Transcript: THEA RIOFRANCOS on Planetary Perspectives of Green Energy /250
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Thea Riofrancos.
Thea Riofrancos One of the most valiant things, or aspects of past struggles for more equality, for you know, feminist struggles, civil rights struggles, labor struggles, like the struggles that predated us, is that their participants wouldn't always be around to see the hopefully better world that their endeavors helped to create. I think that's such a kind of valiant expression of, in a way solidarity across generations.
Ayana Young Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and serves on the Steering Committee of their Ecosocialist Working Group.
Well Thea, thank you so much for joining us on For The Wild Podcast today. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Thea Riofrancos Thank you for inviting me.
Ayana Young Before we delve into the thicket of resource extraction and renewable energy, I’d like to ask you about the importance of understanding energy as a concept that is deeply connected to production and why we must ground our understanding there before we can begin to think about energy democracy or energy as a right?
Thea Riofrancos So that's a great question. We currently live under a regime of what we might call fossil capitalism, and I'm drawing on lots of other scholars and activists that have used that term. At the center of that are the two parts of that phrase, right, on the one hand, is energy that is that comes from hydrocarbons, or fossil fuels, coal, gas, and oil. On the other is capitalism, a system that is based on profit, and private property, and competition, right, among other things, the exploitation of labor, of course. And those two pieces have colluded, we might say, to create, what is the climate crisis that we're living through today. So that climate crisis is simultaneously about the underlying energy system and the sources that it draws on to power everything that we do right? Transit, turning on the light, heavy industry, our housing, everything kind of is powered by an energy system rooted in fossil fuels. And then, in addition, that whole system is structured by these imperatives that generate the forms of social inequality, economic inequality, are of course intersected with race and gender inequality, the exploitation of labor, but also we're seeing, especially clearly in this COVID moment, the deep precarity and insecurity of working people around the world. I think we can start to get the sense of how those two pieces intersect with one another, through a long history that's itself kind of rooted in colonial relationships, not only between different places on Earth, but also perhaps we could say, more deeply, in a sense between humans and nature, between some groups of humans over other groups of humans and between humans and nature, right?
So this is kind of the complex, it's an energy system, but it's also an economic system. It's also a social system. It's also just the everyday life, that that we all live. And it's that that I think we need to critique and resist and transform ultimately. The challenge of our current moment, and this is going to circle back very nicely to your question, is that we have an energy transition that is in early stages, it's more and less advanced in different places on earth and different communities on Earth, meaning a transition away from fossil fuel-based energy to energy that doesn't produce emissions, right to energy that is renewable, that's solar or wind, or in some cases, geothermal. And so we're in the midst of this global energy transition, which is meant to address the crisis of emissions and global warming, but what I think we should think about and be concerned about as activists as scholars, as environmentalists, you know, multiple types of folks, I'm sure listening to this podcast, is the way that we can have a renewable energy transition without the deeper transformations that would dismantle and undo and erect something totally different than fossil capitalism. So I think, you know, to your question, we absolutely need to think about how energy is imbricated in our everyday lives, and imbricated in the climate crisis. But I think we should also at the same time, think about how our energy system is structured by forces, like capitalism, like racism, like patriarchy, and like colonial relations between countries so that we don't replicate those harms as we transition to a different system of energy.
Ayana Young Well, thank you so much for grounding us in that introduction and, you often reference the vast disconnect between utopian futures pushed by clean energy advocates and the reality of extractive frontiers and the supply chains that green energy necessitates....In the United States, we are seeing electric vehicles being advertised as an accessible product of the near future, while we are shielded from the truth of what is required in order to make these products accessible, specifically the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and the violent desecration of ecosystems globally. I know this topic is vast, so I invite you to focus on whatever part calls to you, but I wonder if you could share with listeners what a renewable energy transition actually looks like from the perspective of the so-called peripheries of extraction; the mines, power plants, refineries, and ports? What kind of supply chain has been constructed in order to further green energy?
Thea Riofrancos That's a great question. I like the framing a lot. I want to start with where you began your question, which are these clean, so-called clean or green technologies that have been invented and developed and are being deployed precisely in order to transition us to a low carbon or renewable energy system, right? The one that I focus on a lot in my work, are electric vehicles, and particularly the batteries that power those vehicles, the lithium batteries, which are by the way, the same batteries, that power, you know, our laptops and cell phones or they're quite similar, right, so we're already familiar with rechargeable batteries, but the car versions are much larger. So I want to just focus on this label of clean technology or green technology labels that you know, I certainly use myself the idea of green technologies, but I think clean is particularly misleading, right? It kind of gives the idea that these technologies are somehow just synthesized in the laboratory or printed with a 3D printer or automatically produced in some fully automated factory, it kind of has an idea of modernity totally divorced from nature, right? And, and from all of the kinds of raw materials and natural inputs that go into making what we use.
