Crazy Town
Crazy Town
Escaping Imperialism: Where Does Darth Vader Get His Lithium?
Perhaps no community has undergone more versions of imperialism than the tiny island nation of Nauru, which has morphed from being "Pleasant Island" to the mined-out home of offshore banks, discarded refugees, and deep sea mining interests. Jason, Rob, and Asher take a bad trip to wrap their heads around Nauru, the topic of "psychedelic imperialism," and imperialism's new frontier - the clean energy transition.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- "A Dark History of the World's Smallest Island Nation" tells the tale of Nauru.
- S.J. Gale, "Lies and misdemeanours: Nauru, phosphate and global geopolitics," The Extractive Industries and Society, vol 6, July 2019.
- FAQs of the Metals Company
- Eric Lipton's New York Times article about imperialistic mining of the Pacific Ocean floor.
- Mining Watch Canada questions the claims of the Metals Company.
- Elham Shabahat's article in Hakai Magazine, "Why Nauru Is Pushing the World Toward Deep-Sea Mining"
- Definition of imperialism from the Cornell Law School
- J.A. Hobson's book Imperialism: A Study
- Jason Hickel et al., "Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990-2015," Global Environmental Change, vol 73, March 2022.
- Critique of lithium extraction in the Atacama Desert
- Indigenous people's response to lithium mining in Nevada
- How the Sami people are protesting Sweden's "green transformation"
- Episode 3 of the Holding the Fire podcast, featuring Sami leader Aslak Holmberg
- Cobus van Staden on "Green Energy's Dirty Secret: Its Hunger for African Resources"
- Jim Robbins in Yale Environment 360 on "How Returning Lands to Native Tribes Is Helping Protect Nature"
- "Indigenous Land Return Announcement by Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Movement Generation!" -- article by Ines Ixierda
- "New Zealands's Maori fought for reparations -- and won"
Rob Dietz
I'm Rob Dietz.
Jason Bradford
I'm Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town, where we have to travel to other planets, because we can't colonize this one anymore.
Melody Allison
Hi, this is Crazy Town producer Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in season six, we're exploring escape routes, pathways that just might get us out of Crazy Town. In today's episode, Jason, Rob, and Asher are escaping imperialism. Here's a quick warning. Sometimes this podcast uses swear words (LANGUAGE!). If you like what you're hearing, please let some friends know about Crazy Town. Now, onto the show.
Asher Miller
Hey, guys.
Jason Bradford
Hey! You too.
Asher Miller
Early afternoon here in Crazy Town headquarters.
Jason Bradford
Yep.
Asher Miller
Jason, I want to ask you a question.
Jason Bradford
Please.
Asher Miller
You're a global traveler.
Jason Bradford
In the olden days, yes.
Rob Dietz
A fuel burning cretin.
Jason Bradford
A lot of kerosene.
Asher Miller
You've been to far flung destinations all around the world. You've talked about going to the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia You trop New Caledonia.
Asher Miller
New Caledonia?
Asher Miller
Yeah, exactly. So you've gone to those places for your field research. Did you ever go to Nauru.
Jason Bradford
Well, actually not because I went to places where there was living vegetation.
Asher Miller
Oh, okay. Yeah, see, I thought you might have gone there and that's what broke your brain and sent you into Crazy Town.
Jason Bradford
Well, I do studies. I figured out - are there forests where I'm gonna go and if so, are my plants there?
Rob Dietz
You had to do a study to see if there was going to be forest where you wanted to go?
Jason Bradford
Yes. And Nauru, ah. Tough, tough place.
Asher Miller
Well, so Nauru, the story of Nauru, I deep dove this because this might be the craziest town story I can imagine, to be honest with you.
Rob Dietz
Craziest town, craziest towniest of all the stories?
Asher Miller
It's pretty dark. So, you know, grab your blankets, get your hot cocoa, you know. Get your stuffed animal. Get cozy. So I'm gonna try to run through the history a little quickly. So it was first settled by Micronesians, like 3,000 years ago, right. And they practice a form of aquaculture. It's not a big island, you know, but they were fishing. They had about 12 clans who lived on the island. They did have occasional conflicts with each other. But the population did manage to sustain them selves for like 3,000 years. And then they had some visitors show up. Okay, so the first was a British ship named Snow Hunter in 1798. Their captain named it Pleasant Island because it looked so beautiful. They'd had an encounter with indigenous population there, but they didn't actually go on to the island at first so they kind of waved at each other. But over the decades, you know, this is an area that's not far from Australia, New Zealand, you know, in the Pacific. Well, they had some escapees from the penal colonies, the British penal colonies, who would go hide out on Nauru, right?
Asher Miller
Pleasant Island.
Asher Miller
Yeah, exactly. And had a good time. And of course, they had to, you know, they had to like, infiltrate and put themselves sort of as the go between. So they often were the go between the European traders and kind of the native indigenous population. So over the next 90 years or so, you know, they traded regularly with Europeans who came by on whaling and trading ships. And, you know, among other things that they acquired were firearms and alcohol.
Jason Bradford
Oops, yeah.
Asher Miller
And that led eventually to a 10 year long civil war.
Jason Bradford
On that little island?
Asher Miller
On the tiny little island, yeah. A lot of violence broke out. So this has been kind of like a British colony, I guess, you could say.
Rob Dietz
Well, to be fair, who hasn't been a British colony at some time or another. I mean . . .
Asher Miller
Well, the Brits themselves had been colonies. So what goes around comes around. Anyways, the Germans took over. They annexed it in 1888.
Rob Dietz
They decided, here, it's from Germany.
Asher Miller
Yeah, the only way we could put a kibosh on this like civil war shit that's going on here is let's just name some Kings, right? That's the way we gotta do this, right? But then the real fun began, okay? I mean all that's the preamble, right?
Jason Bradford
Yes.
Asher Miller
Real fun is a year later an Australian geologist named Albert Ellis, later he was knighted by the queen. Was the it the queen or the king? I don't remember who it was. One of those whatevers. He discovered that there was a piece of petrified wood that was being used as a doorstop in the offices of this company that he worked at, you know, it was like a trading company. And they thought it was like petrified wood, but he was like, "Oh, that doesn't really look like petrified wood." So he studied it, and he realized it was high grade phosphate ore.
Jason Bradford
Oopsie.
Rob Dietz
I love this. I love it when it's just an accident that somebody's like, "Oh, look at this petrified wood." Nope, that's phosphate. Maybe we could use that . . .
Asher Miller
That's the origin story of some serious evil shit that went down. So he was like, "Oh, wow, high grade phosphate." So he decided to travel to Nauru to investigate and discovered that 80% of the entire island was rich in phosphate deposits. And these, Jason, as you know, farmer here, they are highly valuable as a fertilizer.
Jason Bradford
Well, especially in Australia, where the land is very low in phosphorus.
Asher Miller
Right. And they settlers there from the penal colonies who were farming there, and they were already depleting the soil. So they were kind of desperate for this phosphate. To the point when World War One broke out, they decided to seize the opportunity. And they invaded and took control of the island from the Germans. And then they just went to went to freakin' town. Now, between 1922 and 1966, at least 83% of Nauru's annual output ended up in the fields of Australia and New Zealand, right?
Jason Bradford
Sure.
Asher Miller
So they just mined the hell out of this stuff.
Rob Dietz
We talked about mountaintop removal. This is island removal. You're just shipping an island.
Jason Bradford
I think they made a doughnut so they're still like . . .
Asher Miller
There's this edge around the island, which is now where everyone lives. They live on this tiny strip, right on the kind of --
Jason Bradford
A circle. It's a circular economy.
