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Title: Growing Our Roots Author: Hot N Bothered Date: 2/18/22 Language: en Topics: climate change, columbus, ohio, central ohio, Cultivating Sustainable Resistance, abolition, Autonomous action, environmental justice, midwest
This is Hot N Bothered: Cultivating Sustainable Resistance. Because we
are angry, we are concerned, we are very hot and we want to explore the
methods by which we are building a new future. We aim to cover a broad
range of topics related to environmental justice and the climate crisis.
Specifically, over the course of the next 12 issues, we will hone in on
the landscape of leftist politics and community organizing in Central
Ohio and discuss the implications that these subject areas have for the
future of our Midwestern city as the climate crisis progresses.
We will share worker’s stories, organizer’s challenges, and interview
people involved in the intersecting racial, labor, and climate justice
movements. Each show will balance hope and struggle, with a deep delve
into the theoretical backgrounds of our topic of the month, followed by
an interview, a reflection period, and some brief calls to action that
listeners can feel empowered to participate in. For this issue though,
you’ll just get to hang out with us — your hosts. Lastly, we want to
break down institutional barriers that historically gate kept this
knowledge — our coverage of social theories, history, and the future
will be discussed in a way that is accessible to all listeners.
How does climate relate to the increasing severity of our local housing
crisis? How does climate relate to our cities’ increasing demands for
racial justice? How does it relate to abolition, how does it relate to
queerness, how does it relate to mobility justice, how does climate
relate to literally every social issue we have ever grappled with? And
we are here to at least approach an answer to these questions, or maybe
we will leave with more questions, but either way someone needs to be
having this conversation. So we hope that you will stick with us to
critically analyze these topics and join us in our daring endeavor to
imagine a future that is radically different from the present.
The George Floyd Rebellions of 2020 put the topic of police abolition
into the minds of a lot of youth around the world. Autonomous action
taken during that summer helped forge networks between people who have
been struggling against police brutality for years and those who don’t
see a sustainable future in the status quo. Simply put, abolition is the
process of putting an end to an institution or practice. Our use of the
term abolition is rooted in the black autonomy tradition that grew out
of the settler colonial slave diaspora. By “settler colonial slave
diaspora” we are specifically talking about the extraction of Indigenous
people from Africa due to the slave trade, being forcefully placed in
the Americas and forced to do labor that benefitted colonists settling
in Native American lands. Some of the most repeated historical
conceptions of abolition come from the call to end the
disenfranchisement of black labor and put an end to slavery, but the on
the ground call for abolition was aimed at white supremacy as a social
and political movement. The war against white supremacy hasn’t ended, we
continue to see indigenous peoples and cultures genocided, poc and queer
bodies harassed, killed and thrown away. Generations before us
understood that surviving in the United States means forced
assimilation, for children born into the diaspora, some have seen our
parents’ attitude and self determination falter and crumble before our
youths. With the concept of police abolition gaining traction it was
just a matter of time that the tactic of abolition was to be applied to
all the oppressive forces that plague us.
Prison abolitionists, both in and out of detention, have been calling
for us to collectively address the police’s role in the continuation of
slavery in our penal system. The abolition of ICE detention centers,
jails and prisons in action means dissolving our current institutions of
detention making collective space for networks of care and
rehabilitation. That logic extends to the point of contact community
members have with the law, where broken civil liberties are most likely
to go unreported or uncorroborated. It’s important to me to note,
institutions at the scale of the police and detention centers are not
just dissolved but dismantled from the bottom up by autonomous actors.
But while pursuing an end to all state-sanctioned violence, more than
anything, we must be working in a way that makes such institutions
unnecessary. It’s vital we are building our own collective systems of
liberation. These actions, and the networks that support them, are
formed outside the state in an explicit move to build power. By
investing in systems of dual power we gain the capacity to create new
social institutions that are founded on community care. We must be
confronting the on the ground struggle that our current economics model
demands us to engage in.
And by that do we mean capitalism?
