From the ashes, p.45
From the Ashes, page 45
24. Kahle, Energy Citizenship, loc. 7281–7285, 7876–7880, 8002–8004; David Biello, “Where Did the Carter White House’s Solar Panels Go?,” Scientific American, August 6, 2010, www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/; Loomis, Out of Sight, 133–138, 140–142.
25. Thea Riofrancos, Alissa Kendall, Kristi K. Dayemo, Matthew Haugen, Kira McDonald, Batul Hassan, Margaret Slattery, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining, Climate & Community Project, January 2023, https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining; Alyssa Battistoni, “The Lithium Problem: An Interview with Thea Riofrancos,” Dissent, Spring 2023, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-lithium-problem/; see Thea Riofrancos’s book, forthcoming, www.theariofrancos.com/extraction; Haugen, “Alyssa Battistoni on Care Work”; Kahle, Energy Citizenship, loc. 8694–8697.
26. Martin Gelin, “The Misogyny of Climate Deniers,” New Republic, August 28, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154879/misogyny-climate-deniers; Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity and the Politics of Climate Refusal,” Autonomy, May 1, 2022, https://autonomy.work/portfolio/petro-masculinity-climate-refusal/; Malm and Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel, loc. 1008, 1469–1470, 4233–4248, 7533–7725.
27. Klein wrote, “Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.” Klein, This Changes Everything, 21; for more on destruction and freedom see Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books: 2019); Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, loc. 2549–2551.
28. Berardi, After the Future, loc. 134; Loomis, Out of Sight, 146–153.
29. Loomis, Out of Sight, 148; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 2686–2754; Goodfellow,Hostile Environment, 32–33, 41; Miéville, “Limits of Utopia*”; Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia,”72–75.
30. Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 4–5, 9; Sarah Jaffe, “Post-Occupied,” Truthout, May 19, 2014, https://truthout.org/articles/post-occupied/.
31. Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 27; Hartley, “Against the Anthropocene,” 107–117; Miéville, “Limits of Utopia.*”
32. Ricia Anne Chansky and Marci Denesiuk, eds., Mi María: Surviving the Storm: Voices from Puerto Rico (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 2–3.
33. Elizabeth Chuck, “Where Is Disgraced Former FEMA Chief Michael Brown Now?,” NBC News, August 27, 2015, www.nbcnews.com/storyline/hurricane-katrina-anniversary/heck-job-brownie-where-disgraced-fema-head-now-n400436.
34. Klein, who after all wrote the book on disaster capitalism, wrote of Puerto Rico:
You just have to move your company’s address to Puerto Rico and enjoy a stunningly low 4 percent corporate tax rate—a fraction of what corporations pay even after Donald Trump’s recent tax cut. Any dividends paid by a Puerto Rico–based company to Puerto Rican residents are also tax-free, thanks to a law passed in 2012 called Act 20.…
Thanks to a clause in the federal tax code, U.S. citizens who move to Puerto Rico can avoid paying federal income tax on any income earned in Puerto Rico. And thanks to another local law, Act 22, they can also cash in on a slew of tax breaks and total tax waivers that includes paying zero capital gains tax and zero tax on interest and dividends sourced to Puerto Rico. And much more-all part of a desperate bid to attract capital to an island that is functionally bankrupt.
Naomi Klein, Battle for Paradise (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 12, 17–18, 25–27, 58.
35. Klein, Battle for Paradise, 29; David Cordero Mercado and Laura M. Quintero, “Las muertes por el paso del huracán Fiona son más de las que se han contado hasta la fecha,” El Nuevo Dia, October 31, 2022, www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/las-muertes-por-el-paso-del-huracan-fiona-son-mas-de-las-que-se-han-contado-hasta-la-fecha/; David Cordero Mercado and Laura M. Quintero, “Traspiés en el operativo de contar las muertes a causa del huracán Fiona,” El Nuevo Dia, November 2, 2022, www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/traspies-en-el-operativo-de-contar-las-muertes-a-causa-del-huracan-fiona/; Mel Leonor, “Study: 4,645 People Died After Hurricane Maria, Far More Than Official Estimate,” Politico, May 29, 2019, www.politico.com/story/2018/05/29/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll-610265.
36. For much more on the special economic zone and its place in modern capitalism, see Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 2023); Klein, Battle for Paradise, 6, 28; Chansky and Denesiuk, Mi María, 273–281; Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 64–66.
37. Charo Henríquez, “Puerto Rico Protesters Got Creative: Dancing, Singing, Diving…,” New York Times, July 24, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/us/puerto-rico-governor-ricky-renuncia.html.
38. Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 2251–2275, 2492; Tracy Jan, Arelis R. Hernández, Josh Dawsey, and Damian Paletta, “After Butting Heads with Trump Administration, Top HUD Official Departs Agency,” Washington Post, January 16, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/top-hud-officials-departure-follows-disagreements-over-housing-pol icy-and-puerto-rico-disaster-funds/2019/01/16/e6ba5be4-1839-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html; Nicole Acevedo, “New Probe Confirms Trump Officials Blocked Puerto Rico from Receiving Hurricane Aid,” NBC News, April 22, 2021, www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/new-probe-confirms-trump-officials-blocked-puerto-rico-receiving-hurri-rcna749; Chansky and Denesiuk, Mi María, 7; Frances Robles and Deborah Acosta, “Puerto Rico Cancels Whitefish Energy Contract to Rebuild Power Lines,” New York Times, October 29, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/us/whitefish-cancel-puerto-rico.html.
