Author Archives: Christopher Hongach

Rectifying the Intersection of the Prison Industrial Complex and Climate Change

by Christopher Hongach

Often neglected from the discourse of climate change environmentalism are prisons and prison inmates. By exposing the embedded social injustices that have structured the prison industrial complex in the United States, the overlapping and intertwined effects of racism, capitalism, and imperialism reveal how certain bodies, particularly Black bodies, are targeted, exploited, and made disposable, at the sanction of state and neoliberal powers.

One of the most challenging components of climate change discourse is the establishment of inclusivity. With a society structured on differences and divisions, it seems collectivizing politically for climate change initiatives is nearly impossible. Even emphasizing democratic principles has its short-comings in the establishment of inclusivity, specifically as they operate within state power, both ideologically and institutionally. In order to uphold the essential democratic principles, a policing and a “securitizing” system must exist within state power over society. Understanding this means understanding that there is inherent “otherness” to a society. Upon conviction of certain violations, “others” become “the incarcerated,” who, then, endure the oppression enforced upon them by state power and its supported agencies.

Once convicted, persons are completely dehumanized; closed off from society and open social and political participation, prisoners are cut off the world.

Prisoners line up to vote at the D.C. Jail in Washington, DC.Jacquelyn Martin/AP. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/the-race-gap-in-u-s-prisons-is-glaring-and-poverty-is-making-it-worse/

Due to the war on drugs and the war on crime, from the 1970’s onward, America saw the rise of prisons and, with that, an increase in incarceration in the population. These changes, occurring after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, most effectively targeted Black communities. Today, while there are between 1.7 – 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. (or 1/200 people), Black men make up the largest percentage of the incarcerated population in the U.S. (about 1/100 Black people are incarcerated; with 1/3 Black men being incarcerated).

The increase of prisons and prisoners are part of the prison industrial complex, which seeks to address social issues with incarceration, rather than with sophisticated investments in true rehabilitative resources or social equity.

https://www.ted.com/playlists/651/truths_about_the_us_prison_system

Other features of the prison industrial complex reveal neoliberal agendas that further imprison the incarcerated and violate their human rights, such as the cost-cutting effects on prisoner’s essential needs or through the violating practices of prison labor.

In circumstances of climate change, prisons have especially experienced exploitation and disposability by state and neoliberal forces.

Prisons like SCI Fayette in Pennsylvania, built near a coal dumping grounds, seemingly geographically out of reach of social centers, endure the toxicity of coal ash contamination of water and air, leaving prisoners with serious complications to their health.

Other prison issues pertaining to climate change, like in California, where global warming has significantly contributed to the damages caused by forest fires, exposes the issues of prison labor. Inmate firefighters, who make up 30-40% of California’s fire fighters, receive barely any training and close to nothing in compensation to be on the frontlines of service.

An inmate firefighter pauses during a firing operation as the Carr fire continues to burn in Redding, California on July 27, 2018. Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates-1-an-hour-to-fight-wildfires.html

Understanding how the incarcerated are exploited, abused, and discarded is only the first step to rectifying the faults in our “liberal democracy.”

The racial aspect of prisons, as it relates specifically to climate change environmentalism, is a particular point of focus which highlights the layers of racism, capitalism, and the unconstitutional practices of imperialism that are embedded in the greater issues of climate injustice for the prison population of the United States.

Arguing for the remembrance of “the disposable” mass of the incarcerated, who, in various locations across the U.S., are left out of the discourses on climate change injustice, helps reveal the hypocrisies of our American liberal democracy, by exposing the deeply embedded social injustices that have structured the prison industrial system and by exposing the cruel and unusual punishments put upon them from the unconstitutional practices by biopolitical power forces.

We must not only remember the incarcerated in the discussions of climate justice, but we must critically address the embedded social injustices that structure the prison industrial complex and allow climate injustice to persist.

We must put aside structural racism and clauses of biopolitical eugenics written in our legal codes; rectify the symbolics of our certain harmful social understandings; and end the infrastructures of oppression, by legitimate democratization of social and climate participation.

By outlining community efforts inside, between, and outside prisons in the U.S., such as by the involvement of advocacy groups and media enhancement, we make achievable the possibilities of social and climate solidarity.