Absolutely! The conditions that a capitalist economic system demands are
just plain unsustainable. Having rigid hierarchies and theorized
“unlimited value growth” makes it almost impossible for those with
capital in the 21^(st) century not to perpetuate the patterns of
centralized accumulation and unsustainable land stewardship. Centuries
of colonialism and racist economic and social policies have privileged
certain classes and social milieus with the capability to accumulate
capital and structure their methods of economic growth before most of us
have had a chance to engage. But if we want to champion sustainable
communities and lifestyles we need to escape the rat race, we must
consider our soft and hard power as community members to better our own
conditions and break down the walls suffocating us. The new political
and social institutions we create will determine how we facilitate this
trade and management of wealth and clout. For this reason we have to
have these discussions that create new economic models and theories.
The current economic models wouldn’t seem so permanent if not for the
state’s relentless efforts to protect them through the modern state
institutions such as the police, military, department of the interior,
and the National Endowment for (alleged) Democracy.
Abolitionist autonomous actions are the catalyst for our collective
imagination for liberatory politics. A lot more people are waking up to
the role of economics in our political lives and more importantly
swallowing the pill that the personal is political, damn near everything
is a political choice. When we choose to allow multi-unit housing to go
empty for months because landowners want to exploit land as a capital
asset, we are going against the vital substrate of all existence,
negating the fact that we belong to the land, not the other way around.
When we contextualize how the police function to secure the neoliberal
and colonial attitudes of the state, we are explicitly subverting the
State’s ability to demonstrate its soft power over our psyche. But to
continue our struggle against the prison industrial complex (PIC) and
military industrial complex (MIC) we must come together against all
forms of domination. Our struggle for a sustainable future has no
border, no matter how many billions of dollars nation-states will spend
in attempt after attempt to legitimize borders. The Ecological crisis we
are experiencing doesn’t care about profit and neither can the
collective institutions of our future. As William C Anderson said in his
book, The Nation on No Map: black anarchism and abolition
“ as I confront ideas about nation building and/or trying to use or
reform state power, I ultimately want to encourage others to take
abolition and apply it to borders, nations and states”
They go on by,
“Envisioning a nation that doesn’t need to be a nation and that doesn’t
need to be on a map, because it knows borders, states, and boundaries
cannot accommodate the complexities of our struggle”
We have been barely surviving for too long, and we are running out of
earth to fight over. It’s vital we fight in ways that aren’t reproducing
oppressive structures, our means must be justified in their own right to
create sustainable and just ends.
In a modern analysis of anarchic thought video essayist Daniel Baryon
defines
“Anarchy is both individual and collective freedom to develop our full
creative capacities, constituted through equality of structural power
and the eternal principle of human solidarity. Such a society is not
then a state of unrest, but the condition of existence in which humanity
can determine for themselves what sort of future they wish to inhabit,
free of direction by some dominator class, instead carried forth by
their own motivated wills. If this society has been explained to you as
a state of chaos, understand only that your rulers wish you to think of
a society without domination, a society in which you are in control, as
chaos”
Now sit with that for a second, if you can perhaps think that sure if
“I” was in control maybe “I” might not do so well for that long, or
maybe not at all. But understand that line of thinking applies to our
current system, one where you have the capacity to accumulate power or
signifier of power i.e. capital, and only you. That is what we are
attempting to escape. What we posit through anarchic frameworks is
creating dynamic social conditions where the checks and balances of our
political governing systems can be self-sustaining. Not in a passive way
in which we tout the party or mass line and uphold the status quo, but
one that is legitimized by the active participation in societal efforts.
We are coming together to increase the capacity of EVERYONE on this
earth to have an impact on their material conditions. So, if upending
white supremacist political institutions in their entirety means we must
abolish our contempory political governing structure, so it goes.
Hopefully over the course of our time together discussing and acting out
our future, we can forge a unity and an understanding that knows of such
liberation.
