Survival Bloc is a BIPOC-led network of leaders, movement organizations, and grassroots groups building power and community alternatives to survive the extinction era.

Survival Bloc recently released a new free guidebook, How to Build a Survival Program, filled with “insights, tools and practices for communities to build their own survival programs and other strategies for climate resilience.”

Daisy Carter (she/they) is a queer multi-disciplinary artist, yogi and climate justice organizer working at the intersections of grassroots leadership development, disaster resiliency, and mutual aid infrastructure. They work to implement strategies for self-determination, cultural revival, and alternative care that aim to protect frontline, ВІРОС (black, brown, and people of color) communities who are most vulnerable to climate disaster and political violence. As a movement consultant, they have trained over 500+ leaders in power-building strategies across the country, and worked for organizations such as CODEPINK, The Poor People’s Campaign, The Climate Mobilization Project, and more. Born in New Orleans, LA, they are currently based in Louisville, KY. Daisy is a co-founder of Survival Bloc and works as Network Organizer.

Aracely Jimenez-Hudis (she/they) is a queer community organizer and facilitator born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Over the years, they have led strategic communications + grassroots mobilizations for major movement organizations and campaigns, including The Sunrise Movement and Los Angeles Tenants Union. As a certified yogi with a background in sociology, they are mostly interested in how to build up marginalized communities capacities for intergenerational healing, processing systemic and disaster related traumas, and cultivating resilience within the body. Aracely is also a co-founder of Survival Bloc, and holds down Communications Support.

Resources:

• Survival Bloc 
• Survival Bloc Network Member Application – for folks interested in joining the network, cross-movement collaborations, or building their own survival program
• Free Zine: How To Build a Survival Program 
• Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit from Shareable
• Support The Response: https://www.shareable.net/donate/ 

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Organizing in the Extinction Era with Survival Bloc appeared first on Shareable.

Despite the building blocks of our legacy energy system often being located in Indigenous territories, “Native American communities have higher rates of energy insecurity, while paying higher prices for the energy that is provided to our communities,” says Nicole Donaghy, the executive director of North Dakota Native Vote (NDNV).

NDNV educates and activates Native communities to get more engaged in democratic processes and gets out the Indigenous vote. NDNV was founded in 2018 to push against a voter ID law that disproportionally disenfranchised Native voters. And their work and tribal traditions are the subject of “Spirit Lake”, a new short documentary from The Story of Stuff Project, Rural Power Coalition (RPC), and Shareable.

As Shareable has extensively covered, democratic governance is not limited to government alone—a wide range of institutions can be democratic, governed by elected representatives.

Rural electric cooperatives—also known as electric membership corporations—are institutions of this sort, with great democratic potential at their core. For those serviced by an electric co-op, ratepayers are members who collectively own their utility, and who can be elected to serve on the board of these utilities.

Although these co-ops are democratic on paper, in reality, they often fall short of expectations. “A lot of our community members that we surveyed did not know that they could vote for the governing board,” says Donaghy. “We believe it is by design, by the [rural electric cooperative] so they can maintain levels of power.”

Only one out of fifty-five seats on the governing board of the local energy co-op is Native American, according to Donaghy, despite all tribal lands in North Dakota being served by electric co-ops.

But that may be changing. “We’ve created a task force that is sitting around 125 members that are interested in rewriting the narrative as to what energy production in North Dakota should be,” says Donaghy. “Including getting involved in the governance structure of rural electric cooperatives.”

“Spirit Lake” documents how North Dakota Native Vote is mobilizing Native communities to better represent Indigenous voices in co-op utilities, and to re-democratize these electric cooperatives.

You can also watch and share it on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Take Action

At the time of writing, rural communities are facing significant threats from those who represent them in Congress— with the Senate considering a bill that would undermine the health and well-being of rural residents.

North Dakota Native Vote has a timely call to action here:

https://secure.everyaction.com/1Z60dr83u0i4rh03eGr1aQ2

If you’re interested in following the fight to secure a resilient, modern energy future for rural America, visit the Rural Power Coalition (of which NDNV is a member) and find ways to make your voice heard by telling the Senate to defend key energy programs.

The post WATCH: Getting out the Native Vote to indigenize energy sovereignty appeared first on Shareable.

Megan Saltzman presented her new book–Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona–which explores how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, walking, etc.) challenge the increase of top-down control in the global city. Public Everyday Space focuses on post-Olympic Barcelona—a time of unprecedented levels of gentrification, branding, mass tourism, and immigration. Drawing from examples observed in public spaces (streets, plazas, sidewalks, and empty lots), as well as in cultural representation (film, photography, literature), this book exposes the quiet agency of those excluded from urban decision-making but who nonetheless find ways to carve out spatial autonomy for themselves. Absent from the map or postcard, the quicksilver spatial phenomena documented in this book can make us rethink our definitions of culture, politics, inclusion, legality, architecture, urban planning, and public space.

About the speaker

Megan Saltzman (PhD, University of Michigan) is a teaching professor at Mount Holyoke College in the department of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx Studies, where she also contributes to the Five Colleges of Massachusetts Architectural Studies Program. Her research focuses on contemporary urban culture of Spanish cities with a transnational and ethnographic approach. Her 2024 book, Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona combines literary and visual arts with fieldwork to expose how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, street selling) not only challenge the city’s policed image but also serve to carve out autonomy from below. Megan has published on urban cultural themes in Spain related to gentrification, spatial in/exclusion, immigration, nostalgia, recycling, urban furniture design, grassroots cultural centers and “artivism.” Most recently Megan has been teaching courses that revolve around three themes: (1) urban studies, (2) material and non-human culture, and (3) ethnically hybrid identities. Besides teaching at Mount Holyoke, Megan has enjoyed teaching at a variety of colleges, including the University of Otago (New Zealand), Grinnell College, the University of Michigan, Amherst College, West Chester University, and this coming fall at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Video of Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona with Megan Saltzman

Transcript of Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona with Megan Saltzman

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript, and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.4 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our final Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium this semester. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning, and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Dr. Megan Saltzman. Megan teaches at Mount Holyoke College. Her research combines literary and visual arts with ethnographic fieldwork to expose how everyday public practices, carve out autonomy and resistance from below. Megan has published on urban culture in Spain related to gentrification, spatial inclusion and exclusion, immigration, waste, urban furniture, grassroots cultural center, and artivism. These themes come together in Megan’s most recent publication, her book Public Everyday Space: The Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona. And that is the name of her talk today. Megan, a Zoom-tastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:04.5 Megan Saltzman: Okay, thank you very much, Julian. Thank you for the invitation and also thank you, Tom, for all the tech assistance. And also I want to thank Mount Holyoke College in general for the support in the process of writing and finishing this book project. Okay. Well, I’ll start by saying that free, accessible, open public space is not what it appears to be. In fact, it’s often, especially in the city, the opposite of what it appears to be. Nevertheless, we read the city as a truthful or objective text absorbing knowledge, ideas, norms, and feelings from our public surroundings. Today’s public spaces are designed in a way that very carefully regulates what we can see, what we can do, and what we can know in it. For example, its design prioritizes a limited number of activities such as facilitating formal work or consumption, buying stuff, and also transit, moving individuals, human individuals, quickly from point A to point B. And so today’s public space is designed in such a way to make us think, again, that it’s free, open, and accessible to all. Urban anthropologist Manuel Delgado points out two cities that are coexisting. We have the planned and conceptualized city on a powerful scale, like architectural plans, institutional policies, these top-down initiatives, and imposed normative use of public space.

0:03:43.2 Megan Saltzman: And then we also have what he calls the ciudad practicada. It’s how it’s actually used in daily life, on the ground, everyday practices. It’s something that’s not totally controllable or predictable or quantifiable. It’s mobile, fluid, and it often ignores barriers or lines. So one of the goals of my book is to expose what’s being intentionally limited from view, what the ciudad concebida is limiting from our view and from our possibilities, as well as expose the potential of public space, of the ciudad practicada, that everyday city buzz in the background that circumvents being controlled and quantified. So my book’s main focus is on the small everyday practices that resist the neoliberalization of the city. And for those of you who may be new to these concepts, I understand that this might be very condensed or packed. So let me unpack these concepts, starting with the neoliberalization of Barcelona. By that, I’m referring to the rapid and destructive changes that were undemocratically imposed in the last four decades in Spain and in most Spanish cities to create and maintain this ciudad concebida. And this, in Barcelona especially, dramatically rebuilt central areas of the city, making it unrecognizable for many and economically exclusive for the majority of locals.

0:05:20.4 Megan Saltzman: So what specifically contributed to the neoliberalization of Barcelona? Well, there’s the privatization of public space of the last couple of decades. And I wanted to point out, ’cause I imagine a lot of you are tuning in from Boston, I think these characteristics of neoliberalism that I’m about to name will definitely resonate with those in Boston and in many global cities and major US Cities. But I want to point out that in the case of Spain and Spanish cities, a lot of these neoliberal characteristics or aspects and initiatives are still not normalized. It’s still relatively new. Things that started to happen in the 1990s, for example. So a step behind the neoliberalization of public space, I would say, in the United States and in US Cities. So yeah, the privatization of public space and also the construction of a tourist image of the city, a very narrow, profitable visual definition of the city, equating the city to a brand, the city branding. And in the case of Barcelona, city branding is very strong. You can just stick the word Barcelona into Google Images and you’ll see a billion pictures of Gaudi architecture and the Sagrada Familia, a very monumental architectural definition of the city.

0:06:47.6 Megan Saltzman: And I wanted to show here, since I’m coming more from cultural studies, from arts and film and literature, that culture, the arts, the humanities, which often are underfunded and defunded and not paid much attention to, were actually an important component of these changes in Barcelona, the neoliberalization of the city, the gentrification going on in the city. And here we have an example of the Woody Allen film Vicky Christina Barcelona, one of many films that helped disseminate this global architectural image of the city. And Woody Allen was paid several, one and a half million euros in public funding to showcase Barcelona’s architecture in public spaces. And also I include this image of the Olympics because most of these initial transformations started in preparation for the 1992 Olympics. And again, in the background, you can see this monumental view of the monument. Yeah, the arts are part of this neoliberalization of the city. And also another important aspect has been the creation and maintenance of a wide control apparatus to protect the tourist industry, to protect this new global economy. And part of this control apparatus has been an increase in surveillance, all types of surveillance, more video cameras in public space, more police presence, security guards.

0:08:16.9 Megan Saltzman: And also, for example, in 2006, the city hall, city council came out with a very long document, something like 80 or 90 pages of civic rules of how people need to behave in public space. And this is a city that was not used to having so many rules in public space. But to give you an example of some things that were suddenly in 2006 illegal, unless some kind of previous permission was granted, for example, no sleeping in public space, no drinking alcohol in public space, no begging, no distributing food, no peddling, no throwing up, no painting, no skating, no sex work, no hanging objects, objects from balconies, no hanging posters or banners in the plazas or streets, no taking anything out of the trash, no playing music. And the list goes on and on. And again, perhaps from a US point of view, this could for many seem normalized. But in the case of Spain and a long history, which I think is true in many Mediterranean cities, of a certain informality and organicness in the public spaces, even in times of dictatorship, this was really a shock. And the book is looking at the pushback against this kind of regulation of behavior and appearance of public space.

0:09:50.1 Megan Saltzman: So here I can show you, for example, this is just ironic that in the Plaza de George Orwell, you can see a sign that there’s a video camera there. And here’s some photos that I took of also the implementation of anti-social urban furniture in the public space to, again, control and nudge and mold what we do and who can be, who can rest, who cannot rest. And this idea of moving along public space merely for transit, merely for work and consumption. Okay. This one… This was a particularly interesting type of construction where it was like an inverted slide. So if you tried to sit on this, you would just plop off. Okay. So yeah, another part of the neoliberal was the anti-social urban furniture, which we’re seeing popping up all over cities. Following what urbanist Don Mitchell calls the landscapes of pleasure, these controls have ended up eliminating, displacing, or pushing to the periphery everything that does not fit the tourist image, which means everything that’s not profitable or for maintaining the ciudad concebida. So what has been pushed out of view or destroyed?

0:11:18.9 Megan Saltzman: Well, hundreds of historical working-class buildings, many of them from the 18th and 19th Centuries, and with those buildings, much of their history also disappears. Small businesses, the communities. In many of these Mediterranean cities, we’re talking about very dense space, long-term communities. These central downtown communities have been fragmented. Also, they have tried to push poverty or anything that could be associated with poverty out of view. Spontaneity has for the most part decreased. A lot of the benches, in terms of urban furniture benches, especially the traditional long bench, has decreased in central areas. Informal markets and informal economies, which have a long history in Barcelona, have been cracked down on. And places that look dirty or smell bad have also been eliminated or pushed out of view. And I have… I found this like little zine that illustrates an idea. In doing a lot of the interviews for this project, when I spoke with elderly people specifically, they often spoke of a sense of disorientation resulting from these changes, of not knowing where they were within their own neighborhood because the buildings had transformed so quickly. And so in this zine in Spanish, I have it here down in English. It says, the neighborhood has suffered from gentrification and Mrs. Amalia, after living there for 42 years, has to move because she can’t afford the rent.

0:13:06.4 Megan Saltzman: Can you help her find the exit to the periphery? So this is one of many examples of the cultural responses that I have in my book related to these changes. And also I know some of you all are studying about sustainability in contemporary cities. There’s the whole ecological factor to consider. Barcelona is a small city, compact historical city, and they’re receiving 16 million tourists a year. So it doesn’t have the infrastructure to sustainably welcome or deal with this level of tourism and the amount of water and waste and air pollution that it creates. And also just in these last couple of weeks, there’s been massive protests in Barcelona because all of these processes, the gentrification processes, have skyrocketed the rent and the price renting a home or buying a home, especially in terms of Airbnb and tourist apartments. Going back to this goal, small everyday practices that resist the neoliberalization of the city. So small everyday practices, what I’m referring to with this is a type of small resistance that receives little attention and often goes unnoticed.

