Interweaving #25 - Thinking Beyond Settler Systems
Aerial view of Azure Mountain Power, St. Regis Falls, NY. (Photo: Samuel H. Bailey)
In this episode, we feature a roundtable discussion about the intersection of settler colonialism, ecological responsibility, and the rights of nature in northern New York/Haudenosaunee territory and beyond. In addition to exploring the past and present reality of dams and energy issues in the region, the conversation addresses broader ethical questions about how to move beyond our current system of extractive capitalism.
Host: Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo
Guests: John Collins, Blake Lavia, Emmett Smith
Featured in this episode
Talking Wings collective
https://talking-wings.com/
North Country Rights of Nature Symposium
https://nocoenvironment.org/rights-of-nature
Northern Power & Light
https://www.npandl.com/
NY State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC)
https://www.dec.ny.gov/
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
https://www.ferc.gov/
Candis Callson and Mary Lynn Young, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford University Press, 2020)
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190067076.001.0001/oso-9780190067076
John Trudell
https://www.johntrudell.com/
Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/inter-nationalism
Curt Stager research on Native American historical presence in the Adirondacks
https://www.adirondacklife.com/2017/10/05/hidden-heritage/
Transcript
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Thank you everyone for joining us on this conversation about our ecological responsibility, our ecological duty. In this conversation, we will tackle the themes of settler colonialism, rights of nature, and our environmental future, among others.
To join us in this conversation, we have John Collins, the Editorial Director of the Weave News. We're also joined by Emmett Smith, one of the founders of Northern Power and Light, and by Blake Lavia, part of the collective of Talking Wings, a storytelling environmental collective. I, myself, am Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo, and I am also part of Talking Wings, and I will just serve as one of the co-weavers, tellers, of this story, asking the questions.
To start off, I'm going to ask each and every one of our amazing panelists to share a little bit about themselves, to answer, why do you do the work that you do? To start off with, I'm going to start with John Collins.
John Collins: Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me to be part of this conversation. I'm a university professor. But my work with Weave News is really grounded in a commitment that I have, which is to independent journalism. And I believe that in any society, there's a need for independent voices that are not, let's say, driven by the need for corporate profit, voices that can represent as effectively as possible the concerns of ordinary people, the stories that maybe they're not hearing about on the corporate media outlets and so forth. So more broadly, I guess I would say that I've always been committed to helping people, including myself, begin to unthink some of the things that we take for granted about the world. And I think that independent media can play a really important role in doing that.
Emmett Smith: I'm Emmett Smith, and what Northern Power and Light does is that we connect electricity users directly with local resources. I came to this from my family background in small hydro ownership and operation of a couple of very small little plants on Adirondack rivers. And I think we've been learning, as we've moved into this way of serving customers directly, we've sort of learned what the purpose of that really is. And I think it's about connecting people to their communities, to their resources, and building resilient communities in the process. Giving people authentic choices that that allow them to be conscious of their energy use and be conscious of where that energy is coming from and be directing their energy use and their energy expense and their philosophical ideas towards resources that are sustainable for their community.
Blake Lavia: Hello everybody. My name is Blake Lavia and I'm part of the Talking Wings collective. We are a collective of storytellers and we work through the media of filmmaking, illustration, and also writing, poetry and literature. And our work in the last two years has been mainly focused on the future of our environment, particularly the North Country, northern New York environment, Haudenosaunee territory. Talking Wings has been organizing in collaboration with the Weave several symposiums and panel discussions that want to spark conversation in the local communities about what we want for the future of this area.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Thank all of you so much for joining us, for your introductions. And now, before we continue with our conversation, I'm going to step back to acknowledge that we are right now speaking, all of us joining together, and Kanien’keha:ka Mohawk territory, the territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. And this is a land that was stolen violently through genocide and land theft, and what is now being called Canton, New York by the settler colonial communities. And in acknowledging this past, acknowledging this history, we also knowledge our present, our present in which violence is continually being committed against indigenous nations, nations around the world, original people who are protecting their land against this extractivist, capitalist economy.
And stepping from that acknowledgement into the conversation we're about to have today, I personally acknowledge my own positionality as a settler on this territory. And to begin this conversation speaking with all of you, I would love to know, how do you all navigate your own positionality in doing the work that you do, living on this stolen land and in a stellar colonial society?
John Collins: That's a fundamental question. It's a very deep question that requires a lot of reflection, I guess I would say. And it's been a long process of reflection for me that's ongoing in terms of understanding what it means to be a member of a settler community in a settler colonial, colonized territory.
So my understanding of these issues came through and continues to come through my engagement with a different part of the world, which is Palestine, where I've done a lot of research. And really it was through my work in Palestine and writing about the Palestinian liberation struggle that I came to learn about settler colonialism as a global phenomenon that has shaped all aspects of the modern world. And it was only through that, that I began to really think about the land that I occupy and the land that I grew up on and the political community that I grew up as a part of in the United States and what it means to be a settler in that context. And more recently I've been very influenced by the work of people like Steven Salaita, who insists that those of us who express solidarity with Palestinians from the settler colonial United States have a special responsibility to turn our lenses inward and not only say, oh, the problem is, you know, with the colonization of Palestine over there. There are very similar processes that have happened, that continue to happen here. There are material connections between those processes that have to do with people profiting from weapons and securitization and all those kinds of things. So I feel implicated in all of this as an American citizen, as a taxpayer, and as somebody who is committed to trying as much as possible to contribute to a different kind of future that's as decolonial as possible.