Main Sources

Barroca v. Bureau of Prisons. District of Colombia, Case 1:18-cv-02740-JEB, Document 12. 23 April 2019.

http://abolitionistlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/amended-complaint-Barroca.pdf

Bernd, Candice; Zoe Loftus-Farren; and Maureen Nandini Mitra. “America’s Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration,” Earth Island Journal and Truthout. 2018.

https://earthisland.org/journal/americas-toxic-prisons/

Borunda, Alejandra. “Climate change is contributing to California’s fires,” National Geographic. 25 October 2019.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/climate-change-california-power-outage/

The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons. “No Escape: Exposure to Toxic Coal Waste at State Correctional Institution Fayette.” Abolitionist Law Center and Human Rights Coalition.

https://abolitionistlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/no-escape-bw-1-4mb.pdf

Carson, E. Ann. “Prisoners in 2018.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, NCJ 253516. April 2020.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p18.pdf

Democracy Now. “$1 an Hour to Fight Largest Fire in CA History: Are Prison Firefighting Programs Slave Labor?” Democracy Now. 9 August 2018.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/9/1_an_hour_to_fight_largest

Duncan, Sophie. “Prison Labor in a Warming World: When floods and fires strike, who has to clean up the mess?” The Free Radicals. 14 August 2018.

Equal Justice Initiative, “News: Investigation Reveals Environmental Dangers in America’s Toxic Prisons.” 16 June 2017.

https://eji.org/news/investigation-reveals-environmental-dangers-in-toxic-prisons/

Evans, Brad and Henry A. Giroux. Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle. City Lights Books. 2015.

Flood the System. “Infographic: Prisons and Climate Change,” Flood the System.

Gotsch, Kara and Vinay Basti. “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons,” The Sentencing Project. 2 August 2018.

Greenfield, Nicole. “The Connection Between Mass Incarceration and Environmental Justice,” NRDC. 19 January 2018.

https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/connection-between-mass-incarceration-and-environmental-justice

LeRoy, Carri J; Kelli Bush, Joslyn Trive, and Briana Gallagher. “Suitability in Prisons ProjectL An Overview (2004–12),” Washington State Department of Corrections & The Evergreen State College. 2013.

http://sustainabilityinprisons.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Overview-cover-text-reduced-size.pdf

Lorie, Julia. “30 Percent of California’s Forest Firefighters Are Prisoners,” Mother Jones. 14 August 2015.

30 Percent of California’s Forest Firefighters Are Prisoners

Rakia, Raven. “A sinking jail: The environmental disaster that is Rikers Island,” Grist. 15 March 2016.

https://grist.org/justice/a-sinking-jail-the-environmental-disaster-that-is-rikers-island/

Sabalow, Ryan. “These California inmates risked death to fight wildfires. After prison, they’re left behind,” The Sacramento Bee. 23 July 2020.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article244286777.html

The Sentencing Project, “Issues: Felony Disenfranchisement,”

https://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/felony-disenfranchisement/

Taiwo, Olufemi O. “Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis,” Dissent Magazine. 12 August 2020.

Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis

Tsolkas, Panagioti. “Prisoners File Unprecedented Environmental Lawsuit against Proposed Federal Prison in Kentucky,” Nation Inside. 7 December 2018.

https://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/posts/prisoners-file-unprecedented- environmental-lawsuit-against-proposed-federal-prison-in-kentucky/

Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, 21. 2018.

Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. University of Minnesota Press. 2018.

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b

Further Questions:

How does the prison industrial complex affect other communities–such as Latin-x communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and women? What can we say about intersectionality and the prison industrial complex?
If prisons are abolished, what about social safety? Is investing in the community and social welfare programs really a more dignified, effective solution?
What does a “Marshall Plan”-like economic aid look like for social inequalities, or for climate change initiatives? How would this money get handled?
Even if prisons are reformed, to the extent that living and working conditions are improved, and prisoners are not recruited into the front lines of climate change clean up, what is there to say about neoliberal privatized police and prisons, as climate change continues to increasingly effect the way we live?
Is climate change the next big shift in policing and incarceration? How does this tie directly into capitalism and, even, racism?
Is an universal, all-inclusive climate change discourse possible?