Asher Miller
Right on the very coastal part. The beach part, right? They mined everything else in the middle. And they went through other occupations. The Japanese brutally treated the island to the point which was kind of massively depopulated during World War Two, but the money kept going on. So since the early 1900s, Naura has lost at least 80% of its original vegetation. To your point, Jason, we talked about earlier why you didn't go there. They've exported around 80 million metric tons of phosphate. So there's a guy named Peter DuVernay, Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia, he wrote a book called, "Environmentalism of the Rich." And he did a great job of kind of putting that number, that 80 million metric tons, into context. He wrote, quote, "If dump trucks could fly," which would be, god!
Rob Dietz
That would be awesome!
Asher Miller
I hope somebody is working on that. "The amount of phosphate could fill enough trucks to link them bumper to bumper from New York City to Tokyo, and then go back."
Jason Bradford
Oh, that's a long way.
Asher Miller
Yeah, that so much phosphate off this little island that they extracted and shipped out, right? And it came from an island that's about 1/3 of the size of Manhattan.
Jason Bradford
It tells you what volumetric space is like. We can't even conceive of that.
Asher Miller
And just how great we are at extracting the living shit out of it.
Rob Dietz
And think about Manhattan. You could walk Manhattan.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you can walk Nauru, too.
Asher Miller
Of course. You wouldn't want to walk through the middle of it.
Jason Bradford
No, you can't.
Asher Miller
Now on paper, they got their independence in 1968. They actually continued to increase production of phosphates after they gained their independence. And on paper, at a certain point they were considered the second highest per capita income in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia. Tells you something, right, extractive economies.
Rob Dietz
That's where you want to be. You want to be where the getting's good.
Asher Miller
Right. But it ended up leaving the ecosystem completely devastated. Their traditional way of life gone. The Native population there was completely reliant on this industry. And, as our listeners know, what goes up must come down. There's a dynamic called peak, peak oil, peak everything.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, there probably good graphs of the rise and the fall of exports of phosphate.
Rob Dietz
Well, it's actually just the fall of the island that would be a good graphic.
Asher Miller
Well, it's actually the rise of the seas around the island. Those two things are gonna, you know, meet at some point. So eventually, you know, they kind of tapped out, mined out the island, you know, by the 1990s. They are way down in terms of their exports. So that resort to other industries. Okay? So they decided, you know what? Offshore banking.
Jason Bradford
Genius.
Asher Miller
Yes. Eventually they licensed 400 foreign banks. So you know, you could use it as an offshore --
Jason Bradford
Nice.
Asher Miller
It's lovely. Then they said, like, "Let's sell passports."
Jason Bradford
I wonder how much that goes for?
Asher Miller
Yeah, I don't know. And you wonder who is seeking these passports, right? And then in 2001, Nauru allowed Australia to establish a detention center to process asylum seekers. There are people coming on boats from places like Afghanistan and Iraq, who've been trying to reach Australia. And Australia is like, no thanks. So they actually set up a detention center on Nauru instead.
Rob Dietz
Now look, you've clearly done your research in figuring out how the Nauru route economy has evolved over time, but I did a little more digging and it turns out --
Asher Miller
Little digging?
Rob Dietz
Well, it turns out that phosphate importation is really the growth area now. You want to be a phosphate importer if you want to keep that per capita income up.
Asher Miller
It reminds me of George Costanza. He's an importer and exporter.
Rob Dietz
Right. You just alternate between the two.
Jason Bradford
They've got a politician that's gonna make Nauru great again. And that's his platform.
Rob Dietz
MANA. Wait, that's not the right acronym.
Jason Bradford
Anyway . . .
Asher Miller
This is so bleak. God, I'm depressing myself. So by 2014, there were more than 1,200 asylum seekers. are living in tents. Basically no air conditioning, this blighted landscape in the center of Nauru. They had to like import water, import food, everything you know. They're kind of fenced in they're waiting for the Australians to figure out what they're gonna do. They're basically in purgatory on this island. And Australia is paying for the Naura people, the government, you know, a little bit of money to basically take care of this -- Invisiblize this problem for them, right. So now, you know, the island imports all its food, it has to import freshwater.
Rob Dietz
Told ya. Importation is where it's at.
Asher Miller
And then to add to everything else, they now face existential risk by sea level rise. Worsening storms due to climate change. So we can just stop there and be like, okay, yeah.
Jason Bradford
It's bad enough.
Asher Miller
Bad, bad story.
Asher Miller
Does it get worse? Well, it gets interesting. This is why I'm bringing this up and wanting to talk about this today.
Rob Dietz
It is Asher. We're gonna go to another level. Another depth of depravity here. So
Asher Miller
Yes, another depth. Okay? The latest story of Nauru's economy is being on the frontline of the push for deep sea mining.
Jason Bradford
Sure.
Asher Miller
Okay, so there are nodules on the seafloor, particularly in the Pacific, right, that contain minerals that are key to the energy transition. So there are a bunch of people rushing to figure out how to harvest the living shit out of the seafloor, because God knows.
Rob Dietz
We already harvested the island. Now we gotta get the seafloor.
Jason Bradford
I mean, why stop now?
Asher Miller
Okay, so Nauru entered into partnership with a Canadian company. They're called the Metals Company. Great name.
Jason Bradford
That's great. Simple.
Asher Miller
Yeah. And they're serving as a sponsoring state for one of its wholly owned subsidiaries. And the Metals Company is great. You should just check out their website. They have an FAQ section. And they're presenting themselves as being, you know, part of the solution to the energy transition. You know, we've got to transition to wind power, solar EVs, all that. And this is much cleaner way of harvesting the minerals that we need, right? So they're saying fewer emissions than land mining. Read their FAQ, because it's a great way of of kind of justifying that behavior in my view. And there's an international agency that was set up affiliate with the UN called the International Seabed Authority. They've been tasked with creating environmental regulations around ocean mining, but there's like a provision in it that member states could like enact, and that Nauru's done that on behalf of this company. You basically say, this process is gonna be fast tracked. It's got to be done within the next two years. So even if the environmental regulations aren't in place, they basically are on track to start mining this summer.
Jason Bradford
Wow.
Asher Miller
Yeah. And the Metals Company claims it could generate over $31 billion over 25 years. God knows how much of that is supposed to go to the Nauru people, but they --
Rob Dietz
What do you mean God knows. You know that zero of that --
Asher Miller
It's probably not zero, but it's, yeah.
Rob Dietz
It's very little, let's just say.
Asher Miller
And, you know, the company's cash strapped, right. So they're like, desperate for this to happen. Their stock is trading on the NASDAQ down near $1. So they've been warned a few times that they would be delisted if their stock price got any lower. So there's huge pressure, you know, to kind of get this money. Not just for environmental climate reasons, but because of the economic interests of this company. And then for the Naura people in our government it's like, what else do we have?
Jason Bradford
We have nothing left.
Rob Dietz
Well, I think the three of us should head over to Delaware and form a corporation and we will import seabed.
Asher Miller
Just seabed?
Rob Dietz
Yes. You know, as they take it out, we will be set up to import seabed. It will be awesome.
Asher Miller
In any case, so, you know, a nice heartwarming bedtime story as you know an introduction to today's topic, which is imperialism.
Jason Bradford
This is a tough topic.
Rob Dietz
There's nothing more heartwarming than empires and imperialism. I think we have to delve into the history just a little bit which in some ways --
Asher Miller
So are we gonna do every single country like I just did that level of detail?
Jason Bradford
Now let's talk about Genghis Khan.
Asher Miller
Do you know what it reminds me of? Like the airplane, the scenes of the guy like, I can't remember the character's name. He's like trying to tell about his love story. And people sitting next to him are committing suicide in a bunch of different ways.
Asher Miller
Ted Stryker.