Emmett Smith: Yeah. It is a very challenging question. I mean, I would start just by acknowledging also that I occupy land and benefit from it, both in the moment and generationally. And as to how that impacts the way I live and my work, it starts, well it's sort of personal and professional for me. I don't want to go too deep into both, I guess, but I mean, my family first came here to Fort Jackson near Hopkinton as part of an early wave of settlers in the early 19th century that were really part of that initial displacement of those communities. And thinking about that, becoming more and more conscious of that, in the last 20 years really has been a continual process of shifting that historical narrative in my background from one of essentially pride to something that is much more complicated and much darker and carries much different implications for how we live on this land now, because we are continuing to live on it. With regard to energy, my family's power plant in St. Regis Falls was built on the St. Regis River, which we now know thanks to a lot of great archeological work in the Adirondacks, some by Dr. Curt Stager at Paul Smith's College, that that was a migratory pathway for the Mohawk. We used to think that the Mohawk did not live in the Adirondacks, and it turns out that is not true. That is sort of a narrative that was concocted, I suppose, by earlier generations of colonial historians. I think it's partly a bit of a dodge. It sort of allows us Adirondackers to exclude ourselves from the colonial project in a way that is not justifiable. But we all live with the legacies of that displacement in different ways. The dam in St. Regis Falls obviously changed the nature of that area drastically. It was the center of the town of St. Regis Falls. The town was built there because the dam was built there, and it was built there for timber, for logging. And it was obviously instrumental in the clear cutting of that area in the late 19th century.
So there's a lot of difficult, toxic legacies that have brought us to where we are now. And it doesn't mean that the operations cannot be made sustainable in the moment. But I think it's incumbent on us to be better at connecting with and communicating with the descendants of the displaced peoples. You know, I'm a descendant of the colonialists, of the ones who benefited from this, and I continue to benefit from it. And the way I think about it with St. Regis Falls is, you know, we have this dam which we are responsible for maintaining based on the regulatory and legal structure that we're currently within, which is obviously a colonial creation. But it's incumbent on us to do our best to coordinate with and learn from the indigenous people that are also on this river. And in the case of the St Regis, the Akwesasne reservation is just downstream. And actually, there was a dam there, which they removed. And so they have an interest in restoring aquatic connectivity to the St. Regis watershed in a way that has not been able to exist for many generations. And you know, we want to be part of that project as much as we can.
There's some question about whether there is a natural waterfall downstream of our dam, which would be a barrier to aquatic connectivity. But that's just sort of the kind of thing where it's sort of like you know, let's look at this, this community that still exists, that has the more difficult side of this legacy, and what are their priorities for this river now, and how can we work with them to achieve their goals in the moment while looking holistically at the environment that we're part of. It's complicated because with the case of a dam it's a responsibility that I have, which has sort of two components in my mind. One component is very concrete and legal, you know, I'm required to do X, Y, and Z by various regulatory agencies as the steward of this piece of critical infrastructure. But that sometimes pulls me in the opposite direction of my responsibility to the people and the ecology and the history. So there's always a tension there. And with so many things regarding our toxic histories of settler colonialism, the tension is sometimes just where you have, to live and you have to do your best to be in that moment, and, you know, doing the best that you can without looking for ways out of that discomfort.
Blake Lavia: So it is a very complicated question, particularly because I moved to the United States about 10 years ago at this point. So my Process of dealing with this land and this environment and the people, the colonial society which I do inhabit, and the native communities has been a huge learning process since I did not belong to either of the cultures. And a new process has started during my college years in SUNY Potsdam, when little by little I started studying the history of the natural environment, particularly with the Puritan colonization of the United States. And that gave me the framework, little by little, to understand the society I had come to inhabit and to understand what happened to another world that was defined like this "virgin land" and to the people that inhabited this supposed "virgin land."
So this is how I have inhabited, like I have lived here in this, in the colonial society of New York state and Massachusetts as well. Like trying to understand and learn the history of the environment and the people that live there and understand what was my impact regarding the resources I come to use and give for granted. So it's been like trying to figure out where do I belong in a reality that's very complex and where I did not grow up, and trying to understand at this point as a citizen of the world as I consider myself, how, here, in this moment in time, in contact with these two different communities, I can make a positive impact that will not just influence this area, but will be beneficial for the whole world.
Because somebody might tell me, why are you so involved in caring for the waters and the people and the land of northern New York, Haudenosaunee territory where like, you're not from here, why are you here, trying to meddle? I don't think I'm necessarily meddling. But I feel like the Great Lake area that is very close to here, one hour from here, we have Lake Ontario, the beginning of it just where it branches out into the St. Lawrence, the great river. The Great Lake region holds 21% of the drinking water of the planet. So I think me being here now, coming all the way from Europe, working to protect this environment comes as a responsibility in the sense that not only we need to protect it here, now, for this generation, the future generations, and for the huge migration that this area is going to see with the crisis, but also for the whole world. Because if we lose this water, if we pollute this water, we are all globally going to suffer. So this is how I navigate my responsibility as understanding my role, understanding the societies I live in, and trying to make the best for what I can see there it is global reality that is in a crisis.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: I want to thank you all for your beautiful and powerful answers, thought provoking answers. The question was a hard one. And in dealing with our responsibility with the world that we all face, it's always a struggle to decide how best to take a step forward in a society, in a structure like you all mentioned is built upon violence, is built upon a settler colonial driven narrative, and continues to perpetrate that violence.
And in taking this next step forward in our conversation, I wanted to bring us to a topic that is engulfing the region and which is bringing different communities together from across that region. Just as Emmett, you mentioned how it is necessary to engage. You are talking about a stream, a river, you're talking about the aquatic connectivity of river. We also talk about the cultural connectivity of that river. The river connects us, the waters connect us. And in this connection, we are beginning the conversation about how to give rights of nature, legal, civil rights-type rights to the natural world. Specifically speaking, how to give rights of nature to the St Lawrence River watershed or to the Adirondack watersheds.