We love to have these conversations so early on in setting the
foundation of our time in this show. Because we really do need to be
thinking very broadly about what abolition entails. Like most people
just think it means to get rid of prisons. But the ideology is so much
deeper than only disappearing one of the many facets of this huge system
that works to oppress us.
In Amerika, where lots of people talk about freedom and liberty without
defining why or how we liberate ourselves, it leaves some of us
questioning just how free we are? When our food and energy supplies are
being disrupted and devastated by corporate interests, how can we claim
liberty? The lack of community ownership & input coupled with the
erasure of native knowledge and sovereignty, which has left our soil
damaged and has had demonstrable effects on our mental and physical
wellbeing, how can we preach freedom? When communities suffering from
decades of old racist zoning codes and regulations are forced to
compounded the stress on our youth by explaining, carefully, how to
engage with law enforcement because any engagement could lead to a loss
of life or mobility. We must be centering discussion of actions with
felt impacts on our communities. There are so many intersectional
oppressive forces that the previous colonial leaders have “left for
future generations to handle” and it’s become more than apparent that
those who have been hanging onto that colonial institutional power have
no will to put in the work of changing it. With those oppressive forces
working overtime on our marginalized communities we need to be
increasing the capacity for self and communal sufficiency. So we can’t
talk about environmental justice or liberty without first talking about
abolition.
According to most scholars in the environmental justice literature, and
specifically Dr. Robert Bullard, environmental justice (EJ) is the
principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal
protection under environmental health laws and regulations. This is kind
of the same definition that has been adopted by the US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). An expanded definition of this would include
the right to not be exposed to environmental harms or toxins. This is a
right to all humans regardless of race, class, or other social
identities that keep folks in the margins.
The environmental justice movement, however, did not begin by addressing
the intersection of these and other areas of marginalization. The rise
of the EJ movement was a result of the continued work in the civil
rights movement and also the emergence of an anti-toxics movement in the
United States in the early 1970s. So in the beginning, a lot of
environmental justice demonstrations were focused on exposure to toxic
pollution. For example, one of the critical events which is highly
regarded as the “starting point” of the US EJ movement was the Warren
County, North Carolina protest in 1982. In Warren County, there had been
a proposal to create a dump site for PCB-contaminated soil. PCBs are
“polychlorinated biphenyls,” which are industrial products or chemicals
that have been shown to be very harmful to human and environmental
health. PCBs were banned in the US in the late 1970s, and the producers
of these chemicals had to get rid of them somewhere! So it seems they
started dumping them on poor, often Black, communities with low amounts
of political power. This resulted in the residents and supporting
communities mobilizing against this proposal, which brought in national
media attention and also resulted in over 500 arrests in civil
disobedience.
In 2012, residents from Warren County acquired a historical marker for
this site and held an anniversary celebration in which Rev. Ben Chavis,
a civil rights activist that participated in direct actions in the name
of EJ, was present to give a speech addressing the significance of this
moment in history, which included a forewarning…
<quote> “PCB is polychlorinated biphenyl. Polychlorinated Biphenyl, one
of the most carcinogenic, one of the most cancer causing substances ever
produced by man. It’s man-made, it’s a residue, it’s a runoff, it’s a
by-product. No matter what science, there’s something wrong with
concentrating PCB, even in the best scientific landfill. All landfills
eventually leak. Thank god it has been detoxified, but we still have to
raise the question. Why detoxification in the first place? Why?
We must move forward and not backward, there are forces in our society
right today, They want to take our society backwards. they want to go to
the days of segregation, they want to go to the days of inequity and
injustice. People want to blame poor people for being poor.” </quote
From here, the first EJ-focused social study was conducted in 1983 by
the US General Accounting Office to investigate the racial demography of
communities near toxic waste sites in the South. The results of the
study found that 3 out of the 5 most toxic commercial hazardous waste
sites in the US are located in neighborhoods where Black and Latinx
residents are a majority of the resident population. This led to the
eventual publishing of the famous 1987 United Church of Christ study
titled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which was the first
nationally conducted study to confirm that, above considerations of
class, racial identity was the most significant factor predicting
resident proximity to waste sites producing harmful toxic pollution.
