenon but fails to go deeper and recognize broader implications of the metabolic rift for continued U.S. imperialism. Additionally, the rocky legacy of the environmental justice movement raises questions as to whether working with the settler state can lead to meaningful justice. Though the Green New Deal is an operation of state recognition of the climate crisis as connected to other social inequalities, it does not overcome the settler state’s reliance on racial capitalism and continued exploitation of people and the environment. A climate justice program that is in fact centered on decolonization and indigenous sovereignty is available and must be supported.

Towards Decolonial Climate Justice: An Analysis of Green New Deal and Indigenous Perspectives

Melissa Lynn Crew

GENERAL AUDIENCE ABSTRACT

Table of Contents

Introduction: Eco-Social Relations and the Green New Deal 1

Chapter One: Eco-Marxism and the Green New Deal 13

Chapter Two: Indigenous Climate Justice Possibilities and the State 35

Chapter Three: The Red Deal and Kincentric Ecologies 53

References 64

INTRODUCTION: Eco-Social Relations and the Green New Deal

This research is concerned with the ways in which the crises of climate change produce new, and compound existing, social justice crises. The natural limits to human expansion, as expressed through limits of nature, necessarily connect environmental and social issues as humans depend on the environment to survive. This relationship is turned antagonistic by the large-looming system of capitalist production which not only contributes to increased warming speeds but relies on systems of exploitation of both humans and the environment, creating vast social inequalities linked to environmental exploitation and degradation. This problem has only become increasingly more relevant and paramount as both social and environmental tragedies worsen in tandem against a ticking environmental clock. This connection between the social and ecological dimensions of climate change is certainly not a new argument, however, it seems important to advance assertions that the most effective and hopeful climate activism is one that also situates questions of global inequalities, settler colonialism, and militarism as inseparable from biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, and polluted air.

This connection of the social and environmental has been fiercely defended. Bruno

Latour (2018) has argued that perceived weaknesses of the projects of either socialism or ecology are because each has faced choices of focus, understanding social and ecological questions as separate, and thus misinterpreting social questions as restrictive in nature. Posing a relevant opposition to this would be, as Latour argues, a project to “define the stakes of survival without introducing a priori differences between humans and non-humans” (p. 57). This thought is echoed in the work of William Connolly (2013) who argues for understanding humans as

“implicated in non-human force fields” the likes of earthquakes, tsunamis, and fires whose

1 predicted intensification as the result of climate change has already been felt (p. 7). Additionally, the work of Mike Davis (2001, 2006) powerfully asserts that climatic events, irrespective of direct association with climate change, create conditions out of which complex social conflicts arise. In the opposite direction, his work also illustrates how phenomena like poverty can work to magnify environmental hazards, thusly situating a concern like poverty as separable, but not separate from concerns around worsening weather events, for example (Davis, 2001, 2006).

Lastly, these similar themes take hold in Rob Nixon’s (2011) work around environmental violence as he argues both ecological and human disposability are created and conjoined through neoliberal acts of violence that affect the most vulnerable populations. Examples of this connection between social and ecological issues can be seen prominently in the various anti- pipeline movements across North America, particularly those taking place on indigenous lands which tie environmental issues of the pipeline to unsolved issues of indigenous rights and sovereignty.

Proposed in 2019 by Senator Edward Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez, the Green New Deal (GND) emerges in this context as the prominent climate legislation in the United States. It is key to this study for the ways in which it necessarily links the project of combating climate change with economic mobilization and social issues like healthcare and housing. With goals of reaching net-zero emissions and meeting the power demand with clean and renewable energy, the Green New Deal presents goals that are worthy of support. Of particular relevance to this project is how the GND plainly states that climate change has exacerbated systemic injustices. This is in relation to already existing health disparities and poverty that may increase in tandem with polluted landscapes, for example. It notes the disproportionate effects climate change has on indigenous people and people of color with one of

2 its social justice goals being repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities and protecting and enforcing sovereignty of indigenous people. In this way, the GND seems to effectively gesture towards addressing climate change through socially equitable means. It is here that my research examines these claims of the GND and their actual potential effectiveness in combating these entangled issues. This will be done, however, through zooming out and looking at state-led environmentalism and environmental justice projects more broadly.

Critiques surrounding the GND have been made as many are seeing room to push its goals further and encourage centering projects of decolonization. I am predominately interested in the critiques provided by Kate Aronoff, et al. (2019), Max Ajl (2018; 2020), and Nick Estes

(2019) and The Red Nation (2021). Aronoff et al. seek to map a more radical lens onto the GND, centering questions of energy consumption, for example, rather than hyper-focusing on transitions away from fossil fuels. Max Ajl offers a harsher critique and sees the GND as the bare bones of what is actually necessary to halt climate catastrophe. Also offering a harsher critique is

Nick Estes, along with The Red Nation, who work to wholly center decolonization among climate action and discussion of legislation. I see my research here as adding to and furthering these prominent critiques through an examination of the theoretical underpinnings and assumptions of the Green New Deal, radical GND narratives, and again, state-led environmentalism more broadly. Following this, there are two main sets of concerns that seem central: how the GND operates in North America and how the GND operates in the global South.

While this project will primarily deal with the GND in a North American context, centering decolonization means taking up concerns of U.S. imperialism both in the realms of foreign policy as well as in the treatment of Native communities within the United States (with clear connections to Canadian politics as well). In this way, the settler colonies of North America and

3 the global South can be seen as somewhat distinct sites of analysis, though are ultimately connected in the larger context due to the shared experiences of the brute force of U.S. imperialism.

With reference to the Green New Deal, the central perspectives that will be analyzed in this research are those of eco-Marxists and decolonial and indigenous thinkers. These perspectives transcend both more public spheres, as well as scholarly ones and make up a broad spectrum of influential thought and understanding around a project of environmentalism and its goals and means to achieving them. Examining these perspectives may also provide a look into the thought out of which the GND was created and is maintained and can then illuminate potential limitations to its current theorization regarding its devotion to addressing inequalities among indigenous peoples in North America and the global South more broadly. This project is concerned with answering the following: What assumptions are put forward by eco-Marxists and the GND? What are the implications of the GND for longstanding questions of global inequality? And most centrally, what are the implications of the GND for questions of indigenous rights and sovereignty? Can the GND transcend settler-colonial ideas of the State?

What possibilities are there for decolonial climate justice?

Central Thesis

Though the Green New Deal is a central feature of this thesis, it is used in a way that should allow for larger analyses of environmentalism on the left to be made. My central thesis is the following: decolonization is the paramount feature of effective climate justice. While the

Green New Deal is an important and positive step forward in combating climate change, the ideas presented within it do not necessarily center ideas of decolonization. I aim to demonstrate and support this argument through analysis of what a decolonial climate justice actually

4 encompasses. Beginning with Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, I trace how the alienation between humans and nature arises out of colonial processes of enclosure. I will then situate the settler colonial state as a primary barrier to achieving environmental justice and argue in support of the Red Deal. Crafted by The Red Nation, an activist coalition dedicated to the liberation of

Native peoples, the Red Deal is a political program that moves beyond what is offered with the

GND to meaningfully work towards processes of decolonization. While the argument I present is nothing new, I hope to synthesize many key arguments in these “Green New Deal debates” that attempt to assert an ethic of internationalism and real challenges to capitalism, both of which should be understood to carry definitive earth-cooling effects.

A decolonial approach to the subject of climate justice and the GND is needed for the ways in which it can critically examine questions of land and indigenous sovereignty in ways other approaches might not be able to. It does so by recognizing colonialism as a project of dispossessing native people of land and creating a rift between humans and nature that leads to the exhaustion of both under linear capitalist accumulation. A decolonial approach also recognizes the role of U.S. imperialism within the climate crisis as stifling possibilities for greener futures. The U.S. military industrial complex wastes immense amounts of energy and material resources, is heavily reliant on the fossil fuel industry, is instrumental in setting the foreign policy agendas of the U.S. and other capitalist states, operates explicitly to protect oil reserves and see that they remain in the hands of the transnational capitalist class, and prevents necessary global cooperation to halt climate catastrophe (Schwartzman, 2011, pp. 53-54).

Because of the havoc U.S. imperialism wreaks on the planet and its people, decarbonization and decolonization cannot be accomplished without the dismantling of U.S. imperialism.

5 Critical to define for this argument is decolonization. Here, I draw from Tuck and Yang’s

(2012) landmark piece, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and aim to maintain that decolonization is something unique from other forms of social justice and should not be subsumed within them. Settler-colonialism requires the permanent theft of indigenous land, setting a course for what decolonization must require: the return of land. Tuck and Yank write the following:

“Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers

make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the

disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic,

ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporarily contained in the

arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation” (p. 5).

The value of land in this context is a paramount consideration for the way it problematizes uses of ‘decolonize’ that do not refer to land and power relations involved in occupation and ownership, but also for the way it forms connections to theorizing society’s relationship to the natural world. Land as a site of contestation for the settler also affirms settler-colonialism’s aim to erase the relevance of ecology, particularly through projects that seek to sever indigenous caretaking relationships with the land (Norgaard, 2019). “Decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repartition of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is all of the land, and not just symbolically” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 7). I aim to follow this definition of decolonization and to work against using decolonization as an empty signifier. Furthermore, the project acknowledges the unsettling nature of centering decolonization and works hopefully around the question of can a settler live under the sovereignty of indigenous people?

6 Similarly against empty messages of decolonization regarding native struggles for sovereignty in Canada, Glen Coulthard (2014) argues that a politics of recognition is incapable of transforming the relationship between Canada and indigenous people and in fact risks reproducing the colonial state. This argument can be extended to the workings of the GND to imply that a GND that does not center decolonization, but instead only seeks to repair historic and systemic Native oppression through a politics of recognition is also at risk to reproduce configurations of a colonial State, thus necessitating a different project: the Red Deal.

Methods

This research will be conducted by combining a Marxist historical materialist approach and decolonial approaches to analyze the positions of eco-Marxists and decolonial scholarship as they each relate to and engage in work around the climate crisis. Firstly, I locate and address how proponents of each position argue for connections between social and environmental crises.

Though I find this to be a fitting starting point, I ultimately aim to move past arguments that stop after elevating the importance of realizing connections between social and environmental crises.

Following this, I am concerned with which configurations of the state eco-Marxist and environmental justice solutions to issues of climate change as related to social change (whether more abstract or material) are operating within or risk reproducing. For example, are the solutions of these positions able to offer challenges to a liberal democratic state (or a colonial state or patriarchal state, etc.)? Additionally, I will look for ways in which these various narratives’ solutions potentially fall short of taking seriously questions of capital and empire, perhaps revealing particular methods and theorizations as ultimately foreclosing on ideas of decolonization being essential to climate justice. Answering these questions can then help answer questions around the broader implications of the GND by working to identify

7 assumptions on which the GND relies that may tie back to specific assumptions of the inevitability of the settler-colonial state, for example.

I am understanding a historical materialist approach as one that is focused on identifying and analyzing the material conditions of the climate crisis. Here, I am thinking about displacement, increased severe weather events, droughts and wildfires, poor air quality and increased health risks, extinction events and biodiversity loss, and food scarcity, among many others. Use of this method will also allow me to analyze the role of the state and the role of property in wider webs of relations. Working with the historical materialist method as it relates to ecological questions, John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett (2016) consider a more robust account of Marx and Engels’ historical materialism that accounts for ecological crises as they supersede economic crises. The metabolic rift between humans and nature that formed the basis of capitalism’s existence can then be used to think through ecological crises as related to climate change today and the role of capitalism (Foster & Burkett, 2016). The alienation of humans from labor under capitalism thus radically disrupts the metabolism between humans and nature, creating the metabolic rift and also linking this alienation from labor to one of humans from nature.