0:14:28.9 Megan Saltzman: When we think about political resistance, for example, we tend to think of larger phenomena like protests or social movements or activists, I mean, in terms of people, activists or well-known intellectuals or certain politicians. And that’s good. That’s important. In Barcelona’s case, those types of forms of resistance have already been well documented with books and analytical studies. And so I didn’t feel that I had too much to offer along those lines. So I wanted to focus on a less discussed type of resistance and agency, this type that we can find in everyday practices. And this type of small resistance emerges from lesser known spaces in the city, the everyday spaces like streets, plazas, street corners or abandoned lots. And I found that many of the examples of this type of small resistance are non-confrontational, they’re non-violent, they at times can be joyful or leisurely, they’re often anonymous and very accessible, something that anybody can do. And also I noticed that this type of resistance in Barcelona, we could call it, so to say, weak or weaker because it’s temporary and it’s not loud or eye-catching, it’s quite fragile. But nonetheless, it does challenge and provide nuance to the dominant destructive tourist image and objectives of today’s urbanism in Barcelona because it exposes a difference.

0:16:15.6 Megan Saltzman: And so in doing the research for this book, I think the closest theoretical description that I could find was Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome. I’m not sure if some of you are familiar with that, but to sum it up, a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines or on a new line or on new lines. And these lines always tie back to one another. So this idea of this small resistance that’s temporary, it’s flexible, it’s regenerational, mobile, elusive, like a worm or an octopus, if it gets squashed or eliminated, it can return or it can regrow its parts. So the practices can return if they’re pushed to the periphery. They can return maybe in a different place or at a different time, but they’re able to continue. And so I found that a focus on everyday practices opens up a whole other level of coexisting realities in the city, a place where we can still find some spontaneity, creativity, community, and democratic practices. We can find people carving out space and autonomy for themselves in difficult circumstances where they might not be able to have a voice or have communication with politics with the capital P, institutional level of politics.

0:17:45.5 Megan Saltzman: And also that these everyday practices allow us to see the flexibility and the potential of our urban materials beyond just a singular conventional use of, for example, a bench or a curb. So with the remaining minutes, I will quickly summarize the rest of the chapters, which again, all focus on different types of small everyday rhizomatic practices that go against the grain of what philosopher Jacques Eancière calls the order of things, the order… The normal order of things in the city. Okay, so the next chapter and also the book cover image is this one here, which is actually two superimposed photos on top of each other, one that I took and another a friend took one year later. One day I was just wandering around the central area, the neighborhood called the Raval, and I noticed a group of men, what I assumed to be men, playing volleyball within an abandoned lot. And I was curious as to how they got in there because it was completely fenced off and there’s also these cement blocks around the abandoned lot. And I found this hole, I don’t know, about like 12 inches by 12 inches.

0:19:13.7 Megan Saltzman: And so I thought, ah, okay, so they must have put their bodies through this hole and the volleyball net, the ball through this hole. And I had been reading a lot about Michel de Certeau and his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, and his idea about spatial tactics and how we can repurpose things, in this case, repurposing urban materials and giving them a different function, some unplanned function. And so I decided that many of these practices, small practices of resistance that I was seeing in Barcelona fit under this category of spatial tactics, of repurposing one’s urban material surroundings, having to re-adapt to the destruction in one’s neighborhood and the privatization and the hyper-regulation of one’s urban surroundings. So I found a lot of examples like this. I remember, for example, with the economic crisis of 2007, 2008, it hit Spain very hard. Unemployment, for example, for youth was… For younger people, was over 50%. And there was much more poverty in the city. And with that poverty, I started to see more and more spatial tactics like those ATM bank rooms where you have to swipe a card to get in.

0:20:37.1 Megan Saltzman: I noticed at night that people would go into these ATM rooms and convert them into bedrooms for sleeping at night. Or another example was in Spanish cities, you have these very large trash dumps that are on the sidewalk. And I noticed that next to these big trash dumps, people would carefully leave piles of things that other people might want to use or have or recycle. What else? Also with the elimination of benches, I saw people using all sorts of things in the city, material things in the city to create places to sit. As you can see here, these people have turned a big plant pot into a sitting place, as well as here, this kind of shop ledges turned into benches. Or this example here, it was a person who had created some kind of exercise equipment out of what? Out of these poles to stop cars from coming onto the sidewalk. Okay. And also in this chapter, I focused on a film, which I highly recommend. It’s called En Construcción. And in this film, we can see a wide variety of spatial tactics and not only from human beings, but also in animals and how they all try to adapt to these rapid material changes in the city.

0:22:10.3 Megan Saltzman: Okay. And then the next chapter is about collectives or groups and self-managed spaces that emerged after this economic crisis, the recession. It takes a look at groups that have taken it into their own hands to create their own public spaces independently and the impact that these have had locally and abroad. So these were the ones… What I saw was a boom in around 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. There was a boom of these self-managed, in Spanish, the word is easier, it’s autogestionado, which is a common word for some… It’s a bit like DIY, do it yourself. If the government is not going to pay attention to our needs, then we are gonna act on our own needs and create our own public spaces. So there was a boom of these spaces popping up all over the city in abandoned, again, abandoned lots or plots of land. Like you see here, this is… It’s hard to find words for these type of spaces. I get… In Spanish, sometimes they’re called… Would roughly translate to independent self-manage social space or cultural space. These spaces often had urban gardens and were managed openly, voluntarily by people in the neighborhood.

0:23:40.9 Megan Saltzman: And yeah, they were open. So anybody can come in and help or take food or other resources if necessary. Here’s another example. This sign reads more peppers and less cement. Again, referring to the ongoing gentrification, there was one group I was able to participate in on several occasions called fem placa, which means we make the plaza. And here in Catalan it says, we recover public space as a place of coexistence. And their goal was to intervene in certain plazas where there was mass tourism and where a lot of buildings had been torn down and simply carry out everyday activities. Really simple activities like just standing there or just standing and talking or being together as a group, maybe eating, maybe drinking something, singing or dancing or talking about history. There was always one historian at these events who would read the history, the disappeared history of these plazas.

0:24:57.0 Megan Saltzman: And one day every month there would be one of these fem placa interventions and they carried out these activities without getting permission. So technically what they were doing legislatively is not legal. The police did approach at least twice when I was there and they asked what was going on and then walked away. There is this other element of which perhaps you all have thought about in your classes where, when the resistance looks cool, it can be so to say… So to speak, approved or co-opted by the ciudad concebida. So for example, this could be something that could actually attract more gentrifiers or more gentrification projects. I had another example up here where there were these critical spaces that I was seeing a lot in 2005, 2006 in Spanish, they’re called medianeras, where the buildings have been cut in half and you can see all of their interior private spaces just exposed to the public, to the passerby, people who are walking by. And on one hand, these are very historically triggering, right? You see this and your history questions are immediately mobilized. What happened here? Something happened here in the past. And I also came across some kind of artistic installation, something similar. They had replaced the sink and a shower head and what other bathroom features in this medianera. And then the next year I came across a postcard of this same artistic installation.

0:26:51.6 Megan Saltzman: So there is this tricky line of where does the critical art begin or where does the authorities end up creating it or co-opting it into something that can be commodified or sold. So yeah, here’s another example of the fem placa group. And one of the things they did in one of these interventions was to count all of the private seats in a plaza versus public seats. For example, this is… In this plaza, 61% of the places where you could sit were private. They were mostly cafes and restaurants. So they were highlighting this problem of the privatization of a public space. If I have time, I can go through more of the ways that these self-managed public spaces were operating. Yeah, I can go into that later if we have more time. How they were operating and how they were sharing their resources. Okay, and then the last chapter deals with immigration. Spanish cities not only experienced a boom of gentrification in the ’90s and the early 2000s, but also an immigration boom. So there’s the crux or intersection of these two major social phenomena. And Barcelona has been the Spanish city with the largest population of foreigners and undocumented people. So contrary to the dominant discourses on immigration, which tends to reduce immigrants to numbers or often negative narratives, this chapter seeks to understand these realities more holistically and with eyes on the creative spatial agency of this group of people.

0:28:42.8 Megan Saltzman: And for this chapter, I mainly analyzed two documentaries, Si Nos Dejan by Ana Torres and Raval, Raval by Antoni Verdaguer. And I also include my own ethnographic research on the phenomenon of informal street vending. And so from these resources, from these sources, sorry, I was able to get a better understanding of barriers in public space, specifically physical barriers, racial barriers, and legislative barriers. And also, I was able to see a certain type of mobility, a frequent zigzagging mobile itineraries across Barcelona and also across from city to city transnationally. And I think this is important because we still have very dominant national frameworks for doing the type of research we do and the type of thinking we do about time and space. In these documentaries and in the research, Barcelona is not this glamorous location, but simply a labor stopover within a network of European cities, especially downtowns, centers of these European cities that increasingly need and depend on cheap multilingual service labor, but they don’t offer ways to do so legally or humanely with housing. So that was another conclusion I got from this research. And then also through these films, the ethnographic research, I also saw a lot of solidarity and what I call neighborhood citizenship, referring to social bonds between strangers at the neighborhood level within a dense heterogeneous urban space.

0:30:36.5 Megan Saltzman: And this might be something more Mediterranean. I’m not certain because I’ve primarily done research in Spanish cities, but yeah, within the density of compactness of the Barcelona city, I was seeing this neighborhood citizenship, which was facilitating a more accessible and flexible notion of belonging and upholding networks of care. Again, although temporary and in the face of both gentrification and deportation, and I should add that everything that I have shown you, all of these small resistances, all of these here… Oh, with the exception of this one, they don’t exist anymore. So these urban gardens, these are all new buildings now. Fem placa does not practice anymore. This one, it’s called Germanetes, it does still continue. It was able to secure some legal and financial support from the city hall, which has allowed it to continue. Also this volleyball court, these are all apartment buildings now. That is a reality of this type of small resistance that I’m talking about. I have a lot of other images I could talk about, but this past January, I was able to share my book in Barcelona. And again, the issue of housing was very visible. Here you can see like this means, in Catalan, tourist flat. So you could see the type of graffiti. Also another example of this ephemeral resistance. Okay. So I guess I will end there. And if there’s certain questions, I can show you more of the images that I have. So that’s all for now.

0:32:33.9 Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you very much, Megan. This is a fascinating presentation. And we’ve got several questions, but I wanna open it up because I remember in the early days when we were talking about this, you said, but I’m from cultural studies. You people are in urban planning. It doesn’t matter. What you’re describing here is what we call pop-up urbanism. The small practices of everyday urbanism, pop-up urbanism, and it can be anything from a mural to seed bombing, like throwing seeds over a piece of vacant land. So this is exactly in our domain. And what’s quite refreshing actually is to hear a non-urban planner coming from a different discipline, obviously talking about this. So with that said, we’ve got a lot of questions and I’ve got a lot of questions of my own because I know a lot of people at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice, and they’ve been doing some fantastic work. Isabelle Anguelovski and her team. I don’t know whether you got to meet them, but Marvin says, I thought Barcelona is a walkable city and a sterling urban community model.

0:33:46.8 Megan Saltzman: Okay. Yeah, thank you, Marvin, for your comment/question. Yeah, so that is definitely part of the image and reputation that Barcelona has, especially around the… In the 1990s with the Olympics and right after the Olympics, there was the creation of… Or maybe not the creation, but there was this concept called the Barcelona model. And I think it’s quite well known in architectural studies of like you say, a city that has prioritized its inhabitants, walkability, democracy, green spaces. But upon researching this, that it wasn’t fully true and that all that I described at the beginning of the presentation about… Sorry, I had to turn something off. About the neoliberal effects and the population of the downtown decreasing and it becoming an increasingly exclusive city, at least economically, that those were aspects that were not included in this Barcelona model. So yeah, I mean there are definitely positive aspects and realities and truths in that Barcelona model. And Barcelona has many positive aspects today as well, especially if you compare it to other cities. But when you speak to the locals, when you speak to those who don’t have much of a voice, like people who are being pushed to the periphery or who are outside the institutions, then you do see that it’s much more nuanced and that a large, perhaps even the majority of the population has been excluded from the decision making process in terms of urban planning in the last couple of decades.

0:35:36.1 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks, Megan. We have a question from Shmuel who says, I’m a social activist from Israel and I have a question how authorities of Barcelona are trying to ensure accessibility of poor and low socioeconomic groups of the local population to public spaces in the city?

0:35:53.3 Megan Saltzman: Thank you for your question and comment there. It’s a little tricky to respond to this question because it also depends a lot on what political party is in the city council. So from around 2008 to 2015, there was political party that came from a lot of the protests. If you all recall, Occupy Wall Street in Spain, this was much larger, it was called the 15-M or quince-m. And this… It was a massive grassroots movement all across the country, especially in cities. And one of these leaders of that movement became the first woman mayor, Ada Colau. And so under her mayorship, there were a lot of initiatives taken in the city to try to make sure, for example, that poor, what you name here, poor and low social economic groups and also people with disabilities or mobility issues, elderly people, women. There was a long list of different demographics that they tried to include in the decision making process and also in the material construction and renovation of the city. In the last couple of years there has been less of that. But there are the basics, I don’t know the words for them, but like different textures on the sidewalks for blind people or different sounds for… You’ll have to help me with these words. The different sounds of like for when to cross the street and stuff for blind people. But that’s as much as I can say about that, that it really depended on who was… What political party was in the seat of the city council at the time.