Rev. Ben Chavis who we just heard that speech from was actually one of
the directors of the famous UCC study. Twenty years later, in 2007, a
new report was published (titled “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty”)
which addressed the continued presence of disproportionate exposure to
toxic waste by the poor and specifically by Black communities in the US.
The report states,
“It is ironic that twenty years after the original Toxic Wastes and Race
report, many of our communities not only face the same problems they did
back then, but now they face new ones because of government cutbacks in
enforcement, weakening health protection, and dismantling the
environmental justice regulatory apparatus. Our new report, Toxic Wastes
and Race at Twenty, again signals clear evidence of racism where toxic
waste sites are located and the way [the] government responds to toxic
contamination emergencies in people of color communities,” (pg. 8).
Off of this momentum, EJ formed a more coherent movement in the late
1980s which continues today. Now today we do not only see the addressing
of toxic waste, but we also see EJ focusing on food insecurity,
long-term community health outcomes, infant mortality, mobility, housing
security, proximity to natural disaster areas, proximity to mining
areas, runoff, and so many more topics which we will get into in depth
in this show.
Now, some environmentalists consider EJ to be a “contentious topic”
because some mainstream environmentalists do not think that JUSTICE is
necessary to achieve a fossil free future, an end or at least survival
through the climate crisis, or “sustainable” lifestyles. We
wholeheartedly disagree with this assumption. We think that social
justice has to be at the CENTER of any conversation about environmental
justice, because only by abolishing the institutions that are hurting
our communities can we build more sustainable futures for ourselves and
the more-than-human world.
In the past too, there was quite a lot of pushback in the beginning of
the EJ movement about race being the most deterministic factor of
proximity to pollution, with many scholars in and outside of academia
claiming that actually class was the determining factor of proximity to
toxic pollution. There was also this whole chicken-or-egg debate about
if industries were siting their waste sites in existing Black and POC
communities or if POC were later moving to those areas because of a
lower cost of living. (Side note: Indigenous communities were being
attacked this entire time, but the scholarship didn’t really pick up on
this for years). These claims against race as a factor have been largely
refuted today, but it’s brought up from time to time. Many scholars have
published a variety of different quantitative studies that use different
geographic data points to calculate the significance of impact of race
or class on exposure to show that, even with different methods, race is
still the biggest factor. Mostly I think I would consider the debate to
be settled. There is just too much evidence pointing to the fact that,
regardless of class, being a member of a racially marginalized group
puts you at greater risk of being exposed to life-altering toxic
pollution. I think we as community organizers intimately involved in
this work can attest to that.
I think the inclusion of “justice” in environmental organizing is
changing really fast in today’s mainstream environmental movement, but
you have to remember this was the 80s and early 90s, and honestly most
of the early 2000s as well. I mean, there is a clear lack of
understanding of intersectionality in all of those arguments from back
then. Even as BIPOC scholars, who are the founders of this field of
study, consistently made strong arguments that, while class is a factor,
race outweighs class, the majority of social scientists at the time
refuted the claims. But today, if you look at the propaganda being
pumped out of the Big Tent of mainstream environmental organizations,
like the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, and Greenpeace, and
even the National Park Service, they are going through this weird
rebranding where suddenly it seems like at least they are AWARE of the
need for justice in the environmental movement.
What does that mean for people on the ground? What kind of structural or
interpersonal challenges are formed/need to be confronted when mass
organizations with money and clout are playing catchup?
