We are often forced to fight defensive battles in our movements. When your house is on fire, the immediate and urgent priority is to extinguish the blaze. Such is the case with many struggles against the present administration of President Donald Trump. Virtually everyone I know is finding ways to support—and celebrate the successes of—the vital struggles being led by federal workers, nonprofit workers, and community development financial institutions.

As critical as this resistance work is, we must also confront the reality that the current system is collapsing. This means we must build a new one. The People’s Network for Land & Liberation (PNLL) coalition was formed to do just that.

PNLL is a multiracial, multiethnic consortium of six community-based organizations located across the United States. Its aim is to create a bold yet practical solidarity economy that can transform both politics and the economy from the ground up.

All six PNLL members share a common goal of shifting from power-over, extractive, and unsustainable sociopolitical systems to cooperative, regenerative, and balanced systems. PNLL is also a member of the broader national Resist & Build formation, in which I actively participate.

Central to PNLL’s vision is securing community stewardship over land. As Kali Akuno, cofounder of Cooperation Jackson, explained in NPQ, “A lot of businesses go out of business because they just cannot make the rent. So, we wanted to remove that from the equation as much as possible.”

As critical as this resistance work is, we must also confront the reality that the current system is collapsing. This means we must build a new one.

Forging the Vision

The People’s Network for Land & Liberation first emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Today, six organizations comprise the network, all united behind a transformative political program that aims to:

Decommodify land using community land trusts for community-owned affordable housing, commercial space for worker-owned cooperatives, food production using a food sovereignty framework, and to preserve the integrity of the life-giving ecosystems of Mother Earth.

Support community production employing both digital fabrication technologies and regenerative agriculture-based materials and energy. This means decentralized manufacturing that empowers local communities to create goods collaboratively and sustainably using resilient local supply chains.

Incubate an ecosystem of worker-owned cooperatives that go beyond “co-ops for the sake of co-ops” to create profitable and vibrant local supply and value chains.

Engage in an internal self-education program that engages folks to foster critical thinking, dialogue, and empowerment.

Infuse art and culture in everything. This includes making things beautiful but goes much deeper. Operate according to the adage: “If it isn’t soulful, it isn’t strategic.”

Building the People’s Network for Land & Liberation

Within these five categories, each member group has a somewhat different focus, although there is a lot of overlap. Here is an overview of who’s who within the network:

Community Movement Builders has nine national chapters rooted in the Black radical tradition of self-determination and liberation. Their largest chapter is in Atlanta, GA, where they have been leaders in the Stop Cop City movement, a massive militarized police training facility. They also own and operate four community houses, operate a Community Sea Moss cooperative, and are incubating an aquaponics co-op. They recently purchased 14 acres of land near Atlanta as a space for food production, a movement retreat, and training space, which they call the Love Land Liberation project.

Cooperation Jackson owns 52 separate properties in Jackson, MS. Six are single-family homes with 12 people currently living in them, others are single-family properties that need to be rehabilitated, and some are land being farmed by the Freedom Farms Cooperative. They also operate a 6,000-square-foot community center and a community production center, and own a six-unit strip mall on a city block that is being remodeled to be the site of what will be called the People’s Grocery Store, intended to operate as a worker co-op.

Cooperation Vermont, based in rural Vermont, purchased the historic 150-year-old Marshfield Village Store and converted it into a worker co-op. The second floor is being used as workers’ housing, and they are currently renovating the third floor for additional cooperative housing. The store served as a relief and resilience hub during the recent floods that decimated the region. Earlier this year, they purchased the nearby Rainbow Sweets Bakery building and are converting the ground floor into a commercial kitchen to support local food producers in preparing goods for a commercial market, with the second story to be used for affordable housing.

Incite Focus is based in Idlewild, MI. Also known as “Black Eden,” Idlewild became famous during the Jim Crow segregation era as a place where people could be “fully human and unapologetically Black.” Today, they are recognized as leaders in the process of local community production using digital fabrication technologies in concert with local supply chains, based on regenerative agriculture. They are also in the process of converting a 60-acre resilience hub, a 10,000-square-foot community center, and a historic hotel and restaurant into a land trust. They are incubating worker-owned cooperatives to operate them all.

Native Roots Network is an Indigenous-led community organization that operates in the traditional lands of the Wintu, Yana, and Pit River peoples in what is now known as Shasta County, CA. The group practices “Acornomics,” an Indigenous regenerative framework for land stewardship, cultural revitalization, and community resilience. It has already rematriated two sites: a 4.5-acre parcel which is being developed to become a community resilience center; and a 1,200-acre site for Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK land restoration, Native food, and fiber cultivation and community production, with digital fabrication technologies and an aim to develop an ecosystem to support worker-owned cooperative businesses.

Wellspring Cooperative is working to build a local solidarity economy ecosystem in greater Springfield, MA, by leveraging a community land-trust model. Wellspring already has elements of this ecosystem in place, including a shared-use community kitchen, mutual aid and food security projects, and redevelopment of an abandoned fire station as a community center/co-op hub. It is also continuing to build out a network of mutually supportive co-ops, including Wellspring Harvest—a quarter-acre hydroponic greenhouse (the state’s largest), producing roughly 250,000 heads of lettuce, greens, and herbs per year—Wellspring Upholstery, Natural Living Landscapes, a weatherization co-op called Energía, and Catalyst Cooperative Healing, a mental healthcare co-op.

The central goal of the collaboration among these projects is to fundraise and develop a common land-acquisition fund that can enable community groups to decolonize and remove from the market (decommodify) as much land as possible, capitalize the launch and conversion of businesses anchored in the land and in the community, and use both as the foundation to create local and regional supply and value chains. Ultimately, the network seeks to replace capitalism, not reform or coexist with it.

Can Impact Investing Be Transformative?

The next phase of PNLL is to create a movement owned and operated by a catalytic impact investment fund to scale these efforts. But to realize our transformative vision, our movement needs to completely redesign what impact investing is about.

The central goal…is to fundraise and develop a common land-acquisition fund that can enable community groups to remove land from the market.

Today, a lot of well-meaning wealthy people turn to impact investing as a way to align their money with their values. And on the surface, that makes sense—who wouldn’t want to support companies that are doing good in the world?

But impact investing, as typically practiced, doesn’t actually challenge systems. Instead, it often helps wealthy people stay wealthy, while perhaps easing the guilt that comes with knowing the system is rigged in their favor.

Impact investing still operates within the logic of capitalism, which prioritizes private ownership, competition, and endless growth. That means the goal is still to extract more value than is put in, usually from communities or ecosystems that don’t get a say in the process. It’s a gentler capitalism—but it’s still capitalism.

If we’re serious about system change, we have to go deeper.

The solidarity economy offers a different path. It’s about shifting power, not just dollars. It centers cooperation instead of competition, shared ownership instead of private control, and values people and the planet over profits. This isn’t about charity or better business practices. It’s about transformation—building an economy rooted in democracy, sustainability, and justice.

For those with wealth, that means moving beyond just doing “less harm” with investments. It means investors need to ask harder questions, such as whether they are willing to give up some control, to invest in community-owned enterprises where decisions are made democratically, and to support regenerative models that may yield below-market returns but will help generate meaningful community value.

Truth be told, for our movement’s work to succeed, we don’t need more impact investors. We need more people to help us build the solidarity economy. We need accomplices who are ready to redistribute wealth, shift power, and co-create a future where everyone can thrive, not just the lucky few.

Fortunately, some of these accomplices exist. Ava Keating and Charlie Spears are a couple who inherited wealth and have gone “all-in” on this approach. As Keating told NPQ in an interview, “[The] so-called socially responsible investing is a myth. We know that we need something new.”

She added, “As donors, we need to bring our full selves. This means developing class analysis and organizing skills. It means cultivating relationships… I don’t want a return on investment. I want to help create a humane, equitable world that we all deserve. I want—and need—system change.”

For his part, Spears added, “We are all existentially in the same boat here. Either we break from the capitalist mode of production and create a new society, or there’s no point in having money because the world will be burning around us.”

We need accomplices who are ready to redistribute wealth, shift power, and co-create a future where everyone can thrive, not just the lucky few.

At an institutional level, Boston Impact Initiative (BII) is an example of a nonprofit impact investing fund that is going beyond great projects and is dedicated to building financial, social, and political power. An example is their Fund Manager Education program, which trains community organizers to become fund managers who can implement this vision.

As Shavon Prophet, director of education and strategic partnerships at BII, explained to NPQ, the goal is to engage “in a transformational collaborative process that is challenging assumptions, sparking new ideas, and deepening our shared collective understanding.” Broadly speaking, BII aims to reject extractive systems and advance a solidarity economy rooted in shared power, mutual accountability, and community control.

What’s Next?

We are at a pivotal moment in history. As Antonio Gramsci observed in his Prison Notebooks, after Italy had become the world’s first fascist state a century ago, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

As society confronts the reality of ecological collapse and rising fascism, the urgent need for transformative change has never been clearer. The solidarity economy stands as a beacon of possibility.

By decommodifying land, nurturing worker-owned cooperatives, embracing political education, and embedding art and culture into every facet of our work, it is possible to collectively go beyond merely resisting the old: Communities can actively build the new in a spirit of cooperation, shared ownership, and ecological stewardship.

If you enjoyed this article about the People’s Network for Land & Liberation, please go deeper in this ongoing series about the Resist and Build Framework:

• Our Task Ahead: Reclaiming Revolutionary Struggle in Atlanta and the South
• Resist and Build: A Movement Building Process Centering the Solidarity Economy

The post Organizing for the Long Haul: How to Build a Network for Land and Liberation 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.

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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.

We believe a more just and joyful world is not only possible but it’s constantly being realized in communities all across the globe. That vital work of regular people, often in the face of incredible hardship, continually inspires us.

Here’s a glimpse in 10 stories:

1. Modern-day colonialism and the tragic fate of an indigenous water and land protector

This story by Allen Myers shares insights from his 2022 trip to Brumadinho, Brazil, where he witnessed the enduring scars left by a 2019 dam collapse and the fight for justice that followed.

2. Life-Saving lending library: Union supplies Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid ongoing Israeli genocide

This story by Arvind Dilawar focuses on the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate’s efforts to supply Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

3. The transformative power of Urban Recipe’s Atlanta food co-op model

Urban Recipe is an Atlanta-based food co-op dedicated to “food with dignity.” Shareable is partnering with Urban Recipe for our Food Assistance Co-op pilot project!

4. From reform to what works: Moving from the limits of institutions to a culture powered by neighbors

In the final piece written by the co-creator of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model, John McKnight tells the stories of thirteen communities that replaced the institutional and recovered associational functions by assuming authority for much of their well-being.

5. A Shareable Explainer: What is the Solidarity Economy?

The Solidarity Economy exists all around us, from worker co-ops to community land trusts. This explainer dives into what exactly the Solidarity Economy is, examples in the US and internationally, and much more.

6. Cities@Tufts Podcast: Urban Environmental Marronage – Connecting Black Ecologies with Charisma Acey

This episode explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities.

7. The Response Podcast: Surveillance and reproductive justice with Rafa Kidvai

Rafa Kidvai from Repro Legal Defense Fund joined us to discuss interconnected struggles, the challenges of surveillance, and the power of community in the fight for reproductive justice.

8. New toolkit from Shareable will help you start (and grow) a Library of Things in YOUR community

Learn more about our comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit, designed to help people like you plan, start, and grow Libraries of Things in your community.

9. How to not pay taxes

Shareable is in the process of updating 50 of our 300+ how-to guides. We updated one of our most popular guides, which explains legal (and illegal) ways not to pay federal taxes. This guide is all too relevant to the United States’ annual military budget, which exceeds $916 billion.

10. “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives”

“The journey of rural electrification is a testament to community resilience and innovation. With the inception of Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs) in the early 20th century, spurred by the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, rural America, quite literally, lit up.” This article features the animated short film “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives.”

While storytelling is at the root of everything we do, our work at Shareable only starts with articles like these. In 2024, we also:

• Directly supported nine Library of Things fellows; researched and released the State of Libraries of Things 2024 report; hosted a 12-week Library of Things Co-Lab; helped incubate the new Tool Library Alliance in the US; and released the comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit.
• Continued our partnership with Rural Power Coalition to support a just energy transition to the largest co-op sector in the US. In partnership with The Story of Stuff Project, we released explainer videos on the history of rural electric cooperatives, virtual power plants, and agrivoltaics.
• Supported the development of community backup power systems with our Emergency Battery Toolkit, launched a Food Assistance Co-op pilot project in partnership with Urban Recipe, and co-hosted the Social Co-op Academy with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center.
• Updated and republished 24 how-to guides covering topics from worker co-ops to participatory budgeting to mutual aid to making music with friends and more!
• Co-hosted 13 public Cities@Tufts lectures in partnership with the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University (including Reimagining Urban Planning with Jose Richard Aviles, How to fight a mega-jail with Maya Singhal, and Here There Be Dragons with Jess Myers), released five episodes of The Response (including indigenous disaster response, Facing the heat: Disaster management in the age of climate crisis with Samantha Montano, and journalists in Palestine), and worked with spoken word artists in Oregon to perform “Voices of The Response” (our live version of The Response).

That’s a LOT of content and resources to help you imagine and build cooperative sharing projects in your local community!

And there’s even more planned for 2025. We’ve got big plans to provide resources to launch new mutual aid projects, scale Libraries of Things across universities and affordable housing developments, start new food assistance co-ops, train rural electric co-op member-owners, and so much more.

But we need your support to make it happen.

If you’re able, please make a contribution so we can continue building on this momentum and co-create a world where sharing is daily practice and communities thrive.

The post Best of Shareable 2024 | Reader’s Digest appeared first on Shareable.

Addressing the climate crisis requires more than incremental reforms; it necessitates a transformative approach that dismantles deep-seated inequalities and confronts the historical injustices embedded in global structures.

Achieving global climate justice hinges on decolonizing fossil fuel politics and dismantling obstructionist forces at both national and international levels.

By drawing from and critiquing the Green New Deal movement, Professor Noel Healy explores what genuine economic and political transformation looks like in practice, emphasizing that these systemic changes are inseparable from the pursuit of global justice.

About the speaker

Noel Healy is a Professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University (SSU) and the Director of the Climate Justice and Just Transitions Lab.

His research explores the socio-political dimensions of rapid climate change mitigation, climate justice, fossil fuel politics, and climate obstructionism, with a focus on economic and racial justice in climate and energy policy.

Dr. Healy was a contributing author on the UN’s IPCC (AR6/WGIII) report, and he serves on the advisory board of Cell Reports Sustainability and the editorial board of Energy Research and Social Sciences.

You can follow him on Twitter/X: @DrNoelHealy.

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Watch the video of Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy

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Transcript for Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy

0:00:06.9 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 Bar 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.

0:00:39.9 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities @ Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partner, Shareable and the Bar 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.

0:01:04.5 Julian Agyeman: We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Noel Healy, who’s actually in Medellín Colombia. Noel is a professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University and is the director of the Climate Justice and Just Transitions Lab. His research explores the sociopolitical dimensions of rapid climate change, climate mitigation, climate justice, fossil fuel politics, and climate obstructionism with a focus on economic and racial justice in climate and energy policy.

