Rape, Loot and Pillage Goes Green

Randy Cunningham

#47: Rape, Loot and Pillage Goes Green

My most recent book, Where We Live, focuses on what I call expendable people and expendable places. The people and places have been made expendable by almost five centuries of looting the wealth of the world and crushing anyone who got in the way of the looters. One of my literary heroes was Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano whose 1971 classic, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, described in devastating vignettes the details of the looting of Latin America from the Conquistadors to the multi-national corporations and banks.

The age of exploration and empire had the same effect on the wider world as a truck bomb in a marketplace. What was looted in Latin America were precious metals such as gold and silver, but also the wealth of the land. The looting was global. It extended from the Highlands of Scotland for wool to Welsh coal, North Atlantic fisheries, the gold of California, forests throughout the world, the minerals of the west, Appalachian coal, and the bison herds of the Great Plains. Not only were resources looted, but humans were looted as well by the slave trade from Africa. Whole populations of people were displaced, replaced, dispersed and rearranged to provide the labor it took to loot and use the resources of the world. Nothing was more central to this process than the establishment of the energy industries of coal, oil and natural gas. Wealth beyond the wildest imaginations of the ancients was created. Whole empires rose and fell by their success at obtaining these resources. 

Just as great as the wealth, was the wasting of entire regions. We see the wasting in the devastation of the coal industry in Appalachia, where coal put bread on your table and coal dust in your lungs, sustaining you and killing you at the same time. We see it in mountains of coal ash and lakes of coal slurry. No one has any idea of how to remove these ticking toxic time bombs. We see the legacy of coal in ruined streams, levelled forests, impoverished communities, and decapitated mountains. 

The story of Appalachia and coal has been repeated and is still operating throughout the world, and the same manic process of creating wealth and devastation is still roaring along.

Now, however, there is the threat of climate change. The resulting wildfires, floods, droughts, and storms of biblical intensity are hard to ignore even by those who don’t give a damn about the environment. But climate devastation may be a disaster for some, and an opportunity for others. People have doubted the morality of the marketplace for centuries, but no one can doubt its demoniacal genius.

There is a new race for resources, justified to save us from climate change. That race is for the rare minerals and resources needed to electrify the planet. The mining of cobalt in the Congo is a déjà vu of the 19th century coal mines in the UK, where children were yoked to coal wagons to haul coal out of mines. The rush for rare minerals is fueling what has been called a world war in Central Africa. The casualties have been horrendous, but no one notices or cares because the victims are poor and black, and the perpetrators are on the payroll of the mining companies that have gang raped Africa for generations. 

The conflict in the Ukraine is also fueled by rare minerals. Farmers in Serbia are fighting the opening of lithium mining in prime agricultural areas by the infamous Rio Tinto mining company. Rio Tinto is supplying Germany in its efforts to decrease carbon pollution. Serbian farmers declare, “Let Germany save the planet. We want to save our farms.” Lithium is strip mining Chile and parts of the American West and requires oceans of scarce water to process. It shares this type of destructiveness with the fracking boom in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Manganese, essential of lithium/ion batteries, has been discovered in Northern Minnesota where, along with copper, it threatens the Iconic Boundary Waters wilderness area. A so-called “mother lode” of rare earth minerals has been found in Wyoming. All the elements of a new era of extractive mining are in place to take the place of the old extractive mining of the carbon era. The electrification of the world’s power grid may save us from cooking the planet, but in the process of solving one problem, we recreate the old problems.

There are new problems we are facing. The first is that the move to new forms of energy production linked to the goal of electrifying the global power grid, has ushered in a new era of triumphant green washing. In the old days when we were fighting coal mining, fracking, and the oil industry the battle lines were clear. The mantra of “all of the above” was a distraction, but it did not send us off into a dead-end siding. 

Solar power used to be the specialty of elderly off the grid ex-hippies, and local development corporations serving discreet groups such as Native American communities embracing alternative energy technology to train and employ youth on the reservations. Their efforts were never going to be enough to put a dent in carbon-centered energy production, but they were the ones in control. Now with major utilities embracing solar and wind power, these energy systems are being scaled up, but control is no longer from the bottom up, but from the top down. It is an issue of power and the very same people who brought you mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, oil production and all that goes along with it, are muscling in on the decarbonized energy future.

A green future will not automatically be a just future. It is being built in the same old same old systems that raped the new world during the so-called Age of Exploration, and consumed thousands of people in the mines and mills of the Industrial Revolution. The processing of the new green systems will not be free of the hazards and exploitation of the old carbon-based economies. And there are bound to be new forms of toxic pollution, threatening both workers and communities.

As the new is developed, it will have to be accompanied by those forces that disciplined the old: labor unions, health and safety regulations, regulations to protect communities from the new pollution, and the provision of democratic opportunities to correct and control the new green economy. 

We must put an end to the expendability of communities and people. There should be no more sacrifice zones, and the right to live in a healthy environment, with opportunities for recreation and leisure, should be added to the list of rights we consider essential for civilized life. We cannot leave it to technocrats, bureaucrats, and tycoons to guarantee those rights. We could never trust them in the past, and we cannot trust them with our future. If we are to survive and thrive, the initiative must come from us and not from those who screwed everything up in the past. We cannot do worse than they did. So, let’s do better.

Thanks for reading! Forward to a friend and ask them to subscribe.