“Geology, Race, and Matter” by Kathryn Yusoff

Core Text:

Yussoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018.

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b#ch01

Summary:

The discourses of the Anthropocene and of geology have embedded within them language and histories of racism that complicate legitimate understandings of climate justice. In her chapter “Geology, Race, and Matter,” Kathryn Yussoff describes the issues with using these words in the movement against climate change. Yussoff presents an archeological reveal of the relationship between mineralogy and racism (corporealism), showing how colonial deterritorialization, dehumanization and slave labor all extended from the interest in property. Based in the root preoccupation with property, cultivation and destruction of the world go hand-in-hand with racial injustice.

Yussoff’s main objective is to expose this relationship, so that there can be a narrative that refuses to overlook the embedded injustices in climate change discourse and to assist in the establishment of a clear praxis of climate justice. Essential to this project is the determination of “the human” and “the inhuman” social legacies that fuse the historical anthropos of the Anthropocene. Failure to recognize the legacies of dehumanization based on racial social categorization and injustice is an automatic failure to see how climate change became an issue in the first place, as well as to recognize the issues preventing climate change solutions. Failure to recognize these issues maintains racial and social injustice by erasing the subjectivity and the struggle for recognition by Black people.

While unveiling Blackness from the historical categorizations of inhuman-ness, Yussoff asks readers to understand Blackness as a presence, as a counteraesthetic to white supremacy, and, as such, as an insurgence to erasure, which, altogether, break through the embedded injustices of history and language.

Questions:

1) Does recognizing the human/ inhuman dichotomy of history help keep a reminder for social justice or does it maintain an aspect of otherness? Is a postracial “we” ever possible?

2) If geology and subjectivity are relational, as Yussof demonstrates, does climate change justice entail a push for a reformation of “selfhood”? Does this ultimately change our economic and political organizations?

3) What does solidarity look like for Yussof in the face of climate change? How does language affect the chances of solidarity?

Additional Sources:

McKibben, Bill. “Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues,” The

New Yorker. June 4, 2020.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/racism-police-violence-and-the-climate-are-not-separate-issues

Climate change specialist Bill McKibben compares climate change with police brutality and determines that they lead to similar effects on black bodies. As black bodies are more susceptible to stress brought on by social injustices, such as financial inequality and police surveillance, increased allostatic loads for black bodies often leave them more susceptible to biological disorders. McKibben analogizes having a violent police force in your neighborhood to having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood: they destroy the body and toxify everything. McKibben continues to say that organized crime, partisan profit-oriented politics, support for oil companies, and climate denial, all still fueling during the COVID-19 pandemic, are all conditions that uphold the structures of social and racial injustice. Through these details and comparisons, McKibben allows readers to understand the biopolitics of black bodies in the U.S. that leaves them more prone to the troubles of climate change and less protected by governments.

Godfrey, Phoebe C.. “Introduction: Race, Gender & Class and Climate Change,” Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (2012), pp. 3-11

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43496857?seq=1

Pheobe Godfrey encourages analytical frameworks that help in understanding the interrelations between social inequalities and environmental problems. Modeling analysis on frameworks that are bigger than the limited scope of traditional individualist subjectivities, Godfrey’s work incorporates a true interdisciplinary approach that includes critical social theory, Buddhist spirituality, and ancient cosmology, to name a few, to address social injustices embedded within climate change discourse. The big issue for Godfrey is determining the “we” in climate change solutions. For Godrey, the “we” cannot be achieved for climate change solutions, until social inequalities of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, and other differences are sorted out first.

Nieves, Evelyn and Ilana Cohen, et al. “There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice,” 12 June 2020;

There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice

Given the current convergence of COVID-19 and the BLM protests, there has been a significant rise in the concerns of climate justice and racial justice and how they are related. This article brings together the interrelated structures of racial injustice and climate injustice. Gathering the individual and collective support of climate change organizations, such as the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunset Movement, this article highlights that climate change activism cannot begin without correcting racial injustice first.