I also understand historical materialism as coupled with the assertion that liberation is a historical act brought about by historical conditions, which is a necessary consideration in reference to the climate as well. With use of historical materialism as a method, I ultimately hope to present research that opposes idealism in favor of seeking out real solutions for real problems.

Demonstrating an aspect of this idea is the argument that environmental sustainability in global

South countries has been severely impeded by systemic burdens of national debt to the IMF and

World Bank (Davis, 2006; Maathai, 2009 as cited in Nixon, 2011, p.11) and not by a lack of

8 access to green technological innovations from the West, for example. Conceiving of environmental sustainability in the global South in this way could allow one to see whether or not, to follow this example, Western green technologies address issues of immobilizing national debt and therefore contribute to a more permanent liberatory environmental sustainability.

A decolonial approach is one that would interrogate the destructive role of imperialism in wider networks of inequality by focusing on power relations that surround land and settler- colonial occupation. Using this approach, I hope to examine the ways in which U.S. capital comes under threat as other states try to operate under relations of capital different to those of the

United States. This approach would help to highlight certain resource protection arms of the U.S.

State, for example, and would advocate for the importance of analyzing the U.S. military’s involvement abroad. Here, I am paying particular attention to the ways in which struggles for environmental justice through the state are problematized around the recognition of underlying settler-state violence that underpins and defines the state’s relationship with the land. This necessarily expands the geographical scope of this research to pay attention to issues of sovereignty, however, these considerations seem both manageable and needed within the framework of a critical analysis of the Green New Deal. This is needed because of the ways in which neocolonialism, toxicity, militarism, environmental deregulation, etc. ultimately transform nature (both human and otherwise) in transnational ways (Latour, 2018; Nixon, 2011), not only subjecting indigenous communities and countries in the global South to plots to protect U.S. capital (Estes, 2019), but disproportionately offloading waste and toxins on indigenous lands

(Hoover, 2017). This analysis will be slightly anchored and traced throughout by situating the ways in which indigenous struggles for environmental justice and sovereignty, particularly those

9 of the Karuk tribe as outlined by Kari Marie Norgaard (2019), are addressed within the Red

Nation’s Red Deal.

Again, I am also understanding a decolonial approach as fundamentally centering the importance of land and its conceptualization as more than a physical place, but “an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing” (Aluli Meyer, 2008, p. 219). This foregrounding of the importance of land and place works to situate discussions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land back as inseparable from indigenous conceptions of land and provides room to analyze under which conceptions of land the Green New Deal seeks to operate.

Is land a key site of contestation for colonial state control and management or is a differing conception, perhaps one that is more attuned to understanding land as epistemology, taking shape? Since I am also concerned with how the GND operates in both the global South and

North America, a decolonial approach is useful for mapping out ways in which a potentially more fruitful climate movement would need to be both transnational and internationalist in nature, tying indigenous struggles for sovereignty in North America to those abroad, while also recognizing the intertwined histories of Black and Red Power and the potential for global collective social actions.

Review of the Literature

While some analysis of the Green New Deal primary document will take place, this is limited and focus will be placed on Marxist political theory and environmental justice literature to situate the GND and Red Deal within a broader theoretical context. From this, there are three main groups of literature that are of relevance here. The first is eco-Marxist literature, followed by a work that deals with the GND directly in a way that I consider to be eco-Marxist. And the

10 last category considered is decolonial environmental justice literature and critical indigenous theory, working in tandem with the Red Deal.

Eco-Marxism

This seems to be the largest group of literature to examine. Key scholars here include

John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore, and Andreas Malm. I see these works as challenging general arguments of the Anthropocene and privileging a narrative of the Capitalocene, broadly. This results out of a recognition of an ecological aspect to Marx’s writings, as well as a recognition of capitalism as occupying the central role in causing and accelerating the climate crisis. I will draw significantly here on Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift and his anticipation of ecological degradation under capitalism. Through the works in this section, I hope to locate and organize how the various authors use Marx’s key ideas to generate their arguments around ecological crises and potential solutions, noting whether or not these ideas take them to a wholly decolonial perspective.

A Radical Green New Deal

I am concerned here with the co-authored work from Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni,

Daniel Aldahna Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New

Deal. This book presents a radical idea of the GND that I believe is largely in line with eco-

Marxist environmentalism. This thesis project as a whole is also largely inspired by Nick Estes and his piece, “A Red Deal”. I will initially position Estes’ piece in relation to the others here to foreground the argument that I plan to follow throughout the thesis and return to at the end. In this work supporting the GND, it is clear that they support the anti-capitalist nature of such a project, but only push that so far, stopping short of the larger critiques of colonialism Nick Estes and The Red Nation make in the Red Deal. A Planet to Win centers conversations around

11 financial interests in non-renewable energies, the relationship between capitalism and environmental exploitation, and alternative “green economies,” while also maintaining well- nuanced arguments about resource extraction debates and lowering energy demands. While ultimately asserting that the GND can be a mobilizing effort for social and environmental justice movements, unlike the Red Deal, the authors do not necessarily argue for decolonization efforts in the same manner as other concerns, such as a focus on egalitarian policies aimed at securing public goods. These goals are not necessarily in total contradiction, but there is room to tease out what limits solutions that seek to work with the state have for indigenous environmental justice as intertwined with decolonization. For example, small wins may be awarded through settler state means, but these may not amount to evidence in support of decolonial possibilities offered by the settler-colonial state.

Critical Environmental Justice and Decolonial Theory

In this last category, I am primarily concerned with scholars of environmental justice such as Laura Pulido, David Pellow, and Kari Marie Norgaard. This is coupled with the work of

Glen Coulthard to illustrate a consensus among scholars around potential incommensurabilities between working with the state and struggling for true decolonization. Nick Estes’ “A Red Deal” and The Red Nation’s Red Deal detail how Red Power and internationalism also come into play here as powerful anti-imperial tools in the face of more than one injustice.

12 CHAPTER ONE: Eco-Marxism and Green New Deal

If the current environmental movement and the Green New Deal are concerned with how humans can continue to live on the earth, addressing this concern has to come back to a question of labor and humans’ relationship with nature. In this chapter, I will situate what I refer to as an eco-Marxist reading of the GND, first examining Marx’s relationship to ecology and then what that might look like mapped onto a narrative of the GND. Of course, it is easy to maintain that climate collapse is insurmountable and that there is no way forward, especially if what is required is a break within the existing capitalist social order. However, Marx’s ecological thought can offer insight not only against insurmountability, but potentially in support of a project like the GND which connects social crises to environmental ones in a fight to seek climate justice. By an eco-Marxist reading of the GND, it is not my intention to read any Marxist principles onto the GND and claim that the GND was crafted with any attention to Marx.

Instead, I argue that the GND can be connected to eco-Marxism in the way in which it represents a view of the same phenomenon that Marx’s concept of the ecological rift describes: the alienation of humans from nature.

A central theme I aim to explore here is that of the climate crisis being caused by the growing divide between humans and nature. The problem, I will assert, is not a cleavage between humanity and nature per se, but the role of capitalism and imperialism more specifically. I connect a conversation of eco-Marxism to the GND through this theme, asserting that the layers of this humanity/nature divide, as articulated by the work of Marx and eco-Marxists that do pay attention to the role of imperialism in forcing this separation, are largely absent from the GND.

While Marx does use the language of ‘humans’ and ‘nature’ and the alienation of humans from

13 nature when theorizing the metabolic rift, with a broader understanding of Marx embodied at least partially in an eco-Marxist perspective, one would recognize that this is representative of a larger picture of colonial relations and Western imperialism. For example, while it can be said that the rift is between humans and nature, it can be argued that that rift is only created because of the original colonial theft and enclosure of land necessary for primitive accumulation. This is also represented by the pressure global South countries may feel in that their only option to become sovereign is to develop. Again, I see the GND connected to an eco-Marxist perspective only insofar as it represents a simplistic understanding of Marx’s metabolic rift. The GND still remains an important piece of this broader discussion of the true cause of the climate crisis as it forecloses on the possibility that hidden behind the idea of humanity alienated from nature are the forces of U.S. imperialism orchestrating this rift, a perspective which may be better taken up by eco-Marxists.

The question of whether or not the GND as a bill can, or does, go beyond capitalist relations of production will be set aside for the moment. Instead, the focus here is on the GND as an idea situated among an eco-Marxist interpretation and narrative of climate justice. What seems important, firstly, is turning to Marx’s challenge to systems of alienation and how his ecological thought has become a necessary point of departure for present-day left environmentalism of ecosocialism and eco-Marxism. Next, I will turn to some initial critiques of this GND narrative and discuss how these critiques introduce and welcome an interrogation of the GND and its assumptions around questions of indigenous rights and sovereignty. Later, I will also look at the need to transcend the settler-colonial state and whether or not a project like the

GND possesses this ability.

14 The Metabolic Rift for Understanding the Climate Crisis

Through the foundational works of Paul Burkett’s (1999) Marx and Nature and John

Bellamy Foster’s (2000) Marx’s Ecology, Burkett and Foster seek to address some of the primary criticisms leveled against Marx concerning his position towards environmental issues and ecology more broadly. These criticisms range from those who see Marx as wholly adopting

Promethean, pro-technological views, to those who read any of Marx’s statements regarding the environment as interesting but having “no systematic relation to the main body of his work,” to accusations of speciesism (Foster, 2000, p. 9). Burkett (1999) argues that there is an “inner logic, coherence, and analytical power” that Marx’s treatment of natural conditions possesses (p.1). He notes further that, in many cases, even “eco-Marxists” of the late 1990s did not even fully recognize Marx’s ecological contributions. To begin to undermine the validity of these criticisms and situate Marx as someone whose writings contain useful departure points for effectively theorizing about ecological crises and ways through them, one is tasked with a large project.

Additionally, there is the charge that undertaking such a project reflects desires to read Marx onto current environmental politics, forcing connection where there isn’t one. The works of Paul

Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, as well as Brett Clark, and Kohei Saito collectively accomplish a great deal to trace the rise of the scientific field of ecology, Marx’s interest in scientific developments and agricultural environmental concerns, while avoiding “greening” Marx, but proposing instead that he was green all along. Of particular interest for this paper is coming to terms with Marx’s conception of the metabolic rift.

In Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster (2000) sets out to understand an ecological view of Marx that “links social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature” (p. 1). Foster situates the necessary connection between questions of materialism and

15 ecology, speaking to a crisis of current socio-ecology and environmentalism more broadly.

Foster highlights that the intention behind understanding Marx’s ecological perspective should not be misunderstood as an attempt to ahistorically apply ecological context back into his work, but to recover the “deeper critique of the alienation of humanity from nature that was central to

Marx’s work” (pp. 19-20). Through Foster’s analysis, the pitfalls of a contemporary ‘Green theory’ or mainstream environmentalism more broadly are revealed. This environmentalism,

Foster argues, is fundamentally weak because of the ways in which it neglects to come to terms with material and dialectical forms of thinking that actually led to the discovery of ecology

(p.19). It was, after all, a friend of Marx’s and an “admirer of Marx’s Capital”, E. Ray Lankester, who helped coin the term “œcology” (later ecology) in 1873 (Foster, 2013).

For Marx, human beings differ from animals for their unique productive activity. In

Capital, Marx (1976) writes that labor is “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (p. 283). This suggests that, because of the labor process, man and nature are never, in fact, separate. Domains of that which is ‘natural’ and that which is ‘human’ can be occupied simultaneously through the metabolic practices of the transformation of energy as one is at once transforming themselves by transforming the world around them. In his famous comparison of the bee and the architect, Marx writes that “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax” (p. 284).

