Transcript: KYLE WHYTE on the Colonial Genesis of Climate Change /295
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Welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Kyle Whyte.
Dr. Kyle Whyte: It's not about saving something about today, but it's actually about grappling with the fact that the current landscape we live in, that our ancestors would have understood that as a dystopian time at the same level of extremity that you see in many Hollywood movies.
Ayana Young: Kyle is Professor and Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. His research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the Anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Well Kyle, welcome to For The Wild Podcast.
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Great, and thanks for having me, Ayana, I'm a fan of the podcast and all the work that you all are doing at the intersection of conservation, justice, and the arts.
Ayana Young: I was first introduced to your work through your essay “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and US Settler Colonialism” and I think to begin our conversation today, it would be helpful for listeners if we started by discussing the connection between settler colonialism and environmental injustice. How does the undermining of ecological conditions act as a strategic tool in the violent project of settler colonialism and how can we contextualize the energy networks of today, not merely as a part of the global market, but as a present manifestation of settler colonialism?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Settler colonialism, for me, is something that for many, many decades, the or at least some of the different parts of the environmental movement didn't really take on. And one thing that I noticed when the Indigenous struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, was getting media attention, that so many non- Indigenous persons were just focusing on the pipeline itself as sort of an isolated, individualized problem that Indigenous peoples, that Indigenous community was facing. And activists, scholars who are Dakota or Lakota, who are from those communities, I saw them really pushing back and saying, “Wait a minute, it's not just that the land has been fine for decades and decades, and now there's this pipeline”. Instead, the United States has been actively transforming, terraforming, changing the land to suit the US's energy needs, the US’s water needs, and that the ancestors of people who are now members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe would probably have not even recognized the land today. I mean, they would have recognized certain aspects of it. But it's been completely changed. And for someone to say that the only issue is the pipeline, would be to ignore decades of Indigenous environmentalism that's attempted to stop the dispossession of their lands, the transformation of their lands into industrial agriculture, the massive damage that occurred. So scholars like Nick Estes, for example, in his new book, Our History is the Future do a very good job documenting the history of that Indigenous environmentalism. And so when people forget about settler colonialism, they tend to isolate our environmental issues as just one-off items and forget that we're in a much longer and deeper struggle than that.
Ayana Young: The so-called United States harbors 2.4 million miles of pipelines, more than any other country in the world. But I don’t think many of us visualize the Great Lakes region as being a prominent part of this expanding pipeline network. As an introduction to Indigenous-led movements to protect this region from pipeline disasters, can you speak to the Lakehead System, which is owned and operated by Enbridge Energy Partners, & why, for somewhat obvious reasons, this system is located in one of the worst possible areas?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: You know, linking your previous question to the current question, one thing that I think is rather eye-opening for a lot of people, if they haven't thought about it before is when you see those maps of oil and gas pipelines, maps of energy infrastructure, across North America. And it really gets one to two thinking about just how deep of a transformation has occurred in the land. Since the, you know, the generations that our ancestors were among the primary stewards of the land as well as a number of non-human stewards as well. And so when you see how extensive it is, underneath the ground, underneath water, above ground above water, too, and all the different transportation networks, in addition to the pipeline's themselves, it really is like being in a science fiction narrative, where, you know, we're in the apocalyptic time, we're in the dystopian time and a dominating society has completely transformed the environment underground, above ground in the air. And that we're trying to find ways to get out of that matrix of power into a future that's going to be better for us and for the generations to come. And so in the Great Lakes region, for example, we're dealing with a number of pipeline-related issues and energy infrastructure issues.
I remember when I first moved to Michigan, about 10 years ago, one of the issues we were dealing with at the time, was that some of the byproducts of the tar sands were being dumped in Detroit, in areas that would likely affect predominantly People of color or communities, and the idea that Detroit was plugged into this global energy network centered around the tar sands, very much cemented in people's minds, the depth of the energy infrastructure, and how connected it all was. And so when you mentioned that, the Lakehead System, you know, for me, I've been very focused on doing what I can to support several issues that are related to that, you know, so one is we have the Enbridge line five pipeline, which is an old old pipeline, and it's one of the only ones that actually crosses the different lakes. And it's not been updated. It's not a safe pipeline. It affects waters that are not only significant for Native people but are significant for all people of the Great Lakes and for all non-humans in the Great Lakes region. But Enbridge, the state, not only are they not effectively addressing those safety issues, but they're not addressing the larger issue that we can't just clean up or rebuild energy infrastructure that is based on energy systems that we shouldn't even be investing in anymore.
