As the release date of my forthcoming book, Unlearn Power: Strengthening Communities in the Age of Environmental Crisis, approaches, naturally, I’ve been asked, “What’s the book about?” But given the amalgamation of ecological devastation across the planet, with fallout and stakes unevenly felt across socioeconomic lines and underscored by political forces that engage in climate denialism and assaults on democratic institutions, I urge that “Why Unlearn Power?” is the more apropos question.
While the problems associated with the above are as complex, yet as transparent, as ever, how we engage — or unlearn — our relationships with political and economic power is critical in confronting forces that foment ecocide and undermine the livelihoods of the planet’s inhabitants.
Opening in Indigenous Country — during an evening in which I met with members of the Onondaga Nation concerning the environmental impacts of an impending interstate redevelopment project — the book spans the last 15 years of my work. That dialogue with the women of the Nation, one of whom who had recently returned after engaging in activism against petrochemical pipeline siting, revealed the acute, bare, and unconscionable impacts that large-scale infrastructure projects impose on Indigenous women.
That evening reshaped, and has informed, my thinking on environmental justice ever since. The book goes on to explore the range of my work over the next decade and a half: energy and climate policy, using public science and urban forestry to support development drawn from a community’s own priorities, and collaborating with public health professionals to mitigate firearm violence while better understanding extreme weather and environmental conditions as underlying factors.
The book also engages in global environmental analysis, specifically examining disaster preparedness in coastal Nigeria and energy justice in Iran, in partnership with former graduate students. These global perspectives complement the need for environmental health claimants across the planet to synergize along economic, technical expertise, security, and moral lines.
Underlying Questions
The text’s analysis and approach are organized around a set of questions about the way power animates its own climate and energy policy interests. Some of these are technical — how can lifecycle assessment be operationalized as a fundamental tool in energy policymaking? Others are more deliberative: “Where’s labor?” is a motif throughout. As relates to the book’s energy themes, it highlights that replicating the status quo for workers of fossilized energy systems and economies during renewable energy transitions won’t ultimately lead to desired endgames for workers.
Similarly, its consideration of farmworkers explores the dangerous chemical and environmental exposures that plague agricultural work. There’s an inherent contradiction of a food system that is designed to bestow choice upon consumers, while its workers are stripped bare of all basic livelihoods, with constrictions on down to housing choice and grocery shopping — the most elementary of basic needs. Unlearning Power demands the centering of workers’ safety and autonomy while promoting cooperative activity.
“What’s under the hood?” may be the most prominent question, considering the duality of environmental poisoning that underlies innumerable communities (i.e., literally, “What’s in our soils?”) while metaphorically asking, “What forces intertwine and shape the environmental degradation and social marginalization nexus often materializing in heightened threats and vulnerabilities along racial, geographic, economic, and gendered lines?”
And as for environmental law and policy’s responsibilities and roles in the fight for environmental health and justice? As the legitimacy of federal and state courts, along with law enforcement entities, in the U.S. are undermined by brazen political interference and anti-environmental agendas, perhaps U.S. environmental law efforts should look to the explosive 1960s and 1970s for precedent, an era where a landscape of oppressive state surveillance and forthright attacks on civil liberties, activism, and human rights also produced landmark environmental and civil rights legislative wins.
Conclusion
It may be an uneasy time to write a book that so explicitly calls for ecological health, much less environmental justice. Over the last year, I’ve seen multiple collaborators and professional alliances engage in the calculated business of muting their “equity” discourse to preserve labs, research agendas, and funding.
In the face of ecocide and genocide, an orientation mute on the stakes isn’t a legitimate option. History is instructive here. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., echoing the sentiments of growing antiwar sentiments, rebuked the “Silence of Betrayal” concerning those lacking the moral clarity to speak out against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As many have derived livelihoods (along with six- and seven-figure grant sums) from equity-adjacent work, there’s an obligation to protect the places and fight alongside the peoples that have been consequential to the research portfolios of said parties.
Fiction is useful here, too. In Camus’ The Stranger, while contemplating his imminent demise as a death sentence is looming, the main character is surprised at how physically unimposing the guillotine actually is.
This dangerous moment in human history will pass, though the timetables involved aren’t wholly clear. So long as claimants for justice don’t outsize the nature and magnitude of adversaries and threats — whether they be legal, ecological, or beyond — learning from The Stranger, the pivot toward environmental healing and societal well-being will begin to bend back towards justice. And sanity.
Unlearn Power will be available on Thursday, April 30. Readers can order the book using discount code GLR AT8.
