Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
A few years ago, when New York was considering a five cent plastic bag fee, residents were inundated with messages about how such a fee would “hurt poor people.” Even without additional context or data, there are so many strange things about this argument:
The government hates poor people and wants them to die (see the lack of access to and prohibitive costs of housing, food, healthcare, etc offset only by chronically underfunded programs that pathologize and dehumanize the poor and working class). Since when is something being bad for poor people a deterrent?
Do (poor) people really need free plastic bags? Maybe they do—but as protection from security guards or as an alternative to the cultural-capital-signaling of carrying a canvas tote? In the latter example, can we extrapolate that this signaling is a manifestation of creative class-driven gentrification that destroys cities for all but those who can afford to subscribe to the New Yorker or purchase sheets from Brooklinen?
Plastic bags, like all disposable plastic products, haven’t existed for nearly as long as the underclass has - they were invented by the fossil fuel industry, alongside the inventions of the concepts of trash and of cleaning up your trash, which makes you a Good Person. White people, the guiltiest of people, really took to this notion, yielding a bevy of blog posts and identities rooted in putting all your trash for the week in one tiny ziploc bag !!!! or carrying a metal straw extruded by a baby in the Global South. The people diverted by the idea that waste can (exist at all and be) minimized tend to carry those planet-wrecking canvas tote bags and take the moral high ground, leaving plastic bags for the poor.
Beyond these issues, the idea that plastic bags could ever be free is absurd. While the carbon cost of a reused plastic shopping bag is lower than an underused canvas tote, the upstream and downstream impacts of plastics cannot be denied.
Extracting, transporting, and refining petrochemicals for plastic bag production; transporting those plastic bags; and allowing them to photodegrade in our waterways has extended the oil and gas industry’s life, and yielded a planet of sick people, and a global water system uniformly impacted by microplastics, even in the most remote places on earth. Lately, the same industry responsible for this catastrophe has been pushing obscure ‘recycling’ methods that really are just greenwashing to cover up the utter uncontrollability of tiny bits of petrochemicals.
Why revisit this now? Other than the latest barrage of nouveau recycling nonsense, none of this is new information. But the idea that shifting away from plastics, and generally, moving away from carbon based fuels, hurts poor people continues to rear its ugly, lying head.
As evidenced above with the plastic bag example, the reasoning behind this argument is always inherently flawed, because all of our systems (economic, political, social) rely on the exploitation of an underclass to function, and harming poor people is accepted as necessary collateral for doing most things. The invocation of the poor is doubly cruel when it comes to climate and energy, because we know that no matter what, the sacrifice of the world’s poorest has already been locked in by decades of delay, denial, and disregard by decision makers.
So why is it so powerful to talk about environmental policy changes as harming the poor? Firstly, it makes the elite appear compassionate and concerned about the have-nots, which Democrats (and their counterparts around the world) rely on to maintain both their extractive neoliberalism and moral high ground. Secondly, it’s a great distraction from the broader issue, which is the aforementioned sacrifice of the poor to rising seas, climate-borne illnesses and resource shortages, and the conflicts that will inevitably ensue as a result.
Last but not least, it taps into a shared fear and/or inability to believe that long-term change is possible and necessary (which actually could liberate people from oppression) rather than making short-term, ultimately ineffective changes (like not charging five cents for a plastic bag today that will end up in the ocean tomorrow).
The latest example of this rhetoric I’ve seen is here in Burlington, Vermont, where we love to talk about our 100% renewable electricity. Burlington has long spoken loudly about our commitments to climate. Our public utility, the Burlington Electric Department, gets a lot of good press for its support of the city’s Net Zero plan.
A closer look reveals that much of our electricity comes from hydropower and biomass, both of which are laden with caveats about their cleanliness and renewability. Our biomass energy is cranked out by the McNeil Generating Station, a wood burning facility of a type that tends to last 20-30 years. McNeil has been online for a whopping 39 years, so many Burlingtonians are concerned about what happens next, especially because the plant produces around a third of the city’s electricity.
Most of the burnables at McNeil are leftovers from harvesting trees for other stuff (lumber), or small trees that are removed to encourage healthy forest growth. Basically, picture run of the mill (sorry) logging: tree trunks go to lumber production, and tree tops and branches are chipped and trucked or train-ed to McNeil.
BED also keeps a stock of high quality timber (full trees, in perfect shape) for ‘backup,’ in case they need to burn something and there’s nothing else around to burn. There are a few other sources of feedstock, but those are the big players.
This is not a deep dive into why biomass isn’t renewable, but it’s worth mentioning that when emissions are counted at plants like these, those counts do not include the emissions of cutting down and burning trees. You definitely read that right; the argument is that trees pulled carbon out of the air ‘recently,’ so putting it back in (by burning it) just isn’t that big of a deal, especially because trees grow back. Keep in mind that it takes 400+ new trees to absorb the same amount of carbon as one 150 year old tree.
(There’s also the literal ton of particulate matter released from the station smokestack, containing all manner of carcinogens in tiny bloodstream-entering flecks, which is especially upsetting these days, when Burlington keeps getting stuck under a cloud of particulate matter from the Quebec wildfires.)
Back to the task at hand: what does burning wood have to do with pretending to be worried about poor people? At a staggering symposium a few weeks ago, Burlington Electric’s star spokesman gave his standard We Love Biomass presentation, followed by two scientists offering an alternative perspective about the climate implications of burning wood.
These fine folks explained that when McNeil came online almost four decades ago, burning wood in this forested state seemed like a much cleaner alternative to burning coal, which was Burlington’s primary source of energy prior to McNeil. But that was a long, long time ago, especially in climate change years; the scientists were clear that further investment in McNeil is completely bonkers.
And then the (planted?) audience members chimed in. They claimed that the market McNeil provides for waste wood—those tree tops and branches from lumber trees—makes it financially possible for them to not cut down more high quality trees. Until when? Unclear. And how is this possible?
Someone else from the audience asked how much McNeil was paying for wood chips these days, and the answer knocked off our collective socks. One ton—about 2200 pounds—goes for a whopping one dollar.
In comes the argument: McNeil’s market for wood chips makes it possible for lower-income people to own and manage land in Vermont, because the cost of owning and managing land needs to be offset by the sale of waste wood, at the staggering figure of one dollar per two thousand plus pounds.
In short, this is idiotic. In long, there are plenty of other ways to handle this. The best one is to financially incentivize actual sustainable land management, which would involve leaving those tree tops and branches to decompose and keep nutrients in forest ecosystems.
Another solid option is selling those wood chips to another market—most likely, the people selling wood chips don’t much care where they’re going, since the motive is obviously to get that sweet sweet dollar per ton. For example, wood chips can be made into great building materials, which you’d think would be a priority in a state where we urgently need to build more housing, have some capacity for new industrial activity, can access plenty of wood chips, and like everywhere else on the planet, can get our energy from not burning wood.
There are so many good reasons to stop burning wood to generate energy in Vermont. There are also a few reasons why burning wood at McNeil has been great for the state and its largest city, but helping poor people—excuse me, honest working class land owning folks, aka the bedrock of American identity—is not one of them. Once again, the underclass is invoked to make our little Democratic hearts bleed, instead of drawing our attention to this insane graph and using our brains.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
Aesthetic Planet
One of the things that I’ve appreciated about living in Ireland for the past 3 years is being able to escape the political bubble of the United States. Not in the sense that Ireland’s government sometimes actually functions like a democracy, though that is refreshing, but that US perspectives on politics and culture are overwhelmingly insular and self-referential in a way that doesn’t seem to happen in other places. It seems like every couple of weeks I come across some new political history or a novel perspective that reveals some unexamined assumption I inherited from growing up in a nation that considers itself to be the center of the known universe.
And so today I want to talk about perceptions of the Amazon rainforest and its conservation. The Amazon loomed large in the childhoods of those of us who grew up in the 90s and the millennium. From DK Eyewitness and Scholastic childrens’ books, to the Nature Company and the Rainforest Cafe, the Amazon was one of the touchpoints of the recently-codified Utopian Scholastic aesthetic.
From Dark Academia to Cluttercore, the power of the “aesthetics” bandied about on social media comes from the fact that they are ultimately visual signifiers of some underlying worldview, one that can often bring comfort and escapism from the everyday. Utopian Scholastic’s visual story focuses on ancient Egyptian history and pristine global ecosystems like oceans and rainforests as mediated through nonfiction childrens’ literature and early internet computer programs and computer graphics. Its underlying worldview is the power of education and computer technology to unite humanity around our shared history and planetary system.