Asher Miller
All of our listeners are gonna be lighting themselves on fire, hanging themselves in the airplane. Can't listen to this depressing story anymore, right?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Okay, so who should we go to after Nauru. Who's the next to be colonized?
Asher Miller
Well, we gotta go in alphabetical order.
Rob Dietz
Look, let's just talk a little bit about the history here, but not go so deep that we lose our minds. Quick definition: Imperialism is basically about extending power by acquiring territory. But that's kind of the old school way of doing imperialism. The new school way is to extend your political and economic control, so that that's the way you take over territory. The term of imperialism first came from John Atkinson Hobson. That sounds like he might have been an imperializer.
Asher Miller
That's not fair to say.
Rob Dietz
I know. I have no idea. But in 1902, he had a book called, "Imperialism: A Study." So despite its being around for so long, we haven't actually studied it for all that long. Of course, the term imperialism is connected to the idea of empire. And that's the political form that came from ancient times. When you say empire, who do you think of?
Jason Bradford
Oh, I think of Darth Vader.
Rob Dietz
Please. I'm the one who thinks of Darth Vader.
Asher Miller
Rome, right? Rome was the first one that most people think about.
Jason Bradford
Sure. But a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. So he set me up by thinking a long time ago.
Rob Dietz
The Galactic Empire is the oldest empire that we're aware of historically.
Jason Bradford
Thank you.
Rob Dietz
No question.
Asher Miller
Is it older than the one that the Scientologists believe in?
Rob Dietz
It's a frickin' long time ago.
Asher Miller
Okay, but the Scientologists are like, 500 million years ago.
Rob Dietz
It's a good one. I don't know. Maybe the next Star Wars trilogy can explore Scientology. Okay, but yeah, Rome of course. You know, they had a vast area, the Empire lasted about 1,500 years. Seems like a long time. We've seen examples of empire all over the place, though. Asia, Africa, South and Central America, everywhere.
Jason Bradford
Everywhere but Antarctica, I think.
Rob Dietz
The oldest one, aside from the Galactic Empire that we're aware of, is the Akkadian Empire, which reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BCE. That's a long damn time ago.
Asher Miller
A long time ago.
Rob Dietz
In Mesopotamia. So that's, you know, that's your quick tour of empire. I'm sure a deeper dive will depress you far more.
Jason Bradford
Oh, I see. Well, I think that given my creds as a historian. I think that the peak of Empire is a period of European colonization between the 15th and 19th centuries.
Rob Dietz
I couldn't agree more.
Jason Bradford
When you think about it, a lot of these empires were much more restricted geographically. But in this period, they started getting on sailing ships and going all kinds of places. I think the Chinese had these giant ships, but they didn't -- And they may have gone far, but they didn't colonize other parts of the world as much.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, you think about crossing the Atlantic. That's an unbelievable distance.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. So, it's just astonishing to imagine what that was like for other parts of the world to suddenly have these ships show up. Of course, you had the story of Nauru, but how much human labor through slavery and through, you know, undermining local ways of life so that the colony then provides resources quote, unquote, for the Empire. So really, hundreds of millions of people obviously, were oppressed by mostly kind of Western European nations. And they were, of course, competing against each other. So if your neighbor is an empire, you've got to be one so that you can kind of fend them off. It was a sort of arms race really.
Rob Dietz
It really is an amazing Keeping Up with the Joneses thing. Like you know, your Britain, your France, your Belgiums, your Netherlands.
Jason Bradford
Your Germanys. . . Yeah, your Portugal, your Spain.
Rob Dietz
I need more of these islands than they've got.
Jason Bradford
Unbelievable. So, in the 20th century, there was a lot of giving up of territory by European nations. And so, most of these colonies, at least territorially were given up. And so, this is a big change, obviously. But this makes me think about the difference between sort of colonialism, maybe, and imperialism.
Asher Miller
Yeah I mean, I think, Rob, you touched on this briefly a little bit earlier -- Colonialism is typically like a physical occupation to control land and people. In some ways you can think of it as a subset of imperialism because imperialism can take other forms, right? It could be basically through economic control and exploitation. And so, it doesn't always have to require physical control. Now, some people use colonialism to describe dependencies that are directly governed by a foreign nation. And they contrast that with imperialism, which involves maybe indirect forms of domination. But I think what's key here is to talk about is -- I think sometimes people think that the era of colonialism has passed, right? The British Empire, for example, really in the last century has given up major colonies that they controlled for a long time. India and, you know, in Africa, you know, all around the world. But imperialism hasn't necessarily gone away, right? It's just taken a different form.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. You still have the vestiges of colonialism and the effects that have lingered down through the centuries. But imperialism, as we're going to find out more and more in this episode, is still just happily with us to this day. The way that you can see it today is in the violent conflicts and the military adventuring and occupations that are that are going on. But there's also kind of the economic or the neoliberal imperialism that takes the form of unfair trade agreements or placing countries into debt. You've got multinational corporations that go out and extract the shit out of people in places. One of the examples that we've found is through our friend Jason Hickel, who is an ecological economist, a degrowth spokesperson. He and his colleagues tried to quantify how much the global north drains away resources from the global south.
Asher Miller
And not drained, but drains.
Jason Bradford
It is continuing.
Asher Miller
Exactly.
Rob Dietz
Yes. So what they've found, they looked in the year 2015, the North's net appropriation from the South totaled, okay, stay with me on all these numbers.
Asher Miller
I'm gonna listen. I'm gonna close my eyes and listen carefully.
Rob Dietz
12 billion tonnes of raw materials.
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Asher Miller
Jesus.
Jason Bradford
How many dump trucks is that between Tokyo and New York?
Rob Dietz
I don't know. A lot.
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Rob Dietz
A lot of dump trucks.
Asher Miller
It's enough to take you from here to the moon.
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. 822 million hectares of land.
Jason Bradford
Okay. How many football fields is that again?
Rob Dietz
A hectare is one football field, right?
Jason Bradford
No a hectare is two and a half football fields.
Rob Dietz
Dammit. Alright. So that's like . . .
Asher Miller
So we're talking about billions.
Rob Dietz
No, no, no.
Asher Miller
Yes. Billions of acres.
Rob Dietz
This math is killing me.
Jason Bradford
Okay, so keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
Asher Miller
It's a lot. Okay? Can you just say it's a lot. Like a whole lot.
Jason Bradford
Okay. You've done raw materials, you've done land. Now what else?
Rob Dietz
Energy. 21 exajoules. I don't know what that is.
Jason Bradford
I don't have any -- I have no clue.
Rob Dietz
Okay, here, I've got a helper. That's the same as 3.4 billion barrels of oil.
Jason Bradford
Okay. And there's about how many hours of labor equivalent in a barrel of oil?
Rob Dietz
I got that. 188 million person years, not person hours, person years.
Jason Bradford
Ah, thank you. You've done the math for me.
Rob Dietz
392 billion hours of work.
Jason Bradford
Thank you. I'm gonna put my calculator down.
Rob Dietz
I did that last year for Post Carbon Institute. 392 billion hours of work.
Jason Bradford
Wow, gosh.
Rob Dietz
It's really good.
Asher Miller
Can we just can we just like, take a moment to ponder this. I mean, we're throwing out these huge fucking numbers that are impossible for anyone to imagine. But what is important here to recognize is there's a massive drain of resources and labor that is still taking place through economic systems through globalization, and the economic structures that we've created from the global south to the global north that we benefit from.
Jason Bradford
I don't understand how this can work. Why are they just sending this stuff to us?
Asher Miller
We just asked them nicely.
Jason Bradford
Did we ask nicely?
Asher Miller
Yeah, that's all it is.