0:01:47.9 Julian Agyeman: Noel was contributing author to the UN IPCC’s AR6/WG3 report, and Noel, I’m sure you know what that means. And he serves on the Advisory Board of Cell Reports sustainability and on the editorial board of Energy Research and Social Sciences. His work has been published in leading journals such as One Earth, Wire, Climate Change, Energy Policy, and Climate Change, as well as in popular outlets such as The Guardian, The Hill, Scientific American. His research has also garnered attention from major media outlets like the Boston Globe, W Radio, Colombia, the Times, and Forbes. Noel’s talk today is decolonizing Climate and energy policy, forging a just global green transition. Noel, a zoomtastic welcome to Cities @ Tufts.

0:02:42.4 Noel Healy: Thank you, Julian. It’s great to be here. And hello to everyone. I’m gonna start off by sharing my screen. We’ll just do that logistic first. And Julian, can you see my slides now? Okay. I presume you can.

0:03:01.4 Julian Agyeman: Yes.

0:03:02.6 Noel Healy: Okay, excellent. Okay, great. Welcome everyone. I’m delighted to be here. Today I’m gonna talk about decolonizing climate and energy policy. Julian gave a nice introduction there. Basically, I work on three buckets of research, environmental climate justice, fossil fuel obstructionism, and climate and energy policymaking. For instance, one of my studies investigated the interconnected injustices along fossil fuel supply chains between Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Colombia South America and currently in Medellín Colombia. My study documented the injustices enforceable displacement of indigenous YU and Afro Colombians from coal mining at the Sarah Horne open pit coal mine. In the US, I’ve worked with folks like Greenpeace and others to document public health hazards from air and water pollution and the risks associated with climate change.

0:03:55.1 Noel Healy: And also I’ve worked on a range of issues connected to the Green New Deal. Okay, so what is the current state of the climate crisis? I’m gonna go over this quite quickly ’cause I think my audience is well versed on this, but the IPCC has outlined a magnitude of ongoing and future threats, extreme weather events, sea level rise, increased frequency and severity of droughts, floods, wildfires, and the breakdown of food systems, mass human migration, something that I’m really worried about. Over 220 people died in flooding in Valencia, Spain just within the last two weeks and the Philippines have now been hit by four typhoons in the span of just 10 days or five major storms in three weeks.

0:04:41.2 Noel Healy: Sadly, those least responsible for historical emissions will get hit hardest and fastest. Okay, so in terms of what types of cuts that are needed, and this graph here on the left is from the IPCC’s 1.5 report, and I give a lot of climate and energy folk nightmares when it first come out because effectively we have to cut global net CO2 emissions by 45% as of 2030.

0:05:10.2 Noel Healy: So achieving such a steep decarbonization would involve reconstituting not only our electrical grid, our cultural system, our transportation system, financial system, trade, manufacturing, land use, political system, military, the entire economy. So within a decade, we must cut emissions almost by half, and that’s around 7.8% of pollution cut every year. Put this in context, despite global efforts, emissions have risen every year over the last five years. And while there was approximately 8.8% decrease in global emissions during the first six months of COVID, the emissions have rebounded. So global emissions continue to reach record highs with greenhouse gases 1.3% higher in 2023.

0:05:56.9 Noel Healy: Kevin Anderson is one of my favorite climate scientists because I don’t think that he really sugarcoats the level of transformation that is needed. So we had the opportunity to do an easy, moderate change, maybe 30 to 40 years ago the same time period when fossil fuel companies knew the impact of their products.

0:06:16.5 Noel Healy: But we are now at the point where we can either do a radical transformative shift or face climate chaos. There’s really no scenario in which we won’t be experiencing massive oil and change. So as we face into Trump 2.0, it’s important to first acknowledge that the United States is producing more oil and natural gas today than ever before, and far more than any other country. So the Biden administration might argue that increased oil and gas production during its administration is to some extent a result of issues of leases issued during the Trump administration. Trump auctioned off the leases and the Biden administration signed the permits.

0:06:57.7 Noel Healy: However, the Biden-Harris administration also gave the go ahead for the nation’s largest oil drilling operation, the ConocoPhillips Vast Willow Project in Alaska, known as the climate bomb. And this had nothing got to do with Trump. Okay, so that’s the kind of quick background to where we’re at. So what do I mean by international climate policy? 

0:07:20.1 Noel Healy: International climate policy refers to collective actions and treaties such as the UN’s Paris Agreement aimed at mitigating and adapting climate change on the local scale. So the COP29 is taking place right now, and in the next few slides, and I’ll illustrate how in the fine print of international climate policies, we can still witness the continuing entrenchment and the dominance of the global North over the global south, a region already burdened by historical extraction of trillions of dollars worth of resources and labor by its colonizers.

0:07:53.0 Noel Healy: So the US and the EU are not only accountable for almost half of all historical emissions, but as architects of global Empire, leverage their colonial wealth to steer climate negotiations, obscure historical emissions, overshadowing the severe consequences they have inflicted over the global south. This is a graphic from one of Jason Hickel’s research papers, I’m a big fan of Jason Hickel’s work and Julian Steinberg and others who work on this critical, climate justice stuff.

0:08:28.6 Noel Healy: So there’s a whole body of literature which outlines that decisions on how to count emissions are political ones, with social justice implications. And I think Professor Avi Chomsky, who also teaches at Salem State, does a good job of breaking this down. Almost all emissions are calculated in terms of countries. So most statistics required by the Paris Agreement use territorial or production based accounting, which means counting emissions at the point of production.

0:08:57.5 Noel Healy: On the other hand, calculating emissions per capita or per person highlights a country’s consumption levels. Alternatively, cumulative or historical emissions measure how much a country has emitted over time. So from this perspective, the US and the EU owe a huge climate debt to the world. And many scholars argued that because of the importance of global trade and the way rich countries have outsourced their production to poorer countries, it makes more sense to measure emissions by what is consumed in the country.

0:09:29.3 Noel Healy: We then have the historical perspective. The inequality of the responsibility appears even starker than a annual total or even per capita emissions. So the US accounts for twice the amount of historical emissions as China, even though China emits more every year. So international climate policy conveniently overlooks the historical emissions of the global North, an evasion of responsibility that is a modern extension of imperial dominance.

0:09:56.8 Noel Healy: The Global North represents a mere 14% of the population, yet has emitted 80% of CO2 since 1850. And this historical debt contributes to what can be turned to atmospheric colonization. And now the entire world, especially the global South, is forced to pay the climate price for the colonial industrialization of a few countries. My second point, the Global North’s continued domination within climate policy. UN climate agreements offer non-committal ambitious sounding goals that are not backed by concrete measures to curb fossil fuel production. Meanwhile, the global south endures the most severe ecological and economic impacts of this inaction.

0:10:40.3 Noel Healy: International climate policies entrenched inequality by permitting the global north to continue emitting at levels that dwarfed per capita emissions of the global south. And this non-committal nature of the UN climate agreements allows the global north to set broad unenforceable targets without real accountability. This dynamic enables the global North to dictate terms and priorities, sidelining the urgent needs and voices of the global south as we’re seeing now in COP29.

0:11:07.5 Noel Healy: Take carbon offsets for example, this climate policy allows polluters of the global north to buy their way out of climate impact by funding projects that reduce CO2 elsewhere, often in the global south. However, this can lead to land grabs or environmental projects that displace local communities, disrupting economies and ecosystems without reducing overall emissions. My next point is that it’s not just about emissions within national borders, it’s also about the ecological footprints that span globally.

0:11:37.3 Noel Healy: The Global North exports carbon emissions and pollution by shifting production to the global south. This carbon outsourcing allows the global north to appear greener, maintain higher consumption levels while offshoring environmental damage. International climate policy also has inadvertently triggered a neo imperial rush as nation’s vie for crucial minerals like lithium in the global south.

0:12:01.9 Noel Healy: This green tech race not only threatens to displace local communities, but also murs the historical patterns of exploitation, all in the name of advancing climate progress. My next point, the co-opting of the UNFCCC process by major fossil fuel companies like BP, fossil fuel producer nations like the US has led to non-inclusive policymaking and outcomes that are non-binding and ineffective.

0:12:30.6 Noel Healy: This partnership of public authority and private profit undermines the autonomy of the global south. A staggering 70% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution can be traced back to a mere of 78 entities. So these corporate giants are dictating the planet’s fate. So rather than heeding the urgent calls from the global south for fossil fuel production cuts, the UNFCCC process bows to the interest of a few corporations and Petro states effectively silencing the voices of billions.

0:13:06.1 Noel Healy: For instance, the graphic on the left-hand side shows that there were over 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP29, which is currently taking place. And this is more than delegates from the top 10 most climate vulnerable nations. Only three countries brought larger delegations. Additionally, 480 carbon capture lobbyists infiltrated, COP29 more than the US, UK, and Canada and the EU combined, even though 78% of large scale carbon capture projects have failed. And of course, it’s important to note that most negotiation red lines are drawn way before the COP takes place and fossil fuel interests have got access to all these people.

0:13:50.8 Noel Healy: My next point is that at the heart of international climate policy lies broken promises. The Global North has not fulfilled their 2009 UNFCCC pledge to provide a hundred billion annually in climate finance to the global south. Meanwhile, G20 nations blatantly contradict their old commitments, climate commitments by pouring over 1.4 trillion into fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone. So when the global South is asking for the global north to pay its climate debt, the global north is already pumping close to 1.4 trillion of fossil fuel subsidies. So this shows you the contradiction of the system and how it perpetuates the cycle of neglect, where the economic interest of the powerful trump the needs of the formerly colonized.

0:14:39.2 Noel Healy: My second last point in this first half of the presentation. International climate policy, and the second half I’m gonna talk about solutions, binds nations not with chains of debt, but instead with chains of direct rule, but instead with shackles of debt. Approximately two thirds of climate finance is offered as loans. So rather than addressing historical injustices, the Global North provides loans under the pretense of climate finance, while imposing high interest rates that perpetuate debt dependency in the global south.

0:15:10.5 Noel Healy: Astonishingly in 2018, a staggering 90% of climate aid in Latin America and the Caribbean came in the forms of loans, not grants, strapping nations with debt instead of providing much needed aid. And this places formerly colonized countries in a position of financial subsidy, compelling the global south to spend fivefold on debt repayments over climate action. Meanwhile, wealth is funneled back to northern creditors, perpetuating a cycle of dependency and exploitation where the global north retains economic and political control at the expense of the global south’s sovereignty.

0:15:50.3 Noel Healy: My last point before we get on to the solutions, some pretty interesting graphics here on the left hand side. If you look at the loss and damage fund, which is established to address the irreversible impacts of climate change on the global south, the global north, historically most culpable for the climate crisis have pledged a mere 700 million. This sum is a drop in the ocean, less than 0.2 of the annual losses of the global South will incur due to global warming. A staggering shortfall anywhere or estimated between 300 billion and 1 trillion or even there’s some studies that go even further that a 30 year delay in establishing the loss and damage fund highlights the global north’s apathy, especially in the US, the leading historical emitter, which has no problem allocating 800 billion annually to its defense budget.

0:16:40.9 Noel Healy: So you can see the priorities there. What is more, the global north countries have funneled investments into fossil fuel projects at a rate 58 times higher than their contributions to the loss and damage fund from 2020 to 2022. So that was just seven big points that are condensed into why we need to transform the International Climate Policy system and how these systematic inequities are baked into the system.

0:17:12.3 Noel Healy: So what about solutions? These aren’t easy, but there are solutions out there and there are movements and peoples who are working on this, the first as a organizing framework is climate justice. So what is climate justice? And I use a definition here from Professor Avi Chomsky’s new book on Climate Justice. So climate justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income communities and communities of color around the world. The people least responsible for the problem. It seeks solutions that address the root causes of climate change. And in doing so, simultaneously address a broad range of social, racial and environmental justice.

0:17:55.8 Noel Healy: So this is an economic issue requiring a fundamental reorganizing of our society and economy, not just manipulating incentives and enhancing technologies. I like this quote here from Chico Mendez, “Climate Justice also centers people, marginalized communities and issues of labor, race, gender and class.” Mendez, who was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist famously, he said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” And you could apply that to a lot of conservationist organizations historically and even present day within the US in terms of their focus.

0:18:39.0 Noel Healy: This is a new book which has just came out edited by Farhana Sultana. I’ve just read the first chapter ’cause I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive here in Columbia. The first chapter is available online, and I plucked out this nice quote from the book when I was reading it yesterday. “Decolonizing climate is largely meaningless if it doesn’t accompany measurable shifts and law, policies and institutional frameworks are material distributions.”

0:19:08.7 Noel Healy: So I’m gonna talk about what some of these might actually look like in practice. A second book, which I would strongly recommend and arguably to me, maybe one of the most important books written on climate after Naomi Kleins. This changes everything and reconsidering reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. So this brings us to more complex questions around climate justice. So authors such as Táíwò, Jason Hickel, Julian Steinberg, and others, have outlined how European countries in the industrial offspring, US Canada, and Australia were built on the wealth of extractive colonialism.

0:19:41.2 Noel Healy: They used this to industrialize and build a fossil fuel economy. And I’m gonna read out this quote here from Olúfẹ́mi, “Figuring out who should pay for the loss and damage of climate change brings up familiar problems in distributive justice.” Should rich countries pay because they’re richer, because they’re more responsible? We can add another because they’ve inherited more liabilities from the global racial empire. What does he mean by this? So in his book, he outlines how the global social structure that resulted from transatlantic slavery and colonialism resulted in advantages accumulating to the Global North racially dominant communities. He and others outline that colonized countries, particularly the African continent, often inherited weak legislators, deeply autocratic political structures. And these initial conditions affected the trajectory of legislative power development even after formal dependences weren’t what was one.

0:20:41.8 Noel Healy: And he uses this study here in the top left. This form of accumulation could then directly affect a number of measures that Brooks Setall have found to be key detriments of climate vulnerability, including government effectiveness, political rights, voice and accountability, and civil liberties. I’m conducting more research in Columbia at the moment, and Columbia arguably has one of the world’s strongest climate focused president, certainly from a country that has vast resources of fossil fuels.

0:21:12.9 Noel Healy: Gustavo Petro has pledged no new hydrocarbon exploration licenses, a halt on fracking pilots, and has stopped the offshore fossil fuel development. And this is significant ’cause Columbia produces around 1% of the world’s coal, oil and gas. As you can imagine, he’s facing huge opposition here for various reasons. And if you think US politics is complicated, I think Columbia is arguably even more complicated. One question that has been raised in discussions in Columbia is, will the international community compensate Columbia for leaving fossil fuels in the ground? 

0:21:49.4 Noel Healy: And as you can imagine, questions like this draw a lot of eyebrows from Global North officials, but it raises real questions of distributive justice on a global scale at the COP26 which happened in Glasgow, Costa Rica and Denmark launch an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And initiatives like this are critical in addressing the COP’s historical failure to tackle fossil fuel production directly.

0:22:17.4 Noel Healy: So the next solution framework is the National Fair Shares Approach. So climate justice groups argued that a system of climate reparations could require historical emitters to compensate poor countries for damages up to today by facilitating their rise to a common globally sustainable level of consumption by underwriting low carbon development there. And this kind of global climate justice that many grassroots organizations and the US Climate Fair Share Coalition are demanding. So what exactly is the Fair Share approach? 

0:22:51.4 Noel Healy: So the US is the largest historical contributor to climate change. It has a responsibility and capacity to commit to a Fair Share target, which was introduced by these groups. Within this framework, it calls for 195% reduction, which is 70% domestic reduction and 125 through international support. So this international support can address the Global South emission. So you might think that this, certainly in the next administration, this is not gonna happen that’s for sure. And you might think that something like this would never get implemented into any policy, but in fact, it actually did in some proposals for candidates for the 2020 election and specifically Bernie Sanders Green New Deal proposal. The graph on the right is a graphic from myself and Ray Galvin’s study, which appeared in energy research and social science.

