B4. Radical Ecology

On this episode of Breaking Green we speak with GJEP’s Executive Director Anne Petermann about the human rights delegation to Chile organized by GJEP last October. We investigated the efforts by Indigenous Mapuche People to reclaim their traditional territories, and about the state repression and violence they are experiencing as a result of their efforts. […]

In Ancestral Future, the Brazilian Indigenous leader and philosopher Ailton Krenak recounts the story of the Maxakali community, an Indigenous group from the eastern rivers of Brazil. He describes how, despite being dispossessed and forcibly removed from their land, the Maxakali retain a remarkable ability to recall and narrate the presence of the living beings—animals and plants—that once shared their territory even though they no longer share it with them. Krenak emphasizes that this act of remembrance is more than nostalgia; it is a way of remaining rooted, or sustaining the experience of place. Even as modernity expands, imposing an abstract, homogenized notion of space—a void to be filled with ‘development’—the Maxakali resist this erasure by preserving their connection to nature through storytelling and memory. Their ability to inhabit, even in displacement, serves as a powerful testament to how communities, sometimes against all odds, retain their dignity, their sense of belonging, and their past and future as living, continuous realities. I often find myself returning to this thought as a profound example of resilience in the face of development and its multiple faces of dispossession.

The development enterprise, now 76 years old, has been remarkably effective not in solving poverty, but in producing and perpetuating it. As Majid Rahnema argues in The Development Dictionary, the term had multiple meanings before January 20, 1949. Poverty could be a voluntary choice, a form of exclusion from the community, a public humiliation, or a lack of protection. It was only with the expansion of industrial and mercantile economies that poverty became redefined as the opposite of ‘rich’ or a measure of wealth —a condition of material deficiency requiring intervention. The proposed solution, of course, was development— understood as the systematic deployment of industrial production, a wage-based economy, and the positivist advancement of technology and scientific knowledge, concentrated in the hands of professionals and experts. This logic did not simply enclose the means of production or subsistence, as Marxist thinkers might have predicted; it went further, creating a system of dependencies that rendered people perpetually in need of development itself—an alienating force that reshaped entire ways of being into something incomplete, always lacking, and requiring external intervention. Despite this there are many grassroots, autonomous and alternative movements resisting and creating alternatives to the development enterprise.

For five days in February, I had the privilege of joining land defenders, grassroots movements, Indigenous Peoples, and communities from 20 countries across the Global South in Port Edward, along South Africa’s Wild Coast, to discuss radical democracy, autonomy, and self-determination. Hosted by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, the Academy of Democratic Modernity, the Amadiba Crisis Committee, and the Pan African Ecofeminist Alliance WoMin, this gathering was more than an exchange of ideas—it was a convergence of struggles, lived experiences, and collective visions for autonomy. Despite the participants’ diverse backgrounds, languages, and contexts, a striking commonality emerged: a clear and resounding rejection of the development enterprise. Over the past 40 years, what began as a slow erosion of the means of subsistence has escalated into a full-scale war against it. Development, far from being a means of upliftment, has proven to be an economic and political project of alienation, dispossession, and enforced dependency—disrupting ways of life, dismantling communal autonomy, and deepening systemic inequalities. This gathering reinforced that resistance is not just about rejecting this imposed model, but about reclaiming the power to define and create our own futures.

Participants at the inauguration of the Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self- determination’, Port Edward, South Africa, 2-6 February 2025.

 

What is the crisis we are facing?

Communities and grassroots movements striving to maintain their autonomy and practice radical or direct democracy are facing unprecedented challenges in an era of extreme inequality, shaped by centuries of exploitation and dispossession. The intersecting crises of climate collapse, economic inequality, and rising authoritarianism are intensifying new forms of oppression and violence—particularly against the ‘poor’ and marginalized communities produced by decades of development policies. The state has become central to enforcing the disciplinary, counterinsurgency, and social engineering technologies necessary to sustain capitalist extraction. At the same time, the far right has weaponized capitalism’s crisis to push liberal democracy toward xenophobia, racism, and hatred which serve as tools to entrench elite and corporate-driven forms of extreme neoliberalism.

Meanwhile, leftist and progressive governments have largely resigned themselves to crisis management, acting as administrators of capitalism’s systemic failures rather than challengers of its logic. In countries like Mexico, the rapid expansion of militarization and state-deployed social engineering technologies reinforces what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls the extraction-assimilation system—a model in which people, their knowledges, nature, and the more-than-human world are treated as resources to be rendered extractable. As these dynamics unfold, grassroots resistance remains critical, not only to oppose these structures but to reclaim autonomy and sustain alternative ways of being and relating beyond the confines of capitalist and state control.

At the heart of these struggles is a demand for more than rights or state recognition— a framework that ultimately reproduces condescending forms of hospitality, tolerating otherness while reinforcing systems of alienation through participatory and democratic mechanisms. Instead, these movements are fighting for radical autonomy. Paraphrasing the rich debates and discussions held during the meeting, the prevailing sentiment was clear: “We cannot ask or wait for the state to act. If we did, we would be long dead before development arrived. Instead, we must build, reclaim, or maintain systems of self-governance to sustain our territorialities.”

The concept of territory was central to this understanding. Participants emphasized that land and place are not only essential for constructing autonomous systems of self-determination and radical democracy, but also embody deep historical, epistemic, and ontological relationships—connecting people to nature and to ways of being that precede and resist capitalist modernity.

The meeting reinforced what many have long argued: the race toward development is a race toward deeper dispossession. This is not just about the extraction of resources; it is an increasingly violent system that enforces total alienation from the means of subsistence. As Ivan Illich warned, development is a war on subsistence—where in the logic of capitalism, economy becomes synonymous with scarcity. The crisis we face today is not merely economic or political, it is existential.

Participants of the Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self- determination’ in a visit to the Xolobeni Community, hosted by the Amadiba Crisis Committee (AAC). Photo by Ashish Kothari.

This ‘modern’ state system, as Ailton Krenak argues, has become highly proficient in the production of poverty and perpetual precarity by alienating people from their lands—whether through direct displacement or the slow contamination and degradation of their territories— forcing them into urban peripheries where no connection to autonomous livelihoods remains. Even institutions like the World Bank have acknowledged this trend, which is particularly visible in countries like Mexico, where nearly two thirds of those classified as poor under modern definitions live near or in cities. The state, in its contemporary form, does not function as a protector but as a facilitator of dispossession, offering ‘solutions’ that ultimately serve corporate and elite interests at the expense of communities.

How are communities responding?

While the term radical democracy is not one that communities use to describe their own decision-making processes, participants in the meeting in South Africa emphasized that autonomy and self-determination are not about seeking state recognition, but about reclaiming the power to govern and sustain life on communities’ own terms. The ‘radical’ in the term points towards the multiple struggles at the grassroots where alternatives are actively breaking away from liberal institutions and the extractivism that manufactures dependence. The response to this crisis is not uniform, but it is clear: grassroots communities are rejecting  formal education, healthcare, housing, transport and other expert-led systems that produce “needy” individuals. Instead, they are building self-sufficient networks of mutual aid, reclaiming food sovereignty, energy autonomy, traditional healing, learning and collective (re) inhabitation among many other direct challenges to capitalism and development’s monopolization of basic needs.

Many movements are resisting so-called “green transitions,” which disguise new forms of extraction under the banner of sustainability and climate change ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’. Others are directly challenging the legal frameworks that reduce collective rights to manageable, individual, co-optable categories, reliant on expert, state or market produced services. Paraphrasing what some of the  participants argued: “collective and Indigenous peoples rights cannot be limited to human rights. These rights are based on the rights of nature, on our relationships with territory and place, and on our capacity to determine how we relate to and in these places.”

This response, again is not homogenous, but entails a radical plurality of actions, struggles and movements reclaiming dignity: building radical alternatives that are rooted in creating a sense of place and communitarian entanglements that redefine a sense of value produced through a commonly defined good life.

A tapestry of alternatives and radical democracy, made by participants of the Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self- determination’. Photo by Ashish Kothari.