Rob Dietz
Uhh. It might have something to do with imperialism. Maybe? I don't know. That's just that's just my take.
Asher Miller
Now, keep in mind that when they talk about appropriation, right, they're talking about it not being fairly compensated, in equivalent terms. And this does not account for the environmental destruction of the lasting impact, basically, of the damage caused. Which is, in a sense, robbing future generations as well.
Rob Dietz
I think you're looking at this wrong. I mean, Nauru had some environmental degradation, but look what they've got now.
Jason Bradford
They've an Australian refugee camp.
Asher Miller
You're right. They have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the latest --
Rob Dietz
Seabed mining.
Asher Miller
Exactly.
Jason Bradford
They have a toxic lagoon in the middle of their island.
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Jason Bradford
I'm sorry.
Rob Dietz
Try to be a little more optimistic, okay?
Jason Bradford
Well, let's turn to something more near and dear to our hearts, which is the clean energy transition. Because as we kind of expressed with the Nauru example, that's kind of where a lot of the discussion of sort of the current imperialism that's ongoing is really turning its attention to. And there's this push to mind nodules, which are just, you know, rich deposits on the sea floor. And this is to make the minerals for EVs, for solar panels, wind turbines, servers, computers, and phones. So the idea that if we're going to wean ourselves off the oil economy, it's turning into this metal economy, right?
Asher Miller
But it's not -- I mean, here we're talking about the situation with Nauru and the Metals Company, that's like, basically a new approach that hasn't been done yet.
Jason Bradford
Right, right. And who knows that that'll work even. That's why they're only trading at $1.
Asher Miller
But there's plenty that's already happening that's fueling the clean energy economy, or the energy transition, if you want to call it that. So why don't we just do a quick scan of the world. Like let's start with lithium in Chile, for example.
Jason Bradford
That's fine. Okay, you can start there.
Asher Miller
We have to be equal opportunity, you know, whatever. So, you know, lithium, key mineral for batteries, world's largest reserves of lithium right now are in the Atacama Desert, stored in pools of salty water, brine in salt flats. It's an area that's been inhabited for at least 600 years by more than a dozen groups of different indigenous peoples. And we are going there.
Jason Bradford
Well, and the effects of mining actually turn out to be bad.
Rob Dietz
What?
Asher Miller
No.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, there's consequences.
Asher Miller
No.
Jason Bradford
So, I mean, this is a long way away from where most people live so we don't know. But we're gonna we're gonna let you hear about this. About 2 million liters of water are used to obtain one ton of lithium. And that's going to be metric ton because I said liter. But a metric ton is similar to a non metric ton. So that's easy. So the extraction of water exceeds the water inflows to the salt flat by more than 2000 liters per second.
Asher Miller
That sounds sustainable.
Rob Dietz
That's more than you can drink.
Asher Miller
That sounds really sustainable.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, so there's a lot of under obviously, pumping of underground aquifers going on to sort of make these pools. And so this is just turning into an environmental disaster there. And you can look at it with satellite imagery over time. Soil temperatures are going up, humidity is going down, vegetation is getting destroyed.
Rob Dietz
Are you telling me that when you take water out of an ecosystem that the soil gets drier and the humidity goes up?
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
That is shocking. Absolutely shocking.
Jason Bradford
So, kind of similar to the story of Nauru is that local indigenous ways of life then are getting undermined, right? Because these places were farming, you know, corn, quinoa, produce. They were raising livestock, like from South America livestock, like alpacas and llamas and guanacos. So, when you lose water, and your ecosystem degrades, and the microclimate gets worse, it's harder to do that. And so, you know, it's just another tragedy unfolding, really, that we're pretty much unaware of. Because, you know, we got to pay attention to Donald Trump and Taylor Swift.
Asher Miller
Well, but there's stuff happening closer to home, right?
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Asher Miller
There's a similar story playing out in Thacker Pass in Nevada.
Jason Bradford
Never heard of it.
Asher Miller
Near the border of Oregon.
Jason Bradford
Okay.
Rob Dietz
That's in your backyard there.
Jason Bradford
Never heard of it.
Rob Dietz
I mean, Oregon is a pretty dang big place.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, a lot of passes.
Rob Dietz
And we're talking Nevada, so you gotta get out of Oregon.
Jason Bradford
It's huge.
Asher Miller
So this contains quite possibly largest lithium deposits in the U.S., but also nearly 1000 indigenous cultural sites. And there's a push to basically mine this area. And there's an equal, well hopefully equal push, to resist it.
Jason Bradford
Well, this is interesting, right, of course, because you have the desire to think okay, if we're going to be using these resources, why not use them within our own nation? And if we're going to mine, why not mine where we can see it, and control it, and make it a good mining?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I think we're going to have a lot to chew on when it comes to looking for these kinds of clean energy minerals and the effects on people and places. You want to do a little world tour? I think we got to go over to the far north of Sweden, Finland, Norway, Russia now. That's where the Sami people live. That's the last of the EU's indigenous population. Actually, we did another podcast at Post Carbon called "Holding the Fire" with our friend Dahr Jamail. And the third episode of that features Aslak Holmberg, who's president of the Sami Council.
Jason Bradford
And what do we mean by the last indigenous? Does this mean people living in sort of traditional ways, or pre-agricultural even? Is that the idea?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I think there -- I am definitely not an expert on the Sami, but I think they do a lot with reindeer herding. So yeah, people who are trying to live their traditional way of life. And basically what's going on is in that part of the world, they're trying to do this green energy transformation, right? Like installing wind turbines and doing hydrogen energy. The idea is to make steel without having to burn coal. And there's also the idea of EV battery factories going in there, Giga factories. So here you have people who are actually protesting against this green energy, green transformation because you want to protect the land and protect the people.
Asher Miller
It's such a tricky issue. I mean, like we were talking about with Thacker Pass, you know. Now, there's mining happening in Africa, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, for cobalt, which is just an environmental inhuman hellscape. Closer to home, there's the world's largest proposed gold mine up in Alaska. So these things are, you know, I think they're invisible for a lot of us, but they're happening everywhere. And these are not --
Rob Dietz
We need that gold though, right? Where I grew up in Atlanta, the capitol dome is painted gold.
Jason Bradford
Gold leaf is pretty nice stuff.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I mean, what happens if that tarnishes? We need another mine or two to be able to repaint, right?
Jason Bradford
I mean, there is industrial use of gold.
Asher Miller
This is what it's for.. I know the you're . . .
Rob Dietz
It's not for my beloved dome?
Asher Miller
No. But you know, I think we were just touching on this briefly a little bit, which is like, what does a consciously aware person, you know, somebody who cares about the climate crisis, and cares about the energy transition, how do we think about this? And I just think that this struggle is so invisible to us. And it manifests itself in all kinds of ways. I'll give you like, maybe almost an extreme example. Which is, you have people who have been resorting to psychedelics, for example, you know, as a form of treatment. People are using them to treat anxiety, depression, even to treat addiction, you know, to other drugs. People are doing it to shift their consciousness, to become more aware and connected with one another and the natural world, which is something we've talked about a lot. But even there, talking about things sort of being maybe invisible, or people not recognizing that they're actually participating in a form of imperialism. You see this happening with psychedelics even. And I've bumped in recently, Jason, to Miriam Verlag who is someone that you and I used to work with at Post Carbon Institute.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, a long time ago. Wow.
Asher Miller
Yeah. And she sent me down a rabbit hole on this because she's actually now working on projects that are trying to protect ecosystems and indigenous communities who've relied on these traditional medicines that have been part of their cultures for millennia. That now, people are turning to for kind of Western medicinal, or whatever, uses, and it's pretty crazy.