And so recently in the state of Michigan, we've benefited from having an attorney general Dana Nessel, who's actually engaged in a lawsuit against Enbridge, and Indigenous activists and advocates like Andrea Pierce have done tremendous work as part of some of these Indigenous-led activities like the annual flotilla that occurs, which attempts to present an alternative way of thinking about our relationship to water. But in thinking about the Lakehead System and thinking about Line 5, thinking about Line 3, which goes through Minnesota, as well as a number of other pipeline issues, it's quite horrifying that for years, this energy infrastructure was placed in the areas that it is placed in. And people weren't taking it seriously until just recently.
Ayana Young: Yeah, it's insane to think about the Great Lakes and collectively they're the largest available source of surface water on the planet. They contain 21% of the world's fresh water supply and 84% of the freshwater in North America. So yeah, it's just insanity. And as I understand it, Line 5, one of the most notorious pipelines, is again gaining attention. Built in 1953, Line 5 is now 16 years past its 50-year expiration date, meaning it is in a severely neglected condition with parts of it being corroded, missing protective coating, and operating overcapacity. In response, Enbridge has proposed a solution to maintaining the pipeline, but many communities are calling for its decommission...Can you speak to the importance of decommission? What are the far-reaching implications for the rest of the Enbridge system if protectors are able to decommission Line 5?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: The way that I try to approach these issues with a lot of my colleagues who lived here in the region does go back to some of the great questions you were asking earlier about settler colonialism. You know, one thing about settler colonialism is when you have a dominant society, or more than one dominant society that's attempting to lay claim to an area of land, what they're trying to do is not just to take the resources from the land and ship it somewhere else, but they're actually trying to do is create the illusion that they are the rightful stewards of that land, that they're the rightful protectors of the land, that they're the rightful and sovereign people of that land. And what concerns me is that you know, Indigenous people in the Great Lakes, we have Treaty Rights and, and Treaty Rights are more than just legal protections. They actually speak to Indigenous peoples environmentalism, to the different ways in which our communities, for generations have passed on lessons about what it means to live ethically, with the land and to live in a world where we respect nonhumans, whether fishes or insects or rivers or bodies of water, as their own agents as their own spiritual beings as having their own personalities and their own special ways of living.
And people in Michigan, including Indigenous people, never chose in the past for that pipeline to be there. We didn't choose the regulatory mismanagement of the pipeline, which I appreciate your reading some of those facts about the pipeline. And we also didn't choose to be invested in the type of energy associated with the pipeline. You know, Indigenous people have never benefited from the emergence of the fossil fuel industry, we were displaced to make way for fossil fuel extraction. We haven't benefited from any of the employment opportunities associated with fossil fuels, except for in the case of certain individuals at different points in time. And we certainly are now among the populations facing some of the most dramatic effects of climate change, which is a product of the predominance of the fossil fuel industry. And so decommission is not just about the regulatory issue, the policy issue, but it's about people in the Great Lakes, including Indigenous people, people of color, actually being able to choose actually being able to be stewards and protectors of the land. And it's not Enbridge’s choice about what they choose to do. It's everybody's choice. And the choices of Indigenous people and people of color matter greatly, because these are our homelands too, and some of us have roots in these lands that are much much deeper than the people from Enbridge and for our views to be neglected and for our conception of what it means to have a just an ethical energy future is a tremendous problem.
Ayana Young: So around 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids move through Line 5 every day. On the stretch of Line 5 that includes the Bad River Reservation, Enbridge identified 844 anomalies, referring to cracks or features resembling cracks in 2011. And according to data acquired by the National Wildlife Federation in 2017, they also found that Line 5 itself has leaked at least 29 times since 1968, spilling more than a million total gallons of oil. So yeah, this is a huge issue. And I'm glad that it's picking up steam and people's engagement and it has recently been revealed as well that Enbridge’s private security contractor, Merrills Investigations, has been surveilling water protectors located on the Straits of Mackinac. This comes as no surprise given that we see a wave of legislation criminalizing protectors in the aftermath of Standing Rock...But that being said, can you speak to the ongoing surveillance of, essentially community members who are merely seeking oversight of polluters?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Yeah, I've been especially disturbed to see this transition in the energy industry toward what I think they would call public participation or democratic engagement. You know, I think for people that don't work directly on the ground on these issues, they oftentimes are not aware of the different things that the energy industry is doing. You know, for example, in the case of Standing Rock, and almost any other energy-related issue, I can think of the companies actually directly seek public support through advertisements through local meetings. And they in some ways, see themselves as attempting to play the role as a government. But in my experience, whether it's as an advocate or as a conflict mediator, or researcher, you know, what I find is that their motivations for doing so is barely to quell any opposition to what their plans are, they're not actually acting in good faith where good faith means that in their interactions with other people, with the public, with Indigenous people, that there is a chance that they might not go along with their original plans.
