J ournalism for P eople B uilding a B etter W orld
THE JUST TRANSITION ISSUE
FREEDOM & FAIRNESS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY
no . 83 fall
2017
“Climate change is a multiplier of injustice” BILL MCKIBBEN interviews JACQUELINE PATTERSON
of the NAACP
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R E A S ON S Not Even
RAJ PATEL: 13 BEST WAYS TO FEED OURSELVES IN A TIME OF CLIMATE CRISIS MOUNTAINTOP COAL MINES BECOME FARMS
n Trump Ca
k the Hold Bac R e n e wa b l e
s
R e v o l u t io n
US $6.50 Canada $6.50
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+ WHAT CUBA CAN TEACH US ABOUT HEALTH CARE
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NO MORE WHITE SAVIORS
IN DEPTH FALL 2017
ALASKA SHOWS THAT BREAKING TIES WITH BIG OIL CAN MAKE LIFE BETTER FOR EVERYONE
TRANSITION TO RENEWABLES IS HARD—AND EASY
In Kotzebue, a city on the northwest coast of Alaska, frigid Arctic winters and high energy costs have encouraged renewable energy development since the late 1990s. YES! PHOTO BY STEPHEN MILLER
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E
Stephen Miller
arly in summer 2015, a barge hauling two deconstructed wind turbines lumbered out of Seattle bound for the Alaskan Arctic. It traveled along the western edge of Vancouver Island, passed the pristine wilderness of the Tongass National Forest, slipped across the Gulf of Alaska, rounded Cape Sarichef into the Bering Sea, and worked its way up the coast toward the Bering Strait, 3,000 miles from home.
By August, the ice in the Chukchi Sea had dispersed enough for the barge to get into
Kotzebue Sound. There, the white towers, black blades, and the rest of the parts were loaded onto a smaller boat that made its way past Puffin Island to the southeast end of Eschscholtz Bay. After winding 26 miles inland up the Buckland River, the turbines were placed on trucks for the last 5 miles to a hilltop where they were erected and began to spin.
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Clockwise from top left: As mayor of the Inupiaq village of Buckland, Tim Gavin has overseen the installation of wind turbines and solar panels that offset the high price of energy in remote Alaska. Homes there are built on stilts to keep them above annual floodwaters that, due to diminished snowfall, haven’t come in recent years. This year, May marks the early breakup of the Buckland River and the beginning of summer vacation for Ivory, Rosie, and Nita. A dump outside Buckland.
That is one way to get to Buckland, a village of about 400 mostly Inupiaq Alaskans that sits near the Arctic Circle. I hopped on a small plane in the coastal town of Kotzebue and landed on a red dirt runway on a clear morning in early May. A small welcoming party waited in the shade of a radio tower to receive returning family and friends. Distance and isolation affect every aspect of life in rural Alaska. Nearly everything must be brought in at considerable expense. Groceries, construction materials, cars, toys—everything costs more. In a region with prolonged subzero temperatures and darkness, and where the cash economy merely supplements subsistence livelihoods, energy is prohibitively expensive. Arctic residents pay as much as five times more for power than those in the Lower 48. The Arctic is not alone in its crippling reliance on oil. Alaska is in the throes of a deep fiscal crisis, due to the plunging value of crude, taxes on
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which account for about 85 percent of state revenue. Legislators need to close a $3.7 billion deficit. They’ve slashed spending on education and social services. They’ve trimmed the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend, an annual check that’s gone to all Alaskans for more than 40 years. They’re considering reinstating an income tax. I came to Buckland to see about a different option: a “just transition” to renewable energy. Wind turbines and solar arrays have been popping up across the state. I found wide agreement that it’s time to break ties with the fossil fuel industry and establish an economy that keeps everyone’s lights on independent of global oil markets. But I wanted to see if this transition toward renewables can really be “just,” improving all lives in concrete ways. Because the rest of the country isn’t far behind in the kinds of issues that Alaska faces.
