Tech Won't Save Us - We Can’t Talk About Tech Without Talking About Resources w/ Thea Riofrancos

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Thea Riofrancos to discuss why we should care about the supply chains of technology, what that resource extraction means for people in Latin America, and how we should think about a less resource-intensive future.Thea Riofrancos is the author of “Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador” and co-author of “A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal.” She is also an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. Her argument against green extractivism was published by Logic Magazine. Follow Thea on Twitter as @triofrancos.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Also mentioned in this episode:“Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism” by Martín Arboleda“Could a Green New Deal makes us happier people?” by Kate Aronoff“Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?: Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk” by James WiltSupport the show

Everything else being equal, a transit system or an energy system that is more equitable on the user end also involves less resource use on the extractive end. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that's really interested in seeing the bigger picture with technology. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I have the great pleasure to be joined by Thea Riofrancos. Thea is the author, most recently, of Resource Radicals from Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, which was published by Duke University Press. And last year, she was also a co-author of A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal from Verso Books. Thea is a fellow at the Radcliffe

Institute and an assistant professor of political science at Providence College. She's also written for a number of publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, N Plus One, and many more. Today's episode goes on a little longer than usual, so I'll keep the intro short. We talk about some really key questions, including the supply chains of all these technologies that we rely on in our everyday lives and that are supposed to kind of save us from climate change, with a particular focus on the resources, where those resources come from, and the impacts of all that extraction in those communities. Thea's work specifically focuses on Latin America, and we talk about how Latin American governments have used resources to improve the conditions of poor and working

class people, but also how that has had negative impacts in certain communities, especially those of indigenous peoples. And Thea really cements how we need to think about the future in a way that is both sustainable and creates a good life, not just for those of us in the global north, but also in the global south. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues that you think would enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show possible, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thea, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. It's great to speak with you. Your work focuses on such an important topic that is not, I think,

addressed enough when it comes to technology and the kind of futures that we're building. So just to start, what is really the importance of resource extraction and why is that something that we need to pay more attention to? I think that one way to orient to this conversation is to think about it in terms of the Green New Deal, which is obviously a paradigm that has emerged in various ways in the United States, but also has become popular in other parts of the world in terms of thinking about how to decarbonize rapidly, while also at the same time reducing social and economic inequalities, right, and lifting up sort of the material circumstances of ordinary people. And if we take those to be our kind of twin principles with how we move forward into the future,

a focus on equality and democracy, and also a focus on mitigating the climate crisis, bringing resources into the picture shows that we kind of need to apply those two principles all across the supply chain that will produce ultimately the technologies that we need to decarbonize. So those technologies are various and some of them have yet to be invented. But for now, the technologies that we're talking about are wind turbines, our solar panels, our electric vehicles, are the lithium batteries that go in those electric vehicles, but also go into renewable grids to do energy storage work. And there's a panoply of them. So all of these green technologies, we need to deploy rapidly at scale and in equitable

ways, like within the US, let's say, but everywhere in the world, in order to address the twin crises of climate and inequality. But all of those technologies are produced using things that come out of the ground and also that are transformed by human labor and that are then subsequently shipped around the world. And at each of these sort of moments in the supply chains traveling kind of upstream, which is the kind of wonky way that supply chain analysts think about it. So when we go all the way to the sites of extraction, where materials are pulled out of the earth, and then we go to sites of refining, and then we go to those being distributed to sites of manufacturing, and we go to those being distributed to sites of warehousing, and then finally to consumption, we see that at each of

those nodes, there are the same sorts of climate and environmental injustices and inequities that the Green New Deal paradigm, along with other transformative paradigms, are trying to address. Right. So I think in order to sort of be consistent about our principles, we should think about supply chain issues. But also, and I know we'll get there later in the conversation. Another reason is to also think about the deep connections between the kind of user end of technology, right? Like what types of technologies are being used, how they become part of the built environment, how communities interact with them are actually deeply connected to the rate and quantity of extraction all the way at the upstream end, right?

And my kind of gambit, which I think is, one could say an overly optimistic read, but I'm just going to put it out there, which is that everything else being equal, a transit system or an energy system that is more equitable on the user end also involves less resource use on the extractive end. I want to make that claim. I think that it's a challenging claim. There are all sorts of tensions and trade-offs that I'm papering over a little bit, but I do believe that we can actually hold these pieces of the supply chain together, think holistically, and overall go towards a less resource and material intensive economy that's also much more equitable than our current economic arrangements are.

Yeah. It's such an essential thing to focus on as we think about where we go from here and what the future is going to look like, right? You know, it's really not focused on by the media when there's reporting on, you know, the lot of inequity and harm within it. Like, you know, one of the big examples that stands out is Apple and, you know, getting their cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And that can involve child labor and all of these inequitable practices. But then we are also being sold this kind of vision of the future right now that is very dependent on technologies in order to solve the environmental problems, right? But those solutions, the environmental impacts that they hold within them are also papered over. So this notion that we can just rely on electric cars and battery storage and electrifying our homes and all of these things in order to not use fossil fuels, I guess, ignores

all of the resources that would need to go fossil fuels, I guess, ignores all the resources that would need to go into that and the massive expansion of resources that's involved in that, right? Yeah, you know, if all we do in this sort of energy transition is swap out renewable energy sources for fossil fuel sources, which is no, in itself, easy task. I mean, that itself is ambitious. But if that were all we were to do, or in the case of electric vehicles, to make it even a little more concrete, if all we did is replace like every of the hundreds of billions of ICE vehicles on the road, like with a hundreds of millions, excuse me, not billions on the road in the US with with EVs, if that's all we did, we would leave in place,

on the one hand, like a variety of environmentally harmful modes of extraction and also climate emissions, harmful modes of extraction and distribution. We would leave those in place. And we would also leave in place the inequalities that are baked into our built environment in terms of transit access, right? So what I'm kind of trying to argue against and what other colleagues and comrades that work on these issues are arguing against is the just mere replacement of energy sources or the mere replacement of one technology for another technology without looking at a the broader and more holistic impacts of those technologies on the environment, but also be the way that again, technologies kind of bacon or sediment forms of inequality in terms of access, for example, to transit or housing or other things, right. So if instead of a world of hundreds of millions of