0:37:48.9 Julian Agyeman: Thanks. Sticking with that, the city council idea, we’ve got a question and it’s two part. Is there a way that the spatial tactics of a ciudad practicada can be institutionalized or does that stultify or co-opt the nature of the organic cultural movement? And then second, how did the government of Ada Colau, she’s a socialist, and the Guanyem movement push back against or follow neoliberal policies?

0:38:16.8 Megan Saltzman: Yeah, Mika, thank you for this question. And I talk about this in my book. In my book I say that a lot of these spatial tactics, if you look at… If you say you look at 20 of them, you’re going to see a pattern which is that they’re responding to something that could be some kind of need and these needs could be picked up by the city council. Perhaps we need more exercise equipment in the city, or perhaps we need a volleyball court in the, sorry, in the city. Or perhaps we need more benches if everybody is sitting wherever. So that is something that could be picked up and in some cases it has been picked up and worked on. However, as I mentioned in the book, the creativity, human or mammal creativity of spatial tactics, of being able to constantly adapt and re-adapt, it would continue. So I think that even if the city council did pick up on these and try to improve them, or if they picked up on them and improved them and then commodified them, which I could talk about some examples where that has happened, especially in terms of sustainability and green initiatives.

0:39:31.4 Megan Saltzman: Either way, at the grassroots level, there will continue to be this creativity of circumventing whatever is there or whatever is not there. Let me see the second part of the question. Yeah, that’s a very big question about how the Ada Colau government pushed back because they did so many things. I can send you my book chapter if you like. So many things. I suppose the initiative that they were most internationally famous for is what’s been called… I’ll put it in the chat, it’s in Catalan or I think in English, they’ve been called translated to superblocks. And that is where they take a group of nine blocks and they make all the streets within those blocks for only pedestrians. And their political party, Barcelona en Comú, they created several of these super block conglomerations across the city of Barcelona. And yeah, you can see online on one hand they have become more sustainable, greener areas and for the most part they’re used. You can see people walking around, sitting, playing a wide variety of activities. On the other hand there have been complaints because there is always that population that wants to drive or that want to take their motorcycle.

0:40:56.9 Megan Saltzman: And so this pushes traffic and creates traffic jams in other parts of the city or pushes the pollution to other streets. And perhaps the unintentional effect of these superblocks was that the housing around the superblocks skyrocketed. So now everybody wants to live on a superblock and it has ended up pushing out lower and middle income residents. And yeah, this is in the news like right now, the last couple of weeks there’s been all the… A lot of talks and protest about the housing in these neighborhoods. Let me go back to your question. Where there… Where do there… Supposedly people find the policy, on the spectrum. Yeah, you had written about the superblocks. Well, the superblocks does fall on the spectrum. The progressive political party or if you wanna call it the left wing or whatever, but it fell within the spectrum or the part of the party that’s called Barcelona en Comú and there’s a lot of other examples of trying to… In Spanish they use the word pacificar which is like to make pleasant or to make peaceful, the public spaces for more pedestrians and areas where no cars would be allowed.

0:42:17.7 Megan Saltzman: For example, they also, on Sundays they have blocked off a lot of streets where cars can’t go through. They have also, you might have heard of something called bicibús, which is… If you Google it or look on YouTube you can see videos of it. They in the morning and in the afternoon when kids are going to school and when they’re coming home from school, they’re blocking off certain streets where all the kids can go together on their bikes. So that was another project. They also did try to… I have this chapter about these kind of independent public spaces/cultural centers. They did try to financially support several of them but again it was… It would be… It’s also temporary. It would be like financial support or permission for one year or two years and then when that party gets voted out, then they lose their support. It’s a big question. If you email me, I’ll send you my chapter and then you can get more of the specifics.

0:43:25.0 Julian Agyeman: Thanks Megan, for that. I’m going to ask a question of my own. Those of us in the sort of sustainable communities, sustainable urban planning field, Barcelona is often held up as being one of the key models. What do you think we should take from that? And what should we not take from Barcelona as being held up as one of these models? A socialist mayor, the superblocks, action on Airbnb, tourists go home, refugees welcome. This is a heady mix of progressive policies. What do we take and what do we leave?

0:44:01.0 Megan Saltzman: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I think you have to be constantly critical and you have to… In the book I talk about what happens when we start comparing cities and when we start to compare cities, like, oh, well, Barcelona is so much better than Philadelphia or for example, then we are disregarding the suffering that’s going down in Barcelona, for example, or we are ignoring the people who are not being included in these decision making or these initiatives or projects. So I would say sure, take the good, take the positive from whatever model and also whatever non-model and also take a nuanced view. What’s being left out, who’s not being included in this and ask a lot of questions. In the research for this book, it was just all about asking questions and asking questions. I’m not from Barcelona. I spent a long time living there. But I needed to ask questions not from just institutional people, but from absolutely anybody who is willing to speak with me. So, yeah, sure, again, take the positives, take the good parts, but also be critical. Know that there’s most likely something that’s not being talked about or most likely somebody who’s not being included. Yeah, yeah, just take a more nuanced view of… Yeah, I don’t doubt that Barcelona has positive things that I wish we could incorporate and repeat in Boston or elsewhere, but you have to get as holistic a view as possible of what that model…

0:45:38.8 Julian Agyeman: Another good example, Amsterdam and Barcelona are two of the only cities with sort of protection of people’s digital rights on the Internet. Some very progressive things coming out of Barcelona in that sense. Final question, and this is a real quick one and hopefully you can answer it pretty quickly. Would you be able to talk any more about those examples you referred to where cultural and social spatial practices have been commodified and the results? So just give us one example, maybe.

0:46:09.2 Megan Saltzman: Have been commodified and the results. Oh, probably one of the most popular ones, which I think is not getting so much attention nowadays, but about 15 years ago was the Barcelona graffiti. If you again put into Google images Barcelona Graffiti, you’ll see a massive database of very creative graffiti examples from all over the city. And this really increase tourism to the city. And so this was something also that the city council promoted as this… Barcelona as the city of creativity, the city of art, of informal art. And I would say probably something like 90% of those graffiti artworks are gone because they have destroyed the buildings to create new hotels and new tourist apartments. And I would say right now the biggest case is what’s going on with the superblocks.

0:47:08.8 Julian Agyeman: Great, Megan. I could ask many more questions and there’s many more questions just keep coming up in the chat. But what a fitting end to this semester of Cities@Tufts. Megan Saltzman, Mount Holyoke thank you so much. Can we give a warm round of applause, a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause to Megan Saltzman. Thank you Megan. Thank you so much. As I said, this is the last for this semester. Hope to see many of you back in September for a whole new raft of fantastic presentations.

0:47:41.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

The post Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona with Megan Saltzman appeared first on Shareable.

We welcomed Sanae Lahgazi Alaoui from Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund; Alexa Bee and Rain from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief; Valinda Chan from Mutual Aid Eastie; Laurie Bertram Roberts from Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund; and  writer, organizer, and agitator Vicky Osterweil.

These short talks explore the trans and queer underground, reproductive justice, immigration support, and community-led disaster response.

At the live event, they were followed by breakout sessions on each topic, which were not recorded. So if you feel like the speakers were a bit reserved, it’s because what they are up to may or may not be suitable for the public record… 

Resources:

• Mutual Aid Session 4 video recording
• Mutual Aid Session 4 transcript
• Mutual Aid Session 4 public slides 
• Mutual Aid Session 4 link document
• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Mutual Aid in Action with Sanae Lahgazi Alaoui, Alexa Bee, Rain, Valinda Chan, Laurie Bertram Roberts, and Vicky Osterweil appeared first on Shareable.

Canada was founded on enslavement and dispossession, most exemplified by its assimilationist ideologies and policies, the displacement, subjugation and oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures, and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The colonial theft of land and the accumulation of capital have been foundational to Canada’s wealth. In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron uses settler colonial theory to examine environmental racism in Canada to highlight the symbolic and material ways in which the geographies of Indigenous and Black peoples have been characterized by erasure, domination, dehumanization, destruction, dispossession, exploitation, and genocide. She offers a historical overview of cases of environmental racism in Canada and outlines how she has been addressing environmental racism over the last 10 years in partnership with Indigenous and Black communities, and their allies.

---

About the speaker

Dr. Ingrid Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID-19 in Black and South Asian communities. Ingrid is the author of the book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, and Ian Daniel. She is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project) and helped develop the federal private members bill a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice (Bill C-226). Bill C-226 was approved at Senate on June 13, 2024, and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities, was published on November 25, 2024. It traces experiences of racial trauma in Black communities in Canada, the US and the UK from the colonial era to the present.

Video of A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron

Transcript of A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website shareable.net just click the link in the show notes. And now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we’re delighted to host Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Ingrid is professor and Hope Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Health Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID 19 in Black and South Asian communities.

0:01:42.7 Julian Agyeman: Ingrid is the author of the book, “There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities” which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page and Ian Daniel. She’s the founder and director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project, the ENRICH Project and helped develop the Federal Private Members Bill, a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice and that’s Bill C226.

0:02:20.4 Julian Agyeman: This bill was approved by Senate, the Canadian Senate, on June 13, 2024 and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first ever environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled, From Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter, the Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities was published in November last year. The book traces experiences of racial trauma in Black Canadian and US communities and in communities in the UK from the colonial to the present period. Ingrid’s talk today is a history of violence, the legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada. Ingrid A Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:03:07.1 Ingrid Waldron: Thank you very much and good afternoon to everyone. Can you all hear me? Okay.

0:03:14.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yep, just fine.

0:03:16.1 Ingrid Waldron: Okay. Great. I’m going to begin with a Quote from a resident of Lincolnville, one of the communities that I met with back in 2013 when I started my project. I wanted to meet the indigenous communities and the African Nova Scotian communities to hear what their concerns were about at that time. So I’m going to start. If you look at the health of the community prior to 1974, before the landfill site was located, and our community seemed to be healthier from 1974 on until the present day, we noticed our people’s health seems to be going downhill. Our people seem to be passing on at a younger age. They are contracting different types of cancers that we never heard of prior to 1974. Our stomach cancer seems to be on the rise. Diabetes is on the rise. Our people end up with tumors in their body and we’re at a loss of what’s causing it. The municipality says that there’s no way that the landfill site is affecting us. But if the landfill site located in other areas is having an impact on people’s health, then shouldn’t the landfill site located next to our community be having an impact on our health too? And that community, as I said, is Lincolnville.

0:04:38.8 Ingrid Waldron: And this is James Desmond. He is, or was, I should say. Unfortunately, he passed away two years ago, but he was a staunch environmental activist in his home in Lincolnville. And during that same meeting, we were filming a documentary called, “In Whose Backyard”, which is available on my website. And we asked James to define environmental racism because at that time a lot of people, particularly in Nova Scotia, where I had begun this work, were very confused by that term, environmental racism. So we asked him to define it, and I find that his definition is one that I use often because it’s extremely simple and concise, but very layered at the same time and aligns well with the more academic definition of environmental racism by Dr. Robert Bullard, who I’ll show his definition just after this one. So James Desmond says here, the practice, which is environmental racism, has been locating industrial waste sites next to African, Nova Scotian native and poor white, communities that don’t have a base to fight back. You ask if that’s environmental racism, it’s environmental racism to its core. And here’s the more academic definition of Environmental Racism by Dr. Robert Bullard.

0:06:00.5 Ingrid Waldron: Dr. Robert Bullard is an African American who teaches at a university in Texas, and he is considered to be the father of environmental justice. He’s obviously my hero, and I had the opportunity to host him at a symposium that I held in 2017 on environmental racism when I was in Nova Scotia. So this is coming from his early work. His very first book was called I believe, Dumping in Dixie, from 1990. But this is how he defines environmental racism. He says, environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate location and greater exposure of indigenous and racialized communities to contamination and pollution from environmentally hazardous activities. It is also about the lack of political power these communities have for resisting the placement of industrial polluters in their communities.

0:07:00.2 Ingrid Waldron: The third definition or component of that definition is, the implementation of policies that sanction the harmful and in many cases, life threatening poisons or presence of poisons in these communities. Fourth, environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate negative impacts of environmental policies that result in differential rates of cleanup in these communities. And finally, environmental racism is about the history of excluding the very communities that are most impacted by environmental racism. Indigenous communities, black communities and racialized communities. We often use that phrase, having a seat at the table. These are the communities that typically don’t have a seat at the table. Even though they’re more vulnerable than other communities to environmental racism.

0:07:52.3 Ingrid Waldron: So they’re often not invited to the table to help develop policy and decisions around environmental racism. As I’ve done in my book, what I want to do now, very briefly is talk about geography in a way and space. Because I think it’s really helpful when you situate environmental racism within a spatial analysis. And I do that a lot in my book. I look at spatial processes and spatial inequality in a way to broaden the discussion on environmental racism, which helps us to address the siloing, I think, sometimes of environmental and climate issues. We have to understand that environmental racism is connected to so many other issues in our places and spaces. So that’s what I will do here. So environmental racism that is a manifestation of white supremacist use of space that has come to characterize the harmful impacts of spatial violence in black, indigenous and other racialized communities. And when we say spatial violence, for me that means policy.

0:08:56.1 Ingrid Waldron: That means what is happening on the ground in terms of the various inequalities and oppressions that marginalized racialized communities are experiencing on the ground due to the various policies that can be harmful in purposeful ways, but also policies just by the absence of or the erasure of the issues that these communities are facing. That’s harmful as well. If the policies are excluding the experiences of, or there’s an absence of the experiences of indigenous and black and other racialized people in policymaking, that’s also harmful in subtle ways and perhaps in very indirect ways.