I
’m greeted by Mayor Tim Gavin, an Inupiaq man of 55, dressed in a neon green safety shirt and gray sweatpants. We ride through town on a pair of Honda four-wheelers. Buckland is quiet this morning. “Village life,” Gavin says with a grin. “Everyone’s up all night and sleeps to noon.” Last night he took his daughters caribou hunting, and brown pelts are draped over a four-wheeler out front. Like the other houses in Buckland, Gavin’s place is single-story, wooden, rectangular, and built on stilts. It’s the shoulder season. The snow has nearly disappeared from the rolling hills but the tundra has not yet regained its vibrant green. For months out of the year, Buckland sits in the dark and cold. Now, each day adds about nine minutes of light, and the river is breaking up, taking chunks of ice downstream to the Chukchi Sea. There is a school with about 180 students, a health clinic, and a grocery YES! PHOTOS BY STEPHEN MILLER
WHY NOT EVEN TRUMP CAN STOP THE RENEWABLES REVOLUTION 33
states cut carbon emissions by an average of 12% while simultaneously growing GDP by 22%.
1
2000–2014
States that cut carbon emissions are prospering. WHERE CO2 EMISSIONS FELL MOST ...
Maine –25% Massachusetts –22% Alaska –21% Maryland –20% Delaware –20%
... GDP GREW Maine + 8.8% Massachusetts +20.5% Alaska +37.7% Maryland +32.5% Delaware +16.9%
Source: Brookings Institution: “Decoupling Economic Growth from Emissions Growth”
2
3
Renewables
201%
Coal is not coming back.
Renewable energy is outpacing fossil fuels— and will continue to.
Research shows only 18% of coal power plants planned as of 2017 will ever get built. U.S. COAL PRODUCTION 2012–2017
INCREASE OR DECREASE IN ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION 2015–2050
–25% EMPLOYMENT IN COAL MINING 2012–2017
Ohio, coal jobs hardest hit:
–32%
–66%
2017 Q1 YTD
Since 2012
West Virginia, biggest coal employer:
–45%
–47% Since 2012
2016 was a record year for solar in the U.S. The solar energy market doubled in size to power
Coal
–35%
2.8 million homes.
Oil
–75% Sources: Rhodium Group: May 8, 2017 “Coal Quarterly”; Bloomberg New Energy Finance Outlook 2017
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Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration 2017 Annual Energy Outlook Association; Solar Energy Industries
Turning Appalachia’s Mountaintop Coal Mines Into Farms In the post-coal economy, a transformation for both miners and the land
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SOLUTIONS
Catherine V. Moore
O
n a surface-mine-turned-farm in Mingo County, West Virginia, former coal miner Wilburn Jude plunks down three objects on the bed of his work truck: a piece of coal, a sponge, and a peach. He’s been tasked with bringing in items that represent his life’s past, present, and future. “This
is my heritage right here,” he says, picking up the coal. Since the time of his Irish immigrant great-grandfathers, all the males in his family have been miners.
“Right now I’m a sponge,” he says, pointing to the next object, “learning up here on this job, in school, everywhere, and doing the best I can to change everything around me.” Then he holds up the peach. “And then my future. I’m going to be a piece of fruit. I’m going to be able to put out good things to help other people.” Jude works for Refresh Appalachia, a social enterprise that partners with Reclaim Appalachia to convert postmine lands into productive and profitable agriculture and forestry enterprises that could be scaled up to put significant numbers of people in layoffriddled Appalachia back to work. When Refresh Appalachia launched in 2015, West Virginia had the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation. When he’s not doing paid farm work on this reclaimed mine site, Jude is attending community college and receiving life skills training from Refresh. “I’m living the dream. The ground’s a little bit harder than what I anticipated,” he says of the rocky soil beneath his feet, “but we’ll figure it out.”
O
n this wide, flat expanse of former mountaintop, the August sun is scorching even through the clouds. In the distance, heavy equipment grinds away on a still-active surface mine site—the type of site where some of the Refresh crew members used to work, blowing up what they’re now trying to put back together.