Jason Bradford
So there's an irony here, you're saying, that there's people who are doing this for more like classic mental health problems. But there's other people who are doing it to say, maybe, become more aware of their connection to the rest of life, and decolonize their mind. And yet, at the same time, this is driving an exploitation of these indigenous resources that is not sustainable.
Rob Dietz
Decolonize the mind by colonizing.
Asher Miller
And again, I don't know that people -- I mean, there's industries around this. Like, you look at ayahuasca, right? And there's been all this build up --
Jason Bradford
Banisteriopsis.
Asher Miller
Yeah, thank you for dropping that. You know, they have all these like centers that you can pay money to.
Rob Dietz
That was a relic of colonialism with the Latin name there from the Roman Empire.
Asher Miller
So you've got ayahuasca, you've got peyote, you know. You've got iboga, which is a bark of a tree from Gabon in Western Africa.
Jason Bradford
I haven't heard of that one.
Asher Miller
And then you've got the Sonoran Toad right here, you know, in the United States.
Jason Bradford
He's so cute.
Asher Miller
In the Southwest, right?
Rob Dietz
You guys might remember when we were recording in the greenhouse during COVID, that we had pacific treefrogs.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Rob Dietz
I don't know if you know, but every once in a while, I tried to lick one to see if I could get the Sonoran Toad effect.
Jason Bradford
I think someone would have figured that out by now. That's a pretty common frog.
Rob Dietz
Well in that season I don't think I was any more insightful than I am now. Didn't work.
Jason Bradford
The toad is awesome. My God. What a beautiful toad.
Asher Miller
So again, you're talking about licking them. Basically, what happens is there's a venomous that it has. And people basically milk their glands. And then they kind of dry it out, right. And then they smoke it, basically. And people use it to treat PTSD or anxiety.
Jason Bradford
People are ingenious. You always wonder, who was the first person to figure that one out?
Rob Dietz
Well, that was the guy that was like milking everything he could and smoking all of it. And most of it wasn't good.
Asher Miller
It was a large family and they eventually wound up with one last person.
Jason Bradford
What I don't get is like, for God's sake, do you know how easy it is to grow psilocybin, right, which is one that is not on your list. Probably because it's so easy, and anyone can grow this stuff. And so, why is everyone doing this other destructive stuff? I just don't get it.
Asher Miller
Look, I think it's the operating system of our society, which is, you know, we're talking about imperialism. It sounds, that word, that term, I think, can make people feel really sort of like, defensive, "I'm not an imperalist." They have this idea in their heads that is about being violent and physically aggressive, you know. But it could take a much more subtle form. And it could even take that form with things like we're talking about with this, you know, psychedelic stuff. Like people are, in some cases, doing it for very either benevolent reasons, or they're trying to deal with --
Jason Bradford
Well, the market will provide if there's an interest. And it will actually drum up interest. And I think that's part of the issue, right?
Rob Dietz
Well, I think it's a good insight that it's the operating system that causes us to act out in these ways. You could put this on many of our episodes. It could be a thread through all of them. Like capitalism we've covered this season. And the idea there is, you know, okay, let's talk about the internet as a disruption to capitalism, right? It was supposed to be right open access to information. It was supposed to be global connection. It was supposed to be this free, and anybody can get there, and what happened? Well, through capitalism, and you could even maybe make the case that it's a kind of corporate imperialism. As you get a very small number of big players who take over the internet, who consolidate, and they've got algorithms to keep us all hooked in using it and needing it and you know, what happens? The original intent, the original purpose, gets kind of bastardized by that underlying operating system.
Asher Miller
Yeah. And we're probably going to see that with AI right?
Rob Dietz
No, no chance.
Asher Miller
We already have a small number of corporations literally, like five or four who are spending millions to try to corner that market.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Cyberdyne Systems is the main one. That's out of the Terminator universe.
Jason Bradford
Well, okay, there was a recent article in Foreign Policy by Kobus Van Staden. And he said it really well. Quote: "The dirty secret of the Green Revolution is its insatiable hunger for resources from Africa and elsewhere that are produced using some of the world's dirtiest technologies. What's more, the accelerated shift to batteries now threatens to replicate one of the most destructive dynamics in global economic history. The systematic extraction of raw commodities from the global south in a way that made developed countries unimaginably rich while leaving a trail of environmental degradation, human rights violations, and semi permanent under-development all across the developing world."
Rob Dietz
Thanks Kobus. Maybe we can --
Asher Miller
Find somebody a little more depressing. Sweet.
Rob Dietz
Okay, guys, here's some listener feedback for you. This one comes in from Heather in Oregon City with the subject line, this was an email, "Crazy Town is my favorite podcast."
Jason Bradford
Oh, it's my favorite too.
Rob Dietz
Heather just leaves this note to say a lot of nice stuff about it. And I'm not --
Asher Miller
What? You're not gonna read that? Come on.
Rob Dietz
I am not going to read that. You guys don't need your ego stoked. But what I do want to read from -- Stroked not stoked.
Asher Miller
Well, I'm stoked.
Jason Bradford
I know. I'm totally stoked.
Rob Dietz
So the thing that I wanted to share that Heather said in the PS is, "My favorite low tech tool is my manual push mower. I get a full body workout, it's pretty quiet so it doesn't disturb the peace, and it's totally human powered."
Jason Bradford
Nice. Keeping that sharp is important.
Rob Dietz
I know. I did write Heather back and I said, "I used to have one of those, and it's clear I need to up my sharpening game." I would roll that thing over grass and bend it. But it was fun. I liked using it a lot, too.
Jason Bradford
Alright. Well that's great, Heather.
Asher Miller
Thank you.
Rob Dietz
Quick run through of the Marvin Harris cultural materialism concept. The idea is that infrastructure, which is our surroundings, the things in our environment, inform the structure, which is the policies and the laws, which in turn informs the superstructure, which is our culture in our belief system. So for Imperialism, let's look at the infrastructure, the physical things that define imperialism. I think the first one we got to hit is the military. You know, especially when you're talking about old school imperialism. You had to have a military force to go in and invade and take over.
Asher Miller
We still have it, you know, in the U.S. in shipping lanes and what not.
Jason Bradford
84 countries have bases in them or something.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that's not as big a number as some of the ones we were hitting earlier at the metric tons or whatever, but there's a lot of them. That's a common theme. A lot. Another, of course, is the global supply chains. We hit that in our episode on globalism. I think when the three of us were discussing the infrastructure of imperialism, something kind of fascinating to me came up. And that was that a lot of it's actually invisible. There's like this chain of horrors around the world that gets lithium into the batteries that go into your benign, quote unquote, "benign technologies." Your EVs, right?
Asher Miller
And let's think, could anyone point out with lithium looks like in the wild, so to speak? Or even how what lithium looks like in a battery? I mean, these things are completely divisible.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. That one still kind of messes with my mind a little bit. There's this huge, vast infrastructure that we just can ignore, because we don't see it day to day.
Jason Bradford
Well, I think what's happened is that if those who are wealthy have been able to move to places that are isolated from, you know, the industrial agriculture, or the industrial mining and the manufacturing, the warehousing, you don't see any of that stuff where you live. You live in these, like, cozy neighborhoods. And it all gets shipped in. And it just comes packaged and clean to you.
Jason Bradford
Well, let's talk about the structure, okay? So, the rules that reinforce all this. And one is the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar. And this is hard to overstate. There are so many nations that actually peg their currency to the dollar, or even just use the dollar. They've just given up on their own currency. And this allows us, of course, to run a national debt and not have the same consequences that other countries would. Because as we create more money to finance our debt, there's all these other nations that are just willing to buy that. And so it props us up in ways that no other nation -- We kind of get a pass.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, like, we don't have to employ these rules of austerity on ourselves.