Reaching the Grassroots across the World: Suffering as Motive for Global Climate Justice

In his essay “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities,” Paul Routledge emphasizes the significance of transcending personal and spatial limitations by widening basic conceptions of solidarity, particularly as it pertains to climate justice and climate-related conditions of hegemonic structures, so as to posit achievable means to alternative models for just and efficient co-habitation.

Touching on capitalism’s structural “accumulation by dispossession,” especially in contrast to factors such as “food sovereignty,” Routledge’s essay harks on the understanding that the current climate system already works translocally but by the means of exploitation of resources and of peoples. The political counter-power rests, therefore, in the people affected by these exploitations.

But which people? How are they affected? These questions may not be able to be answered by those functioning at the top of the hegemonic power structures, but rather, the answers to these questions, too, emerge from below, from the people affected by the injustices. There are differences between peoples and differences between consequential climate injustices.

Image by Sam-Lund Harket

https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2018/nov/19/climate-justice-and-extinction

Routledge writes:

[A] key issue concerning the forging of meaningful solidarities is how the

network’s ‘imaginary’ is visualized and developed at the grassroots: how to construct

senses of shared (or ‘tolerant’) identities (della Porta 2005) concerning climate justice

amongst very different place‐based communities. This will require the co‐recognition and

internalization of others’ struggles in a ‘global’ community. In part this must be based on

shared values and principles (common ground) concerning economic and political justice

and ecological sustainability (9).

Local, cultural and linguistic differences may pose further limitations, but, as Routledge supports, co-recognition and solidarity based through chains of equivalence can be the starting point of a power that rises against the hegemony at the strings of climate change. Routledge believes that climate justice networks can be formed from this starting point and can develop a medium through which local place-based and group-based concerns can be acknowledged and implemented.

Determining an “imaginary” of the network, as Routledge describes it, relies, at root, on the basis of shared values and principles. This inevitably roots the issue in discourse; but through discourse, what is at heart of the issue can extend beyond discourse, into practical and effective bonding for social change. As Rob Leurs explains, Laclau’s and Mouffe’s “chain of equivalence” provides a discursive practice that goes beyond essentialism, without turning things into eclecticism. Meaning of the issue may be subjective to local groups, but meaning from the issue, as it is agonistic to hegemonic injustices, becomes grounds for solidarity translocally.

Upon first reading, Routledge’s essay appears a bit dense in build-up of referential discourse on the challenges and pathways to solidarity; but further analysis has me wondering whether communication technologies (such as social media) could facilitate climate justice network models and whether third spaces and fourth spaces could produce alternative effects through changing cultural structures and avenues to access of information and participation. Routledge believes that the imaginary must begin at the grassroots, but how is a grassroots accurately conceptualized without linguistic and cultural conventions? We end up at de-contextualized values and principles that discursively operate as a mode of charged symbolic meaning-for (for justice) in order to reach a meaning-from (from structural change). The core grassroot non-distinction, therefore, is a matter of mutual impressions of suffering.

Leurs, Rob. “The ‘chain of equivalence’. Cultural studies and Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory,” Politics and Culture. Issue 4. NOVEMBER 9, 2009.

https://politicsandculture.org/2009/11/09/the-chain-of-equivalence-cultural-studies-and-laclau-mouffes-discourse-theory/

To ignore or not to ignore?…There is no question

Stengers encourages her audience to see beyond the superficial fallback excuses and typical ways of viewing the problems of the climate crisis. She invites us to catch common phrases which do us no good, but rather keep us in different forms of division. She sees the consistent default being that there is no confidence in “the guardians,” there is no choice, there are no alternatives (save the “infernal alternatives,” resulting in different forms of division).

Her sharp terms “cold panic,” “infernal alternatives” play on the situation as metacommentary on the climate crisis. They operate in the rhetoric of the climate crisis, and, by such a way, remind us of the layered political issues that result from the debates.

In her chapter on capitalism, Stengers writes that an idea or party will mobilize, claiming to transcend the conflicts and unite everyone. She writes: “I anticipate and equally dread such appeals to sacred unity and the accusations of betrayal that automatically accompany them” (57). Alliances, as she sees them, are inevitable. I follow Stengers by adding that choice of alliance, it seems, could fall on minor issues, but, with the current lack of accurate information, access, and trust, the general arguments seem stuck on the topical surface—is climate change really happening? what do we call this climate issue? Etc.

