Environmentalism from Below Talk: Imperialism, Poetry, and the Struggle for a New Energy Future

This is a paper I presented as part of a roundtable for Ashley Dawson’s Environmentalism from Below, at the CUNY Grad Center

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Thank you all for being here, and thank you Ashley for this wonderful and insightful book.

I want to talk about a central concern that Ashley highlights in his chapter on “Reclaiming the Energy Commons”: the fight for energy autonomy, a public power (in both senses of the word) that works toward a just transition away from fossil fuels and toward a grid of renewable energy democratically controlled by the people. In the examples of India and South Africa, we find the confluence of repressive and corrupt governments, profit-driven energy production, and the people caught in between.

In the chapter, Ashley, I think very importantly, emphasizes the frictions between energy production and narratives of decolonial liberation—something stressed particularly in his discussion of Modi’s India but can be seen in many other former colonized countries across the world. This acknowledgment points toward the difficulties faced by a world system of energy consumption, a system that must consume and produce electricity to continue to grow and consume. This cycle of growth swallows not just the land needed to dig a mine, or the ocean floor drilled for oil but also the people who live on the front lines of these extractive practices.

Ashley, as well, recognizes that electricity is “one of the fundamental elements of modernity” and that blackouts–caused by “acts of god” or government or corporation—have both “material and psychological” impacts. The lack of reliable energy and the fight for it is a fundamental concern of this section of Ashley’s book, and I think one that is illustrative of the project in general: the struggle, not simply for a just transition away from fossil fuels, but a people’s movement that will fundamentally transform the ways we interact both with each other and with the natural world. 

In the locations Ashley discusses in the chapter, we see the violence of coal mining and energy production and the ways in which extractivism is both a kind of slow violence and fast violence: the slowness of landscape pollution and the immediate violence mediated onto resistance movements.

In India, a narrative of national self-reliance turned into a kind of distorted logic of extractivist decolonialism, culminating in 2020’s “Unleash Coal” campaign. And when global north countries who, according to Indian officials, had already “colonized the atmosphere” (122), attempted to call for a “phase-out” of coal, the government and some activists were quick to label this a kind of hypocrisy. And, in some ways, they are correct. The Global North did colonize the atmosphere, did pollute poorer countries, shipping its waste and garbage overseas. However, this language is a question we must still think through in order to complete a global phase-out of fossil fuels, and I am curious to hear more of Ashley’s thoughts on this kind of narrative later.

Of course, to unleash this coal, someone would need to be displaced: The Adivasi people, who, after the passage of the Forest Rights Act in 2006, were the legal protectors of the forest in which corporations like the Adani Group wanted to mine. However, laws put in place during British colonial rule “grant the state sovereignty over all resources that lie beneath the surface” (124). The expropriation of land for mining, Ashley points out, “originates in colonial violence…” (125). This kind of violence—both state-enforced or state-supported—props up a corrupt extractive industry, which the Adivasi people have fought back against to save not just their lives and the forest but the very autonomy that the state attempts to strip from those who resist displacement in the name of profit. The Adivasi, in protest, performed nonviolent actions such as forest occupations, blocking roads, and peaceful marches.

In South Africa, as well as in India, Ashley introduces a key idea for thinking about how extractive industries turn land into locations of slow and fast violence: the idea of the sacrifice zone. These zones are places in which the land has been turned into hostile and deadly landscapes, where, in the case of Highveld, the area has been turned into a “hellscape,” filled with toxic waste and poisonous air. Drought, pollution, and displacement are the legacies of cheap fossil fuels in South Africa, and after their takeover, the ANC abandoned their socialist vision for a neoliberal one, leading to mass “service delivery” protests, a popular rebellion against the ANC’s failure to deliver on its promise “ to provide basic services such as water, education, housing, and electricity to its constituents” (113).