0:23:41.0 Noel Healy: So Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal arguably represented the most transformative proposal of all 2020 climate plans. And it did in fact incorporate the fair shares approach. His Green New Deal proposed to reduce domestic emissions by at least 71% by 2030 and reduce emissions among lease industrialized nations by 36% by 2030. The total equivalent of reducing our domestic emission is by 161%. And this will be accomplished by providing 200 billion for the Green Climate Fund.

0:24:13.0 Noel Healy: So this is important because rich countries never met their stated yet insufficient goal of dispersing a hundred billion per year in climate violence. However, climate justice scholars and labor groups and EJ groups from the Global South argue that solutions should go way beyond the terms of transfer to mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. And I’m gonna name a few different types of mechanisms that we could explore. This is from a study from myself and Fergus Green.

0:24:42.7 Noel Healy: As a political scientist at University… At College London, we conducted a desk review of around 30 Green New Deal policies that were proposed between 2019 and 2021, mainly from the US and Europe. And we then categorized the different planks or components of Green New Deals. So if you look at the top, you have reconfiguring power, so pro-union reforms, racial and indigenous justice. You have then financial security policies, so proposals like job guarantees, minimum living wage. Then if we go back, one, we have supportive macroeconomic institutions. So Green Investment Banks, complementary carbon centric policies.

0:25:28.4 Noel Healy: So carbon centric policies are traditional climate policies like carbon taxes, regulation of upstream fossil fuel supply, and then foreign policy, which I’m gonna talk a lot about in the next two slides because those were something that Green New Deals were missing certainly from the mainstream US Green New Deals.

0:25:46.6 Noel Healy: And then the last bucket is, sustainable social provisioning policies. There was more radical Green New Deal proposals such as a Red New Deal, which was a number of indigenous groups proposed various counter proposals to a Green New deal which centralized even more so environmental justice, anti-capitalist principles, and decolonization. The Red Deal is a great example of this. It’s an indigenous action to save our earth. Is a political program for liberation and climate justice that emerged from one of the oldest class struggles in Americas. The fight by native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. And the central components include indigenous treaty rights, land restoration, self-determination, decolonization, and liberation, these rights-based approaches.

0:26:44.5 Noel Healy: So when we did this analysis of the Green New Deal, the one gap that was really missing was foreign policy. And of course, foreign policy is the one that would really challenge all or would be part of this decolonization process. So the Green New Deal is meant to be about redistribution and justice, and it shouldn’t stop at US or European borders. A recent study pointed to a real foreign policy justice gap.

0:27:10.5 Noel Healy: So among the few Green New Deals in our sample that mentioned foreign policy, some focused on border adjustments to penalize other countries taking inadequate action to reduce emissions, while others focus on rules about trade, capital flows. For example, a Green New Deal foreign policy might seek to facilitate sharing green technologies, intellectual property with poorer countries, liberalize trade and green technologies, and restrict trade in carbon-intensive goods and services.

0:27:38.0 Noel Healy: However, while the functioning of the global economy might seem obscure and beyond the reach for those who study climate, climate justice scholars and Global South groups contend this is essential for climate justice. So Global South debt, trade agreements, tax havens are big factors contributing to emissions, and how global corporate powers slow international climate action just as they do at the international level. Global Green New Deals need to name and challenge these usually invisible rules of the global economy. Our nation state-based thinking visibilizes inequality domestically, but it naturalizes it internationally.

0:28:18.2 Noel Healy: And it’s also critical to note the global inequality is racialized. So many climate justice groups and academics frame foreign policy in terms of climate reparations. Poor people in Global South are asking for foreign policy that dismantles the unjust global economic system that keeps poor countries poor and rich countries over-consuming. And climate reparations are important for both climate justice and for climate. Third world debts, global tax havens function to keep resources flowing from South to North and from poor to rich.

0:28:49.0 Noel Healy: So we shouldn’t just conceive reparations as the distant past. And this is a point made eloquently by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. It’s reparations for current extraction, not just past extraction, but it’s also how we understand the present and the future. So the Pacto Ecosocial del Sol was a Green New Deal proposal from the Global South, and they proposed plans like cancelling sovereign debt of countries, and that would allow them to reshape their political world and build platforms for countries to achieve low carbon development.

0:29:24.6 Noel Healy: This report got so little attention, and it’s just so important because Indigenous resistance stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one quarter of annual US and Canadian emissions. And when we’re talking about climate actions, this report highlights the various Indigenous-led campaigns against fossil fuel projects like pipelines, coal mines, LNG terminals, showcasing the diverse tactics used to resist development and it led to a huge amount of emissions and fossil fuels staying in the ground.

0:29:58.0 Noel Healy: So beyond direct emissions reduction, the report also argues that Indigenous resistance has also shifted public discourse around fossil fuels and Indigenous rights, and I think that that is quite accurate. If I’m to summarize all the different planks of international climate policy that could change, first one, if we look at decolonizing climate governance, so international financial institutions will have to change, establishing new global climate institutions, global trade agreements, climate refugee programmes.

0:30:32.7 Noel Healy: The second one, I’ve talked a little bit about that paying for climate debt. So climate reparations, debt cancellations, global wealth taxes, loss and damage fund, fair shares approach, Indigenous rights. So this would be Indigenous rights and climate agreements, Red New Deals, traditional ecological knowledge, legal pathways, that field is quite exciting and developing really fast at the moment in terms of climate lawsuits, global trade agreements, IP for climate tech sharing, etcetra. Fossil fuel phase-outs, so supply side climate policies which have been largely ignored. New initiatives like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And then rethinking economies or eco-socialist, economic policies, degrowth policies, universal basic services, planetary boundaries policies, international Green New Deals.

0:31:23.8 Noel Healy: There’s also a number of different proposals on the table that climate justice groups are proposing some of the… If you’re able to zoom into the screen, you’ll see some of them there. There are also some other ones, there’s tax on dirty ship fuels, island nations are advocating a 2% tax on ships burning, polluting fuel oil, a tax on shipping and aviation which is supported by the IMF to address emissions from sectors contributing 3.5% to global emissions. I really like this one, it’s a windfall tax on fossil fuel profits that is proposed by the UN Secretary General. I think that would be politically actually attractive from the masses, maybe not from fossil fuel interests.

0:32:07.0 Noel Healy: Another one which would be really nice in this day and age with massive global inequality is wealth tax on billionaires. Politically challenging, yes, but a 2% tax to ensure a minimum contribution could be akin to a global corporate tax reform. This has been backed by Brazil who is hosting the next COP and they believe it could generate around $250 billion annually. There’s also loan deferral for climate disasters. So mechanisms like the World Bank’s debt pause, clause allows countries to delay repayments and debt for nature swaps as well. When we’re also looking at other systems, I just read this article from Jessica Green, who’s a political scientist at Toronto, and she called for the shifting focus to international trade and financial institutions. And this is actually a better focus.

0:33:00.0 Noel Healy: So the COPs have largely failed for the last 30 years. I’m not saying that we need to abolish them, but we need to change tact. If something is not working, we need to try new strategies. And a lot of her work, she argues that tax policy as climate policy. So she highlights the impact of corporate tax practices, particularly offshoring, which deprives countries of crucial revenue for climate initiatives. So a global minimum on corporate tax could redirect funds towards sustainable projects.

0:33:28.2 Noel Healy: Another proposal is reforming investment laws. So fossil and fuel companies have exploited foreign investment laws to sue governments for climate policies that impact our profits. And this creates a regulatory chill. So reforming our withdrawing from treaties with investors state dispute settlements provisions could help countries implement stronger climate policies without fear of lawsuits. There’s also trade policy adjustments such as the World Trade Organization, which restricts domestic support for Green industries and reforming trade policies to allow local Green initiatives adopt carbon border tariffs, which could create a more supportive environment for decarbonization.

0:34:09.5 Noel Healy: And then finally, and this is linked to some domestic points that I’m going to make in terms of the current election. We need to build political support through material benefits. So effective climate policies must prioritize material benefits for working class citizens such as secure jobs and clean energy. And while Biden’s IRA had a lot of good things within it, it was mainly focused on tax breaks for industries and manufacturing. And people on the street could not really see these benefits and we probably won’t see a lot of these benefits for many years to come.

0:34:46.2 Noel Healy: So these initiatives could gain wider political backing, moving climate action from austerity to more tangible economic growth and stability. And if I end with just one or two slides on the recent election, inflation was a major issue in this election with many voters feeling that the Biden administration failed to address it effectively leading them to support Trump. Voters experienced severe or moderate voters who experienced severe or moderate hardship due to inflation favored Trump by significant margins. While those unaffected by inflation leaned towards Harris.

0:35:24.2 Noel Healy: Prices included gas and housing rose more under Biden and Trump leading to declining real incomes, which influence voters perceptions of economic management. Of course, you can argue that the Trump administration is selling snake oil in terms of how they might address this, but the message that the economy was doing great fell flat with voters.

0:35:46.5 Noel Healy: This is a pretty interesting graphic, which shows how Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda around March, 2020. And he embraced austerity in March, 2020 onwards. And the Harris campaign effectively just carried on with this unappealing platform in terms of that it wasn’t economic populous platform. And so they gave up on economic popularism and pivoted towards austerity and a historic Pentagon budgets and that did not sit well with the electorate.

0:36:18.5 Noel Healy: And then this is my final slide, and I think one of the best climate think tanks in the US is the Climate and Community Institute, has some of the top green New Deal scholars and others. And I think that they’re really politically savvy in how they lay out, how we need to tackle the climate crisis and inequality at the same time. Essentially the Green New Deal argument and the majority of voters chose change and disruption over stability and the continuation of business as usual.

0:36:48.6 Noel Healy: So if we were to win power again to make people believe, again Democrats will have to be the party of change, which means the party itself will have to change. And I’m not sure everyone is really confident that is gonna happen soon, but the focus has to be on the material impacts not abstraction. So we need powerful, persuasive alternatives, visions of a different future to counteract Trump’s sledgehammer approach to the status quo. And many of the climate and economic conditions are devastating for working class communities, and they’re only set to deteriorate.

0:37:25.7 Noel Healy: So we need a political vision that links everyday concerns with the urgent issues facing our planet. And as the Community and Climate Project says, we need a political vision that connects kitchen table issues to the fate of the planet. Naomi Klein and others have said similar things that we all need to become Eco populous. That means championing policies that significantly lower costs while lowering emissions. So like heat pumps for all, robust tenant rights, rent caps, free and better public transportation, make polluters pay for the transition, tackling the cost of living, good jobs and infrastructure, strong unions, lower household costs by investing in public services, investing in social safety nets. All these planks within the Green New Deal actually have proven to be really popular across the political divide. Maybe when you term it green New Deal, there’s some bipartisan and cues within that. But even the Green New Deal itself, when you look at some of the polling over the last few years, it actually is very popular.

0:38:28.5 Noel Healy: And I think as we’re going into era, we have to rethink how we are framing and introducing climate policy within the US. We have to move away from this carbon centric approaches about carbon taxes that doesn’t sell. We have to tackle inequality, which is at its highest phase in many decades. So if we have a new vision for climate politics, and we have to start building that now as we’re coming up to Trump 2.0. Okay. All right. I think we’ll leave it at that. So I’ll stop sharing my screen. I think I’m within time, more or less.

0:39:08.1 Julian Agyeman: You are spot on, Noel.

0:39:08.3 Noel Healy: Here we go. How about that? 

0:39:10.7 Julian Agyeman: 12:45, we said, and it is 12:44. Noel, what a tour de force. I thought I knew something about this. You’ve opened my eyes to a whole range of new thoughts. One thing I just, one big omission, and the reason I’m gonna mention it is because next semester in Cities@Tufts, we’ve got Dr. Duncan McLaren who’s gonna talk about geoengineering as potential solutions. Now, you didn’t mention geoengineering, as I understand it, there’s two aspects to it. One is solar radiation management, the other one is carbon capture and removal. What’s your take on techno’s fixes, techno solutions? Noel.

0:39:52.9 Noel Healy: I guess the short answer would be false solutions. I think if a good rule of thumb is when you’re looking at climate solutions, what are the fossil fuel industry doing? What types of solutions are the fossil fuel industries promoting and funding within universities. And fossil fuel industry are funding geoengineering, again, like carbon capture and storage, carbon… These technologies haven’t worked at the scale we needed within the timeframe we needed right now.

0:40:26.1 Noel Healy: And even within Biden’s IRA, much of funding is going towards arguably false solutions like carbon capture and storage. Yes, they are within the IPCC but how do they get in there in the first place? Fossil fuel industries funds lots of monies into universities across the world to look at these techno fixes and these techno fixes won’t work within the timeframe.

0:40:50.9 Noel Healy: So I would argue that these geoengineering solutions are just another delay tactic by the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual and continue burning coal, oil and gas. On the flip side, if you talk about like supply side climate policies, bans, moratoriums, ending LNG exports, these are solutions that are real, that work, but they challenge the political… They challenge the profit margins of the fossil fuel industry. So when you’re thinking about solutions, it’s always good to see, to think about which solutions are the fossil fuel industry backing or not.

0:41:27.0 Julian Agyeman: Yeah. Exactly. And I’m excited for his talk though, because he’s gonna talk specifically on the justice implications of geoengineering which has received a scanned attention. Great. Thanks for that Noel. Could humanitarian issues such as the impacts of cobalt mining in Congo be included in climate finance packages going to the global south? What interventions have resulted in effective ways for shifting power dynamics between donor countries and receiving ones, if any? 

0:42:00.0 Noel Healy: Climate finance package? Yeah, the best of my knowledge, I’m not sure if that has been included in any formal COP talk. So unfortunately, the Green Tech rush is replicating a lot of the harms that fossil fuel extraction has created over the last, since Industrial Revolution. And I think there’s now a greater awareness that issues like mining for cobalt and the Congo is something to be addressed.

0:42:30.1 Noel Healy: So I’m unaware of any finance packages linked to that, but I think it’s a great idea. That’s certainly something that needs to happen. And for the most part, when we turn on our light switch, there’s a certain level of consumer blindness. We don’t know where our electricity comes from. So in the case of Boston and Salem, when we turned on our light switch, the Salem coal power plant used coal from Salem Home Mine in Colombia, and that’s why I did the lifecycle analysis. So there’s all these supply chain issues within fossil fuels, but also within Green Tech as we try and get more critical minerals for the energy transition.

0:43:09.6 Julian Agyeman: Right. Thanks Noel. Chris asks, given national and international policy makers have, as you said, failed to bring about the types of policy approaches we need for a climate justice perspective. In states and localities that have more progressive politics, what have you seen or what can you suggest could build a movement towards power and eventual international success? 

0:43:34.8 Noel Healy: Yeah, I guess over the next 40 years, everything’s gonna be decentralized in terms of the climate movement. And so that means that I’ve done a lot of research on the Green New Deal at the federal level, but the Green New Deal can be proposed and implemented at a local level. So we saw Michelle Wu, she had a fantastic Green New Deal and proposal that was central to her election campaign in Boston. And they’re now going through the sticky politics process of trying to get different components of a past. So I think that over the next four years, everything is going to be decentralized. We’re gonna go back to local climate policy planning, state level Green New deals, even within the UNFCCC process. So it looks like Trump is gonna pull the US out of the Paris agreement. Technically, that isn’t the worst thing in the world.