Crew members Eva Jones and Chris Farley, residents of Mingo County, work the soil. It is compacted, composed of blasted rock, and lacks organic matter.
YES! PHOTO BY PAUL CORBIT BROWN
Crew leaders drive out to an undulating ridge where we can see a 5-acre spread of autumn olive—a tough invasive shrub once heavily seeded on former mine sites as part of coal companies’ reclamation plans. It’s summer 2016, and the crew for this particular Reclaim Appalachia site is awaiting the arrival next week of a forestry mulcher that will remove and chew up the shrubs into wood chips. By the following spring, the clearing will have been replanted by this Refresh crew with over 2,000 berry, pawpaw, and hazelnut seedlings. During my visit, everyone’s clearly excited for the mulcher to arrive. “It’s almost like a continuous miner head,” explains Nathan Hall, “but instead of mining coal, it’s mulching autumn olives.” Hall is from Eastern Kentucky and worked for a short time as a miner before attending the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies; now he heads up Reclaim Appalachia, which focuses on repurposing mine land. There are a few small agriculture projects on other former surface mines in the area, but Refresh and Reclaim are the only outfits attempting anything of this scale while also operating a job-training project. One of the crew members, former miner Chris Farley, says he’s stoked to be a part of “the first bunch” to attempt to farm these rugged lands. “It’s a long-term science project,” says Ben Gilmer, Refresh’s president. Southern West Virginia nonprofit Coalfield Development runs Refresh, Reclaim, and a family of three other social enterprises. In an environment yesmagazine . org
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SOLUTIONS WE LOVE
A radio station that gives teen girls power 6 People We Love: Playwright activism 9 5 Ways: Go beyond Little Free Libraries 10 Commentary: Put “carpe diem” into politics 12 The Page That Counts 13
Members of GRLZradio, from left to right, top to bottom: Selena Rodriquez, Jomelly Munoz, Vanessa McKenzie, Taja Boone, La’Porsha Hickson,Yaritza Villar, Fatima Doumbia, Olivia Williams, Victoria Omoregie, Nellcie Bodden
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GIRL POWER ON AIR yesmagazine . org
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CULTURE SHIFT
Do-it-yourself reparations 48 Books + Films + Music: No More Heroes, The Revenge of Analog, and First Daughter and the Black Snake 54 Yes! But How? Give a dead body back to Earth 62
Powerful Ideas Emerging
Sarah van Gelder: Cuba’s health care 64
T
TB
REPARATIONS AS
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Christine Nobiss, Plains Cree-Salteaux of the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan and founder and chair of Indigenous Iowa, lives with her family on land lent to them by a local property owner to continue the social justice work they found at Standing Rock. YES! PHOTO BY JEN MADIGAN
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DO-IT-YOURSELF REPARATIONS The end of White supremacy doesn’t have to involve an official decree. Just one step at a time.