In that process, we have engaged in multiple conversations everywhere from the Adirondacks all the way to Akwesasne. But I would like for Blake to give a little overview of that work and the rights of nature movement.
Blake Lavia: So the rights of nature movement is not necessarily a new movement, it started in the seventies. But we have seen in the last few years an increase of interest, and the law has been applied both in United States and worldwide, so it's a movement that's growing. And I think it stems from the fact that more and more people are realizing that the laws that are in place and that supposedly are there to protect our environment are flawed. They mainly give permission to big corporations to exploit and destroy further instead of really protecting. So I think the rights of nature movement, I see it as a natural evolution. People are seeing that their environment is in danger and is not respected. So it could be just the step we need to give it personhood rights. After all, like over the last 100 and more years we have given personhood to people that would not have been thought like slaves were not considered people, and yet to the certain point we gave them personhood. And now luckily, for the most part, we all have equal rights. Also women were considered property, and then at a certain point, we said no, they're not property anymore. And now we all, for the most part, have equal rights. And the same, I think, we can start considering for nature because after all, these are the environments that host us. And they should have equal rights, rights of standing in court if their livelihood and the livelihood of all these pieces that inhabit them is in danger.
So starting from this idea, Talking Wings and Weave News came together and we decided to bring the possibility of creating ordinances or starting the process of giving rights to the St. Lawrence River watershed or the Adirondacks watersheds and bring this conversation to the local communities. So we had this past March 22nd the North Country Rights of Nature Symposium. And during the symposium we brought stakeholders from all over the New York region, particularly the northern New York region from the Adirondacks to the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. We discussed together the possibility of enacting the rights of nature in this area. And not everybody came at it with the rights of nature focus. Most people didn't even quite know what it was or couldn't quite grasp it, but nonetheless, the discussion has started. And after that, with a group from the community, we have been working on drafting an ordinance imagining the language that we would use to protect the rivers of the North Country, Haudenosaunee territory.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Emmett, you approached us, you approached Talking Wings because you wanted to be part of the conversation and have since been pivotal in helping, guiding the conversation forward. Want to share a little bit about your experience engaging in this conversation?
Emmett Smith: Appropriately, it was one of my customers that sent me the notice of one of your meetings just a couple months ago. It hasn't been that long. And I joined just to find out what it was about, and I'm glad you think my input has been valuable since it was not something that I had been thinking of directly before, the rights of nature. But I find it a compelling legal framework that kind of brings together a number of different problems that I see in the way our river systems are currently governed. As I was saying before, I'm sort of like beholden to and complicit in a lot of regulatory regimes that I don't necessarily feel that I agree with. I will say that the law is not my favorite tool really for social change, but I think that the rights of nature is sort of more than a legal idea. It's a bigger shift in how we think of rivers. You know, traditional property rights sort of section the rivers up into little bits and pieces. And, you know, the river is essentially managed by the management of the property rights of different people along it. That doesn't take into account the whole system either ecologically or socially.
So two different threads that are coming together here for me are, you know, we're noticing more and more that we've fragmented these ecologies in a way that isn't natural. Whether or not those ecosystems are healthy as sort of another question, but it's certainly not the way the river system had been. And we've also fragmented our communities, you know, talking about the displacement of native peoples and, you know, they're at their end of their river and I'm at my end of the river and there's nothing in law and very little even in culture that suggests that I'm supposed to have any relationship with them, even though we're constantly connected by this stream of water that sustains both of us. And I think that's a problem. And I think that the rights of nature, by compelling us to look at the whole river system, both ecologically and socially, it can help reestablish those connections.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Thank you so so much. And going off of that, you mentioned of course that the legal system that we have now is not your favorite tool to use, to shift or challenge a settler colonial society. And in looking at that, of course, rights of nature exist within the settler colonial paradigm. You use a settler colonial law for the most part, even though it's a step forward in trying to honor the reciprocal relationship we all have the natural world, like you mentioned, in breaking away from the concept that nature is property, that natural ecosystems are property owned by quote unquote humans, and go to the point that the nature, no, is a relative. It's another member of our community.
John, you have studied settler colonialism around the world, specifically focused on Palestine, but also elsewhere. How do you view the rights of nature project functioning within the settler colonial paradigm as we attempt to shift away from settler colonial law?
John Collins: Well, it seems to me like opening up a space where one can debate the nature of the law itself, where it comes from, whose interests it represents, what it can accomplish, what it can't accomplish, opening up a conversation for that strikes me as essential to the larger process of dismantling and unlearning and unthinking all sorts of things associated with settler colonialism.
So speaking for myself as somebody who you know, grew up a settler on this land and whose education is very much grounded in what's called, you know, sort of the Western tradition, right? The enlightenment and, you know, where these ideas about individual rights come from and so forth. And so, you know, growing up the law was the law. It's like, there's this thing, it's called "the Law," capital L, right? And you don't really think that much about where it comes from and so forth.
And so then there's been a whole process for me, I think, like for many people, of becoming aware of what the law is, where it comes from, the fundamental role that colonization played in establishing the law itself through imposing regimes of private property as Emmett was talking about, and then beginning to understand the role that private interests in general play in establishing the law, but then also maintaining it, giving it its veneer of objectivity and inevitability, right?