Now, what you're speaking to is something that people are now becoming even more aware of, which is that at the same time, that a lot of these companies were claiming that they were rolling out a more democratic approach, they were also continuing to invest in surveillance tactics in ways that would provide them a legal advantage, or a capacity to threaten just people who are trying to protect the water. So for example, in the Great Lakes region, we've been very inspired by the model of water stewardship that Josephine Mandamin gifted to us with the Mother of Water walk, and that started as a movement tied to Anishinaabe women and their historic relationship to water, but it's inclusive of people of all genders in all walks of life.
But that model of environmental stewardship in which people are supposed to see water as a relative and are supposed to walk along the water, and see that relationship ceremonially, and to practice it as part of their life way, even when they're not near the water. People that are just engaging in acts of ceremony are being surveilled in ways that a company could then attempt to use legally as a threat to them. And what is important to think about with regard to settler colonialism is that it's always been part of settler colonialism to outlaw our ceremonies. And this is actually another form of attempting to punish people for engaging in ceremony, and Indigenous people, of course, and this came out through the water protectors at Standing Rock that they didn't want to be seen as doing, you know, direct action, they wanted to be seen as engaging in ceremony. But again, right, the settler population was trying to find ways for ceremony to be outlawed, to be regulated, to be controlled. And it's not just Indigenous people. There are other groups as well that see their connection to the environment, ceremonially, whether it's historic ceremonies, whether its ceremonies have been more recently developed by different communities. But the point being is that these companies are, on one level, saying that they're being democratic, but another level, if they're really being democratic, why are they investing in all of this secretive surveillance, that is just doing things that the fossil fuel and other extractive industries have been doing for generations?
Ayana Young Yeah. This part of the conversation makes me think back to a conversation I had with Mariame Kaba, she discussed the importance of reframing our understanding of violence and crime to include those who steer powerful corporations. And it's just interesting because these people are permanently poisoning communities and environments. And it just feels important to mention that, while private contractors are looking for any sort of evidence or information to incriminate protectors, the CEO of Enbridge received a $2 million raise in the aftermath of the 2001 oil spill, which is considered one of the worst in-land spills in the country. So again, just seeing who is punished for what. It's really disturbing how “justice” is played out in this culture, this dominant culture. But I also want to talk about the Great Lakes region in terms of the mining industry. So could you share more about the history of mining interests and the current struggles, whether in terms of the operations of the Canadian mining firm, Aquila Resources, or the proposed Back Forty Mine?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Yeah, absolutely. Some people today, you know, if you're not living in this region, or even if you are living in this region, there is a kind of forgetfulness of the history here. Not only the Indigenous history but what came immediately afterward. So for example, in Michigan, you know, going back over 100 years, you know, Michigan has been a leading economic producer in the industrial sense in a number of different industries, whether agriculture, mining, the automobile industry, so if you name an extractive industry, including tourism, Michigan has had an era where it was one of the leaders in the United States. And that's had a huge and dramatic impact on the land here.
And so areas like what's currently called the Upper Peninsula, historically, and still through today is a major area for mining. And while I would have hoped that there'd be a greater appreciation for the impact of mining on the communities, whose lands are affected by mining, we still see companies today that are pushing and like you mentioned, often transnational companies that are pushing to establish mines in areas that it's clearly not right to put land there. So the Back Forty Mine is something that I know and I've supported a lot of Menominee people who are greatly affected by that mine. So the Menominee Nation, and I've had about a 10-year relationship working with the Sustainable Development Institute out the College of Menominee Nation, right, I frequently visit the community there for my work, they have land in their ancestral area that goes well into what's currently called Michigan, and the Back Forty Mine is a mine in Michigan, that actually, you know, it's a sulfide mine, that will affect land that's part of the Menominee origin story, its land that is at the core of Menominee culture. It's land that if it's affected, it affects the Menominee people’s very memories as a people and a community. And what I don't understand is that, in cases where you'd see an equivalent effect to say, a Christian community, a white Christian community, would there be as much resistance as the mining company has posed to the claim that this is deeply unjust and unfair and inappropriate? And so in this way, we're in this settler colonial landscape, where even the most powerful of cultural, religious, and social arguments still means nothing to some of these companies, who nonetheless just see it as a cost of doing business to create mechanisms, including some of the surveillance that you referred to before, to lessen the legal and social and media impact of our resistance to these industries.
