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Summary:

“Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewable Energy Revolution” is a video lecture from my chapter in the book Shifting Climates-Shifting Peoples, Dr. Miguel De La Torre, editor.

The video-lecture that is shot outside our repurposed school-bus tiny home examines the insidious manifestations of greenwashing and environmental racism in the context of humanitarian imperialism—the ways in which our taken-for-granted standard of living dictates and breeds relentless consumption in the name of “Democracy.” The litany of our collusion with corporate forms of domination is infinite within the Anthropocene Era (forced migration, plutocrat-driven corporatocracies embedded in bacteria-phobia, commercialized-childhood, extractive industries). This collusion includes privatization of every corporeal and planetary so-called “resource” (reducing the Commons to privately-owned commodities’), compulsory Eurocentric-model education, and the entrapments of convenience-culture. We must be attentive to the ways in which we unconsciously embody the very racist hegemonies we seek to dislodge. This includes our technocratic petro-pharma addictions that use technology to create “equality.” Big Pharma, Corporatized Education, and Agribusiness payoffs drive policy. Even if policy appears to be in alignment with environmental ethics, we are consistently finding that policy change simply replaces one hegemony with another.

Watch the Video Lecture