The gathering highlighted the vital role of grassroots struggles in advancing radical democracy and emphasized the urgent need for academia, NGOs, and civil society to reconsider how they engage with these movements. Too often, these institutions, even with good intentions, align with the development agenda by treating knowledge as extractable and transferable, reinforcing the same systems of power that communities resist. In contrast, the struggles represented assert that knowledge is not the exclusive domain of universities: communities possess their own theories and political visions, rooted in everyday resistance and collective traditions.

The central question is no longer whether radical democracy is possible, but how to sustain it in a world bent on its erasure. This calls for a fundamental shift: from supporting movements through hierarchical models to co-creating with them in ways that dismantle the extractive-assimilation system. The struggle for autonomy is not merely opposition to development but a process of rebuilding social fabric through mutual aid, reciprocity, and self-determination.

As the confluence in South Africa demonstrated, these struggles are not isolated—they are interconnected nodes in a global movement toward radical democracy. As several  of the participants expressed: “We should no longer seek recognition from the state, but from each other.” From Indigenous communities defending their lands against extractivist projects, to urban collectives reclaiming the capacity of decision making from the state, what emerges is a vision of autonomy built on global solidarity that moves beyond reform to the active construction of new worlds. Autonomy and radical democracy thus cease to be abstract concepts: they entail the lived experiences of those who refuse to be governed and ‘developed’.

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By Eva Camus & Panagiota Kotsila

Heatwaves expose deep inequalities, hitting racialized migrants hardest due to race, gender, class, and poor housing. In Neukölln, Berlin, we see the urgent need for inclusive, locally-informed climate adaptation strategies that prioritize migrant voices, housing justice, and equitable access to cooling resources.

The numbers are staggering. Last month, the Climate Risk Index 2025, published by Germanwatch,  documented the growing impact of extreme weather events globally. Between 1993 and 2022, more than 765,000 people have lost their lives due to extreme climate events, while over 9,400 climate-related disasters, including hurricanes, floods, storms, and heatwaves, caused economic damages exceeding $4.2 trillion (Climate Risk Index, 2025). But behind these figures lie deeper questions: Who is most at risk when disaster strikes? Who shoulders the weight of climate?

While some stay cool in air-conditioned offices, shaded neighborhoods, or public cooling centers, others, including migrants, low-income workers, and racialized communities, endure the heat in overcrowded apartments, precarious workplaces, and public spaces where they are often unwelcome. Across European cities, adaptation strategies often overlook these inequalities, reinforcing existing patterns of environmental injustice and exclusion.

Who gets to stay cool? Heatwaves and climate injustice in European cities

Heatwaves are not just a weather event; they are a crisis of inequality (Anguelovski et al. 2025). As temperatures rise, cities become heat traps, where dense infrastructure and the urban heat island effect push temperatures higher than their rural counterparts and disallow urban neighborhoods from cooling down during the night. In Europe, risks are growing as it has become the fastest warming continent (Climate Risk Index, 2025). While Mediterranean cities have long coped with high temperatures, northern European cities are now also struggling. Many buildings, designed to retain warmth, make cooling difficult, and where air conditioning is scarce both in private homes and public buildings, heat stress is an increasing concern.

Not everyone experiences extreme heat the same way. As political ecologies of risk have long noted (see Collins 2008;Wescoat 2019; Huber et al.), vulnerability to environmental and climate impacts is socially produced. Power relationships are reflected in how such impacts and the subsequent policies of mitigating or adapting to them are governed, and social structures determine who will be most at risk and whose voice will be heard in processes of risk assessment, prevention and policy. The risks that climate change poses to human health and well-being are no exception.

Extreme and prolonged heat impacts places and communities by building on and magnifying existing inequalities related to urban planning and zoning decisions, historical patterns of socio-spatial exclusion and segregation, as well as to everyday patterns of life and work, hitting those at the most precarious positions the hardest. Research has identified children, older adults, and those with pre-existing conditions as particularly at risk, taking into account the biological predisposition of different people to the effects of heat (Rebetez et al., 2009; Kovats and Hajat, 2008). However, we need to take a closer look at the role of deeper and historical social, economic and cultural determinants of such vulnerability, including how race, gender, class, and living conditions are just as decisive of factors when defining vulnerability as biological predisposition (Abi Deivanayagam et al., 2023; Anguelovski & Kotsila, 2023; Anguelovski et al. 2025).

In the context of urban life in cities in Europe, some of the most socially vulnerable groups are racialized migrants; people that come from countries of a majority world context and now live in Europe. Despite increased attention to how racialization and marginalization shapes heat injustice, we have seen limited attention on the topic from scholars in Europe. In response to this gap in our understanding of climate injustice in EU cities, we designed a pilot research project to examine how migrants experience, understand and react to extreme and prolonged heat in the context of Neukölln neighborhood in Berlin, Germany.

Created by: Jana Dabelstein
@mentalnotearchive (Instagram)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/janadabelstein

 

During May and June 2024, we held 2 participatory workshops with 11 majority-world migrant residents. We adapted the Relief Maps method, to capture intersectional dynamics of heat-related dis/comfort in everyday spaces, and the contradictions often faced by migrants regarding thermal versus emotional comfort.

Firstly, we found out that ten out of eleven participants find public transport uncomfortable in relation to heat, mainly due to poor ventilation, high temperatures, and overcrowding. Gender significantly influences these experiences, with public transport showing the highest average discomfort in the gender dimension. Five of eight women and gender-nonconforming individuals reported insecurity due to harassment, with a young woman from Mexico, describing “a lot of sexual and sexist harassment.” The results also reveal that race and ethnicity contribute to discomfort on public transport, with four participants experiencing stereotyping, judgment, and overt racism.

Agreeing with scholars who have identified migrants working in construction, agriculture and manufacturing as particularly vulnerable due to their exposure to long hours in direct sunlight, or poorly ventilated environments with minimal protections against extreme temperatures (Hansen et al., 2014; Venugopal et al., 2014; Messeri et al., 2019), we found that beyond physical conditions, deeper socio-cultural structures and circumstances—such as language barriers—also significantly influence their access to thermal comfort. Five participants in our study noted that limited German proficiency restricted their job options, made it difficult to communicate with employers, and left them unable to advocate for better conditions. The exclusion from workplace decision-making processes mirrors broader patterns of labor control in migrant economies, where language is often a barrier to social mobility and labor rights advocacy (Collins, 2012).

 

We also found that for migrant women, these vulnerabilities were even more pronounced. Many are overrepresented in caregiving, cleaning, and service jobs, where gendered expectations of emotional and physical labor heighten their exposure to heat. One participant, a childcare worker, described how the burden of protecting others during heatwaves made her own discomfort secondary:

“If I have to go to work on a hot day, then it’s kind of annoying because I work with kids, and we have to go to the park. Then it’s like I’m stressed about the bodies of 20 kids instead of mine. I’m stressed about whether they have sunscreen, if they have their hats, if they’re drinking water, if they’re not burning themselves on the metallic parts of the park. And then I’m super exhausted. […]”

Her experience reflects a broader reality of gendered workplace precarity, where migrant women are expected to manage heat exposure not only for themselves but for those under their care, often while earning low wages and receiving little institutional support (see also Sultana, 2014; Truelove & Ruszczyk, 2022).

Furthermore, housing conditions turned out to be a key determinant of climate vulnerability. Yet, for many migrants, their home offers very little protection from extreme heat. Scholars in urban political ecology emphasize that thermal comfort is not just about the level of air temperature, but also about access to safe, affordable and stable housing which is in turn deeply shaped by economic and social inequalities (Anguelovski et al. 2025; Checker, 2020).

Our workshops, indeed, revealed that while some participants found relief in good ventilation or cooling infrastructure, others faced overcrowding, poor airflow, and noise pollution at home, making heat waves unbearable. One participant, living with five others, described her home as “impossible to endure” without air conditioning, underscoring how housing conditions shape thermal comfort as much as outdoor temperatures. This is compounded by the constant struggle connected to securing an affordable home, let alone one that offers relief during times of heat. Many participants described constantly moving in search of affordable rent, reinforcing the argument that housing precarity compounds climate risk (Rolnik, 2019). With rising rents and few housing options, cooling often became a secondary concern, demonstrating how heat vulnerability is inseparable from economic instability and displacement. As one participant shared:

“I’m paying a lot for a small studio, and this is the fourth time I’ve moved in a year. Most housing is overpriced for the little space it offers.”