0:44:26.1 Noel Healy: Okay. Yes, it is terrible. Climate change is an existential crisis, but the UNFCCC is non-binding, so that doesn’t change the bread and butter of what the US does state by state level. And if you think about within the US states, there’s 10 states that make up most of the emissions. And if those 10 states continue with their strong climate policies, states like California, even Texas is now one of the biggest wind turbine producers within the US.

0:44:56.9 Noel Healy: There’s still a lot of hope in terms of decentralized climate action. But of course the real challenge with climate change in a global level is that we need everyone on board. We need massive federal funds and certainly in the US, we’re gonna have to pivot a little bit, but it does also open up an opportunity for the EU to take more leadership, for China to take more leadership and others. And I think that the climate movement can come out stronger in terms of after four years. The problem is the climate clock is going the opposite direction.

0:45:32.4 Julian Agyeman: Denise says, hydrogen, nuclear and geo technologies are false solutions, but are there instrumental bandaids to keep the climate crisis at bay? 

0:45:43.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, so I guess when nuclear… People are really passionate about nuclear as either pronuclear or anti-nuclear. And if we are thinking about even within the climate movement, I think there’s been a slight adjustment to people’s feelings on nuclear and that people are now weighing up the sheer level of transformation that must happen in such a short space of time. And even like slight changes to some of the, we’ll say, the 2020 Green New Deal proposal. Some had proposed to leave existing nuclear power plants in existence. And I think that seems to be a fairly reasonable plan at the moment.

0:46:21.6 Noel Healy: There is a lot of hustle and bustle around green hydrogen and other technologies at the moment. And I would add a little asterisk to those in terms of the fossil fuel industry are promoting them. Nuclear, I think is something that is… The debate has certainly changed over the last number of years. Yeah.

0:46:43.6 Julian Agyeman: Where do you stand on nuclear these days and has that changed, Noel, since you were a young radical, you’re an older radical now, but since you were a really young radical, has your position changed on nuclear power? I’m not gonna say whether I’m wavering, but…

0:46:56.3 Noel Healy: Yeah. I think it has changed a little bit in that we’ll say that Bernie signed a New Deal and to the best of my recollection, he called for the decommissioning of his existing nuclear power plants. I would probably, at this day and age of the climate crisis, be okay with nuclear plants not being decommissioned and letting them to continue. So I would say my thoughts on nuclear would’ve changed a little bit, but in terms of depending on nuclear for to solve the climate crisis, it’s not gonna happen within the timeframe needed. It’s too costly as well in terms of comparing to how cheap renewable energy is at the moment. And we have the solutions right now in terms of wind, solar, and wave energy. But the problem is the political will. The problem is we’re still subsidizing fossil fuels. So until we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, until we get political leaders who treat the climate like the emergency it is, yeah, we’re gonna be in a rough space.

0:48:06.2 Julian Agyeman: Going back to your points about Mayor Wu in Boston, I remember the night she was elected in her victory speech as soon as she mentioned, yes, Boston will become a Green New Deal city. It was the biggest cheer, and I suspect it was a lot of her younger supporters. And this is something my students and I are talking about in the coming four years, refocusing on the locality, refocusing on communities on working with progressive cities and things like that. Can you say a bit more about where you see Boston’s Green New Deal? Because politically, it seemed to have been a bit hampered when the Green New Deal SAR wasn’t given a chief role, but was given the role of director and I could never work out what was the difference and was this new Green New Deal SAR hampered by not being a chief, therefore not being able to have maybe the leverage that he could have had? 

0:49:05.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, I’m a little bit out of the loop in terms of what has happened since I’ve been down in Columbia for the last half a year or so, but just in general in terms of the Green New Deal as a new climate paradigm. So the basic principles of a Green New Deal is that we engage in deep decarbonization across all sectors. So it’s not just the traditional environmental sectors, it’s energy, it’s housing, it’s essentially all policy is climate policy. And at the same time, we’re tackling inequality. And because we are at a point in history where there’s just extreme inequality, it’s just politically wise to merge these two goals together. And that’s the kind of basic principle of what the Green New Deal is. And arguably, Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal proposal was one of the top state level or city level Green New Deal proposals within the US and hopefully over the next four years, you’ll have other cities who are mirroring this.

0:50:15.0 Noel Healy: And that movement will push people towards recognizing that we need to tackle inequality and climate at the same time. It’s no longer carbon tax. If you are getting your students and who’s gonna go out and march for carbon taxes in this day and age, like nobody, except for maybe a lot of climate wonks or climate scientists who think that carbon, in theory, carbon taxes are the most efficient method. But in this day and age, it’s not gonna cut it.

0:50:41.2 Noel Healy: We have to tackle inequality and climate at the same time talking about housing, public transportation, rent caps, and making the fossil fuel companies pay. Vermont just, I think in the start of this year, introduced a new… I can’t remember the name of the bill, but it’s polluters pay bill whereby the fossil fuel companies are on the hook for X% of damages that happens within Vermont and New York are also looking at similar proposals like this. So we have to push like economic populism works. Trump was smart to enough to realize this granted he’s selling snake oil, but the Democratic party and state level, we have to go back to old school economic populism akin to the FDR era, which jumpstart the US economy after a severe number of years.

0:51:41.1 Julian Agyeman: Right. Last question and just a 30 second, one minute answer. If there was a kind of silver bullet that could cascade other changes, catalyze them, what would it be? Of all of that raft of ideas of great solutions, what would be the one that would’ve maximum bang for the buck? 

0:52:05.7 Noel Healy: At the global level and from a justice perspective, canceling global south debt is an easy win in terms of your canceling debt. Instead of countries being forced to pay a high percentage of GDP back into repaying debt, they can instead use that for climate resilience, for expanding their low carbon economy. So debt cancellation. And it’s not charity, it’s actually, it’s repaying a climate debt, repaying economic debt for plundering, and also it’s preventing continued economic or climate damage, which is gonna impact the global north anyways.

0:52:46.7 Julian Agyeman: Noel, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your time in Medellín. Can we give Noel a great round of applause from Cities@Tufts from our last Cities@Tufts this semester? 

0:53:00.3 Noel Healy: Okay. Thanks for having me. And hopefully that was of some news.

0:53:01.1 Julian Agyeman: Absolutely. Thank you very much and happy holidays.

0:53:04.4 Noel Healy: Okay, thanks Julian. Bye everyone.

0:53:08.5 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 Bar 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 graph recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager.

0:53:45.2 Tom Llewellyn: Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candace 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.

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Throughout US history, street food vending has rarely been considered an improvement to modern society or its capitalist economy. However, beginning in 2008, a new generation of mobile vendors serving high-quality, inventive foods became popular among affluent populations.

Ginette Wessel’s new book, Mobilizing Food Vending: Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City (Routledge 2024), investigates the gourmet food truck movement in the US and provides a clearer understanding of the social and economic factors that shape vendor autonomy and industry growth.

Using a human-centered approach, the book features case studies in a variety of American cities and uses top-down and bottom-up urban theory to frame a discussion of food trucks’ rights, displacement, and resiliency. Wessel shows that food truck vendors are critical actors that support local economies and contribute to the public realm while shaping regulatory policy from the bottom up.

This lecture appeals to urban scholars studying the contemporary neoliberal city, the public realm, and communication technology and mobility, as well as to urban planners seeking to understand how vendors shape city plans and policies.

About the speaker

Ginette Wessel, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University, where she teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research.

As an urbanist, designer, and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Urban Design, as well as chapters in Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice (MIT Press 2017) and Participatory Urbanisms (UC Berkeley 2015).

She holds degrees from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina (UNC), Charlotte, and she is an experienced urban designer who has worked with communities throughout her teaching at RWU, San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, and UNC Charlotte.

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Watch the video of Mobilizing Food Vending

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Transcript for Mobilizing Food Vending

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.

0:00:40.2 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tuft’s 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 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 are delighted to host Dr. Ginette Wessel, who is associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University.

0:01:19.0 Julian Agyeman: She teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research. As an urbanist designer and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, as well as chapters in my book, Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice, and a chapter in participatory urbanisms. Her forthcoming book, which I’m sure she’s gonna tell us all about, is called Mobilizing Food Vending, Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And that’s coming out apparently next month through Routledge. It investigates food trucks rights and resiliency in the urban food scape using ethnography, policy analysis and spatial interpretation. Ginette’s research interests include current social and cultural transformations that are underway in city making with an emphasis on public space, social equity, and communication technology. Ginette’s talk today is mobilizing food vending, planning and policy for gourmet food trucks in the American city. Ginette, a fantastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:31.0 Ginette Wessel: Thank you, Julian. I’m very excited and delighted to be here, and thank you for everyone to come and listen to the talk today. My title of my talk, as Julian mentioned, is Mobilizing Food Vending, Planning and Policy for Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And I first really became interested in food trucks back in 2008 when I was doing my doctorate work and I found myself really intrigued by their growing presence around the San Francisco Bay Area. And their ability to mobilize, using social media and activate urban space was really something quite novel to me and unfamiliar. And little did I know I would spend about 16 years following the industry, but here we are and I have a new book to share with you, that talks about that. So let me get my slide moving here.

0:03:27.1 Ginette Wessel: So in my book, I use a spatial lens to question how food trucks navigate social structures of power in cities and contribute to the evolution of urban space. I look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Charlotte, and I examine how agency among usually disproportionately powerful actors unfold spatially in the act of claiming rights to urban space. I also examine how social life is generated in urban spaces with the help of communication technology and mobility. And further, I incorporate a firsthand study of space to understand how food truck locations play a role in the public realm of the capitalist city. I confront as well problems facing food trucks, due to rising property values and shifts in the real estate market. So in this book, I question if food truck’s spontaneous ability to overcome time and space is an indicator of a wider bottom-up transformation of how urban space and social life are generated. How will cities adapt and react to food trucks and how should they plan and accommodate them? Who is the gourmet food truck phenomenon, including who’s it excluding? And what about food trucks helps to diversify the city and support a more equitable city?

0:04:49.9 Ginette Wessel: So in this book, I argue that mobile food vending offers a window into a wider urban transformation, in which urban space has become part of a social and economic system reliant on mobility and technology for success. And that’s a new urban process that has become really fundamental to society’s social landscape and neoliberal economy. So the talk today is gonna follow this sequence. I first wanna talk a little bit about the origins, then I wanna shift into some theory that supports the framework for my work. I wanna look at a series of vignettes, about displacement, bottom-up policymaking, pandemic resiliency, and then we’ll look at some of the benefits and drawbacks and then a planner’s toolkit.

0:05:39.2 Ginette Wessel: So Roy Choi, Korean-American, professionally trained chef had just left his job at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and had a sleepless night. He began experimenting with Mexican and Korean flavors and created a short rib taco made with warm corn tortillas, the Korean barbecue beef or bulgogi, salsa Roja, cilantro, onion, lime, relish, slaw, and chili soy vinaigrette. Without enough money to open a storefront, Choi decided to sell his $2 tacos out of a food truck. His friend Mark Manguera quickly brokered a deal with a local commissary owner for a used catering truck. And he called his sister Alice Shin, who was a writer in New York City to manage the customer relations. Manguera, his wife Caroline, her brother Eric and Choi, bought $250 worth of food and trained for one week and began serving Korean barbecue tacos on Sunset Boulevard. Together the team of friends and family established the Kogi barbecue food truck, which made stops in South Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Koreatown and their initial vending locations had really predictable foot traffic, but were surprisingly unsuccessful.

0:06:55.3 Ginette Wessel: And then in December of that year, the team tweeted and parked outside a co-op housing unit at UCLA during final exams week, and 1000 students lined up for tacos. Choi’s recalls that was the turning point for their business. And the truck grew steadily with crowds up to 500 people within the first three months grossing nearly $2 million in that first year. And the food trucks customer base grew rapidly, both through word of mouth, but also Twitter really launching Choi into a leader of culinary experimentation. The team soon added Roja, Verde and Aranka, which served different areas of Los Angeles County, and Rosita was used for special events. And following the success of Kogi food truck imitators emerged almost immediately, each one trying to recapture Choi’s mix of fusion street food and street smarts. In 2008, a variety of unique converging factors led to the perfect moment to start a food truck business.

0:08:00.4 Ginette Wessel: For one, the economic downturn in 2008 and the subsequent decrease in consumer spending, diminished sit-down restaurant sales and made the purchase or the maintenance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant impossible for many. Chefs found food trucks to be more financially feasible option for supporting existing restaurants or starting a new business. And food truck ownership and leases grew among the under and unemployed populations across US cities. While clever food entrepreneurs sustained their livelihoods with food trucks, they also introduced a new competitive dining model to the American public. At the same time in 2008, the social media website, Twitter, which is now called X, was just 2-years-old, and it was growing in popularity among young adults. And by alerting customers to the day’s plans with a simple tweet, chefs could visit different locations with the assurance that their customers could find them. This new mode of finding food was also a fun engaging activity for food truck fans who really enjoyed seeking out new foods at impromptu locations.

0:09:12.1 Ginette Wessel: And so also another critical factor in 2008 is also thinking about food trucks and mobility, which was certainly helpful for the industry’s success. The mobility that a food truck has, really affords vendors the flexibility to change locations if business is slow or if demand is picking up in a specific location. Mobility is characteristically an American phenomenon, one that has been deeply embedded in the country’s economy and American everyday life for over a century. And more recently, mobility has been leveraged to create new economic sectors, such as on demand shopping and food delivery businesses that really cater to where people live and work. Food trucks mobility challenges also established planning ideologies, which generally address economic growth and consumer dining through very fixed and predictable business locations.

0:10:15.4 Ginette Wessel: So this calculable process of development usually allows governments to easily regulate and monitor business activity within the formal market system. In order for food trucks to align with those existing regulatory processes, governments actually require food truck owners to submit a very detailed vending schedule or operate a GPS device for surveillance. Fundamentally, mobility afforded by the food trucks temporarily activates urban space with social life, providing more opportunities for the public to socialize or take a break from work. Aside from organized special events, food trucks frequently appear in underused marginal spaces of cities of which many are privately owned. As opposed to the celebrated downtown centers, these spaces are typically a distance from restaurants or have fewer regulations. And these unfamiliar spaces also reveal the unbalanced priorities of cities, which typically focus on economically productive space, new development, or automobile circulation. Food trucks informally provide opportunities to strengthen the public realm by converting the once auto dominated spaces into more active pedestrian hubs. And food trucks also blur clear social and political boundaries of urban space, by carving out spaces for the public on private land.

0:11:49.4 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks are also attractive to customers because each visit includes a culturally charged experience. The marriage of Korean and Mexican flavors created a specific consumer connection for the Kogi food truck. Whereas over the 20th century when we were talking about cooking French or Mexican or Chinese or Italian food, that really meant providing Americans with a very well-known and easily recognizable dish reminiscent of a particular culture.

0:12:19.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi’s Korean barbecue tacos are inventive, they’re original, and they’re cooked with ingredients that showcase Choi’s ethnic background in culinary expertise. Chefs also bring with them global influences to urban spaces through vibrant food truck branding as well as the music, all of which play and have a powerful effect on how we recognize other cultures, whether they’re real or constructed identities. And many food trucks chefs have trained in culinary kitchens across the globe, experienced transnational mobility throughout their lives, and created popular dishes that incorporate those indigenous ingredients sometimes combining them to create new fusion foods. And as food truck customers seek out or outdoor food experiences, they’re also immersing themselves in the flavors and the ambiance of distant cultures.