So for me there's a whole series of steps that have to happen so that we can get to the point where we can completely unthink all of that. And I'm finding the conversation today really interesting because it seems to me like in the same way that water systems are essential to life, we can think the same way about information, right, and media, and trying to recognize the ways in which private interests have fragmented information flows and have established certain patterns in who controls information. And so if you go back to the 1960s and seventies with the Non-Aligned Movement globally, there were efforts at the international level with the United Nations and so forth to establish rights to information. And of course that was resisted in many, in many ways, by some of the dominant Western powers for reasons that I think we could probably connect with some of these other aspects of the topic we're discussing today. So yeah, there's a lot of connections to be made here, but for me, it all comes back to this question of how do we begin to dismantle and think outside the structures that settler colonialism has established and naturalized.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Thank you so, so much John. Following along that same river of thought to private property, it's been mentioned before, we've all discussed private property, how it relates to rights of nature, how it relates to the settler colonial project, how it relates to how we consider even ourselves, how we interpellate ourselves within this current reality. We know that the colonization of this land happened parallel to the partitioning of, again, this land into parcels. We can look to the 1785 ordinance that was authored by Thomas Jefferson in which every six miles is divided up into 36 parcels of 640 meters. And from there on, we can say that everything has been more and more divided, more and more commodified, and this has also served as tools for colonization. Following that, we all have to engage in private property to exist in a capitalist society. There's no real way to live outside of it, there is, but it's very, very hard.
And I was going to turn the conversation to Emmett. You've spoken very eloquently about how you position yourself and also the industry where you work in this context. But to make a living, you need to sell energy, and you're selling the energy of the river itself. How do you view this work that you do? How do you balance out the need to exist within this property driven system and your intention to shift it?
Emmett Smith: Well, that really is the question, isn't it? And I think it's a subset of a bigger question that I struggle with every day, which is like, how do you use the tools of capitalism to solve the problems that were created by capitalism, you know? And when I say the word capitalism, I'm particularly thinking of late 20th century capital driven market economics. And there's a lot in there about what is and isn't capitalism. I don't think necessarily that anything that involves the exchange of money is capitalism.
But to look at electricity specifically, I mean, electricity was absolutely complicit in the creation of this particularly exploitative and destructive version of capital driven economic expansion in the 20th century. And a big part of what electricity accomplished for that new social and economic order was to allow people to have an essentially unlimited source of power without having had any connection to our responsibility for where it came from. You know, electricity, you can send mode of power long distances instantaneously. You plug in your whatever in your house and you have access to that power, but you don't have any connection to where it came from, to what the resources that went into it were, to what the consequences of its production might've been, or even mostly to who you're really buying it from.
In this area, the first electricity systems were actually very local. Paul Smith's Electric Light and Power Company was like a five-town utility based on hydro built by Paul Smith. And it was sort of a local business and there was more of a connection to resources. And I think that this most toxic promise of economic expansion in the last 80 years has been, you know, you can have whatever you want and you don't have to worry about the consequences of it. And I think that electricity is very complicit in creating that misunderstanding, which we now know was a big misunderstanding. We are all living with the consequences on a global scale, and to start to undo that, we have to become more conscious of what our choices mean and where the resources we rely on are coming from.
And so what Northern Power and Light has done is basically to take independent hydro generators, which in this region have been decoupled from their communities by economic and regulatory changes over the last 60 years, and reconnecting them directly with users. So now I am paid by people in my community who have chosen to source their energy from me. And in most cases, they've chosen to do that as a part of the process of making their lives more understandable and more sustainable and becoming aware of those things they've been told they didn't have to care about for so long.
So I think it becomes part of a very pro-social project. You know, it's not to say that I'm undoing all of the harms that were caused when the dam was made or through the displacement of indigenous communities. But I think it's a big part of making our world now more sustainable. And I wouldn't be here having this conversation if I hadn't done that too. I mean, it's not just a solution for the consumer, but it's making me, as an operator of this facility, more responsive to and more aware of all of these issues.
A big part of my dissatisfaction with the regulatory regime has come essentially from my community. From an environmental perspective, we're basically regulated by the DEC, which I always sort of felt good about, you know, they're the Department of Environmental Conservation, their job is to make sure that the ecology is healthy and that we're doing our part for that. But a lot of the feedback I got from the community was that they don't particularly trust the DEC in that role. And I'm not a scientist enough to say whether they are or are not doing the best job that they can, but it does force me to acknowledge my role in whatever the result of their choices is. And it makes me responsive to the community in that way. So there's kind of a global and a local ecological and environmental benefit. And one of the things that's most compelling to me about the rights of nature is it addresses not only those things, but being indigenous led, it carries the weight of that history of settler colonialism as well and gives me some tiny pathway to try and acknowledge that history in the present.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Let's delve into a little bit of the history of dams in the North Country. I know that Emmett, you have studied this, you know a lot about this history. Could you paint a picture for us of the reality of dams currently in the North Country? For someone that comes from far away and has no conception.
Emmett Smith: Sure. Well, the Adirondacks is a mountainous region in central and northern New York and has a lot of different river systems that are flowing down out of the region that go in all directions. They go south to the Mohawk River. The Hudson River is actually one of them. They flow east to Lake Champlain, and they flow north and west to the St. Lawrence River. And when white people were first establishing settlements in that region, it was mostly for timber, but it was also for small settlements of tourists, and the waterways were the primary way of getting around in the late 18th and early 19th century because it was before railroads. And in order to make those waterways more consistent and more reliable, they built dams and they built locks to connect lakes so that they could navigate from one place to another on water.
They also built dams to float logs as they started cutting logs. They would float them down the river systems. So like our dam in St. Regis Falls was initially built sometime in the 1880s by the Brooklyn Cooperage Company, which owned the land, and they were cutting the trees and they built the dam to have a pond to float the logs down to the mill and also to provide mechanical power for the mill.