 

Exclusionary adaptation: who gets to benefit from green cities?

At a systemic level, migrants’ ability to adapt to extreme heat is shaped not just by economic hardship but by policies that reinforce exclusion. Neoliberal climate strategies, rooted in historical racism and capitalist exploitation, limit access to resources, making it harder for migrant communities to cope with rising temperatures (Kotsila et al., 2023). While European cities promote sustainability and climate adaptation, these efforts often mask, and indeed exacerbate, deep-rooted inequalities. Green infrastructure projects (including parks, permeable surfaces, green roofs, regeneration of waterfronts, etc.) are celebrated as solutions to urban heat. However, these are seen to frequently drive-up property values, displacing low-income and migrant residents and making public spaces less accessible (Anguelovski et al., 2018).

Parks and cooling green corridors offer relief from extreme heat, yet for many migrants, these spaces remain unwelcoming due to harassment, discrimination, and police surveillance, as participants in our study described.  Eight participants said they seek heat comfort in parks, and green spaces were also valued for their financial accessibility, particularly by those unable to afford private cooling options. Despite their cooling benefits however, experiences of exclusion and racial profiling severely also shape access to these environments. Three women and non-binary participants reported feeling unsafe in parks due to histories of sexual harassment and cultural judgment.

Access to life-saving information is another barrier. Many migrants struggle to access heat warnings, emergency resources, and public health information due to language barriers and weak institutional support (Kotsila et al., 2023; Lebano et al., 2020). Even when cooling centers exist, social exclusion and lack of networks prevent many from using them.  Our findings revealed a significant gap in awareness regarding municipal or NGO-provided heat relief locations. As one participant shared:

“Honestly, I do not know about these spaces. I have not heard about these places and did not know they existed in Berlin or Germany.”

The absence of commentary from other participants suggests that this lack of awareness is widespread. Beyond information gaps, social dynamics also played a role in limiting access. One participant, described feeling “very foreign in this place”, highlighting how migrants may feel unwelcome or out of place in institutional spaces designed for heat relief.

Rethinking climate adaptation: from exclusion to justice

If European cities are to adopt adaptation strategies that benefit all and prioritize the most vulnerable, adaptation must move beyond mainstream technocratic approaches that treat the city as a blank slate and assume “trickle-down” benefits. Local context, the history of neighborhoods and the realities of those who inhabit them, need to be the pillars of climate adaptation, including knowledge and practices from networks and collectives that have long sustained, involved, and provided care for and with the most vulnerable.

Migrants, often framed as passive victims of risks, hold crucial knowledge about surviving adversity and detecting risks of social exclusion and injustice, because they often have long experience of such processes. Heat knowledge, for example, consists of histories of adaptation in hotter climates and resource-scarce environments, but also by years or generations of people living in conditions were heat often becomes a health-threatening factor during or after the migration journey.  

Understanding climate health vulnerability through the experiences of migrants requires centering their situated knowledge and everyday adaptation practices. In our efforts to capture this through the workshops in Neukölln, we heard participants’ proposals for more shaded pedestrian and cycling routes, increased public water fountains, and capped-price fruit and drink vendors to ensure equitable access to cooling. They also suggested developing an app to map shaded park pathways, helping residents navigate cooler routes during extreme heat.

Urban adaptation strategies remain shaped by top-down processes and resulting policies that exclude the communities mostly at risk. This is not just a procedural or coincidental oversight. It is the result of the socio-economic production of urban nature, including how ecosystems have been managed, altered and commodified, within and outside of cities for the purpose of urbanization and urban economic growth; of how communities of color and the working class have been assigned certain roles and social positions, reflecting on the formation of certain types of neighborhoods and housing complexes; as well as of how nature is being increasingly instrumentalized to proxy urban health and climate protection in order to promote powerful interests such as those of the tourist or real estate industries.

Instead of climate policies that raise property values and displace vulnerable communities, adaptation must prioritize housing justice, labor protections, and equitable access to cooling infrastructure. Public spaces should be designed with inclusivity and safety in mind, ensuring migrants and racialized communities feel welcomed rather than policed or excluded. Most importantly, cities must create spaces where migrants’ experiences and adaptation strategies are valued as essential. In the face of intensifying heatwaves, relief cannot remain a privilege. Climate adaptation must be about redistributing resources, dismantling systemic inequalities, and ensuring that no one is left to endure the heat alone.

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We are honored to be a part of this recently published book, Contesting Colonial Capitalism in the Americas, Africa and Asia edited by Dip Kappor. “This book is a critical excavation of capitalist development that is being driven by the Global North in the modern (neo)colonial era, with a related focus on the anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance […]

Grazing in open-air landfills is a common practice in various parts of the world, especially for goats. Yet, this practice can have devastating consequences for both the health of the animals and the humans who consume their products. Driven by curiosity, I wanted to explore how this dynamic worked in intersection with environmental colonialism within the socio-ecological context where I found myself: at the edge of the Sahara Desert.

It’s the final stretch of our annual winter escape – the trip my boyfriend and I try to take every year to break free from the monotony of the coldest, most stressful season. Our rental car is carrying us north along the highway that slices through the country, winding through the pre-desert landscapes surrounding the city of Gafsa.

Suddenly, a flock of goats grazing among the dunes catches our attention – not because of the animals themselves, but because we slowly realize the sand of the dunes has been replaced by piles of waste. To make things worse, a sharp, nauseating smell begins creeping into the car, growing stronger by the minute. Driven by curiosity, we decide to pull over and walk towards the flock, determined to figure out what kind of bizarre place we’ve stumbled upon.

Columns of smoke rising from burning waste in Gafsa’s open-air landfill. Credits: Alexandra D’Angelo

«Don’t you have them in your country?» the shepherd asks, pointing to his goats, trying to grasp the reason behind our interest in his grazing.

«Yes, we have them in Italy too – he works with goats», I reply, pointing to my boyfriend. Only then does the shepherd seem to make sense of our unusual behaviour: “this white guy must be a shepherd too”, he probably thought. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t really make a difference. What seems important is that, between the two of them, they’ve found a common ground of knowledge and interest, making it easier to carry on a conversation full of brief words and plenty of gestures.

We are on the outskirts of Gasfa, a Tunisian city with 120,000 inhabitants and the capital of the eponymous governorate. Here, to greet anyone arriving from the southwestern regions of the country, there are around 35 hectares of waste, the equivalent of 50 football fields.

Columns of smoke rise from burning waste here and there, while herds of goats and sheep graze, hopping among plastic and metal debris between one dune and another.

«They find cellulose in the paper» the shepherd informs us. Cellulose, typically found in plants, is an essential element for the survival of goats and sheep. However, when vegetation is scarce, as in desert ecosystems, the animals are forced to seek it elsewhere. This is how cardboard packaging, canned goods, or piles of unused paper documents end up in the diet of Tunisian ruminants, not without repercussions on their health and, consequently, on the health of humans who consume their milk and meat.

A group of sheep chewing sheets of paper to ingest the cellulose essential for their diet. Credits: Alexandra D’Angelo

A High-Risk Diet

Paper may seem like an innocuous source of nutrition, but it rarely is. This is largely due to the industrial process used in its production, which involves numerous chemicals. Among them, chlorine and other bleaching agents are commonly used to achieve a white, uniform appearance, but their use can leave behind traces of toxic residues.

Additionally, paper discarded in landfills is often contaminated by a variety of potentially dangerous substances, including inks, glues, heavy metals, and other chemicals used during processing and printing. These can accumulate in the tissues of organisms that ingest them. Dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and heavy metals, in fact, are not eliminated from the body but instead progressively accumulate in fatty tissues, causing harmful effects both on animals and on those who consume their products.