The struggle for a just transition in South Africa calls not just for a transition away from fossil fuels but a total reorientation of society. The One Million Climate Jobs proposal is an articulation of the necessity of thinking of socially owned, renewable energy, good union jobs, and green infrastructure as interconnected parts of a vision of a new energy future. This is a crucial insight in this section of Ashley’s book: that in order to build a green future, we must transform society as a whole. To create green energy alone, without thinking about the ways in which political and social domination are connected to energy production and infostructure, is to only think of this issue one-dimensionally. Moreover the key, as Ashley highlighted, in South Africa was located in resisting the ANC’s plans to privatize Eskom and figuring out how to turn it into a socially owned vehicle for renewable energy. And here, we might see a parallel with Ashley’s work with the Public Power campaign.

The fight for the future of the planet is the fight for power. And here, we must think about power in both its meanings. Right now, the struggle for power, as Ashley points out, is no more important than it has ever been, and in this chapter, and in the book as a whole, Ashley wrestles with the ways in which people who’ve been dispossessed, sickened, beaten, impoverished, and killed by fossil fuel energy production can take back power from governments who’ve stripped the public sector for parts, selling it off for short-term debt relief and international extorters like the World Bank and IMF. In a similar sense, the word energy and its dual meanings provide an insight into the relationship between people’s movements and the necessity of a transition toward green, social energy.

Electrical energy flows between power plants and homes, across wires and through cables; the energy of the people moves across town squares and fields. The energy of the crowd, Jodi Dean writes in Crowds and Party, is libidinal, it flows and collectives, solidifies into a mass of communal autonomy. The energy and power of the mass movement, the crowd camping in the woods or chaining themselves to a bulldozer is the future of energy and power. To build socially owned, collective energy, we need social and collective power built through the energy of the crowd, the mass of people resisting in various locations and means, and Ashley’s book underlines the diverse tactics through which people resist the world as it is with the vision of the world as it must be.

I want to finish by thinking through electricity in the poetry of and about Palestine. In June Jordan’s “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” she writes:

  They said they wanted simply to carve

a 25 mile buffer zone and then

they ravaged your

water supplies your electricity your

hospitals your schools your highways and byways all.

the way north to Beirut because they said this

was their quest for peace

 The reality and necessity of electricity becomes an axis of war and genocide. The vital unitarily of electricity is weaponized, turned into a location of violence and elimination. It is, as well, a tool through colonial domination is realized in the daily lives of people under occupation. It is a method of control. In Gaza, Israel has cut electricity, let power plants run out of fuel, allowed hospitals to run out of power. Water and electricity, two basic needs of life, are cut off in the drive toward elimination. Everyday life is disrupted.

This logic is present in Naomi Shihab Nye’s “You Are Your Own State Department”:

somebody soon the steady eyes of children in Gaza. ,

yearning for a little extra electricity

to cool their lemons and cantaloupes, will be known.

And, in Mahmoud Darwish’s A River Dies of Thirst, electricity is tenable, an always-in-flux character, moving in and out of poems as Darwish wonders when it is coming on again—or when it might be shut off. In “He said: I am afraid” the fear of being without electricity is presented as one of many fears under brutal occupation. Of course, electricity doesn’t just provide light; it provides power and information, as Darwish illustrates in “Beyond Identification” as he sits and watches the news or himself as the totem of the entirety of Palestine. “I sit in front of the television since I can’t do anything else. There, in front of the television, I discover my feelings and see what’s happening to me.” Electricity here is information; it is assurance, or, at the very least, a connection to the world outside the walls of the home or the militarized border.

All these instances point toward the necessity of power and the ways in which electricity is an essential utility in the lives of people, most especially those living in brutal and violent occupations. Power is, as Ashley’s book has stressed, a central location in the fight for our collective future, and collectives like Global Blockadia provide a hopeful blueprint for a fossil-free future. Their successes point toward the power of people to shut things down, and by developing these cross-national networks, we find a vision of a new, democratic, and green future.