So a lot of dams were built for the timber industry, but something that most people don't realize is that the vast majority of the dams that we have now have no specific purpose now. They were built for an economic purpose a hundred years ago and were just left there. And actually the state is the biggest owner of dams. Most of the dams are on state land. Most of them are very small. And you know, they're just maintaining a water level of a lake or a pond or a stretch of the river. I'm not a total expert on this, but the basic interpretive framework of the Department of Environmental Conservation with regard to these ecosystems, is they look to see if the ecosystem, as it is, is a healthy one. And then they try to maintain it in that state, if they can, unless there's a compelling reason to make a change. So if you have a dam that was built a hundred years ago, you know, the ecology around it has adapted to its presence and you have different species living there because of it. And so it can be very disruptive to think about removing it.
Again though, that's a framework that's somewhat like property rights, where you're looking at these little sections. If you take a river, you're looking at, you know, this pond and then this stretch of rapids and this, and you're looking at whether those ecosystems are healthy without necessarily looking at the whole river system holistically. There are some river systems where they are making more of an effort to restore aquatic connectivity for specific species. But I still don't really think it quite rises to the, you know, sort of rights of nature level of considering the river system as its own entity.
The initial two waves of dam building were navigation and then timber. And that brings us up into the early 20th century when electricity generation became possible and when the need for these renewable electricity resources came into being through electrical demand and a number of dams were built for power production. The Raquette River famously is one of the most dammed rivers in the East, if not the most dammed river, and that's primarily for hydropower. The Raquette is particularly good among the Adirondack rivers, because it's very long and it has a number of big lakes at its head, which makes the flow very even so it's very good for hydropower.
And those dams were in sort of a different regulatory framework where when you built a hydro dam subsequent to the Federal Power Act in 1920, the dam is not a regular property right. It's rather a license. So it was actually Teddy Roosevelt who was a famous conservationist president, who decided that there's a compelling public interest in rivers and that people shouldn't be able to just go building dams willy-nilly and then saddling all future generations with the presence of those structures. So they created a licensing process where you basically apply to get a license, to build a dam. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has the burden to look at your plan and everything else they can find, including what local people are saying, what other state agencies might be saying, and decide whether your proposal to build a dam is on balance in the public interest. And if they say that it is, they grant you a license, typically for 40 years, but it can be as much as 60, for you to build your dam. But at the end of that license term, you have to relicense it. And they get a chance to look at everything again, and they can come to the opposite conclusion. If they want to say, you know, this dam is no longer in the public interest, you know, then they can change how you manage it or they can even have it removed.
So a lot of dams in the Adirondacks that are hydro dams were built in the early 20th century. And then they were abandoned in the mid-20th century when the consolidated power grid switched over to a more fossil fuel-based generation system. And they decided it was too much of a pain to run all these little tiny power plants that had been built by people like Paul Smith. And so they were essentially abandoned. And when my family got into hydropower was during the first oil crisis in the Carter administration, and Carter is a big fan of renewable energy. And he noticed that there were all these mothballed, broken down hydroelectric power plants, as well as dams that had never had generation at them before, but were built for some prior purpose. And they created a framework that said, anybody who wants to go out and bring a new, renewable energy resource online without creating a new dam by either using an existing dam or restoring a mothballed power plant, we'll require the utilities to buy your electricity at the rate that they're charging people basically in that community.
And that created a kind of a boom in the eighties and nineties of restoring these old hydro plants in the Adirondacks to operation. If the licenses had lapsed, a lot of them were relicensed at that time. The economics have changed drastically since then, and we used to get paid basically the same rate that the utility was charging for customers. I don't want to go into too much detail, but there have been a lot of changes to the interpretation of what that rate is. And now it's gone from, we were getting 11 cents in 2004 to the market price in our area now is about 2 cents a kilowatt hour.
So you have all these plants that are no longer economic but are still a critical part of our infrastructure as we understand it. And you also have this wave of relicensings that are going to happen. So all these plants that were granted 40-year licenses in the eighties and nineties, they're going to be relicensed in the 2020s and early 2030s. And a lot of these dams are also aging. They were either built in the early 20th century or the late 20th century, either way they're pretty old. Average age of dams in New York is like 82. So we have this real coming together of critical circumstances where you have these legacy resources that are not economic, and they're aging, they're not able to make investments. They are facing a relicensing process where if they can't show that they're economically viable, they won't be granted a license. And you have a growing community awareness of the ecological impacts of these structures. All this means really, like this is the time to have this conversation as a region about what we want from these structures. And there's clear pathways for us to have our, make our voices heard. And I think that there's also clear pathways through like what NP&L does for resources to establish community connections that would give the community even more control over those structures. And there's an urgency that we have to do it, both because we're facing a global climate catastrophe and because we have all of these structures that are, in some cases, not too far from failing. So that's the short version, believe it or not, of the history of dams in the Adirondacks, but I think it's a critical moment the key takeaway.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Just, the one more question about how the public can participate in this process. You mentioned there's different possibilities and one of them being participating in something like your work at Northern Power & Light. But what other ways can the public participate in the relicensing project process for example?
Emmett Smith: So when a dam goes through relicensing, it typically starts three to five years before the end of their license term. And there's a series of public notice requirements where FERC requires the dam owner to do community outreach and provide forums for community feedback. That's not the limit of the community's opportunity. FERC, like a lot of large regulatory bodies, can be kind of hard to find the entrance to. But basically, there is a regulatory docket for each power plant, and people can submit documents or comments to it, which will be part of FERC's review. If you are looking at the newspapers, there will be notices for the relicensings of dams. You can also go on FERC's website and look at the license terms for dams in your area. And you can see, when does the license expire, and that will let you know when that public feedback process might be beginning.