Jason Bradford
Exactly. Having English as our language, it's now the new language of commerce. And there have been other languages throughout history like this, you know, but now it's the turn for English to dominate the globe.
Rob Dietz
It's really interesting, because you might file that under superstructure or culture, but it's kind of almost like a codified rule at this point.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. I mean, think contract law and all these things are written in English as the first thing.
Asher Miller
Interestingly, if you extend the concept of language, it's not just which language commerce is done in, or even negotiation. It's the complexity of that language, the nuance of that language. And the disadvantage that people have. You think about, like, for example, meetings, at the UN or other intergovernmental things. And it's like, the structure that exists that advantages countries or people that come from places where they're not just familiar with the literally the language, but the way the language is used. The terminology, you know?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, to be fluid at it is -- fluent -- is really important. Well, we've kind of turned over the empire to these multinational corporations. So you know, we can feel like we're voting for people who are not imperialist. But in reality, there's an indirect sort of management of the empire now. And this is then done through superstructures above the nation state, like the IMF, the World Bank, the G7. And it's kind of like, I think the nation states are a little bit, they're somewhat wiping their hands clean a little bit and creating the superstructures.
Jason Bradford
Wait, wait, you're confusing it with superstructure.
Jason Bradford
Sorry. In other words, the structure above the nation state.
Rob Dietz
You're talking about a big structure, not the Marvin Harris superstructure.
Jason Bradford
I am so sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry.
Rob Dietz
I was losing it there for a second.
Asher Miller
Well, let's talk about superstructure the way that Marvin Harris means it which is culture and beliefs. So what are those, the culture and beliefs of imperialism? I think nationalism is one of those things. People can get caught up in sort of that nationalist fervor, and to see interest through that frame.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. It's like when you're proud to be an American where at least you know you're free.
Asher Miller
Yeah. That's great man, you should coin that. There's the ubiquity, in this case, you can think of this as a modern form of imperialism. There's the ubiquity of Western or American culture that gets exported around the world. Well, we're harvesting --
Jason Bradford
I mean, TV and movies.
Asher Miller
We're harvesting resources, natural resources, and labor from the Global South and all that. And what we're sending to them is sort of our culture, right? And one of the consequences of that, from the superstructure standpoint, is the destruction of traditional cultures and languages and ways of life and their own belief systems. I mean, it was, we've talked about this before, when we did watershed moments. That season, we talked about the Doctrine of Discovery, right? And what happened with the Catholic Church giving a stamp of approval of colonization of the Americas and Africa as part of like a religious thing of like, we need to bring God to these people. So they're replacing their belief systems with a Western, you know, in that case, Christian . . . You know, Islam did the same for thing --
Jason Bradford
The Ottoman Empire, my God.
Asher Miller
It's not just Christianity, but you know. And now you could say that the form of religion is kind of neoliberalism. It's this idea of this market should function this way the economy should be this way. That is a form of religion that we've exported. And we've replaced other ways of operating and belief system.
Rob Dietz
And I think this exportation of culture, or the dominance of American culture . . . Like I'm ground zero for how effective movies and things are for doing that.
Asher Miller
Yeah, your brain has been really colonized by 80s movies.
Rob Dietz
Unbelieveable.
Jason Bradford
Congratulations.
Rob Dietz
Thank you.
George Costanza
Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be.
Jerry Seinfeld
If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
Rob Dietz
Welcome to Do the Opposite. We re gonna get into some ideas that you can use and some visions for how things could be different. But before we do that, I just want to give a little sympathy, empathy to our good friend Asher over here. You were responsible more than Jason and I were for having to outline the episode on imperialism. And this was a, this was a tough call.
Jason Bradford
You're more responsible for Imperialism.
Asher Miller
I am, yeah.
Rob Dietz
Well, I mean, the reason -- We had some good conversation last night over a beer or two about what does it mean to escape imperialism? How do you walk away from imperialism without utterly walking away from the modern world? And the real dilemma is that, yeah, we want an energy transition. We want something more benign than an oil industrial nightmare. But then you look at, whatever, the places like Thacker Pass, or the Atacama Desert, or. . . And you're like, well, can we can we mine lithium? Is that okay? Can we not? What should we be doing? And it's really, really tough. I mean, I love my ebike. If I'm going to be in a car I have a huge preference for driving an EV versus, you know, a diesel or gas guzzler. But I can't feel real good about that either, can I?
Jason Bradford
It's tough.
Asher Miller
Well I think this is part of why we're often content for it to be invisible to us, you know? Because it is easy to get an electric vehicle and to drive down the road and feel like I'm doing my part. And we want people to feel proud. We want people to make the right kinds of choices. It's just that we are in this pickle, right? Where as long as we're participating in modernity, as you said, there are these consequences to it. There is no free lunch as David Hughes, you know, one of our advisors likes to say.
Rob Dietz
I've been trying to think of it as maybe I'm doing less harm. So it's, you know, it's a shade. But it's no rationalization for consumerism or imperialism.
Asher Miller
Now, the other challenge in thinking about how we escape from imperialism is thinking about the things that we could do. There are things I think we can point to if we happen to operate like an enlightened, self-aware superorganism, and not like how we are actually operating, right. If we could get, you know, consensus, understanding of what's required, and what's necessary. If we can make decisions that might, you know, have some pain associated with them, but we recognize the long term value or, you know, the prospective justice. If we can act that way --
Jason Bradford
Yes.
Asher Miller
There are things I can point to that we'd be like, Let's do these things.
Jason Bradford
Tell me. Tell me.
Asher Miller
Okay, fine. Here's one: ratcheting down fossil fuel extraction.
Jason Bradford
Amen.
Asher Miller
We would heavily price it, stop externalizing the impacts of it. We regulate the living shit out of it. We would put control of key transition, you know, minerals and materials into the hands of the local communities that are there. If we say, okay, we actually need this, there's a decision that has to be made here in the sense to help with this transition. But the people who benefit from that economically are the ones who are, you know, connected to the land that it's coming from. There's a truer price on those minerals so that it's actually going to cost us to do this. So not all of us are going to necessarily decide that we're going to get the latest electric vehicle in the market.
Jason Bradford
Truth, yes.
Asher Miller
Because it's got heated seats, or whatever.
Jason Bradford
That's right.
Asher Miller
And a larger display. You know, we would subsidize the costs of that transition so that people weren't being left behind and they could participate in it. Demilitarization, right? The country of Costa Rica. They decided to demilitarize you know? And imagine if the U.S. demilitarized its defense budget, which is $1.6 trillion, by the way, a year, right? That's a big fucking number. That's like 13% of the U.S. budget. If we said, and I know that sounds pollyannish, right. But if we said, look, we can use those resources in a better way. Let's transfer that monetary wealth towards other things. Hey, let's redirect all the people that work in the military. And instead of having them sit in a bases, you know, dozens and dozens of bases all over the world controlling, you know, basically the shipping lanes or whatever else that we're trying to do so we can keep the flow of goods going, and the consumer economy going, let's actually bring them back home and have them help communities transition in a way that's just and resilient.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, think about it: a lot of soldiers, a lot of military personnel are all about protecting. They want to protect others. They want to protect places. Come on home, and let's protect ecosystems.
Jason Bradford
With good marketing you could do an amazing job with this. And people would feel so proud, and I mean, yeah . . .
Asher Miller
And shit, the way the military industrial complex has set this thing up is that, you know, they've got bases or whatever. They've got military operations in every congressional district in this country in order to make sure that it's easy to get their votes to keep spending the money. Well bring them back to each of those congressional districts and put them to work, you know.
Rob Dietz
That's great. We'll have an ecobase in every congressional district.