So instead, what I try to do in my work in conversation with other scholars and activists is show the very earthly material, natural origins of this technology, and that's to draw a broader point, which is to say these technologies are produced currently, in the same way, that any other commodity under capitalism is produced, raw materials are rested from the Earth, they are extracted, if they're agricultural materials, they are harvested, right? They are refined and processed, often using toxic chemicals and through polluting processes themselves. They are shipped to other parts of the world often to be further refined and then to be manufactured. We could look at that manufacturing and look at the exploitation of labor, look at you know, whether that itself produces also emissions and other environmental impacts, what are the safety conditions right? And then at the end of that process of manufacturing, and that long chain of relationships and different geographic sites, those technologies head to places of mass consumption. And what I think this kind of shows us is that, if we just think of the clean technology and the green, or the green tech at the end of this whole chain of events, then we really miss out on a lot of where the environmental and social injustices might occur, right? So I just advocate in general that we take what some call a kind of planetary perspective, meaning a perspective that can apprehend this spatially dispersed process that happens in all different parts of the world, from Chile to Indonesia, from the Philippines to China, and I'm just talking there about lithium-ion batteries and only talking about a subset of the places that are involved, right? And zoom in on what's actually happening in those places and is that the kind of low carbon future that we want to build, as let's say, climate justice activists? Is at the kind of low carbon future that those workers and communities want to be a part of? Were they asked to be a part of it? Did they consent to the forms of extraction and exploitation that takes place in their communities? And I think usually the answer is no, because of what I said earlier about the way capitalism functions, we aren't really asked, we don't have democratic participation that kind of governs the economy. And that is, I think, even more, stark and apparent and dramatic in the places in the world that have been systematically and historically subject to forms of what we might call colonial or Imperial relationships, right?
So what I learned, just tracing the supply chains of lithium-ion batteries, is that the lithium that is extracted has pretty I think, concerning environmental impacts in the immediate sights of extraction. I did my fieldwork in Chile and spent several months there and I will be returning as soon as the pandemic allows me to, and I traveled around the country, both in the capital where a lot of important decisions are made right policymakers and corporations, but I also went to the zones of extraction in the north of Chile, in the Atacama Desert, which is a just beautiful landscape, it is also the home of Indigenous communities that have lived there for 1000s of years well before the Spanish conquered Latin America or before the Chilean state existed. So you have Indigenous communities, you have a beautiful landscape that they have developed all sorts of practices of cultural exchange and socio-natural kind of relation with that landscape. Then you have more recent, we could call them settlers, migrants, internal migrants, you also have tourists, right? So you have all sorts of people living in this space. And what is concerning about the lithium extraction process, which is extracted from these underground brine deposits, salty water deposits in other words, from these beautiful expansive salt flats, it actually has the effect of making freshwater, the water that humans rely on for consumption and agriculture, and of course, is also water that that's the other species rely on as well, that water is directly impacted by the rapid and rapacious extraction of brine, there's a whole complex water system that actually, Indigenous people know quite well, but scientists are just beginning to actually understand, because it's such a complicated and unusual water system that involves both brine and freshwater, and is in the second driest place on Earth, after Antarctica. So you can just imagine the complexity but also the vulnerability of this water system. Lithium is being or I should say brine is being extracted, and then a raid on these huge evaporation ponds in the desert, so that the water evaporates into the air and you're left with a more concentrated lithium concentrate, which is then further refined elsewhere.
That whole process is very inexpensive for lithium companies because actually the sun and the wind do a lot of the evaporation work for them which is free. So it's another kind of gift of nature. But it's it's very concerning because it draws down the freshwater table at the same time, and this is compounded by two other processes impacting the region one is climate change itself. So you know, bit ironic that this extractive frontier of technology that is meant to combat climate change is also suffering severe consequences of drought and further desertification. And then, on the other hand, copper, which is also extracted in this region, and requires also a lot of water to be processing in particular, and ironically, again, copper is extremely needed for green technologies like EV’s because of all of the electric wiring. So you have this place on Earth, that is a home to ecosystems and human communities that is being triply impacted in this way, by climate change, and by lithium and copper, which all are, you know, again, the attractive frontiers of technologies that are actually needed to combat climate change, and just to close out here, how we produce those technologies, who uses them, who controls their production, and how much extraction they require? These are all political and social questions that we should think about because it's not preordained, actually how much extraction is required, in order to produce technologies needed to combat climate change.
Ayana Young Wow, just thank you for explaining all of that and connecting some of the dots that I think some of us are having an intuition about, I think many of us are starting to question, what it actually takes to do this green energy transition, and it was really helpful to hear so much of what you just brought up. I'm wondering if you could highlight the connections between renewable energy development and state deployment of the military and police in the name of extraction. I know, we can't generalize South America's approach to resource extraction, but I do think listeners would be interested in hearing about the correlation between the green energy boom and state violence to the extent that you're willing to speak about it?
Thea Riofrancos Sure, it's an excellent question, both because there's a lot to say historically, and, and currently about it, but I also think that some of answering this will require actually a bit of speculation, which I think can be an interesting, you know, creative kind of mental activity to engage in. So I'll come to that speculative piece at the end. But let me tell you what I think we do know, empirically already. One is that extractive sectors around the world, not only in the global south, or in Latin America, or Chile, including in you know, the U.S. and Canada, for example, which have major attractive sectors, particularly in oil and gas and coal. We see that around the world, extractive sectors often are marked by particular levels of violence, repression, and conflict right? The state is often one key actor there, states often deploy repressive force, whether that's police, or military, or security, or intelligence agents, right, there are different types of state repression, but they often deploy a direct repressive force to protect such projects against resistance or conflict or even sometimes when there's no actual resistance, you will see armed guards protecting sites of attraction, right? To kind of project the authority of the state, states often label these sectors as “strategic,” sometimes that's written into the very constitution of a given state and what that means is that the state, you know, thinks these sectors are extra important to protect, and that sort of carries also that indication of the potential for state violence.