Teslas, for example, we had a world in which we tried to reduce the amount of cars on the road, replace as many of them as possible with mass transit, cycling, walking, and I'm even much more in favor of like micro e-mobility because it's less environmentally intensive. The batteries are just much smaller than when we're looking at a luxury sedan or something. So especially if they're shared mobility and multiple people are using that bike in a given day. So if we think holistically about the transit system, we want to produce and evaluate it based on being consistent about environmental sustainability and social equality, then I

think we get to like a different transit future, one that definitely involves technology, and I'm not, and I know you're not, like anti-technology, whatever that would mean, which I think is a strawman argument often used by eco-modernists about folks that have criticisms of certain deployments of technology or ownership regimes. But, you know, I think if we think holistically about the transit model we want and think about the fact that that transit model model like in US or in New York City or wherever we are locally has ramifications globally, then we can do our best. And I don't, you know, perfection is impossible, but we can do our best to like promote transit models that are great on the user end in terms of equity, but also are much less resource intensive. And I just take the example of like an electric bus versus a Tesla, like how many people is an electric bus moving around? How many cycles does that battery actually go through before it's exhausted versus a privately owned car, which sits in a garage the majority of

the day, which also subjects our landscapes to this whole car dominance thing, which is dangerous and fatal actually produces like lots of death and injury every year. Yeah, I completely agree. It's not even that harm that comes on the resource end or the supply chain. And it's also the harm that is just in our communities where the car itself is used, right? And which also gets completely ignored. But you know, I guess that's, that's another issue. Yeah. And I just want to note that it's such a live discussion, an interesting moment for this interview. And for your work in general, I just read an article in the New York Times today that there's a big political fight coming over what to do with the streets because we've had this pandemic moment and this sort of semi-economic

reopening that's involved a lot of new uses for the street, including restaurants, cafes, but also folks using the sidewalk as part of the classroom in which they're teaching their kids just to get out of the house a little bit. And so, you know, all these new social uses to the streetscape and thinking about how to actually institutionalize those rather than just give them back up to cars, you know, as soon as folks are commuting more. And so I think there's a quite live live discussion right now. Definitely, it's, it's very exciting to watch how things have developed and just how these ideas that, you know, you wouldn't have really heard being so mainstream just a few months ago, like at the beginning of the year, now are in like all the major publications and like are frequently a topic of discussion. So

it's really exciting to see how that's developing. And also like the focus on the e-bike, because as you say, like if we can even just switch people from cars to e-bikes, like that is a huge transformation that would have incredibly positive environmental impacts. As you say, if we can even just switch people from cars to e-bikes, that is a huge transformation that would have incredibly positive environmental impacts. Exactly. And so as we look at this future, there is also this concern about the larger dependencies that come out of it if we are going to still rely on electric cars and things like that. I've talked about this in the terms of we can't just go from

an extractivism based on fossil fuels to one based on much more intensive resource extraction. And you have, in a very similar way, written about green extractivism. So just want to describe a bit what you see green extractivism to be. Yeah, and I think it follows very nicely from our earlier conversation. One know, one way to think about green extractivism is a model of an energy transition in which the energy is swapped out or one technology is swapped out for another technology, but nothing else changes about sort of broader patterns of ownership of property relations of wage labor relations or of extraction that prevail under capitalism and have prevailed and intensified over the past 500 years, right? So we kind of keep everything about capitalism,

a system that is like currently in deep crisis, in place while just swapping out some other things. And part of what that keeps in place is a rapacious rate and volume of resource extraction of what in some cases are non-renewable resources, and in other cases might be renewable, but are extracted at a rate that far exceeds their rates of natural reproduction in ecosystems. And so that's the current system that we live under. And what I worry about with the energy transition and the sort of prevailing consensus around how to do that energy transition manifesting in, for example, electrification of transit looking like everyone owning an electric vehicle is that the resources required are really high. So like an electric vehicle, you know, I want to make clear, I think is better with a lifecycle assessment on carbon emissions than an ICE vehicle. It does get tricky when we're

talking about electric grids that might still run on coal or gas. And when the EVs are hooked up to those grids, they may not be producing emissions in the moment of combustion, but there's emissions obviously being generated earlier on. So it does get tricky. But I think overall, the basic scientific consensus is that with the whole life cycle included that emissions are lower with EVs, but there's a lot of other types of environmental harm that also can result in emissions, but also result in localized ecosystem harm that are worse with EVs, right? And I think that this is hard for environmentalists to grapple with. And there have been environmental groups that promote EVs a lot. But when we look at the copper use, the amount of copper in an electric vehicle is something around 180 pounds.