Because we have an idea of it, the labor process is then something that is exclusively human.

This concept of labor as conscious mediation of the metabolic relationship between humans and nature is key to understanding how Marx’s critique of capitalism is also deeply ecological (Saito,

2017, p. 64). In Kohei Saito’s (2017) Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, he seeks to further claims made

16 by Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster in their earlier works, noting that today, many Marxist scholars and activists have taken up the foundational arguments from Burkett and Foster and many no longer view claims of Marx’s relevance to reflection on current ecological crises as an exaggeration. Saito remains strong in his argument that “it is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx’s] critique of political economy if one ignores its ecological dimension” (p. 14).

Saito maintains that ecological crises are the central contradiction of capitalism’s social production.

By describing the labor process as a metabolic interaction with nature, Marx discusses a material interaction between raw materials, means of productions, and human labor (Saito, 2017, p. 74). Metabolism here refers to “an incessant process of organic exchange of old and new compounds through combinations, assimilations, and excretions so that every organic action can continue” (p. 69). Alienation of humans from labor under capitalism thus radically disrupts the metabolism between humans and nature, creating the metabolic rift. This process is set into motion by the dispossession and enclosure of land during primitive accumulation. A previously metabolic cycle becomes linear as the soil becomes depleted instead of replenished and waste at the site of consumption accumulates instead of being absorbed back into a metabolic cycle.

Linked then is the alienation of humans from labor and the alienation of humans from nature.

Following this, in simplistic terms, the labor process as a metabolic relationship (and one that is disrupted under capitalism) “clearly indicates the fundamental physiological and transhistorical fact that the production and reproduction of humans must occur through constant interaction with their environment” (p. 102). Humans live on the earth through the metabolic relationship with nature. Disrupting this relationship, creating the rift, is thus a threat to continued life on earth.

17 Here, Saito (2017) seeks to make clear that the modern destruction of the environment must be comprehended in relation to the historically specific capitalist mode of production. This suggests that labor power and nature under capitalism have a specific association to value: “they are important for capital only as a ‘bearer’ of value” (p. 122). By being the bearer of value, the laborer (and/or nature) is then exhausted in an effort to satisfy the desire for the accumulation of capital, which cannot be otherwise satisfied with the governing of use-values instead of exchange-values. Once basic needs are met, labor does not stop as capital thirsts for surplus labor and seeks to stretch labor power (through extension and intensification of the workday) until it is ultimately exhausted (pp. 123-124). This neglect of labor power and nature, material dimensions of the labor process, leads to their exhaustion and erosion of human life and the environment (pp.

122-3). It makes clear sense then why Marx would declare soil and the worker to be the “original sources of all wealth” (Marx cited in Foster, 2013). Drawing on agronomist Carl Fraas, Saito

(2017) highlights the view that humans do not manipulate the environment at their will, but instead reach certain natural limits resulting from the incapability to regulate metabolic rifts “due to their instrumentalist treatment of nature” (p. 248). The same purposeful actions that create the metabolic rift also cause negative environmental effects over long historical periods (p. 248).

And it may be useful to think about the metabolic rift and its environmental effects through the logic of the longue durée, an approach to studying history that pays attention to long-term rather than instantaneous time. This recognizes that social science analysis coupled with that of environmental crises cannot bypass historical time (Braudel, 2009). Similarly, historical ecology might add that, in order to craft an environmental history, one must look past the history of environmentalism to contributions form sociology or economics, thus painting a more complete

18 picture of the systematically interrelated environmental changes that have taken place as a result of the metabolic rift (Hornborg, 2010 & Crumley, 2006).

Saito’s (2017) synthesis showcases how Marx’s ecology can provide hope for a different, transformed relationship between humans and nature “so as to ensure a more sustainable social metabolism” (p. 21). In this sense, Marx does not in fact fall into the trap of being deterministic or apocalyptic but offers something beyond capitalism. In Foster and Clark’s (2018) article, The

Robbery of Nature, this ‘something’ beyond capitalism could be a sustainable human development “in which the associated producers would rationally regulate the metabolism between nature and society” (para. 59). It is difficult to say what exactly this might mean, but challenging alienation through privileging kinship relations might be a way forward. This is even hinted to in Marx as Foster and Clark reference Marx’s belief that it was “essential to treat nature, as the Epicureans had, as ‘my friend’”(para. 59). Marx’s conception of the metabolic rift and critique of capital which provides fuel for ideas of how to restore unity that move beyond the capitalist mode of production are exciting and further bolster connections between environmental crises and issues of capitalism. But this concept of the metabolic rift can also be easily extended beyond what are understood to be singularly environmental concerns. Foster and Clark point out how Marx and Engels understood that “the capital system disrupted corporeal metabolic processes due to insufficient or inadequate food, leading to various illnesses, ailments, and starvation diseases” (para. 48). The lack of clean water in working class neighborhoods also furthered this claim. An expansive view of the metabolic rift as something that also takes place in our own bodies necessarily connects issues of public health to those of labor and the environment.

19 One can look to the situation in Flint, Michigan as another example of this connection.

The extensive pollution of the Flint River by General Motors led to a public health crisis as lead pipes were corroded and the city and its children were poisoned for almost a year before being made aware of the extensive poisoning and witnessing the health effects (Rosner & Markowitz,

2016). The slow violence of Flint and many other industrial dumping sites shows how the metabolic rift has direct effect on human bodies. The linearity of capitalist production and extraction produced waste that was dumped into communities deemed disposable.

This focus on public health is also seen within the text of the Green New Deal as the inaccessibility of basic needs is positioned as related to wage stagnation (H.Res. 109, 2019, p. 3).

The language of the document describes “several related crises,” then listing inaccessibility of basic needs, such as clean air, water, and food, followed by “a 4-decade trend of wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and antilabor policies” and the greatest income inequality since the Great Depression (p.3). Elaborating further, this trend is described as leading to hourly wage stagnation despite increased worker productivity, poor socioeconomic mobility, erosion of workers’ bargaining power, and “inadequate resources for public sector workers to confront the challenges of climate change,” among other struggles of wage stagnation (p. 3).

The connection between public health and labor struggles is then also connected to climate change within the Green New Deal. The attempt to connect various struggles, whether over housing, health, or racial injustice, to the dangers of a warming planet suggests an expansive view of Marx’s metabolic rift; one that does not necessarily name the existence of a rift or name capitalism as the cause, but highlights the ways in which the fight against social injustices (for Marx, labor concerns) can be connected to the fight against ecological injustices

(for Marx, soil depletion). To demonstrate this through the mechanics of metabolism as

20 connected to climate-warming emissions, fossil fuels are burned and carbon dioxide is emitted, however, the emissions of carbon are then never consumed, indication of a linear process rather than a cyclical one of metabolism in which nothing would be wasted at the site of consumption or production but put back into the cycle, replenishing the soil, earth, air, etc. Connecting the idea of the metabolic rift and call to repair it to the project of the GND might prove to be a simplistic and generous reading of the GND (here, both as a bill and an idea), however, if capitalism is characterized by the alienation of nature and the metabolic rift between humans and nature, a project working against capitalist alienation would also necessarily include repairing the metabolic relations between humans and nature and vice versa (Saito, 2017, p.14). Again, the

GND can be connected to eco-Marxism in the way in which it represents a view of the same phenomenon that Marx’s concept of the ecological rift describes: the alienation of humans from nature.

Choosing to combine all of these various issues under the banner of a holistic climate justice echoes a similar sentiment to understanding Marx’s metabolic rift as something that not only happens among what we call nature, something outside and separate from us, but also within and among other natural systems that are interrupted in a variety of ways by the hastening of productivity. Here, again, for the ways in which the GND concretely connects social crises to ecological ones under a fight for climate justice and the way this encapsulates sentiments of the theory of the metabolic rift, a type of eco-Marxist approach can be recognized, but only in simplistic terms as what is missing is the colonial dimension of how the metabolic rift came to be and is continuously reproduced.

Important among this conversation of eco-Marxism is a debate between John Bellamy

Foster and Jason Moore regarding the metabolic rift and how it is to be understood within

21 contemporary conversations of capitalism and life. Andreas Malm (2018) works to summarize this debate, writing that limitations Moore wants to point to in Foster’s work primarily include that of repeating or falling back into Cartesian dualism, which Foster would suggest Marx’s metabolic rift moves past. For Moore, an issue arises when Foster is using language of nature and society, instead of nature in society, for example (p. 166). Moore’s insistence here, according to Malm, is that capitalism doesn’t just have an ecological regime, it is one and that this is missed within Foster’s understanding of the metabolic rift (p. 167). Malm suggests that this new terminology presented by Moore carries with it ultimately unclear analytical advantages

(p. 167). Contrary to Moore’s argument that capitalism and nature make each other, Malm insists that “the utter disharmony between the two” is what the theory of the metabolic rift consistently seeks to account for (p. 169). Clearly supportive of the ‘school of the metabolic rift,’ Malm also notes that it likely does not “provide the final word in the search for a unified red-green theory”

(p. 181).

Moore (2000) is also concerned with taking a more global, world-systems approach to the metabolic rift, which would usefully argue that world ecology is reorganized during each phase of capitalist development. Thus, the metabolic rift is a primary factor behind the ramping up of environmental exploitation and degradation at the hands of capitalist expansion (p. 124).

“. . . because of its metabolic rift, capitalism has been unable to sustain itself as a closed

system, in which nutrients are recycled, but rather only as a flow system, requiring ever

greater external inputs to survive. As a result, the system is compelled to seek out fresh

land beyond its boundaries” (p. 146).

This is a crucial point, connecting the metabolic rift to expansion and quests for new land; something which signifies the colonial and imperial conquest at the heart of the logic of capital.

22 Moore goes on to say that this expansion to land also necessarily comes along with the need to re-create the town and country structure and division of labor, only the city grows exponentially bigger in relation to the country, producing more and more waste and widening the metabolic rift. This is also represented on a global scale in the reorganization of world ecology into cores and peripheries and the resulting unequal consumption. For Moore, the center of climate induced collapse is the ecological limits reached at (and because of) the height of global capitalist expansion. This argument suggests that decolonization is necessary to slow climate collapse.

Returning to Malm (2018), he wants to be clear that a recognition of the ecological contradictions of capitalism is not suggestive of relative inaction or waiting around until capitalism is undone by its own doing. This type of logic is not reflective of the disproportionate stakes for global South communities nor is it conducive to furthering “ecological class hatred,” arguably a key crucial element in political mobilization against capitalist state inactivity (epub p.

181).

In Malm’s (2020) newest text, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, he speaks of the Green New Deal directly, using its existence (as well as the literature surrounding it) as evidence that the state has enough ‘know-how’ to guide a transition to decarbonization. The literature on the GND and climate mobilization is “enough to guide a transition several times over,” even (p. 145). Though, looking at state-led action, it is inactivity that reigns. It seems that no capitalist state could indeed carry out decarbonization without being forced to “through application of the whole spectrum of popular leverage, from electoral campaigns to mass sabotage” (p. 146). Here, Malm evokes Lenin in his September text to help illustrate that what is occurring is nothing new. Despite having the means to combat famine, the Russian state chose servility to capitalists and thus the path of inactivity. The ways of

23 combatting climate crisis are available. If the state really wanted to exercise control, they could.

Malm notes that there are, of course, the eventualities of intense weather events that would

“catch up with the dominant classes,” tearing into property (p. 146). Echoing earlier arguments, waiting for this eventuality is the least desirable as it would come at the cost of lives and livelihoods in the global South, where effects of climate charge are felt first and the hardest. It is here that Malm makes a proposal for ecological Leninism.