It’s interesting, because we … have trust issues. Right? Like I do not
trust the National Park Service to actually address justice issues, I
will be extremely surprised if they did in any significant way, and even
then I would be skeptical. But I think what it could mean in the
immediate and material future is money. Money being moved out of the
hands of these large institutions which have historically not
re-invested their funds into actual grassroots efforts. We may actually
see that money and it will be up to us, as locals on the ground, to
assess what is the most sustainable use for those resources as they come
in. Because once they realize that the justice movement would threaten
their ability to make money off of nature or politics or whatever it is,
the money will probably stop coming in. And in terms of relationships
with those organizations, I would say that as long as there is no formal
obligation to provide or do anything in order to access those resources,
it could be really beneficial to smaller groups. Because once you enter
into formal agreements about “this money will be used to accomplish this
goal, and you have to publish a report on it, and you have to re-apply
for these grants to ensure you can keep your organization alive,” then
the grassroots organization has been captured.
Which is the perfect segue to going back and addressing what
environmental justice has to do with abolition and why we are talking
about it today. For one, environmental justice and the climate crisis
are two topics that we will discuss at length throughout this show. And
we cannot talk about those topics without grounding ourselves in the
principles of abolition and liberation. As we mentioned earlier,
abolition in general is the ending of an institution or practice. Most
commonly in the United States, abolition is discussed in reference to
the prison industrial complex. But there is much to be said about
abolishing other violent institutions, which we would define as
institutions that can exert physical or psychological violence against
individuals and communities in an effort to force social control onto
those communities and benefit the institution. Usually this looks like
the state or the private sector (or their offspring) screwing people to
make a profit. This is broad and it would include many of the
institutions (and their extensions) that we often find ourselves
operating within, such as any of our governmental institutions,
detention centers, even public schools and yes, our economic system of
capitalism. In order to achieve environmental justice, which is a
process and an outcome, we need to live free from harm of toxic wastes,
with access to the material resources needed to survive, while assuming
a mutually beneficial stewardship with the natural world. It will
require the abolition of many things, including the abolition of fossil
fuel extraction, which means the abolition of capitalism, and the
processes that protect it, to achieve this goal.
To actively fight for land stewardship starts with questioning the roots
of our aforementioned trust issues. In our current position we cannot
afford toxic cleanup when conglomerates and subsidiaries, having no
budget for aftercare, ravage the wellbeing of our bioregion to exploit
local resources and labor. We lack community based investment programs
that are purely focused on redeveloping our built world to meet the ever
expanding needs of community members. If you consider our municipal
agencies, who are kept in lockstep by local capitalist and
landowner-owned NGO’s and staff, the political body is up to the task,
then we have a lot of work to do. That’s why we’re here. The prevalence
of these monied interests and the mindset they impose upon the public
makes it hard to remember that opportunities for change are not locked
in a building in city hall. As corny as it is, we all have the power to
stop injustices in their tracks. The access to information in the last
30 years has changed how generations have grown to adapt and conform to
conditions they have been born into. We are a part of a social
revolution around the world that has been ongoing since before colonial
boats hit any shore. One that pertains to sustaining our ecosystem not
in a way that preserves just what works but in a way that helps us adapt
without asserting domination over our ecology.
Like we mentioned in the beginning… We are staring the climate crisis in
the face. There are millions of climate refugees worldwide already. The
wildfire season keeps extending. Growing seasons are changing. Floods
are increasing in severity. There have been a ridiculous amount of
devastating hurricanes even in the last season alone. We have seen snow
maybe twice in the 2021–2022 Ohio winter. And yet we still like to
pretend that we are not going to feel these effects in the Midwest. This
is simply not true!!!! Lake Erie is suffering from severe algal blooms,
our climate is changing in a way that is forcing native plants to move
North, we are experiencing heat waves and increased rainfall. The crisis
is HERE AND NOW. And we need to get ready for that. We need to organize
our communities because we know that the state will not protect us as
long as it is rooted in protecting white supremacy, settler colonialism
and global neoliberal capitalism.
But, not only that.Yes, the crisis is here. But here in Columbus, in
Ohio, we are in a pretty strategic location to deal with the impacts of
the climate crisis. We do not live in a natural disaster corridor like
our comrades in the Southern US or on the coasts. If we can protect
them, we have the protection of the Great Lakes in return. So more than
anything else we need to plan for the future in which WE are at the
HEART of the battle against the crisis in the US. People will move here
from regions of the world more prone to disaster (AND ARE! ALREADY!).
