Pretty Heady Stuff Scott Stoneman

Dr. Ingrid Waldron should not need an introduction. The leading voice on environmental racism in Canada and author of There’s Something in the Water, Waldron has built a reputation for being unusually skilled at working with and within community and at reading the social landscape for fluctuations in the way that power works. She is the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program at McMaster University and both the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, which has been a crucial source of organizational strength, culminating now in a series of funding announcements and some serious policy changes as Environmental Justice Bill C-226 is debated in Canada’s parliament.

Ingrid’s commitment to public engagement and to publicizing the fact of environmental racism has made a huge impact in Nova Scotia, but it’s also been an inspiration to people globally, in part because of the success of a 2019 Netflix adaptation of There’s Something in the Water.

Waldron’s radical definition of environmental racism is, as far as I’m concerned, the most precise one: she describes it in terms of the “white supremacist use of space” and explains how the “white supremacist use of space manifests in the disproportionate placement of polluting industries in Indigenous and Black communities.”

From that powerful definition, Ingrid develops an argument that leaves a mark by detailing how the fact of environmental racism is rooted in “boundary-making practices that create social hierarchies” and why environmental racism is related to “other structurally induced racial and gendered forms of state violence.” This all has a history, and that history matters because it manifests itself as a combination of ecological destruction and social violence.

We talk about how “racial capitalism” influences, and in some cases even determines, the politics of places like Nova Scotia and Flint, Michigan, which have seen intergenerational struggles over how polluting industries get sighted. We also discuss Indigenous sovereignty and the wisdom of Indigenous land and water protectors for thinking more expansively about health, wellness and treatment of the body’s ills.

While the language of holistic medicine has been wholly co-opted, Waldron looks to reclaim and recover the concept, reminding us that “This includes all of the medicines the land provides, as well as social relationships with family members and the wider community.”

Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuel dependence.”

Catherine was appointed as one of the advisors to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body in early 2021. She also serves on the strategic advisory committee for the Global Gas and Oil Network and the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Destination Zero has been foundational to the creation of the important Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, as well.

In this conversation we talk about Abreu’s experience of COP28, the health of our democracies and whether they’re up to the task of accomplishing the massive and mandatory shift to clean energy. We look at the culpability of Canada in the climate crisis and the level of responsibility that culpability therefore requires as we move into a future that is likely to be environmentally very unpredictable and dangerous.

How can the climate movement gain more traction? How have we kept fighting in spite of so many setbacks and blockades produced by private industry and governments? Part of it, I think, is a sense that the struggle is just and it is urgent. As some of us wait on incremental change to repair -relations to the Earth, others--like Catherine--keep pushing for an ecologically rational disruption of the system that could create a series of chain reactions and ultimately the kind of lasting change we’ve been told is absolutely necessary to protect the world from anthropogenic climate change.

Darin Barney is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He has written some really impactful work in communication studies, and received several awards for his academic work. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil collective and Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta, among other groups.

Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a printmaker and has been a member of numerous art collectives, including Space 1026 in Philadelphia and more recently the Occuprint Collective. His current research focuses on the political economy of green technologies.

Hannah Tollefson is a media and environmental studies scholar who works on questions of ecology, economy, and infrastructure. She studies how territory is technically mediated; the work of infrastructure in shaping relationships of place and scale; and the politics of energy transition. She is working on a project with Darin about contemporary efforts to develop oil sands bitumen for non-combustion uses and to devise formats for transporting bitumen in solid phase. Her work has appeared in a number of academic journals and anthologies.

This conversation is focused on the reality that there is a surprising lack of friction between the fossiil fuel and the cleantech industries. Rather than posing a threat to the domination of everyday life by fossil fuels, we're seeing the ways in which compartmentalization of climate action and the diversification of portfolios is leading to a wholesale corporate capture of the future for energy, or, we should say, for fuels.

In the case of Darin and Hannah's writing, their research has taken them into the boardrooms of companies that are vying for a place in the market for solid state bitumen products. With Jesse's work, there is a focus on how greenwashing as we know it has evolved into an ideology of only valuing innovation and imagination within narrow market terms, even when the innovation in question is devoted to cracking the climate crisis.

In both instances, there is, in this critique of capitalist enclosure of clean energy or emergent forms of fuel, a sense that actually those that are involved in contemporary entrepreneurialism do want to have a positive social impact. The issue is that, as Jesse argues, the narrowing of innovation under capitalism means that these sorts of entrepreneurs are more or less obligated to concentrate their energy on doing well financially, rather than doing good socially or ecologically.