Malm’s (2020) ecological Leninism involves three principles. First, the crises of symptoms must be turned into the crises of the causes (p. 148). Though the war of Lenin’s time cannot be easily compared to today’s climate crisis, Malm remarks that the current emergency is chronic and “crises of symptoms will ignite again and again, and every time they do, the strategic imperative must be to switch energies of the highest voltage against the drivers” (p.

148). This first principle of eco-Leninism suggests a rejection of band-aid techno-fixes, like some geoengineering practices, as well as offering nuanced commentary on the celebration of vaccine rollout in a pandemic, for example.

Second, speed is paramount (Malm, 2020, p. 150). This is obvious to those already concerned with the state of the climate, but it is worth differentiating here between speed that might be enacted by a technofix which reverts to solving a symptom, versus, speed in a less literal sense than pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. This second kind of speed could involve simply beginning to work on a definitive climate action plan that focuses on lowering energy demand, for example. (And it should be noted that this speed is ultimately a speed to act to decarbonize, while acknowledging that addressing some of the largest climate crises, such as the slow violence of environmental racism, extractive colonial legacies, and toxicity of landscapes, might ultimately be a slow process.)

24 Third, “ecological Leninism leaps at any opportunity to wrest the state,” “and subjects the regions of the economy working towards catastrophe to direct public control” (Malm, 2020, p.

151). Malm writes that nothing is suggestive of ExxonMobile’s ultimate desire to

‘metamorphize’ into something better and greener (p. 151). Coercive authority will be required.

This might include working through the bourgeois state, working to bring popular pressure to bear upon it, with the caveat being that more political volatility is to be expected and one should be ready for what kinds of openings to move against the state will be created by increased emergencies (p. 152). Through a call for experimentation with ecological Leninism, Malm shows where eco-Marxism can and perhaps should turn next. And it is some of the same sentiments reflected in Malm’s proposal of eco-Leninism that can be found in the narrative of a ‘radical

Green New Deal.’

A Radical Green New Deal?

Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (2019), authors of A Planet to Win: Why We Need A Green New Deal proclaim “[i]n the twenty-first century, all politics are climate politics” (p. 3). They suggest a vision of a radical Green New

Deal as the best and only way to effectively assert climate justice and decarbonize. This can be done, they argue, through “egalitarian policies that prioritize public goals over corporate profits, and target investments in poor, working class, and racialized communities” (p. 5). Key to their argument is a project of building solidarity across borders noting that “the boundaries of the nation state can’t be the boundaries of our political imagination” (p. 140). This is the primary aspect of the authors’ argument for a radical GND that will be interrogated further in this chapter. I am interested in how much of their argument and proposal for this radical GND can be

25 read as eco-Marxist or even eco-Leninist and what the limits of their perspective might be when it comes to questions of internationalism and indigenous sovereignty.

The argument of a radical Green New Deal presented by Aronoff and coauthors (2019) relies on the fact that America needs to begin a project of decarbonization, but suggests that global South communities, in which the majority of extraction for the necessary minerals of renewable energy technologies takes place, should not bear the brunt of the West’s renewable energy transition. The authors illustrate two important perspectives around extraction taking hold in Latin America: resource nationalism and frontline opposition. These positions have different answers to who should be in charge of making decisions about extraction: the state or indigenous communities. The central problem of extraction for resource nationalists is the dominion of foreign capital, whereas frontline opposition is centrally concerned about extraction’s destruction of ecosystems and livelihoods (p. 147). Here, the authors do spend some time talking about the

Lithium for Chile movement launched in 2016 in which the export of lithium for foreign companies left poverty in its wake (p. 152). Resource nationalism is referenced here as a path to poverty reduction, but further complexities of the position are not expanded upon. The position of the authors seems to be that the marked differences between these two perspectives, while arguably not representing a total impasse, indicate an urgent need to rethink systems of ownership and management with analysis not going much further. They note that indigenous environmental organizations are especially looking for alternatives to ‘eco-coloniality’ or the process of deepening extractivism in the name of addressing climate change (p.151). It is also important to note that these two different Left positions on extraction did not used to be separate, but could coexist when the Right held power, uniting the positions against the common enemy of neoliberalism (Riofrancos, 2020).

26 The realization that socialism and environmental/indigenous rights may be two separate things in practice is challenging and calls for looking beyond the logic of ownership and a call to transcend the extractive model, however, it is apt to also question whether or not the authors’ portrayal of indigenous anti-extraction perspectives risks romanticizing indigenous views towards nature. Predominantly, anti-extractivist positions as described by the authors risk becoming complicit in imperialism as wealth generated from extraction cannot be realized to sever relations with private foreign capital and create sovereignty. Returning to the example of

Chile, the authors write that “while Indigenous and environmental activists often agree in theory that state ownership would be better than private capital, many are skeptical that a state enterprise would deviate from the extractivist logic of its private equivalents” (Aronoff et al.,

2019, p. 152). The authors seemingly go back and forth on the question of extraction, unable to foreclose on positive possibilities of resource nationalism since they recognize the need for countries in the global South to develop. Here, a discussion of the importance of climate reparations seems crucial, but it is not mentioned within the book. With the pressure for the West to decarbonize, climate reparations are crucial to thinking about post-extractive futures as wealth must be generated somehow to lift people out of poverty and assert sovereignty. If extraction and nationalization of resources is best enacted as a somewhat short-term goal, climate reparations could be a path to ending further extraction and ecological harm in the future.

A recurring theme throughout A Planet to Win is about shifting from talk of transitioning to renewable energy to talk of lowering the energy demand in the first place. Here, this might reflect Malm’s (2020) first principle of eco-Leninism, shifting from a crisis of symptoms to a crisis of causes. A large part of the authors’ radical Green New Deal focuses on public investments, echoing the New Deal, noting the reverberating global effects if America were to

27 prioritize public transportation run on renewable energy. And this, of course, is contrasted with the allure of electric vehicles for the wealthy and notions of individual responsibility. U.S. reduction of energy demand at home, they say, would positively affect the network of global trade of minerals necessary for the renewable energy transition (Aronoff et al., 2019, p. 154).

This also does well to pay attention to the nuances of production that are not addressed in the

GND. The treadmill of production theory, for example, would suggest that efficiency of technology does not necessarily equate to greater ‘green-ness,’ but instead incentivizes greater use and energy consumption. Avoiding devastation to mining communities might very well include, as noted earlier, “envisioning new paradigms of ownership” and “a new system of socio- natural values” (pp.152-3). The authors argue that the networks of global trade of minerals mean that democratic control over energy is ultimately a global project. As reflected upon earlier, this global project would also require negotiations with labor and indigenous communities and not just nation-states, however, this suggests that sovereign global South nation-states are perhaps not considered central. This might not be the case of the authors’ argument, but lack of specification leads to this critique. In this sense, the authors argue that an effective Green New

Deal is an internationalist one, thus risking minimization of the importance of socialist states in

Latin America as on the forefront of meaningful climate justice, for example. Despite this, the authors do ask “how can action in the United States help ensure decarbonization beyond our borders?” and remain focused on prioritizing “equity and democracy across supply chains” (pp.

154-155). It is just still unclear what exactly is meant by an internationalist eco-socialist GND, thus causing the argument to potentially fall short around the question of resource nationalism and sovereign global South states.

28 They do argue for what this radical GND is not. It is not a gray totalitarianism that many might assume and they rightly point out that we might as well already live in that gray world “as the fossil fuel industry commits crimes against humanity,” for example (Aronoff et al., 2019, p.

191). Connecting the arguments presented in A Planet to Win of the necessity of a radical GND to an eco-Marxist narrative seems to make sense as a radical GND can become a project of reestablishing the unity between humanity and nature against capitalist alienation. This connects back to the central theme of expanding this humanity/nature framework to seek to account for the hierarchies between the global North and South and central feature of the climate crisis, imperialism. This more radical interpretation of the GND does in fact go further into these relationships than what is offered within the original GND, thus providing a more eco-Marxist perspective, however, the even deeper role and power of America within a global landscape of environmentalism is still partially unquestioned.

A Global Green New Deal?

It is suggested that eco-socialism is the only alternative to eco-apartheid (Aronoff et al.,

2019). While supporting the argument for a radical GND as potentially the only alternative to eco-apartheid is important, it is equally important to interrogate assumptions a radical GND may have, consciously or not, about America and its role as an empire. Max Ajl (2018) writes critically of the Green New Deal. For Ajl, the GND signals a rather lackluster call for social- democracy in the U.S. and a primary issue arises when this vision for social-democracy, one obviously run on renewable energy, becomes understood as a model that can be transported onto countries in the global South. As the name would suggest, the Green New Deal harkens back to

FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s and the series of public works projects that were undergone to boost the economy and stave off a socialist revolution. Ajl wants to dispel the prominent myth

29 about the New Deal, that it ended the Great Depression. The Great Depression was ended by military Keynesianism. The current GND, Ajl suggests, is a dilution of socialism as the word is worked and warped fit amongst the left of the Democratic party. It is also seemingly a goal to make the Green New Deal something comfortable, something nostalgic. It’s success in this regard will be its failure, Ajl argues, since the New Deal “did not do what it is represented as having done in popular memory” (para. 13).

Ajl (2018) sees the Green New Deal specifically lacking on discussions of agriculture and sovereignty and thus wonders what happens when talk of the GND is replaced with talk of

“a green consummation of national liberation” (para. 21). National liberation coming about out of ‘green’ circumstances is perhaps the solution that was missing among Aronoff and coauthors’

(2019) arguments for an internationalist GND. Ajl suggests that decarbonization can and should be tied up with an overhaul of our agricultural systems and respect for sovereignty of indigenous people in the U.S. and abroad. Ajl argues that a lack of solutions is not the issue at hand. It is clear that some solutions are valued while others are both purposefully and perhaps unintentionally ignored. And those that are being ignored or dismissed, most prominently

‘solutions’ stemming from indigenous knowledge, are those that offer the most promise for thinking outside of existing systems and structure of ownership and patterns of alienated relations to the natural world.

Another question posed by Ajl (2020) is about the uniqueness of the GND. Instead of being actually unique in fundamental ways, Ajl recognizes that it might just be the most visible climate legislation in fact composed of bare bones solutions. Needing to bulk out initial lacking

GND proposals leads one to imagine a global Green New Deal. Poignantly, a global GND would be one in which leaders would not be assassinated for trying to nationalize resources, as one

30 example (see Ajl, 2020; see Prashad in Young, 2021), in addition to actually listening to those who have good solutions and pairing an overhaul of the energy system with one of the agricultural systems too (Ajl, 2018, para. 26). This perhaps represents the global GND as a departure from the radical GND, as concerns over the mining of lithium and cobalt are concretely connected to development. “Seeing lithium or cobalt batteries as an easy fix rests on

. . . continuing to make development a rare privilege, suitable for only an elite of the world’s population” (Ajl, 2020, para. 30). This assertion also pays attention to the need for “a social ethic of redistribution of wealth and resources, and equality” (para. 31).

There are clear areas where the radical GND proposed by Aronoff et al. converges with

Ajl’s global GND, but Ajl (2018, 2020) speaks more to America’s role and suggests the necessity of filling out current GND proposals to craft firmly anti-imperialist ones in an urgent manner. Asad Rehman (Rehman & Ghadiali, 2019) put forth a similar argument for a global

GND. “If we lose the next five years to climate inaction, it’s a death sentence to the poorest people in the global South” (para. 20). Rehman is hopeful, noting that the actually fair solutions to climate change, those that tackle social, racial inequalities globally “are also the exact solutions needed to tackle economic inequality” (para. 27). If the climate crises are to be most accurately understood in the terms of underlying power dynamics, focusing on only a transition to renewable energies, while imperative, will not alleviate the social crises capitalism continues to create (Rehman, 2019). Similar to Ajl’s arguments highlighted earlier, Rehman wants to hone in on the reality that “[t]hose with the least responsibility for these crises are not only suffering the greatest impacts, but also point the way back out of this trap” (Rehman, 2019, para. 18). This simultaneously frustrating and hopeful fact seems to define the global GND and ultimately set it apart from a radical GND.