Certified American
Rainforests, in particular the Amazon, were a major source of this. The Amazon is conceived of as “the lungs of the world,” a global source of ecological diversity and technological advancement through medicine, and being a globally important entity. It belongs to and is the responsibility of all of us. The example of medicine is so indicative of just how ubiquitous these ideas of the Amazon are. I have no idea how Amazonian species are surveyed and used in the medical and biotech industries, but it has been drilled into me that that’s one of the reasons the Amazon is important and I bet if you asked any millennial they would tell you the same thing.
But if the rainforests of Central and South America are all of our responsibility, how are we to manage and, more importantly, protect them? My US-centric view of this has always been that NGOs are our best ally in this global environmental governance problem. The Rainforest Action Network, Rainforest Trust, and my one-time employer Rainforest Alliance are all based in the US and all founded in the late 80s. All three companies claim to work closely with “local communities” and they all need your [monetary] help to achieve their mission.
These NGOs were also all founded with the intention to liberate environmentalism from its hippy connotations (more on this from Dan Nosowitz’s article) and they did this by focusing on business and capital as solutions: The Action Network targets corporate board-rooms via protest and lobbying, the Trust purchases land to conserve it, and the Alliance certifies consumer products using “sustainable” cultivation methods. In short, if the world’s rainforests belong to all of us, then the way to preserve them is through the one thing we all belong to: the market.
Amazonian Roots
This was the understanding of Amazonian conservation I grew up with, and to some extent have still held onto into adulthood – it’s a flawed system but is our best hope at the moment. That is, until my fragile American worldview was cracked open a few weeks ago in a seminar by Brazilian environmental historian José Augusto Pádua. Pádua explained that Amazonian deforestation is largely a 20th century problem. The Amazon and the indigenous people calling it home had largely been left unregarded at the expense of the almost complete destruction of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. The “decades of destruction” beginning in the 1970s began largely as an internal colonization effort by the Brazilian government, motivated by the fear that “undeveloped” areas with native populations who didn’t identify as Brazilians could easily be claimed by another nation—namely, the United States.
The forces that established Brazil’s military dictatorship and pushed it to encroach upon the Amazon came from the United States, and the most effective efforts to conserve the forest came not from US NGOs, but Brazilian workers. Chico Mendes was a leader in the Rubber Tappers Union and the Rural Workers’ Union from the 1970s until his assassination in 1988. Rubber tapping has long been an industry and a livelihood in Brazil and has a unique relationship with the forest. Rubber trees require diverse forest cover to grow well and tapping involves scoring the trunk of a living tree to collect its latex sap. Since trees only begin to yield latex at five or six and can continue to be harvested for twenty years, rubber workers have a vested interest in the conservation of the rainforest ecosystem that allows rubber trees to thrive.
In his talk, José Augusto Pádua shared that in one conversation he had with Mendes, the labor leader told him “at first I thought I was fighting for the rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting for the forest, and then I realized I was fighting for the planet.” The movement of rural workers in Brazil fought for human livelihoods and forest conservation at the same time because they saw them as the same issue: the worker relies on the ecosystem and the ecosystem on the worker. This worldview has held weight in the post-dictatorship government, with the ascendance of the workers party and folks like Marina Silva, a prominent rural union leader elected to the senate in 1994 who is currently Brazil’s Minister of the Environment. Importantly, it has worked: compared to the Rainforest Trust’s 20 million acre holdings, Brazil has been able to put over 170 million acres of forest into protected areas (though the funding of this program by the World Bank is still worthy of criticism).
World Rainforest Café
Leaving the responsibility for environmental stewardship to organized labor and democratic governance is not something Americans, or really any society in the Global North, can easily accept. We understand labor unions and democratic citizens to vote selfishly, so we reach for something bigger than and outside of ourselves to hold us accountable. We reach for the market. How else to explain the growing appetite at recent COP meetings to establish a carbon credit market that would pay countries like Brazil for afforestation efforts so that countries like the United States can keep polluting?
But the globalization and commodification of plants, animals, and ecosystems as “resources” to be “traded” and “credited” [and accumulated] by the market is horrible because it is a tool for humans to pretend that humans aren’t making the decisions. If we give industrial power to workers (even fossil workers) and governing power to citizens (even citizens of petrostates), isn’t it plausible to think they, we, would use that power to dismantle the systems making our labor unsustainable and our governments unjust? If we take the Utopian Scholastic worldview seriously, that our education about our shared planet and history binds us together, what action does that lead us to?