http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35847-how-new-england-students-are-taking-fossil-fuel-divestment-a-step-further
[links in on-line article]
How New England Students Are Taking Fossil Fuel Divestment a Step Further
Friday, 29 April 2016 00:00
By Abby Cunniff, Waging Nonviolence | Op-Ed
In the past few weeks students across the country have been demanding
that their schools stop profiting from oil, coal and gas companies. As
student organizers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, we
believe that we can stigmatize the fossil fuel industry by mobilizing
students around issues of climate change. But making changes on campus
is not enough; we know that we need to participate in local fights
against fossil fuel companies to strengthen our largely symbolic
campaigns. The fight in our own backyard is Spectra Energy's project to
expand its "Algonquin" pipeline, which carries fracked gas from
Appalachia to Boston. Spectra is constructing about 35 new miles of
piping and expanding the existing pipeline to be more than twice its
current width within just a few hundred feet of a nuclear power plant.
The fight against Spectra may seem like a new climate fight, but it
represents only the most recent version of climate colonialism and
environmental racism. Spectra's "Algonquin" pipeline follows in the
legacy of violence against indigenous peoples in New England and
contributes to climate devastation occurring throughout the world.
Spectra's decision to use a derivation of Algonquian, a major language
grouping in New England, is initially quite confusing. However, when we
start to identify multiple instances of businesses using indigenous
words for commercial products, we can see that there is a definitive
pattern. Companies have seen that stealing tribes' names and words is
often profitable, and corporate appropriation of indigeneity plays a
large role in erasing our understanding of the indigenous people who are
alive today.
When asked about Spectra using an indigenous word for their pipeline,
Mahtowin Muhro for United American Indians of New England responded by
saying, "Do they think it is somehow honoring indigenous people to call
it that? We cannot imagine that anyone at [Spectra] knows anything about
indigenous lives or nations or values."
The "Algonquin" pipeline successfully reminds us of the caricature of
the "natural and docile Indian," and distracts from the fact that
expanding this methane gas pipeline close to a nuclear power plant could
create an explosion estimated near the size of Fukushima. It also
distracts from the fact that methane gas is 25 times as potent as carbon
dioxide in disrupting the global temperature. This disruption is what
causes drought, storms, and sea-level rise across the world and heavily
affects the Global South in a continuation of colonial violence.
To understand the patterns of global climate destruction, we looked to
Naomi Klein's discussion of Black Lives Matter and climate policy.
During the period of national unrest last year, she wisely stated, "If
we refuse to speak frankly about the intersection of race and climate
change, we can be sure that racism will continue to inform how the
governments of industrialized countries respond to this existential
crisis." We know that the United Nation's failure to create meaningful
climate policy has solidified the fact that white and wealthy people's
lives are treated as more valuable than others. People in Southeast Asia
are watching their homelands slowly go underwater, as people in other
parts of the Global South are suffering from oil spills, drought,
extreme storms and various forms of climate destruction. In the United
States, we know that wealthier and predominantly white communities are
less affected by hazards related to fossil fuel extraction and
pollution. The 2010 BP oil spill devastated communities along the Gulf
Coast, and coal mining continues to endanger the lives of people in
Appalachia.
To make sense of the immense amount of climate destruction, we began to
think of climate change in the context of global colonialism, which has
historically decided whose lives matter and whose lives do not. This
colonial mindset is especially relevant in New England where indigenous
peoples have faced scalping and murder, in addition to disease and land
theft at the hands of settler societies.
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