I mean, it's an enormous amount of copper in one electric vehicle. The amount of lithium in the type of battery size that goes into an EV with current designs is in the order of 10 or 12 kilograms, right? And I'm not getting into nickel or cobalt, nor am I getting into steel, which we don't currently, I think, you can correct me if I'm not a material scientist, but I don't think we have a really carbon neutral way to produce steel yet, right? So there's a huge amount of steel, which is in any car, but then there are these new forms of extraction or intensified forms of extraction that copper is already just a source of much environmental harm

and carbon emissions and labor repression in the world. Chile, a place that I did several months of fieldwork for the current project that I'm working on, and I did that fieldwork in relation to lithium, but I just want to note that Chile is the number one producer of copper in the world. And it's just a source of severe environmental devastation and currently remains a carbon intensive. So if we're talking about dealing with climate change remains a carbon intensive extraction process. And then we can go to lithium and Chile's number two in the world behind Australia right

now. But they like sort of jockey for that first place in terms of lithium exports and the extraction of lithium under current methods, they could be improved. I want to know, don't believe in techno fixes, but do believe in technological progress, like it could be improved. I want to note, don't believe in techno fixes, but do believe in technological progress. It could be better. But the current methods of lithium extraction in brine deposits in Chile are extremely water intensive. And it's in the second driest place on earth after the Antarctica. It's the driest desert in the world, the Atacama Desert. And then we can get into the issues around land use and dispossession and lack of prior consultation for

indigenous communities. And there's been pretty severe labor repression of workers at these lithium installations trying to unionize and facing repression that in some ways the state has been complicit in as well. So there's a lot of injustices there. And what I'm calling green extractivism, I'm drawing on the work of other colleagues that have worked on this stuff, including friends in Chile, is to think about a sort of model of an energy transition where all of these forms of extraction are intensified, rather than a model of energy transition, as we were discussing earlier, that sort of upholds the principles of environmental sustainability, democracy, indigenous and labor rights, etc, at each node of the supply chain. Yeah, I think that's very important. And I think that's one of the really interesting pieces of

your work. You really illustrate the impacts of this resource extraction and this larger supply chain on Latin America, on the people of Latin America, on the indigenous peoples down there, the communities. So did you just want to start by explaining what the impact of resource extraction actually is and how in pursuing resource extraction and resource wealth that has really affected a lot of especially poor and indigenous communities in parts of Latin America. Yeah, this is, as I kind of mentioned, a very old history that dates to the sort of violent colonial encounter, you know, starting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It's a long durée history, but it's also one that has a more recent kind of provenance

in the sense that in the first 15 years of this, this millennium from like roughly 2000 to 2014, there was a commodity boom globally. And this was in large part, not exclusively, but in large part driven by increased demand from emerging industrialized economies. So we're thinking of China, but also India, Brazil, elsewhere in the world. So there was a big demand for primary resources, which pushed up their prices. And so in that moment of the years 2000 to 2014, which we're sort of getting towards my book, Resource Radicals, really focuses on overlapping a time period with that, we had increased extraction in Latin America. And some of that groundwork had been laid by

prior decades of neoliberal reforms, which to use less wonky language, like deregulated resource sectors and really integrated national economies into the global economy and into those global markets for raw materials. So that's just a little bit of sort of historical and background. But in terms of the localized impacts of extraction, there are several, there's social,, and environmental. So the social impacts that we can think about is oftentimes people are directly dispossessed and displaced from their land. So if your land, your indigenous community or a peasant community, or even in some cases, urban communities that are working class communities whose land sits on some valuable

resource deposit or some place that is perfect for a dam or for agriculture, mega development or, you know, soy or whatever it is, you're literally forced to move. And so, you know, we might be familiar with this in the US under the sort of auspices of like eminent domain and things like that. But this is a very violent process as it often takes place in Latin America and has resulted in immediate conflicts between communities, states and corporations, which often get militarized. Even if it's a private firm, the state will often send in, I'm talking about all states in Latin America, sort of painting a broad brush, but the states will often send in police or military because these resources and sectors are considered, quote unquote, strategic,

sometimes in the constitutions of state, meaning that the state wants to ensure their development, right? And so the state will protect that even when it's a private actor that's doing the extraction. So the dispossession from land is a major issue. Going right along with that is the violation of indigenous rights. So according to international conventions, but again, oftentimes in national constitutions or law, indigenous communities are supposed to have the right to prior consultation before projects that could affect their land, territory, livelihoods, or environment. That often doesn't happen, or it happens in very kind of weak ways, depending on the area. It might be hunting and fishing. You know, it can be all sorts of livelihoods. And in Argentina, like some of the conflicts around mining are actually between wineries

and vineyards and mining, right? So it's not always like a really disenfranchised or marginalized form of livelihood. It might even be like the backbone of a province or something like that, that depends on tourism or agriculture. So those livelihoods and those land uses often conflict directly with extraction. Then I'll just, you know, lastly, we have the environmental impacts, which are, you know, species loss, habitat devastation, contamination of soil, water, and air. And there are all these discourses in the mining industry about more sustainable mining or even green mining, but there's yet to be any method of removing masses of material from the earth and then chemically

processing those and processing them with water that doesn't impact water, soil, and air. I mean, it's like a little bit of a zero-sum game. You can't do one without the other. Mining can be better and worse, but it can never not impact pretty deeply the surrounding environment. And then at each of those stages, wherever you're using energy to accomplish some task, you probably have carbon emissions. And you also have a lot of trucking, right? So you have the whole set of transit infrastructures to think about transit in a different light of highways and ports and multimodal transit systems that are built to get this stuff to market. And in the case of Chile and Peru and Ecuador, for that matter, a lot of the getting it to market is complex multimodal kind of port