We've seen this type of violence in the fight over Standing Rock, Keystone, we have just seen this time and again, right, it's not something that just happens in other places. In Latin America, this takes additional forms. You often also see, in certain contexts, paramilitary violence, so it's not official state violence, but often there are, you know, nebulous connections to the state in some way. You might see corporations that actually hire their own private security guards. So when I did research in Ecuador, which might come up later in this conversation for an earlier project, I researched a copper mining company that hired private guards, right, and they inflicted quite intense violence on community members that were in protest of the mine. So this just gives you a sense, this is a correlation that many scholars have drawn out around the world. And you know, we can link this already to the renewable energy transition. So I already mentioned copper, and I'm just going to bring it up again. It's hard to overstate how important copper is to renewable energy, and that those two words copper and renewable energy might not be words that listeners have thought about side by side. But just to remind folks that in order to transition to a renewable energy system, we need to electrify economic processes that are not currently electrified. We can use the car example right? So an electric vehicle needs to be able to be plugged into the grid, and needs energy conducted through copper wiring within the car and in the broader energy system, right. And that's the case for any device or activity that we want to power with renewable energy, we need to be able to plug it into the grid, so to speak, unless we have our own little solar panel on that whatever that thing is, but you need to be able to connect to the grid, that means a lot of copper wiring, and that means an enormous amount of copper will be extracted in order to allow us to use renewable energy technologies. We've seen around Latin America, particularly in the Andean region: so in Chile, in Peru, in Ecuador, just to name a few places, copper mining causes a lot of conflict, a lot of social protest, and also be the site of a lot of state and corporate forms of repression, right? So that's just one angle to take on it just through the lens of copper.
I want to kind of go to that speculative piece that I was saying earlier, as I noted, at the beginning of this conversation, we're in a nascent stage of the energy transition, it is globally uneven, some places have transitioned more than others, we still have a lot of work to do to really move away from an energy system that's based on fossil fuels. So I think, you know, at early stages, you can start to detect trends that might take hold and take root and be more predominant, once a fuller transition occurs. And, you know, what I'm starting to get concerned about in my research is the way that states, and not only in the global south, I'm talking about in what I'm about to say about the US and the European Union, actually specifically, are starting to designate the minerals needed for renewable energy technologies as “critical” or “strategic” or “crucial”, they use different words. And that should give listeners pause when a state actor says this natural resource is strategic or “critical”, it means that oftentimes states will use additional forms of repression in order to protect its extraction. And so the EU has done this and added lithium to its list of critical minerals. The U.S., first under Trump, but actually, more recently, again, under Biden has designated lithium as well as several other minerals as critical. And sometimes it's directly said that it's not just about the green technology, but that military technologies in general rely on these minerals as well. So you get this ominous sense that states and perhaps corporations as well might respond with additional forms of repression around protest against, you know, let's say, or conflict around these types of sectors. And it's speculative. We don't know this yet. But I just want to sort of put that there because I think there's a long history of state repression and extraction going hand in hand. And I hope we don't repeat that history. But I think it helps to be aware of that at the outset of a process rather than, you know, unfortunately, when it's too late.
Ayana Young Yeah, that's very interesting and yeah, I think it should give all of us pause to realize that there are multiple systems being set up to extract these resources. And yeah, it is frightening to hear those kinds of words because in a sense, they're like, they're like warlike terminology and that is something to really consider. In “Latin America’s Green New Deal” you and co-author Daniel Aldana Cohen write; “While the Green New Deal idea massively expanded the scope of climate action—from carbon pricing to rewriting the United States’ entire social (and ecological) contract—it said little about the rest of the world. Its chief historical referent, the New Deal, invokes U.S. history alone. And yet, the project’s edges have been internationalist. Leave aside the phrasing, and the substance of the project has everything to do with contemporary political-economic struggles all over the world, including in Latin America.” And I think my previous questions have sort of alluded to what a Green New Deal might mean for resource-rich countries in South America, but I’d like to ask you to elaborate a bit further on the global dimensions of a Green New Deal, or perhaps talk about what a globally accountable Green New Deal would look like instead?
Thea Riofrancos Yeah, that's a great question and it's tricky because there are many ways to unpack it both on a level of sort of, I guess, you know, three kinds of levels that occurred to me immediately. One would be if we just implemented a Green New Deal, right now in the U.S. without much attention to those global ramifications, how would it affect the rest of the world? Right? So that's one kind of question to ask. Another, two sets of other related questions are, what kind of policies could we implement as part of a Green New Deal kind of transformative moment that would have more beneficial effects for the rest of the world, rather than potentially harmful ones? And then a third, and perhaps even thornier question is, how can we, let's say us activists kind of reconstruct what I see as very lost and weakened relationships of solidarity with groups and communities and movements around the world? Relationships that I think at other moments in political history, we're stronger than they are now. I think we've lost a lot of the habit and ethos and kind of orientation of solidarity and internationalism and sort of a global perspective in movements in the U.S.