31 For Aronoff et al. (2019), the focus was largely placed on public works projects with a noteworthy global perspective and a call to reduce energy consumption before putting total faith in decarbonization. But ultimately, it could be argued that, while taking up a global perspective, the solutions of the radical GND are still quite Western solutions. This is not to say, however, that the largest polluter should not be held responsible in some way for the climate crisis, but instead, to say that a truly global perspective would encompass the need for solutions to come from the already existing ways of life of indigenous peoples as well as global South communities. It is this path that might offer some sort of reckoning for ongoing histories of colonialism for which the American capitalist empire is the culprit. The U.S.-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia and the ongoing U.S. state hostility towards Maduro and

Venezuela is evidence of the U.S. state attempting to maintain its grasp on resource wealth for corporations. This introduces a key critique of the GND: that it does not question America. This will be tackled more explicitly in the following chapter.

Further differentiating a radical GND from the evolving picture of a global GND,

Aronoff and coauthors (2019) situate the need for public works projects and then also suggest that solutions cannot be limited by the bounds of the state. This is a noble nod, but the radical

GND might offer little to actually think about this notion in action. The concept of a global

Green New Deal is taken up by Vijay Prashad (Prashad as cited in Young, 2021). A global GND, he argues should be fundamentally concerned with protecting precious life. He uses the Black

Lives Matter movement as an example to insist that “there is no project in the democratic party that addresses the broader question of life” (para. 27 [in transcript]). This could be the aim and primary concern of a global GND: protecting precious life. Of BLM, he talks in terms of crimes and punishments and about concerns clearly taken up about the punishment, the killing. He

32 wants to interrogate the crimes, arguing that they do not make any sense. BLM demands that the killing must stop, but Prashad asks, what about the crime? Prashad wants to push past or expand on narratives of stopping the killing and put forward those of protecting the whole of precious life.

Elsewhere, Prashad (2018) expands on this to ask, “what is the crime for which the world’s poor are being punished?” (p. 5). This is seen explicitly within the climate crisis as those least responsible for climate change bear the brunt of its devastating effects. His concern over the crimes draws on Marx’s early concerns with peasants being beaten and arrested by the police for collecting sticks in the forest and Marx notes that the peasants understand the punishment, but not the crime. Prashad argues that a similar situation is playing out among the world’s poor.

Much like the peasants, they do not understand the crime for which they are being punished. And this punishment can come in the form of poverty inflicted by the control of wealth by foreign capital or being displaced due to rising sea levels. Prashad cites David Choquehuanca, recently elected vice president of Bolivia, and his speaking of “Qhapag ñan, the path of the good life, with the need to create not consumers and owners, but iyambae, a person without an owner” (p.

57). This is quite powerful. Restructuring an idea of what the good life is seems central to addressing the causes instead of the symptoms of climate change and getting to the root of why being poor and sometimes even dreaming of a better world is considered to be crime.

In conclusion, I find that an eco-Marxist perspective can be responsibly read onto the

GND, but only in the sense of the GND as a radical idea, and not necessarily the bill itself. It may turn out that the bill itself would operate differently from the GND as an idea and vision of climate justice. This eco-Marxist narrative is one that draws on Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift in unspoken, but intrinsic ways. Left to explore are notions of representation within the GND

33 and whether they are enough to fully support indigenous sovereignty, as well as a more focused version of a global GND: a Red Deal.

34 CHAPTER TWO: Indigenous Climate Justice Possibilities and the State

This chapter will delve into a central critique of the Green New Deal, as suggested earlier by Ajl (2018, 2020), Rehman (Rehman & Ghadiali, 2019; Rehman 2019), and Prashad (Young,

2020; Prashad, 2018), examining to what extent questioning of the role of the American settler- colonial state figures into the particular narrative of environmental justice for which the GND advocates. Here I am interested in paying particular attention to how the underlying violence of the state is theorized in conjunction with environmental justice and what this might subsequently mean for the climate justice movement, a project like the GND, and climate ‘solutions’ in general. In what follows, my argument is twofold. First, drawing primarily on the works of Laura

Pulido (2017; Pulido & De Lara, 2018) and Kari Marie Norgaard (2019), I will assert that the

GND does not operate in the context of recognizing that environmental racism is racial capitalism; an essential theorization of effective climate justice. This applies to both the GND as a bill as well as Aronoff and coauthors’ (2019) articulation of a radical or eco-Marxist GND narrative. Second, drawing primarily on the works of Nick Estes (2019) in conjunction with The

Red Nation (2021), as well as Glen Coulthard (2014), I will echo those who argue indigenous inclusion via recognition into state-led solutions (such as the GND) does not adequately fit within narratives of decolonization that are also necessary to assert climate justice. Here, this argument is dealing exclusively with the context of the American and Canadian settler-colonial states. I want to be clear about which type of state is examined as indigenous inclusion into state- led actions in Bolivia, for example, as represented by the 2010 Peoples’ Agreement led by the

MAS party does in fact represent efforts to decolonize. The Red Nation’s Red Deal, along with connected ideas about indigenous social action, caretaking, and decarceration, provide necessary

35 elaboration onto narratives of the GND, thus resulting in different ideas about the role of the U.S. state and how and why it is necessary for climate justice to aim to transcend this imperial state. If the GND cannot effectively transcend the U.S. settler-colonial state, further consequences for indigenous sovereignty in particular may need to be examined.

The central theme I will explore in this chapter is around the question of working with the state. I argue that the settler state is dependent on racial capitalism and, therefore, certain ways in which one can ‘work with the state,’ namely through juridical processes, do not offer meaningful justice to victims of environmental racism. This realization does not foreclose on opportunities to seize the state, for example, but instead problematizes projects of environmental justice that do not reckon with the racial capitalist underpinnings of the settler state.

Recognizing the Role of Racial Capitalism

In Laura Pulido’s (2017) “Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence,” she argues that the environmental justice (EJ) movement has in large part failed to actually better lives and environments because of its failure to theorize environmental racism as constituent of racial capitalism. This then leads the EJ movement into dealing with the settler state not as a site of opposition, but as a force to work with in allyship. For Pulido, this state must become a site of opposition, specifically because of its sanctioning of racial violence through racial capitalism (p. 525). Drawing from the work of

Cedric Robinson and the Black Radical Tradition, Pulido asserts that racial capitalism, a recognition of “racism as the functioning logic of capitalism,” carries with it new political urgency that necessarily pays greater attention to colonialism, primitive accumulation, slavery, and imperialism (pp. 526-527). The situation resulting from understanding environmental racism as racial capitalism, Pulido argues, is then understanding the inevitability of environmental

36 racism under capitalism. This is due to the fact that the accumulation of capital requires the production of difference and inequality. Viewed in this light, it is clear why EJ as a movement would not want to work with or view the settler state as a neutral force when it is intrinsically involved in the environmentally racist practice of the accumulation of capital.

The creation of land as property through the conquest of primitive accumulation and dispossession and enclosure of land gave way to a differentiating category of “dispossessed and removed” (Melamed as cited in Pulido, 2017, p. 528). By turning land into property, recognized difference was produced by creating distinct categories of property owners and the dispossessed.

National colonial territories then came to be based on the dispossession of native nations. Pulido also connects this to the ways “whiteness derives its meanings and value from various forms of nonwhiteness” (p. 527). This production of difference was and is necessary in order to create a category deemed expendable and exploitable at the hands of capitalist production. Because primitive accumulation is an ongoing process, capital must continuously seek ways to produce difference and inequality. The settler state can be seen as intrinsically involved in the environmentally racist practice of the accumulation of capital through the ways the persistent inequality between white and nonwhite communities is created and maintained through a variety of practices and regulations (p. 525). Pulido describes appeals to the state through environmental justice lawsuits filed based on the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment that have all failed due to the inability to prove discriminatory intent. Similar shortcomings are seen in the dismal success rate of filing Title VI complaints with the EPA against their discrimination along racial lines. Pulido’s research here suggests that the settler state does not take seriously evidence of environmental racism and/or is armed against doing so by the power of capital and capital accumulation that relies on the existence of this racism. The ability to pollute vulnerable

37 communities, for example, is what capitalist production relies upon. This is because pollution can be seen as the effect of the environment and nonwhites first being categorized as different and then being stretched and exhausted in order to produce surplus value. The extremely limited success of EJ lawsuits and regulations is further evidence against justice movements’ prioritization of any work with the settler-state through similar processes.

Turning briefly to Marx to illustrate the importance of primitive accumulation further, in chapter twenty-six of Capital, he describes the problem of capital and the production of surplus value, both of which presuppose each other and cannot be understood without an initial accumulation preceding capitalist accumulation (1976). This accumulation, primitive accumulation, is “an accumulation not the result of the capitalist mode of production, but its starting point” (p. 873). Here, the separation of labor from the means of production through enclosure, in which land becomes capital, is the foundation of capitalism. The violence of the enclosure of land is the secret of primitive accumulation of which Marx speaks. With this realization, any assumptions of capitalism as a ‘natural’ process begin to crumble. Further in

Capital, Marx also describes capital as coming into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt;” poetic language to symbolize capital’s brutal arrival (p. 926).

The enclosure of land means the abolition of serfdom, thus creating a proletarian class that is then hurled as “free, unprotected, and rightsless” laborers onto the labor-market (p. 876). The usurpation of the commons by driving peasants from the lands in England can also be seen in the process of colonization. The violence of the enclosure of land in England was then mirrored in the colonies. This ‘secretive’ violence is not only what capitalism arose out of, but what it continues to rely upon today (Pulido, 2017; Coulthard, 2017). What Pulido wants to point out with centering the continued settler state reliance on the violence of primitive accumulation is

38 that EJ movements that perhaps just focus on one racial/ethnic group miss a far larger picture of capitalism’s commitment to violently producing difference wherever it goes. In this sense, the continued colonial violence and racism of which the EJ movement tries to work against must be understood as the governing logic of capitalism.

With recognition of the underlying violence of primitive accumulation out of which the modern American liberal state still functions, Pulido (2017) brings up the issue of there being no apparent alternative to the state in which to search for justice, environmental or otherwise. This is indeed a large issue to confront since it is a key reason why those in the EJ movement and others continuously turn to the settler state as a means through which to acquire the justice they seek. Pulido writes that “if environmental racism is part of racial capitalism, then its regulation becomes the province of the state” (p. 529). In the interest of maintaining firms’ competitiveness on the world market, the settler state becomes not only complicit in environmental racism but is responsible for the creation of difference and devaluation of nonwhite people that is intrinsic to racial violence. Environmental racism can be seen as inevitable under the settler state as forms of racial difference are produced to devalue communities, thus allowing the pollution and dumping of waste outputs as capital accumulates in a linear fashion. But inherent state violence and inevitability of environmental racism, as Pulido suggests, would necessitate other ways to seek justice that do not involve the settler state perpetrating the violence. Continuing to try to work through the state could be seen in many ways as a crisis of imagination. A crisis of imagination should not determine decisions to view the state as an ally or neutral force, however, as this may contribute to the failure Pulido is recognizing in EJ; that of the perpetuation of environmental racism at full force, despite the movement’s activism. Recognizing that the state is a racial capitalist state suggests an approach to EJ that sees the state “as an adversary that must be

39 confronted in a manner similar to industry” (p. 530). This is of course no easy task, but Pulido is right to assert that the potential further co-opting of the EJ movement by the settler state, through state actions of going through the motions of regulatory activity and participation, as well as EJ’s failure to not theorize environmental racism as racial capitalism, is too large a risk to take.