systems that are getting it towards Asian economies, right? And so you have a whole trans-Pacific kind of portal of shipping that, again, with current technologies is carbon intensive as well. So those are the sort of localized impacts. I just want to flag one other thing and then I'll let you jump in with more questions. I know I've gone on a while. That's okay. The economic impact for these countries writ large, right? And so a lot of the time, I think that in the environmentalist and indigenous rights discussion, we focus for very good reason on localized impacts. But I think it's worth noting that nationally within

a resource dependent country, whether it's Brazil or Ecuador or Chile or basically almost any country in Latin America exports raw materials as a big part of this sort of economic profile, that these are also very economically unsustainable sectors as the basis for economic development. And so I alluded earlier to this commodity boom moment, which was a historic commodity boom because it lasted so long and affected so many different sectors, everything from soy to beef to copper to oil to timber. Almost every raw material saw this lift in prices. That's unusual for it to last so long and be so. What we usually actually have is these like really short boom and bust cycles that are quite volatile. And even that 15 year cycle, of course, was followed by a dramatic and precipitous decline in those prices, starting in the early 2010s for agricultural

goods and mining, and then 2014, that drop in oil that probably we sort of remember, because it actually affected, of course, gasoline prices and things like that. So commodities are known for being very volatile, they're very sensitive to swings in demand and supply, they're very inelastic in that sense. And so they're not a great sector to put all your sort of economic bets on as a national economy. And keeping in mind that Latin American countries tend to get a decent amount of the national government income from royalties and taxes on these sectors, rather than from like taxing the wealth, property and income of the wealthiest within those countries, right? So these are, these become very precarious economically, as well as those really devastating, violent, and dispossessing

localized impacts of extractor projects themselves. Yeah. No, I think that's a fantastic thing to note. And I would just add to it, the impact of this resource boom was not just felt in Latin America and other countries in the global South. The resource boom was also very significant for the Canadian economy, for the Australian economy. But the difference is that when the bust comes, there are often other sectors that can kind of cushion that blow, whereas Latin America and other countries in the global south wouldn't so much have the kind of ability to stop the implementation of massive austerity programs or IMF structural programs or things like that, right? You're bringing up a lot. And I'm sort of going to stop myself from saying too much, because these different outcomes with resource

dependent states is really interesting. And I think what you're saying points to the sort of basic fact, which is a lot hinges on your position in the world system. Like, you know, I think that it's interesting to note that the US, Canada, Norway, and there are many states that are have high GDPs and are considered affluent and x, y, and z, of course, they're extremely inequitable internally, especially the US of those three, but that aside, but that don't suffer from these like pathologies, quote unquote, of resource dependent economies, such as like Dutch disease. They're called pathologies kind of in the economic literature, because it's ways that resource dependency kind of shapes the rest of your economic outlook. Whereas in Latin America, because of the situation with debt, because of the

extreme dependency on global markets, because of the lack of sectoral diversification, and the like deep inequality of the societies, combined with like a ruling class that has been historically unwilling to pay taxes, like at all makes those economies and therefore governments like much more sensitive to these global economic changes than other wealthier resource dependent states are. Before we get to the local politics in Latin America around resources, I also wanted to get you to explain one more thing. And that is who is really involved in this resource extraction in Latin America? Is it mainly domestic companies and state companies, or is it mainly multinational mining companies

that are coming in from the global north? How do those companies then interact with the local politics that you see in Latin America? It's a really good question because the situation is a bit complex. Basically, it's all of the above, right? And so what I referred to earlier as this few decades of neoliberal reforms in Latin America, partly due to IMF and World Bank pressure via the loan conditionalities, but also due to domestic political elites embracing these reforms. And that's a whole other story of how these reforms came about, but they did. And what they did, as I sort of mentioned earlier, but in a way it's a little more pertinent now, is they deregulated these resource sectors. They more thoroughly integrated national economies into global markets. And they also privatized and

or changed nationally owned resource companies to function more like private firms. So sometimes you have state-owned companies in many cases, but various reforms have been put into place that make them act a bit more like private sector actors. And on top of that, you have many more private sector actors. So the outcome is, just in case this isn't clear, that you have state-owned resource companies primarily in the fossil fuel sector. So primarily when we're looking at oil and gas, we have lots of state-owned companies in Latin America, but you also have oil and gas multinationals in those same sectors, right? So you have both. And then when we get into other resources, there's a mix, but it trends a little more to the private

sector. So mining is mixed there. In Chile, we have a big state-owned mining company, Codelco, that does copper mining. But lots of other places in Latin America in the 80s and 90s privatized those state-owned mining companies. And so some cases, they no longer exist, or they exist in a kind of shell form. And then when we get into agribusiness, we have even more private versus public, right. So depending on the sector, there's a mix of private and public. But in general, the market forces that have been like unleashed on these countries by this deep market integration have pushed companies to act pretty similarly, even if they're publicly owned. And I think that's a shame, because I do think that there's a way in which better governance