Chris Moore-Backman
I had a fascinating breakfast conversation with my 11-year-old daughter a few days back. The night before I had a fitful dream—one that was short on plot and imagery, but chockfull of emotion. In this case, the feeling was of a deep, immovable sorrow. When I awoke, it didn’t take long to recognize that the article I’d been working on—this article—was definitely working on me, too. During breakfast I knew my daughter could tell I wasn’t on solid ground. She’s a sensitive soul, and I figured I should go ahead and tell her what was going on. “I’m struggling with my article, Isa,” I told her. She already knew that I was working on a piece about reparations. The word was new to her, though the concept was secondnature. She took a bite of her apple as I continued: “What do you do when there’s more damage than you could ever hope to repair?” Still chewing, Isa gently prodded me with her eyes, not quite understanding what I was getting at. “Like with what White people have done—and continue to do—to Black people and to Native Americans,” I said. “All the violence and theft. All the broken promises. What do you do when there’s so much more than you could possibly repair?” Isa finished her bite, then spoke without hesitation: “You should repair
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as much as you can,” she said. “And then you should teach young people about what happened, so it doesn’t happen again.” Guileless, she took another bite from her apple. It gave her time to find the rest of her answer: “And you need to say sorry.” The end of an age, the advent of a movement of movements The most hopeful interpretation I’ve heard of the still-surreal outcome of November’s presidential election is that Donald Trump’s ascendancy does not mark the beginning of a new era so much as the end of an age. While the new president and his supporters champion their Reaganesque revival, some intuit this shocking swing of the pendulum as the official beginning of the end for the reign of capitalism, patriarchy, and White supremacy. It’s a gargantuan claim, to say the least. And, in view of our current
circumstances as a civilization, we’d better hope it’s on the mark. The intensification of social crises around the world and the threat of allout ecological collapse have made clear that the time for global action has more than arrived. But our current multifaceted emergency also signals that the scale and character of the action now needed point to the rising up of more than a movement. A growing number of changemakers have begun pointing to the emergence of a massive movement of movements as our greatest hope. In her essay “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” Naomi Klein describes the indivisibility
CULTURE SHIFT
of capital-driven violence against the Earth and systemically racist violence against people of color. In the end she reaches the conclusion that “the most pressing task” must be that of “strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements.” This, she argues, is “the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo.” We’re in a bona fide all-hands-ondeck situation here. In order to rally the strength and vision our historical moment requires, our many and varied social and ecological movements are
being called beyond mere collaboration and intersectionality. We’re being called to a level of coherence and unity unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. And this is where it gets really tricky and plenty overwhelming. As a White person who has moved in a variety of multiracial movement spaces, I have a sense of what the above assignment actually entails. I’ve come to know something of the vast distance between collaboration and true coherence. It’s more or less equal, I’ve found, to the distance we Whites tend to fall short of genuinely meriting the trust of our sisters and brothers of color. And let’s be clear: In the context of our nation’s
Watani Stiner sits in his room at the restorative justice-centered house Sister Water, at Canticle Farm in the Fruitvale District in Oakland, Calif. Stiner, a former member of the Black nationalist group US, was sentenced to life in prison following the 1969 shootout at UCLA, in which two members of the Black Panther Party were shot and killed as activist groups called for the founding of a Black studies program at the university. Now, after being released, Stiner leads monthly speaking engagements at high schools, colleges, and organizations centered on criminal justice. Living at Sister Water, he says, has helped him discover his passion for speaking and makes his “journey worthwhile.”
YES! PHOTO BY VERONICA WEBER
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BOOKSBOOKS + FILM+ +FILM MUSIC + MUSIC
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YES! ILLUSTRATION BY FRAN MURPHY
BOOKS + FILM + MUSIC
Let the People Lead Their Own Movements
Aura Bogado
The time we’re living in requires an extraordinary understanding of who we are, what we’re working toward, and how to get there. As people committed to social justice in the time of Trump, our challenge is twofold: resisting an administration that came into power through an election won on the dehumanization of marginalized people, while also being mindful not to reproduce the devastating hierarchies that mimic that power. So far, we’ve largely come up short. A new book by Jordan Flaherty, No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality, offers insight into how the practice of “saviorism” injures our movements and provides visions for an alternative and much-needed praxis. You’re no doubt familiar with the White savior: a person of privilege picks a cause they know little to nothing about and insists on solutions that inevitably cause more harm than good. As Flaherty explains, the savior mentality cannot exist without turning people into objects who need rescuing. “It is as old as conquest and as enduring as colonialism,” he writes. As an activist and a journalist, Flaherty has witnessed firsthand the harms of saviorism and neatly lays out countless