Extending this argument to involve Green New Deal discussions, racial capitalism cannot be resolved by “tinkering with policy,” Pulido notes (2017, p. 526). This is a central takeaway for those concerned with the large task of even getting the GND passed and implemented without any major concessions. And while the GND is definitely not to be considered as

“tinkering with policy,” we can begin to think about where lines should be drawn among the policy sphere between projects deserving of the critical support of the EJ movement and those that definitely risk reproducing the same racial capitalist state that they may appear to be contesting. This is not to say that policy gains are not important and represent hard-fought victories for decolonial environmental movements per se, but rather that there should, and indeed must, be a space in between a full faith in policy and denouncement of the state. It is from this space that one can better work and theorize about moving through the climate crisis while affirming marginalized peoples’ rights to dignified lives.

Digging even further into the fraudulent nature of the state and working to find a way for environmental justice activism beyond the settler state, Pulido and DeLara (2018) situate EJ as a place of convergence. They argue that there is a long history of abolitionism connected to the struggle against environmental racism and EJ can be a place of convergence in the sense that different radical epistemologies can come together and create spaces for meaningful solidarity outside confines of the liberal state. They further argue that “decolonial border thinking and abolitionist thought . . . each acknowledge the central role that nature, space, and the state have

40 played in the entrenchment of racial capitalism” (p. 77). The key point here is that if there is underlying systemic violence because of a society rooted in racial capitalism, this violence cannot be overcome with state-led solutions, specifically those that are process oriented and juridical. This is not to say that the state itself cannot be a site of contestation entirely, but that focus should be placed on attempting to address the underlying violence of racial capitalism as rooted in the settler state specifically. If capital were subservient to the state as opposed to the state being subservient to capital, underlying capitalist violence could perhaps be addressed through state-led juridical processes, for example. This understanding is not necessarily addressed by Pulido and DeLara though. Yet again, this lack of meaningful justice is a fear for a project like the GND: that it may not fundamentally change any of the underlying conditions of the settler state and its reliance on racial capitalism that cause and perpetuate environmental violence. Connections between abolitionist thought and environmental justice may seem clear on the surface, but, moving beyond the 14th Amendment, Pulido and DeLara illustrate just how much abolitionist thought can be used to help further the connection between abolitionist epistemologies and those of decolonization, both having roots in the initial theft of land and projects of colonialism. They write: “abolitionism provides a way to imagine a political project of liberation that extends the struggle for Black freedom to abolishing the same racial and capitalist relationships of power that produced the colonial project of plunder and dispossession in the Americas” (p. 78). At stake for not theorizing EJ as a place for abolitionist and indigenous epistemologies to converge is a larger and more holistic vision of justice that transcends what is possible through the state, but immediately gets to the core of the underlying violence of the state and its inevitability. As a final note, Pulido and DeLara acknowledge the popularity within the

EJ movement of recognition and rights-based strategies in collaboration with the state that, while

41 perhaps having good intentions, “only validate the underlying injustice of racial capitalism and colonialism” (p. 92). All of this would suggest that achieving meaningful justice through the settler state is entirely tricky, if not impossible; a task the GND may not be equipped to take on.

Colonial Eco-Social Relations and the State

Following this discussion of racial capitalism and state violence, J.M. Bacon (2018) puts forth a connected argument about thinking through eco-social relations in conjunction with settler-colonialism. For Bacon, settler colonialism comes to form the primary force that constructs society’s relationship to the environment in the United States. This, they argue, is due to the state’s ongoing occupation of indigenous lands that serve as sites of wealth and power. An environmentalism that goes beyond critiques of extraction as related to capitalist expansion to attempt to reckon with embedded structures of colonialism that are still ongoing creates a more sufficient picture of who the culprits are and where the environmental justice or climate justice movement should be focusing their energies. Bacon details the ways in which differences between colonizer and colonized are sought to be erased through overt genocide as well as assimilation, political policies of termination, and education more generally.

Evidence of this can be found in the common struggle of many to answer Bacon’s (2018) suggested questions for self-reflection like “Whose traditional territory am I living on? How many federally recognized tribes are in my state? What are their names?” (pp. 60-61). Bacon is also right to highlight the settler colonial goal of erasure that is bound up within the roots of U.S. environmentalism. This is a history present environmentalism must reckon with in order to be able to more sufficiently argue for a different kind of state-led environmentalism or to effectively draw popularity away from only thinking about state-led solutions. A clear example of settler- colonial state interventions Bacon outlines is that of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR).

42 Created in 1902 to develop water projects in the west to meet settlers’ demands for water, BOR appropriated water resources at the expense of indigenous peoples, actively seeking potential water sources for Native Americans and laying claim to them before the Bureau of Indian Affairs could (p. 63). And continuing today, the BOR plays a “pivotal role in the development of large dams which continue to wreak lasting devastation on Indigenous eco-social relations” (p. 63).

For Bacon, settler-state forms of elimination have clear and material impacts on indigenous eco- social relations. Genocide can be seen as enacted through the poisoning of food and water. And similarly, cultural assimilation took the form of purposefully targeting and disrupting indigenous ecological knowledge (Table 2, p. 63). All of this together comprises a phrase coined by Bacon: colonial ecological violence. This is a useful way to think through the purposeful state violence against indigenous ties to land and ecology as it centers the history of colonization and genocide in struggles over both indigenous sovereignty and environmental racism.

Similar to how Bacon (2018) sought to frame ecological violence in terms of colonialism,

Jessica Hernandez (2019) also sees a different gap within environmental justice studies around

Native peoples. She argues that tribal sovereignty possesses a uniqueness that does not fit within traditional pillars of environmental justice for marginalized communities. Through her research,

Hernandez finds 58 ‘pillars of indigenous environmental justice’ that represent important resources tribes have advocated for that may not have been sufficiently represented in other makeups of environmental justice pillars. For example, a traditional pillar of EJ is “fairness in the distribution of environmental resources and negative impacts” and ideas of equity surround this, focusing on categories of race, class, gender, or age (Fig. 2, p. 177). Theorizing more indigenous-specific pillars of EJ would help illustrate how environmental justice issues are perhaps connected more to culture, language, and education for indigenous people. For example,

43 by including salmon as its own pillar, Hernandez suggests that necessary synthesis and quantification of what “Coast Salish people will undergo if their salmon is threatened versus other non-indigenous communities that consume salmon, but not as a traditional or cultural food”

(p. 181). Other indigenous EJ pillars include the fight against fossil fuels, protection of hunting and whaling practices, and climate justice. Again, this is useful for thinking about why there are gaps within traditional EJ discourse, the same discourse that might seek solutions through the settler state, that do not adequately account for violence against indigenous epistemologies as related to environmental inequities.

David Pellow (2016) theorizes the Black Lives Matter movement and environmental justice together as he works to develop a critical environmental justice. He shows that the same communities that face police violence also face immense ecological burdens, but that these two types of violence are rarely talked about as interrelated. Calling for a critical environmental justice is Pellow’s response to what he sees as limitations within traditional EJ scholarship. A prominent limitation he sees, as also recognized by Pulido (2017) and others, is that the ‘vision of change’ articulated by some EJ scholars is one that primarily looks to the state and capital (p.

224). Yet again, the conclusion reached for Pellow is that “such an approach leaves intact the very power structures that produced environmental injustice in the first place” (p. 224). The legitimacy of the settler state seems to be ultimately what is up for grabs when one talks about working with or through state means such as policy concessions, for example, and this affirmation of settler state legitimacy is something that scholars like Pellow argue environmental justice activists should actively refuse at practically all costs.

Pellow (2016) further illustrates this point through discussion of the BLM movement, noting that if the goal is to confront state-sanctioned violence, the state-sanctioned violence of

44 environmental racism must be included in this picture. He argues that environmental racism is not necessarily thought of in this way as it is more frequently described in terms of single categories of difference, rather than their entanglement, as well as something different and detached from “authoritarian control over bodies, space, and knowledge systems” (p. 223). This is the mistake that leads to less critical environmental justice struggles that, perhaps unintentionally, favor reform over transformative possibilities or the possibilities taken up by an

EJ that theorizes police violence and environmental racism as settler state-sanctioned violence and therefore deeply connected. Pellow’s move here is yet another argument in favor of interrogation of the U.S. state as a crucial capacity of effective environmental justice movements.

Kari Marie Norgaard’s (2019) Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People is a wide-ranging case study of the Karuk tribe in northern California and their battles with the state over their homeland on the Klamath river and their traditional and increasingly threatened ways of life.

Norgaard seeks to explain why and how indigenous solutions to climate change are being purposefully ignored, dismissed, and undermined by the settler-colonial state.

Norgaard beautifully expands upon the work of Pulido (2017) and Pellow (2016) by offering the following:

“But what if rather than tracing environmental justice as an outgrowth of the black civil

rights movement or a response to white environmentalism, we traced its origins to

Indigenous conquest and resistance? Why have we not done so, and what does this

absence imply?” (p. 159)

For Norgaard, this acknowledgment makes it clear that the environmental injustices, like those of climate change, are about deep structures of race and racism. This tragically plays out in a multitude of ways for the Karuk tribe as they experience overt violence when harvesting

45 traditional foods, see severely diminished salmon runs as a result of the damming of the river, and notice the downturn of forest ecosystems at the hands of state fire suppression. There is a myriad of connections made between settler-state violence and the health of land and people. To expand on one, the Karuk tribe has high levels of diabetes and heart conditions that Norgaard and collaborators effectively tie back to diminished salmon, noting that salmon consumption pre- genocide was a staggering 450 pounds per person per year and has fallen to just less than five pounds per person per year (p. 130). Similarly, policies of the U.S. Forest Service that prohibit traditional tending and burning rituals damage once abundant crops of acorns while simultaneously doing very little to actually prevent devastating wildfires. This and other considerations lead Norgaard to write that “Karuk people appear to have experienced one of the most dramatic and recent diet shifts of any tribe in North America” (p. 130). Norgaard’s research here situates the material realities of environmental degradation and suggests an expansive view of environmental justice that would move beyond decarbonization to wholly center the indigenous epistemologies of kinship and caretaking as decolonial practices.

The crux of Norgaard’s (2019) work is to demonstrate the ecological dynamics of settler- colonialism. The obvious connection between the two is land. “Indeed, the emphasis on the role of land is at the heart of the contribution of the settler-colonial framework, making it particularly well suited to theorizing the relevance of the so-called natural world on social action at large” (p.

85). Crucially, the transfer of wealth from Native to non-Native settlers in Karuk territory involved the implementation of laws regarding how the land would be understood (p. 114). Land became inanimate objectified property in which only settlers could maintain relationships of ownership and tending and thus could be the only ones to hunt, fish and manage (p. 114). In today’s context, Norgaard asserts that “Indigenous people offer a multitude of sophisticated,

46 time-tested, and pragmatic solutions” to climate change and that their voices must be taken seriously (p. 239). What is then at stake for a project like the GND is simply assigning different relationships of ownership and management of land and resources that do little to reckon with the deeper settler-colonial dimension of ecological violence that relies on the initial theft of land.