Ayana Young: Now, I’d like to transition to discussing some of your writing on dystopias & fantasies as it relates to the environmental movement. In your article “White Allies, Let’s Be Honest About Decolonization” you write: “Decolonizing allyship requires allies to be critical about their environmental realities—and about the purpose of their environmentalism. To do this, allies must realize they are living in the environmental fantasies of their settler ancestors. Settler ancestors wanted today’s world. They would have relished the possibility that some of their descendants could freely commit extractive violence on Indigenous lands and then feel, with no doubts, that they are ethical people…” Initially what comes to mind is the sort of visible colonial fantasy represented by vast pipeline networks, oil fields, open-pit mines, and clearcut landscapes...But, I’d really like to focus on the topic of dystopia as it relates to the very harmful trajectory dominant culture seems to be on when it comes to addressing climate change. Can you speak to the ways in which our greenwashed pursuit of climate justice will continue Indigenous dystopias?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Yeah, thanks for that important question and I'm glad that some of my work has been, you know, supportive of the work that you're doing. The thing that struck me and I can't remember exactly when, but when I started really thinking about how many environmentalist positions or campaigns or points were about saving something. And so I thought about that I thought, well, what's being saved. And if there's something about today that's being saved, and if we compare it to points that you raised earlier about the extensiveness of the pipeline network, but also combining that with the idea that lands that are unaffected by pollution are also lands that Indigenous people largely do not have the right in the eyes of others to live and steward those lands in ways that their ancestors had from generations. You know, to me, that doesn't sound like something that is worth saving. And so when I thought about this idea of what is worth saving about today, I realized that actually, at least with respect to the Indigenous folks that I've worked with, and learned from that it's not about saving something about today, but it's actually about grappling with the fact that the current landscape we live in that our ancestors would have understood that as a dystopian time at the same level of extremity that you see in many Hollywood movies.
And recently, this thought has taken me in some directions that I'm not sure that I'm even that comfortable with because part of greenwashing, part of greenwashing is the idea that somebody from a privileged background, whose ancestors did tremendous harm, and somebody whose own education and own capacity as a scientist, or as a leader, or as a media person, is based on having been raised with the advantages that come from the fossil fuel economy, coming from the fossil fuel energy sources, right? That was the basis of how one developed one skill set was through technologies and infrastructures that were created by that industry, right. And that those people would like to become the heroes that they want to have every bad thing that they may be associated with in the past, but at the same time, in a single generation, they also want to be known as the heroes as the ones that saved the environment. And that notion of heroism, to me, is very offensive. Because why would they get to be the heroes? Why do they expect to be the heroes? And do they really think that the way that things are going that within a generation, there's anything heroic that anybody could do?
And so so if my recent writings, what I've been thinking a lot about is that there's an obsession with what I think a lot of people call an ecological tipping point, that we are on the verge or have already passed an ecological tipping point of which there's no going back. But what people don't talk about is the relationship tipping point, the tipping point about whether, globally and locally, people relate to each other in ways that as we move toward greener technologies, that people will be able to work together in ways that are ethical, and just. In a recent article that I published in the WIREs Climate Change journal, I pointed out that if we look at the current literature on sustainable technologies, whether it's wind power, well, I wouldn't want to call it sustainable, but you know, hydro-power, whether it's solar, the emerging literature, and very credible literature shows that when these technologies proliferate, even if they might be associated with the lowering of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it's still Indigenous people, it's still people of color, it's still people impacted by poverty, it's still people impacted by other forms of domination that are not winning.
So, for example, most attempts to reform the energy system do not make it possible for tribes or neighborhoods of color to be central to those new energy networks. In fact, we're often excluded from them. And so to me, this suggests that there's a relational tipping point, a state of relationships among people that was passed a long time ago through colonialism and capitalism. And it's made it so that greenwashing is not only a false promise, but it's one that even if the best green technologies are implemented, it could just be as bad for many of our communities as the previous system.