Asher Miller
This is not my idea.
Jason Bradford
Ecobase, yeah! Repatriating patriotism but with the matriarchy.
Asher Miller
There you go.
Rob Dietz
I don't know what that means. You are off the marketing team.
Asher Miller
Anyways, look, I could go on and give other examples of like, basically large-scale interventions that we should do and then we would do if we were rational fucking actors.
Jason Bradford
But we aren't.
Asher Miller
Right.
Jason Bradford
That's the problem.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. What does that mean? We're an unenlightened, self-delusional superorganism? Is that what we are?
Jason Bradford
So this is a problem, right? All these shoulds, all these oughts. We always come back to then, what would a person who sees the world like this -- what would they do? How would they educate themselves? And what personal choices they might make? How might they try to enroll others and advocate to do things that are more tangible?
Rob Dietz
Well, let's look at it through our Marvin Harris lens, through visions of what we could do differently. And let's start at the base with infrastructure. And I think the very first one, this is not new, this is not shocking, it's powering down. How can you use less of a throughput of energy and materials in your life? And the more that you can slim down and have a leaner existence that way, the less you are propping up imperialism. The less you're beholden to a system that can't go on.
Asher Miller
Yeah, 100%. There's also the land back movement, which is something that in some ways all of us can get involved with. The land back movement in the U.S., Canada, and other places around the world is really about supporting Indigenous communities to rematriate lands. I do like that term actually quite a lot.
Jason Bradford
I like it.
Asher Miller
Instead of repatriate, rematriate.
Jason Bradford
I like it. I appreciate that.
Rob Dietz
When I saw that word, I was like, hey, a lot of times when people sort of try to do this evolution of language, it comes out clunky and weird. I was like, Ah, that's a good word. It's kind of intuitive. And you know, you're dealing with the patriarchy,
Jason Bradford
Mother Earth. I like that.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
Asher Miller
So, there are all kinds of examples. You know, there are indigenous land trust's that are in both actually rural and urban communities. There's some great examples of allies who are coming together in solidarity with some of these movements.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, for example, our friends at the Sustainable Economics Law Center --
Asher Miller
The Sustainable Economies Law Center.
Jason Bradford
Oh my gosh. Sustainable Economies Law Center and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. Did I get that right?
Asher Miller
Yeah. Well, you know those guys.
Jason Bradford
I mean, it's been a while. They helped the Sogorea Te Land Trust -- I don't know if I said that right -- But, rematriate 43 acres in the East Bay of California. So that's interesting.
Asher Miller
Yeah, actually, I heard at a conference recently, I heard Karina Gould from that organization share a story of actually a different project that they had taken on, which was rematriating 2.2 acres of land. But it happened to be in the heart of Berkeley, California.
Jason Bradford
That's expensive stuff.
Asher Miller
Really expensive, dense urban environment. You could say only 2.2 acres? But it was pretty revolutionary, sort of, what they did. They said that they are representatives of the Aloni community and archaeologists at UC Berkeley that work together. They said that the site was one of the last open and undeveloped spaces of the location of an ancient village that the Aloni people had were Strawberry Creek used to run. I think, you know, Rob, we talked recently about basically creeks being invisible underground.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I've walked a couple of creeks in the East Bay and you're sorta like going through parking lots.
Jason Bradford
It's rough.
Rob Dietz
And under streets and through culverts. Yeah.
Asher Miller
So this was sacred land to them. You know, Strawberry Creek used to run into the bay there. There are ceremonial burial grounds there that dated back to more than 5,700 years in that area. So they basically, a hard fought victory took them, you know, years and yours to basically try to reclaim this 2.2 acres for the people. And they were able to do that through the support of allies, partly financially to be able to do this. And the city of Berkeley contributed a bit as well. And obviously, there's a big battle with developers who wanted to, I don't know, put some bullshit thing on this property. And so their plan now is to expose the creek in open space with native plants and build a 40 foot tall mound covered with poppies that will house an educational Memorial component for their community.
Rob Dietz
Well, and you know, 2.2 acres, okay, that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a pretty cool foothold.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. And it represents a movement that could spread a lot and is spreading.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. So one of the ways obviously, as an individual that I can show support for something like that, or have some solidarity is to donate money that I gained through my imperialistic associations and give it back.
Asher Miller
I mean, there's that, but there's, you know, like, in the case of this effort in Berkeley, they're showing up to council meetings. And so it could that for listeners, there's an effort underway in your community like this. And if you don't have financial resources to support them, you can volunteer, or you could actually just speak out, you know, politically, publicly, that you are in favor of this movement.
Rob Dietz
But if you do have financial resources, make sure it's not dollars because we don't want to support that currency problem that you mentioned, Jason.
Jason Bradford
Do you want gold then?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, give them gold.
Jason Bradford
Another thing I think about is when I look at it, I see how farms are managed nowadays, and how important food systems are. And all the people that hunger to actually, you know, sort of a modern back to the land movement with understanding agroecology and permaculture and regenerative agriculture, and people wanting livelihood on the land. You may not be, say, an indigenous person, ethnically to an area, but if you are somebody who wants to sort of become more indigenous to a place and restore it, wouldn't it be great if we let people like that have access to land in general? Boy, there's vast acres that really, really smart people that had these values could take on and put their life and creativity into it. It would be remarkable.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I'm sure ADM and Cargill and whatnot are gonna sign up for that program.
Jason Bradford
You know, almost all of the land is actually owned by families, you know, historic families. And sure, ADM and Cargill are the people that are buying the grain and processing it and they have the facilities where these farmers take it to, but there's tons of land. Most land is owned by historic families who inherited it through generations.
Asher Miller
Yeah, and probably some form of participating in colonial project.
Rob Dietz
No doubt. Okay, well, as we're figuring out how to escape imperialism, land back movement is a great one. Another example of something that can be done comes from New Zealand and what they've done with reparations. I had this this little time when I got invited to give some talks for the Asia section of the Society for Conservation Biology. And I met a guy from New Zealand there, and he was just like, really psyched to tell me about what New Zealand was doing to try to make up for its past relationship with colonialism and the harms that have been done to the Maori there. And it just made me feel terrible. I was like, I mean, I felt good in that, yes, I'm glad that's happening. I was like, I cannot tell you similar thing in the United States. But what they've done is inspiring. It is a good start. So, the Nation of New Zealand issued an acknowledgement and an apology and then kind of had these different forms of reparation. They made financial amends to some degree, $30 million. They returned sites of cultural significance. They provided funding for cultural revitalization and have done things to try to say, Hey, we know we did something pretty, pretty crummy in the past, and we want to try to make amends.
Jason Bradford
Totally. Exactly.
Asher Miller
And I think they gave them rights to purchase like a forest, I think, that was acritical part of their traditional lands as well, right?
Rob Dietz
Yeah. When I was being told of these things, I was going like, Wow, we should totally do that here. And so that's what I'm suggesting. We should totally do that here.
Asher Miller
Okay, so those are some thoughts about a different infrastructure. Let's talk about structure a little bit. And again, this is sort of operating maybe at a larger scale. But there's thinking about the global arrangements that we have, you know, economic arrangements we have, trade arrangements. And, you know, one obvious place there is the debt arrangements that keep a lot of the Global South, basically captive to the global economy. And particularly, to kind of siphoning off wealth to the Global North with financial resources and labor and all those things.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. And China's a big one on this now, too. So, it's not just the old IMF structures.