0:09:35.4 Ingrid Waldron: Teelucksingh and Masouda are both Canadians who are working in the space of environmental racism and spatial inequality. And they observe that space is more than a geographical area. It is also a socially constructed and highly contested product that has significant political, cultural and economic implications. So what they’re saying here is we often tend to look at, or in the past we did, geography as this fixed issue. And now we’re seeing with human geography, health geography, all these really exciting disciplines popping up. We know that it’s not simply about a fixed space. It’s about how inequalities are imbued within spaces. And it also talks about how these spaces are socially constructed.

0:10:23.8 Ingrid Waldron: They’re socially constructed because individuals, communities have relationships with each other and they have relationships with organizations. And there’s the social construction. They’re always manifesting these issues, these inequalities over time. So we have to look at space as always under construction, as fluid, as never fixed, and as ever changing. So this is what Teelucksingh and Masuda argue. Lipsitz, who is another professor I admire who is American, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At that same event where I hosted Dr. Bullard, I also hosted at the same event, Dr. Lipsitz. They were both my keynote speaker. And I love doctor Lipsitz’ work on the racialization of space and the spatialization of race. It really helped me to open up my view on environmental racism. I had a very, in the beginning, a very constricted view of environmental racism. And after reading his article on the racialization of space, which I think comes from a publication from 2007, it opened up my eyes about the various connections and how we can talk about environmental racism in a more critical way. So he talks about that and he talks about the inequalities, racial inequalities that are imbued and manifest in all our spaces.

0:11:49.4 Ingrid Waldron: And this concept is useful in helping to think through the implications of race, class, gender and other social factors with respect to spatial processes that have the most deleterious impacts in racialized communities. And these include government and industry expropriation of indigenous lands, the formation of neighborhoods segregated by income, class and race, neighborhood revitalization projects that gentrify low income and often marginalized areas by bringing in businesses and housing that ultimately push out long term residents, and also environmental racism.

0:12:31.8 Ingrid Waldron: What these spatial processes have in common is a quest for profit by business owners and industry leaders. And these processes tend to shed light on how spaces of profit are often premised on possession, dispossession and displacement. It’s for these reasons that it’s important to challenge notions of space, as I said earlier, as fixed, neutral, ahistorical and physical.

0:13:02.7 Ingrid Waldron: So rather, space is an embodiment of power relations that are fluid and ever changing. And I also point to Doreen Massey, the late Doreen Massey. Her work on space also resonated with me, specifically her work from this article from 1992. She put it really succinctly when she argued that space is never apolitical, but imbued with a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.

0:13:39.7 Ingrid Waldron: There have been, in Canada, several cases of environmental racism in Indigenous and African Nova Scotian communities. I would say over the last 70 years. I’m going to begin with my work in Nova Scotia. That’s where I began my work on environmental racism in 2012. And what’s on the screen is a community called Shubenacadie First Nation. This is an Indigenous community. And starting in 2014, Alton Gas, which is a company in Alberta, Canada, was planning to build a brine discharge pipeline near the Shubenacadie river near to this community. There are tons of studies in the United States indicating that brine discharge pipelines can be dangerous, although Alton Gas argued that it was not dangerous, it was safe and the community had nothing to be concerned about. But starting in 2014, when this project was announced, the community began resisting.

0:14:39.3 Ingrid Waldron: And in 2021, I’m happy to say that the project was closed. We often don’t find success when we’re talking about environmental racism. There’s often not success. But they spent seven years resisting this pipeline project. They were concerned about the impact of the pipeline on fish, on their health and on climate change. And they used social media and on site, in person practices and approaches to stop this pipeline project from coming into their community. And in the end, they won in 2021 when Alton Gas decided to pack up and leave.

0:15:21.5 Ingrid Waldron: We have another Indigenous community in Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s called Pictou Landing First Nation. And this is an aerial shot given to me by a journalist when he was flying over Pictou Landing First Nation. And this is called Boat Harbour. And Pictou Landing was a pristine hunting and fishing ground for the Indigenous community before a mill started dumping effluent into boat harbor in 1967. And over that time, particularly in the 1980s, the government made many broken promises to the Indigenous community, saying that they were going to close the mill. That never happened.

0:16:07.1 Ingrid Waldron: This is another success story, but it took 50 years, unfortunately. In the end of 2019, the Nova Scotia government said that the mill did not come up with an appropriate or robust plan for their waste water treatment, and that he was going to close the mill. And he did. And that happened at the end of January 2020. But you can imagine, 50 years this mill was operating, dumping effluent into Boat Harbour. It became a toxic cocktail of different pollutants.

0:16:42.9 Ingrid Waldron: And the community would say that high rates of cancer, high rates of respiratory illness and skin rashes and other illnesses is due to Boat Harbour. What can I say about Boat Harbour? Yeah, I think that’s really the pertinent issue. There were some rumblings that the mill would open again, which of course concerned the community, but that hasn’t happened. So they’re involved right now in the long process of cleanup.

0:17:09.9 Ingrid Waldron: We have Aamjiwnaang First Nation, another indigenous community near Sarnia, Ontario, and it’s often referred to as Chemical Valley, which tells you all that you need to know. This is a stunning case of environmental racism. I would say the worst case of environmental racism in Canada. Why? Because the community is surrounded by over 60 petrochemical facilities. And it sounds incredible, but I also remember reading, I think it was a New York Times article way back about an African American community in Louisiana that was also surrounded by a lot of toxic facilities or petrochemical facilities. And that community was referred to as Cancer Alley. And they had, of course, high rates of cancer. And they were, just like Aamjiwnaang, surrounded by petrochemical facilities.

0:18:05.3 Ingrid Waldron: So this community, like the other communities I’ve discussed, have extremely high rates of cancer. They have… When I talk about environmental racism, I often say it’s also a gendered issue because many indigenous women have reproductive cancers. They have gestational issues, birth anomalies. So the birth rate ratio is abnormal compared to the Canadian average. I believe there are more female births than male, and it’s extremely out of whack. And of course, all these communities will have mental health issues, the psychosocial stressors of living near to these contaminated sites. Redress is on the way. The Canadian government, the Department of Environment and climate change, is currently working with the community, with the chief, to address this issue.

0:19:04.1 Ingrid Waldron: We also have Grassy Narrows First Nation, another indigenous community near Kenora, Ontario. So in the 1960s and 1970s, mercury was dumped into the Wabigoon English River near to this community. So you can imagine mercury is serious and will have health effects. There was cleanup in 2015. The government put millions of dollars towards cleanup and it was cleaned up. However, in 2022, April, there was a CBC article that came out with residents talking about the enduring health impacts from the mercury being dumped into the Wabigoon English River in the 1960s and 1970s, which just shows you that even though you might have cleanup, the health effects can remain. So they talked about less serious health issues, skin rashes, to more serious health issues such as, cognitive delays, neurological problems such as numbness in the fingers, et cetera.

0:20:06.8 Ingrid Waldron: This is another indigenous community in Canada, this time in British Columbia, specifically in northern British Columbia. So there is a plan, there has been for a while to develop a multi billion dollar pipeline project near to this community which is called Wet’suwe’ten First Nation. And over the past several years, there have been mass demonstrations, sit ins and blockades that have gripped parts of Canada over the movement to support the leaders of Wet’suwe’ten First Nation, who are opposed, of course, to this multi billion dollar pipeline project near to their community in Northern BC. This is an ongoing issue.

0:21:01.3 Ingrid Waldron: In the United States, it’s not strange to talk about African Americans experiencing environmental racism. But I think in Canada, when people hear environmental racism, they assume that only indigenous people are impacted. That’s not the case, and it’s certainly not the case in Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada. And that’s where I began this work and I spent 13 years there. And what I witnessed during my 13 years there is that quite a few African Nova Scotian communities are impacted by environmental racism. And it’s been… I haven’t seen that in other parts of Canada, but for whatever reason I see it in Nova Scotia, the province of Nova Scotia.

0:21:40.6 Ingrid Waldron: What you’re seeing on the screen is Africville. This is a historical African Nova Scotian community. The unique thing about African Nova Scotians is that they’re in many ways unique. They’re dissimilar from the Caribbean community and the community that comes from the continent of Africa. African Nova Scotians have been in Canada for over 400 years, so they’re not considered to be an immigrant community, although everybody’s an immigrant really, because I could talk about their heritage.

0:22:11.1 Ingrid Waldron: So African Nova Scotians are descendants of black loyalists from the United States who came to Nova Scotia after the War of 1812 that took place in the US. They’re also descendants of Jamaican Maroons and they’re descendants of people from Sierra Leone. So they’ve got all that in their heritage. However, they’re the longest residing black community in Canada with, I would say, unique and very specific challenges related to racism. They fare worse on every social indicator, whether you’re talking about employment and education. They fare worse compared to other black Canadians in other provinces.

0:22:54.3 Ingrid Waldron: So this is Africville. And Africville is one of those historic African Nova Scotian communities. There’s a total of about 45 African Nova Scotian communities. And what makes them unique as well is the fact that they’re located mostly in rural areas. Typically when black people immigrate to Canada, they’re going to Toronto or Montreal or the more urban spaces to find work. The unique thing about African Nova Scotians is that they typically reside. There’s only one community that was urban, and that’s the one that you see on the screen, Africville. But all the other communities are rural. Africville was certainly not wealthy. There are no wealthy black communities in Canada. But they were thriving in terms of they were well connected. And we know that social connectedness is an important determinant of health. Some of them had their own businesses, right? 

0:23:47.1 Ingrid Waldron: So in many ways, they were well connected and a healthy community. And then in around the mid-1960s, Halifax, the city of Halifax, decided to gentrify their community and start building or started engaging in industrial development. So they needed this community to get out and so they pushed out this community, which is gentrification, or what we call urban revitalization.

0:24:13.8 Ingrid Waldron: So I would say that Africville is an example of both gentrification and environmental racism. Why is it an example? We know why it’s an example of gentrification because the government was trying to push them out to engage in industrial development. But it was also considered to be a case of environmental racism because a lot of social and environmental hazards were left in the community due to industrial development. And these social and environmental hazards, making this a case of environmental racism, included a fertilizer plant, a slaughterhouse, a tar factory, a stone and coal crushing plant, a cotton factory, a prison, three systems of railway tracks, and an open dump.

0:25:00.4 Ingrid Waldron: Here’s another African Nova Scotian community. So you saw a photo of James Desmond earlier. I said he was from Lincolnville. This is Lincolnville’s dump. Starting in 1974, the municipality placed a first generation, let’s say, landfill, because a dump is different from a landfill. So this is a landfill. They placed a first generation Landfill in 1974 near to the African Nova Scotian community. And just when the community thought that perhaps they were making some headway in getting redress and having the government relocate this landfill, they received a bit of a slap in the face.

0:25:39.5 Ingrid Waldron: In 2006, the municipality put a second generation landfill over the first one. What a slap in the face, of course? So of course, the dirty water is seeping into the second landfill. And the community would say that we’ve seen, as I… That was the quote I presented to you when I first came on the screen. The quote from somebody from Lincolnville who said over the years, since 1974, our health is worsening. Higher rates of cancer, higher rates of respiratory illness. So this is what the community argues, that it’s because of these two landfills that we are seeing poor health outcomes in our community.

0:26:15.8 Ingrid Waldron: If you were able to watch my documentary at all, it ended up on Netflix in 2020 and it was co-produced by myself and actor Elliot Page. You would have seen activist Louise Delisle from Shelburne. Now, the African Nova Scotian community lives primarily in the south end of Shelburne, but the white community lives in the north end of Shelburne. They’ve had a dump. So I’d call this a dump, not a landfill, because there’s no liner. They’ve had a dump in their community since the early 1940s. I would say probably in Canada, this is probably the first case of environmental racism, because all the way back in the 1940s, this dump was placed there. And the community would say everything and anything went into this dump. Syringes from the hospital, items from the military base, dead animals, et cetera, et cetera.

0:27:10.8 Ingrid Waldron: And over the years, they would also say that we’ve seen increasing rates of cancer, and particularly like multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer. When I first met with Louise in my office, she said to me, Ingrid, 95% of the people in my community have cancer. Of course I didn’t believe her, but I remembered that New York Times article about that African American community in Louisiana where most people had cancer because they were surrounded by petrochemical facilities. And I said, is this happening in Canada? I really couldn’t believe it when she said 98% of the people in my community have cancer. But she was telling the truth, because if you see the film, she’s driving down a street, many streets in Shelburne, pointing out different houses with people who had cancer. And it’s a stunning part of the documentary.

0:28:00.9 Ingrid Waldron: So it is the case that there are extremely high rates of cancer in Shelburne. Lots of things are happening right now. I don’t have the time to talk about it. Louise is a strong leader and she’s led so many things in that community and so many great things are happening right now, such as a Nova Scotia human rights case. The first part of it, which has found, actually, which is probably the first time in Canada that what’s happening in Shelburne is a case of racism because it’s environmental racism. That’s never happened in Canada where environmental racism by any human rights board or commission has found it to be an example of racism.

0:28:38.6 Ingrid Waldron: So they’re making a lot of headway, and I would say primarily due to Louise’s activism. Here is Toronto. The Greater Toronto and Hamilton area is known for high levels of air pollution, particularly Hamilton. So I teach at McMaster University in Hamilton. And Hamilton is considered to be Canada’s industrial town and increasing rates of immigrant people, racialized immigrant people who are being exposed to poor air quality. And that’s the same in Toronto, particularly in areas such as Scarborough and Etobicoke north in Toronto, where there are high rates of or poor air pollution.

0:29:23.6 Ingrid Waldron: So what have I been doing over the years to address these issues? I founded, in 2012, an organization called the ENRICH Project, the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Projects, which would be advocating around environmental racism for indigenous people and African Nova Scotian people. First off, in Nova Scotia, now it’s gone broader than that because I’m back in Ontario, so it’s all across Canada now. And I didn’t know what ENRICH would be at that time. I was new to environmental racism. I had no experience. But it has turned out to be incredibly interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, multi approach, multimedia, and very intersectional in its approach, in its viewpoints, in many ways, in terms of how I articulate what I’m finding.

0:30:17.5 Ingrid Waldron: I thought that the first important thing for me to do when I founded ENRICH was to raise awareness because there were a lot of people who were skeptical about what I was doing. They were environmental racism. Are you sure about that? And they thought the term was funny. And I let people know, I said, this isn’t a term that I came up with. This is a term that originated in the United States by Reverend Benjamin Chavez back in the early 1980s. So I didn’t create this term. So don’t get angry at me. They thought I created it and I was playing the race card. And everything that people say about people like me who are staunchly anti-racist and whose work I consider myself to be a race scholar before I would consider myself to be an environmental scholar or health scholar, I focus on race.

0:31:08.5 Ingrid Waldron: So I got a lot of pushback in the beginning. So I thought, well, in order to address the pushback, maybe I need to raise awareness to talk about the structural underpinnings of environmental racism. Because when you look at the term environmental racism, it sounds crazy. Someone would say, anyone could say, yeah, how can the environment be racist? People are racist. How can the environment be racist? So I said to myself, I needed to explain to people the structural policy implications of environmental racism in order for them to understand this as a systemic issue. Just like when we talk about racism in labor, racism in health, racism in employment, this is racism in the environment, and it means that environmental policies are the root of it.

0:31:57.6 Ingrid Waldron: So because I needed to raise awareness, I held so many events in Nova Scotia, in other parts of Canada, and even in the United States. I was asked to talk at various events in the United States as well. And this is one of the events that I held where I brought together communities and activists and government people. And this continues to be what’s on the screen, my favorite event. It was inspiring. It was educational and entertaining. We had drum groups.

0:32:27.2 Ingrid Waldron: And so I try to do different things every time I have events. And I think over time, particularly in the province of Nova Scotia, people began to get it, right? Because I was constantly, every year putting on these events, trying to explain what environmental racism was. And I would say, in Nova Scotia, people get it. And what happens when people get it is that they want to help. And often after my events, people will say, oh, I get it now. I didn’t know this was happening in Nova Scotia. How horrible can you let me know how I can help? And that’s magic to my ears, of course. So I think creating awareness sounds benign, but it has been extremely important for me and for my project, because eventually people want to help out, and it’s really good if I don’t have a grant, it’s really good to have volunteers who really want to help and who are really passionate.

0:33:21.0 Ingrid Waldron: As I said, multimedia has been part of what I’ve done. Multimedia is a way of sharing information, just like an event. So I’ve done a lot of it. And I like to be creative. I recognize, particularly as a professor, I’ve got students in my class, and students want to learn differently, they want to be assessed differently. Some students are good at writing essays. Some students are good at multiple choice, right? So for me, this is about targeting my audience in a way. Who needs to hear about environmental racism? Who needs to do something about it? Is it the policymaker? Is it the educator? Is it the ENGO? 

0:33:58.4 Ingrid Waldron: So I have to think about who I’m targeting and then what multimedia, creative multimedia resources can I create or use? One of those was a map using GIS analysis, a map of Nova Scotia that actually shows the location of toxic facilities, different types in African Nova Scotian and Indigenous communities. What is on the screen is a flat map, but if you go onto my website, you will see one layer for indigenous communities and another layer for the black communities. So basically, this is not saying that white communities are not close to these sites, but it shows undeniably that black and indigenous communities are disproportionately near these different sites.

0:34:42.1 Ingrid Waldron: And here is actor Elliot Page. This is a kind of a long story, so I can’t get into it, but we connected through Twitter in 2018, just a few months after my book came out. Elliot had apparently read my book and loved it and wanted to express that on Twitter. So I noticed that my Twitter page was extremely active and I saw somebody following me called Elliot Page. I didn’t connect it to the actor. I didn’t realize it was the actor. And I had seen Elliot’s movies like inception with Leonardo DiCaprio and Juno and other movies. And I said to myself, is this the actor? Like, why would he be trying to connect to me? And it was. So I DM’d him. And I said, I want to thank you for promoting my book and for supporting my Enrich project and supporting the women on the front lines. And he said to me, I’m trying to find a way to use my celebrity to help. And Elliot’s from Nova Scotia, interestingly, and his family is near to Shelburne, which I just talked about.

0:35:57.9 Ingrid Waldron: So he had a kind of very personal connection to this. We ended up talking at the end of 2018, the week of Christmas, on the phone with his friend who actually connected us. Because when the friend found out Elliot had connected with me on Twitter, the friend said to me, oh, I’ve known Elliot for 15 years, Ingrid, do you want me to connect you guys? And I said, yes. So we did it on the phone and we didn’t really come up with anything. Then we met again in January of 2019 and we decided we would do some maybe posts and videos, short videos, 10 minute videos to post on Twitter. And then we changed again.

0:36:37.1 Ingrid Waldron: I had an opportunity to see the full film. Elliot had come down to Nova Scotia where I was living and filmed me in my home, and then went out to the community to film the indigenous people and also Louise Delil, the African Nova Scotian woman in Shelburne. And Elliot invited me to his mother’s home in Halifax to see the film. And I noticed when I was looking at the film, I said, people are crying. This seems really emotional. I don’t think slapping it onto Twitter is going to do this topic of environmental racism justice. I said to them, Elliot and the co-director, Ian Daniel, I said, we want awareness, don’t we? We want to make an impact. What better way than to create a documentary? And Ian said to me, are you talking about like a 70 minute documentary? I said, yes, and we could submit it to the Toronto International Film Festival and Robert Redford’s Film Festival.

0:37:38.7 Ingrid Waldron: And the Berlin Flag just kept going. And they agreed and we submitted it very late. I would say it was after the deadline, to be honest. And we got into the Toronto International Film Festival and it premiered in September of 2019. And Elliot’s publicist also arranged for us to speak to all these high profile media outlets. So we spoke to the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, which is an Entertainment Magazine, and other media outlets, Television, Entertainment Tonight Canada, et cetera, et cetera. It was an extremely exciting day to have this film based on my book. It was actually based on my book. My very first book premiere at a film festival at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is widely considered to be the best film festival in the world. I’m a bit biased.

0:38:38.0 Ingrid Waldron: And then to have all these media outlets that we connected with to get this issue out into the public, this is what we call, as academics, knowledge mobilization, but for me, prime knowledge mobilization. And for this to happen to me and to my first book, I’m still very shocked by it after all these years. So this was 2019, I’m still shocked. And then we heard rumblings that it was going to go to Netflix. And I was like, okay, I can’t believe this. And that came from Elliot. We were walking with Ian Daniel to a Japanese restaurant in Halifax and I think Elliot said, I think it’s going to Netflix. And at that time, Elliot had started that show called the Umbrella Academy, which was on Netflix. And I thought, oh, maybe this is kind of going to happen because Elliot’s already on Netflix. And it did happen. We found out in October of 2018 it was going to Netflix. And it started streaming on Netflix March 29, 2020, just a few weeks after COVID hit.

0:39:38.3 S4: And then I also heard then it also went to Apple TV. I think it’s still on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and also Microsoft Xbox. So I’ve done a lot of media stuff, I’ve done a lot of creative stuff because I think it’s important to share information about studies in creative ways. This is Nocturne, Halifax’s annual nighttime art festival. This was during the height of COVID We did this on Zoom. It was really interesting. We had the community activists, indigenous and black, in five minutes, talk about environmental racism in their community.

0:40:19.4 Ingrid Waldron: And then they were paired with an artist. So whether it be a musician, a spoken word artist, or poet, a dancer, a multimedia artist, the goal of this project that I developed was to pair one activist with an artist on Zoom. And it was very well received. People loved it. And the fact that we were able to do it on Zoom, something like this was just an achievement, really. So it’s just another example of how I like to be creative, to share knowledge.

0:40:50.0 Ingrid Waldron: So media is really important to me, and I continue to give interviews to television and radio and podcasts and magazines and newspapers for all my research projects. Of course, I have to do research. I’m a professor. I’ve done a lot of research. But the one that’s wrapping up right now is Focus on Shelburne. I mentioned to you that Shelburne, they’ve had a dump since the 1940s. I mentioned multiple myeloma and cancer and high rates of cancer. So we’re trying to figure out with this study, why are there such high rates of cancer in Shelburne? And we’re looking at four issues as causal factors potentially. Is it the dump? Is it racism and other structural determinants of health? Is it lifestyle factors such as smoking, nutrition, diet, exercise? Or is it African ancestry and genetics? So we have a black cancer biologist on the team, and she looks at race and cancer, cancer in black people, particularly black women.

0:41:54.2 Ingrid Waldron: So we’ve done the focus groups and interviews. We’re just waiting for the DNA sampling to come in. So we took blood at a town hall two years ago when we went to Shelburne, and the DNA sampling stuff takes a while to come in. That’s going to come in soon, and we’ll write a report on that. But we’ve already written a report on the focus groups and the interviews, and we’ve shared that on social media. Of course, I have to publish, and this is my very first book on environmental racism. I look at environmental racism in Canada, but of course, Nova Scotia is a bit of a case study.

0:42:29.2 Ingrid Waldron: I also talk about the United States and the leaders there, such as Dr. Bullard and others. And this was the book that the Netflix documentary was based on. I like to build capacity in communities. I don’t want to be a professor, a researcher who goes into communities and just takes from them and never returns. So I like to build capacity. And one of the many ways that I’ve done that is by water testing. Many of these communities, specifically Lincolnville and Shelburne, have always wanted to test their water, but they didn’t want the government to do it because they didn’t trust the government because the government would probably say everything’s fine, right? 

0:43:10.7 Ingrid Waldron: So I got together a team comprised of a hydrogeologist, an environmental science professor and environmental science students. We formed a working group in 2016 to test the water of Lincolnville. And we tested the water at no cost. That’s the whole point of this. These are low income black communities in Nova Scotia. They don’t have the money for this. So we did this in the environmental science professor’s lab at no cost. We tested the water, we wrote a report on the findings, we went back to the community, we shared our findings and we educated them on how to keep your drinking water healthy, how to manage your drinking water.

0:43:53.8 Ingrid Waldron: And we continue with various projects like Healthy Wells Day. Many rural communities in Nova Scotia are on wells. They’re not on municipal water. Well water can be contaminated. So we have done this kind of multimedia social media on site project, awareness project for Nova Scotians to say, you’ve gotta find ways to keep your well water healthy. And we post infographics on social media. We did Facebook live and we also chose four communities to test their water on site. We collected the water from them and it’s a whole day, one day, typically it’s October, where we just educate the Nova Scotian public about keeping your well water healthy.

0:44:44.3 Ingrid Waldron: I’ve recently got into climate change, I would say maybe since 2021. I would say most of my projects now are on climate change. And I didn’t think I would be interested in this topic, but I realized that it operates very similarly to environmental racism. Who are the communities that are most vulnerable and exposed to climate change? It’s black communities once again, it’s indigenous communities. Why? Well, it’s because these communities tend to be low income. If they’re low income or poor, they’re living in neighborhoods that are low income and poor.

0:45:16.3 Ingrid Waldron: Low income and poor neighborhoods are less prepared for climate change. Their public infrastructure might be fragile, their housing might be poor. So when people often say to me, Ingrid, everybody’s impacted by climate change, not just black people and indigenous people, I say to them, yes, climate change doesn’t choose black people to impact, but they’re more vulnerable to it because they tend to be. In Canada, black people and indigenous people are our poorest, lowest income groups. And that means it’s like a Domino effect. That means they’re going to be living in neighborhoods that are low income and poor. And that means that their public infrastructure will be fragile, including their housing.

0:45:57.9 Ingrid Waldron: And that means that they will be less prepared for the onslaught of climate change. And it also means that they are the communities that are less… They’re not given attention by policymakers, climate policymakers. So these are the reasons why black and indigenous communities and racialized communities and low income white communities will be more vulnerable to climate change. I’ve looked at legal remedies for environmental racism, particularly with Ecojustice.

0:46:25.9 Ingrid Waldron: This is a law charity, environmental law charity in different cities in Canada. So I’ve worked with them so that they can develop a case for some of the communities I talked about. This confidential information, so I don’t have much information unless I get permission from community members, which I have in the past, just to say that it was really convenient that we had water testing results because we were able to hand over those water testing results to Ecojustice to help them make their case for many of the communities that I have worked with.

0:47:00.0 Ingrid Waldron: Then we get into politics. I wanted to have an environmental justice law for Canada for a long time and that started just provincially. I wanted an environmental justice law for Nova Scotia and that never happened. And I co-developed the very first environmental justice private members bill with former politician Lenore Zann. And she put that private members bill forward in Nova Scotia several times. It never went anywhere.

0:47:30.1 Ingrid Waldron: So in 2020, she moved over to the federal department as an MP Liberal for Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister. And she said, Ingrid, remember that bill we developed back in 2015? And I said, yes. She said, well, it’s now 2020 and I think we should take that bill and turn it into a federal bill for all of Canada, not just Nova Scotia. I said, fantastic idea. I said, because we can deal with all the pipelines in indigenous communities across Canada.