You are theoretically represented by regulatory bodies who are required to participate in these relicensings like the DEC. The power plant owner has to pay for things like environmental impact statements and environmental quality studies. And those are all reviewed by the DEC and Federal Fish and Wildlife as part of the relicensing process.
So to the extent that you, as a citizen of New York, have the ability to make your voice heard to the DEC, that's sort of another pathway, but in a way that's sort of the problem. We're all represented theoretically by these different regulatory bodies, but they can be so inaccessible that it can be hard to feel like that's really real.
With Northern Power and Light, and there's also many opportunities with solar, it's an economic participation on the one hand where you're directing your dollar towards something that you believe in instead of something that you either don't understand or don't believe in. And if the project is done right, in my mind, then that also gives you access. It gives you a compelling relationship that empowers you to shape how that project is operated and how that project is connected to the community. And I think that's really powerful. I think we don't really know how powerful it is yet. I'm excited to be finding out day by day. But I think that's a really important thing to do.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Thank you so much for teaching us, for helping us learn, helping us unlearn, and for paving the way for this conversation to continue. Now I'm going to ask each one of you the same question that inspired that amazing series of answers from Emmett, which is: how do you grapple with this private property colonial system, and how do you see the path forward to unraveling this project, at least in your own lifetime?
John Collins: I feel like we're living in a moment right now, and anybody who claims to be able to see clearly, we should view that with some skepticism, you know, because the processes that we've all been talking about, particularly the ones associated with the capitalist system, are accelerating in many ways as the climate crisis also accelerates.
Having said that, personally, I think that it's essential for all of us to grapple with the role of media and information here. It strikes me, for example, that if you look at some of the large media conglomerates, whether we're talking about a CNN or we're talking about ABC or even Twitter, I mean, they function kind of as dams. Their purpose in some ways is to aggregate and then direct and to make enormous amounts of money for small numbers of people in the process. And we're also living through a moment when people are recognizing the limitations of that system. We're seeing some of the problems that can be produced by that. And so the kind of investment or direct connection that Emmett's talking about, where, if you buy into a particular energy project that gives you a bit of a voice, it gives you a mechanism to have some influence, you see the same thing with more participatory forms of media and independent media where people are supporting media directly, rather than just as consumers of the massive projects that have been sort of handed to us, those legacy projects.
And so I see these things as all being connected, ultimately, I mean, a famous line that activists often use is, like whatever issue you care about the most, media should be the second issue that you care about because it impacts everything, right? And if there's not good flowing information and people don't have access to the facts that they need and the perspectives that they need, the full range of perspectives that they need, then you can't possibly achieve what you're looking for, whether you're working on environmental issues or you're working on racial justice issues or whatever the case may be. So I see struggles over information and struggles over media as playing a central role in the processes that we've been talking about today.
There's a great book, which perhaps we can link to this in the notes for today's episode, a book called Reckoning, by a couple of scholars based in Canada, really looking at how media and journalism can begin to grapple with their investment in settler colonialism, and what forms of media representation need to emerge once we begin to question the idea of objectivity that comes with this settler system. So I think that there's a lot going on in the media realm, which is the stuff that I often pay the most attention to, that is part of this larger picture that we're talking about.
Blake Lavia: It's very hard to even foresee what exactly is going to happen, like John has said. We live in a very complex reality, and the consequences of this very complex reality are scary and multifaceted and predictable and completely unpredictable at the same time. Because of course, we are human and with our science and prognostic, we have foreseen certain things, but we do not know exactly what will come out of those predictions when things become heated.
It is very important to start thinking what kind of world we want. We are already late, but we can still start thinking now and start working towards it. The capitalist society is boxing us more and more to the medium we use. We are divided between party lines, so we don't listen to each other anymore. Through the amount of money we have, we have access to certain kinds of education, certain kinds of opportunities, certain kinds of also transportations and how far you can go, where you can go. And now also with the housing crisis we are seen who can live where, and why, and what does that mean. We need to start reconsidering what is property to us personally, and how we treat our property. So in the case of people who have large properties or who are renting, start reconsidering, like, who am I renting for? Why am I renting? Do I want to provide any service for the community? Or am I just here to make money? And what does that mean in the long run? So we see like in the Adirondacks, like there is a huge rental crisis mostly due to holiday rentals. The Adirondacks has become a holiday resort or a gated community. So this means that people cannot live there anymore, people that would like to just have a family, have a house, can't have it.
So we need to start restructuring the society, thinking that we all have the right to live in it. And just the fact that you have a property does not exclude you from the economy and from the responsibility you hold. And that's one little step, but that's already, if we give people the opportunity to leave to places that just become holiday resorts for the rich, we will see a huge change in what an economy of a place is.
Also what we buy, where we buy, buying less online, buy more local, restructuring the entire economy, imagining that we want things to come from close by where we are and not from the other side of the world. We don't need that many objects, we can do with less. And that's something that frightens a lot of people, because when you say less, they're scared because like, oh, I can't live with less, but we can. We don't need to have all year round avocados from Mexico. Because as we probably know, the drug cartels are taking to cultivating avocados because they're more profitable than selling drugs. We don't need coconuts in the Adirondacks. We don't necessarily need bananas in the Adirondacks. It's just like starting to rethink society in a way that we can use and consume things that are local without having to go far away and destroy other environments for our own needs.