is easier through public ownership. I hold out a hope for that in Latin America. And I think, actually, there could be really interesting reforms that kind of get these public companies, even in fossil fuel sectors, to be more responsive to worker and environmental and community interests as they hopefully phase out fossil fuels, right? So I actually see like an interesting role for state-owned companies to kind of change their mission. But overall, unfortunately, most companies, whether public or privately owned, have acted the same. And the way that you see the similarities is actually goes to this other part of your question, which is you see the similarities in the way these firms interact with local communities. There's almost no difference from a community perspective of whether it's a state-owned oil

company or a multinational company. In some cases, actually, and I don't know if I think this is true, but I think it's an important claim to put out there. In some cases, local communities will say that they have better experience with foreign multinationals than they do with state-owned companies, either because the foreign multinationals are headquartered in places like Canada, where there's a lot of anti-mining activism that puts pressure on shareholders and forces those companies to behave marginally better, or at least forces better transparency around what these companies are doing, if not actual change. But sometimes that can be helpful to communities on the ground, that there's that pressure coming from elsewhere, where when you have a state-owned company, they tend to be very entrenched with the political

establishment. There's often a lot of opacity about how they operate. And in terms of calling in the military or police when extractive operations are disrupted, that chain of command might happen more quickly. So I'm not saying I personally prefer, or even indigenous communities personally prefer privately owned, shareholder owned multinationals, but just that it's complex when you're thinking from the ground in terms of what community experiences are. And I did a lot of interviews for my book and would ask these types of questions like about what communities prefer. And, you know, first and foremost, communities, you know, came around to a more militant position on extraction altogether. Like we don't want extraction, we don't care who owns it. It's the state, it's publicly owned or privately owned or

whatever. It's Chinese owned or European owned, you know, like all of this has been bad for us. And so we basically oppose it. But I think we can have an interesting conversation about how there's a role for publicly owned companies, whether it's phasing out fossil fuels, or whether it's a different form of extraction. I think that's an interesting conversation to have, but I think first and foremost, the localized impacts need to be dealt with and mitigated and really transformed and the overall volume of extraction needs to be radically reduced in order for any of these better outcomes to occur. Yeah, definitely. And the reason I asked the question, of course, is because we do have so

many multinational mining companies here in Canada. And, you know, they don't always have the greatest track record in the countries where they go to extract minerals. But now I want to get into the kind of politics of resource extraction that you detail in your new book, Resource Radicals. on Ecuador, but I think a lot of what you describe is applicable to other countries in Latin America as well, right? You outline a resource nationalism and an anti-extractivism that has kind of developed, I guess, in opposition to that. So do you want to start by describing what this resource nationalism is? Who is kind of pushing it? And what impacts has it had on Ecuador or other countries in Latin America that have pursued it? Is it completely negative? What are the positives? Can you just explain that a bit more?

Absolutely. And so I want to just zoom out and say for folks that are unfamiliar with thinking about resource extraction in Latin America, as I already mentioned, it's a 500-year history. It's a very long history. Latin America was incorporated into the Spanish and Portuguese empires to provide raw materials for those empires. When they achieved independence, the economic model didn't fundamentally change. And the US became a sort of hegemonic player in the region, as did Canada, and when we're talking about resource sectors in particular. And now there's yet another shift where we could maybe think about China as a hegemon. And I recommend that folks read Planetary

Mind by Martina Arboleda, which details a lot of these emerging sort of geopolitics of extraction. But basically, maybe the powerful actors have changed, but the model of accumulation has really not changed. But what's interesting, it's sort of, I don't want to paint this as like just like a 500 year depressing history, because I think the interesting for leftists and radicals looking at this is that it's been a super contentious history. It's been a history very live with labor militancy, with indigenous militancy, with community environmental activism of all sorts, and a lot of really interesting working class kind of environmentalisms and movements that focus on that are that are kind of parallel to the environmental justice movement in the US and Canada. When we think about folks that are organizing against localized forms

of harm, we have a lot of similar movements in Latin America. And we also, as I said, have, you know, things like labor strikes and protests in urban areas, and it's a whole panoply of things. And so what I do in the book Resource Radicals is kind of sketch out this history of various moments of radical resource politics in Ecuador, in ways that I agree with your assessment are applicable to many other countries in the region, I would say to like the global south more broadly. And there are even some resonances with the US, I would say, as I was just kind of with North America, as I was just kind of noting, right. So they're not totally specific to Ecuador. But the reason Ecuador is interesting is that it's one of the more resource dependent countries in the region. And also, it's had some of the more

explicitly radical forms of resource politics in ways that I think highlight the different forms of demands and grievances of marginalized communities. And so what you were just referring to around resource nationalism has a long history as a kind of paradigm in Latin America. And it has more radical variants to it, which are the ones I focus on a bit more. But it also has less radical variants, but they're still sort of progressive. The basic idea is that the state should own resource sectors, should be the owner of companies that extract, and that the benefits should be channeled towards development. With that really broad definition, we can see that there are different ways this could be taken. It could be a sort of more elite project, as it was in the sort of mid-century, 1950

through 70s, in lots of countries, of like state-owned oil or mining or even agribusiness companies. And the proceeds go to state coffers and then are reinvested in heavy industry to kind of move up the developmental ladder. So that's one version of this. The more radical version that I document in Ecuador is radical versions of sort of like the democratization of resource ownership. And also, it's a very broad idea of how the proceeds should be redistributed to the communities most impacted, both workers and indigenous communities, right?