examples of its failure—perhaps most poignantly when he writes about Brandon Darby. Flaherty cites numerous articles and other activists for his wellresearched chapter about Darby, a man he’s known for several years. Darby’s origin myth, as it were, begins in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when Darby says he rescued Robert King, a Black Panther who spent three decades in solitary confinement until his conviction was overturned in 2001. Darby, along with anarchist organizer scott crow, “had taken a boat to Robert King’s house [and] faced down state troopers who got in his way.” Shortly after, Darby became a leader in “Common Ground, an anarchistleaning volunteer group that brought
No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality Jordan Flaherty AK Press, 2016
thousands of young, mostly White volunteers to work on rebuilding New Orleans,” writes Flaherty. What followed, as described in No More Heroes, is a case of “disaster masculinity,” a term coined by scholar Rachel Luft to describe the familiar practice in which charismatic men (often White—but not always) poise themselves to presumably lead a marginalized group to freedom. What ensues is destructive abuse and exploitation against the very people these saviors claim to want to rescue. As described in No More Heroes, in the case of Darby, it was not only the Black people of New Orleans who were disregarded in order to let Darby shine, but also women who were sidelined through the use of sexual assault under his leadership at Common Ground. Despite constant warnings about and accusations against him, Darby garnered and maintained support from well-intentioned men and was allowed to continue to do his work however he saw fit. That work paved a path of ruin. yesmagazine . org
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YES! BUT HOW? DIY WAYS TO LIVE SUSTAINABLY
GIVE A DEAD BODY BACK TO EARTH Research and Illustrations by Jennifer Luxton
Whether it’s sudden or a long time coming, we all draw a last breath. What happens next is largely driven by tradition, regulation, and a multimilliondollar industry: Approximately half of Americans choose cremation, and the other half are buried. But what if you want your body to be useful still? Ideas emerging from an alternative community of mortuary and hospice professionals offer ways to give your body back to nature. As strange as some of these methods might seem now, they are at least getting us talking “outside the box” about death.
CONSERVATION BURIAL The simplest solution might be natural burial grounds, which let you go into the grave without a casket or even embalming. An essential oil solution can be used as an alternative to formaldehyde. Plots are marked by GPS tags rather than headstones to maintain the landscape’s natural appearance. Some cemeteries and brokers facilitate conservation burial by purchasing land for the use of green burials, thereby designating it exclusively for cemetery use in perpetuity.
REEF BALLS Mushroom mycelia, which help to decompose flesh, are woven into the suit.
INFINITY BURIAL SUIT The body is buried in a casket made of organic material or placed directly in dirt wearing a biodegradable suit woven with a mix of mycelia and other microorganisms. As the body decomposes, fungi help with decomposition, neutralize toxins in the body, and transfer nutrients back to the environment.
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If cremation is still the most cost-effective option, consider this alternative to an urn. Florida-based Eternal Reefs offers to add your ashes to a concrete structure designed to attract aquatic plants and animals when set out on the ocean floor. Eternal Reefs’ partner, the Reef Ball Foundation, sets out artificial reefs in areas of development to encourage estuary restoration and habitat recovery. Besides reef propagation, they are also used as breakwaters.
SOURCES: NATIONAL FUNERAL DIRECTORS ASSOCIATION, COEIO, ETERNAL REEFS, URBAN DEATH PROJECT, GREEN BURIAL COUNCIL
MORTALITY COMPOSTING Soil scientists with the Urban Death Project in Western Washington are prototyping the “recomposition” process on human remains after successful trials with livestock remains. The eventual plan is to build a recomposition structure for use on a metropolitan scale.
1 The body is placed inside a vertical chamber layered with woodchips, similar to the way compost piles use leaves as a carbon source.
2
Over several weeks, as the body is decomposed by bacteria, it shifts down the chamber. Other bodies are laid on top as part of a continuous process.
3
Eventually, all that’s left is a nutrient-rich humus ready to nourish new life.
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“YES! celebrates good works like no other magazine.” Activist and actor Danny Glover YES! board member for 17 years
“Communities are empowered by seeing their efforts recognized, by finding the tools and resources they need, and by connecting with others in common struggle.”
YES! PHOTO BY BETTY UDESEN
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