0:13:15.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi food trucks are unique, in that they intentionally seek out diverse social classes in both affluent business centers and low income communities in LA. Their menu is priced affordably at $3 a taco, making the food attainable for many Angelenos. And these lower price points help attract loyal customers whose regular presence allows that truck to keep the prices low. However, very few food trucks can maintain lower prices, given the complexity of the menu or the operational costs in their region. It’s not uncommon for food trucks to exclude low income groups with prices ranging from 15 to $30 a person. The great recession of 2008, the convenience and rising popularity of social media, and the renewed desire to engage in the public realm of cities led to the birth of the US gourmet food truck movement. Over time, the food truck industry has steadily grown with the exception of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and expanded to mid-size cities and small towns.

0:14:20.0 Ginette Wessel: And as of 2023, there are more than 47,000 food truck businesses nationwide, and that industry is now worth approximately about $2.2 billion. Mobile food trucks are an important topic to study because their presence can be an indication of a changing urban landscape that reconfigures the social, the cultural, the economic, and the physical contours of cities. Moreover, as communication technology is part of our everyday life, and proximity is less of a factor in customers’ decision making shifts in how urban space is consumed and produced really should be carefully considered.

0:15:03.6 Ginette Wessel: So, let’s keep moving here. All right. So historically government officials have resisted street food vending on the grounds that it supports unsanitary food practices, it congests streets, it weakens business for brick-and-mortar establishments, contributes to crime, and is part of a low income sector. Unfavorable views of vendors have reinforced the mid 20th century modernist planning and design ideals that were about creating clear order, automobile-centered city streets and doing away with activities perceived as inefficient or unproductive.

0:15:44.9 Ginette Wessel: In the 1970s, concerns over the oversaturation of vendors in New York City prompted a 3000 vendor permit cap, which in turn tripled the cost of the permits and produced a black market. The treatment of vendors historically is rooted in a belief that their presence is an informal practice with little contribution to the formal economy. In 2009, municipalities were taken by surprise, really with the rapid growth of food trucks, which forced them to revisit the outdated and often irrelevant vending regulations.

0:16:21.6 Ginette Wessel: The lack of effective regulations allowed food trucks a bit more freedom in finding locations, enabling a faster expansion of the industry. But however, food trucks soon learned that regardless of whether they’re conducting business in a public right of way or on private land, they’re gonna draw a debate from a variety of social groups that are economically or socially motivated. And food trucks relationships with cities and municipal government, and other food sectors has fluctuated over time in terms of its acceptance or resistance, but I would say overall increasingly favorable as the customer demand continues to this day.

0:17:04.7 Ginette Wessel: So let’s talk a little bit of theory. I’m gonna look at Philosopher Michel de Certeau’s concept of strategic and tactical spatial practices, which are particularly relevant to understanding the spectrum of power or lack thereof in the mobile food vending industry. Regarding the tactical spatial practices, Certeau states, “Tactics are a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents, and also to the play it introduces in the foundations of power.” He emphasizes that participants in the city who live in transverse adapt, alter in appropriate space, make it their own. And food trucks perform tactical spatial practices, finding opportunities within the urban landscape and adapting to new changes. Similarly, Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the oeuvre perfectly frames food, trucks, social production of urban space. And oeuvre is an urban milieu in that is participatory in nature within which urban citizens have a right to appropriate and modify their environment.

0:18:21.7 Ginette Wessel: And oeuvre is a realm of everyday life, an opportunity for play and social exchange in the city, rather than a space with the functional purpose of making profit. To the benefit of residents, food trucks offer opportunities to remake the city as an accessible and livable social space. They are nimble, flexible, and self-organizing. And however, they’re often subject to regulatory controls or strategic spatial practices which observe, measure, and control vendors determining their inclusion or exclusions from government’s total vision of urban space.

0:19:03.7 Ginette Wessel: So I would like to review a few of them. Notably proximity bans, which are advocated by restaurant owners, proximity bans are among the most common examples of strategic spatial practices limiting their opportunity. Supporters of the bands argue the presence of vendors creates direct competition, and therefore vendors should be distanced from restaurants to protect their profits. The protectionist views often align with the interest of local politicians and council members, who leverage their decision making power to promote or to protect or improve economic development in the area, which is often defined by property taxpayers.

0:19:47.0 Ginette Wessel: Some municipalities, such as Chicago, Boston, and even Cranston, Rhode Island, have begun monitoring food locations by requiring them to place GPS locator in their vehicles. Restrictions that contain vendors to districts or ban them from public property or limit the amount of time they can stop and wait in one location also serve as examples of powerful interests really seeking to gain from regulating food trucks. The complexity, the type, and the degree of regulation enforcement in the US depends on the local municipality and its residents.

0:20:30.3 Ginette Wessel: Strategies that are used to regulate food vendors can be categorized, as I’ve done here, as acts of spatial exclusions, things like proximity bans or bans on public and private property, acts of regulating and monitoring behavior, such as putting GPS devices in the trucks, or spatial distancing between vendors, or regulating alcohol consumption and recycling, or acts of enforcing public health standards, such as requiring a commissary or letter grades for the trucks. So, however, food trucks become more powerful and gain more rights when they work collectively as an association or they seek out representation from a supporting advocacy organization, and these groups argue for more equitable regulatory frameworks and fight for vendors’ rights and share best practices. The Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association is the most legally active group in the US, having sued 13 municipalities for not abiding by the California Vehicle Code, which states that vending regulations for the public right-of-way must address a specific public safety issue.

0:21:48.7 Ginette Wessel: So, for example, in Monterova, California, the city’s ban on food trucks in the Old Town District for reasons of business competition was quickly reversed by a lawsuit. In 2013, as these food truck associations began to grow across the nation, the President Matt Geller, co-founded the National Food Truck Association, along with six other association leaders to support existing food truck associations and build new ones. And the organization represents now about 18 regional associations across the US, and I’d also mention, likewise, the Institute for Justice in Washington DC, which was founded in 1991, and that’s a non-profit public interest law firm. They litigate for food truck vendors, and they’ve organized and filed over a dozen food truck cases across the country, winning most of them and publishing many research reports on how to promote food trucks as small businesses in growing.

0:22:55.4 Ginette Wessel: So, tensions between how we think of tactical and strategic spatial practices are inevitable when public space is at stake and when new food industries emerge in landscapes with established restaurants. The strength of the food truck industry in each city is really determined by that interplay between the bottom-up efforts of food truck vendors, the associations and the advocacy firms, and the top-down regulations that are typically installed by local, county, and state government. So, now I’d like to share a series of vignettes that I think best capture the central debates at play surrounding the gourmet food truck industry.

0:23:37.1 Ginette Wessel: In 2010, the rise of gourmet food trucks on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile led to a dispute with local restaurant owners at the Museum Square and LA County Art Museum, who argued vendors were encroaching on their business at a time when sales were in decline following the 2008 recession. One restaurant owner stated, the economy’s been so bad I had to cut employees and these trucks show up and I have to cut more. We all average $16,000 in rent and I have to pay employee taxes and alcohol licenses.

0:24:11.4 Ginette Wessel: Supporting the restaurants, District 4 Councilman Tom LaBonge claimed the trucks monopolized parking spaces and he said these trucks parked for multiple hours in a commercially zoned area, contrary to the intent of those metered spaces. Parking meters were designed to encourage turnover of vehicles in high-demand areas. Soon, junk cars began appearing to occupy the available spaces for trucks and LaBonge proposed two alternatives to City Council, either restrict trucks from commercial zones or create designated zones for them.

0:24:50.4 Ginette Wessel: The food truck vendors saw LaBonge’s proposal as short-sighted and in violation of the same code that upheld the earlier People versus Garcia-Lonchera court case, which found that local regulations can only be enacted for matters of public safety. Accordingly, LaBonge expanded his argument and claimed that the trucks blocked visibility of drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. A local food truck advocate turned to Twitter, spread the news about the debate on a Friday in 2010, asking the community to contact LaBonge with concerns. A Facebook page titled Los Angelinos Against LaBonge described him as a friend of the celebrity and a foe of a small businessman. And by the next Monday, LaBonge’s phone and inbox were flooded and the backlash postponed the measure for two years, allowing the trucks to continue business if they located an empty parking space.

0:25:44.3 Ginette Wessel: In December 2012, Los Angeles City Council approved two restrictions for the area. Food trucks larger than 22 feet long and 7 feet high were prohibited from parking with oversized vehicle restrictions along 15 blocks of Wilshire Boulevard. And second, oversized vehicle parking was prohibited from bisecting streets entirely. These restrictions, still in place as of today, reduced the number of potential parking spaces by half, from 40 to 20. And food truck advocates claim that the lack of visibility has not been proven and argue that the new regulations were a way of balancing competing interests and not having to take sides. The vendors feel the real losers are the customers who have more limited lunchtime options. So the restaurants argue that by selling food in the vicinity of their locations, food trucks are unfairly luring customers away from their establishments.

0:26:52.7 Ginette Wessel: However, the several court cases really have no evidence to support that. And much of the case law has been established by longer running Loncheras. 1978, another case where there was the banning of sale of viticules on public streets with within 100 feet of a brick and mortar establishment. And after Loncheras fought this ordinance, it was ruled that the regulation discriminated economically against catering truck operations. So that’s important to realize that the Loncheras had such an incredible role in laying a foundation. Some restaurant owners have been more inclined to embrace, actually, the food truck activity and found ways to reinvent or boost their business.

0:27:37.1 Ginette Wessel: So for instance, the owners of the Lennon ru restaurant in the HBO Hulu campus in Santa Monica realized that they could not stop food trucks from parking near the campus and instead lowered their prices and changed their menu with a different offering each day. Their new business model responded to the consumer demand and have more to go options. So from the perspective of mobile food vendors, restaurants constitute an entirely different market that offers dining space and restrooms in a climate controlled environment.

0:28:11.9 Ginette Wessel: The person who’s going to the food truck isn’t going to it over a restaurant, they’re making an active choice to go. Even so, many vendors are aware of restaurant complaints and make an effort to really avoid areas with the established restaurant scene. And in the end, consumers are driving the market and today they want more options and more access to foods that are inexpensive, inventive, and healthy.

0:28:36.9 Ginette Wessel: So my second vignette illustrates the vulnerability of food trucks at bottom-up food truck rallies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Two years after Kogi had been serving the streets of West Hollywood and they were really popular in major cities across the US, they just started emerging in Charlotte at office parks and breweries on the outskirts of the city. When Kelly Kierson arrived in Charlotte in 2010, she was eager for her own business and found that the startup cost of a truck were too high and the city’s regulations were not friendly.

0:29:13.6 Ginette Wessel: In May of 2011, Kierson started her roaming for food business in a refurbished equipment trailer and began contacting property owners at major office parks in Ballantyne and South Park. Two months into her search, she began building a relationship with Gaines Brown, a local property owner with a passion for growing the arts culture in the South End. Brown owned a vacant lot sparsely covered in grass at the intersection of Camden Road and Park Avenue. He purchased the lot in the 1980s as part of a larger initiative to create Live Work Hub art studios in this dilapidated area. In the 2000s, the lot hosted a popular weekend tailgate and Brown agreed to let Kierson operate on his lot on Wednesdays for lunch and on the first Friday art gallery crawl.

0:30:08.7 Ginette Wessel: In February 2012, Gaines Brown, Brian Seely, owner of the rising food truck Urban Legend, and Ted Boyd of the Charlotte City Center City Partners began collaborating to host food truck rallies on Brown’s lot every Friday night. City Center Partners helped them build a relationship with the city officials since the event violated current ordinances. Next door, a local grocery provided restrooms and sold beverages that could be brought to the rally. The trucks were scheduled and managed by the Tronner family, who operated the Sticks and Cones ice cream truck, and the rally started with just three trucks and rapidly grew from there, reaching 14 by 2015. These family and dog-friendly rallies also supported the neighboring Fat Burrito restaurant, whose manager reported that the weekly gathering had doubled their sales. After three years of popularity, in October 2015, Brown announced on Facebook that the last food truck rally at the lot would be that November. The lot, along with parcels of land on the 2.3 acre block, was being sold to make way for the Dimensional Fund Advisors investment firm headquarters.

0:31:27.2 Ginette Wessel: Brown saw this nine-story, 292 square-foot commercial office space development as crucial to supporting the amount of housing in the city and he was nearing retirement and wanted to pursue other things. And while the closing of the Food Truck Friday rallies at the lot was upsetting for many, it was not unexpected given the area’s rising property values and the walkable access to light rail and the strong housing growth in the surrounding area. Luckily, Brown, whose impact on the arts community was lasting, took steps to accommodate the rally at a local brewery.

0:32:04.2 Ginette Wessel: Sycamore Brewing, one of Charlotte’s rising brewery establishments, had a 1.6-acre property with an unused gravel area that could accommodate 12 trucks just a few blocks south of the original site. At the brewery, the trucks were successful but eventually seen as an amenity, not a focal point, for customers who primarily visited the location for the quality craft beer. Eventually, in 2021, as the South End neighborhood continued to appeal to real estate investors, the owners of Sycamore Brewing sold their property for $9 million to developer Hortman Holdings.

0:32:41.1 Ginette Wessel: The two-phase, 16-story development called The Line includes 285,000 residential square feet, 28,000 retail square feet, and the retail component of the development is anchored by a new 7,000-square-foot Sycamore Brewery and Taproom. And while the brewery moved into the new development, no plans were made to relocate the food trucks. And as South End became more vulnerable to development pressure in the neighborhood, food truck rallies were phased out. The food truck rallies had played a vital role in introducing the area to outsiders and to facilitating the community’s revitalization for 10 years and were a true public space, fostered from the bottom up by the public and local food entrepreneurs.

0:33:26.0 Ginette Wessel: So for my third vignette, I wanna step back a little bit to 2008 to explain the challenges that hindered the growth of them in Charlotte. In 2008, just before gourmet food trucks had arrived on the scene, the city revamped its food vending ordinances by enacting strict controls after residents complained about crime and noise from them along South Boulevard.

0:33:50.1 Ginette Wessel: And among the many regulations implemented, the most impactful limited them to vending only 90 days a year, limited the hours of their operation, required 400 feet of separations from residential communities or another vendor, and prohibited them entirely on the streets within the Central Business District. At the time, Loncheras, the Latino vendors that were the dominant population, saw the new regulations as a direct attack on their 50 vendor community. In an attempt to change what felt like a discriminatory act, the Loncheras launched the Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign and petitioned for the ordinance to be amended. Residents and city council members, on the other hand, argued the regulations were not about ethnicity and were meant to eliminate noise, garbage, and loitering. Unfortunately, the Loncheras’ advocacy efforts were too late to prevent the passage of the regulations, which had a detrimental impact on their businesses, decreasing from 50 to 7 by 2019.

0:34:52.3 Ginette Wessel: In 2014, Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Planning Department proposed the first major set of revisions since 2008. This was in response to the gourmet food truck scene, which had found the mobile food vending regulations way overly constraining. And these amendments established more zones which food trucks could operate in and were overall viewed as a step in the right direction. But vendors still felt they didn’t go far enough and were concerned that they were limited to operating one day a week, they had to remain 100 feet away from restaurants or residential districts, and they could not provide tables and chairs outside of their truck. So in response to this, vendors formed the Charlotte Food Truck Association in 2014, launched charlottefoodtrucks.org, and collected 3,000 signatures in three days. These advocacy efforts materialized in the Charlotte Mobile Food Truck Citizen Advisory Group, which were meetings held by the Planning Department.