So let me, you know, go back to the beginning of where I framed that. What I worry about, despite what I should say, being on record, as an extreme advocate of the Green New Deal right, I think it's a wonderful paradigm shift and climate policy, it connects the crisis of inequality to the crisis of global warming, it focuses on real material improvements in ordinary people's lives, and it sees, I think, a really vigorous role for the public sector, and also for creative forms of public ownership and community ownership and cooperatives and you know, just a different way to organize our economy. And so I'm like, you know, just want to frame this by saying, I'm a big advocate of the Green New Deal, but I also think they're different versions of the Green New Deal. And that, you know, we should be intentional, especially about this international peace from the get-go.
I worry that a Green New Deal that doesn't attend to global supply chains, and to the extraction required by green technologies, could, you know, just neglect the forms of social and environmental injustice that those technologies currently require, to produce, to be produced. I emphasize currently because I don't think it's inevitable that these technologies, whether it's solar panels, or electric buses, right, these technologies could be produced quite differently than they are. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. But if we don't attend to global supply chains, then we just use the normal methods of production and consumption and extraction, the ones that we've already talked about, right, and we might reinforce them. And we might reinforce them dramatically, because when we look at major changes, major and aggressive and fast changes in our whole, you know, kind of energy system, there might be a huge rush to secure these minerals around the world and to ramp up production for these technologies in ways that are just not attentive to the issues of labor exploitation, or contamination of local waterways, or Indigenous rights, just to name a few, you know, I think important issues to attend to, so I worry about that.
But I don't think it's inevitable and now I'm going to go to the second piece that I said like what kind of policies or and frameworks might a Green New Deal employ in order to avoid exacerbating resource conflict and extraction around the world, but instead actually reduce extraction, reduce the resource requirements, reduce how much is pulled out of the Earth in the name of more production of these technologies. I would just put a few points. One is, I think that the worst way to do the energy transition, especially when we're talking about transportation, right, which is a place where we're seeing a lot of change already, right? The people buying electric vehicles, these auto companies producing new electric vehicles, etc, that's an area where we're seeing, you know, in the current moment, the energy transition unfolding. What worries me is this paradigm that's become very popular with politicians and corporations, which is that the way to combat climate change is for everyone to have an electric vehicle in their garage. Now, first of all, that is just not economically accessible. And you actually asked at the very top of this show, like, you know, is this really accessible? Is this even an accessible kind of solution? And I would say, no, not for poor and working-class people that can't afford, you know, without a lot of government help, and maybe there will be government help, but anyway, can't afford a new car. And actually, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to drive a car that is less energy efficient, that produces more emissions, or maybe to not be able to afford a car at all right? And so there's some equity issues, first and foremost, with a car-centric approach to our energy transition.
And then I think, second of all, everyone owning their own car is very resource-intensive. I think that just might make sense. I'm just going to let that kind of land there. Because I think it's clear that if everyone has their own thing, a lot more things need to be produced. And so what if instead, we had an economy that was focused on public services, on collective consumption, on forms of sharing with one another and forms of caring for, you know, what we have, and not always getting a new thing? What would that look like? And so, you know, what I advocate for, along with others is a transit system that focuses on public transit and mass transit. I know there are challenges in rural areas. So I also think there's a lot of interesting creative solutions for rural areas to have public transit systems. So on massive public transit, a single bus with its lithium battery can maybe ferry around 1000s of people a day versus a car that sits in the garage most of the day. So it's a much better use of those resources. But also, you know, maybe in some spaces, especially in urban areas, eliminate private cars, passenger cars altogether, right. And there are fascinating movements in Europe, and elsewhere in the world to have car free cities. Of course, we always need to take into account that there are differences in folks’ mobility, right, so not everyone is going to walk and cycle. But there can definitely be provisions made for fully equitable and accessible transit systems that are mix of public transit, and walking and cycling and electrify all transit, don't rely on individual ownership of electric vehicles. So that's the second piece, policies, thinking about policies that require fewer resources and actually change the way we consume, rather than just like a kind of green capitalist situation where we consume the same exact way, but with renewable energy.
The final piece and I'll be a bit shorter here, but I think it's worth mentioning and it resonates a lot with that excerpt you read out loud from Daniel and my essay, which is beyond the level of policy. it's also I think, important and incumbent upon movements in the United States climate movement, social justice movements, racial justice movements, to see themselves in global perspective, to see themselves as part of struggles that transcend borders, as impacted by processes of oppression and exploitation, that also, of course, transcend borders, and sort of re-stitch together relationships with movements elsewhere in the world. That despite our very global media systems, and Twitter, and x y&z I think a lot of those relationships, like despite the fact that we can at any moment with our smartphones, figure out what's happening elsewhere in the world, I think the relationships between movements have really suffered. And it's, it's a longer question as to why that's the case. but it has been the case. And I think that it would be positive for our projects like the Green New Deal, to kind of re-solidify and shore up those relationships, both so that we're attentive to what some of the negative impacts are elsewhere in the world and we can stand in solidarity with let's say, Indigenous communities in Chile if they resist listing lithium mining, both for those types of campaigns and issues, but also to learn from elsewhere in the world, right? It's not just about being a good ally, it's also about learning what has worked well, you know, in terms of more socially just energy transitions in the places that have embarked on that. So I think there's a tremendous amount to be gained with a more from a more international and solidarity-based perspective.