And the list can go on. When it comes to transportation, reimagine a transportation system that's not only based on cars. Northern New York has almost no public transport. If you have to go from Canton to Potsdam or from Potsdam to Saranac Lake, you're screwed essentially. Maybe there is one bus every once in a while, it goes one way; you won't come back until the next day, maybe, if you're lucky. Everybody has to have a car, which means everybody has to have enough money to have a car. And a lot of family can't have it with high rents, with high everything. You have to have a car or you don't move.
So these are all things that are all imbued in the capitalist system, in the private property system, that is straining the population, particularly the one that has been smashed and smashed and smashed by the fact that they are the bottom while the top is becoming heavier and heavier with the fat of this accumulation that makes no sense. And we need to restructure that, we need to reimagine and take concrete steps. And there are structural steps that we can take, and we all have, possibilities to take, just if we take the responsibility of what we have and we can do in our daily lives. And that goes from lowering your rent if you realize you're being absurd with it, to pushing for having more transportation around and so on.
So it is complex, but we are not that helpless. We can say no, and say yes to a society that is more egalitarian and is for everybody and not just for the few.
John Collins: If I can just jump in there for a second. What you've given us there, Blake, I think is a really compelling argument for why making settler colonialism like a part of the conversation, making it visible, is important. Because when you talked about the rental crisis in the Adirondacks, it's a good reminder of how one of the things that settler colonialism did in setting up the world we live in is it set up a whole series of structures that are designed to facilitate white settlement, including tourism, and people having vacation homes, and these kinds of things, right? And then for the people who are displaced by, victimized by, those structures who themselves are also settlers, right? That's where we see this like boomerang effect of settler colonialism, that it comes back and eventually becomes what some scholars have called endocolonization, right, where you're extracting from your own population. What's so interesting to me is how settler colonialism itself, which we've all been talking about today, is completely absent from public discourse. It's never been placed on the table in the public arena as something that we need to discuss as a society. It's completely absent from that discussion. And you've given us right there, a number of reasons why it needs to be on the table for discussion.
Emmett Smith: I think that there's a number of different things that all that brings up for me. I think in part, the way we're supposed to live our lives, that Blake was sort of describing, and we all have our own house and our own car and our own this and our own that. I mean, that's all part of the sort of toxic promise that was made to us by late 20th century industrial capitalism, which fragmented our communities and our families into these little tiny individual units. You know, the promise that you can be self-sufficient without having to rely on the people in your area because the market and the government in combination will provide for your needs. That was very, it's very unique in human history. And it took apart this kind of interdependence on our neighbors and our extended families that we had lived with for hundreds of thousands of years. And I think we're sort of struggling with the consequences of that to this day. And I think that disconnection is one of the primary drivers of all of the toxicity that we see in our culture. And I think that we need to sort of reconnect and reestablish those relationships. I mean, settler colonialism was sort of the genesis of that. And it sort of combined, it seems to me, with that economic project that seeks to disconnect us from each other.
We're coming to the end of this like 60-year expansion of that cycle, and the economic power is going further and further up, and we're being depleted at the lower levels at a rate that's really not sustainable. I don't have any sort of crystal ball into the future or any silver bullet, but I think that seeking to have close relationships with our communities and to reconnect our relationships with the things that sustain us is going to bring us in the right direction. And it's going to bring us a level of accountability to each other, which I hope will mitigate the kind of toxic dialogue that has captured us nationally. You know, when you live in a close group of people, you can't get away with being a total jerk with ridiculous opinions all the time, but in our society, you can because you can get into your own niche and you can talk only to the other thousand people in the whole country that happen to agree with you. And, you know, I think that the more we have, where we establish our social relationships back around our local communities, I think that the more that will push back against that.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: If we were going to imagine this other world, a world in which settler colonialism was part of the discussion more frequently, in which we would discuss all of those problems that you mentioned, Blake, and some of the possible solutions that you mentioned, Emmett, let's imagine that world, let's say 30 years into the future, in which we've had a chance to talk about issues of, whether it be private property, grappling with private property, grappling with capitalism, grappling with the systemic injustices of the society, the colonialism of the society and building upon those discussions to build a new world. What would that world look like? What do you all dream for that world to look like? We exist in, we're in a society in which we are constantly bombarded with a doomsday rhetoric. Yes. doom and gloom is coming, yes it's here, that's all real, we know that. However, we're all fighting for a society that we want to live in. But what would that society look like?
Emmett Smith: I think it's easier maybe to imagine it from this region than it is to imagine that on a global scale. And I think that maybe that's part of where the answer lies. I don't want to restate myself too much, but like I see it as a social, governmental and an economic system, which is more focused on prioritizing small communities and small ecologies as being more self-governing and self-dependent. And that's not only in terms of legal control, but also resources, that communities can, or would be more dependent on what they have and what they can access where they are. And we become more connected to and dependent on people that are part of our regional community and less dependent and beholden to larger systems that are really beyond our control and beyond our ability to influence. That's sort of a core tenet of sustainability is you have to have enough of a tangible connection to what you're relying on to understand what its impacts are. And there's almost no way to do that except for having it be local.
My perspective on that is probably influenced by the fact that I work in energy. Electricity, which is like the most intangible commodity, is one of the hardest things for people to make a choice about because it doesn't give you the kind of direct physical feedback that like buying a carrot from your local farmer does, it's not as understandable. And I think it's one of the most challenging things to sort of incorporate into this more regional framework. That's my perspective. I would see us having more close knit, regional communities that were more self-sustaining and self-governing.
