Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Hello friends! I don’t have much for you today, because I’m working on wrapping my head around how the energy grid works for a piece I will hopefully finish for next week.
Recently, a near-stranger started venting to me about how ‘the government just wants us to have everything be electric’ and that ‘the grid will just fail’ if we oblige. I chuckled to myself about how opponents of energy-related change always make the dominant narrative much more radical than it actually is. I wish the government wanted us to convert everything to electric, but I don’t see that being the case while the fossil fuel industry is still calling the shots on energy policy.
All of this is to say: change, especially on the scale of systems, is always complex and challenging. But using oil and gas is really really complicated and dangerous, yet we do it every single day. There was a time when no American household had electricity. One hundred years ago, American cities and towns were in the middle of their big wave of electrification, whereas by 1932, only 10% of rural homes had electricity. I couldn’t even find this number for now; rather, there are metrics for how many homes are all-electric, and how many have internet access. Basically, when you ask the internet if homes in the US have electricity, the internet rolls its eyes at you.
This was disappointing, and maybe I can dig up more for next week—what about people who live in poorly serviced apartment buildings where electricity goes in and out? who are reliant on the grid amid now fairly regular climate disaster? people who do not have permanent homes, or live in trailers where they rely on shaky hookups?
I’m hoping to learn more about the great electrification of US infrastructure, and what entities were involved in this massive overhaul of how stuff works. I’ll also connect this discussion to the latest on adding renewables to the energy mix, since most of the grid is still powered by fossil fuels (a favorite talking point for the anti-electrification crowd).
One of the things I’m excited to read is this article, which will be featured in the forthcoming issue of Earth Island Journal, in which a piece of mine (!) will also be published.
In the meantime: the last couple weeks have been full(er) of climate action, including demonstrations against Senator Manchin’s dirty side deal to push through more fossil fuel permitting. Take a minute to call your Senators at 888-997-5380 and tell them to oppose Manchin's dirty deal. You don’t need to say a lot of words, just tell those elected homies we need climate action, not more fossil fuel bullshit.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
First Glance
Greetings from the weird part of Dublin Airport that is actually America. The path to the pre-clearance line is marked by a long series of American flags, and the security line is all faux-fancy wood paneling. It’s 10:00 AM here and the person behind me in line ordered a croissant and a last pint of Guinness before their flight. It’s weird.
Also weird [smooth segue, I know] is that my parents, who I’m flying home to see, have recently gotten into the show Aussie Gold Hunters, which follows several teams of folks digging for gold in various parts of southern and southwest Australia. These prospectors use metal detectors and trowels to dig up land already cut over by industrial gold mining, searching for any small nuggets or deeper veins missed by the heavy-duty machinery. The show depicts their attempt to extract wealth from their series of small land leases as heroic - battling the elements day in and day out until they literally strike gold.
Double Take
Last week, as part of an artistic research workshop on the subject of Working With Waste, I was able to watch Riar Rizaldi’s film Kasiterit, which is set on the Indonesian island of Bangka, where one-third of the world’s tin is mined. The film takes this premise in all sorts of fantastic directions, but one of Rizaldi’s primary focuses are “unconventional miners,” who rake over the land and water previously exploited by Indonesia’s state owned tin mining company to secure their own livelihood. There are few key differences between these Indonesian and Australian case studies. Tin mining on Bangka is a much wetter process. Rizaldi notes the low life expectancy of these unconventional miners (around 40) as they wade into bright blue tailing ponds to extract a living. The Australian miners may suffer heat stroke or sunburn if they stay out too late into the summer, but digging through the dirt for gold is just much less likely to slowly poison you.
Then there is the attitude surrounding these two parallel extractions. The Aussie Gold Hunters are rugged, independent, and celebrated. They have an entire TV show where most of the time is devoted to the wiggly sine-waves of metal detectors. The miners are almost all white, and are clearly hobbyists. Despite the potential for windfall profits, it’s not enough to sustain the miners’ livelihoods or mechanical investments. There is a clear colonial narrative in the way the miners, and the show, depict the Australian landscape as a wild thing needing to be conquered.
In contrast, the Indonesian tin miners are an invisible source of labor outside of, yet supporting, the electronics industry. Rizaldi’s film showcases the entanglements we all have with the island of Bangka: that a part of our electronics, and by extension our lives, are from this place. So too are the miners working and living on the land as it becomes waste-land. Despite their labor being integral to the global electronics industry and having clear conventions and dynamics, they are labeled “unconventional.”
Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World explores these exact dynamics through a case study of matsutake mushroom hunting in the northwestern United States. The camps of immigrants and drifters searching through logging forests for these fragrant specimens have different social and economic dynamics, but they follow the same pattern as our Australian and Indonesian miners. They work at the edges of capitalism and in its ruins, picking mushrooms from land originally exploited for different purposes. They haggle with mushroom buyers the way a gold miner talks up the value of a particularly unique-looking nugget. Only after these interactions is the material graded and assigned a market value. While it’s in the hands of the miner, it remains outside the realm of capital, not quite waste, not quite byproduct.
Hindsight
As Tsing points out, the mushroom itself mirrors this relationship: matsutake grow best in disturbed and disrupted forest ecosystems, and thrive in the ruins. If Aussie Gold Hunters contributes anything of value, it isn’t the gold, but the depiction of the dense network of economic and environmental dynamics that play out in extractivist “waste lands.”
Lena, I’m sure, would point to Newtown Creek as another example, and in truth these dynamic living ruins are all around us. Rizaldi’s film shows us as well that the products of these ruins are intimately woven into our technology and our lives. With Tsing’s framework, capitalism seems less like a circle with a center and a periphery, but a branching network of nodes like a mushroom’s mycelium. Even in the midst of it, we touch its fraying edges.