Ecosocialismo: Envisioning Latin America’s Green New Deal

By Ruth Santiago, Sabrina Fernandes, Julie Michelle Klinger, Thea Riofrancos, and Daniel Aldana Cohen - NACLA Report, March 26, 2021

A radical Green New Deal for the Americas calls for thinking beyond U.S. borders. This event brings together scholars and activists from across the Americas to dig into the underlying idea of a Green New Deal—injecting massive public investment into a rapid, democratic green transition—and to share lessons, insights, and proposals from their research and organizing experiences. Their conversation will tackle pressing questions around mobilizing investment in support of climate justice and the underlying principles of a Green New Deal.

About the Moderators:

Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020-2021). She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Boston Review, The Baffler, n+1, Dissent, Jacobin, among others. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and serves on the steering committee of the organization's Ecosocialist Working Group.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He is co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need A Green New Deal. His research and writing on climate politics in Brazil and the United States have appeared in Nature, The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Public Culture, The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Dissent.

About the Speakers:

Ruth Santiago is an environmental and community lawyer who lives and works in Salinas, Puerto Rico. She is the recipient of the Sierra Club;s 2018 Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award. Santiago serves on the EarthJustice Board of Trustees and co-authored "¡Ustedes tienen que limpiar las cenizas e irse de Puerto Rico para siempre!": la lucha por la justicia ambiental, climática y energética como trasfondo del verano de Revolución Boricua 2019 (Editorial Educación Emergente, 2020).

Sabrina Fernandes is an ecosocialist based in Brazil. She is the lead editor for Jacobin Brasil, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and the University of Brasilia, and she runs the radical left YouTube channel Tese Onze.

Julie Michelle Klinger, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware, where she is a council member of the Mineral, Materials, and Society Initiative. She has several academic and popular publications on rare earths and global resource geopolitics. Her recent book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press, 2018) received the Meridian Award from the American Association of Geographers for its "unusually important contribution to advancing the art and science of geography."

Co-sponsors include CLACS at NYU, Dissent Magazine, DSA Ecosocialism Working Group, the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative at UPenn & Jacobin.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.