In the United States, relatively well-off people embedded in the capitalist system do not face housing insecurity, pressing financial struggles, and debt, and are able to live entire lifetimes without truly ruminating on the immense human cost of limitless industrial expansion and colonization. Maintaining comfort and wealth is generally clung to with an iron grip, at the expense of true progress towards new systems that could provide sustainable job opportunities not entrenched in the destruction of our planet and oppression of our fellow people. As someone living in “the belly of the beast”, I alongside many others, fear that a mass scale, productive mobilization of the people to protect the planet will not be undertaken until it is too late. Without such mobilization, our water systems will become polluted and undrinkable in the near future, exacerbating the water crisis currently faced by many communities due to systematic poverty and climate change.
Consider this: What price do we pay for turning on our faucets? In Boston, we do not face life threatening droughts yet, but are we aware of the conflicts happening in our community over water and energy infrastructure? Last summer I participated in a sit-in with other activists over the construction in Lincoln, Massachusetts, of a gas pipeline that required the clear cutting of a protected forest area. In a federal lawsuit, the city of Cambridge claimed that the project could “lead to a long term degradation of a major municipal water supply”; moreover, according to court records reported by Molly Farrar, “the .247 acres is on watershed protection land with a conservation restriction”. The proposed pipeline in Lincoln is additionally a segment of a larger expansion of a 1,100 mile long pipeline that is being constructed by the same company, Enbridge–a company that is infamous for its crimes against indigenous communities whose land rights are violated and whose people are blocked from receiving any of the potential benefits of pipeline construction. At the protest, United States military forces (”police officers”) were posted and armed, consistently surveilling us and acting to protect corporate fossil fuel interests.
Despite various forms of backlash, many of us will continue to defend our trees and fight carbon producing industries, because we know climate change is dire and deadly. A reduction in fossil fuel demand by reducing the budget of our disgustingly overinflated military, for example, and by putting an end to war crimes that pollute, destroy, and murder, will be less costly than investing in more pipelines and will begin to alleviate social and environmental problems. We must fight for investment in energy efficient practices, elimination of unnecessary energy usage, and expansion of training opportunities and jobs in green trades. We must hold our governmental boards and councils accountable at a scale that will ensure real progress and sensible change. Tribal citizens living on reservations in the “United states”, struggle to heat their homes and use clean water on a daily basis while others blow energy resources on unsustainable, vapid endeavors such as AI Chatbots that waste water and emit unnecessary carbon into the atmosphere.
There is some evidence of growing recognition of the threats lurking in our current system. The loss of agency and lack of public awareness over pipeline regulations and construction in their communities, largely coinciding with the rise of unregulated capitalist systems, have spurred countless protests, widespread civil disobedience movements, and legal battles since the 1950s. For example, in 2012 the bank JP Morgan was called out for manipulating the energy market in California and areas of the Midwest. According to the Los Angeles Times, JP Morgan had “manipulated the California energy market for its own profit and at a cost to residents and businesses in the state that could be $100 million, $200 million or much more” and had “gamed the state’s power market for $57 million in improper payments over six months in 2010 and 2011”. This is just one of many instances of an insatiable corporate drive for profit harming working class people.
It is essential for all of us to question where our energy and water resources come from and the humanitarian cost of our current systems. It is also crucial to take action and organize with others in our communities to ensure truth and justice for everyone in our society, especially those who are being neglected by racist policies and white supremacist ideas of what “progress” looks like.
Silas Rutherford is an Intern at Massachusetts Peace Action. He is active in a variety of groups including the Indigenous Solidarity Working Group, Racial Justice Working Group, and the Newsletter Committee.