0:47:58.7 Ingrid Waldron: So we took that 2015 Nova Scotia private members bill and we turned it into a federal Canadian bill, hoping that it will become environmental justice law in Canada. We didn’t know at the time that it would. And that private member’s bill was called Bill C226. And it eventually, shockingly went to Senate, third reading at Senate in June 13th of 2024. And I thought to myself, this rarely has a chance of becoming the very first Canadian environmental justice law. And I don’t even know if the United States has this a law. I know everything is being dismantled by that president that you have, but I think this is maybe really groundbreaking, I thought.

0:48:45.6 Ingrid Waldron: And then on June 20, 2024, it passed. It was given Royal Assent, which means it became Canada’s first, very first, environmental justice law. And I’m, of course, happy that I was part of it, that I helped to develop it with Lenore Zann. Part of this law, there is a policy, it’s called the National Environmental Justice Policy, which requires the government to do consultations across Canada with impacted communities and to allow them to give them an opportunity to be part of the policy making. If you remember earlier, I talked about having a seat at the table, and I said, one aspect of environmental racism is that [inaudible] table. With this new legislation, this new law, and with the national environmental justice strategy, which is essentially a policy, the communities now have, I think, a seat at the table because in addition to sharing their concerns about environmental racism in their communities, they get an opportunity to say, this is what I think should be in this policy. So they’re, in a way, co-creating this national environmental justice strategy with government.

0:50:02.2 Ingrid Waldron: So I’m happy really to say that this law, this environmental law and the strategy specifically, has to wrap up. With the law, its going to be there forever, but the strategy has to wrap up next year. So right now, the government is engaged in consultations with indigenous and African and other communities across Canada, but their deadline is next year. And that’s it. I thought I would leave you on a high note. So we have a law in Canada, environmental justice law. Yay. Thank you very much.

0:50:37.9 Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you so much, Ingrid. What a tour de force presentation on all of the issues in Canada. Unfortunately, we’re out of time for questions at the moment. I just… One little thing that I was thinking, but you’ve addressed it at the end. Environmental racism is the kind of negative. Environmental justice is the goal. And I notice in your bill, it’s a bill for environmental justice. Can you just say in one minute a word or two about your use of the two terms environmental racism and environmental justice? 

0:51:11.3 Ingrid Waldron: There was a bit of a debate about that. We wanted it to be called environmental racism, and the government wouldn’t let it go. They said, we’re not going to agree to that unless you put in the title environmental justice. But that’s fair, because that’s what we want. So for me, people obscure. People use those terms interchangeably. Environmental racism, environmental justice. What we want is environmental justice. So for me, what environmental justice is, it’s the tools, the actions, the resources that we put in place to advance environmental justice by addressing environmental racism.

0:51:50.1 Ingrid Waldron: So for me, the bill is one of those tools. You can use various tools. You can use activism, you can use advocacy, you can use a private member’s bill, you can use the legislation that we developed. That’s a tool to advance environmental justice, which means that you are addressing environmental racism. Environmental racism is the sickness, it’s the condition, it’s the illness that we have to deal with. Environmental justice is the antidote, it’s the medication. That’s the way that I describe it.

0:52:22.2 Julian Agyeman: On that note, can we thank Ingrid with a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause. Thank you. Thank you, Ingrid.

0:52:30.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Anka Dregnan. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

[music]

The post A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron appeared first on Shareable.

Similar technologies are now being used in the United States to criminalize dissent, target marginalized communities, and suppress mutual aid efforts. This brings us to the theme of this week’s episode. Today, we’re sharing excerpts from Shareable’s Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series‘ third session.

Elijah Baucom of Everyday Security & UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic discusses security for mutual aid groups before Sarah Philips of Fight for the Future shares the current state of mutual aid financial surveillance and privacy tech. The third speaker from Session 3, Erika Sato from Sustainable Economies Law Center, opened with a 30 minute overview of legal basics and the benefits and limitations of formal structures for mutual aid groups. We’ve left it out of this episode, but you can watch/listen to the video on Youtube or below.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid Session 3 video recording
• Mutual Aid Session 3 transcript
• Mutual Aid Session 3 public slides 
• Mutual Aid Session 3 link document
• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Surveillance, cybersecurity, and financial tech for mutual aid with Elijah Baucom and Sarah Philips appeared first on Shareable.

Julian will start with a 25-minute presentation about power dynamics and how to work with others before addressing questions submitted by the live audience. 

Resources:

• New Economy Coalition
• Sources of Power
• Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freedman)
• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Video)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Transcript)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Slides)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Links from Stephanie, Julian + chat)
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Group decision making, conflict management, and power dynamics with Julian Rose appeared first on Shareable.

This talk explores how and why city governments can step up to lead on climate action and how resident organizing is critical in making this happen. This talk also explores how to build and sustain the political coalition to ensure climate justice policies can be passed and implemented.

About the speaker

Hessann Farooqi is the Executive Director of the Boston Climate Action Network. He is the youngest person and the first person of color appointed to lead BCAN. Hessann studied economics at Boston University, worked in the United States Senate under Sen. Ed Markey, and served on various federal, state, and local political campaigns. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also appointed him to oversee the implementation of Boston’s key climate law on the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) Review Board. Hessann is Co-Coordinator of the Boston Green New Deal Coalition and serves as an Environmental Justice Advisor to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council on developing their Greater Boston Climate Action Plan. Hessann previously served as an advisor to The White House and Department of Energy’s Opportunity Project.

Watch the video of Local Leadership for Climate Justice with Hessann Farooqi

The post Local Leadership for Climate Justice with Hessann Farooqi appeared first on Shareable.

Climate policy increasingly relies on techniques to remove CO2 from the environment as a supplement to cutting emissions: counter-balancing residual emissions in ‘net-zero’ and reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to safer levels. In this talk, Duncan will survey how cities are engaging with carbon removal – reviewing the realistic scope of possibilities such as carbon negative building materials, and carbon removal through urban waste management; and suggest ways in which urban carbon removal could be governed to contribute to goals of justice and sustainability.

About the speaker

Duncan McLaren is currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. His research examines the politics and implications for justice of novel technologies, particularly using public engagement methods. Prior to his PhD studies, completed in 2017, Duncan worked as an environmental researcher and campaigner, most recently as Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland from 2003 to 2011. He has advised and consulted for research and financial institutions, government departments, philanthropic donors and non-governmental bodies on energy, climate, urban and sustainable development issues. Duncan can be found on Bluesky @duncanmclaren.bsky.social, and at www.duncanmclaren.net.

---

Watch the video of From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren

---

Transcript for From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren

0:00:07.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Sharable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website shareable.net just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Professor Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Dr. Duncan McLaren. Apart from being a good old friend of mine, Duncan is currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. His research examines the politics and implications for justice of novel technologies, particularly using public engagement methods. Prior to his PhD studies completed in 2017, Duncan worked as an environmental researcher and campaigner, most recently as Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland from 2003 to 2011. He’s advised and consulted for research and financial institutions, government departments, philanthropic donors and non governmental bodies on energy, climate, urban and sustainable development issues. Duncan’s talk today is From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice. Duncan, a zoomtastic. Welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:16.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s a real pleasure to be with you, Julian, and to renew our association in the city space. Shall I just get kicked off? 

0:02:28.1 Professor Julian Agyeman: Okay, go straight away, thanks. Yep, yep.

0:02:31.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Great. So, thanks for the invitation and as Julian says, I’m talking about urban carbon removal. There’s a lot to get through. So here we go. So, first I’m going to introduce carbon dioxide removal and its purposes and limits. I’ll then outline some past CDR promises before exploring some urban CDR prospects with a library of examples offering an estimate of practical urban CDR potential in the light of the politics around it, highlighting particularly questions of justice, before ending with some policy recommendations and conclusions. So first, what is CDR and what is it not? Well, CDR techniques are human interventions that remove CO2 from the environment, place it into long term stable storage. They are both anthropogenic and intentional, not incidental. The CO2 must come from the atmosphere or the wider environment, not from flue gases or other point sources, and be stored for centuries to millennia and not re-released. CDR does not include the natural operation of biological or geological sinks on land or water. There are some blurry boundaries however. So looking a bit deeper into the terminology, carbon dioxide removal is often shortened to carbon removal, sometimes broadened to include other greenhouse gases may also be described as negative emissions techniques or technologies.

0:04:08.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s often mixed up with other things. By contrast, carbon capture and storage is typically an adjunct to fossil fuel use, capturing perhaps 90% of the emissions at a point source and shipping them for storage or utilization. Carbon utilization can be in durable materials, but is more often in chemicals, short lived plastic products or even synthetic fuels. So typically therefore it is at best a form of emissions abatement, not carbon removal. Sequestration Carbon sequestration refers to locking away carbon dioxide but with no concern about what source it’s come from. And while EOR or enhanced oil recovery might sequester some carbon dioxide, it does so by using it to force more oil or gas from old wells. One of the big issues here is that deliberate conflation of these different techniques under the rubric of carbon management allows the fossil industry and petrostates, to justify continued fossil fuel extraction. Such discursive tricks exacerbate the big policy challenges facing CDR. These are additionality ensuring that CDR would not that that CDR would not have happened anyway durability ensuring that the storage is long term and without significant leakage and avoiding mitigation deterrence where promises of future removal enable delay in cutting emissions.

0:05:50.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So getting into what these methods look like this schematic indicates the main techniques involved in CDR proposals. It’s not a comprehensive set, but hopefully enough to note the principal routes of capture and storage in CDR techniques. The options in the orange shaded box have clear urban applications and I’ll say a little more about how these might work as I run through the examples later. Here I’ve added one potentially important urban option for CO2 storage in building materials using carbon sourced from biomass, Biochar or direct CO2 capture.

0:06:32.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Before discussing particular techniques though, a reminder of why we’re talking about carbon dioxide removal. Typically, it’s seen as having three functions in climate policy. First, accelerating progress towards net zero, then counterbalancing recalcitrant residuals at net zero, and finally reversing overshoot through net negativity after net zero. To deliver any of these functions, CDR must be additional to emissions cuts not a substitute. But so far in practice, most CDR, primarily from forestry and a little from soils and biochar, is traded in offset markets, so does nothing to accelerate progress. And all those forms of biological CDR are vulnerable to reversal by wildfire or drought, for example. So such traded substitution could ultimately make things worse.

0:07:35.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And in exchanging emissions reductions now for future CDR, adding to overshoot in the hope of reparation, we’re gambling on the effective delivery of that future CDR. Here, of course, by we I mean humanity in general. Though of course such a simplification is unfair to those not involved in these choices. Nonetheless, modeling suggests that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius seems impossible unless CDR is deployed. Scenarios from the IPCC project CDR being used at rates of 6 to 11 gigatons a year in and after 2050. That’s in comparison to current emissions of around 40 to 45 gigatons a year. So about big big share and a vast increase from current levels of CDR, which are around 1.3 million tonnes, four orders of magnitude smaller. Analysis of nationally determined contributions and low emission development strategy pledges suggests countries are currently anticipating that CDR will reach 8 to 10 gigatons by 2050 to deliver net zero with around 20% of current emissions remaining. Much of the anticipated CDR is land based, with pledges accounting for over a billion hectares of land dedicated to CDR. That’s equivalent to 2/3 of all arable land. Delivery of such projected increased levels of CDR would likely transgress sustainability limits, harm human rights and exacerbate injustice.

0:09:27.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Experience so far suggests such modeled promises are exaggerated and dangerous. Inherent model features such as discounting future costs mean that CDR displaces early mitigation action. But the models then only square carbon budgets through huge future projected CDR capacity. That is likely impractical and almost inevitably socially and environmentally harmful. Early modeling presumed use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage until it was shown that the levels projected would require three times the land area of India to provide biomass, creating real threats to food security. Now modeling often assumes direct air capture, which would involve energy demand nine times India’s primary energy use or around 2/3 of current world primary energy use, suggesting similar threats to energy security. Some advocates have suggested that marine CDR might prove more fruitful, but the implications there are as yet little understood and some companies in the space have already failed. So could urban CDR help fill the gap? Some research and advocacy reports suggest potentials for urban CDR of between 5 and 20 gigatons per year. However, I’m going to pour cold water on this and argue that it’s too good to be true and risks fuelling further climate procrastination. Exaggerated promises of CDR contribution don’t come out of nowhere.

0:11:06.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So noted already models discount future costs of CDR. They also overlook sustainability limits and tend to exaggerate the costs of near term mitigation. But there are other sources too. In the neoliberal model of venture capital funded innovation, such technologies need to promise both scale and profits if they are to obtain investment. Developers therefore project lower than realistic costs and where these businesses get funded, VC works by shunting aside the scientific founders and installing business managers to find the earliest profitable exit. The prospect of inclusion of removal credits in carbon markets risks undermining climate purposes too. Carbon traders want more products and more credits to trade, and for them, higher continued emissions means more opportunities to profit from trading, a perverse incentive for them to big up CDR’s potential. CDR also acts as a promissory technology for the oil and gas industry to legitimate its operations and protect otherwise stranded assets.

0:12:28.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Here there may be some hope of delivery. The oil and gas companies think they can get paid by the public for transmission storage of CO2, even if they then use it for enhanced oil recovery. But overall, this means that even if CDR could be massively scaled and net zero achieved by balancing two carbon elephants rather than two mice, huge harms would remain from continued fossil extraction and combustion. This all leaves us facing something of a dilemma. Exaggerated promises of CDR undermine essential immediate action to mitigate and phase out fossil fuels. But without removals, we’ll likely exceed carbon budgets and impose substantial additional harms on future generations.