Image by Garry Knight

Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

In his article “Will Climate Change Destroy Democracy?,” Damon Linker writes: “There’s an oddly apolitical character to most of our talk about environmental threats… Arguably the problem of politics is getting individuals and groups in a given political community to put aside their own self-interest in favor of the common good.”

Linker’s argument meshes well with Stengers’s understanding of what is actually going on with climate change issues. We are stuck in the theory side of “climate change”–remote, inaccessible, and, therefore, apolitical. The “right to not to pay attention,” as Stengers calls it, is deeply protected by default from these conditions. This right being upheld leads to incremental corruption, further instability, and an inability to trace where it all went wrong (Povitkina). The right to not pay attention to climate change stems from “the guardians'” policy of not paying attention to citizens: it has become a mutual looking away.

The point, however, is to understand what does not work, in order to fix the issue—capitalism, the impossibility of “meddling with” governance by asking questions (55), lack of clarity and trust in leadership…

Fair, efficient assemblage on the climate crisis has been foreclosed for a long time, but it is Stengers’s hope that with open interactive questions and with reconceptualizations of “the guardians” as human, citizens as participants affected, and of capitalism as an evil spirit preventing unity and stability, collaborative efforts to mitigate panic and to establish a proactive defense against climate change and political risk-offsetting could be achieved.

Stengers’s underlying message could be read as a call for a true, active democratization of climate crisis discussions. Her chapters here advance the discourse by demonstrating alternative ways to seeing oneself (whether “guardian” or citizen) in the space of climate change discourse and participation.

References:

Linker, Damon. “Will Climate Change Destroy Democracy?” The Week.

https://theweek.com/articles/839648/climate-change-destroy-democracy

Povitkina, Marina. “Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era,” E-International Relations. 6 May 2020.

Reflecting on Democracy, Corruption and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

A “Convenient” Model: Gore’s Behavioral Approach to the Climate Crisis

Perhaps the underscored theme in the film An Inconvenient Truth is hope. But it is a certain kind of hope, a hope that is entrenched in perseverance and commitment. While Al Gore’s lectures all around the world seem heavily pronounced with this hope, despite the “inconvenient truth” of global warming, the tonal aspects of the film ultimately function as an accordion playing out signals for hope and alarm for the audience.

Al Gore, a quintessential underdog who has travelled all around the world, in order to save the world; for decades, doing the same work and improving upon it, even as time reveals more damage around the world from global warming; persisting, even when the naysayers call him a “hoax” or a threat to American society; he preserveres in his commitment and rings tirelessly the alarm bells of a “moral issue,” “not a political one,” all while reminding his audience that they have a choice and humankind can do anything, even the unthinkable, even the impossible.

Al Gore in 2007 discussing the impact humanity has had on the planet’s ecosystem. LLUIS GENE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The film’s incessant framing of Gore as a hero can be distracting to the significant messages in the film, such as the damaging effects of 2005’s hurricanes, the loss of polar bears , the increasing heat over the current years , and major potential disasters arising for Beijing and Calcutta. At each circumstance, I am waiting for more information, left with questions. What measures are being drawn up to prevent these issues? What new technologies could help us gain “dramatically altered consequences”?

But, at the same time, despite the film getting nowhere close to any resolve for any of these issues, it is, essentially, this certain hope of Al Gore that is to set the precedent for global warming awareness-raising. It is Gore’s universal commitment that is emphasized in the film. He travels the world, seeks out scientists, has been involved for decades, he thinks about the future. In some way, Gore is the “hero” of the [first wave of] climate crisis attention.

An Inconvenient Truth, despite its shortcomings or its conceits, ultimately presents a model for a behavioral approach to climate crisis: stick to truth, and stay with it, because, no matter what you may lose, nothing compares to losing the planet.

For more, check out: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/conservationists/inconvenient-truth-sequel-al-gore.htm

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change

MALS 78500 Summer 2020 Dr. Kaitlin Mondello