39. Chansky and Denesiuk, Mi María, 7, 68.
40. Ricia Anne Chansky wrote, “Resilient is a word that has often been used to describe the people of Puerto Rico in the aftermaths of Hurricane María. This label is problematic, though, as it sidesteps the reality that this resiliency is born of repeated abandonment by the federal government during the almost 125 years that Puerto Rico has been a part of the United States. What is named ‘resilience’ is in actuality what occurs when a people are taught not to expect equitable treatment from their own government, developing a necessary understanding that they must be largely self-reliant in order to survive.” Chansky and Denesiuk, Mi María, 10, 310; Klein, Battle for Paradise, 2–3, 10, 33–38, 40, 50; Sarah Jaffe, “Teachers in Puerto Rico Demand an End to School Closures and Privatization,” Truthout, April 11, 2018, https://truth out.org/audio/teachers-in-puerto-rico-demand-an-end-to-school-closures-and-privatization/; Hayes and Kaba, Let This Radicalize You, 57–58.
41. Jason Schachter and Antonio Bruce, “Revising Methods to Better Reflect the Impact of Disaster,” United States Census Bureau, August 19, 2020, www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/08/estimating-puerto-rico-population-after-hurricane-maria.html; “Puerto Rico: The Exodus After Hurricane Maria,” CBS News, September 21, 2018, www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-exodus-after-hurricane-maria-cbsn-originals/.
42. Maroon is a reference to the communities created by people who fled slavery, created their own culture, and carved out spaces of resistance in a broader slave society. Loiza was home to one such community, and the people who live there today might be descended from those who built a space of freedom there. Olasee Davis, “Open Forum: Puerto Rico Shares Some of St. Croix’s Rich Maroon History,” St. Thomas Source, August 11, 2022, https://stthomassource.com/content/2022/08/11/open-forum-puerto-rico-shares-some-of-st-croixs-rich-maroon-history/.
43. Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 14, 64; Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 28; Klein, This Changes Everything, 416; Marya and Patel, Inflamed, 14; see also, Marx, Capital, vol. 1; and Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2010).
44. Walia, Border and Rule, loc. 618; Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 196; Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 91; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 460.
45. Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 51, 94–95, 99; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 451–465, 643.
46. It’s worth including the longer quotation here from Hall:
I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity—mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon—Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history. The notion that identity has to do with people that look the same, feel the same, call themselves the same, is nonsense. As a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other.
Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Essential Essays, ed. David Morley, vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002710-005; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 164; Loomis, Out of Sight, 110, 131; Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 111.
47. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 104, 220, 225, 237; Federici, “Re-enchanting the World,” loc. 3887–3900; Klein, This Changes Everything, 159; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, 643–684.
48. Rackete with Weiss, Time to Act, loc. 1682; Silvia Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation,” in Re-enchanting the World, loc. 2282; Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 11–12, 63, 66, 69, 87–88, 97, 165; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 2038–2054, 4408–4459; See also Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann (Public Domain Books, 2011), Kindle.
49. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 141–144, 170, 186, 203; Carol Rosenberg, “What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked like to the Tortured,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-drawings.html; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 4476.
50. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 165–166, 174.
51. Descartes quoted in Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 51–54; Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 149; Carolyn Merchant, “‘The Violence of Impediments’ Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation,” Isis 99 (2008): 731–760, https://nature.berkeley.edu/departments/espm/env-hist/articles/90.pdf; Malm and Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel, loc. 3015.
52. Frederick Engels, “Dialectics,” in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, vol. 3 of Selected Works, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Progress, 1970), 95–151, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm.
53. In similar terms to Federici’s “re-enchanting,” Kate Soper calls for “an alternative hedonist turn to the spirit [that] would seek to redress this imbalance and to restore sources of direct spiritual well-being that have been sacrificed to the commodifying logic of consumer culture,” and a “more spiritual consumption, when conceived along these lines, would introduce new thinking about what constitutes a distinctively human flourishing.” Soper, Post-growth Living, loc. 1929–1967;Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 3217, 3235, 3244, 3261, 3291; Federici, “Re-enchanting the World,”loc. 3835–3852, 3870.
54. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, loc. 182; Malm and Zetkin Collective, White Skin Black Fuel, loc. 2510–2520.
55. Reuters, “Pakistan Authorities Breach Lake to Save Other Areas from Floods,” Guardian, September 4, 2022, www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/pakistan-more-floods-lake-manchar-swells-monsoon-rains.
56. Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 59; Federici, “The Debt Crisis, Africa, and the New Enclosures,” in Federici, Re-enchanting the World, loc. 911–959, 2410–2417; Walia, Border and Rule, loc. 1456–1504; Kristen Lyons and Peter Westoby, “Carbon Colonialism and the New Land Grab: Plantation Forestry in Uganda and Its Livelihood Impacts,” Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014): 13–21, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.06.002. Harvey explained that Marx’s idea of “primitive accumulation,” so called because it was assumed to be setting the ground for capitalism to grow, was insufficient to understand the way that capitalism continues to enclose land, resources, and even intellectual property through “predation, fraud, and violence.” He described it as “accumulation by dispossession.” The forms of violence discussed in the beginning of this section—colonial occupation, the enclosures, the witch hunts, the suppression of alternate ways of living and relating to the natural world outside of the property relation—have not stopped, as Silvia Federici also documented in the texts cited above, and indeed now, Harvey wrote, “Wholly new mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession have also opened up.”
The emphasis on intellectual property rights in the WTO negotiations (the so-called TRIPS agreement) points to ways in which the patenting and licensing of genetic materials, seed plasmas, and all manner of other products, can now be used against whole populations whose environmental management practices have played a crucial role in the development of those materials. Biopiracy is rampant and the pillaging of the world’s stockpile of genetic resources is well under way, to the benefit of a few large multinational companies. The escalating depletion of the global environmental commons (land, air, water) and proliferating habitat degradations that preclude anything but capital-intensive modes of agricultural production have likewise resulted from the wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms. The commodification of cultural forms, histories and intellectual creativity entails wholesale dispossessions—the music industry is notorious for the appropriation and exploitation of grassroots culture and creativity. The corporatization and privatization of hitherto public assets (like universities) to say nothing of the wave of privatization of water and other public utilities that has swept the world, constitute a new wave of “enclosing the commons.” As in the past, the power of the state is frequently used to force such processes through even against the popular will.
David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004), https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5811.
57. Amitav Ghosh wrote:
It is instructive, in this regard, to compare the world’s military expenditures with its spending on climate change mitigation. At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, it was agreed that wealthy countries would channel $100 billion a year to poorer nations, to help them cope with the impacts of climate change. But the Green Climate Fund set up by the UN succeeded in raising only $10.43 billion and is now running out of money: it never came close to being funded at the level envisaged at the summit. In that same period the world’s annual military expenditure has risen from slightly above $1.5 trillion to almost $2 trillion. The total costs of the US’s post-9/11 wars have been estimated as over $6 trillion. Yet the subject is so little studied that, according to three leading scholars in the field, “research on the environmental impacts of militarism [is] non-existent in the social sciences.” (Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 2161–2169, 2844)
See also Walia, Border and Rule, loc. 1512–1538.
58. Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 217.
59. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 96, 99–104, 298, 953; Riverkeeper, “Newburgh Drinking Water Crisis,” www.riverkeeper.org/campaigns/safe guard/newburgh-2/; Sarah Jaffe, “Standing Firm at Standing Rock: Why the Struggle Is Bigger Than One Pipeline,” Moyers & Company, September 28, 2016, https://billmoyers.com/story/standing-firm-standing-rock-pipeline-protesters-will-not-moved/.
60. Estes, Our History Is the Future, loc. 109–113, 981–987; Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 345; Federici, introduction to Re-enchanting the World, loc. 299.
61. Estes, Our History Is the Future, loc. 113–115, 140, 158–160, 307–313, 443–481, 812–832, 877, 943–981, 3881–3889; Marya and Patel, Inflamed, loc. 63; “Cowboy and Indian Alliance Stands Against Pipeline,” CBS News, April 23, 2014, www.cbsnews.com/pictures/cowboy-and-indian-alliance-stands-against-pipeline/; Mary Kathryn Nagle, “A Year for Epic Victories amid Historic Loss,” in Barnes, Merritt, and Williams, After Life, loc. 648–649, 702–705, 719–725; Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to ‘Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies,’” Intercept, May 27, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race, Prisons, and War: Scenes from the History of US Violence,” in Abolition Geography, loc. 2434–2438; Walia, Border and Rule, loc. 622.
62. Estes, Our History Is the Future, loc. 477; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 4176–4200.
63. Some scientists have argued that the Great Dying, which killed perhaps 90 percent of the Native people in the Americas, contributed to the period of climate change known as the Little Ice Age. According to Live Science, “Essentially, once these tens of millions of people died in North, Central and South America, they could no longer farm. The forest then crept in, taking over farmland and doing what plants and trees do best: breathe in carbon dioxide (CO2). This process decreased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, leading to widespread cooling, the researchers said.” Other researchers disputed the claim. Laura Geggel, “European Slaughter of Indigenous Americans May Have Cooled the Planet,” Live Science, February 8, 2019, www.livescience.com/64723-great-dying-little-ice-age.html; Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, loc. 742–792, 875, 882, 896, 902–921, 946, 954–1018, 1077–1107, 1239, 2857; Estes, Our History Is the Future, loc. 224, 1387–1407; Gilmore, “Race, Prisons, and War,” in Gilmore, Abolition Geography, loc. 2442–2444; Hayes and Kaba, Let This Radicalize You, 153.