In fact, the ingestion of waste can have devastating effects on animal health, extending well beyond immediate damage, as it can compromise the reproductive system, reducing fertility and hindering their ability to produce healthy offspring. In the long term, such alterations undermine the stability of populations, making it more difficult to maintain balanced and sustainable ecosystems.

A shepherd crouching on piles of waste while his flock grazes. Credits: Giovanni Bailo.

Moreover, one of the main and most dangerous characteristics of dioxins is their persistence in the environment and their high ability to bioaccumulate along the food chain. This means that people who consume meat or dairy products from goats and sheep grazing in landfills may also accumulate these substances in their bodies. Dioxins are linked to a wide range of negative health effects, including hormonal disorders, immune system damage, reproductive problems, and an increased risk of cancer.

In addition to dioxins, landfills often contain heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, found in common items like batteries, electronic devices, paints, and pesticides. In this case too, these substances can accumulate in internal organs, bones, and tissues. Heavy metals are known for their toxic effects, including neurological damage, kidney problems, cardiovascular disorders, and, in some cases, teratogenic effects (i.e., harm to the foetus during pregnancy).

Among the potentially most dangerous contaminants are microplastic residues, which accumulate in landfills in significant quantities. These tiny fragments, once ingested, can cause severe inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract, impairing digestive function. Furthermore, microplastics act as carriers for other toxic substances, amplifying the health risks for exposed organisms, especially for the most vulnerable populations such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly. For instance, in the case of pregnant women, exposure to dioxins and heavy metals through the diet can have negative effects on fetal development, causing growth delays, cognitive issues, and other congenital malformations.

Waste and Phosphates: The two sides of Tunisian Environmental Colonialism

The issue of illegal landfills and, more broadly, the hazardous management of waste, is a pressing topic in Tunisia’s recent history, often sparking protests and mobilization led by the country’s environmental movements.

First and foremost, Tunisia has never implemented any recycling system.

Indeed, it has recently come to light that there has been an illicit trade between Tunisia and Italy surrounding the illegal disposal of waste. In 2020, a judicial investigation discovered the export of approximately 7,892 tons of unsorted municipal waste packed in 70 containers traveling from the southern-Italian region of Campania to the port of Soux, on the western Tunisian coast. These waste materials, falsely declared as recyclable, were destined for a company called Soreplast, which lacked the proper facilities for treatment.

As a result, the waste was either burned along roadsides or buried in the outskirts of cities—practices that are unfortunately common when waste disposal is controlled by organized crime, and which have severe consequences for the ecosystem and the health of local communities. On one hand, burning waste releases highly toxic substances into the air, including dioxins, furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). On the other hand, burying waste in areas lacking adequate soil sealing systems can lead to soil and groundwater contamination through the liquids produced by waste piles (known as “leachate”).

The open-air landfill near Gasfa is just one of the countless examples scattered across the country.

However, the uniqueness of the region that stretches from the Gasfa mountains to the border with Algeria lies in its phosphate rocks, which have been targeted by mining companies for over a century to produce phosphate fertilizers, which are essential for global industrial agriculture.

The ingestion of waste can have devastating effects on animal health. Credits: Giovanni Bailo

In fact, Gasfa’s phosphate leads the global market in terms of quality and purity. Since 2022, the Tunisian market has become even more competitive after phosphate prices skyrocketed with the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, as both countries, along with Belarus, are among the world’s largest phosphate exporters.

Tunisia is now aiming to significantly increase its production and, consequently, its export to Western countries. This represents a potential massive economic gain for the country, but with minimal impact on the local economy of Gasfa, the region with the highest poverty rate in Tunisia – an imbalance that has been at the root of protests and mobilization in this mining basin since 2008.

Indeed, phosphate extraction does not create jobs but causes significant environmental damage and risks to human health. The mining process releases heavy metals like cadmium and arsenic, which contaminate the soil and groundwater, posing a serious threat to the health of ecosystems and nearby communities.

Waste and phosphates represent two sides of the same coin of relentless environmental colonialism – where external powers exploit and deplete local ecosystems for profit, while exporting wealth, importing disease, and perpetuating poverty.

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By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project March 26, 2025 Introduction Genetically engineered (GE) trees are an untested and unpredictable technology that threatens not only the biodiversity of our forests but also the ecosystems that depend on them. The case of the genetically engineered American chestnut tree, particularly the Darling 58 (D58), offers […]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thacker Pass Protectors File First-Ever “Biodiversity Necessity Defense” in Nevada Court Also pursuing “Climate Necessity Defense” and making allegations that mining company has violated their rights. Attorney: “They’re not criminals; they’re heroes.”

WINNEMUCCA, NV — In a first for the American legal system, the lawyers for six people sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation for protesting the Thacker Pass mine are arguing a ‘biodiversity necessity defense.’

The necessity defense is a legal argument used to justify breaking the law when a greater harm is being prevented; for example, breaking a car window to save an infant locked inside on a stifling hot day, or breaking down a door to help someone screaming inside a locked home. In these cases, trespassing is justified to save a life.

This week’s filing states that “Defendants possessed an actual belief that their acts of protest were necessary to prevent the present, continuing harms and evils of ecocide and irreversible climate change.”

“We’re in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth, and it’s being caused by human activities like mining,” said attorney Terry Lodge, who is representing the protesters. “Our lives are made possible by biodiversity and ecosystems. Protecting our children from pollution and biodiversity collapse isn’t criminal, it’s heroic.”

Currently Earth is experiencing one of the most rapid and widespread extinction events in the planet’s 4-billion-year history.

Biologists report that habitat destruction, like the bulldozing of nearly 6,000 acres of biodiverse sagebrush steppe for the Thacker Pass mine, is the main cause of this “6th Mass Extinction.”

Permitting documents for the Thacker Pass mine show the project will harm or kill pronghorn antelope, golden eagles, mule deer, migratory birds, burrowing owls, bobcats, roughly a dozen bat species, various rare plants, and hundreds of other species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently being sued by environmental groups in an attempt to secure protection for a rare snail species who lives in Thacker Pass and who are threatened with extinction.

“Our ancestors fought and died for the land at Peehee Mu’huh,” says Dean Barlese, an elder and spiritual leader from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe who is one of the defendants in the case. “We’ve acted for the coming generations to protect Mother Earth.”

In their court filing earlier this week, Lodge and the other attorneys working on the case made several additional legal arguments, including invoking the doctrine ‘unclean hands,’ asserting that Lithium Nevada Corporation has “engaged in serious misconduct including violating the Defendants’ human rights, Defendants’ civil rights, misleading the public about the impacts of lithium mining and how lithium mining contributes to climate change and biodiversity collapse, and conducting the inherently dangerous and ecologically-destructive practice of surface mining at the Thacker Pass mine”.

They’re also arguing the “climate necessity defense,” reasoning that by attempting to stop a major mine that will produce significant greenhouse gas emissions, the protesters were acting to reduce emissions and stop a bigger harm: climate change.

According to permitting documents, the Thacker Pass lithium mine is expected to produce more than 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, roughly equivalent to the emissions of a small city and amounting to 2.3 tons of carbon for every ton of lithium that will be produced.

This legal strategy has been used by many fossil fuel protesters around the world for roughly a decade (and has been successful in a few cases), but this is the first time the same argument has been applied to a ‘green technology’ minerals mining project.

“Lithium Nevada, a mining corporation benefiting from the violence used to conquer Native peoples, is trying to bully peaceful protestors opposing the destruction of that massacre site,” said Will Falk, an attorney and one of the defendants in the case.

“People need to understand that lithium mining companies—like coal or gold mining companies—use racist and violent tactics to intimidate opposition.”

“The Indian wars are continuing in 2023, right here,” Barlese says. “America and the corporations who control it should have finished off the ethnic genocide, because we’re still here. My great-great-grandfather fought for this land in the Snake War and we will continue to defend the sacred. Lithium Nevada is a greedy corporation telling green lies.”