Ayana Young Well, one of the largest questions that I've read that you tackle is whether or not we can improve well-being without an extractive model of development, and I think we’d both agree that we absolutely can live well without extraction, but this question becomes much more complex when we ask if we can have leftist systems of care under capitalism, without extraction of some sort. Because so often, countries have nationalized their resources so that they can improve the social conditions of their own country to compete with what the so-called West has defined as a decent quality of life. Can you speak to the dilemma and whether or not it’s possible to have national governments without extractive development? And if so, what does it look like to center social care and economic security in the immediate future, without extraction?
Thea Riofrancos Yeah, this is probably one of the thornier questions that we'll talk about today, which is a high bar, because you've already raised a number of obviously complex questions and nuanced questions, but this one gets at the heart of so many different issues. And I think your framing, which is one that I've also used of dilemmas, is very apt, right? A dilemma is where you confront a situation where the sort of pros and cons of different ways forward are very fraud. And it's not clear what the best approach is, right? Or that's one way to think about a dilemma. And that's the way that I think of one, you know, dilemmas kind of make us paralyzed because it's not clear how to move forward. And I feel like this is a set of issues that can result in that kind of orientation. I guess that what I would say, just to kind of frame a little bit, and then I'll get into the more specific substantive questions that you ask about progressive governments, let's say in the global south, and how they can provide for, for their people without reinforcing an extractive model of development. And I would say that over many years of thinking about this, and my thinking continues to evolve, so maybe in a year from now, I'll have a different way of thinking about it. But this is kind of how I've, how I've come around to it. I think that it's important to disentangle extraction from extractivism, is one way to think about it. And maybe we actually just need a different word than extraction altogether. But I want to put a little space between the words extraction and extractivism, I don't think that there is a way to build even the best society, the most utopian society that we could think of that is socially just egalitarian, low carbon right doesn't have racism or patriarchy, or exploitation, right, I'm just imagining a society, that society would still need, in some way to appropriate resources, though, maybe they'd be called something else. Because that already kind of commodifies nature a bit, but anyway, would have to interact with nature in some way, right? The solar panels that that society uses in its, you know, perfectly democratically owned energy system, those solar panels would need to be made from minerals that are extracted from the Earth, they would need to be manufactured with machines and factories. And so I think that it sometimes is an easy way out, but I myself have also taken this easy way out, this route to say, there's, you know, we want a society with no extraction. But I don't think that that is possible, though. Maybe we just need a different word from extraction, because maybe in our ideal society, the way in which we interact with nature will be so fundamentally different, that we wouldn't call it extraction anymore. But I think that we will use nature's bounty in order to produce what we, you know, to sort of produce what we need to survive and to and to do more than survive, to flourish. Right.
So, you know, I think even in all right, my ideal, let's say eco-socialist utopia, lithium would be needed, right? I would want there to be electric buses, and right now, we don't have another way to power them. And even if we created another way, it would still come from the Earth, because everything comes from the Earth, like at some point. But the question is, how much extraction, under what terms, who has to consent to it? And those are the real political questions that I think we should address head-on, and that don't have easy answers, but I think that, you know, a system, a social system that, that uses things from nature is different than or doesn't have to be the sort of pathological system of extractivism, where everything nature and humans are subordinated to economic growth to constant consumerism, to production without end, aside from profit. Right?
So, you know, that's why I kind of put a little distance between extraction and extractivism. And then to get to your like, the kind of the crux of your question, are there ways to improve wellbeing without an extractive model of development? And I think you say you asked this question, particularly in contexts that are resource-rich that have historically extracted and exported those resources, a relationship that can often be traced hundreds of years, to a colonial period. But really, the basic relations have not fundamentally changed. So places like Ecuador, where I mentioned earlier, I've done a lot of fieldwork and wrote a book about, is a place that a lot of its state budget comes from oil-related revenues, and now increasingly mining-related revenues as well. And earlier in sort of Ecuador's recent history, when a left government first came to power in, in 2007, the government of Rafael Correa, the President, committed to using those resources, the revenues that the state gain from extracting those resources in order to fund social services and public infrastructure projects, which by the way, as your question very much, I think is attuned to were exactly the types of demands that social movements, popular movements, labor unions, Indigenous movements included, had made for a long time, they had said, we live amongst this natural wealth, and it is expropriated by foreign capitalists, and we never see the benefits of it. And Correa said, for the first time in Ecuador's history, you know, from all the way from when Ecuador was a colony to independence to military dictatorships to other democratically elected governments, my government is going to address social needs, and it's going to do so with the revenues generated by extraction. And that put the Correa government in this fundamental dilemma to use that word again, which is that that made short and even, you know, some extent, medium-term economic and social sense, and it made a lot of political sense. He was a very popular president. And he did the things he said he was going to do, he decreased poverty dramatically, almost cut it in half, he expanded dramatically people's access to health, education, transit, and housing. But he did so using a model that was environmentally devastating. That wasn't new. That had been the case previously, in Ecuador’s history, but he, you know, you know, reaffirmed that model that violated Indigenous rights and that also was economically precarious, because it depended a lot on the global prices for those commodities and how high they were right. And so he was caught in those dilemmas. And those eventually really undermined the transformative project that he sought to pursue, in addition to his government's own repression. And that's worth, you know, mentioning movements that contested extractivism, that resisted it.