0:35:54.5 Ginette Wessel: In March 2017, after three years of meetings, a set of amendments were approved by Charlotte City Council. Of them, some of the significant ones were allowing vendors to operate in residential districts at schools and churches, but still maintaining 100 feet from a property line, residential property line, down from that previous 400 feet, allowing them to operate near a restaurant if they had permission from the owner, written permission, otherwise they needed to stay 50 feet away. Vendors were no longer constrained to certain hours of operation, and although the regulations still required expensive special event permits, this was largely seen as a collaboration between city officials and vendors and resulted in much less severe restrictions. And vendors felt the new regulations were really an improvement and were pleased that their voices were heard.

0:36:52.1 Ginette Wessel: So though Loncheras were unable to change policy in 2008, and food truck vendors were able to achieve this middle-of-the-road agreement in the subsequent decade, it highlights the kind of ensuing challenges ethnic vendors face in the US. And for my final vignette, which I’m gonna kind of shorten ’cause I see time’s getting a little tight here, I do wanna mention that Charlotte’s residential communities were really unanticipated lifelines for sustaining profitable food truck businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, something that many vendors hadn’t predicted. Charlotte’s residents, like residents of many cities and towns in the US, were ordered to stay at home. And at that moment, food trucks across the city really started to appear in housing complexes.

0:37:47.2 Ginette Wessel: And in addition to the thrill and the novelty of ordering a meal from a truck, vendors were providing an enjoyable break from the monotony of daily life and the opportunity to connect with other people, things that were really taken for granted before the pandemic. One food truck expert had noted that neighborhood associations and apartment management companies quickly started scheduling food truck visits as a perk for their residents, and real estate businesses benefited from happy residents and residents enjoyed food options close to home. So this was a big shift for vendors who were very familiar with very predictable commercial and office areas. Now shifting into this new set of residential communities.

0:38:34.4 Ginette Wessel: And this eventually, now with the new unified development ordinance in Charlotte, is now a long-term opportunity for vendors to be vending in these large multi-unit residential complexes. There’s even data to show that the county had noted in 2021 about 250 food trucks and 70 of those had opened within the year of the pandemic. So very resilient despite that.

0:39:03.3 Ginette Wessel: I do want to pause here for another little snippet on thinking about rights. So the right to the city, as Henry Losev reminds us, always requires mobilization and struggle. Food trucks’ rights are never fixed. In this past January, I spoke with a reporter about a food truck dispute in which two Haitian Food Truck owners filed a lawsuit against their Virginia town of Park Slee after a vulgar city council member cut the truck’s water line because the owners did not have an active conditional use permit and were allegedly disposing of grease in the city’s sewer system. The lawsuit states that if the owners had not been of Haitian descent, the town government would not have engaged in abusive contact, effectively putting them out of business.

0:39:50.9 Ginette Wessel: I wanna mention that food truck vendors claiming rights to urban space is a very high risk activity that can collapse their business entirely and add to the many, many challenges of being successful. And so for this reason, actually, catering companies and brick and mortar locations become preferred by chefs and food truck owners after just a few years of operating. And while it’s unclear what the outcome will be for the Haitian food truck owners, this case is certainly a reminder that food trucks’ rights to urban space are deeply entwined with issues of cultural prejudice and protectionism of property.

0:40:29.4 Ginette Wessel: Food truck locations are also vulnerable due to the rising property values, as I’ve mentioned, and that was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. And as vacant land in the growing capitalist city becomes sparser and more valuable, food trucks are at risk of displacement. Additionally, and paradoxically, while food trucks are displaced, they are also part of the gentrifying process in a neighborhood. They can participate in changing a neighborhood economically by fostering food business competition or catering to populations with middle or upper incomes. And food trucks could also be promoted as amenities for new housing developments, even as they simultaneously displace homeless who occupy marginal and unseen spaces of the city. Therefore, food trucks can be gentrifiers, but not unilaterally. They are part of a wider set of relationships that force neighborhood change, and they sometimes experience the brunt of that change themselves.

0:41:32.5 Ginette Wessel: So I know we’re getting tight. So I’m gonna skip a few parts here as we get down to thinking about… I’m gonna jump down to the toolkit as I start to think about how we might approach planning for them in the future. So let me get to my slide on that one. Okay.

0:41:57.5 Ginette Wessel: So I’d like to conclude with a planner’s toolkit. Food trucks, they can support planners’ strategies to diversify and grow small businesses. And they can introduce food options to areas with very few food businesses, and they can diversify food options for customers and others. In areas with an older restaurant scene, food trucks can elevate food quality, they can provide friendly competition at lower price points. And in general, food trucks strengthen the local economy rather than weaken existing revenue streams. Food trucks can also serve as a catalyst for diversifying that economic landscape by increasing the growth of other small businesses in mobile enterprises like beauty salons, pet shops, and health services. And planning for the growth of small businesses and recognizing them as critical economic contributors within cities helps grow entrepreneurship among that middle and low income population.

0:43:00.8 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks should be considered as part of short-term and long-term urban planning strategies to activate urban space with pedestrians. They can attract patrons by social media or by proximity. They are versatile in their environment and should be considered when we think about how to distribute them with high and low income neighborhoods.

0:43:22.0 Ginette Wessel: Food truck markets create large social gatherings and more economic revenue and facilitate streamlining permits and simplifying seating and trash and other amenities. So food truck businesses also can do well independently, but both models of having independent or collective vending can be used in combination with urban activation plans. And whenever possible, they should also be supported with mobile and permanent seating shade and weather protection.

0:43:56.4 Ginette Wessel: Zoning ordinances that deregulate rather than creates constraints leave room for interpretation and flexibility when it comes to the particularities of locations. Each site’s unique and so therefore thinking about each challenge should also be unique. And so the ability to kind of think about ordinances that incorporate access to easy transportation, thinking about how public safety and fire prevention codes apply to land use zoning is also an important element that needs to be simplified. Managing these issues on a case-by-case basis appears to be the best policy that will mitigate issues and conflict. But there’s many, many other things that they can do by simplifying their permit application. They can build better communication between enforcement and the decision makers that reduces unneeded ticketing and unneeded fines. They should also think about delegating the parking enforcement to be kind of the guardians of the industry opposed to police force who are too busy to kind of manage them.

0:45:14.5 Ginette Wessel: I’d also add that data, in some of my past work, helps to support kind of an efficient form of urban planning. When you can start to see where the food trucks move over the city over time, you can pair that with land uses and food deserts and public infrastructure and property values. So thinking about how the data of social media posts can be incorporated as a planning tool is also very powerful.

0:45:42.0 Ginette Wessel: Almost done. So almost last slide here. In the end, as I recall my visits to food trucks since 2008, I realized that the industry is a microcosm of a larger set of dynamics that define everyday urban life in the 21st century. The public realm may forever be digitally mediated and amplified by our social connections. And at the time of writing, mobile enterprises are growing in value in American society. And as real estate prices continue to skyrocket. And as formal urban centers in the public realm grow fewer, the demand for informal public spaces becomes ever more obvious. So food trucks are pop-up reminders of the tremendous value in public social life in cities. Thank you, and I look forward to chatting if we have time.

0:46:34.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Ginette. That was fascinating. And as I mentioned in my introduction, Ginette contributes to the great chapter to my book on food trucks, which is now seven years old. Go back to some of the research that we did, and we found, for instance, you know, Portland Go figure is the gastro-polis, the great food truck center, and they only have three permit requirements, whereas Boston in 2015-16 had 17 or something requirements. So of those forms of regulating trucks, I think spatial exclusion, there was behavior. And then public health. And public health. We found in Boston, the public health restrictions were huge. I mean, is this still the case? Is… Well, which of those forms of exclusion do you think is most prominent?

0:47:41.6 Ginette Wessel: It’s a good question. You know, gosh, Portland is such the anomaly in the food cart democracy because they do not require this commissary use. And I think that commissary use is a very powerful regulation coming from the county’s public health regulatory body. And so I think that is the biggest shaper of what the food trucks can or can’t do, meaning that they would have to park their trucks overnight. And in all states except Portland require that. It’s quite amazing to see this. But you see what it looks like at the end of the day if we didn’t have that particular regulation on there.

0:48:24.3 Ginette Wessel: So I think that’s one of the most powerful shapers. But I would also say the immediate reaction to them was proximity bans, as that is now over time, I think, lessened. And we’ve gotten to really look at, again, site-specific requirements opposed to blanketing the whole city with a ban to restaurants or schools, which was a very holistic approach to thinking about it. So I think we’ve backed off from that immediate reaction. And like I said, over time, the headlines to me just keep improving in terms of their acceptance. Yes, it may mean more layers of regulations in some places, but there is generally a partnership and relationship forming between cities and food trucks to what I call in San Francisco, a top up form of urbanism really where there is a strong, strong, tight-knit relationship. And that can lead to drawbacks and benefits too, certainly thinking about vendors’ autonomy is at jeopardy there. So I think I’m always fascinated. Every place has a different story that emerges from it. And it’s really a wonderful topic to explore and study.

0:49:45.9 Julian Agyeman: So we’ve got a question from our own page, Kelly, from Shareable. She says, “Any thoughts on the growth of mobile food trucks in rust belt cities and the economic benefits they could bring?” She says, “I’m in Syracuse, New York, and it feels like we’ve had a food truck boom. Local businesses like beer gardens and even our art museum have really embraced them with permanent or regular food truck days.”

0:50:11.1 Ginette Wessel: Yeah, no, I think that is absolutely the case. It is… And again, I think this is reinforcing what I just mentioned as the kind of top-up urbanism where you find city officials and event organizers really tapping into and actually looking to I would say the industry for help in understanding it better. Some of the more famous food truck advocates have become really stars for helping cities understand what to do. And that might be the case there, that they’re starting to kind of really latch into and seeing the value and the benefit that these trucks are providing in terms of economic development. There’s wonderful spillover effects that can be heard. But it comes back to kind of Julian and your work and always thinking local, right? This is another amazing illustration of how the local sustains and is resilient and continues. The COVID didn’t kill the food trucks, you know, they found a way. And so there’s just a beautiful, local approach to thinking about how we can continue to fight for rights and agency over urban space, as long as we kind of stay true to the fight.

0:51:29.5 Julian Agyeman: Right. Okay. We have another question here from Tom, Tom Llewellyn. “Are there examples of food trucks increasing access to food in neighborhoods without grocery stores and brick and mortar restaurants.” That’s a great question, Tom. I’ve never actually thought about it. So are there food trucks that are really helping out in food desert, so-called food desert areas?

0:51:56.2 Ginette Wessel: There are. And that was one of the slides I had to quickly go through. But World Central Kitchen has actually more recently been famous because they are starting to work with food trucks during disaster relief efforts, predominantly in Florida, where there’s been a lot of destruction happening. So that is becoming, more recently, the newest kind of resilience, where they’re really helping support communities in times of need after devastating natural disasters. Roy Choi, believe it or not, started a restaurant called Local, which was meant to serve low-income communities in Watts neighborhood in LA. And so he, believe it or not, the first person has really put that message forward of trying to think about how do we serve vulnerable communities in food scarcity.

0:52:50.3 Ginette Wessel: There are also education programs with schools that will take a truck for free of lunch programs in the summer for children in neighborhoods. So there is an incredible amount of efforts and it… I’m thinking too, actually. Yeah. The wildfires in California, food trucks were able to kind of go and mobilize to help collectively get a lot of food that they could distribute quickly. I know Off the Grid was very well part of that effort there in San Francisco. So there’s so many great ways I think that they are helping in filling in the void in so many dire situations of dire need or everyday stresses of communities too.

0:53:29.6 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Ginette. So final question. You know, you’re talking here to a lot of urban planning students. If there’s one thing you can say about food trucks going into the future, that they need to be aware of as budding urban planners, what would that be?

0:53:49.0 Ginette Wessel: That’s a great question. It’s a hard one. I would say, don’t ever assume, always talk to the chefs, talk to the owner. Ethnography is an incredible tool and powerful tool for urban planning, and I think we don’t put enough attention to it. And so that would be my last piece of wisdom to leave you is, look closely and get to know your subjects that you’re looking at.

0:54:14.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Well, Ginette, thanks so much. And you’re in Providence, I’m in Boston. Next time, let’s get a coffee in the tent.

0:54:24.3 Ginette Wessel: That’s right.

0:54:29.2 Tom Llewellyn: I 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 Ronna Alexander. 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.

The post Mobilizing Food Vending with Ginette Wessel appeared first on Shareable.

On October 15, Jaxon Schor was detained by Israeli soldiers outside of Nablus in the West Bank, and then transferred to a nearby Israeli police station for interrogation. A US citizen of Jewish descent, Schor had been in the West Bank with Faz3a (pronounced “faz’a”), which facilitates foreign volunteers’ participation in Palestinian demonstrations opposing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, all of which are internationally recognized as belonging to a future Palestinian state.

Spurred by the US government’s ongoing support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, volunteers from the United States, like Schor, have been traveling to the West Bank as part of the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Such foreign volunteers participate in demonstrations, accompany Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and children traveling to and from their farms, fields, and schools, respectively, and document crimes against them, as they are often at risk of attack by Israeli soldiers and settlers hoping to drive them from the area.

The annual olive harvest is a vital aspect of Palestinian culture, identity, and economic independence, as generations of family members care for the same groves—and sometimes even the same trees. For that same reason, Israeli soldiers and settlers often attempt to keep Palestinian farmers from their groves, especially during the harvesting season, effectively depriving them of both economic and moral support.

In response to Israeli violence against Palestinian farmers, Faz3a has been working to “defy colonial rule” by facilitating the participation of international volunteers in the annual olive harvests for the last four years. As Abdul Hakim Wadi, a supervisor with Faz3a, explained to Shareable, the impact of the volunteers is both sentimental and practical.

“This has a positive impact on the psyche, to know that there are free people in the world, and they believe in [Palestinians’] right to live in peace,” Wadi said. He also notes that the presence of volunteers encourages more Palestinians to participate in harvests, demonstrations, and other activities opposing Israel’s genocide and occupation, as Israeli soldiers and settlers are less likely to attack foreigners.

When Schor was detained, he was accompanying Palestinian farmers harvesting olives. Among the Palestinians and other foreign volunteers, Schor says he was seemingly arbitrarily singled out by Israeli soldiers, who confiscated his US passport and then detained him, as there was allegedly “a personal order against me being in the area.”

Schor received no further explanation until the Israeli police arrived more than three hours later to handcuff him and announce—for the first time—that he was being arrested for trespassing in a “closed military zone.” When Schor asked to see the written order closing the area, he was flashed a piece of paper too far away to read and then thrown into a police car. At the station, the charges against Schor escalated further, with an interrogator accusing him of participating in “anti-Israel Hamas demonstrations” and “fighting Jews.” When Schor denied the accusations repeatedly, he was shown the “evidence” against him.

“He flipped a folder around that was on the table and showed me pictures of me that dated back to one of my first days outside, pretty much after I got here,” Schor told Shareable, referring to the interrogator. “They had basically an investigative folder on me.”

Although the photographs only depicted Schor participating in peaceful events like the olive harvest, the alleged evidence sufficed to have him deported and banned from Israel, as well as the occupied Palestinian territories, “indefinitely.” Such deportations are only the latest tactic being used by Israeli forces in their attempt to staunch international solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Schor’s deportation is only the latest tactic that Israeli authorities have used to try to staunch international solidarity with Palestinians. According to a press release issued by Faz3a, the deportation followed multiple detentions, arrests, and even informal expulsions, in which Israeli police drove volunteers to the Israeli-Jordanian border and ordered them to cross. Faz3a describes all of these efforts as “part of the assault on Palestinian ability to resist Israeli colonialism.”