Politics of Recognition and Colonialism as a Convergence

The core of the argument in this chapter comes in large part from the work of Glen

Coulthard in Red Skin White Masks. For Coulthard (2014), “the politics of recognition in its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend” (p. 3). Writing in the Canadian context, but with obvious connections to indigenous sovereignty struggles in the U.S. and elsewhere, Coulthard notes that state tactics of genocide and assimilation have transformed that which reproduces settler ideologies “through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation” (p. 6). Coulthard is wanting to dig into the question of how can the relationship between the state and indigenous people be anything other than colonial? To his main points, it cannot, particularly in the ways it focuses on recognition politics, instead of land back, for example.

Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation is taken up by Coulthard (2014) in necessary and expansive ways. Coulthard seeks to amend some things about Marx’s thesis, recognizing the usefulness of theorizing the power of capital and colonialism as intimately linked, especially for

Native contexts. He first takes issue with Marx’s suggestion that primitive accumulation is something that is temporally bound, instead asserting how its violent process of dispossession is ongoing and necessary conditions for further dispossession are continuously produced. This is

47 key for Coulthard as it also suggests a “more ecologically attentive critique of colonial-capitalist accumulation” through a greater focus on the physical dispossession of land and embedded violence of that dispossession and enclosure (p.14). Also, for Coulthard, if settler colonialism produces “forms of life that make settler-colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies [seem] natural,” then this naturalization of hierarchies is what is at show through politics of recognition (p. 152).

In “Beyond the premise of conquest: Indigenous and Black earth-worlds in the

Anthropocene debates,” Bikrum Gill (2021) discusses the idea of the Capitalocene as it has emerged in opposition to that of the Anthropocene and seeks to respond to narratives produced by the Anthropocene that would center human agency as something separate from the dominion of capitalism. Gill wants to draw attention to the ways in which the Capitalocene still “remains unified with the Anthropocene in the reproduction of a Eurocentric power-knowledge regime that functions to confirm the historical priority of Euro-Western agency and presence” (p. 2).

The argument here is that the assumption of conquest risks neglecting earth-worlding capacities of Black and Indigenous peoples, rendering them secondary to, or only ever in relation to, those of Europeans. This is an especially important consideration in the context of narratives around the GND and climate justice as it suggests that non-European epistemologies and world-makings should not just gain significance through an understanding of their history of being acted upon by European colonialism, but instead should be recognized for possessing world-making capacities prior to contact and which settlers came to depend upon for survival. Gill then suggests that settlers’ “refusal to accept the vulnerability associated with such dependence, and instead initiate a project of mastery and conquest” is what actually gives ground to the current geologic epoch and dispossession and extraction associated with the climate crisis (p .4).

48 This necessarily digs into assumptions about planetary crises as set in motion by the West through colonialism and labels these assumptions as Eurocentric for the ways they consequently render Black and Indigenous geologic capacities outside the realm of being ‘original’ (Gill,

2021). The significance carried through to current conversations is such that talking about indigenous forms of life only in terms of alternatives to capitalism, for example, is troubled. The decolonial project in this sense needs to be pushed, Gill argues, to better situate Indigenous and

Black peoples, not European capitalism, as possessing the original geological capacity. This way, asserting Black and Indigenous sovereignty also becomes a project of restoring social-geological capacities that would carry positive and life-giving possibilities (p. 15).

An Indigenous Environmentalism

As this thesis project seeks to move beyond just asserting that indigenous movements are central to climate justice and instead seeks to draw meaningful focus to decolonization as climate justice, Nick Estes’ (2019) question in his piece on the Red Deal is particularly insightful. He asks “[i]f Indigenous movements are foundational to climate justice, then why isn’t decolonization as well?” (para. 4). Similarly, “Why is it easier for some to imagine the end of fossil fuels but not settler colonialism?” (para. 15). The same way that every struggle can be connected to the climate struggle, so too can every struggle be connected to decolonization. Estes presents the Red Deal, created by The Red Nation, in which the original theft of indigenous land is seen as “not inevitable or beyond our current capacities to resolve” (para. 16). The proposal of a Red Deal, red to symbolize a revolutionary left politics as well as indigenous liberation, goes where the GND does not and aims to place an interrogation of U.S. imperialism at the center of the climate crisis. While Estes notes that concerns over fossil fuels are still important in the Red

Deal, he describes added considerations which include military, police, and prison divestment as

49 well as simply acknowledging that, while “green” jobs may be needed, this popular discussion rarely includes talk of the realities that “[h]alf of the workforce faces employment discrimination because of mass criminalization and incarceration” (para. 21). Estes raises parallel concerns about citizenship, asking “what right does a colonizing settler nation have to say who does and doesn’t belong?” (para. 22). He also centers demilitarization as a concern of the Red Deal, noting the very limited references to national security in the GND. In fact, in relation to militarization, climate change is frequently only framed as a ‘threat multiplier’ (para. 23), which does not bode well for those potentially wishing some military funds would be diverted to other ‘greener’ projects, for example. Even by cutting the U.S. military budget in half, it would still come in at the largest military spending of any country, still double the spending of China (para. 25).

Ending U.S. imperialism and militarism is a central feature of an indigenous approach to climate justice as advocated for by Estes and the Red Deal.

Ultimately, Estes and the Red Deal proclaim that “no society can ever have an ethical relationship to a place it stole” (para. 34) and this is the paramount challenge presented to a GND narrative. Does the GND do enough to reconcile this colonial relationship? The following is one of the GND’s written goals:

“obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for all decisions

that affect indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and

agreements with indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and

land rights of indigenous peoples” (H.Res 109, p. 14).

Taken at face value, this text of the GND may work to advance the belief that the GND holds positive implications for questions of indigenous rights and sovereignty and it in fact might, however, this notion is troubled by the synthesis of arguments above about limitation to working

50 through the settler state, particularly for questions of indigenous sovereignty. It might also be the case that questions of indigenous sovereignty are unintentionally not at the forefront of the thoughts of supporters of the GND and the inclusion of the above goal is a sufficient measure of indigenous inclusion and recognition. A Red Deal, as will be discussed further in the next chapter, offers a way to more meaningfully center indigenous sovereignty and epistemologies, and enforce, not just honor treaties, while also connecting to abolition and demilitarization that are seen as largely absent from the GND.

In this chapter I have worked to demonstrate the ways in which capitalism and colonialism are deeply intertwined through the original theft of indigenous land and the ongoing violence of capital’s primitive accumulation. From this understanding, I have focused on scholars who argue that issues of environmental injustice must be seen in the light of colonialism and racial capitalism to begin to effectively struggle for justice. It is argued that this struggle for justice as a project that utilizes the settler state as an ally or neutral force is highly problematized for the ways in which this state is fundamentally settler-colonial and racial capitalist to its core and thus, justice gained through this state risks reproducing the same relations of power responsible for the initial violence. Similarly, a focus has been placed on the particulars of an indigenous environmental justice that would, in large part, need to transcend the state to be able to fully restore social-ecological relationships of caretaking and kinship in a way that would make up definitive strategies to combat climate change. Solutions that ‘move beyond the settler- colonial state’ do not necessarily offer any especially concrete suggestions and that presents a big challenge. A shift to focusing on justice at the community level is advantageous here. Tying this back to the conversation on the GND, I argue that the GND does not operate in the context of

51 recognizing that environmental racism is racial capitalism and thus does not do enough to reckon with the nature of the U.S. settler-colonial state.

52 CHAPTER 3: The Red Deal and Kincentric Ecologies

Created by The Red Nation, the Red Deal is presented not as a counter to the Green New

Deal, but as something that goes beyond it, fully questioning U.S. imperialism and taking seriously climatic implications of its continuation. I would like to position the Red Deal as an example of effective decolonial climate activism for this reason and detail the ways in which the

Red Deal does well to connect the fight for Native liberation to liberation from U.S. imperialism around the world and how this struggle is deeply connected to fighting for climate justice. Then, drawing from the work of Kyle Whyte, I will relay his concerns about relational tipping points and acting out of urgency for the climate crisis, but at the same expense of indigenous peoples.

The possibilities for indigenous-led kincentric ecologies are deeply troubled by this, deserving further questioning. Here, I aim to address the following questions: what else is available if the

GND fails? If faith can’t necessarily be placed in climate legislation for its potential inability to transcend the settler-colonial state, what else is possible? What ecologies are possible and what do they teach us?

Firstly, important to note about the Red Deal is the way it draws inspiration from the

2010 People’s Agreement, initiated by the MAS party in Bolivia (The Red Nation, 2021). The indigenous resistance and decolonial struggle encapsulated by the People’s Agreement is resonate throughout the Red Deal, as one of its most potent features is its internationalism and articulation of connected global struggles against U.S. imperialism and capitalism. The Dakota

Access Pipeline, they argue, was a project deeply concerned with hurting Venezuelan oil and cutting off supplies to Cuba (p. 16). “The goal is not only to profit from the destruction of

Indigenous lands but also to crush the political alternatives to neoliberal capitalism that

53 Venezuela and Cuba represent” (p. 17). And the resource nationalism of countries like Iran,

Venezuela, and Bolivia is met with heavy sanctioning by the U.S. with devasting effects on civilian populations. The necessity of an anti-imperialist climate policy is articulated in the following:

“In other words, because of U.S. intervention, economies of the Global South are not

allowed to develop to a point where they can transition away from fossil fuels. Therefore,

any climate policy must also be anti-imperialist, demanding an immediate end to

genocidal sanctions and the payment of northern climate debt to the rest of the world” (p.

18).

Sanctions as the result of refusal to engage in the imperial supply chain of oil are just one part of a much larger picture of U.S. imperialism. The Red Nation points out the over 800 overseas military bases “that violate sovereignty and deny self-determination to millions;” the same sovereignty and self-determination that is being fought for within the U.S. borders in North

America (p. 29). The Red Nation makes clear again and again that this is the same struggle because it is against the same enemy.

For those skeptical, further elements of the entanglements between imperialism at home and abroad is not difficult to find. Just look to how the U.S. border patrol “employs Israeli technology developed for the walls of Gaza and the West Bank, and US police departments send officers to learn tactics of repression from Israel’s occupation forces” (The Red Nation, 2021, p.

46). The Red Nation ties the heavy investment in U.S. military back to the nature of settler occupation and the creation of settler sovereignty through war against indigenous peoples. There was also a need for “free land to repay war debts following [the] war of independence with Great

Britain” (p. 61). Indigenous peoples then and still today pose one of the biggest threats to U.S.

54 hegemony as they serve as a constant reminder of America’s false sovereignty and genocidal inception. And the continued colonization “in the name of natural resources, territorial positioning, and profit” takes on new enemies (p. 63). “The Indian Wars never ended; the United

States simply fabricated new Indians–new terrorists, insurgents, and enemies–to justify endless wars and endless expansion” (p. 63). Again, this message is at the heart of the Red Deal and clearly represents a move beyond that of the GND to position all fights against U.S. imperialism as fundamentally tied to fights for land back, indigenous sovereignty, and against imperial settler-state violence in North America. And this then becomes tied to fights for climate justice through the centrality of indigenous peoples in these fights (and how indigenous forms of life are emblematic of a non-extractive and non-exploitative relationship with the land) and the recognitions of the imperial supply-chain of fossil fuels.

It should be noted that the Red Deal is not titled the Red New Deal. The Red Nation

(2021) makes it clear that the legacy of the New Deal is not one which they intend to follow with the Red Deal. This is due to the plunder of indigenous lands that the New Deal required in order to keep the settler-economy afloat (p. 12). But this is also in reference to narratives around development and the Global North, positioning lack of development in countries in the Global

South as part of the reason for increased greenhouse gas emissions. “Nations of the Global South cannot follow the same path of development as the North in their pursuit of climate equity because the atmosphere has become colonized, disallowing the path for industrialization and development the Global North has followed” (p. 12). Different paths must be envisioned, and the burden of transition must be shifted off of those least responsible. Here, siding with arguments of a radical GND, the Red Deal situates the importance of working to lower U.S. energy consumption instead of fixating on the goal of subsidizing consumption with green energy.