Columbus is poised to be a really important physical place in the next
10, 20, 30 years. So as we gear up and organize our communities, we need
to be constantly evaluating ourselves. We are the future. How do we
manifest our imaginations into physical reality? We need to support Land
Back and Indigenous sovereignty, we need to support BLM, we need to
support reproductive rights, we need to plan ahead, stop being so
reactionary, and provide social infrastructure for our communities. And,
we believe we can do that. We just need to start.
The truth of the matter is we are in no position to continue the use of
colonial ethics, social status or financial status as a way to deem
someone’s worthiness for necessary resources. It all comes back to land
stewardship and who our society deems fit to make those decisions. We
can’t be scared of our innate power as human beings, but embrace it and
how we can change our built world. When we collectivize our power we can
no longer be out-organized by monied interest. Sustainable social and
political infrastructure is built through grassroots efforts and our
elders have been putting in the work generation after generation and
against all odds. We have to be ready to grow from whatever calamity is
tossed our way. To never conform around the nation-state and its
identity. But to carve out our own space and let it shine, to inspire
and revitalize those who may feel like there isn’t enough energy right
now to make change. To understand the solutions to generations problems
we must be looking internally at how we perpetuate those because no one
is 100% innocent. We all hold the guilt of complacency that is born of
privilege and ignorance. Such realizations are not prompts for mass
paralyzation but calls to action to each individual who wants change. We
must actively change and build on the foundation we have inherited
through past struggle. Sustainable resistance is one of healthy
community relations and active vulnerability to embrace hope. So, if
you’re reading this and ya feel the need to act, and act now, you are
the resistance, stay strong!
This month we want to highlight the ongoing struggle in Columbus agaisnt
police brutality in the midwest, we want to shout out a group of
community memebers working to shine light on Casey goodson Jr.’s story
and truth in light of the up coming trail of Murderer Micheal Jason
Meade. Meade had shot Casey in the back 6 times as Casey was entering
his house. Meade is just one example of the how policing has been used
as an istrument of terror, because if not for the communtiy outrage we
don’t believe there would even be a trail. So help the community members
share Casey’s truth to the people of Franklin county or your local
region. For more information follow @convictmeade on instagram facebook
and twitter and reach out if you want to get involved.
We also want to highlight the case of James Williams, a father who was
shot through his backyard fence by canton pd after shooting his firearm
in the air on new years. The officers did not name themselves or engage
in contact with Williams until after the shooting started. if you want
to get involved with these ongoing struggles you can find updates on the
facebook pages of Consistency Speaks and Persistent Media
Back to hope… here’s a quote from Dr. Cornel West closing out our first
zine
“I’m not optimistic, I don’t believe in optimism. I don’t believe in
pessimism. Black folks say “I’ve been down so long, that down don’t
worry me no more, but I’ll keep struggling anyway” that is not an
optimistic statement, nor a pessimistic one. Neither sentimental nor
cynical. It is an expression of hope. Never confuse or conflate hope
with optimism. Hope cuts against the grain, hope is participatory, hope
it’s an agent in the world. Optimism looks at the evidence so see
whether it allows us to infer if we can do x or y. Hope says”I don’t
give a damn, I’m gonna do it anyway”
You just read the first zine By Hot N Bothered: Cultivating Sustainable
Resistance. We would like to take a moment to acknowledge folks and
organizations who have worked on and inspired the production of this
content
: And another shoutout to: Mutual Aid Street Solidarity (@massohio),
Sunrise Columbus (@sunrisecolumbus), Convict Murderer Meade
(@convictmeade), Tamala Payne (Casey’s mother @misstypayne), and elders
in the environmental justice movement such as Dr. Robert Bullard, Rev.
Ben Chavis, Dr. Cornel West, and others who we will mention in a future
episode.