But I think that doesn't answer the question, could he have done otherwise? Was there another route to social and economic well-being in Ecuador, for example, other than relying on oil and mining revenues? And, you know, I think that's a very hard question to answer. What I've kind of come around to recently, even since writing the book, is that that question can't be answered at the scale of Ecuador. That question can't be answered in one country, on the peripheries of the global economy that has historically extracted these resources and it is a just pillar of the national economy. That is not a transition that Ecuador can just make on its own, so to speak, because if it was just Ecuador, and they decided, “Okay, we're going to leave the oil on the ground.” And that's it, it would actually be quite difficult to address people's needs, which is not to say that Ecuador shouldn't leave the oil in the ground, they should. But I think it immediately raises responsibility, complicity at other levels of global governance, right? So whether we look at the region of Latin America, the hemisphere, you know, all the Americas, the U.S. included, or the globe, I think that it's incumbent on more powerful, affluent, and well-resourced places and institutions and economic groups and companies in the world who have historically benefited and profited from the extraction and the environmental devastation that it causes, I think it's incumbent on them to alleviate the kind of economic straits that Ecuador, for example, finds itself in to, for example, reduce or cancel the debt that Ecuador owes to all these financial institutions debt that was contracted under very illegitimate circumstances, I think and is part of what forces a country like Ecuador to extract resources, because you have to, you know, pay this debt to the IMF, to private creditors, to whoever it is, right. And, and so I'm just giving listeners a sense that I think these questions have to be answered at broader scales, in some part - that it's hard for one low-income country whose primary economic sectors are attractive to just, you know, sort of get off the extractive grid. And at the same time, care for, feed, clothe, and house, and hopefully much more than that, the people that live there, and I think, involves other forms of global, regional and global redistribution, debt cancellation, and maybe new regional economies that in concert with one another, countries in concert with one another shift away from an extractive model development towards one that centers social and natural care. My chest is constantly buzzing. This my love fills up all those walls.
Ayana Young Yeah, I want to go a bit deeper into this. And as a follow-up, ask what does a just transition look like in the so-called Global South versus the Global North?
Thea Riofrancos It's such a good question that I think a lot of interesting thinkers and activists in the Americas and I'm sure many other places in the world are grappling with, right now, you know, so I think that there's a lot that can be done to, to use forms of public investment in Global South countries, to shift away from extractive sectors and instead, kind of transition towards renewable energy. In fact, renewable energy is a very under-tapped resource in Latin America. There's a lot of potential for renewable energy. It's such a climatically ecologically diverse region and so you can get the idea that there are places that are extremely well situated for solar energy, places very well situated for wind energy, and then actually, due to the volcanic activity in the Andean region, and probably elsewhere, that's just the region I'm familiar with, there's also a lot of geothermal potential as well. So there's a lot of untapped renewable energy potential that, you know, again, in my ideal world could also be coordinated, involving forms of community ownership, making sure that communities get real economic benefits from these projects, that they can actually manage these projects, right, and make sure that they fit in well with other livelihoods, with local ecosystems, and what the community's desires are for how they are designed even on an aesthetic level, right? There's a lot of evidence from research around the world that when communities take part in the renewable energy transition, when they have a real role, a real stake real power, they like the transition much more, they benefit from it, they are they feel positive about it, and they embrace it, right? And that's very different than a top-down imposition of renewable energy, you know, with a green capital capitalist corporation that swoops in and says, “We're going to dispossessed you of your land,” which has happened in many places in Latin America. And there's a lot of unfortunate examples of this in Mexico, for example of Indigenous people actually being dispossessed by mega wind developments, but if those same communities, you know, owned the wind developments themselves, right, designed them themselves, you get the idea, right?
So I think that there's a really interesting path forward for Latin America, to pivot to renewable energy and do so in a way that's different than what we've seen in a lot of the world so far. And I think that, you know, given also the natural resources, such as lithium that exists in the region, if there was much more regional coordination and supply chains that were less about serving global markets and foreign consumers and more about serving the sort of region, and its people right and needs, then, you know, you might be able to get some green technology development and manufacturing that just was fundamentally different in its character, right, because it wasn't to be exploited far away, but rather to build kind of local or regional forms of manufacturing and create dignified jobs for people in the region. So there are all sorts of different ways, I think that you could transition to a different type of economy, that I don't know if I could say totally non-extractive but, post-extractivist, right, no longer centered on extractivism, as its guiding principle.