Ayana Young: I think that savior mentality also leads to the eraser of so many people and histories. And also, I think, more realistic solutions if we're going to talk about the word solution, which I don't even like. But I think that the savior mentality of big green really wipes out solutions that people have known about for 1000s of years that aren't implemented because they're not, maybe they're not able to make the same kind of money, because they're not about the industry, and they're not about creating big companies that will then be bought and sold on the marketplace. So I'm really happy we spoke about this because it's something that's on my mind a lot. And yeah, and you know, of course, there's also the examples of REDD and the World Bank programs and the UN, and, and you know, and that's connected definitely to this renewable energy monster, that I kind of see it. None of them are really supporting people. But I think it's dangerous because it gives the image as if things are getting done in some type of regenerative way. But they’re not.
Dr. Kyle Whyte: If you don't mind, I did want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which I take very seriously, you know, in some of my recent experiences, working with tribal communities that are trying to figure out how to deal with governments with corporations, there is a tremendous issue right now, I think, for young environmental professionals and young activists that I now see almost every day. For many people in their 20s and 30s, when they went to college, they were actually taught that environmentalism has to be democratic, they were taught the ideas that public involvement and public participation are critical to a successful environmental program, or campaign, or green technology development. But that's given the illusion that if you just create the activities, the democratic activities, then that by itself, will somehow stop domination, that that will heal distrust, that that will heal decades of a lack of consent that Indigenous and communities of color have faced, that itself will provide the solution which will then enable the person who enacts those types of activities, those democratic activities, the hero or the changer or the transformer. But what I think a lot of younger people are going to have to grapple with and come to terms with is when they do engage in those activities, it doesn't solve distrust, it doesn't change the landscape of power. And instead, there has to be a different model in which people invest in the relationship building that it will take to build trust, consent, reciprocity. But the problem with that is that those relationships, they don't establish themselves quickly, for me to build trust with somebody else. If we work at it, even if we work at it quickly, it won't get done in a year. It might even be a project over the course of a lifetime. But as we watch dangerous climate change exacerbate, we have to change our conception of what it means to be an environmentalist. Maybe that ecological crisis is not the best way to frame or to motivate the actions we're taking. Maybe it's best to go into some of these traditions that were excluded from our education, that focus on the importance of consent and trust and reciprocity, as the basis for how not only relate to the environment but how we relate to each other.
Ayana Young: Yeah, I just keep thinking maybe I'm thinking about the route of why people are not willing to slow down in order to - well, maybe it's like I said, maybe it's a thing of fear, maybe it also seems less controllable. Like, if you were to have a company and you built a thing and you get it funded, you could just do it, where to build trust and consent, the savior, let's just say the environmental savior, they're not the ones in control, they're not the ones in power. And I think just even questioning that in the savior mentality is really challenging because the savior mentality is about ego and control, and not really having to wait around for somebody to consent to what they think they should do. So yeah, that's a very deep question, deep analysis. And I think it's something that I'll probably be thinking about for my whole life and asking people questions about the entire life of the podcast, because it, it's so I think, at the core of our issues and the way that we relate to climate catastrophe. And this kind of relates to this next question, I want to ask you, when I was preparing for this conversation, I came across an article you co-authored titled “Invasive Species, Indigenous Stewards, and Vulnerability Discourse,” which explores Indigenous stewardship in relationship to invasive species, which as is pointed out in the article, is rarely discussed in scientific or environmental circles...I’m hoping you can speak to this topic a little bit more, both in terms of what it means for Indigenous agency in environmental research & how it works towards addressing the larger issue of the pervasiveness of vulnerability narratives in the environmental realm? And What does this negation of vulnerability mean in terms of policy?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: I'm definitely going to quote you some of the good points you were making about the relationship between urgency, and I guess what you could call saviorism, or heroic intentions, and how that relates to also an assumption of a capacity to control. And I think, especially the way that you said it, you know, philosophically relates to this, this issue of vulnerability that I deal with in a lot of my work, especially when I worked specifically with tribes on their climate change planning efforts.
So the topic of invasive species is an extremely challenging one. Scholars like Megan Bang, and some of her co-authors have done really important work on trying to sort of decolonize this term, invasive species. Because on the one hand, when a new species, a new plant, animal, insect, fish comes into your land, that presents all sorts of challenges, right? But the model has been to look at the actual plants and animals themselves and on humans themselves as what's invasive, instead of recognizing that actually, those particular beings are responding to what is truly the invasive species, which is the human industrial culture, or, you know, settler colonialism and capitalism.
And so in Megan Bang’s work, but then we're also seen work by scholars, Anne Spice on invasive infrastructures, and beginning to make that change and saying, “Wait a minute, why is it that it's the fish that are invasive and not the pipelines? Or the dams?” Because if you no matter how you look at it, why would one be invasive? And the other not? It makes no sense, right?