Bethany Sam:
“Our people couldn’t return to Thacker Pass for fear of being killed in 1865, and now in 2023 we can’t return or we’ll be arrested. Meanwhile, bulldozers are digging our ancestors graves up. This is what Indigenous peoples continue to endure. That’s why I stood in prayer with our elders leading the way.”

Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu:
“Lithium Nevada is a greedy corporation on the wrong side of history when it comes to environmental racism and desecration of sacred sites. It’s ironic to me that I’m the trespasser because I want to see my ancestral land preserved.”

“It is truly outrageous that we live in a society where our Supreme Court has granted constitutional rights to resource extraction corporations, making their destructive activities fully legal and virtually immune from oversight by We the People. Even their right to sue us is a corporate personhood right,” said defendant Paul Cienfuegos, founding director of Community Rights US.

“Lithium mining for electric vehicles and batteries isn’t green, it’s greenwashing,” says Max Wilbert, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass and author of the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. “It’s not green, it’s greed. Global warming is a serious problem and we cannot continue burning fossil fuels, but destroying mountains for lithium is just as bad as destroying mountains for coal. You can’t blow up a mountain and call it green.”

Earlier this month, the judge presiding over the case dismissed an “unjust enrichment” charge filed against the protesters, but allowed five other charges to move forward. The case is expected to continue for months.

About the Case

The lawsuit against the protestors was filed in May 2023 following a month of non-violent protests on the site of the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada. Thacker Pass is known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, and is a sacred site to regional Native American tribes. It’s also habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife.

Analysts say the lawsuit is similar to what is called a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” or SLAPP suit, aimed at shutting down Constitutionally-protected free speech and protest. It aims to ban the water protectors from the area and force them to pay monetary damages.

On September 12th, 1865, federal soldiers murdered at least 31 Paiute men, women, and children in Thacker Pass during “The Snake War.”

This massacre and other culturally important factors have made the Thacker Pass mine extremely controversial in the Native American community. Dozens of tribes have spoken out against the project, and four — the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, Burns Paiute Tribe, and Winnemucca Indian Colony — battled in court to stop the Thacker Pass mine. The National Congress of American Indians has also passed several resolutions opposing the project.

But despite ongoing criticism, lawsuits, and lobbying from tribes as well as environmental groups, ranchers, the Nevada State Historic Preservation Society, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, both Lithium Nevada Corporation and the Bureau of Land Management have refused to stop construction or change any aspect of the Thacker Pass mine.

In February 2023, the Bureau of Land Management recognized Thacker Pass as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as a “Traditional Cultural District,” or a landscape that’s very important to tribes. But the very day before, they issued Lithium Nevada’s final bond, allowing the Canadian multinational to begin full-scale mining operations.

###

Today, Protect Thacker Pass is announcing the release of a new comprehensive report, “How Mining Hurts Communities.”

The report focuses on the growth of mining and especially rapidly growing demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and other metals for use in “green technologies.” According to the report, at least 384 new mines for minerals such as graphite, lithium, nickel, and cobalt will need to be built in the next decade to meet projected 2035 demand for batteries.

“Mining may impact your community sooner than you think,” says lead author Elisabeth Robson. “We are on the brink of the biggest expansion of mining in history.”

The report includes information about:

• Projected mining industry growth
• How mining harms ecosystems
• Eight mining and extraction case studies from around the world
• The scale of mining globally
• The relationship between indigenous communities and the mining industry
• Links between extractive industries, violence against women, and other crimes
• Analysis of mining law
• The relationship between fossil fuel industries and mining

Mining has a long history in the western U.S., and especially in Nevada, known as the “Silver State” for the first major discovery of silver ore in the United States in 1859. Silver and gold were mined to enrich prospectors; copper, lead, and iron to supply the military; and of course oil and gas to fuel the modern economy.

Today, we are seeing a new “green rush” for so-called “critical minerals” to supply industry, including uranium for nuclear power; lithium, copper, nickel, and more for electric vehicle and grid storage batteries, iron and nickel for steel to make wind turbines; silver, cadmium, lead and more to make solar panels; and copper, iron, and nickel to make high voltage grid lines.

“Most people do not understand the impact that mines and the mining industry have on communities, in part because mining usually takes place in rural areas and has the most impact on poor and rural communities,” says Protect Thacker Pass co-founder Max Wilbert, who assisted with the report. “These harms include destruction of land culturally and historically important to communities; violence, especially to women and girls; and pollution that impacts both human and non-human communities who depend on the land, clean water, and clean air.”

Robson says the goal of this report is to educate and empower people to fight the mining industry, and to challenge the idea of “green growth.”

“We’ve put together this report to inform people concerned about mining’s impacts in their communities, around the state of Nevada, and throughout the country and the world,” she said. “We show how mining companies stifle dissent, how the law sides unjustly with corporations, how mining pollutes the land, air, and water, and how mining destroys the ecosystems we all depend on for life.”

You can download the report for:
1) Reading on a computer screen
2) Printing (we recommend printing double sided and stapling along the edge)

Contact us for more information here: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/contact-us/

For ideas for a future without mining and extraction, you can read our Solutions here: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/solutions/

To donate to Protect Thacker Pass and help us educate communities, or contribute to our legal defense fund, click here: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/donations-and-funding/

About Protect Thacker Pass

Protect Thacker Pass is a grassroots community organization that was originally established to oppose the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada. It’s mission has since expanded to include opposing the Jindalee lithium mine proposed just north of Thacker Pass and to include advocating for nature over mining more broadly.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Judge Tosses One Claim Against Thacker Pass Protectors Rejects “Unjust Enrichment” Claim, But Five Other Claims Proceed in Ongoing Lawsuit Over Spring 2023 Protests

WINNEMUCCA, NV — A judge has dismissed an “unjust enrichment” charge filed against seven people sued for protesting the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, but allowed five other charges to move forward.

District Judge Michael R. Montero rejected Lithium Nevada Corporation’s claims that protesters had engaged in unjust enrichment by writing online messages encouraging supporters to donate, ruling that these messages are “protected speech under the First Amendment.”

“This is a very significant win for my clients and a rebuke to Lithium Nevada,” says Terry Lodge, an attorney representing six of the protesters. “But,” Lodge says, “we’ve still got a long way to go in this case.”

“It isn’t illegal or wrong to fundraise for community organizing and for our legal defense,” says Max Wilbert, one of the defendants.

While one portion of Montero’s ruling was favorable to the protesters, other portions were not. Judge Montero issued a prelimary ruling in Lithium Nevada’s favor on five other claims. But, Lodge says that at this stage, the judge was not determining whether Lithium Nevada’s claims are true or not. He was simply reviewing Lithium Nevada’s allegations, taking them as true, and determining whether those allegations were violations of Nevada law.

These five other claims will now move into the next stage in the ongoing suit. During the “discovery” stage, both Lithium Nevada and the defendants will have an opportunity to gather evidence.

Native Land Claims “Frivolous”

In another part of his ruling, Judge Montero called arguments that a Paiute protester has a right to access the September 12, 1865 Thacker Pass massacre site within Lithium Nevada’s mine site to pray for massacred Paiute ancestors “frivolous”. The ruling states that recognizing traditional native land claims “would unequivocally undermine each and every property owner’s rights” and concludes that “[t]his is a Pandora’s box the Court is unwilling to open.”

The defendants are seeking monetary donations to their legal defense fund. You can donate via credit or debit card, PayPal (please include a note that your donation is for Thacker Pass legal defense), or by check.

Arlo Crutcher Removed at Fort McDermitt

In other news, Fort McDermitt Tribal Chairman Arlo Crutcher has been voted off the tribal council after attacking and choking a tribal youth in mid-January.

Crutcher was the key figure behind the Fort McDermitt Tribe’s cooperation with Lithium Nevada Corporation.

The January attack took place as the youth — a mine opponent — attempted to film Crutcher and other tribal leaders meeting with Lithium Americas employees Tim Crowley (VP of Government and External Affairs) and Maria Anderson (Community Relations Director).

Mine opponents blame this violence on Lithium Nevada’s “divide and conquer” techniques.