Just one other thing I would say since the word has come up a couple of times, is that there are a lot of interesting ideas from a feminist perspective and an Indigenous perspective in the Americas about a care centered economy, like what would it look like, instead of the economy to sort of run on extraction, for it to be oriented around health care, education, elder care, the creation of vibrant communities, the arts, you know, and these, these are the same things I would endeavor for the United States, they're not specific to Latin America, except that Latin America, and in particular, you know, in some countries, in particular, has a very vibrant feminist movement. I'm thinking of Chile and Argentina stand out a lot, as well as Mexico, just really militant, vibrant, creative feminist movements that have thought a lot about care as a concept, just sort of reclaim and think about it as actually a foundation for the whole economy.
So these are like touchstones for me, but I would encourage listeners to also read other folks, I'm sure there are many ideas I didn't. I didn't mention, you know, we could get into regenerative agriculture, for example, as opposed to the mono-crop agriculture that's destroying the Amazon and the cattle ranching that's destroying the Amazon. So there are many places to go with the idea of a post-extractive economy. But I do want to reiterate that some of these, well, I should say, many of these economic activities that I've mentioned, require some initial public investment. And would and also, not all of them generate the kind of revenues that oil does. And so I think this still brings us back to the question of responsibility to other scales.
Right now, Latin America, by all accounts is the region of the world most economically devastated by COVID, we can get into why that is, you know, in a follow up if you're interested, but you know, readers easily read news stories about this, it has just ravaged the region economically, in large part because of how many workers are quote, unquote, informal workers and just lack of basic social safety net, and therefore have had to choose between starvation, if they don't work, or the virus if they do, right? And it's been a very, it's just been a very tragic situation in Latin America. So you have these, you know, this region of economic devastation, and governments that have spent every penny that they have on on the basics of public health provision, and are also in debt by huge quantities to global creditors and international financial institutions. And so in that context, you know, can a government a single government in the Global South or in Latin America, invest in this new economic model that's renewable, that's care-centric, etc? I think that again, it brings up the issue of the need for redistribution, and help, and solidarity from other governments and economic entities around the world. But I do think there are great ideas for what that model would look like. The question is, is are there the economic resources within the region to transition to it right now?
Ayana Young I want to go back to something that you were touching on earlier around collective consumption. And, you know, I've heard you talk about and other articles and or interviews about the relationship between solidarity and consumption and how solidarity can in fact, look like consuming less, but not at the individual level. Rather, we can actually consume less and demonstrate solidarity by strengthening our ability to collectively use goods and services. So I'd love if you could talk a bit more about the importance of collective consumption and how it guarantees more equity and justice throughout the entire supply chain.
Thea Riofrancos Thank you for that question. I just want to say though his name has already come up, I've learned a lot from my collaborator Daniel Aldana. Cohen, about why collective consumption and public and shared forms of abundance, we might even use the word luxury are so important, both for improving people's material well-being, and simultaneously for addressing the climate crisis and the broader crisis, also of ecological devastation. We so often think of consumption as individual, in individual terms, like, I choose to consume this and so for many environmentalists that can take the form of like, I'm going to individually consume differently. And then immediately, we're sort of like, but okay, I'm not gonna use a plastic bag, but everyone else was using a plastic bag, there are obvious limitations to an individual understanding of consumption, and we get sort of like in these rabbit holes of like, you know, kind of never-ending what should I be doing differently kind of thing. But I want to encourage us to zoom out as your, you know, the excellent question does, which is to say, even when our consumption appears to us as an individual choice, even when it seems we're just walking to the supermarket, using our own money and buying the thing that we want to buy, it's never individual, meaning that consumption is highly socially patterned, right? It's highly constrained or enabled by the social systems that we live in, you know, if I live in a suburban enclave, in the, in the United States, I have no choice but to drive. There is just literally no choice, if I don't drive, it's probably because I'm too poor to afford a car or to afford gas or to afford my car insurance, right? Anyone that can afford to, drives, I actually live in what, you know, a city in Providence, Rhode Island, and it's um, and it's, you know, a decently dense small city. And our public transit is so bad that, even though I don't actually live very far from where I work, there's really no way for me to get there other than to drive there. In fact, I got a driver's license, at kind of an old age of like 33, in order just to get myself to work. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because, despite the fact that it might seem like an individual choice that I drove to work, it really wasn't a choice, it was a social choice, to not provide me with any other option, right? So we should always think about consumption in social terms.
When we zoom out and think that way, it opens up all these other possibilities of how we might as a society consumed differently. So rather than the system that we have, which is individualized, init's like ultimate effects, but really, you know, is designed by by by policy choices, is highly unequal. Some people, you know, consume radically, more or less than other people, right, it's a very unequal system of consumption. And it has all these other characteristics, of course of race and gender as well, in terms of like how much people consume, what people's options are. There's a lot of studies that show that low-income communities of color just have far fewer options in terms of what supermarkets or might not have supermarkets at all the so-called sort of food desert phenomena, right? So again, all of these are social choices, but at an individual level, we don't have a lot of control over them. And you know, what would it look like to transition from that type of system of consumption to a system in which consumption more often took place with other people like in literal community with others and literal kind of communion with other people? What if instead of driving in our individual steel traps, cars, death traps, we were, you know, in a train or tram, or bus or a trolley with other people, right? So that's a form of collective consumption. It's many people consuming the same service at once. You know, what, if instead of streaming Netflix alone, in our apartments, we and I know this is a hard time to say this with COVID, but let's just relax that assumption for a moment and presume that at some point, we can reenter society. Alright, so instead of Netflix in our homes, what if we went to the theater with other people? What if we actually saw plays, right, which are much lower carbon, by the way than anything that requires so much, you know, streaming content and huge internet servers and that kind of thing.