So the second thing is this is tied to a couple of different ways that vulnerability is used problematically. And so, you know, on the one hand, even among privileged societies, when they talk about invasive species that affect their recreational culture, their industrial culture, they imagine themselves as vulnerable to something from the non-human world, which to me is completely ridiculous, given it's their own actions that are engendering the environmental issues that they're concerned about. But in terms of Indigenous people and people of color, when climate change, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, right, became more and more of a topic that people were looking at in terms of the issue, that not everybody's going to be affected in the same way, the original model that many white and privileged people created for how to understand any equality was the idea that you have vulnerable communities, so Indigenous people are vulnerable. Why are they vulnerable? Well they live lives closely connected to the land was one of the common explanations for that, right? They live off of natural resources, and hence they're more vulnerable than people in other societies. And when you look at an example like that, it is just rife with so many problems, you know, so only Indigenous people live off of the land, right? Nobody else lives off the land? Isn't it everybody that lives off the land? That Indigenous people only are people that live in very rural areas and are not people that are everywhere, in fact, in some places more predominantly in cities, and that Indigenous people are primarily reactive, which excluded generations of Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous adaptation and capacity, as well as solutions that Indigenous people are engaging in today to deal with, with climate change, it completely erased that. And so for example, if you look at a lot of the climate science literature, if you're an activist, if you're an anti-fossil fuel person, I think you'd be really surprised by what you see because you'd see some of the same communities that you know, have been out front opposing energy infrastructure and proposing alternatives, referred to in the scientific literature, as just people that are worried about declines in salmon, and all of those actions that they're taking to make change are not talked about. It's completely separated out.
You know if science is primarily understanding Indigenous people in that way, and in one of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reports, the 1.5-degree report, I think, if you look at where Indigenous people are referred to, they're oftentimes referred to just in terms of regions that are at risk, or they're referred to themselves as just a vulnerability with no further elaboration on their culture, their history and their current activism.
Ayana Young: I do want to transition towards a conversation on Indigenous climate justice, & perhaps we can discuss this in context to the framing of climate change as both a rapid assault & an “episode of colonialism” - two ideas I have come across in your work. Ultimately, how is Indigenous climate justice the only long-term climate justice?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: I think it goes back to something I mentioned earlier about your work relating to, you know, conservation, justice, the arts, and how we imagine ourselves how we create expressions that can begin to create an alternative to the mainstream way in which industrialization is privileged. And environmentalism remains naive and remains participatory and systems of power that it claims to resist.
So one of the big myths is that climate change as an issue is a new thing for humans to grapple with. And by new thing, I mean, something that humans explicitly grapple with, in fact, in most educational systems in a country like the United States, climate science itself is seen as a fairly new science, one that has some origins in the 19th century, but really gets put together as a field, you know, in the 20th century, and has built a lot of steam in the 21st century. And when people say things like that, they ignore the fact that for a lot of cultures, including Indigenous ones, our oldest sciences were about understanding our relationship to the climate system, and its relationships, to weather, to ecosystems, to habitats. And so, historically, if you look at many North American Indigenous peoples, say Anishinaabe, a people of which Pottawatomie are a part of, you know, our sciences are based on the idea that we need to have a good understanding of what it means to be a people who can respond to a constantly changing environment, an environment that changes over the long term, in terms of climate and environment that changes each year through seasons, but also that human relations with each other and human relationships with plants, or animals, or fishes, or insects depending on how those relationships play out can also make changes that we have to prepare for and understand. So I would argue at a highly speculative level that for many cultures, probably the majority of human people, that climate science is the oldest science actually. And that if somebody were to take a class on you know the history of science or even a class on political philosophy, that the original philosophies dealing with science or politics were ones that had to do with how humans live in relation to a constantly changing environment.
So with that in mind, Indigenous people have tracked, through generations, how their interactions with other societies have affected the climate system. So in some of my writing I've looked at testimonies from times when people like in the 19th century were talking about treaty relationships and they were saying things like the problem with settlement is that it deforested, it wiped out the game, it wiped out the fish, and we're arguing, if we were to use today's language, that the treaty was a way for them to have a relationship with the dominant society that would make it possible to continue certain livelihoods that they'd been dependent on for generations in a world that was very much changing, that the weather system, the climate system, the landscape was being changed by colonialism. So for that reason human-caused climate change was absolutely a part of colonialism in the 19th and 18th centuries, when you deforest the landscape, you change the soil, you change the temperature, you change everything, it's absolute terraforming of land.