“Their end goal was to deport us”

The West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip were all invaded by the Israeli military during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and continue to be occupied by Israel.

Palestinians have always opposed the Israeli occupation, but opposition both locally and internationally has intensified since the attack by Palestinian militants from Gaza on Israel last October, which Israel responded to by killing more than 44,000 Palestinians, including at least 16,000 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as cited by Al Jazeera. The actual toll of the genocide, obscured by the continued Israeli attacks and blockade, may top 330,000 deaths by the end of the year, according to estimates published in The Guardian.

Events in Gaza have also provided cover for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, which was announced by the Israeli government on November 11, as reported by Middle East Eye and others.

Despite the nonviolent nature of their work, foreign volunteers with Faz3a and the International Solidarity Movement, a similar group, are being targeted by Israeli soldiers, settlers, and even a newly formed police unit, according to Faz3a. For the volunteers, the consequences are often violent and sometimes even deadly.

In July, Faz3a volunteers were accompanying Palestinian farmers in Qusra when they were attacked by masked settlers armed with clubs, severely injuring several farmers and volunteers, including at least four US citizens.

In August, a Faz3a volunteer from the United States was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper while leaving a demonstration in Beita. Later that month, hundreds of masked settlers stormed Qusra, attempting to raze the village to the ground and injuring two Faz3a volunteers, including at least one US citizen.

Violence against volunteers reached its most extreme on September 6, when an Israeli sniper shot and killed Aysenur Eygi, a US volunteer with ISM, who was leaving a demonstration in Beita.

Following international condemnation of Eygi’s killing, Israel appears to have changed tactics from direct violence to deportation of foreign volunteers.

While detaining Schor on October 15, the same Israeli soldiers also detained another Faz’3a volunteer from the United States, Hinou Chung, seemingly by coincidence. Chung was also accompanying the Palestinian farmers outside of Nablus when Israeli soldiers singled out Schor, and Chung decided to stay with Schor to monitor the situation. Although Chung was at first told he was free to leave, the soldiers then decided to detain him, too. Chung had no “personal order” against him, but he was also arrested for allegedly trespassing in a “closed military zone,” accused of being a “terrorist,” and deported on the strength of the alleged evidence against him: one photo with Schor.

“They arrested me at an olive harvest before telling us that we were not allowed to be there, but their end goal was to deport us,” Chung told Shareable. “Their end goal was to find some reason to get us out of the country because they knew we were helping Palestinians.”

“That’s why we go”

While both Chung and Schor are US citizens who were detained, deported, and, in Schor’s case, barred indefinitely from returning to Israel, a close international ally of the United States, neither Chung nor Schor have yet to hear anything regarding their cases from the US government. That silence, however, is far from unexpected as the US government has yet to take action in other, even more extreme cases, such as Eygi’s murder.

In fact, at least four US citizens have been killed by Israeli forces since last October, and the involvement of the US government has started, and thus far ended, with requests for the Israeli government to investigate its own soldiers and settlers. For its part, the Israeli government has yet to hold anyone accountable in any of the cases.

But as both Chung and Schor are quick to point out, Israeli violence against Palestinians is far more extreme than against foreign volunteers such as themselves. While the casualties of the ongoing Israeli genocide are concentrated in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed more than 700 Palestinians, including 160 children, in the West Bank since last October, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as cited by Al Jazeera. In Beita alone, ISM reports at least three Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers since the start of the genocide.

“It’s terrible for anybody to experience this stuff,” said Schor, contrasting his deportation with the routine violence endured by Palestinians. “But we are still international citizens. We still have a privilege that is undeniable, and that’s why we go, to try to take advantage of that.”

Chung, too, described his deportation as trifling compared to the experiences of the Palestinians he had met in places like Qusra.

“A lot of the children that you talk to in the village, they have bullet wounds, they have knife wounds,” he said. “It’s so matter of fact that, after some time, you get used to it—even though it is very messed up, to think about these children, who are as young as 10 years old, having a bullet wound and just shrugging it off, laughing about it. … One can only imagine how much they have to live through.”

It’s in light of such harrowing experiences, rather than despite them, that Wadi believes volunteers like Chung and Schor will continue coming to the West Bank.

“The presence of solidarity is increasing,” he said, in reference to the volunteers. “The presence of more foreign supporters, and the continuous presence of local and international media, helps in documenting the crimes of the settlers and the occupation army against the Palestinians and foreign supporters, exposing them in the countries of the world.”

Additional coverage of Palestine

• Life-Saving lending library: Union supplies Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid ongoing Israeli genocide

• Covering Palestine: The impact on journalists on the frontlines and abroad with Arvind Dilawar (The Response Podcast)

• There is another way: Round table on Palestine-Israel (The Response Podcast)

• Direct action for Palestine with Mohamed Shehk (The Response Podcast)

Arvind Dilawar is an independent journalist. His articles, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast and elsewhere. Find him online at: adilawar.com

The post U.S. volunteers remain dedicated to solidarity in Palestine, despite Israeli violence and deportations appeared first on Shareable.

The episode features a compelling conversation with journalist, filmmaker, and community organizer Allen Myers, whose recent article for Shareable, Modern Day Colonialism and the Disastrous Fate of an Indigenous Water and Land Protector, offers a chilling look at the ongoing struggles in the region. Myers shares insights from his 2022 trip to Brumadinho, Brazil, where he witnessed the enduring scars left by a 2019 dam collapse and the fight for justice that followed.

In January 2019, a toxic dam operated by Vale in the State of Minas Gerais failed catastrophically, releasing 12 million cubic meters of sludge into the surrounding environment. The disaster claimed 272 lives and decimated the livelihoods of countless others. This was not an isolated incident—just four years earlier, the Mariana dam collapse, also operated by Vale, caused Brazil’s worst environmental catastrophe. Despite warnings and inspections highlighting structural vulnerabilities, Vale failed to act, prioritizing profits over safety.

For the Indigenous Kamakã Mongoió, the collapse was not just a distant tragedy but a direct assault on their way of life. Chief Merong, a prominent leader of the tribe, emerged as a steadfast protector of his community’s land and water, standing against the encroachments of Vale. He and other Kamakã Mongoió have faced threats, harassment, violence, and even death for their resistance, a chilling manifestation of what Myers calls “modern-day colonialism.”

While the subject matter of this episode of The Response is tragic, it’s also a call to action. Myers draws parallels between the disasters in Brazil and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, highlighting the universal dangers of corporate negligence and environmental exploitation. Both of these stories serve as stark reminders that disasters exacerbated by greed are not inevitable but preventable.

Editor’s note: Allen’s trip to Brazil was captured on film. The original project included producing a sequel to our award-winning documentary, “The Response: How Puerto Ricans are Restoring Power to the People,” but we have had to put it on the back burner for some time due to a lack of funding. Please contact theresponse@shareable.net if you would like to support bringing this story to the screen.

Resources:

• Survivors for Peace
• www.allen-myers.com
• Donate to The Response

Indigenous Disaster 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 Indigenous disaster response: The fight against a mining giant in Brazil with Allen Myers appeared first on Shareable.

In the heart of Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais, the lush green canopy veils both the stunning beauty of nature and the shadowy depths of exploitation. Here, an age-old conflict persists between those committed to protecting the land and water and those who profit from its destruction.

Chief Merong, a respected leader of the Kamakã Mongoió tribe, stood steadfast as a guardian of his territory against the encroachments of Vale, a multinational mining corporation notorious for its environmental destruction. Vale’s relentless pursuit of profit clashed with Chief Merong’s commitment to safeguarding the sacred springs and forests that sustained his people.

Talles, my interpreter and local fixer, and I journeyed into the verdant hills and dense foliage that surrounded Brumadinho. Along the border of fenced-off land claimed by the mining giant Vale, I encountered a stark juxtaposition: guarded and private land stripped of its life to bare red soil alongside open, teeming canopies of flourishing jungle.

We followed a narrow and winding road as instructed by our contact until it ended abruptly into a wall of vines and trees, an impassable berm. We parked, and there, peering through the green shadows, spear in hand and a small headdress, was our guide to the village. As we walked, he pointed out edible and medicinal plants and shared with excitement about the wild boar they hunt and the fish from the pools of fresh water they harvest. It was as if he was introducing us to members of his family. It was clear: this land was a part of him.

The path began to ascend. At the top of the hill, we could look west across a small ravine and see the scars left by Vale: barren land, naked red soil, and the ominous distant roar of lifeless machines with an endless appetite. From where we stood, paths continued in different directions, a patch of land open to the sky where rows of seedlings sprouted among taller coffee and corn plants. We had arrived at the Kamakã Mongoió Village, a humble bastion of resilience amidst the encroaching threat of exploitation. A simple banner reading “Territory of the Kamakã Mongoió” marked the border of the tribe’s claimed land. There waiting for us was Chief Merong.

Legacy of ecocide

Vale’s history in Brazil is marked by catastrophic failures and enduring environmental destruction. In 2015, the Vale-operated Mariana Dam collapsed, unleashing 60 million cubic meters of iron ore waste, creating a toxic mudflow that devastated communities, killed 19 people, and polluted the Doce River, affecting hundreds of thousands of residents. This disaster was not only the worst environmental catastrophe in Brazil’s history but also a stark warning of the risks associated with lax safety standards in large-scale mining operations. Just last week, a Brazilian court did not find Vale and mining giant BHP “legally” responsible for the damn collapse. Despite the ruling, over 620,000 complainants, including many Indigenous communities, continue to seek over $45 billion in damages from Vale.

Despite this avoidable tragic event, necessary reforms and safety measures remained unimplemented. Just four years later, in 2019, history repeated itself when the Brumadinho Dam, also operated by Vale, catastrophically failed. Ignoring prior warnings and expert reports of imminent risk, the dam’s collapse released 12 million cubic meters of toxic tailings, which swept through the area’s infrastructure, including a busy cafeteria and several villages, and claimed 272 lives. The surrounding community of Brumadinho was devastated by the loss of life, environmental destruction, and erosion of trust with the region’s largest employer.

As we recount the devastations wrought by Vale, it’s crucial to recognize the demand driving such destruction. The iron ore extracted from these mines, a cornerstone for the steel used in buildings and vehicles across the developed world, ties global consumers directly to the ecocide in Brazil. Each ton of steel in our cities’ skylines to the appliances in our kitchens starts with ore mined at great environmental and human cost—facilitated by a global market system that prizes low costs over ecological or social impacts.

Listen: “Indigenous disaster response: The fight against a mining giant in Brazil with Allen Myers”

In Brumadinho, the relationship between the residents and Vale is fraught with contradictions. On one hand, Vale is seen as a benefactor that has brought economic prosperity to the region. Jobs provided by Vale are often well-paying compared to local alternatives, bringing a level of economic stability previously unattainable for many families. Schools, healthcare, and infrastructure have all seen improvements directly or indirectly due to the presence of mining operations.

However, this financial dependency is a double-edged sword. The economic benefits come with a high cost. The environmental degradation caused by Vale’s activities has not only scarred the landscape but also undermined the community’s long-term sustainability. Fishing and agriculture, once staples of local subsistence, are now compromised by pollution and land use changes.

Interviews with local residents reveal a spectrum of emotions—from gratitude for the economic opportunities Vale provides to a profound sense of loss and betrayal after the dam disaster. Geraldo Oliveira Silva, a resident of Brumadinho and employee of Vale lost his brother in the 2019 dam collapse. He expressed his dilemma this way: “What are we to do? We need jobs and yet, these jobs could cost us our lives.”

While many in Brumadinho feel economically tied to Vale, they live under the shadow of a grim statistic: according to data from Global Witness, Brazil is the second deadliest country in the world for environmental and land protectors, with hundreds killed over recent years. This underscores the high stakes of any opposition to the mining giant.

The sentiment of being trapped in an “abusive relationship” with Vale is echoed throughout the community. Many express anger and frustration over the disasters, recognizing the preventable nature of these tragedies if Vale had prioritized safety and environmental concerns over profits. Yet, the fear of losing their primary source of income keeps many from voicing their concerns too loudly.

Community division on the issue strains the social fabric. Talles shared, “Many people have been paid lots of money for the disaster, they feel grateful to the company, while others have received nothing. There is inequality in the community based on how close you are with the mining companies.”

The story of Brumadinho is a microcosm of a global issue where local communities are caught in the web of corporate influence and malpractice, dependent on the very forces that threaten their way of life and environment. The tragic irony is not lost on the residents, who continue to grapple with their realities, hoping for change yet wary of the consequences.

For the Kamakã Mongoió, who are not employed by Vale, who live simply on land claimed by the company, Vale’s role in the story is much more straightforward: They are a villain, unceremoniously exploiting land and water for profit, land and water they hold to be sacred, the dam collapse in their eyes is an unsurprising continuation of disastrous behavior.

Learning from disaster: A personal connection

As I embarked on my journey to Brazil, my initial intent was to glean insights from communities grappling with the aftermath of catastrophe. I’m from Paradise, California, a community intimate with major disasters. The 2018 Camp Fire reduced the mountain town of 28,000 to rubble and ashes in a single day. The inferno claimed 85 lives and laid waste to 14,000 homes, including my parents’ home.

Like the tragedy unfolding in Brazil, our own disaster bore the fingerprints of corporate greed. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), entrusted with maintaining our vital electric infrastructure, had long ignored the warning signs of impending danger.

On November 8th, 2018, as unrelenting winds, accelerated by the effects of the man-made climate crisis, swept through our parched landscape. An outdated transmission line broke free, sending a shower of sparks into the tinder-dry brush below. These sparks fanned by unseasonably high winds whipped up a wildfire of unprecedented magnitude. By year’s end, the Camp Fire stood as the most costly disaster in the world in 2018, another grim testament to the perils of corporate negligence, climate change, and poor forest management.

Exploring Post-Disaster Recovery: A Journey to Brumadinho, Brazil

Armed with a keen sense of inquiry and a commitment to understanding the intricate dynamics of post-disaster recovery, I embarked on a journey to Brumadinho, Brazil. There, amidst the wreckage left by the dam collapse, I sought to unravel the complexities of community resilience and response to disaster in a cultural context.

I connected with survivors, dedicated search and rescue workers, community organizers, and journalists who tirelessly chronicled the aftermath. While much of the focus was understandably on immediate relief efforts and survivor support, I was compelled to delve deeper, probing into the vital work of prevention and regeneration. This led me to the Kamakã Mongoió tribe.

The Kamakã Mongoiós are a family of the Pataxó-hã-hã-hãe people, whose mother village is located on the southern coast of Bahia state, Brazil. Chief Merong, as prompted by spirits in the dream world, relocated to Menias Gerisis with a mission to heal the land from the destruction of Vale. “I was called by the Earth to be here,” he shared with me.

Indigenous wisdom

We settled into the Kamakã Mongoiós’ communal gathering space, a maloca made from logs from the forest and thatch from its fronds. Chief Merong greeted us and broke into song and dance with members of his tribe; they moved in unison, weaving a rich tapestry of harmonious sound in a circular dance. What transpired before me was far more than merely settling in for an interview, it was a revered and vital ritual for welcoming outsiders and commencing a conversation. It felt, for lack of a better word, holy.

I posed questions that weighed heavy on my mind: How can communities organize after disaster to address the underlying conditions that led to catastrophe? How can they rebuild in a manner that meets the diverse needs and aspirations of all members? And, crucially, how can future disasters be mitigated through informed decision-making and collective action?