So all I'm saying is that there are always different ways that we can pattern consumption socially. And the individualist system that we have in the US is also a very unequal one. And it's a very resource-intensive one, as we already discussed with the example of individual electric vehicles versus electric buses. And so I think there's a lot of benefits to thinking collectively about consumption. It's more equitable because everyone's consuming the same service, right? It's not like, you know, you can buy your way into like, very different consumer categories. Everyone's using the same mass transit system, let's say, so it's more equitable. It is less resource-intensive because it's just more economically efficient. You have these economies of scale, with the resources that are extracted and more people are making use of them. I think there are other benefits of it that are important to attend to, which are kind of more social, psychological, emotional, relationship kind of level, which is that it creates a different type of society when we do things together more, when we see one another as part of a shared collectivity or shared community when you know, you're riding the subway or bus or whatever it is, you have the opportunity to maybe enter into a conversation with someone that you don't know, right, or you say hi to the bus driver that you see every day on your route, you can, you know, see kind of the different communities that interact with and use this infrastructure. Whereas a car is totally isolating and alienating, right? You're moving alone through a landscape and I think it can't be sort of overstated how much the way that we consume actually affects our sense of politics and our sense of community. And I think how pernicious it's been to have this model of consumption in the US that's highly individualized, though, again, it's socially designed, but it's very individualized in terms of like the unit of the consumers, the individual versus a society that some times in places we've had in the US and certainly in other places in the world, there are examples of where we have these more collective forms of consumption, more public forms of consumption, shared experiences with one another, and opportunities to create relationships that get us outside of our immediate, you know, selves, our domestic context that allow us to encounter people from different backgrounds and I think that could have a lot of positive political and social and psychological, I would say effects to as much as we can transition to that mode of consumption.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really love that vision and I appreciate you putting that out there so we can collectively dream on it a bit more. And, yeah, thank you so much for your time. This has been such an incredible interview, I've learned so much from you and I appreciate your clarity and just how studied you are, and how much time you've clearly taken to understand these complex systems. And yeah, as we come to a close, I'd like to read listeners a passage from your article, “What Green Costs”; “I might not know the exact shape of the world I want. The present weighs heavily and makes imagination difficult. But I know it starts with relating to this planet’s bounty as mysterious, vital, and nourishing; envisioning abundance as shared flourishing; and broadening our solidarities to encompass people we may never meet and places we may never visit but whose futures are bound up with our own.” As we dream into the future, can I ask you how you define the type of abundance that has existed long before extraction?
Thea Riofrancos Oh, that's such a great, I think that's your hardest question because it involves a sort of leap of imagination, right? I mean, and I think that there is, I want to just emphasize that like it, there is a way in which the world that I would like to create is unknown to me, in a way it's unknowable to me and it probably won't be created, you know, in full in any full sense in my own lifetime. I always think that one of the most valiant things are aspects of past struggles for more equality, for you know, feminist struggles, civil rights, struggles, labor struggles, like the struggles that predated us is that their participants wouldn't always be around to see the hopefully better world that their endeavors helped to create, right, I think that's such a kind of valiant expression of in a way, solidarity across generations, right of sort of intergenerational justice of wanting something that maybe honors the past right ancestors and, you know, ecosystems before capitalism, despoiled them, but also has this sort of future orientation of, we're in a collective project, to create a world that is more abundant, not because of more individual consumption, but because of more meaningful lives that feel more fulfilled, that feel more secure and safe. And that interact with nature in a non-extractive and fundamentally different way. That project is a collective project. It's a global project. It's one that is spatially dispersed, and it's one that unfolds in this sort of uneven way over time. And that, you know, we that fight for that right now won't be around to see how that project ends up, you know, 100 years from now, let's say, but I think that it's incumbent on us, especially at this moment, of just dramatic and severe climate crisis, to get as quickly involved in that project as we can, right even if we won't be around to see all of its fruits and its bounties, I do think that we have a responsibility to do everything that we can to make sure that we're laying the foundation for that other world that we hope others will pick up the process of realizing.
Ayana Young That was such a beautiful closure to this conversation. Thank you Thea so much. I really enjoyed this and was also stretched and learned a lot and I think this information, especially now is so important and pivotal, and really necessary for us to understand. So thank you for all of your time today and all of the time and work you've put into studying this over the years.
Thea Riofrancos Thank you so much for your really nuanced questions, that really made me think that last one was. I'm going to sit with it for a minute but thank you so much for the opportunity to talk to you.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by 40 Million Feet, Mitski, and Alexa Wildish. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.