If you look at how Indigenous people have often understood this that colonialism itself can be understood as a form of power that inflicts environmental change on other people, and some of that is climatic, similar to how deforestation or similar to how the development of industrial agriculture or the changing of hydrological systems, how that has a dramatic effect - it's not just an effect on weather, it's an effect on climate too. Now the last thing I want to mention is that that's just looking at one type of change, the other part of it is that deforestation, industrialization inflicts immediate climate change but we now know that it puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which then generate changes of their own.
So colonialism is like a double whammy, especially industrial versions of colonialism; it inflicts environmental change, dangerous environmental change, on colonized people in order to set up an economy that generations down the road will be extremely disruptive to the climate system at a global scale. So for somebody to argue that colonialism and climate change are somehow detached, they would be wrong in fact you have to talk about them together. I can talk about colonialism while only talking about climate change, I could talk about climate change while only talking about colonialism that's how interchangeable there
Ayana Young: So for my last question, I’d like to again revisit your essay “White Allies, Let’s Be Honest About Decolonization” specifically the following passage: “I want to experience the solidarity of allied actions that refuse fantastical narratives of commonality and hope. Determining what exactly needs to be done will involve the kind of creativity that Indigenous peoples have used to survive some of the most oppressive forms of capitalist, industrial, and colonial domination. But above all, it will require that allies take responsibility and confront the assumptions behind their actions and aspirations.” And perhaps I could ask you to expand on the importance of refuting commonality and hope in this context?
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Absolutely. So hope I think is one of those assumptions that have, in a lot of ways, has gone out of control. I hear people a lot of times using hope in a way that actually I don't understand what they mean by it. For example, we'll talk about Indigenous people who are facing extreme forms of domination and say, “Well, when I look at these people's situation, I see an example of hope.” And I've never understood what that really means. Because hope in a lot of contexts, right, especially where it's privileged people talking about the importance of hope if they're telling me that I am right for, for hoping, that just sounds like they're trying to say that I should hope for a future that we should already know is not going to happen, which again, is a way to quiet the direct actions that I could take to make change. It's a way for me to lessen my motivation to do things that are truly transformational because I have hope. And I actually think that the entire idea of hope should be completely removed from environmentalism, environmental discourse. I think it has no place or no role.
Instead, and I think a lot about my own ancestors, I think a lot about the ancestors of other people who they've shared with me stories about, a lot of these particular individuals are ones that they were about the business, they confronted power directly, they didn't need hope. They recognized that the way in which formations of power were constructed was so stacked against them. That to engage in something that was driven like hope would not have been effective. And instead, what you see are, and this is what I hope arises, and future ally ship relationships, instead, realizing that what we have together is the potential to build coalitions that are based on strong standards of consent, and trust, and reciprocity, and transparency. And if we focus directly, even if it seems to be daunting, given the power that we face, we focus directly on building those relationships on creating the basis for example, for genuine consensuality. What does genuine consensuality actually mean, and what does it take to achieve? That itself is a project much more powerful than hope, I don't hope for a better climate future. Instead, I'm adamant that I will do whatever I can to build consensuality, to build trust, to build reciprocity with other people, I don't need an illusion of a carrot at the end of that, to be devoted in that way. I don't need to hold out that there might be something better, when there's no reason for me to think that there would be in the absence of genuine trust, consensuality, reciprocity, and other qualities.
And so in that way, when you say we are just focused on something like consent building, which means grappling with the idea that a lot of our relationships are one in which it's very hard to establish direct consent, we have to grapple with, especially with nonhumans. We don't know what they consent to. And sometimes they do things to us that we would not consent to. It's challenging. But if we are focused directly on building out those qualities, then it completely removes the temptation to be a hero. And we can actually accept that maybe my role is not that different from generations of anti-colonialists, some of whom we remember some of whom we don't. But they knew that they were doing what had to be done. And the fact that some of us some of our communities are still around today is based on their work, whether we remember them directly, or we remember them indirectly because we know they must have existed and we know they must have been part of that work.
Ayana Young: Wow, I'm really with you. I love what you're saying about consent, rather than hope. It's about consent, reciprocity, relationship building and I think about how many times consent has been, not only broken but never even attempted for in the first place. And I think also about transparency. And I think why don't people want to try for consent or transparency and it goes back to the savior mentality, it goes back to me for control. It goes back to the urgency thing, if you just want your thing done, if you want your project done, if you want to feel like you're doing something, you don't want to have to wait for somebody to consent. And you sure as hell don't want to tell them all the transparent issues that may arise in this project of whatever you're doing. Because then people may object and you don't want objections. If you just want to steamroll, bulldoze through and do what you want to do as the savior.