Blake Lavia: I can see it for this area but I also see it for of course where I'm from and seeing the struggles that particularly the younger generations are having to even build a life for themselves and the future. So it's a bit hard for me to answer this question/ I agree with everything Emmett said, we need to bring back, quote unquote, the power, the social power, to the people, the communities. Smaller communities need to be able to be self-sufficient to the best of their abilities, of course, and operate according to a more direct system of government in which the responsibility of the action is not given to people in power far away somewhere else, but it really lies in the communities themselves. And that I think already will shift a lot because the interest themselves with the communities will be focused on taking care of the people in the community. So I think a lot of the abuses that our environment faces and a lot of the economic gaps and even situations of de gradations will be addressed. Because if it's a small community taking care of itself, I don't think they will just like turn a blind eye and leave half of their people in horrible conditions since everybody should have a voice in how things are run. I deeply believe in that. We need to relocate power and give it back to the people and centralize it in a system that allows people to interact directly with it. Also, and that goes for a lot of things, goes for the educational system, it goes for the health system. We have these decentralized situations that most of the time, are way too expensive to sustain themselves, and then people can't even access them. If we reduce them and really make them local, not only will we ensure that everybody has a possibility of working, but also we will ensure that everybody is taken care of in a way that this system does not allow, particularly depending where you live, you don't have access to certain medical needs or to certain educational needs. It's just like really complicated like that. Those are things I would like to see, and that will for sure make it a much more beautiful future. And also what I hope is really a shift in how we perceive our society and our world. And maybe just already that shift in how things are organized will do it.
But this global reality, coupled with capitalism, has created a society that's not going into a very beautiful direction, particularly seeing how technology has been affecting people's brains and has been changing us all. So of course, we are talking about changing the structure of how we operate, but how do we deal with the changes that have been brought about by a technology that has made us completely supine, completely subservient to just consuming images and stop thinking. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges we'll face, and there's no real answer for it. People have a smaller, smaller attention span, people don't talk to each other anymore like they used to. And isolation is monstrous that brings them to acts of violence as we see that are getting worse. So that's the thing that concerns me the most. And it's like a social disease. And I think we need to start working on that too, and bringing people back together and away from screens and also distance education from technology as much as possible. Because I think that's the biggest damage that the society is doing to human beings. And it's going to be the biggest challenge we'll face in the future, new generations that have never lived without social media technologies. They have forgotten some essential ways to be, think, and act in this world.
John Collins: First of all, thank you for the question, because I think it's really essential for us not to give up or let go of our capacity for utopian thinking, for realizing that we can participate in creating a different world, a different reality, and that that begins in part with imagining what that would look like. And I don't think anybody should tell us that we need to lower our sights or stop looking at those horizons. I'm inspired by what both of you have said. And I don't have a lot to add there, but just two points. One, I'm reminded of something that John Trudell said, you know, he was one of the leaders of the American Indian Movement was involved with the occupation of Alcatraz. And Trudell talked about power as being, for humans, our power is really about our relationship to life. He emphasized that we shouldn't confuse power with authority. We have all these systems of authority that we think are power, but in fact, are just authority. And it seems to me like a lot of what we've been talking about today is really about our failure to understand life or our inability to really think about life directly. And so the emphasis on community, the emphasis on the local, the emphasis on, let's say, overcoming some of the legacies of and impacts of technology, all of that to me really seems to be about a future that is organized around a deeper understanding of life rather than a culture that's really about death, which I think is what the kind of colonial legacy is, right? It's a culture of death.
And so that's the first point for me is really about life. And then the second one is, if we're looking at a future that is very local, we hope, animated by a sense of community that's meaningful, I think that that will have to be accompanied by an ethos of welcoming as well, because people are going to be moving. People are going to be on the move in ways that we're already seeing, but are going to increase. And so the local has to also be a place of transit, a place of welcoming, a place of, you know, whoever is here now is welcome as part of this community and has a home here. As opposed to this is who we've always been, and therefore we're going to put walls up in some way, right? And so that's the future that I see also is a future where the support for the local and the commitment to the local is matched by a commitment to welcoming the stranger.
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: And just to finalize this conversation based off the amazing answers again, thank you so much for everything you've taught me today, that each of you have given and shared with everybody and with our audience. Bringing it back again to the rights of nature where we kind of started this conversation, which has at its foundation the need to create reciprocal relationships, reciprocal relationships between us as human beings and the ecosystems which we inhabit, the other living beings that exist within these ecosystems, and repositioning ourselves just as one community, one community among other communities, which are non-human communities, but which are also existing within this larger structure, within a watershed, within a bioregion. And within that space that you all mentioned, we each and every one of us have our own duty, our own responsibility towards each other, towards the future, the future generations, the past generations, and in creating this new world, which you also beautifully painted for us.
And in imagining our own ecological duty, which is part of this reciprocal relationship, I'm going to jump back, and this is going to be a shout out to one of the old Weave News programs, which is Big Questions, and which was the Weave News asked thinkers, amazing people such as yourselves, some big questions. And we all filmed videos for it as one of the first programs that I was involved when I collaborated with the Weave News. And one of the last big questions which we usually asked people is, what is your big question? So I'm kind of going to end with, if you're going to ask the audience a big question involved in creating this new reality, what question would you ask, would you ask the people who are listening to us today to consider and to shape for this future?
Emmett Smith: Where does the power come from? Where does the power lie, both literally and metaphorically? You know, what are the systems that are really empowering and disempowering you and where are they coming from? And you know, how can we replace those systems that aren't working with systems that are working?
John Collins: How can we deconnect and reconnect?
Blake Lavia: What kind of future do you want to see for yourself, your children and the children of your children, and what are you going to do now to make that possible?
Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: I so wish this conversation could continue, but we're going to pause it there. I'm sure all of you who are listening to will have future conversations, and hopefully we can engage you all in future conversations. And again, thank you all for helping us weave together this tapestry of resistance, tapestry of change and planting the seed for the future to come.