Abboud Hamayel is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. In this conversation we talk about a number of his recent articles, and think through the implications of the October 7th Al-Aqsa Flood, or the attacks led by Hamas within the so-called Gaza Envelope.

Abboud has written some invaluable pieces breaking down the assumptions people project onto Palestine in the West, on the complicity of the United States, in particular, in the ongoing annihilation of Palestinian society. Those essays are absolutely essential for thinking through and acting against the settler colonial violence being perpetrated in Gaza.

The conversation here is relatively long, but extremely focused. There’s a concentration on what can be done that should be useful, but Abboud also offers a really rigorous theorizing of the foundations of occupation and settlement. He understands how the occupation affects life and politics in the West Bank, and that reality is something that I think we need to grasp more thoroughly.

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. As a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East, she has an overriding concern with how individuals, groups, and governments use concepts and material practices to shape the body, the self, and the other.

We’re at a point now where the death toll in Gaza has climbed to more than 30,000 and yet we still can’t expect an end to the merciless, genocidal attack on Palestinians by the Netenyahu regime in Israel anytime soon. A team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Johns Hopkins University just released a report called "Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-Based Health Impact Projections" that says we can still save thousands of lives by establishing a ceasefire that would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid as Gaza is throttled by Israel. It describes the situation by saying that, "In case of a ceasefire now, we would be saving around 75,000 lives." That means that a continuation of the military assault on Rafa will lead to a humanitarian catastrophe at an unimaginable scale.

In this terrifying moment, I spoke with Sherene Seikaly about her sense of the roots of this overwhelming, punishing violence in colonial logics of dehumanization. It comes from civilizational hierarchies that have already been established to secure colonial relations and render whole populations disposable.

It also comes from silencing and denial. In Sheren’s words, there has been a “repression of people calling for Palestinian liberation” that allows the untold horror to keep happening without the resistance and rage that could end it. For a long time we have been in a situation where “knowledge itself,” she says, “has become a target of war.” This “epistemicide” means there is no relationship between politics and the truth in Israel, there is a tacit encouragement of the genocide by American imperialism and its agenda in the region, which lets the US continue arming Israel with no conditions whatsoever. This obscuring of the reality of genocide, and the jubilation with which settlers are making Gaza unlivable, is forcing Sherene, she says, to question everything that she thought she knew about the world or the notion of a rules-based international order.

We talk about her book Men of Capital, which is an untold history of the Arab world through the lens of Palestinian statehood. She says that “Maps are actually violent processes” of colonial and state formation and fundamentally “constructions.” She explains why Palestine contains “an abundance of lessons” about the future we’re heading toward. But we start with the question of the Palestinian child, the eviction of Palestinian people from the category of the human, and the spectre of a violence that aims to erase generations of Palestinian people that have not had a chance at a life.

Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research has examined Arab medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry, as well as modern prose fiction and visual culture. I spoke to her about three of her books: Bad Girls of the Arab World, which is about women and transgression in the Arab world, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, which is an invaluable study of Palestinian resistance through the lens of Third Cinema, and her most recent edited anthology, Gaza on Screen.

I learned a lot in this conversation about humility, opacity and the limits of solidarity across distance and across gaps in exposure to vulnerability. Yaqub has a deep understanding of the politics of the so-called “humanitarian image,” which is something she is very conflicted about in her work. She asks whether humanitarian images of Palestinian suffering “are always depoliticizing or victimizing, or whether the depoliticization occurs through the inherently ideological frameworks in which such images circulate.”

I ask, as my first question to Nadia, what that idea of the framework means in the current moment, where Palestinians are limited in using artistic practices to demand freedom. I think a lot of us are wondering about the political forces that exist around the overwhelmingly terrifying images we’re receiving of total war being waged on Palestine’s civilian population and infrastructure. Nadia’s insight are really helpful here.

There’s this idea in her work that the visual practices of Palestinians make up what she calls an “image archive of steadfastness.” Steadfastness is a core value in Palestinian culture. Yaqub is picking it up in a unique way to say that, especially in terms of art and storytelling, steadfastness is about trying to sustain a sense of community. There’s power in this idea for thinking about the role that communication plays in providing the conditions for political sympathy with Palestinian liberation.