55 Again, the language and legacy of the New Deal and the sentiments around development that it evokes now are not necessarily elements that resonate with indigenous people.

One of the Red Deal’s three central calls is to divest (The Red Nation, 2021). This involves defunding the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border

Protection, and Child Protective Services. Ending bordertown violence, abolishing incarceration are included too, as well as the ultimate calls to end occupation everywhere and to abolish imperial borders. This aspect of the Red Deal does not necessarily involve language about the climate or deal with carbon or energy consumption but is placed front and center of the climate policy in order to echo the central sentiment of the Red Deal: decolonization or extinction.

From an understanding that the violence of settler-colonialism cannot be escaped or evaded through state-led climate action, the meaning behind decolonization or extinction becomes clear. The Red Deal does not embody any compromises. The urgency of the climate crisis is deeply troubling, yes, but that might not translate into throwing support behind any new state-led climate policy. The Red Deal demands that protecting the climate from catastrophic warming does not come at the expense of indigenous lands and lives, thus, centering decolonization and abolition and the physical return of indigenous lands as the only solution that prevents further harm and violence of indigenous people, while also liberating others around the world who are under the thumb of U.S. imperialism.

The other two areas of the Red Deal are “Heal Our Bodies: Reinvest in Our Common

Humanity” and “Heal Our Planet: Reinvest in Our Common Future” (The Red Nation, 2021).

These focus on the importance of indigenous caretaking; a practice deeply disrupted by colonialism. These sections include some similar points to a radical GND with calls for free housing, education, and accessible public transportation. Clean energy and land restoration are

56 key here too, though, similarly to the GND, the Red Deal argues that all these things are still interconnected. For example, the Red Deal notes that “Indigenous practices of collective land stewardship directly counter the privatization of property that causes poverty, houselessness, and displacement” (p. 83). The caretaking economy emerges here too as part of the path to heal the planet as the Red Deal argues that this healing “is ultimately about creating infrastructures of caretaking that will replace infrastructures of capitalism” (p. 108). Fundamentally, however, this caretaking cannot fully take place until indigenous land is given back. The Red Deal is clear that its goal is not to finally ‘be given a seat at the table’ so to speak, but instead asks that the table get off indigenous lands (p. 112). This resonates again with moves among left state environmentalism like the GND that seek to include indigenous voices and perspectives and even have indigenous decision makers, but ultimately fail to actually decolonize anything.

Crucially, there is no language in the GND that protects against the criminalization and brutalization of water protectors and land defenders. The Red Deal insists that these protest rights must be protected, and this is especially important if indigenous peoples cannot count on receiving any meaningful justice through state action. This strengthens the need to be able to protest for the land and water, without fear of arrest, injury, or even death.

The Red Nation (2021) wants to reiterate again that it is nothing new, but is instead

“belonging to longstanding, dynamic traditions of Indigenous resistance” (p. 146). Additionally, connecting back to the initial discussion of DAPL and the movement at Standing Rock, the Red

Deal is quick to remind readers that AOC was inspired to run for politics during her time as a water protector at Standing Rock. This seems to be an important reminder of the power of Native movements for sovereignty and justice and their ability to inspire others to action. The extent to which the left in North America continues to sideline indigenous peoples and knowledges “will

57 be the measure of its failure to contribute in any meaningful way to the global revolution yet to come” (p. 146). This is the concern of a state-led GND, especially one that does not listen to indigenous voices. And, again, going further, the Red Deal is ultimately against indigenous knowledges and perspectives only brought in to be listened to and given a seat at the table when they should instead be asserted as truth.

“Rather than taking an explicitly conservationist approach, the Red Deal instead proposes

a comprehensive, full-scale assault on capitalism, using Indigenous knowledge and tried

and true methods of mass mobilization as its ammunition. In this way, it addresses what

are commonly thought of as single issues like the protection of sacred sites–which often

manifest in specific uprisings or insurrections–as structural in nature, which therefore

require a structural (i.e., non-reformist reform) response that has the abolition of

capitalism via revolution as its central goal” (p. 21).

We return again to decolonization or extinction. There is no room for compromise among the

Red Deal and this is in line with the argument in the previous chapter that suggests little can be done when working for justice through institutions of a settler-colonial state. And the message of decolonization or extinction takes on the global dimension of the climate crisis and the imperialism that perpetuates it, holding steadfast in the conviction that Native struggles for sovereignty and land back in the U.S. are tied to global struggles against the U.S. and other imperial powers. The Red Deal argues that the only type of effective climate justice is one that meaningfully centers decolonization. The Red Deal is possible and should be fought for, even alongside the fight for a better GND.

Indigenous scholar Kyle Whyte (2019) usefully theorizes further around the concept of decolonization or extinction in his paper ominously titled “Too late for indigenous climate

58 justice: Ecological and relational tipping points.” Here, he argues that there are two main scenarios associated with the future of the climate crisis. The first scenario is one in which nations act out of urgency, but at the expense of justice for indigenous peoples. In this scenario, a two-degree Celsius warming is avoided and there is substantial clean energy, but still continued injustices. In the second scenario, the focus is on repairing kinship relationships and reckoning with settler violence. The trouble is that “the slow onset of achieving these relationships

[forecloses] the global capacity to avoid climate disruption” (p. 5). Neither scenario is preferred, and Whyte rightly wants to present the question of are we at an impasse? He situates this predicament by talking about ecological and relational tipping points. Surpassing a two-degree

Celsius warming is an ecological tipping point, whereas breaking of consent, trust, accountability and reciprocity are qualities of a relational tipping point. The relational tipping point, Whyte argues, was crossed a long time ago beginning with the original theft of land and subsequent flowing systems of capitalism, imperialism, and industrialization.

This is a devastating reality for indigenous peoples. In another of Whyte’s (2017) works,

“Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Conservation and the Anthropocene,” he writes that “some indigenous peoples already inhabit a world our ancestors would likely have characterized as a dystopian future” (p. 207). For indigenous people, the future is considered from the perspective that they have been living in a dystopia for some years (p. 207). For Whyte, it is easy to recognize this dystopian perspective, one in which people have suffered immense environmental change and thus dramatic changes to ways of life, as what others (white settlers) “dread they will face in the future as climate destabilization threatens the existence of species and ecosystems” (p.

208). The climate anxiety of many white people has been the reality of indigenous peoples for many hundreds of years, and this is significant for the framing of ecological and relational

59 tipping points.

Returning to his later piece, Whyte (2019) outlines that the qualities of consent, reciprocity, and mutual responsibility as associated with relational tipping points, are also commonly associated with kin relationships. A kincentric perspective on climate change may be one in which it seems ‘too late’ to address climate change in terms of both preventing injustices, which continue to be enacted, and preventing a two-degree warming, which largely forgoes concern for injustices around relationships between the state and indigenous peoples and the state and the land. Indigenous anthropologist Enrique Salmón (2000) writes of kincentric ecology as

“[pertaining] to the manner in which indigenous people view themselves as part of an

extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins. It is an awareness that life in

any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin. The

kin, or relatives, include all the natural elements of an ecosystem” (p. 1332).

Illustrating further the importance of kin relationships and a kincentric ecology for indigenous ways of life, Whyte (2019) describes how the severing of kinship ties due to settler colonialism is more extreme than what many indigenous people fear about moving beyond ecological tipping points (p. 5). Further he writes: “I know few indigenous persons who are willing to sacrifice quality kin relationships for the sake of swift or urgent action. It’s in fact the establishment of kinship that will make it possible, at some point in the future, to behave urgently when the need arises” (p. 5). If, in fact, kinship relationships are not sacrificed under any circumstances, what are we left with? Is the only option to be resolved to ecological collapse? Of course, that is not the suggestion, however, in similar ways to which others call for more critical interrogation of state environmental and climate actions, Whyte calls for a move against urgency, or at least the

60 urgency that is only ever at the cost of someone else’s land and livelihood. Ecological and relational tipping points must be addressed together (p. 6). Recognizing the troubling nature of what he is positing, Whyte also asks two very key questions. “Are there additional possible futures, and ones that do not sacrifice indigenous consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity?

Can these qualities and kin relations be established at the pace of urgency?” (p. 5). These are important questions for the ways in which a crisis of imagination cannot be an excuse to forgo asserting true climate justice out of concerns of urgency. Kincentric ecologies are possible and the potential for them to be established and enacted at the pace of urgency may well still be up for grabs.

In this thesis project I have used the Green New Deal as a backdrop from which to examine debates in environmentalism and climate justice among the left. I have argued that decolonization is the paramount feature of effective climate justice and that an effective climate justice is not embodied through the GND or even a more radical interpretation of it. The Red

Deal is an example of effective climate justice for the ways in which is centers and prioritizes true decolonization and connects indigenous struggles against U.S. imperialism to struggles against the same enemy abroad. Primarily, the Red Deal is effective for the way it does not seek to work through or in collaboration with the state. Decolonial indigenous and environmental scholars are in agreement that working to achieve justice through state means cannot fully reckon with the embedded settler violence of which the U.S. cannot escape.

I have also examined Eco-Marxist perspectives of environmentalism and the metabolic rift that effectively connect the alienation of humans from labor to the alienation of humans from the land due to systems of capitalist accumulation and production. It seemed necessary to position an Eco-Marxist perspective up against proponents for a radical Green New Deal, seeing

61 connections between the two around goals for reestablishing the unity between humanity and nature against capitalist alienation. From there, divides between a radical GND and decolonial environmental justice perspectives began to grow, particularly around the question of the state. A decolonial perspective is one unwilling to compromise on justice and land back for indigenous peoples, creating a difficult, if not impossible, task for the GND. Recognizing that the GND may not be able to transcend the settler-colonial state, thus leaving minimal justice for indigenous peoples, other possibilities are necessary. Ideas presented within the Red Deal notably feature a call for kincentric and caretaking ecologies alongside decolonization as alternatives to colonial capitalism. And while these solutions may be up against an ecological clock, no compromises are ready to be made, perhaps forcing the question of can a settler live under the sovereignty of indigenous people?

This is an important and challenging question. In reference to this, as a settler, theorizing about and then practicing different ways of living, ways to engage in caretaking relationships, and ways to redefine ideas of ‘the good life’ can perhaps begin to work towards affirmatively answering this question. In an interview with indigenous activist of the Land Back movement,

Nikita Longman, they are asked if settlers will have to leave the continent if Land Back is achieved. They respond by noting that erasure and displacement are not core values of Land

Back, but, however, “if violent, extractive and capitalist goals are what some settlers desire, I do not feel as though there is room for them in achieving Land Back” (Gray-Donald, 2020). The clear message is that there is no room for those with capitalistic goals; goals that are inseparable from settler occupation of stolen land. This notion necessitates other ways of living that do not culminate in occupying a place, despite being physically present on someone else’s land. Perhaps

62 this a project of collective unsettling for which opportunities and possibilities must be created and acted upon.

It is my goal to generate a hopefulness around climate justice, decolonization possibilities, and emergent ecologies through a critical recognition of the usefulness and limits of eco-Marxist thought, the inescapability of settler-state violence, and the values of mutual responsibility and caretaking. It is recognizing the limitations of positions that do not fully reckon with settler state violence that should bring hope as they initiate conversations of what other types of solutions and worlds are possible. If restoring kinship relations and decolonizing is seen as the project to save the climate, and it should be, the Red Deal and its revolutionary capacity is the action to support.

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