Chief Merong, a young man of 35, wore an exquisite headdress of Macaw feathers. Adidas flip-flops protected his feet, and tattered board shorts hung from his hips. His resolute gaze matched the clarity and directness of his words. “Our connection to this land and water is not merely about survival—it’s a profound relationship with all beings,” he explained. “Being good stewards of this earth is an ancestral duty, deeply ingrained in our way of life. The examples of destruction we see are because they are hurting the Earth. This is just the Earth reacting, balancing. The company [Vale] does not care about the Earth. We are here to defend the land and water.”

The land settled by the Kamakã Mongoió was in contention: Vale believed the land was theirs to expand their iron ore extraction. The Kamakã Mongoió believed their duty was to restore and protect the land and water. Courts sided with Vale, but the Kamakã Mongoió remained on the land. The stage was set for conflict.

Chief Merong recounted chilling encounters with modern threats: unidentified men appearing without notice that issued stark ultimatums to vacate their land, drones that buzzed overhead as symbols of surveillance and intimidation. “These aren’t just intrusions; they’re direct assaults on our sovereignty and well-being,” Merong stated. The cold mechanical whirring of drones— celebrated technologies in the global north—became harbingers of fear in the otherwise tranquil village.

After some time in conversation, with children playing nearby and chickens pecking at some sweet morsel, Merong wanted to show us the sacred spring and offer another song. We walked past simple structures made of local materials. Coffee, taro, and other edible plants lined the path to a modest pool of water shaded by the thick canopy of the jungle. There, Chief Merong and other tribal members recited another song. There was reciprocity in all of his interactions with the environment; the water wasn’t merely there for his taking but something to be worshiped.

Tragedy strikes

On March 4, 2024, I received a text from Talles notifying me that the Chief was found lifeless and hung from a tree. As the days unfolded, news reports emerged that cast his death in stark terms: murder. His death sent shockwaves not only through the Indigenous community but the residents of Brumadinho, who all the more starkly felt the internal conflict of loyalty to a company that provides them with jobs and victimization by a corporate power that values profit over life.

According to data from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) published on Tuesday, March 5th (a day after Chief Merong was found dead), at least 126 human rights and environmental defenders were murdered in Latin America in 2023. That’s a murder every 3 days in Latin America alone. Chief Merong’s death fits into a larger, menacing trend. According to Global Witness, five percent of the world’s population are Indigenous peoples, yet they make up 40 percent of the murdered land and water defenders. They are the frontline communities seeking to protect that which we all depend upon and yet are at the greatest risk for reprisal.

Despite knowing his life was under constant threat, Chief Merong bravely stood his ground and ultimately sacrificed his life for the sacred lands he cherished.

Colonialism is alive and well. It operates as it has for hundreds of years by exploiting and extracting resources to the benefit of the few. It hides behind the innovation of “free markets,” presenting an incomplete story devoid of cause and effect. In the global north, we are encouraged to seek personal opportunity and indulge without limitations. We reap the benefits of environmental exploitation and are shielded from the consequences of our appetite for consumption.

As we mourn the loss of Chief Merong, we are compelled to confront the stark realities of our world—a world where Indigenous voices are silenced, where the pursuit of profit can trump even the sanctity of human life, and where the legacy of colonialism continues to build systems of exploitation in the present. In honoring Chief Merong’s memory, we must redouble our efforts to dismantle the structures of oppression that continue to plague our world.

Yet amidst our resolve, a troubling reality looms large: the pervasive influence of the very systems we seek to dismantle. Indeed, we find ourselves entangled within a web of exploitation as both victims and unwitting accomplices. It is only through collective awareness and concerted action that we can hope to break free from the grip of the “company” and forge a future rooted in justice and equity, where we are all water and land protectors.

Editor’s note: Allen’s interviews on this trip were captured on film with the help of a local fixer who also served as a translator. The original project was intended to produce a film as a follow-up to our award-winning documentary, “The Response: How Puerto Ricans are Restoring Power to the People,” but have had to put it on the back burner for some time due to a lack of funding. Please contact theresponse@shareable.net if you would like to support bringing this story to the screen.

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Describing a place as a food desert, says food sovereignty activist Sophi Wilmore, “implies that this is a natural phenomenon—that the lack of healthy, fresh, nutritious foods in certain neighborhoods is par for the course, normal, organic.” 

On the contrary, says Wilmore: The real issue is structural racism, and unjust systems that keep people impoverished, hungry, and positioned for incarceration. 

Wilmore is the co-executive director of Feed Black Futures, a community-based, Black, queer-led food sovereignty organization in California that connects Black and brown farmers with Black mamas and caregivers whose lives and families have been impacted by incarceration and the criminal legal system. 

“It’s all part of the systems of oppression and how they function,” they say. “Getting us further away from the places that have the highest food distribution intersects with food apartheid. These are the places where there is limited-to-no access to fresh foods and vegetables.” 

Food apartheid, a term coined by the farmer and advocate Karen Washington, has real impacts. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, among the more than 54 million Americans who lack access to healthy food, formerly incarcerated people and their children are at least twice as likely to suffer from food insecurity. People with felony drug convictions, for example, are permanently banned from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, though many states, including California, have opted out of this ban. 

But even joining, or re-joining, government food programs can be difficult for formerly incarcerated people, who often lack the information, resources, and support they need to restart their lives. This makes the lack of healthy food an “often overlooked consequence of incarceration” that is connected to other societal injustices, such as homelessness and unemployment. 

This type of structural racism hinders the well-being of Black women and caregivers who have been impacted by the justice system, Wilmore said, and who are owed reparations. 

“We were promised land after the abolition of slavery and never received that land,” they said. 

In response, Feed Black Futures pursues reparations through a teach them to fish strategy of food justice, food education, and farmer training to decrease dependency on industrial and capitalist food systems that put profit over people and the planet. 

Ali Anderson, FBF’s founder and co-executive director, jumpstarted Feed Black Futures with a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 and feed 20 families that benefited from the annual Black Mamas Day Bail Out at the start of the pandemic. She collaborated with the Essie Justice Group, a women-led membership organization that supports Black and Latinx women and families affected by incarceration. A month later, Anderson had surpassed the initial goal to raise about $90,000.

That initial effort motivated Anderson, an experienced community organizer who holds a masters degree in public health from Emory University, to start Feed Black Futures. 

Today, the organization, grounded in principles of abolition, liberation, and self empowerment, connects Black women and their families and caregivers with nutritious foods and fresh produce purchased from Black and brown farmers—what Anderson calls “building pathways of food and land sovereignty in California.”

Fannie Lou Hamer, a community organizer and civil-rights activist who died in 1977, once said: “Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon. But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family and nobody can push you around.” 

Feed Black Futures breathes life into Hamer’s words by training participants to start and nurture backyard, apartment, and community gardens — and to advocate for food sovereignty policies and practices that enable marginalized communities to gain access to fresh food production and equitable food distribution. 

In practice, Wilmore and Anderson’s organization has made more than 5,000 food deliveries to over 215 individuals, trained over 166 people in agricultural practices, and invested $120,000 in Black-and brown-owned farms in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Feed Black Futures considers all of the people they help as members. That includes people who have received food services and gone through garden and farmer training. Participation replaces dues or any other type of remuneration. Wilmore’s hope is FBF’s investment in members will create a larger base of people advocating for food sovereignty. She also sees a future expanded platform that includes Black and brown farmers too.

Oakland resident Joymara Coleman, who has loved ones in the prison system, has been a Feed Black Futures member for the past two years. She says that knowing where her food comes from has had a positive impact on her emotional, mental, and physical health. 

“Anybody can get a community food bank box of non-perishables full of GMOs,” she said, but Feed Black Futures “gives us something more, like being intentional about the quality of food, the energy that went into growing that food, knowing that this is a symbiotic relationship between the grower and the consumer. That for me is the ultimate self-care.” 

By partnering with groups such as the Essie Justice Group, Agroecology Commons, and others in California and across the country, Wilmore said she hopes one day Feed Black Futures will become irrelevant, as more BIPOC women and families give up unhealthy food systems, support ecologically sound Black and brown farmers, and no longer go hungry because they or people they love were once incarcerated. 

“A great way to keep people impoverished is to keep them reliant on a system they cannot control,” Wilmore said. “Their choices are limited as to where they can get their food from. So we’re talking about food sovereignty as a mechanism for liberation.”

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But there is a way to reestablish balanced ecosystems by a process called depaving: the act of removing pavement and freeing up the soil below. Depave, a Portland-based nonprofit promoting the “transformation of over-paved places,” put together a guide to help people depave in their communities.

As How to Depave: The Guide to Freeing Your Soil states, “The removal of impervious pavements will reduce stormwater pollution and increase the amount of land available for habitat restoration, urban farming, trees, native vegetation, and beauty, thus providing us with greater connections to the natural world.”

Here are Depave’s key points to depaving.

Preparation

Before you start tearing pavement up, do some research. Things to consider include how water interacts with the site, what drainage currently exists, and where the downspouts from existing buildings send water. There may be opportunities to disconnect downspouts from sewer lines and utilize the newly-depaved area for on-site infiltration.

Depave suggests contacting your local city or county for guidance on stormwater retrofit information and design. You’ll need to find out how removing pavement will affect adjacent areas. For a first-time depaving project, start with a small lot of 500 square feet or less. The guide also suggests that you discuss the project with the property owner and get written approval.

1. Determine site history and soil health

Before you depave, determine the condition of the underlying soil. Start by researching the site’s history. You can do this at your local library or assessor’s office or by viewing land deeds.

Lead is a common urban soil contaminant you may find, from lead paint, older construction, and older houses. Depave recommends testing for lead, cadmium, hydrocarbons, arsenic, and organochlorine pesticides if the post-depave plan includes growing food.

If you find these contaminants, Depave discourages removing pavement as the contamination is capped and is not causing any severe negative environmental or health impacts. “Unless there is a cleanup plan in place,” they write, “removing the pavement may do more harm than good.”

Another test to run is an infiltration test. This will help determine if the soil is suitable for certain types of stormwater management systems. This test measures how quickly water can soak in and flow through the soil and can be easily performed. The How to Depave appendices provide detailed step-by-step instructions for testing soil.

2. Develop a site plan

Once you’ve determined the site conditions, create a plan for improving the space. As Depave explains, “A well executed depaving can help revitalize a neighborhood space with features that can: manage stormwater, provide habitat diversity for urban wildlife, reduce the urban heat island effect, and/or provide garden space for community members.”

Depaved sites can also be used as stormwater management devices. Common ways to do this include:

• Vegetated bioswales, which slow runoff
• Rain gardens, which store runoff until it can be infiltrated into the ground
• Planters, including infiltration planters, contained planters, and flow-through planters, which beautify the site and slow runoff
• Trees and naturescaping with evergreen trees and native plants, which also beautify the site and slow runoff
• Learning gardens for people to experience growing food and plants in an educational setting
• Community food gardens and orchards. These can have raised beds for soils with low permeability or if there is any possible soil contamination, and individual garden plots to provide garden space for many people and build community around the garden

3. Seek approval for your plan

Before depaving, you’ll also need a detailed drawing of the site, including any proposed changes. Your city may require this, which will help determine what materials will be needed, the budget, and how the project will look when it is complete. You may also need permits from various city departments.

From the Depave guide: “Your site plan should clearly depict: where you propose to depave, a scale, a north arrow, elevation points and water flow across the site, stormwater drains, important project notes, as well as existing and proposed structures and trees. These drawings do not need to be polished documents, but do need to be drawn to scale and thoroughly detail the elements of your proposal.”

Reach out to the community when creating your plan. You may find design professionals who can help create and visualize your design for a future green space.

4. Create a plan for recycling the pavement

When it comes to depaving, you’ll need to determine what surface material you’ll be removing and what you’ll do with it once you’ve removed it. Concrete can be repurposed and reused to construct walkways, flower beds, fire pits, retaining walls, and other outdoor structures. Local pavement processing companies can recycle asphalt into a crushed rock aggregate used in construction projects.

5. Prepare the pavement

Before removing concrete, you’ll need to break it up with a jackhammer. Asphalt must be cut with a walk-behind saw to cut it into slabs, which can be removed by hand. Before you depave, have a 10-yard dumpster delivered to your site to collect materials.

Once the pavement is cut and broken up, you’ll need hand tools to remove the pieces one-by-one. Tools and supplies needed include:

• Pry bar
• Pick axe
• Sledgehammer
• Wheelbarrow
• Hand truck
• Gloves
• Closed-toe shoes and long pants
• Eye protection
• Ear protection
• Dust mask

Depaving techniques

Now comes the actual removal of the pavement. If it was cut into squares, start with a pickaxe or pry bar. You can cut and remove small triangles at the corners of a few squares to give yourself places to start.

Start at a corner and use a pry bar to get under the slab. Leverage the slab with the pry bar on one end and have someone do the same on the other. This should be enough to get the heavy slab off the ground.

Have at least two people lift the slab into a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow will be very heavy and can easily tip over, so Depave cautions against overfilling it.

Now you need to get the asphalt from the wheelbarrow to the dumpster. There are two ways to do this:

1. Ramp it: You can either use a big piece of plywood or rent a metal ramp at any local tool rental location
2. Throw it: Carefully toss smaller pieces over the edge

Make depaving a community event

Depaving is not easy work, but there are great payoffs. Make it a celebration for the whole community. Here are tips to create a fun and effective depaving event:

• Promote the event to make sure you get plenty of volunteers
• Provide food and drinks
• Make sure there is plenty of shade for rest breaks
• Prepare leaders ahead of time with the right safety procedures
• Provide volunteers with gloves, glasses, and dust masks
• Add other festivities and music
• Try hosting your event in conjunction with other neighborhood activities

Post-depaving

Once you remove the pavement, there’s typically four to six inches of gravel. There are two ways to remove the gravel:

1. With small sites, the gravel can easily be shoveled out of the newly depaved area. Gravel can be reused to create walkways through gardens, fill potholes, create drainage areas, and more
2. For larger sites, the gravel can be removed using heavy machinery. You can hire a local contractor to do this work, or rent a small backhoe or bobcat from a heavy equipment facility and do it yourself.

If kept separate from other materials, gravel can be hauled away in a dropbox and recycled at a local reuse facility.

1. Restore the soil

Soil restoration is an important part of depaving, as pavement compacts soil and prevents it from being vital. The Depave guide explains,“The biggest problem caused by heavy impervious surfaces is soil compaction. The weight of the pavement crushes macropores—the small spaces between the soil aggregate—preventing water, air, and roots from moving through the soil.”

To break up the compacted soil at small sites, use a spading fork or pickaxe. For larger sites, you’ll want farm implements such as a deep-ripper or chisel plow.

Once the soil is broken up, mix in organic matter such as compost or a three-way blended soil mix to help create a healthier soil profile and bring your site back to life.

2. Landscape

From the Depave guide: “Now for the fun part! Using your site plan and planting plan as a guide, your team can begin to bring the site to life. While depaving is a great summer activity, plants shouldn’t go into the ground until fall, when the temperature is cooler. Determine the best time of year to begin planting in your area to ensure the highest possible survival rate for the plants. Organize volunteer work parties to space out the work over several days and many hands.”

For more information on depaving, see How to Depave: the Guide to Freeing Your Soil, by Depave.

This article was originally published on April 15, 2015, and was most recently updated on August 13, 2024.

Check out these related articles:

• Let’s make dirt: 5 community composting resources you can start using today
• How to create a Resilient Space in your neighborhood
• COVID-19 pandemic brings new growth to Montreal’s urban gardens

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