About the Case

The suit was filed in May 2023 following a month of non-violent protests on the site of the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada. Thacker Pass is known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, and is a sacred site to regional Native American tribes. It’s also habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife.

Analysts say the lawsuit is similar to what is called a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” or SLAPP suit, aimed at shutting down Constitutionally-protected free speech and protest. It aims to ban the water protectors from the area and force them to pay monetary damages.

“Our ancestors fought and died for the land at Peehee Mu’huh,” says Dean Barlese, an elder and spiritual leader from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe who is one of the defendants in the case. “We’ve acted for the coming generations to protect Mother Earth.”
On September 12th, 1865, federal soldiers murdered at least 31 Paiute men, women, and children in Thacker Pass during “The Snake War.”

This massacre and other culturally important factors have made the Thacker Pass mine extremely controversial in the Native American community. Dozens of tribes have spoken out against the project, and four — the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, Burns Paiute Tribe, and Winnemucca Indian Colony — battled in court to stop the Thacker Pass mine. The National Congress of American Indians has also passed several resolutions opposing the project.

But despite ongoing criticism, lawsuits, and lobbying from tribes as well as environmental groups, ranchers, the Nevada State Historic Preservation Society, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, both Lithium Nevada Corporation and the Bureau of Land Management have refused to stop construction or change any aspect of the Thacker Pass mine.

In February 2023, the Bureau of Land Management recognized Thacker Pass as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as a “Traditional Cultural District,” or a landscape that’s very important to tribes. But the very day before, they issued Lithium Nevada’s final bond, allowing the Canadian multinational to begin full-scale mining operations.

###

For the past three years, I’ve been involved in a campaign to stop the Lithium Nevada Corporation from destroying a beautiful mountain pass in northern Nevada – known as Thacker Pass in English, or Peehee mu’huh in the local Numic (Paiute) language – to extract lithium from the land for electric car batteries. Thacker Pass is some of the best remaining greater sage grouse habitat left on Earth. Thacker Pass is home to pronghorn antelope, coyotes, sage brush, meadowlarks, rattlesnakes, pygmy rabbits, kangaroo rats, golden eagles, a rare snail known as the King’s River Pyrg that is threatened with extinction by the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, amongst many other creatures. Thacker Pass was also the site of two massacres of Paiute people including the September 12, 1865 massacre where federal soldiers massacred at least 31 men, women, and children in the Snake War which was fought over…wait for it…mining encroachments on Native land.

We lost the campaign. Mine construction proceeds full speed ahead and hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of Thacker Pass are being carved up right now by Lithium Nevada. Though we lost the campaign and the mine is being constructed, four Native folks and three settler allies (myself included) were sued by Lithium Nevada for “trespassing” on public land to protest the mine. We might end up owing Lithium Nevada – a corporation profiting from the destruction of threatened species’ habitat and the final resting places of massacred Paiutes – hundreds of thousands of dollars for our peaceful protest. The case against us is still in its early stages so we’ll probably be fighting that lawsuit for months, at least. All while the violation of Thacker Pass and all the creatures who live there only gets worse.

Tonight, I will watch the Super Bowl – and the inevitable deluge of electric vehicle commercials that corporations will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure are witnessed by millions if not billions of people worldwide. (Yes, I know the Super Bowl is not the biggest sporting event on Earth. Still, it is widely viewed in North America, Europe, and parts of Africa.) The electric vehicle commercials are infuriating, of course. But, truth be told, most commercials infuriate me because virtually every one of them are wickedly designed to manipulate both the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind to consume evermore stuff. And, what does consuming evermore stuff – whether it’s consuming evermore Coca-Cola, Coors Light, that new dog food brand that you refrigerate, or electric vehicles – do?

It destroys more of what’s left of the natural world. And, at a time when human population has overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity, literally anything you consume destroys the natural world in an unsustainable manner.

But, what will really infuriate me while watching the Super Bowl will be the echo of all the people who criticized those of us working to stop the Thacker Pass mine for owning automobiles (and using them to get to Thacker Pass to confront mining there), for owning computers (and using them to educate the world about what mining does), for owning cell phones (and using them to organize resistance to the mine.) I will be infuriated because these people seem to truly believe that the destruction of the planet can be stopped if the precious few of us who both 1. actually care about the destruction of the planet and 2. are willing to do more than just tell everyone how much we care about the destruction of the planet just give up our cars, computers, and phones. Meanwhile, the corporations who profit from destroying the natural world will gain access to the consciousness of billions of people with their commercials encouraging everyone that if they just spend a smooth $60,000 or $70,000 on a sleek new electric vehicle they can stop the destruction of the planet and appear very virtuous while they’re at it.

Unfortunately, manufacturing electric vehicles includes the same fossil-fuel intensive processes that manufacturing anything (including traditional vehicles) does. When you buy your groovy new Tesla, you need to see the destruction of places like Thacker Pass, the deaths of child laborers in mines in the Congo, the murder of golden eagles reflected in that polished gleam your car salesman is so good at achieving.

But you also need to understand that just like simply buying an electric vehicle isn’t going to save the planet, simply refraining from buying an electric vehicle isn’t going to save the planet, either. Why? Because the global economy is based on the destruction of the natural world. This is true whether we’re talking about destroying the natural world for electric vehicles, whether we’re talking about destroying the natural world for agriculture, or whether we’re talking about destroying the natural world with the pollution nearly 9 billion humans make just from eating, pooping, and sheltering themselves. (Yes, people in the so-called First World use many more resources than others, but per capita consumption by all humans is increasing).

Because nearly every human life today is only possible through the destruction of the natural world, we’re simply not going to convince enough people to ever make the sacrifices necessary to keep the world from ecological collapse. This is especially true when those most responsible for destroying the natural world can put their propaganda in every American living room through things like television commercials more or less constantly. And, please, if you think that a few of us “leading by example” or “being the change” by giving up tools like computers will ever be as persuasive as Super Bowl commercials, then please keep in mind that virtually every traditional culture that thrived with stone age technologies has been massacred, forcibly assimilated, or otherwise destroyed upon contact with the dominant industrial culture. Those 31 Paiutes murdered in Thacker Pass by federal soldiers for standing in the way of mines are just one of countless examples of that.

Am I saying “give up?” Hell, no. I’m saying that we have to think much bigger than personal responsibility, lifestyle changes, or consumption choices. We can’t pat ourselves on our backs for arguing with people who disagree with us online, for buying a “green” product, for writing passionate essays.

Which brings me to Taylor Swift. I played college football. And for the first 22 years of my life, playing the game of football was my favorite thing to do on Earth. So, yes, I have been watching the NFL this year and have followed the Travis Kelce – Taylor Swift story. I’ve watched as some conservatives – believing that God has mandated that they try to put in her place an uppity, successful woman who points out some forms of misogyny – lose their minds about Taylor Swift. I’ve watched as some environmentalists – believing Mother Earth has mandated that they put an individual woman who boards planes which burn fossil fuels – lose their minds about Taylor Swift. I’ve watched as some feminists – believing the Goddess has ordered them to protect a single billionaire because she’s a successful woman that some men have criticized – lose their minds about Taylor Swift. (Full Disclosure: I do not know Taylor Swift, but I have a partner who cheers my activism on like Taylor Swift cheers Travis Kelce on. And that means something to me.)

But, here’s the thing: I see far fewer of anyone losing their minds about the current mass extinction event we’re living through, far fewer of anyone losing their minds about the fact that we’ve lost over 70% of vertebrate species on Earth since 1970, far fewer of anyone losing their minds about the fact that we can’t convince anyone to do hardly anything to actually stop any of this.

We’re not going to convince most people to make the sacrifices necessary to make sure there’s a livable planet to watch the Super Bowl on, to complain about Taylor Swift on, to complain about those who complain about Taylor Swift on, to – you know – live on. The good news is we don’t need to convince most people. We just need to deprive most people of the tools they need to continue to destroy the Earth, our only home. Worried about misogyny and porn culture? You don’t have to convince internet servers to stop serving pornography if you smash them. Worried about climate change? You don’t have to convince oil refineries to stop refining if you break them. Worried about how mass media affects us? You don’t have to convince televisions to stop brainwashing people if you pull enough power lines down.