And I do think that a lot of the oil and gas companies think they are saviors in their own way. I think they think that they're supplying the world with technology and modernity and comfort and energy. And we all need energy, so I actually think they kind of fit into the savior mentality in their own way. But what if resource extraction projects or even environmental projects, if they were transparent from the beginning, it's true that people may not consent. But what happens when people don't consent, then it takes longer to make decisions. And I think we have to be okay with that. And I almost think almost all the time, at this point, we have to really take a lot longer to actually come to a decision before we start to do physical changes to the land, whether it's restorative or not. That slowing down that transparency, and consent building, and trust-building, and relationship building are so important, because we would not rush into these decisions that we've made as a culture that have really been detrimental.
So I'm so with you. It's a slowing. And it's steady, it's more steady to me when we're able to build that consent. And I think it also really makes us have to shift our ideas of success. Because, okay, again, if you're in the savior mentality, and you have a project that you think is going to be good for somebody, you just want to done, and you want to show the outcomes, and you want the data on the graphs and the numbers and to show how well you did. But again, if you go the other direction, words, relationship, consent, transparency, and all these other things we've talked about, I think one really has to get out of that colonial mindset of what success is and what measurables are, and realize like what you're saying, there are folks that have been busting their ass way before us. And perhaps they weren't in their ego state that they had to somehow have a measurable of what they did, they were just doing the right thing. And I think when we do these other modalities or modes of being in relationship with each other, and the Earth, it doesn't have the same type of sometimes flashy outcome that greenwashed colonial environmentalism has. And so again, it's like really going into our minds and shifting our concept of how we can feel ethical, how we can feel “successful”, and realizing that at the end of the day, the relationships we have, will really measure how well we were able to do what we were trying to do.
It's something that I've been thinking about a lot, especially because people are really scared. And people want to see changes now, because they're seeing the changes they don't want to see. And so it's hard to get through to people. And I've heard a lot too, but you know, this species is going extinct, or the water is running dry, or this or that. So we have to try something. We have to try something. It's like, well, why don't you try to deal with your consumerism? Why don't you try to get the logging to stop? We don’t have to try these greenwashed solutions. I mean, there's a lot of other things like stopping pipelines, that we absolutely no need to be taken out. Anyways, I'm totally going on a tangent now because he really got you really got me going on this. But anyways, maybe for another interview, we can dive into these topics even deeper, because I do feel like these are at the root of how we can actually bring justice to the movement space in a way that feels authentic and genuine, all of the things you mentioned. So yeah. Wow, Kyle, thank you.
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Yeah, thank you. I think that was totally well said. And I'm definitely gonna quote you because I like the way that you're describing the decision-making process, because I think you really went directly to the issue that it's a difference in how we think about time. If you say, “Well, how long is it going to take to protect the environment?” Well, it's going to take as long as it takes to establish trust, consent, reciprocity, transparency, it's not like it's going to take a year, two years, 10 years, 20 it's, that's the duration of time as measured through kinship, right through those qualities. And so people who say whether they're corporate, or environmentalist and using your own words, that we don't have to embrace the time that will take to make genuine decisions, not only are they violating ethics and justice, but similar to what I was mentioning about what I found out about, you know, energy solutions, for many of us, even if they do lower greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it won't be a better future for us. Because our communities will be flooded, our communities will be sucked for resources, again, for solar or wind, it won't be better for us, right? We won't be central to those new energy systems. And that's a reality that I hope people, and I used hope just now, but I want people to really embrace that. And thanks for your articulations of your own thoughts about that, which to me are also very powerful.
Ayana Young: Thank you, Kyle, this has been such a stimulating conversation. Thank you so much for being on For The Wild Podcast. I know that folks who are listening are probably feeling that there are ways to be engaged. And there are ways to be in integrity. And we really need to shift the way that we show up and are contributing to the movement. So this has been great. Thanks.
Dr. Kyle Whyte: Okay, great. Well, thanks for having me on. I enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to staying in touch.
Andrew Storrs: Thanks for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. I'm audio producer Andrew Storrs. The music you heard today was from Cary Morin and Bonnie Prince Billy. I’d like to thank our team, Ayana Young, Aiden McRae, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, Erica Ekrem, Carter Lou McElroy, and Melanie Younger. To learn more about today's guest, visit our website or follow the link in the detailed description of this podcast. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next week.