And so that's radical resource nationalism. I just use that to distinguish it from that other way of interpreting it. And that was kind of the prevailing set of demands on the part of social movements from like the early 90s to the early 2000s. It still exists. I don't want to nothing just disappears in politics. It's just like things become more, you know, or less prevailing. And what happened in the early 2000s in I date it to the election of Rafael Correa, Ecuador's first democratically elected left wing government who came to power in 2007. So right around when he came to power, an interesting shift happened that I document, which is that

his administration kind of took on movement demands and saw itself as responding to movement demands and said, we're going to exert more national control over resource extraction. And what happened in that moment is movements kind of pivoted and said, okay, you're taking the sort of watered down version of our demands. We're going to actually radicalize our demands and target them a little more broadly, which is this entire extractive model of development. You know, I'm simplifying a bit in the history that I just told, because throughout that whole period where labor unions and indigenous movements had demanded democratic national ownership of

resource extraction and redistribution of resource wealth, there had been growing concerns about resource extraction itself, like under any guise, right? And so especially indigenous communities in the Amazon throughout the 90s and early 2000s will be coming more and more militant and actually like blockading their territory and preventing mining and oil companies from entering their territory and becoming militant oil companies from entering their territory and becoming militant in terms of demanding a moratorium on oil extraction, just becoming more militant because they were experiencing the effects of what I mentioned earlier, which was this deregulated like resource extraction and just, you know, all these companies flooding the

country and trying to buy up their land, dispossess them, etc. And so they became more militant. And it was just just interesting sort of critical juncture, a left wing government comes into power kind of adopts in sort of watered down version, the prior set of social movement demands and movements pivot, reorient and start actually demanding an end to an extractive model of development altogether. And let me just answer this kind of other part of your question, which I haven't addressed yet, which is like, what have been the effects of, for example, a left of center government, which was, by the way, in power from 2007 to 2017, reelected several times, so pretty

popular, long tenure in power, adopting, even if in a watered down version, because you still have private companies, but you did have more state coordination of resource extraction. You also had contract models that really increased the amount of taxes and royalties to the state, so cut a bit into the profits of private firms, and attempted to do more regulation on the environmental end. That was very unevenly enforced. So that's what resource nationalism looked like under a left-wing government in Ecuador. And I would say we could do similar things for Bolivia, Brazil, lots of countries that had left of center governments that also started to coordinate and kind of assert more state power in resource sectors at that same time period. So what were the effects of this? I mean,

the positive effects is that the state as a result of these new contract models and policies, and also the commodity boom itself, the high prices had a lot more money to work with. And so left wing governments were able to actually fund social services that had been totally neglected for forever in some cases, but at least for many decades. When we're talking about housing, sanitation, education, healthcare, basic infrastructure, public works, like all of these saw much more public money. And I think that that had some great effects on, I shouldn't say I think, it did have some great effects in terms of poverty being dramatically lowered, inequality being really lowered in some of the most unequal

countries in the world, and other downstream effects in terms of developmental indicators, like health and nutrition and all sorts of other things improved. And so that's good. The problem is, though, and now this will all I think slot into place with our earlier discussion is that that all happened at the expense of a lot of dispossession and devastation, socially and environmentally in primarily, but not exclusively indigenous communities, also in mestizo, mixed ethnic peasant communities, and also urban working class communities. So a lot of those communities bore the brunt of the harm of that model. And, you know, also, when the price increases ended, or when I should say when the commodity

boom went bust is a better way to put it, in 2014, the state suddenly didn't have any of that money. And even left-wing governments implemented austerity, even though they came into power and remained popular precisely by having an anti-austerity approach to public spending. And so the model was on precarious economic footing and involved a lot of localized harm. That isn't to say that it didn't decrease by the millions people living in poverty. And we have to be able to kind of say both of those things at once. And I think that that's a hard thing to do, especially in the global north and wanting to be clear about our solidarity with the communities that are impacted by extraction. But we're also in solidarity with

the foreign working class folks that saw their material, you know, sort of circumstances lifted up by this model. So it's challenging. But I think, you know, at this point, there's just a lot of open discussion in Latin America over how to move forward. And we can get to that later, or not at all. But like, you know, we're in the midst of this economic crisis, the pandemic, it's hit Latin America super hard. So there's a really live set of debates and questions over like, what is the economic model that we're going to implement next? And how can that economic model do better on all of these fronts, right? And so I think that these conversations, as difficult as they are, are actually pretty salient right now, among Latin American leftists and social movement organizers. Yeah, no, I think that's super important. And, you know, as you say,

because this version of radical resource nationalism was implemented, and people did get to see that, you know, there were benefits to it, but there were also a lot of downsides. There is this kind of reaction to it and this opposition to extractivism that is growing, at least in Ecuador, but I'm sure, you know, in other Latin American countries as well. So what is that movement? How powerful is it? And what kind of things are they demanding? I'm glad that we're getting to this a little bit, because I think it is interesting and connects some dots all the way to earlier in our conversation around the Green New Deal. I just want to note something that I sort of left off of my narrative for the last question that I think will set us up for understanding this one. So when I said that movements pivoted in this interesting moment of a commodity boom and increased and intensified resource dependency, but also a whole slew of left-wing governments doing a certain version of resource nationalism, what movements pivoted towards was a militant anti-extractive stance, right? And so this resulted in protests and blockades and territorial