Asher Miller
It's restructuring those, but bringing it closer to home. I mean, there are a lot of projects, or resistance to extractivist projects that are happening all over the place, right. So if you can support frontline communities, we talked about the proposed Goldmine that's in Alaska. Well, supporting communities and groups like the Mother Kuskokwim Tribal Coalition that is leading kind of a local indigenous opposition to the Donlin Gold Mine. There are folks, like the Thacker Pass Seven, this is a group of people that were doing direct action to oppose the lithium project that the lithium Nevada Corporation was trying to undertake. And they were sued, these seven people. And they were charged with things like civil conspiracy, nuisance, trespass, tortious interference with contractual relations. Listen to this is fucking language. Tortious interference with perspective economic advantage.
Jason Bradford
I really hate legalese. I really hate it.
Rob Dietz
We may be committing tortious interference right now with what we're suggesting.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, it's tortious not tort-i-ous.
Asher Miller
Well I was thinking about tort, you know.
Rob Dietz
Should the three of us jump in an EV and drive down and become the Thacker Pass Ten.
Jason Bradford
We're gonna kick them in the gluteus maximus.
Rob Dietz
The three of us could add our talents to the seven.
Jason Bradford
So, I think supporting any of these Indigenous led projects seeking to preserve land, protect biodiversity, build resilience of these communities. There are groups you can look to support like the NDN collective or cultural survival. So I think if that is your passion, there are groups you can align with.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. I've definitely made, in the last few years, a habit of doing that. Like looking for who are these groups that are really trying to keep cultural practices of Indigenous folks going.
Asher Miller
And protecting Indigenous land. I mean, the indigenous population of the world is less than 5%. But 80 something percent of the intact biodiversity is in Indigenous hands right now.
Rob Dietz
Okay, infrastructure, structure, I think it's on me to turn to superstructure since I seem to have the most colonized mind of them all. You know, besides stopping quoting Ferris Bueller and Arnold Schwarzenegger and various movies, what can we do to decolonize our minds? I mean, I think one of the key things is to understand where you live, you know? The place that you occupy instead of just occupying it, instead of just sitting on it, know and love the ecosystem or the watershed. Follow that frickin' stream even if you gotta crawl through the culvert. I mean, don't drown while doing it, but figure out where do these streams go. How does energy flow through this ecosystem? What are the critters? I mean, Jason, you've obviously been captured by the birds. I had a friend of mine, he'd call it going herping. He'd be out looking for the lizards and snakes and stuff.
Jason Bradford
At night, yeah.
Rob Dietz
And just being aware of that and letting your mind go there instead of to all this other crap.
Asher Miller
It makes me think of a local guy here, hopefully he wouldn't be embarrassed by us talking him, Dave Eckert. He moved to this area, I don't know, 15-20 years ago, something like that, and fell in love with this land. And he actually fell in love with understanding the history of the indigenous people here. He's taking groups up to Mary's Peak, which is the local kind of mountain here that is deeply important to the indigenous community. And trying to help create that same sense of reverence and connection for people through groups. They've done. They've done a creek restoration projects. He's hosted these events where they actually have people from the local indigenous communities come and talk. They share stories, share their history, share their practices, and this just comes from his passion and awe for this land and for the people that have inhabited it for a long time.
Rob Dietz
To me, that's a brilliant example of the idea of being cognizant of the effects colonialism may have had in your area. But then kind of trying to get past that. So, reading the history, or understanding the history by talking to the indigenous folks who have who have struggled against the challenges. And I've got to put a plug in for our sister podcast, "Holding the Fire," which does that, right. It's like, hey, let's hear from indigenous folks who have been fighting against colonization throughout their history.
Asher Miller
Yeah, and it's not extracting from indigenous communities their practices or their identity, right? It's not just trying to, to suck out of them their wisdom, their knowledge of a place. It's about supporting them to basically inhabit the land and to have a voice at the table. Especially when we're thinking about solutions that all of our communities are facing, or the challenges that we're going to face ahead. So if we're not trying to think about, you know, back to sort of the psychedelic stuff, or other forms of kind of, in some ways, appropriation of traditional medicines, or traditional ways of being. I heard someone named Colette Pichon Battle say this recently, and it really struck me, she said, you know, if you go back far enough in your history, we're all indigenous people, right. So instead of trying to appropriate the culture of an indigenous people, maybe where you live now, its trying to understand the history of where you come from. Because there are indigenous practices, there are indigenous ways of being that go way back in all these communities or else they wouldn't have existed in the first place. They wouldn't have existed long enough to now be in a situation that they're in. Like, so for you, Jason, a Bradfords here. You go way back to --
Asher Miller
Yeah, Bradford, England. Sure. Yeah.
Asher Miller
Was it Bradford, England?
Jason Bradford
There's a Bradford, England because there's a river there. So it's like, you know, it's like a wide crossing.
Asher Miller
So you have way back because you'd have to go back before the French colonized. I don't know, maybe you have to go back before the Anglo-Saxons.
Jason Bradford
Romans? Yeah. Who knows.
Asher Miller
You gotta go way, way back.
Jason Bradford
I don't even --- I haven't even done one of those genealogy things. But I think I'm kind of muddy by now. You know, so that Bradford name . . . But who knows what I'm all mixed up with. And that's the thing, right, of course, with globalization and all the different mixing of cultures. Like, how many people are really like purebred, or whatever you want to say? Like, it kind of gets a little bit ridiculous, in other words, to trace it back, to know exactly where you're from. But I guess maybe pick one and learn about it and whatever inspires you.
Asher Miller
Just feel connection.
Jason Bradford
And then also do what Rob was talking about which was like, what would it mean now to be more indigenous to this place, right? Like you're saying, not to just occupy it, but to just fall in love with it, and to really understand it, and to feel like you need to protect it and even make it more thriving. So I think that's the attitude. I think it's more important in what you start doing with it. But I want to mention something besides just decolonizing. I think colonization is just a subset of imperialism, right? So what about de-imperializing the mind? I think that's even a broader thing to do. And that's a part of this sort of superstructure. And what we've done a lot in this episode is kind of painfully make visible what has been invisible where you don't want to look at this stuff. See the connections between consumption and the places and people that are providing for your way of life and understand that what is being lost when we have all this stuff.
Rob Dietz
That is a tough way to walk around because everything that I can put my eyes on, or anything that I can touch, smell, taste, see, whatever, I know there's a downside to it.
Jason Bradford
I mean, at least this stuff that's like manufactured, right. But this is where I think getting back outside and becoming more connected through your livelihood to a place. That's why I think that's so important.
Asher Miller
You know, in some ways it's as simple as thinking about replacing things with experiences and connections. We could talk about that for all kinds of other reasons. But you could see that as a way of trying to escape imperialism as well. Because what we're basically saying is that imperialism in some ways is now taking the form of consumption and consumerism. And that includes even the way that we consume energy. Even if we're trying to consume it in a quote unquote, "clean" way. And we're trying to look at that and recognize that, like I said before, there isn't a free lunch, and there's a consequence and a cost to that, whatever that we're consuming. And it has been historically, and it continues to be, at the cost primarily of people in the Global South, right. And it's a form of imperialism. We're talking about kind of paring down, trying to give up those things, but still inhabiting a modern world. You have to replace it with something else, in a sense. And so what are you replacing with? You're replacing with maybe connection to land, maybe a connection to people, maybe a connection to a different worldview. Because, you know, we're not asking our listeners, or ourselves, to basically walk around just feeling like shit about everything that we're doing all the time, right. There has to be something that you're feeling that is inspiring, that is empowering for you as a person. And so, the focus should be on the ways that you're actually interacting with the world and other people that is not, does not require this kind of imperialist global system to support it.
Jason Bradford
I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to become a Jedi Knight. And I'm going to help the Wookiees and the Ewoks in the revolution against the Empire.
Rob Dietz
This makes great sense. I love the empowering until Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader show up and force choke it right out of you.
Melody Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
Jason Bradford
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