0:13:11.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Delivering large scale CDR could have serious implications for justice right now, not least for other species, but also through competition for agricultural land and clean energy. We can’t afford to have a carbon tunnel vision and disregard human rights, food security and biodiversity. But nor can we reject CDR out of hand. We need policy mechanisms that can support it in just and sustainable forms and scales while weeding out the false and exaggerated promises. In the next section of the talk, I’ll sketch out existing practice on urban CDR and explore the realistic prospects, highlighting some of the misleading promises about specific techniques and possible scales which CDR methods show particular promise for cities well thinking about urban functions in procuring, managing and regulating buildings, cities have opportunities to promote carbon storage and building materials, incorporate direct air capture in buildings as operators and regulators of energy systems and buyers of energy for buildings and transport systems. Cities offer opportunities for bioenergy with CCS, perhaps including biogas and biofuel production.

0:14:30.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Cities also operate and regulate solid and wastewater management with more opportunities for BECCS, biochar and capture of biogenic carbon from wastewater, possibly even incorporation of enhanced weathering or alkalinity enhancement into water treatment. And of course, cities own and manage land with opportunities for biochar, both biomass supply and biochar use in parks, urban forestry and so forth. Maybe enhanced weathering through rock dust use or carbon storage in trees and soil. There are also some niche CDR opportunities that I won’t talk more about that some cities might share, like desalination, sea defences and beach replenishment. I’m going to run through this library of cases quickly and maybe skip some if we run short of time. So timber construction is generally positive in climate terms.

0:15:37.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Timber buildings are better in earthquake zones that don’t increase fire risks. They’re lighter, requiring less deep foundations. Using timber in construction means that carbon accumulated by the trees prior to felling is kept out of the atmosphere for at least the lifespan of the building. Recent advances in mass or composite timber mean even large buildings up to 18 storeys high can be constructed entirely from timber. On average, mass timber construction stores about 380 kilograms of carbon dioxide per meter square of floor area, but costs less up to $150 per meter squared less to construct than concrete and steel.

0:16:16.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So Boston’s Mass Timber Accelerator provided development teams with technical assistance and funding grants to assess and integrate low carbon mass timber building practices into their projects. It supported 10 projects over three years involving buildings up to nine storeys high. If they all come to completion, there’ll be 48 buildings over 10 million square feet of total floor area and around 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide stored.

0:16:51.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: However, net gains in carbon storage in the building and built environment from timber may be at least partly offset by net losses in forest carbon. One estimate suggests mass timber use could average 2 gigatons per year of carbon dioxide, but notes that the forest pool is already declining at 0.7 gigatons a year. Highlights that potential increase in demand for timber for building materials threatens to intensify deforestation and illegal logging. Given that current timber supply would only cover about a third of estimated 2050 demand for construction if it was all shifted to timber, that means pressures on forests would grow dramatically. For this technique, lifespan and end of life issues are critical. Will these buildings remain in use for centuries or just decades? If construction waste can then be reused or become feedstock for BECCS or biochar, then storage might be meaningfully prolonged to really climatically meaningful timescales.

0:18:00.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: There are also several methods been explored for storing carbon in concrete buildings. These include enriching concrete with carbon dioxide in the curing process, using alternative minerals such as magnesium carbonate that absorb more CO2 in the curing, and directly incorporating carbon rich aggregate to biochar in concrete up to 15% by waste wait. The Four Corners Carbon Coalition partnership of several US cities provides grants to accelerate CO2 removal projects and in 2023 it awarded nearly $400 million to 4 billion businesses incorporating carbon removal in concrete, cement, synthetic limestone and insulation materials. However, claims in this field are likely exaggerated, perhaps in defense of the interests of a major energy intensive industry. Most alleged removal of storage in this sector is not enough to even offset the emissions involved in the production of cement and concrete. Accelerating carbon uptake in concrete curing is of questionable additionality as it largely merely replaces carbon dioxide that would be absorbed over some years from the atmosphere. Accelerating curing using CO2 from fossil sources as is happening in New York is therefore likely counterproductive in CDR terms.

0:19:29.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR promises here seem likely to help lock in the use of energy intensive concrete and steel where alternatives timber or building refurbishment would be environmentally preferable. Adding biochar or carbonaceous aggregate in residual concrete uses, however, would remain sensible. Direct air capture delivers carbon removal by the selective chemical capture of carbon dioxide from air passing over a contactor. Once saturated with CO2, the contactor is moved into an enclosed space and regenerated by temperature, pressure or humidity swing techniques. The collected CO2 would be pressurized and shipped to geological storage or utilization. Direct air capture uses a lot of energy for moving large volumes of air and regenerating the sorbent. Integrating DAC into building HVAC systems, as Solitaire Power are doing in pilot projects, should increase its capture efficiency by using air enriched with CO2 from respiration as the source, and it should reduce energy demand by utilizing the HVAC airflow.

0:20:46.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: The pilot in Aarhus promises 15 tonnes a year of removals for this one office building with no confirmed destination for the CO2 as yet. The costs are also unspecified, but described as adding 5 to 14% to rental and operational costs. At the lowest end. This implies over $1,000 a ton of carbon dioxide despite the efficiency savings. Whereas centralized DAC currently costs perhaps 400 to $600 a tonne in urban settings, collection transport costs will likely be higher too.

0:21:23.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: However, there are potentially significant health benefits from reducing CO2 concentrations indoors. Perhaps the poster child for urban CDR is Stockholm BECCS project. BECCS Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage works in theory by capturing up to 90% of the carbon dioxide from flue gas from biomass combustion, it counts as CDR because the biomass is considered carbon neutral. BECCS typically uses a chemical amine capture agent through which the flue gas is filtered. The amine is then regenerated to separate the captured CO2 which is then purified and compressed for storage, typically in a geological reservoir. Overall, this takes carbon dioxide that’s originally captured in photosynthesis into long term geological storage. But in practice most existing BECC’s plants do not result in net removals because they capture CO2 from biofuel fermentation with an overall capture rate only around 50% as the remainder of the carbon ends up in the fuel and they sell the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, which can lead to 150% or higher rebound in emissions.

0:22:45.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: At least the Stockholm Beck’s proposal is better than those. It’s a form of biomass combustion generates heat and or electricity. Some 20% or so of the energy generated has to be used to run the capture system, which means that overall biomass use in a retrofit like this is increased. So Stockholm Exergy is retrofitting its Vertan biomass cogeneration district heating plant and the retrofit is scheduled to begin operations in 2028. The plant relies on importing biomass about 60% from elsewhere in Sweden and will export compressed CO2 by ship for storage. EXIGEE has won EU innovation funding of $180 million and Swedish government support of around $160 a ton for 800,000 tonnes of capture per year for 15 years. It’s also selling removal credits 3.3 million tonnes already sold in advance to Microsoft and around $50 million worth via Frontier to various buyers.

0:24:04.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: This means much of the CDR benefit will be offset by emissions legitimated elsewhere. And intriguingly, EXIGEE has lobbied the EU in efforts to ensure that the Green Claims Directive doesn’t undermine the business logic of such credit sales. I’m going to skip this, as methanol production is a form of biofuel BECCS, which is at best a highly inefficient form of CDR. More biogenic emissions remain than are captured and a full life cycle analysis might not demonstrate net negativity. However, it was highlighted as a significant source of potential in the Amsterdam Region report commissioned by Carbon Traders South Pole, which I’ll mention later.

0:24:49.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Even for cities using biofuel or biogas for buses, electrifying the transit and directing biomass to more efficient CDR techniques would seem a better approach. In Trondheim we have another form of BECCs here, rather than using virgin biomass, it’s being put on a waste incinerator which incinerates mixed waste. Treating the biogenic component of mixed waste as carbon neutral by definition and thus capturing the emissions from its combustion cancer CDR. The potential here is around 300,000 tonnes per year capture from mixed waste in synergy of which about a third is fossil. The big downside here is that it creates incentives to increase or maintain waste production rather than avoid reuse or recycle or, as has already happened in Sweden, end up importing waste from other countries to feed the incinerators. Health risks from emissions make incineration unpopular in many countries, so tying CDR to such technologies might make it harder to promote.

0:26:04.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Turning to biochar. Biochar is the pyrolysis of biogenic materials, often waste such as forestry residues at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. This generates a carbon rich solid character, the biochar and combustible gases and or oils. Burying the char in soil can result in stable storage of carbon for centuries.

0:26:32.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Nova Carbon’s biochar park, the third I think of four they’ve developed so far at Grevesmühlen, captures around 3,200 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The cost per ton are unclear, but biochar in general is estimated to cost a little under $200 per ton. The biochar may then be used in agriculture or urban landscaping. Char is believed to benefit soil stability, water retention and fertility in most settings.

0:27:13.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: But concerns have been raised about contamination arising from waste feedstocks, especially if there’s things like heavy metals that survive the high temperatures involved. That might limit the use of such char to landscaping in relatively undisturbed areas. There are other possible biochar synergies in dry and wildfire risk areas. Incorporation of biochar might usefully enhance soil moisture retention, thus helping restrain fire spread. And there is a need to collect biomass. Harvest biomass for fire suppression purposes, which can then be supplied to the biochar facility like BECCS Biochar as CDR rests on the assumption that biomass is carbon neutral. Collection, transport and processing emissions are typically accounted for, as are emissions from any gaseous or oil fraction produced in the pyrolysis process. In this case, Nova Carbon claimed that the carb capture in char fully offsets process, energy use and the gaseous fraction.

0:28:12.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: But they’re also selling carbon credits and it’s not clear whether the net result would be some double counting once the emissions legitimated by the credits are included. Moving to Wastewater treatment this is the first of two different approaches in wastewater treatment. At Wood Huxley Sewage Treatment plant in Zurich, CCS is being installed on a sewage sludge incineration facility aiming to abate 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year at a cost of over $1,000 per ton. So this is another form of BECCS here, though the process is unlikely to generate surplus energy given the energy costs of drying sludge, so several questions are generated there. I’m going to skip on more innovative approach in New Haven, Crude carbon, a spinoff from Yale, is adding alkalinity to microbial wastewater treatment. This captures carbon dioxide as bicarbonate for export to the ocean via the plant outflow. Crew Carbon claims its pilot operations have demonstrated 4,000 tons a year removals and on this basis they have made advanced sales of carbon credits for 72,000 tonnes over the period 2025 to 2030 at a cost of around 450 tonnes at $450 per ton. Unlike BECCS, DAC or even Biochar, the total quantity of carbon captured here is difficult to measure directly and monitoring reporting verification standards become critical, especially if removals are to be marketed as credits.

0:30:02.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: A more conventional form of carbon removal has been practiced in Yokohama. Seagrass meadows and salt marshes are amongst the most effective biological carbon sinks with per hectare rates several times greater than forests. Since 2011 Yokohama has supported projects planting and protecting eel grass and seaweed beds which are generally being lost and degraded faster. But since 2015 they’ve been turning the carbon gains into tradable credits and as of 2019 total removals were just 80 tons.

0:30:45.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Such projects have valuable co benefits for fisheries, but the carbon removals are marginal at best and may even be double counting as these would be previously unmanaged spaces. Perhaps a bit of a niche as the this depends on a coastal location, but the Captura process uses electrodialysis, an energy consuming process to separate seawater into acid and alkali streams. The acid stream is first added to contain seawater, forcing out dissolved inorganic CO2 and the alkali stream is returned and mixed and the now CO2 depleted water returned to the ocean where it re equilibrates by drawing down atmospheric CO2. Captura have a 100 ton per annum pilot plant at the port of LA and are developing 1000 ton per annum plant In Hawaii, costs are currently estimated at perhaps $2,000 a ton and need to be cut significantly to make it competitive.

0:31:46.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Finally, Freetown in Sierra Leone is using reforestation tree planting to accumulate and store carbon in living biomass. Following the loss of over 500,000 trees each year from 2011 to 2018 and devastating mudslides killing over a thousand people in 2017, the city is aiming to plant 20 to 25 million trees by 2050. Motivated primarily by climate resilience benefits, stabilizing slopes and providing shade, citizens have been mobilized to plant and maintain trees through a digital app and micropayments. Funding has been raised in part through the sale of digitized tokens for corporate social responsibility purposes and plans to sell carbon credits. The project is deliberately targeted informal settlement areas for equity reasons. However, the long term durability of these carbon stores must be questioned as the land involved is in a growing urban area and policies on land use can change quickly.

0:32:58.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So the bottom line, how much carbon could cities remove? All these projects have generated only small numbers, none of them more than a million tons a year, some of them down in the level of tens of tonnes. Putting it together, there are a few reports that have made estimates, but there’s huge variation in the estimates and the amounts and even in the techniques considered.

0:33:28.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: This quick survey of the literature suggests a range from less than half a gigaton to 5 or even perhaps 13 gigatons. Those upper figures appear to me hugely over optimistic in terms of the credibility of the techniques that we’ve just looked at, the sustainability of supplies for them and the uptake levels that would be likely achieved in practice. So amongst the reports, the Mercator Institute’s estimates of 0.3 to 1.2 gigatons seem perhaps most responsible in this respect. But these exclude waste management routes. So my best guess, adding some potential for waste management to the Mercator estimates is a maximum of around 2 gigatons. That builds an estimate for waste treatment based on BECCS and 3.8 gigatons of municipal solid waste in 2050, around 70% of it urban and around 20% biogenic carbon. Even this, allowing an ambitious coverage of 50% of waste treated that way, would give the figure of 0.9 gigatons. So we’ve got an overall aggregate figure that’s certainly well worth pursuing in the light of the IPCC’s estimates of a need for 6 to 11 gigatons, but not something that’s a silver bullet. There’s lots of positives being raised in the cases that I’ve suggested and lots of questions outstanding.