occupations, in marches and capitals and a whole range and repertoire of tactics to say, you know, enough of this extractive model. And that, you know, those forms of protests continued for, you know, the period after my book covers. And then we had a whole new set of protests that relate to those, but are also on different topics this past fall in Latin America. And I know it's sort of like the fall is like a century ago, but let's just remember that the fall was an amazing cycle of global protests, right? Everywhere from Lebanon and Iraq to Chile and Ecuador and Bolivia, you had like this moment of social unrest and just this feeling of being fed up with the sort of status quo. And in Ecuador, you had this interesting sort of resurgence of this very broad popular sector, meaning different marginalized groups, coalition that was coming out against the neoliberal policies of the current administration. In Chile, likewise, you had a really broad protest movement that had major, major ramifications for the current government, which is a right-wing government there and forcing it to pull back on a number of policies. So you had a lot of protests in Latin America, then the pandemic hit, and Latin America thought it was safe for a

moment, like it didn't hit as soon as it did in the US or Europe. But when it hit, it hit devastatingly. And that is a result of those austerity policies, which date, you know, for decades, but were kind of re implemented in the commodity bust moment, right. So you had really weak social health care systems, despite the fact left-wing governments had built those up. And again, as we said, they were forced to pull back a bit. They were forced to take IMF loans in some circumstances. So it's, you know, I don't want to get into too much of the details, but you have decades of austerity, a sort of less austere moment, and then the return of austerity, and then you have a pandemic. And we know that pandemic outcomes are deeply shaped by like social infrastructure. And that had just been really devastated in Latin America.

And so you have a very, very intense outbreak of COVID in a lot of Latin American countries, the economic toll is likewise just horrific. And part of that has to do with how much of Latin American economies are, quote unquote, informal, that might be a new term to listeners, or they might think of it in a narrow way of like the illicit kind of drug economy. But in Latin America, the informal economy is everywhere. It's like everything from domestic labor to popular markets where people buy their food, it's just enormous. And in some countries, like half of the workforce works informally, which means they have zero protections during like an economic lockdown period, right? So

really, Latin America is suffering. I just need to drive that home because that's the context in which these interesting new proposals are coming out. And so what a set of scholars, intellectuals and movement activists, and also progressive and left-wing elected officials across the region have been coming up with different ideas of how do we address the social pain that people are experiencing, while at the same time not doubling down on the extractive model of accumulation, but actually using this as an opportunity to transition to a more just, more green, lower carbon, more sustainable economy. You can see immediately the kind of parallels with the Green New Deal. And a lot of these plans, one of them

is called the Pacto Ecosocial, which is the eco-social pact that came out of Argentina, but quickly spread around the region as an interesting proposal. There's also the Nuestra America Verde, Our Green America, and there's like a couple of more, but those two are probably the biggest. And the Pacto Ecosocial has been now in circulation for a couple of months and people are really talking around the region. And what all of these ideas bring together is we need to, as I said, sort of protect people from social and economic harm, but also change the economic model in Latin America. And that this crisis moment, the sort of triple crisis of pandemic, economic crisis and climate crisis presents us with an opportunity that we cannot pass up. And I think folks will hear the resonances with sort of Green New Deal conversations in the US and Canada and in Europe. And so similar ideas, the one thing I would say is important that's

different out of these Latin America proposals is that in general, when we talk about the Green New Deal in the US, I'll stay with that example for now. Aside from some people like me, really people mean like a domestic policy. They're not thinking about the global picture or how Green New Deal would interact with global supply chains or the global trade and financial architecture, right? That's changing a little bit. I'm not trying to be dismissive, but overall, it's a domestic policy conversation, right? Whereas in Latin America, these proposals, these nascent kind of proposals that are gaining momentum are immediately concerned with the international picture, because you can't be in the global South and hope to have a different version of development,

or even in some cases, more radical ideas of a total alternative to quote unquote development. You can't have those types of ideas without realizing that it's global structures that put Latin America in the position that it's in, right? So just to make this much more concrete, in the Pacto Ecosocial, one of the key demands is a cancellation of debt, because there's no way to sort of fund a massive public investment in social infrastructure and environmental and climate safety without having the actual fiscal room to maneuver and freeing up resources that right now are servicing debt that is totally unsustainable in many contexts was signed or agreed upon in very illegitimate situations in terms of how the negotiations or, you know, in some cases, there's debt that dates to like dictatorships, and it's an unsustainable and illegitimate amount of debt. And it needs to be canceled in order for Latin

American governments to have the fiscal room to to implement a more sustainable policies. And so the reason I'm bringing up this debt thing is just to say that when you have proposals that come out of the global South, and I think this resonates across Africa and South Asia as well, you have more attention to that global economic architecture, because it's more apparent to folks in those contexts that that architecture is an impediment to equitable and sustainable forms of development. I think it's an impediment in the US too, like free trade, so-called, negatively affects US workers and negatively affects the ability to implement better policies in the US. But we just don't see it as much because when you're in a more hegemonic position in the world economy, I think those global forces are less apparent. So

that's a real interesting contribution that comes out of these Latin American proposals that I think is relevant for all of us wherever we're situated. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And it's so important to, you know, understand not just the Green New Deal that is coming out of the global north, but also these visions of what a future might look like, or how different the economic system and the extractive industries and what have you might be organized from the global south as well, right. And so I wanted to end by asking you, you know, you've talked about this eco-socialist pact, you've talked about the Green New Deal. If we're thinking about what a sustainable eco-socialist future is going to look like, in which we transform our relationship with resources and with extractivism, what do you think that materially looks like in the United