I know that’s scary to think about. I know it would be scary to do. But, isn’t the collapse of life on Earth scarier? Scarier, at least, than team mascots, football games, or Taylor Swift?

Yesterday, I attended a Tribal Leaders Summit at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) with the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC). The event was hosted by UNR’s Office of Indigenous Relations, University Center of Economic Development, and the Nevada Indian Commission. The second half of the event was devoted to UNR faculty trying to sell the Tribes on Joe Biden’s designation of UNR as a “TechHub” with support for Nevada’s new lithium economy. Faculty proudly presented about all the jobs lithium mining and electric car battery manufacturing would bring to the region. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo made an obligatory appearance and filled a full 10 minutes of the 30 minutes he was scheduled to speak for before peeling out to attend to more important matters.

As UNR faculty presented, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. My friend and colleague RSIC Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Michon Eben was too. I was afraid we were the only ones until Te-Moak Chairman Joseph Holley asked Dr. Mridul Guatam, UNR’s Vice President of Research and Innovation, about just how “clean” or “green” lithium mining really was. Dr. Guatam pretended not to know. And, then several of the Western Shoshone representatives proceeded to inform the UNR faculty about how mining has devastated Western Shoshone homelands. One Western Shoshone leader called her homelands a “hellscape.”

Because Dr. Guatam danced around the question about just how “clean” lithium mining is, I was allowed the microphone to explain how the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, by Lithium Nevada’s own numbers, will produce over 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually, will burn over 12,000 gallons of diesel on-site daily, and requires sulfuric acid obtained from oil refineries. Noticing that UNR faculty were advocating for lithium mining while standing next to a prayer staff with eagle feathers, I explained that Lithium Nevada has been granted permits to kill golden eagles for the Thacker Pass mine. I also explained how racist it is that UNR faculty were so proud of the jobs created by lithium mining when the First Nations who have lived in the region from time immemorial, and who were ethnically cleansed from the land lithium mines are now destroying, have no right of consent over these mines, even when those mines destroy the most sacred places in the world to Native communities.

I have no idea whether the UNR faculty who presented yesterday actually believe the ideas they were spewing. I suspect they do. I suspect they’ve convinced themselves that more mining, more steel manufacturing, more plastic production, more pollution for electric vehicles is the only way to stop climate change. I suspect that they’ve further convinced themselves that Native peoples are backwards and selfish for not being willing to sacrifice what’s left of their homelands for another mining boom. I suspect that they resent organizations like Protect Thacker Pass that insist that its wrong to sacrifice greater sage grouse, sage brush steppe, Lahontan cutthroat trout, and golden eagles for products like electric vehicles that simply are not necessary for anyone’s survival.

Regardless, even if UNR faculty are just doing their job or presenting what their bosses tell them they must, this is no excuse for participating in ecocide and the destruction of Native culture. In effect, what UNR communicated to the tribes was: The lithium industry is going to mine. You can’t stop them. You have no right to say no. So, you might as well take a few jobs. You might as well take a little money from the corporations destroying your land and culture.

I want to make this personal: If this is you, if this is your job, if you’re making money helping the lithium industry destroy the Great Basin and destroy Native culture, you should quit. Right now.

I don’t know about y’all, but when someone comes to my home to destroy it, I don’t cooperate with them; I fight back. Let’s fight back together.

When worldviews collide, planet and people pay the price for ethnocentric arrogance

Note: today is the 3-year anniversary of Protect Thacker Pass.

The term “racism” brings to mind bigots, slurs, and the Ku Klux Klan, or the systematic disenfranchisement of certain communities through discriminatory policies around housing, banking, and policing.

When we think of environmental racism we often think of what is happening in Flint, Michigan, where a majority-Black community has faced a toxic water mismanagement crisis leading to lead poisoning.

Or, we think of “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River in Louisiana along which, according to the United Nations, an “ever-widening corridor of [150] petrochemical plants has not only polluted the surrounding water and air, but also subjected the mostly African American residents in St. James Parish to cancer, respiratory diseases and other health problems.”

But today I want to write about a different type of environmental racism; one that is more subtle, and perhaps more far-reaching.

***

Three years ago today, my good friend Will Falk and I traveled to Thacker Pass, Nevada, and set up camp high on the side of a mountain, on the GPS coordinates of a planned open pit lithium mine.

Help protect the "Thacker Pass 7"

We were there to protect the land, and within months, we began developing relationships with traditional indigenous people from the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone tribes. Soon, community members from Fort McDermitt, Reno-Sparks, Summit Lake, Duck Valley, Yerington, and other Native American reservations were regularly traveling to the protest camp, bringing supplies, and standing on the front lines.

A profound kinship began to develop. We’d sit on the mountainside with elders, discuss strategy, share food, and watch the land. Golden eagles wheeled overhead and jackrabbits ran through the sage.

One particular elder, Josephine Dick from the Fort McDermitt Tribe, has a twinkle in her eye that reminds me of my grandmother. She would tell stories about tanning hides, about making cradleboards for babies, about the history of Peehee Mu’huh (the Paiute name for Thacker Pass). She speaks about how, one day, we’re not going to have cars, or electricity, or phones, or any modern technologies. “One day,” she says, “that’s all going to be gone. And people will have to know the old ways.”

While at Thacker Pass, I spent time reading documents detailing the government’s attempts at consultation with native tribes. One of them is the transcript of a meeting with government officials in nearby Winnemucca attended by Josephine, among other tribal members.

“We have blood, a heart, organs, keeping us alive,” Josephine tells the Bureau of Land Management officials. “Mother Earth has water, soils, rocks, keeping her alive. To me, the more Mother Earth is mined, it is slowly killing her, and creating problems in the world. She needs her parts the way we do.”

***

There are different ways to live in the world. One is Josephine’s way: a way that sees land as sacred, sees animals as relatives who are our elder siblings, and sees water and the basis of all life. This is traditional in Paiute society, and it’s also traditional among my own ancestors, before they assimilated or were conquered by empires.

In fact, this worldview is shared amongst almost all tribal and land-based societies around the globe.

Nemonte Nenqiumo, a Waorani leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon, lives 4,000 miles from Paiute territory, but in her brilliant 2020 essay My Message to the Western World: Your Civilization is Killing Life on Earth, she shares a similar perspective: “This forest has taught us how to walk lightly, and because we have listened, learned and defended her, she has given us everything: water, clean air, nourishment, shelter, medicines, happiness, meaning.”

She continues: “You forced your civilization upon us and now look where we are: global pandemic, climate crisis, species extinction and, driving it all, widespread spiritual poverty.”

Ati Quigia, an indigenous leader from Columbia, said it even more clearly: “We are fighting not to have roads or electricity — this vision of self-destruction that’s called development is what we’re trying to avoid.”

From a scientific perspective, you could say this worldview is common because  sustainability is an adaptive trait, and an “animist” perspective promotes sustainability. Or, you could say that this worldview is a more accurate way of perceiving the world than a purely mechanistic, western perspective.

Both of these interpretations are true. My direct experience at Thacker Pass is that the land itself is alive, sentient, with feelings and perceptions far different from our own. But if we listen, the land speaks.

Compare the worldview of Josephine and Nemonte Nenquimo to our opponent.

Set against us at Thacker Pass is Lithium Americas, a transnational corporation based in Canada and operating through a fully-owned U.S. subsidiary, Lithium Nevada. They are traded on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange, and have attracted major investors from around the world. The company is worth billions, and is collaborating with General Motors Corporation to develop the Thacker Pass lithium mine.

The mine, which is now under construction, will consist of an open pit nearly two miles long and half a mile wide, as deep as the height of a 35-story building, carved into the side of the mountain. New mountains have begun to rise, made up of the toxic acidic byproducts of the mining process. A sulfuric acid plant is under construction, which will use sulfur from the oil industry — possibly the Alberta Tar Sands — to burn lithium from the soil.