0:35:15.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So we need much more rigorous assessment of the promises of such proposals. It’s not to say such pilot projects are bad, but we should free them from the pressures and distortions of venture capital and carbon trading, providing instead public funding and public accountability based on radical transparency and public intellectual property. Rejecting offsetting for CDR is a first step towards addressing these problems, but also critical in moving away from continued magical thinking and the promises that go on contributing to mitigation, deterrence and climate procrastination CDR advocacy is riddled with magical thinking, notably expectations of technological fixes, a belief in technological wizardry to evade material and environmental limits, often coupled with financial wizardry, a belief that venture capital and novel financial instruments in constructed markets will somehow make these technologies effective and affordable.

0:36:20.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: These combine to generate exaggerated expectations and facilitate delay and mitigation. Taking CDR into the public realm as a vital future shared utility might also seem magical thinking, especially at the current moment in US politics. But if any group of actors in the CDR space could lead such a move, then it might be cities focusing development of CDR on techniques with co-benefits for their existing services and facilities.

0:36:57.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Doing that will need careful navigation of a host of political currents and interests that want to turn CDR into a marketable commodity, deliberately substituting for mitigation efforts including finance, oil and gas, airlines and others. But there may be potential to win support from other sectors like the development sector as well as from the broader public. Key to public support is likely to be the question of justice and fairness, and taking account of all such issues is likely to further reduce practical potential for urban CDR.

0:37:45.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: I think leaving an impression of perhaps half to 1 gigaton per annum by 2050 as the possible practical contribution would be responsible and realistic. David Morrow and his friends and his colleagues have suggested these guiding principles for climate justice with respect to CDR. Play the long game, support CDR as reparation, avoid carbon tunnel vision, account for all impacts, split, don’t lump measure and manage different techniques separately, and don’t bet the house on the models. Those are all useful guidance, I think for cities. More specifically, urban CDR could exacerbate injustice through several routes, notably via the location and impacts of pollution, odour, truck movements and so forth of energy and waste facilities.

0:38:37.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR doesn’t make energy generation or waste management magically clean, also via the effects of CDR in construction materials on relative housing costs and availability. Thirdly, through competition for land elsewhere for any additional BioMass to supply BECCS or biochar and finally through the many injustices in offsetting and carbon trading, such as intermediaries extracting the value, the wealthy purchasing offsets and the poor suffering project impacts. So with urban CDR cities must beware exporting impacts. BECCS and Biochar may still rely on land outside the city.

0:39:23.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR is not exempt from the risks of green colonialism. Overall as well, we should remember that environmental justice is not necessarily served by every entity individually reaching net zero. Net zero is a global goal. Cities may well do more to cut emissions and less CDR, while rural areas might have more sustained emissions from agriculture and transport, but do much more in absolute terms to generate removals. Delivering environmental justice in CDR requires careful attention to historical and continuing inequalities, failures of recognition and uneven capabilities and vulnerabilities. Coming to conclusions. Some preliminary recommendations for urban CDR policy. Keep CDR subsidiary to mitigation and adaptation. Look for the co benefits for example in waste management, district heating, air quality and health, wildfire suppression, urban greening, shade and resilience.

0:40:35.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Focus any BECCS or biochar on genuine residual waste generated by the city and not on imported biomass. Integrate CDR in municipal functions, states management, waste management, building regulations and planning rules, for example, and avoid buying CDR offsets. Minimize selling removals that are generated by public utilities. For brief conclusions so urban CDR has lots of potential worth exploiting even at the total half to 1 gigaton level. But cities have far greater prospects to cut emissions and eliminate fossil fuel use. Those must be the priority. In climate policy terms, urban CDR can be part of a CDR portfolio. But neither urban CDR nor CDR as a whole is a silver bullet for the climate and cities exploring in this space must beware misleading and illusory promises from CDR promoters, especially those who are seeking to sell credits. And in working with CDR, cities must attend to justice Implications CDR is not a magic wand that will erase social and environmental side effects. Thanks so much for your attention and let’s move over to the question and discussion section. I’ll be making the slides available and there’s some extra slides with links.

0:42:21.7 Professor Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you so much Duncan for that. Fascinating. And you did cover some serious ground there. It’s a lot to take in and if you just stop the screen share then we can get a picture of everybody. There we go. Well, we’ve got a lot of questions and let me just go through them. So Venkata asks, what are the challenges and support systems for alkalinity enhancement in coastal cities that also provide some level of resiliency support for local corals against ocean acidification.

0:43:06.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: If I caught that correctly, the question is would these sort of alkalinity measures be good for protecting coral reefs and so forth? That’s one of the functions that I think researchers in the space are exploring. What’s not clear at the moment is whether a process like the Captura one would provide alkalinity in the right places and in weight in forms that reef organisms could make use of. I think there is… It’s an area that’s definitely worth thinking about, a very clear possible co-benefit here. And as I said, most of these things need co-benefits to become affordable for a start because they’re otherwise very expensive. And focusing on the co-benefits is a good way of deciding which techniques are most appropriate in the relevant location.

0:44:12.9 Professor Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks, Duncan. A very practical question from Michael. What are the super accessible interventions that cities and cities and groups can pursue in their cities? What’s the equivalent of eat less beef for citizens and city dwellers? 

0:44:32.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: I don’t think there’s anything quite as simple as that. There’s nothing… There was a study that I looked at during preparing for this that looked at biochar incorporation in residential yards and the average result was 10kg of carbon a year. You do better than that by taking the train once instead of driving. So really personal carbon removal is probably not in the big picture. But at the city level, the shift to shifting at the margin of new build into timber buildings and using biochar in city parks and urban public spaces, those would seem to be probably the early win wins and there are probably some other no regrets in terms of the management of land, whether that be urban forests or urban coastal lands.

0:45:41.3 Professor Julian Agyeman: Is Edith in the room? Because she has a quite a long question, very detailed question, and I’d rather she ask Duncan directly. Edith, are you in the room? 

0:45:54.4 Edith Kutz: Yes, I am. Can you hear me? Hi. Hi. Hi. This was a great presentation. I went to one yesterday that was… Doesn’t even compare because you really hit. You really made it practical. You were critical and you also included policies. So anyhow, I just wanted to let you know, I mean, to ask you if you’re aware of. I’ve been following carbon collect. They are a direct air capture machine, let’s say, and it uses ambient air and it doesn’t use fans. So it doesn’t require huge sources of energy. And it has a proprietary transfer mechanism to absorb and release the carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide can be reused in carbon Manufacture concrete, like through the carbon cure method. So it’s like this win, win for a city. I mean, because you could get a circular economy going. And it’s a modular and a really attractive, the most attractive DAC mechanism that I have come across thus far. It’s not like Climeworks or some of the others. So I just wanted to suggest that because as a landscape architect, I’ve been trying to find out ways to bring DAC right into the city in parks and in places. I mean, I work with natural bay solutions also, but I’ve been really trying to find the application for mechanical ones within a city, which is why I found your presentations really very interesting and really good.

0:47:20.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Well, thanks, Edith. I was at the same webinar as you yesterday. Appreciated your contributions in the chat. I haven’t heard of Karma Collect specifically as you describe them. They’re not dissimilar to solitaire that I did include in the, in the talk.

0:47:39.7 Edith Kutz: No, no, no, no. Solitaire is connected to buildings, right? Yeah, no, this is a freestanding.

0:47:47.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Right.

0:47:48.6 Professor Julian Agyeman: Just Google Carbon Collect. You’ll see it as Mechanical Tree.

0:47:53.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Immediately, I would worry a little about the embodied capital cost of doing something that uses ambient air, at least in, in places that aren’t very windy. If you’ve got wind generating a good airflow, then then in theory you can get the efficiency high enough. And in general, I think DAC does have a lot of limitations because we look at photovoltaics and we think that’s brilliant. We have this dispersed, decentralized system which does away with or limits the amount of infrastructure we need because it supplants having such an intensive energy grid. DAC’s the opposite. If you make it modular and dispersed, then you have to have more infrastructure or more costly, less efficient ways of collecting up the CO2 to get it to permanent storage. And that’s partly because I’m more skeptical of the concrete reuse. So in concrete, I think incorporation of biochar is a better route than accelerated curing with DAC CO2 and more broadly, reuse of buildings. And timber buildings are better than concrete buildings.

0:49:22.5 Edith Kutz: Well, I think you ought to take a look at Carbon Collect’s site, because I’ll bring that question up to them. I’ve been in contact with them regarding their technology, but I think that the ambient air thing is not inefficient. So anyhow, I think you ought to check it out.

0:49:39.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And it’s a long standing debate in the in the DAC field about the potential for use of ambient air. It will probably have a niche. It will probably not be the only way to do DAC or necessarily the best way to do CDR in cities.

0:49:57.6 Edith Kutz: Okay, Well, a few… I agree. There’s going to be a mosaic of all kinds of different application technologies.

0:50:04.8 Professor Julian Agyeman: Yeah, great. Thanks for your question, Edith. Patricia Lacacia, what are smart technologies and policies that can enhance urban resilience in the face of climate disasters such as the increased frequency of hurricanes? 

0:50:20.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: That’s a huge question, Patricia. And there are. What I’ll try and do is think if there are any contributions from CDR practices specifically. There are of course, many, many other ways in which cities should be building resilience. Starting from probably the biggest and most sweeping, increasing social equity as a way to build resilience amongst the population. That always seems to me the biggest and most overlooked way of preparing for these sort of disasters. In the CDR space, there may be possibilities for coastal cities in the way that coastal defenses and beach replenishment are done. I mentioned that as niches there are carbon removal techniques that involve putting pebbles or rocks on beaches where the wave action helps accelerate the carbon uptake, using particular basaltic rocks.

0:51:32.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And if cities need those for to improve the defense of the city against storm surges or whatever, one could see a synergy there. That’s a very marginal thing, I think, or a niche thing in the overall resilience. Hurricanes obviously also tend to bring excess water. So anything that’s improving the permeability of urban areas is good. And here again at the margin, use of biochar in public parks and lands could be improving the ability of those parks to absorb and retain water. CDR wouldn’t be my go to technique or set of technologies for building disaster resilience in cities. I think I’d start from the other end.

0:52:24.7 Professor Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Duncan. Roger? Roger Hickman, are you still in here? For those of you who don’t know, Roger actually worked at Friends of the Earth in the in London around the same time as Duncan was there. Roger, are you in the room? 

0:52:47.8 Roger Hickman: Yeah, I am in the room. Nice to see you both and it’s great to see you both working together, which is why I came really more than anything else. But excellent presentation, Duncan. You just thoroughly exhaustively researched and great and albeit a bit depressing. I just in New England, but you know, a lot of British cities, we’re right next to Dartmoor territory and I’m wondering about sort of what potential is there and what the sort of carbon abatement is there.

0:53:17.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Thanks Roger, you broke up a bit. It’s a real pleasure to hear from you, but I got the gist that you were asking about peatland enhancement as a climate tool. Really? And yes, I didn’t mention it in the list of techniques because there’s rarely peatland managed by the city within the city boundaries. This would fall into the category of the rural areas doing more CDR and cities doing more emissions cuts in that cities should stop using peat in their gardens and urban public spaces because the extraction of peat from peatlands is a big carbon emitter because it ends up drying out the carbon comes out of it and protecting peatlands re wetting them is indeed a potentially valuable carbon removal tool.

0:54:25.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Peatlands can be more rapid and more dense sinks than forests. However, rewetting peatlands also does tend to increase methane emissions from and getting a net balance that is Capturing more carbon or in greenhouse gas terms is carbon negative rather than carbon positive will depend on the particularities of the location and the age of the peatland in particular. But broadly, yes, intervene to re-wet and restore growth in peatlands and stop digging them up and turning them into gardens.

0:55:08.6 Professor Julian Agyeman: Great. Thanks Duncan. I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for. Can we give a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause for Dr. Duncan McLaren? Our next Cities@Tufts colloquium is on March 12th, when we have Hessann Farooqi, who is the ED of Boston climate Action Network talking about local leadership for climate change. Thank you for coming and see you on March 12th. Thanks again, Duncan.

0:55:37.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s been a pleasure.

0:55:39.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the Show Notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable with support from the Barr foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co producer, audio Editor and Communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff and Bobby Jones, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

The post From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren appeared first on Shareable.

Today, we’re sharing the audio from the half of Session 2, and will be joined by Stephanie Rearick, to discuss how to start and build momentum for a new, or (re)newed mutual aid group. She’s a longtime organizer and advocate for cooperative economies and the founder of the international Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks. We had Stephanie as a guest on the show a couple of years ago and knew she would have an important voice to feature in this series as well.

Stephanie starts with a 25-minute presentation before addressing questions submitted by the live audience. Next week on The Response, we’ll feature Julian Rose from the New Economy Coalition and EndState ATL, who focussed on power dynamics and how to work with others during Session 2.

Our next live event is tomorrow, Wednesday, March 5th, where we’ll focus on the benefits and limitations of formal structures, financial basics, and fintech for mutual aid, as well as how to understand risk and safety protocols for mutual aid projects. 

Presenters include: Erika Sato, Attorney of Sustainable Economies Law Center; Elijah Baucom, Founder of Everyday Security & Director of UC-Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic; and Sarah Philips, a Campaigner at Fight for the Future.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Video)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Transcript)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Slides)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Links from Stephanie, Julian + chat)
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Building (and rebuilding) mutual aid groups with Stephanie Rearick appeared first on Shareable.