States and Canada, but also in societies in Latin America. Yeah, I think that the the overall point and this is one that we make in in a planet to win and also something that Daniel Aldana Cohen has emphasized a lot in his work, who's my co author on that book and collaborator and lots of things. One of the the concepts that I think helps clarify this is thinking about forms of prosperity, abundance, luxury, I know leftists like debate which term they like, but whatever, thinking about terms of abundance, let's put it that way for the time being that are less materially and resource intensive, right? So you're not giving up on the idea of like the good life, let's say of like a good life, a life worth living a life that allows

for not just like the bare survival, but actually like human flourishing and creativity and deep relationships and political activism and all the things that we value. But a version of that, that doesn't require rapacious extraction. And actually realizing that versions of that, that do require rapacious extraction have these downstream and upstream effects that are not good, right? We actually can't have like real equality, democracy, indigenous rights, labor rights, all of these things, and climate and environmental safety when we're rapaciously extracting? And also maybe there's a deeper philosophical argument, and there's this article I love by another co-author on the book,

Kate Aronoff, about happiness. And just thinking about how getting off of the track of desperate, endless, infinite consumption of things that are made to be obsolete so that we keep consuming, like doesn't make us happy. And like, would a Green New Deal that actually deeply changes our relationship to nature, to the built environment, to our communities, to each other, like actually make us happier, right? So that's like a maybe a deeper point. But I think it's an interesting one to think about. So just back to the to the original response that I was giving, thinking about how to make our forms of prosperity and abundance less resource intensive is one that that I think like unifies and holistically connects all these different nodes on the supply

chain all the way to our end use experience of technology and infrastructure. And so are there ways that and I'm going to circle back a bit, but I think it's useful to kind of tie the conversation together, like, are there ways that instead of swapping out every vehicle on the road for an EV that we can like reduce the amount of vehicles on the road, but yet still have transit equity and access? Like we don't necessarily need to think that transit equity and access hinges on the sheer number of vehicles on the road. It turns out that actually I would argue, and I think, you know, informed by your work and James Wills' work, right, that like the more vehicles on the road, the less transit equity and access. It's almost like those are actually inversely related, right? So if we have fewer vehicles that more people can use,

and a whole, you know, system of infrastructure that's designed to prioritize the needs of working class and POC communities, then, and indigenous communities, right, like then we, then we're actually getting towards something like transit equity. And so, you know, I think thinking holistically about resource and material use about the material and resource footprint on the on the environment, even at the total end use moment of consumption certainly shapes the entire supply chain, but just like brings these things together mentally helps us have like a mental map of how to connect those. So I don't know, not that's like the best answer to your question. But that's the way that I think of it. Just, you know, understanding that people need to consume in order to live and that our relationships are forged through practices of consumption. It's

not about being like anti-consumption. That would make no sense. We all need water. We need food. And we need more than that. We need art. We need, you know, creativity. We need all these things. But to think about ways that, you know, instead of streaming the Netflix alone, which by the way, is so energy intensive, just look it up. It's kind of shocking. It's hard to think about ways that, you know, instead of streaming the Netflix alone, which, by the way, so energy intensive, just look it up. It's kind of shocking. It's hard to think about because we all stream all the time, including, you know, we're doing it right now, basically. But, you know, so streaming, individual streaming is like the worst way environmentally to consume wonderful, you know, films and, you know, great TV shows. Like, I like films and TV like anybody else.

But, you know, I know it's hard in this COVID moment to think about theaters. But let's just I'm gonna put aside COVID for just a second. Hopefully we'll be out of it one day. You know, lots of people using even that same streaming service is like much more environmentally efficient. So it's like, the more people the more collective and massified our consumption is, even if the sort of same thing is being consumed, we actually consume it in more efficient ways, like environmentally more efficient, I mean, but honestly, in more like fun ways and ways that are, I think, more relationally satisfying. And so I think we can sort of, I don't want to say have it all, but like, we can continue to consume maybe not all things like we do need to consume like much less red meat. I'm not going to enforce veganism. I'm not a vegan. I'm not going to enforce that any

particular dietary preference. And I think culturally, that gets very problematic with folks saying, you know, who should eat what in the world, and there are many different eating practices in the world. But like, overall, the world needs a bit less red meat. Let's put that right. So I don't want to say consumer practices don't need to change they do. But I think it's not about consumption versus anti consumption or tech versus anti tech. It's more about how can we do things in ways that are actually more meaningful, more satisfying, don't involve pulling as much stuff out of the earth, and actually create positive community rather than isolating and individuating us. Because

last point here, like the isolation of our practices of consumption is not unrelated to the alienation we see in the political sphere, right? Like I think that we can really trace some of the new right and sort of resurgent conservatism in the US to the suburban landscape, right? And to how alone people are, and sort of isolated from community people are. So there's also positive political effects of doing things together more. And I guess I'll end that there on that really posi note. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. You know, I think that's so important. You know, we do need to focus on more collective experiences and what George Monbiot calls, you know, public luxuries, right? And hopefully this conversation has helped people to better

understand, you know, those supply chain effects and how, you know, the products that we use, the tech that we use in our everyday lives actually has this much longer impact and this much longer chain of activities that puts it into our hands. So Thea, I want to thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your experience with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It was really a pleasure to talk with you. Thea Riofrancos is the author of Resource Radicals from Petronationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. It was published by Duke University Press, and you can buy it from the publisher anywhere else books are sold and hopefully get it from your local library. Thea is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor of political science at

Providence College. You can follow her on Twitter at at T Rio Francos. You can also follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. And you can follow me Paris Marks at at Paris Marks. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, a group of left wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Thanks for listening.