All this is only possible by first destroying the land with huge bulldozers, blowing up the mountain with explosives, and killing or driving away every single plant and animal. The scale of pollution, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions for a project like this is staggering.

Corporate power is a major driver of our environmental crisis. Global warming, species extinction, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, toxic pollution, plastic and chemical contamination, oceanic dead zones, overconsumption, urban sprawl, deforestation, desertification, sea level rise, ocean acidification, aquifer drawdown, overfishing — all of these problems are linked to corporate overreach. They are also all linked to abuse of human rights, declining human health, and threats to the future of our children.

***

Ethnocentrism refers to evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of one’s own culture. It’s also perfectly descriptive of Lithium Americas: a foreign corporation (foreign to both the Paiute nation and to the United States) imposing its vision of “development” on a population that opposes it, through the use of force.

That force is often filtered through intermediaries. For example, in Argentina, indigenous and non-native communities fighting lithium mines face kidnapping, torture, and sexual assault at the hands of Argentine police forces. This includes the lithium extraction project developed by Lithium Argentina (a corporation which was until recently part of Lithium Americas, until they split to allow greater access to government subsidies).

Similar violent, repressive techniques are being applied in Nevada, on Paiute-Shoshone land at Thacker Pass. This week, the chairman of the Fort McDermitt Tribe (which took money from the mining company against community wishes) physically attacked and choked a member of his tribe — an 18-year-old boy — who attempted to film his meeting with Lithium Americas employees Tim Crowley (VP of Government and External Affairs) and Maria Anderson (Community Relations Director).

I believe this is the second time this Chairman has physically attacked a mine opponent. The other incident was captured by the New York Times (the photo is inaccurately labeled as Tildon Smart).

Mining companies use divide-and-conquer strategies to split communities apart and weaponize them against each other. Another way companies shut down dissenters is lawsuits. Four indigenous activists and three allies (including me) are being sued by Lithium Americas for our work to #ProtectThackerPass, a sacred and biodiverse place now being bulldozed for mining. We face the possibility of massive financial penalties.

The ethnocentric racism of Lithium Americas corporation and others like them claims that their vision of economic and technological development is the solution to the world’s problems. These companies believe that wildlife habitat, water, and the sacred places of traditional indigenous communities are less important than profits and the development of electric cars. And their vision of “progress” leads to mad hypocrisies; “Mining is inherently unsustainable,” says Thomas Benson, Vice President of Global Exploration at Lithium Americas — before he goes back to his well-paid job in mining.

Ethnocentric racism leads to Lithium Americas stock boosters saying things like this: “No natives equals few water issues. Natives can be a royal pain to deal with. Lithium Americas has had its fair share of native issues for its South American mine (and the same can be said for Thacker Pass in Nevada) but these are to be expected. Still, not having any natives is a welcome bonus.”

This is the language of colonization and genocide.

Ethnocentric racism leads Thacker Pass supporters to disparage Native American resistance to the destruction of Peehee Mu’huh, a ceremonial site where Paiute ancestors were massacred, as “horses” in response to a ceremonial prayer horse ride, as shown here on social media:

There is a circular relationship between economics and oppression.

In his book Capitalism and Slavery, Trinidadian historian Dr. Eric Williams writes that “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Williams argues (as have others) that racism developed as an ideology to justify subjugation that was already in progress for economic reasons. In other words, exploitation for economic growth or power came first, and racism developed later, as a moral system to justify the exploitation.

The economic drivers behind Thacker Pass are titanic. According to the International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook report in 2021, “If the world gets on track for net zero emissions by 2050, then the cumulative market opportunity for manufacturers of wind turbines, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells amounts to USD 27 trillion. These five elements alone in 2050 would be larger than today’s oil industry and its associated revenues.” (emphases added).

As Stan Cox has written:

Globally, mining and processing of metallic ores has doubled just since 2000 and is responsible for a whopping 10 percent of total world energy consumption. Now, if plans to “electrify everything” are carried out worldwide, the tonnage of metal extracted and processed in the next 15 years alone will exceed the tonnage that humans have produced during the 5,000 years since the start of the Bronze Age.

The Washington Post, citing International Energy Agency figures, predicts that by 2040, global demand for metals that go into batteries will balloon 20-fold for nickel and cobalt and 40-fold for lithium; demand for manganese, critical for wind turbines, will increase ninefold in just the next decade. Demand for aluminum, which is already produced in vastly larger quantities than any of those metals, will increase by yet another 40 percent, largely to produce lighter-weight electric cars and support solar arrays.

Forbes estimates that almost 400 new mines will be opened worldwide by 2035 just to keep battery factories supplied with cobalt, lithium, and nickel. This will create many more of what have come to be known as “green sacrifice zones”: localities across the world, from Congo to Guinea to China to Bolivia to the Pacific Ocean, that are bearing or will bear the human, environmental, and socioeconomic costs of the transition to non-fossil energy. And the deployment of wind and solar power plants across the world’s windier and sunnier regions will mean converting vast stretches of the Earth’s land surface and even seabeds into industrial energy farms.

Derrick Jensen builds on the insights of Dr. Williams. He writes: “hatred felt long enough and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are.” The hatred required to build 400 new mines and call it “progress” is enormous.

The result of this hatred is the profoundly dispassionate, scientific racism that animates corporations like Lithium Americas. It doesn’t look like the racism of the Klu Klux Klan, or the environmental injustice of Flint, Michigan. But it’s far more mainstream; sequential Republican and Democratic administrations have backed Lithium Americas, defending the project in Federal Court against tribes and environmental groups.

And they are not only defending a mine; they are defending the process of assimilation. They are defending the conquest of an Earth-centered worldview by a profit-centered one.

This is the continuation of an ongoing process. In the spring and summer of 1865, as the Snake War raged throughout Nevada between United States government and the Paiute and Shoshone, the highest military officer in the State wrote that Indians had “prevented the settlers along the Humboldt from putting in their crops, retarded the settlement of the rich agricultural lands of that section, [and] prevented the development of the rich mineral resources of the whole northern portion of our state…”

Mining vs. indigenous people and the land has been a recurring theme in Nevada for more than 158 years, from the Snake War to the Dann Sisters and Mount Tenabo to Thacker Pass.

***

Today, three years after I first set up camp at Thacker Pass, I remember Grandmother Sagebrush, an ancient shrub under whose branches I first dreamed about protecting Thacker Pass from an open pit lithium mine.

In my mind, I walk north from the protest camp we established on January 15th, 2021, towards the fenceline where Grandmother Sagebrush grows. The clouds fade from red to orange to purple, then green and a dark blue. Coyotes howl from the far mountain, echoing in the still air.

In my mind, I approach Grandmother Sagebrush, and something cracks inside me. I stumble onto my hands and knees and burst into tears. The grief pours out, my blessing to the land. Like many grandmothers, she has power over tears.

I do not know if she is alive or dead at this moment. If I visit the land, I can be charged with a felony.

I spend my days researching what is being done to the planet —the mining, the fracking, the clearcuts, the species disappearing one after another. A hundred today. A hundred yesterday. A hundred the day before. And, I try to throw myself on the gears of the machine, to slow it down, grind it to a halt, tear it apart.

Every day this work tears my soul apart and stitches it back together again. But the alternative is dissociation — a normal state of being inside our dysfunctional culture, and a state which is fundamental to “othering” and committing violence against other people, and against the land.

***

I recall another walk on the mountainside at Thacker Pass. On that day, I am not alone; a writer joins me. She asks questions, but not the normal ones. She is more interested in me than in lithium.

She asks, “Why don’t you give up? Why don’t you go home and sit on your couch and complain, like most people do? Why are you here?”

“Because I’m in love,” I told her. “I am in love with the land. And you don’t give up when you’re in love.”

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as we consider the perils of greenwashing and Bright Green Lies, I want to share this quote. Originally meant as a commentary on capitalism, militarism, and the moral decline of the United States, it is just as cautionary when we consider the project of eco-modernism.

“We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”