Earth day is a cursed experience, usually. Like pride month but for the planet, it provides an opportunity for companies to post hypocritical propaganda while continuing their path of exploitation. ANYWAY, we’ve chosen today to start a new thing called LEARN with ORCA.
The idea is that we’ll go out and learn things, and then post about them to share with our friends.
Today’s question
The first ever Learn with ORCA asks: What if universities supported resistance movements? We’ve been wondering this since we started our campaign against Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). CISL is one of the uni’s main points of contact with the world on issues of environmental action and policy. How do they choose to engage? By building partnerships with some of the worst companies in the world!
What’s the alternative? Can we imagine what it would look like if universities put their skills and clout into the service of resisters, not oppressors? At the Wellcome Collection’s Hard Graft exhibition we found an example of academics doing exactly this.
Hard Graft
The exhibition itself was good – despite Wellcome’s very dodgy history, their public work is pretty insightful these days. It covered the history of work in plantations, prisons, the street and the home. We really liked the clarity with which it linked plantations and prison labour, although it could have done more to show that exploitative prison labour isn’t just a US problem. In the UK, the British Legion poppies are made by prisoners on near-zero wages, for example. We also liked the attention the exhibition gave to sex workers and sanitation workers.
In one room marked “the Post-plantation”, a film was showing about “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana. Cancer Alley is a stretch of land along the Mississippi River, where plantations have been replaced with highly-polluting corporations. The majority-Black communities (including those descended from enslaved people) who live in the area are facing high rates of illness and low life expectancies because of the air, water and land pollution. This is an example of environmental racism, where environmental harm is concentrated in areas inhabited by Black and Brown people because in white supremacy Black and Brown bodies are valued less than white ones. It is not accidental that present-day environmental violence is overlaid on the sites of plantations, where enslaved people were subjected to so much violence in the name of profit.
The film showed how people are resisting this violence today. One resistance group is called Rise St. James, who are fighting petrochemical expansion in St. James Parish, Louisiana. It was quite an emotional film to watch – they’ve shown the injustice very clearly. We were excited to see how Rise St. James are working with academic institutions to create evidence against the polluters. One paper by Kimberly A Terrell and Gianna St Julien at Tulane University has demonstrated the impact of industrial emissions on the health of racialised and impoverished communities.
Forensic Architecture
The most exciting thing for us was a study created by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University. They’ve created a portal where you can see air pollution data in the present day, and also overlays of former plantations. The point of including the historic data is to identify the sites of Black cemeteries – these in theory should be protected, and so identifying the sites gives Rise St James a stronger base from which to push back against petrochemical expansion. Sadly, many of these sites have been erased. Forensic Architecture are aiming to recover them by finding anomalies on modern-day aerial maps and comparing those to historical plantation maps. You can find the portal here: https://louisiana.forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are exactly the kind of thing we were looking for. On their website they say “We investigate states and corporate entities—including militaries, police forces, government agencies, and companies—for their violent acts, including repressive policing, civilian deaths in conflict, structurally racist policy-making, violence against migrants and refugees, and historical and contemporary colonial violence, including the destruction of traditional environments and life worlds.”
In a time where students are being abducted and deported without trial, where academic freedom on the issues of Palestine, racism and environmental injustice is under even greater attack than usual, it’s cool to see a space where academics are so directly supporting resistance movements. They’ve worked on Grenfell, on German colonial genocide in Namibia, on Hind Rajab’s death and on mapping Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The point is not just to record but to support resistance.
So what does any of this mean?
- There’s an alternative to corporate engagement – universities can create ways to lend their clout, knowledge and skills to resistance movements (rather than collaborating with the oppressors).
- Even when universities do support resistance movements, the drive and power comes from people on the ground. Without the leadership and energy of Rise St. James, none of this would matter.