Continuations in Carbon Democracy

This week, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy and my previous job at the Pachamama Alliance, a San Francisco-based NGO dedicated to eradicating oil companies from indigenous occupied land in Ecuador. Mitchell detaches our understanding of democracy as part of a social history, and reattaches the idea of democracy to processes of coal and oil exchange. The idea of democracy, or a more distributed social power, was enacted when coal miners found that they could locate and manipulate areas for effective disruption in coal production. I’ve attached here a long quote, just because I think it summarizes pretty well the first part of Mitchell’s argument:

“Despite such limits and setbacks, working people in the industrialised West acquired a power that would have seemed impossible before the late nineteenth century. The rise of large industry had exposed populations to extraordinary forms of social insecurity, physical risk, overwork and destitution. But the concentration and movement of coal required to drive those industrial processes had created a vulnerability. Workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a class culture, collective ideology or political organization, but by the increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined, loaded, carried, stoked an out to work. The coordinated acts of interrupting, slowing down or diverting its movement created a decisive political machinery, a new form of collective capability built out of coalmines, railways, power stations, and their operators. More than a mere social movement, this socio-technical agency was put to work for a series of democratic claims whose gradual implementation radically reduced the precariousness of life in industrial societies.” (Mitchell 2011: 27)

This quote is so interesting to me because for Mitchell other ways we have come to understand social ties (class culture, collective ideology, political organization) are de-emphasized while labor around carbon energy is brought into the foreground—this is the primary social tie for Mitchell. I wonder whether the other social ties can really be seen as “weak” compared to the social ties created in labor around coal, or rather another part of it. Although it makes a lot of sense that a certain vision or use of the concept of democracy is strongly attached to energy trade, does it mean that every use of the concept of democracy should trace an attachment to energy trade? Is that what Mitchell is arguing?

Apart from these questions, I found that the idea of democracy attached to energy was interesting to apply to the Pachamama Aliance. The Pachamama Alliance is both an environmental and human rights protection NGO based in the U.S. The NGO does well—bringing in more than a million dollars each year—so the issue of battling large oil corporations does resonant with some audiences. They have been in operation for more than 20 years. I worked for them for about a year after finishing college, and I felt perpetually intrigued and confused by their motivations. So, maybe I will gain some clarification by analyzing the organization through the lens of Carbon Democracy. J

On the Pachamama Alliance website, under the tabs of “Amazon Advocacy” and “Oil-Free Amazon”, there is a blurb speaking to potential donors of the importance of interfering with oil companies’ plans to extract oil from the “pristine rainforest” (http://www.pachamama.org/advocacy/oil-free-amazon). There is next a video clip of the President of the indigenous Achuar Nation speaking directly to the camera, and addressing potential friends of the cause. Directly below this video there is this message:

“You Were Born for This Moment

Yes, this moment-the one full of environmental, social, and spiritual crises. It's your opportunity to live one of the most meaningful lives in history.”

The Pachamama Alliance are asking here for support in their services, which are to assist Achuar and Ecuador people in navigating the legal system to resist oil companies finding ways to enter into governmental agreements allowing them to extract oil from rainforest land. The Pachamama Alliance, I feel, are essentially enacting the concept/use of democracy in the same way that coal miners would (by disrupting flow of production), but I feel that the justification for doing it is very different. They are speaking to values of environmental protection, social justice, and an idea of spirituality that is connected to protecting the environment and each other.

In another post, the organization refers to their work as “inherent to democracy”, and so there is a another connection to the use of democracy in opposition to oil production:

“Dissenting to government policies and defending constitutional rights are inherent to democracy and we are not willing to give up their exercise. We consider this position to be coherent with the mission of our organization, therefore we reject any act that seeks to impede or make our work difficult.” (http://www.pachamama.org/news/government-of-ecuador-shuts-down-fundacion-pachamama)

I thought it was interesting to see the ways in which disruption of oil production is still being done in the name of democracy, and also what different actors are involved in the process, and why.

One additional point of comparison I forgot to address is the racialization of Pachamama’s activism. Mitchell talks about the racialization of labor in energy production, and I thought that this idea could be applied to oil opposition as well. In Pachamama’s video you see that environment and spirituality are racialized in attachement to the Achuar people, and the protectors (donors) are generally understood as members of “First world” nations.

Who’s protected:

Who’s protecting: