 Good afternoon and welcome to the Rouser College of Natural Resources Spring 2022 Horace Albright Lecture in Conservation. I'm David Ackerly, Dean of Rouser College of Natural Resources. It's a pleasure to welcome our panelists who are attending virtually. Hello. I haven't met you all as well as our host in person and all of you. Those of you who live and work at Berkeley know that we are right on time as in Berkeley time. So sorry we're a moment delayed. And also I just want to start out by saying that in this world of hybrid events we actually have a wonderful audience. We haven't packed this room here for those who are here in the room but we actually have hundreds of people who have signed up to watch remotely. So just channel all that energy of a huge audience. And I think you all know that in this day and age these recordings just live on and hundreds more people watch later. So we're so pleased to be able to work in multiple media simultaneously. Today's moderator Daniel Aldona Cohen is here in person. He is an assistant professor of sociology here at Berkeley where he directs the socio-spatial climate collaborative SC2. He is also a founding co-director of the Climate and Community Project and a member of the Climate Equity and Environmental Justice Roundtable, one of a number of new faculty hired in our recent campus cluster hire. The Roundtable will galvanize many years of collaboration on topics of shared interests such as today's discussion spanning multiple departments, schools and colleges at Berkeley. And as of yesterday there is a website live ceej.berkeley.edu. Before I welcome Daniel to the stage I'd like to share a bit of background on these lectures. The Horace Albright lecture series at the college has been going strong for over 50 years. The lectures are a tribute to the achievements of Horace Albright born in Bishop California in 1890, a graduate of UC Berkeley in 1912, second director of the National Park Service and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by Jimmy Carter. We're honored to have the opportunity to use the Horace Albright endowed lecture series for the public good, fostering a dialogue on the critical issues facing our society. The Albright lecture series has brought to Berkeley a who's who of the world's most thought-provoking and innovative leaders in conservation and public service and I recommend you Google the website and you can find the recordings and lots of information about past talks. The panel discussion you are about to hear aligns perfectly with the spirit and traditions of the series. So for those of you online we'll be taking for those of you here we'll be taking live questions at the end of the discussion. Those of you online through YouTube can also add comments through the YouTube live link and they will be fed through to Daniel. As I said there will be a full recording and then after the talk we actually have two different audiences here. We have Esbom, our one of our department's grad fest end of the semester and Esbom has a lunch planned for that group and for those of you who are guests of the college we will have a reception on the ground floor following the talk with some snacks and coffee. So with no further ado I'm pleased to welcome Daniel to moderate today's panel. Thank you so much Dean Akerly. It is truly wonderful to be here. Let me start by acknowledging that University of California Berkeley sits on the territory of Weechin the ancestral and unceded land of the Tritunia speaking Ohlone people the successors of the sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. The land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band. As members of the Berkeley community it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand but also that we recognize that the Muwekma Ohlone people are live and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader the area communities today. So we're in a climate emergency but we're also in a long-running emergency of racial capitalism and colonialism of what Alufa Mitao calls global racial empire in his new book which we'll be talking about today. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez has said that the latest climate science indicates a code red for humanity. More recently he said that the climate breakdown is so urgent that every second counts and I agree with him but I think the friendly amendment I would make and I think this panel would make is that we also live in concurrent and equally grave emergencies of racial economic and other forms of inequality and on those matters too every second counts on those matters too it is code red and to act we have to think and to talk together and I'm so grateful to be spending the next almost hour and a half with this incredible group of panelists. So I am going to introduce our extraordinary panel. First we'll speak Alufa Mitao followed by Naomi Klein, Sabrina Fernandez, and Jackie Fielder. I'm going to introduce these panelists quickly then I will give you the brief kind of outline of how this panel will go today. Alufa Mitao is assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He's a member of the climate and community project and he's the author of both reconsidering reparations with Oxford University Press and Elite Capture with Haymarket which just came out this week. I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of Elite Capture to write a blurb. I felt very lucky and I completely agree with what I wrote namely that Femi Mitao is one of the great social theorists of my generation and with his new work this fall this spring in particular I think he has truly arrived as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of our generation of this country and indeed of our kind of global debates. Speaking of great public intellectuals Naomi Klein really doesn't need an introduction but I'm going to give a little one anyway. She is an award-winning journalist, columnist, international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire. They've been translated into over 35 languages. In September 2021 she joined the University of British Columbia and is the founding co-director of the UBC Center for Climate Justice so she is our neighbor and I'm incredibly grateful to have Naomi in my time zone and all the more grateful to have her with us right now on this panel. Her books have utterly shaped how I understand the world. Her constant engagement with movements has inspired me and has guided me. To put a twist on an expression that I hear a lot I'm thrilled that she has been living rent-free in my brain for a very long time. Sabrina Fernandez is a Brazilian eco-socialist organizer with a PhD in sociology, it's a great discipline. From Carlton University in Canada she's the author of the books St. Thomas Morvidus and C. Kizer Muda-Humundo, Morbid Symptoms and If You Want to Change the World. She currently has research and postdoctoral appointments at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Brasilia and the Rosa Luxemburg Sifthang. She's the founder and producer of Tezi Onzi, Brazil's major eco-socialist online communications project aiming to bridge activism and research. It includes a YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers and that's just one of her many massive online platforms. I'm going to say a phrase that I hate to say but I'm in the bay, public intellectual 2.0. If such a thing exists, Sabrina is that. She is inventing this role. I don't know of anyone who's worked harder to bring left-wing ideas and climate analysis to online attention, working with Brazilians and also now especially in English. She's active on every social media platform I know of and many more that I think I don't know about and it is just an incredibly serious project, a public engagement, movement, pedagogy, public research, academic research. I think books are going to be written about this and so thrilled to have Sabrina here, at least virtually at UC Berkeley. Jackie Fielder, who's just up in San Francisco, is an awe-inspiring organizer, inspires awe and me. She's transforming politics in San Francisco and California. She founded the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition, has worked on a wide variety of campaigns including an incredibly brave and inspiring run for the California State Senate in 2020. These are my words. She garnered 191,000 votes. She ran on an Indigenous wildfire task force, a green new deal for California, $100 billion housing emergency fund, if that's even enough in California, a police accountability, single payer health care and more. She's since launched a grassroots political action committee called Daybreak Pack to support other corporate free candidates in California. She continues to organize around San Francisco Public Bank Coalition, organizes four clean community renewable energy against fossil fuels. She is based on the Ramaytush Ohlone land and is a citizen of the three affiliated tribes in North Dakota. And I can say without a trace of corniness that Jackie is one of those fearless millennials who gives me hope every time I think about the work that she's doing. Okay, the plan for this event is simple. Femi is going to open. He's going to talk a little bit about his recent book, Reconsidering Operations, perhaps a bit about elite capture, and then we'll get responses from Naomi, Sabrina and Jackie. We'll then have a quick round of responses within the panel, and I will pose questions to the panel from YouTube, from questions submitted in advance, and from questions that I get here live. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to Femi. Thank you all very much for being here for this wonderful conversation. Thank you. What can I say? I'm really grateful for the kind words in the introduction. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to talk to you all and to talk on this panel with Naomi and Jackie and Sabrina, which is really great. And I'm honestly more looking forward to what they have to say. So I'm going to be brief, but really there's three things that I try to do in the book, and I want to say just by way of introducing what the book has to say and getting this conversation started about the world, which is obviously what it's all about the end of the day. So there's a historical point, a theoretical point, and there's a what do we do about any of this kind of scripted practical point. So on the history side of things, as Daniel said in the introduction, I use this term global racial empire, which is just a term that helps point people to the empire part, the fact that there were imperial conquests that were pivotal in setting up the history and the way that I think it goes. I'm not saying anything substantively different from what's actually about a century of scholarship at this point has said from historians like Eric Williams, writing in the 1930s, or theorists in sociology like Oliver Cox, writing later, or Samir Amin, or Issa Shivdi, lots and lots of people have tried to think about on a world scale, on a planetary scale, what our world is like, what our economic system and political systems are like, and what they have to do with the histories of domination. And along the short of it is starting in the 15th century with the conquests of Spain and Portugal in the so-called New World and the actually earlier setting up of what became the transatlantic slave trade, there was a period of human history that started that built the world, literally built the world. These eras, these epochs, these conquests, the setting up of trade routes across all of the world's oceans and population centers, this is a formative event in world history that created a planet-size system of political and economic ties. This system was explicitly racially organized and the organization of that world has implications that lead up to the present, to summarize them, social advantages, things like wealth, but also things like state capacity and research capacity, so both tangible and intangible kinds of resources and social advantages. They tend to climb up the ladder of the world's hierarchies. They tend to go get produced and distributed towards the so-called global north, the richer countries of the world, which are disproportionately yesterday's colonizers, and disadvantages, poverty, the lack of the various kinds of capacities, but also disadvantages like pollution, tend to move down the world's hierarchies. They tend to accumulate both in racially disadvantaged communities, wherever they are in the world, and they also tend to accumulate in the global south. This is a picture of how the world works, this is a description of our social system. It's one that's been built over a long amount of time by scholars, as I mentioned, importantly by a scholar in my discipline, Charles Mills, who recently passed, but something that people contributed to for a long time, and I'm really just kind of trying to summarize and make available that works. And based on the understanding of the world, the historical point, then I make a kind of theoretical point. There's been long conversation about reparations, arguably as long as there's been transatlantic slavery and the colonial conquests that built to this world, and that reparations is a response to. And I think the view of reparations that matches the view of history that I just explained is a view of reparations where we take seriously this formative claim that I made historically and that many people have made before me. It's not just that there were atrocities like transatlantic slavery and wars of settler conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples. It's not just that those evils happened, but that the world that we exist in was built out of those evils, was built on top of those evils. The world that we exist in is a consequence of that kind of formative intervention. And so I think the right view of reparations that matches that is a constructive view. What we should be trying to do is rebuild the world this time in the direction of justice, this time in the, you know, you could say broadly egalitarian direction. And I have lots to say about this in the book. I'm happy to say more in Q&A, but what I'll say for now is I mean this literally. It's a literal construction project. The things that colonialism, that global racial empire built were literal social structures, literal political organizations, but it also changed the ecology. It changed which soil was productive. It changed where water and trash flow and who has clean water. And importantly for the third and final point, it changed the nature of the climate that we all inhabit. So the same structure that built our planetary economic system eventually gave birth to capitalism in the form that we have it now. So that's again a connection to earlier discourses on racial capitalism. And it caused the energy revolution that produced today's dire situation, today's levels of emission and the climate crisis and the broader ecological crisis that's based on that. That connection has long been noticed by civil society, by, you know, people fighting for radical change, especially in the global South groups like Axion Ecologica, the people who attended the Cochabamba People's Agreement in 2010. It's long been noticed. And not only does the climate crisis stem from this same history, but the political structures that will respond to tomorrow's ecological events, drought, food insecurity, so on and so forth, also was built out of that same history. We saw that kind of crisis at work in the lead up to Hurricane Katrina and the very racially unequal response to Hurricane Katrina. That's something that also happens on a global scale, obviously not just in the United States. And what this means is, again, that the constructive view about reparations, about responding to the history of global racial empire can't be just an aspect of moral principle or ethos. We literally need to reconstruct the world. We need to reconstruct our food systems, our water systems, maybe most pivotively our energy systems. And we need to reconstruct the political systems built around all of those that decide who is vulnerable, who is left vulnerable by how those systems work, and who those systems work to protect. In the current state of play, those systems are managed to protect and empower certain kinds of people, disproportionately white, disproportionately male, disproportionately, of course, rich property owning and share owning, asset owning. And if we want systems that protect everybody and not just those kinds of people, then we need to rebuild them because as they are constructed, that's who they work to protect and defend. So I'll leave it there. I'm looking forward to hearing what all of you have to say. Thank you. Thank you so much, Femi. And I'm going to pass it on now to Naomi. Thank you. Well, it's great to sort of be with all of you. I am speaking to you from the unceded territories of the Shishat Nation, the banks of the Salish Sea in so-called British Columbia. And as Daniel said, we are kind of neighbors now, which means we breathe the same wildfire smoke. So thank you so much for this invitation, Dean Ackerly, and of course, Daniel Adonico and thank you for all the work that you do and those incredibly kind words. This is really just such a kind of dream panel. I'm so excited to be in conversation with everybody on it. But just a special congratulations to Femi for the publication of this extraordinary book, which is finding its way onto syllabi as we speak and is really reshaping the discussion in so many ways. And congratulations on the new book as well. So I feel particularly grateful for the international scope of the discussion of the lens, which is the only way to think about the climate crisis. But too often, particularly in North America, we speak about it in nationalist terms. And when the United States is itself in a time of crisis, and we are in overlapping crises, but people are feeling a huge amount of urgency, including me, about the loss of reproductive freedoms and rights and wondering where this is going to end. And in moments like this, I think there's an even greater tendency than usual, I have noticed, to turn inwards in a way that kind of blots out the rest of the world. And that's too bad, because there is no justice without internationalism. Climate justice is a feminist issue. Women's unpaid labor and discounted labor should be part of our conceptions of world making and world remaking. And we also have a great deal to learn from feminist movements, particularly in the global South as we confront regressive forces at home. So let me just keep an eye on the clock here a little bit. What I find so exciting about reconsidering reparations is the way it looks at reparations as the basis for a very ambitious new balance of power, rebalancing of power, turning of the world right side up, as Eduardo Galliano might say. I actually have used the frame of repair quite a lot to describe the work of our times. Sometimes I've called them the years of repair, thinking about repair in it as abundant a way as possible, thinking about repairing our relationships, repairing the messes we have made on the land, repairing our stuff. But I really appreciate Femi's challenging distinction between reparations as repair work versus reparations as construction work. So the way I read that, this is a distinction between thinking about reparations as patching up the holes in this profoundly impossible and unjust and rapacious status quo versus the construction of something really different and transformed between a reordering within the confines of existing logics versus the construction of new logics. And of course this is in conversation, if you don't mind me saying Femi with your other book, Elite Capture, because it speaks to the way that elites have sought to subvert and defang the radical dreams and demands of identity politics as it was originally conceived by radical socialist feminists. It is really this equal access to question of equal access to power or transformation of power structures, which seems like the underlying question. I was particularly struck by the invocation of MLK's warning about integrating into a burning house and the need to become firemen. This is now so literal amidst the climate fires and our minds must turn to our friends and comrades in India and Pakistan who are facing as we meet temperatures that test the limits of survivability. The house is burning and it must be rebuilt but not as it was. And here we should think about Daniel and his team's visionary work on green social housing as a human right. The very nature of housing itself must be transformed. So Femi mentioned that he writes in the book about Hurricane Katrina and observes that everywhere is New Orleans now, a system that has been described as climate apartheid. For me, covering Hurricane Katrina while I was writing the shock doctrine was my personal wake-up call, that moment where I sometimes say I stopped kind of outsourcing with the climate crisis to other people and realized this is interlinked with everything that I care about. I had been telling myself a story that I was focused on more urgent issues than the climate crisis that the big green NGOs kind of had this covered but watching the ways in which that disaster traced the injustice, the pre-existing injustices of racial oppression and inequality in the way and who was vulnerable, in who was monsterized in the aftermath. But it's also important to remember that it isn't only about what that reveals about the urgency of the reparation projects, it's also about what the aftermath reveals because New Orleans became more unequal after the storm. It was the site of extreme what we now understand as climate gentrification, a radical privatization, particularly the education system of land grabbing and privatizing of public housing. So this is what our current world that Femi using the term global racial empire, this is what global racial empire is built to reproduce in the face of the climate crisis and it speaks to the urgent need for system change, including decommodification, I believe, of the basics of life. So I'll share a few more observations but maybe before I do that I want to talk about another sort of entry point for me after Katrina, I certainly understood that the climate crisis was an issue for anybody who cared about injustice and inequality but I didn't really understand how responses to it could truly be transformational and for that my wake up call came when I was writing about what was called Durban 2. It was the eight year anniversary of the Durban Conference, the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa that happened in 2001, September 2001, which is a fateful case of bad timing because this was a landmark event in the history of the global demands for reparations for slavery and colonialism for those of you who don't know this history. It was a huge gathering, it was a coming together of more nationally based reparations movements with this truly international context. It shocked the organizers, the governments who had said yes to this conference because they thought that it was going to be a kind of pat on the back for ending apartheid to be a great photo op, it was supposed to be a celebration of the kind of elite capture anti-racism that Femi writes about and they got way more than they got bargained for because people were demanding land back and people were demanding cashback and people were demanding the turning of the world right side up and undercover and I make this argument in some of my writing that there was anti-Semitism at the first Durban Conference, but it was exploited and exaggerated as to be the excuse for the U.S. to walk out of the conference when the real reason they didn't want to be at the conference was because the price of fighting racism went up significantly and so when I went to the anniversary conference Obama had just been elected, it was 2009 and I met with a group of activists from Bolivia who explained to me the concept of climate reparations and ecological debt and they said this is part of the same process because it's all linked with colonialism but when it comes to climate we can really track where the emissions came from and we believe this is how we can really win reparations and and so this is I continue to believe that this is one of the most powerful tools organizing tools that we have and we have to use it to full effect and I think that Femi's contribution here creates an incredible platform incredible opportunity for these movements that have been around for a long time to maybe get some more wind in their sails. A couple more observations before I close I really appreciate the ways that the book engages with cycles of regression backlash and backsliding that follow periods when gains are made by social movements. I think that carries a lot of wisdom for obvious reasons in a moment like ours. I know that on the left we don't feel like we're winning but we have radically moved the culture and the discourse over the past little bit more than a decade since Occupy and through Black Lives Matter and Me Too and putting the Green New Deal on the on the political agenda and every moment of high political ambition for the left meets fierce push pushback and backlash and building on Femi's beautiful framing at the end of the book and I really really urge people if you read nothing else read the last chapter and really grapple with this concept of ancestor perspective and also revolutionary patience. We have a responsibility to learn from our movement ancestors so that we can minimize the damage from this cycle of backlash and regression and come back stronger and more ambitious than ever. So if you don't mind Femi I'm just going to quickly read the passage that really landed with me most on page 201. Any sober analysis of the implications of this fact cannot but recognize these further conclusions. If we fail in the struggle for climate justice there's a serious risk that the gains our ancestors made will be lost. If we fail our descendants may not have the resources or strategic position they need to ride the ship. Depending on how we fail our descendants may not have descendants of their own at all. So no pressure but that kind of crystallizes the particular moment we are in and once again it was just such a pleasure to engage with this wonderful text. Now such a pleasure should be in this panel here with Femi, Naomi, Jackie. You obviously really want to get things happening which is exactly the kind of initiative and spirit that we need right now and thank you to Berkeley for hosting us today. I have been following Femi's work for a while and having the opportunity to read the book and now I haven't properly finished a capture yet but I am so impressed because this is the kind of stuff that's like yes I've been wanting to read this for a really long time. I wanted to have this kind of word view properly organized you know I have like in a systematic way that even though Femi does write in the book in Reconciling Reparations that you know you can't just give someone like a book and one author the job to kind of create this blueprint but I think there's enough in Reconciling Reparations that we can just start picking and like leading to other things and not connecting primarily to praxis to what movements are doing so what kind of experiences we're already having in the sense and I think this is going to become like a foundational work for a lot of the things that we have to do and I'm hoping I don't want to say a lot of things that we have to do for many many years to come but for the things that we have to do now because they're so urgent I would hope and this comes as a compliment for me but I hope that the book becomes obsolete very quickly in the sense that I hope that we can actually achieve a lot of the things that you set out to propose in the book and when I was talking to Daniel about the date for this event then today's May 5th is the birthday of Karl Marx 204 years and like I kind of made a joke about it but then reading the the book two things kind of like came to my mind one is like well the first you know when we start talking about the communist manifesto and the history of class struggle you know being the history of society and how this really connected to a lot of things that Femi was talking about in relationship you know how benefits and burdens they're cumulative and they compound and they add through time so there's a huge difficulty today when we're talking primarily in terms of like climate change negotiations of looking at this scenario that we have today as if there's just a way of like transferring one thing to another so we're going to like help out these people with these needs that they have right now and we're going to offset some of some of the carbon but something that we're quite aware of when we're talking about greenhouse gases is that everything's compounding for a really long time so even if we have the opportunity to make very radical changes today at this moment we know that we're still going to be dealing with this for a really long time that's why the IPCC when they come up with the scenarios they even talk about overshoot they talk about how things may get even worse until we might be able to get them a little better even if we take a very radical direction which is not the current situation right now right so every scenario that could be desirable to keep us under 1.5 or at least keep us under 2.0 those are not on the table right now because you know the big states they're really just playing with us in the in the sense of when they come up with their target targets their NDCs and things like that so much the last year during COP26 one of the main things that were kind of driving us nuts during the conference is that we had this job to come like come up with this agreement that maybe this time they would be willing to follow through but every day we just got these new headlines on newspapers they had to do with the fact that like some countries kind of got together and decided to make their own pledges so they will make these voluntary pledges here and there and those were grab held lines because everything was about doing all greenwashing around the time but there's no way of actually you know keeping up with those making sure that they're going to be respected and things like that meanwhile the green climate fund has been this disaster for a really long time right not really this is something that Femi explains in the book not really getting into like the amount that is promised and also really focus on this idea of like of that right so one of the main issues you know with the position of the US last year during COP26 was primarily because we wanted to make sure that this was about grants and not loans but they want to leave this door open for loans and also leaving the door open to a whole system of that that has to do with the proper situation around loss and damages right so when we're talking about like hurricanes and like there's a great passage in the book when Femi's explaining the situation around well how people can't properly evacuate in time like if you don't have enough notice first and foremost then it can't properly evacuate because there's no proper infrastructure in society because people are dealing with inequalities and disabilities and things like that so when we're talking about loss and damage and we're talking about preventing future problems like that so dealing around adaptation adaptation is a way of like thinking around reparations in a way that's like very radical if we do it through community building if it's not just about while we're transferring this type of technology here these are some loans for you to execute this very specific project so right now a lot of the conversations around adaptation in terms of like global in the global system they're very tight to very specific projects is not really building a different community reorganizing society so that people can become more resilient so if something really bad comes along in terms of extreme weather events which is already very much the case we can avoid the worst so reparations is really useful in that sense because it goes back to this other quote now by Marx on the on the Brumair when he's talking about well we as a society we can make changes but not under conditions of our own choosing right so this is precisely what we're dealing with you know this historical view that I think like in the first chapters Femi does like an excellent job bringing that together and like I'm particularly happy to see how this is intertwined with Brazilian history of like you know descendants from like slave communities and the revolta dos males the male revolt this is something that has been recently rescued again within Brazilian history because you know this is a very racist country where like black history has been erased for a long time indigenous history has been erased for a really long time as well and black movements have done an excellent job rescuing the history of the male revolt and how this can be a way of thinking of like what kind of society that you have to build in terms of an alternative so it's very radical looking at this together and it really makes us understand that our job right now is a job of like dealing with the conditions that we have inherited from the past saying that they are completely unacceptable we can't we can't accept them anymore we need to make changes they're absolutely urgent even though most policymakers don't really think in the same time framework as we do we have to keep making that point especially if we want to make sure that all their people get to make the calls and make the decisions that we're not so reliant on the institutional perspective you know just waiting for a new build to come along a new you know package coming from like the legislative side and really in terms of like that how the communities can get organized and can get a grip on these things so if we're talking about this we're talking about these conditions that we have to address and the new conditions for the future that really have to do with like in a proper sense perhaps i'm going to bring in the word of infrastructure here because infrastructure really makes me think of like what we have around us and how we organize ourselves around it right so when we're talking about for example right to the city movements and issues around mobility bringing here then it was great work around green housing again if we already have you know secure housing that's you know efficient in in many ways around climate and you have you know free transit and free transit that's properly electrified and the city is more accessible to people this is a whole issue of infrastructure but also provides us with a lot of what Femi was talking about in the book is you know it's word making because once you change these things people have to enter into different relationships as well and many times people are already trying to enter into these relationships so we have all of these history of movements and like i'm here i'm speaking from the perspective of Latin America primarily but these applies to all the parts of the global south as well in terms of like solidarity economies like trying to conceptualize of the way that we deal with you know creating products providing services and seeing what kind of necessities that we have in our reality if there's not enough you know child care provided by the state let's see how our community can organize around this so we can have like more collective labor in the community to make sure that you know care is democratized and things like that we're already trying to do this but it's really hard doing this around an infrastructure that's you know we're kind of just running against these walls all the time because the current system you know the global racial empire talking about all the capitalist division of labor the capitalist division of resources being transferred from one places to another now very much conceptualized around commodities this really does mean that we're getting to a point that our imagination becomes stifled because we're trying really hard to reorganize society but we have this whole issue of infrastructure so thinking of operations as a way of like building new social infrastructure around our dreams around you know the kind of relationships that we want to build I think this is quite powerful and it does help when we're dealing with something else that I think this is something that came really strongly to me in the book which is a discussion that Femi does around avoiding the binaries and I want to close with this because normally like doing the work that I do you know like coming from Brazil like working with grassroots movements in Brazil traveling somewhere else in the global north if to do research and things like that sometimes I end up in this position of being like the global south person that's in the room and supposed to give the global south perspective around things and it's always very uncomfortable because well there's not one perspective and you know there's like gender ratio uh disability issues that have to be addressed and not one person can represent it that way but also because I think it's come to a point because of the way political economy is organized and we know this is very much related to going back in terms of the you know slave trade but also in terms of commodities today and the new patterns around extractivism that most people kind of think of the line you know the global north up there and the global south up there and this is a way of erasing processes around settler colonialism that happened in the global north all the time erasing the very complicated conditions around for example the cost of living crisis that we see like in the US and Canada and Europe popping up here and there uh issues around migration issues around refugees so breaking that binary is really important for us so even though like I think we are absolutely required to understand that there is a very unequal flow of resources and here you know bringing back the conversation around unequal ecological exchange and unequal economic exchange dependent capitalism this perspective between the center and the periphery we need to be talking about this but also we have so many things that unite us and I think this is where our strength is if we're going to be doing this we need to be doing this from an internationalist perspective and obviously this requires you know going you know um and and facing the imperialist strategy right away and we know this is taking on like new turns now because now we're talking about green extractivism we're talking about a lot of these perspectives around um you know uh electricity and like and renewables in richer countries normally completely ignore where minerals coming from or the tax coming from or a good friend Thea Rio Franco's does amazing work on this and uh we need to bring this in but we also need to understand like we are kind of trying to imagine the same things when we're looking at the margins in every single place and in the margins there's always going to be people demanding reparations and if that's done through a constructive approach as Femi proposes in the book I think that we're going to find a lot more in common and this is the way of finally bridging that divide and and bringing something new to the word that we really need right now. Thank you so much Sabrina now I'm going to turn it over to Jackie. Hello everyone my name is Jackie Fielder I am a citizen of the three affiliated tribes but lifelong californian and I'm currently on occupied rheumatism aloney land such an honor to be on this panel um Femi thank you so much for this book this is honestly one of the top books I've read since college and although there may not be a lot of books I've read since college this has been one of the best um so thank you so much for sharing this I really appreciated the sections at the end uh with attention to the solutions especially the parts about the dakota access pipeline movement because that was that's really the reason why I'm here speaking in front of you um I may have mentioned but I'm a lifelong californian born and raised in southern california but I am an ascendant of the kota and hitotsa people who are in present day north and south dakota and in 2016 as some of you may know our treaty rights were violated when the us army corps of engineers approved and enabled a fossil fuel company to put a pipeline through our ancestral territories um could go into the whole 10 minutes about this particular event but in the book uh Femi you talk about divestment and I really appreciate your attention to the flow of capital because that is really what I see is my work is is following the money and that was something that I came into in in the decode access pipeline movement from here afar in san francisco and at that time I saw our president who at the time was obama uh was allowing the army corps of engineers who I had known from stories about my grandma the army corps of engineers set up a system of dams along Missouri river in the mid 20th century really to redirect the flow of water to benefit predominantly big agriculture um at the expense of indigenous peoples so my grandmother's community was entirely put under water of course the government promised compensation and um indeed kind of reparations but of course they're never followed through um so when I heard that the army corps of engineers was going to be in charge of this pipeline and had said that it would make sure that everyone is that the proper environmental impact statement was done I just I was losing my mind um and when especially as an indigenous person you're just kind of uh uh usually going to assume that the federal government does not have your best interests at hand although perspectives among indigenous peoples differ on that in the US context and I'm sure it can as well but um in essence I really just felt extremely pessimistic about the government's ability to recognize indigenous rights and and still have a healthy dose of pessimism however uh that was why I turned to following the money um and long I mean along these lines I also wanted to point out the power of indigenous resistance just last year there's a report that came out from indigenous environmental network and oil change international that found that indigenous lead resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the US and Canada over the past decade has stopped or delayed an amount of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one quarter of annual US and Canadian emissions so when we talk about remaking the world is and also uh really getting enough time to remake the world for future generations I think resistance has to be a part of our toolkit um and honestly this is such coincidental coincidental timing today that this panel is happening uh and we're talking about climate change and reparations because yesterday uh was uh the day that the president proclaimed today as missing or murdered indigenous persons awareness day and what I really appreciate about this book was the thesis posited around this current world um being and this is my layman's understanding I'm not in academia but I'm trying to hold it down for the non-academia people on this panel but um but that colonization changed our relationships with each other they changed our um systems of distribution which is also our political system and certainly they changed our relationship with the earth um and I really appreciated which I I hope to continue to follow this thread on with elite capture appreciated the uh acknowledgement that representation is not going to be enough and so I mean you quoted Baldwin and it's one of the pages that I have earmarked in this book but basically Baldwin says that one thing one of the great things that white the white world does not know but I think I do know is that black people are just like everybody else we're also mercenaries dictators murderers liars we're human too and I felt that really resonated with my own experience with my own tribe because my tribe being in north Dakota is actually where the decoders pipeline begins and would not have been possible without the tribal government of my tribe it wouldn't have been possible without the social system of governance that was imposed in our tribe where capital is put foremost before clean water before clean air before the safety of our women and now we have decoders pipeline we have an epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women and so the social systems is what I hope to speak to and I really I really do appreciate the the attention to the global level of change that is required to actually fulfill the project of reparations but I'm going to hone into the local part because that's where I I actually act though my mind is at the global level too and as Daniel mentioned I ran for state senate in 2020 which is not something I had set out to do before honestly 2019 and ran on a number of ideas but I really just want to drive home some points which is that no one's going to save us it will take thousands of millennials and Gen Zers to take up positions of power to actually steer the ship in the right direction and certainly fulfill this project of reparations and set the stage as Femi put it for future generations also take the mantle one thing that I ran on was an indigenous wildfire task force so although I'm going to run a citizen of a tribe in North Dakota I also acknowledge that I am really a visitor on Rimetush Aloni land here in San Francisco and currently I'm in love with and will probably always be in love with a state that has a horrendous history of genocide and ongoing violation of indigenous rights of indigenous peoples here so when we realize that colonization has divorced us from our relationship with the land I think it only makes sense to make sure that the people who do have that relationship are in positions of power to lead us and there is currently actually a good amount of attention to indigenous space what is called traditional ecological knowledge but there can always be more and the one thing I also wanted to point out is there are always opportunities to push our agenda and this is exactly what the fossil industries know this is what sort of interests that want to dictate what what is done with our bodies they know that there's no lack of ideas but one of the ones that I wanted to point to at least for California is a 70 billion dollar equitable transition fund and one million clean jobs by 2030 it sounds like a lot of money and it sounds lofty maybe but this was a recommendation from a 2021 report led by an economist who was actually commissioned by a climate and labor group and one of the the labor groups involved was in is represents oil workers that's the price 70 billion and yet California is currently deciding how to spend a 68 billion dollar surplus just for this year so that's the governor and that's our state senate and that's our state assembly but we didn't really know that unless you followed state politics there's other opportunities at even the local level during the pandemic there's these funds called ARP funds I forget what they stand for the acronym but that was a ton of funding that cities spent in different ways I think here in San Francisco we spent it on police of all the things but I point this out to say that they're in our country with with so much wealth that was ill gotten through genocide and colonization and slavery we should be able to as Femi puts it deliver on our promises around a climate fund and in the form of grants not just loans I also want to uplift the part about and I appreciate this as a political strategist and pushing for these kinds of ideas that it's awesome often conducive to push ideas where elite and non-elite interests converge and I can't think of a better example than wildfires wildfires in northern California obviously affect all of our lungs certainly some can afford air filters but Dan and I am talking in the past about smoke-tasted wine but soon there will be a time if not already where elite interests are unable to run away from the effects of climate change and I think it's at these points that we really need to intervene kind of the last few thoughts I want to leave you with is again there's no one coming to save us and I really am talking to the millennials and Gen Z if you think that even a progressive city like San Francisco has is doing enough on climate we're really not we have a climate plan but it's it's a really tough political political world I currently grapple with it every single day about what I want to say in it but if we are to deliver on the promise and vision of reparations we do have to remake the social systems that got us here um so thank you all so much and thank you for me for this wonderful text I will continue to recommend it to everyone here thank you so much Jackie and thank you for this bracing but I think profound point no one is coming to save us we have to do it ourselves um before I turn it to questions I just want to give you all a brief chance to respond there's so much going on right now my dream was that this would be like six hours with buffet tables all over the place but you know next time next time and and of course and of course local wine I'm just going to ask you to go in the same order and just take a minute or two and feel free to just pick up on any of the threads that have come up and then we're going to I'm going to grab some questions from the audience here and from online so let me throw it back to you Femi so first of all thanks everybody for those really generous really thoughtful comments um and there's so much there's so much to talk about maybe I'll just make maybe I'll just pick up on two threads um just so that I can be coherent because you know my thoughts are going in a million directions um but one point that um Sabrina pointed out about you know in in one sense just like being called on to give certain kinds of representations in certain discussions right so so in in Sabrina's case you know being called on to be the global south person and I think you know a lot of us have a version of that um and trying to square that with the complexity of the situations that we're trying to address right um especially if you're talking about the global south which is you know more than 80 of the world right but but even if you were talking about a smaller you know uh you know a numerically smaller number of people there's still really important kinds of differences between how people are positioned that um get that aren't well discussed from that starting point and so a thing that I talk a little bit about in the in the book but that I'm really you know really anxious to hear from you know as many people as possible about are the kind of institutional design questions around how to do any of these um any of these things with respect to climate but maybe in particular about the energy system right so there are really tough kind of technical questions around you know what is a good model of governance for renewable energy and for getting fossil fuels out of our energy system look like in a granular sense um and so you know there are people who have been working on the on energy democracy or community control over energy um there are people who have been working with um energy workers um and there are people who have been working on the kind of investment side of things um for example public banking um which I believe Jackie you work on as well so that's something um that I think we need to stare directly at and for me it's kind of the other side of the divestment um sort of politics right we need to get money out of fossil fuels um but we also need to put you know resources social resources into better alternatives and we have these design questions in front of us about what those might look like it's actually I'm just going to make that kind of statement but I'm really grateful for um everybody's responses thank you um Femi is always just too modest I just have to point out that you just led a report on dead cancellation reparations with the climate and community project so climate and community.org you go to projects you'll see this piece that that Femi just did so very much in the mix of this policy redesign um okay throwing it to Naomi um yeah so I mean on that question around of energy democracy and what that might look like in the context of reparations it it raises for me the question of just the obscene amounts of money that continue to be made by fossil fuel companies in what we hope are their dying days but particularly with the um price spike um you know courtesy and part of of the the invasion of Ukraine and I think I think we have a right to that money you know they burn the world and and I just think we have to to be like part of the pressure that we need to be putting on our governments has to be around expropriation um and um and there's a history of that too I mean particularly the oil sector and it's part of decolonial struggles and I think that we need to be you know threading that through our conversations um I know there's not much time so um I would just you know Jackie when you were talking about the Army Corps of Engineers and and and and and the the violent history I was reminded that that that the it was the Army Corps of Engineers that failed to repair the the levies in New Orleans despite warning after warning and that's just one of the many things that they did to to put that region into into danger into peril you mentioned also Jackie the that it's going to be millennials and Gen Z that will that will have to write this ship um and uh and I think that's very powerful I wanted to just share a quote from Arundhati Roy um just she was in the in in St. Louis a couple weeks ago and gave an interview um and what you said reminded me of the the her final words she said we have to know that maybe we're not going to see change because one party is going to lose an election to another we might have floated beyond that we may not be able to turn the ship back and go to shore we have to find another shore and that idea of that that that what we're reaching towards is another shore that it isn't the return I think it's a really resonant image and really fits with Femi's framework um of of world-making and I'll leave it there thank you so much um Sabrina yeah well I'm going to pick up on the on the point of energy democracy because it's kind of my jam but just kind of like building up like reparations the framework of reparations is a great way of thinking about priorities right and what what priorities that we need to set in terms of climate transition and you know a more just society that we need and it comes from the point of view that but we can't have it all I think this is one of the main debates that we've had with you know the so-called eco-modernist we're trying to promote a perspective that's a little closer to like having it all and but while one nature doesn't work that way we do have a lot of limits and we also are trying to catch up in terms of society like we have to think when we're thinking about the disparities in terms of like inequality and great deal of poverty in society we're actually fighting so that a lot of people the majority of society will get to have their you know a lot of firsts for the first time first time have electricity in your house right so this is about priorities and when we're having like reports coming out around you know this demand for you know green minerals for for the transition and they're talking about numbers like 500 growth in demand while one thing that we know is that those numbers don't even include the more than 800 million people who need to have access to proper electricity for the first time in society so they don't include that so there's that's already a problem because priorities are not being said and those numbers don't include the more than 130 million electrical vehicles that are predicted for this next range of years which kind of is like kind of puts the question that like I many years ago I started like watching these documentaries like killed the electric car and everything of course like Elon Musk loved the this whole thing in the the second time around but I think that part of a job is you actually like probably killed the electric car in the sense of the electric individual vehicle because you know this is working is a new type of denialism it's this idea that you can know electrified is like personal individual ways of doing things you know like Marcus Vincent and Otis Brown have done work on the imperial mode of living we have to deal with that this is like an idea that's put in our society that you can actually like change you know the current way of dealing with the climate crisis but keeping the imperial mode of living or thinking that it's expendable or that it's not actually very dishonorable and it's built on the backs and blood of a lot of people in the global south and in the margins of the of the global north as well so maybe yeah let's kill like probably kill the electric car and build more electrified households through renewables and make sure that like was actually really sexy that here is the electrical bus and no proper mobility in our cities and more integration between rural and urban areas thank you so much Jackie thank you so much for these questions by me because I wish I got to this in my original 10 minutes yes with the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition we're currently grappling with the question of governance and I think this is where the real work and thinking I guess next adventure the new short is personally I've been needing to draw from really other countries other examples of public banks which is why I'm so grateful to Thomas Marwah who I had the honor of speaking with actually today about who has has documented a number of public bank governance structures from the worker owned Costa Rica's public bank that is largely owned and responsible to the workers of Costa Rica there's also the system system of German banks and kfw it's really like a kind of like a ladder of public banks where municipal governments elected sorry government officials and another community I guess we can call them representatives serve on the board and at the public public bank coalition we've been grappling with okay how do we how do we delegate seats for people in the community who are energy advocates I mean in the equity sense or people who are living in and know what it's like to be under the crunch of increased rent um what we really want are the experiences but we're also coming up against um the problem of elite capture because uh terms like affordable housing mean different things and renewable energy expert could mean really for all intents purposes someone in a different department in Chevron that works along sustainability so there's so much to be said about this particular subject and I really think that grassroots um organizers and and people who really just want to be engaged in these conversations really do need to look outside of the U.S. because we do have such a lack of institutional knowledge or really imagination about different government structures and I always like to remind people that before what we know is the U.S. government and any other governments that were under jurisdiction of today there were hundreds of systems of governance um indigenous ones that's not clear uh who all had pretty different governance structures in fact the U.S. one as some of you may know is based on um governance structure I believe you're quite confederacy um and in any case there are many examples to drop them and I think yeah as we make this new shore and as we find ourselves trying to remake the world and the social systems it may have to be a mix of what we know works and also some some new stuff as for governance of renewable energy or or really energy systems I'm also involved with this as a commissioner in the city of San Francisco um and I guess the long story short here is that PG&E until we get a governor who is free from the influence of PG&E until we get politicians mayors who are free from the influence of PG&E it's going to be really hard to remake those systems of governance um which is another one of thousands of reasons I'm as interested in corporate free candidates and getting them elected to office but um I do believe that community choice targets or co-ops um even some municipalization projects uh would work for communities but it really just depends on on the communities and the community power thank you um all right I am we're running out of time the best panels need hours more so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to pose quickly an amalgam of a bunch of the questions that came online and they basically boiled down I think to two core tensions and I'll just invite you each to take a minute to address them one is a tension between community deep rooted organizing and this feels to many folks like very nebulous global organizing is it about the UN is it about treaties what is the forum for that global politics that Femi has pointed out the need toward and the other is a tension between I think concrete practical realpolitik and the moral clarity of a long-term project of reparations um which you outlined so compellingly Femi so I think tensions between the local and the global between what feels practical short-term and the moral uncompromising vision long-term I'm just going to invite you each to take a minute before I close this out Femi so um I will stay under my mid I promise but you know as Daniel said you know we could take hours on either of those right but I think the broad the the one I want to say on local versus global is that the distinction between local and global is a result it's not you know something that you set out to in to do in the beginning right with Christopher Columbus just found the got lost and found one island right but there were global results of that you know that you know stream of terrorism that he started on that island um that can happen for good as well you know we might get something right at the local level that other people hear about and decide to adopt and follow that pattern of and in fact that is how divestment movements have had the global impact that they have you know somebody the students at divest harvard or fossil free pen when when a battle and other students say you know we could do a version of that and so on so forth I think that's the most plausible version of global change that we can expect not people necessarily saying here's my grand vision for the entire planet but people doing something that makes sense where they are and being related talking to getting the information out to people in different localities so I think that was already probably a minute so I'll stop there but thank you that was brilliant it's perfect philosopher answer you just start with a breathtaking flip and then give a really great a couple of examples uh Naomi yeah I mean I'd be remiss if I didn't say uh harvard definitely didn't start it and uh they they won they just won so late um and uh but I would I would say that the relationship is is is about building power right I mean none of this happens without building power and we don't build power at the global level we be we build power in our communities in our workplaces in our neighborhoods and and and and bring that power upwards to different you know subnational national international forums but but you know as as you write for me I mean power can seize nothing without a fight and and um you know I have this very vivid memory of uh going on a a delegation to standard and pours with the late Arthur manual who is a very important um indigenous leader here in Canada Scott muck um leader um who who who managed to get a meeting with standard and pours um and the person whose job it was to issue Canada's credit rating um and he presented this person with a a load of evidence about how much of Canada's wealth was based on ignoring its own laws its own court rulings um and made the argument that Canada owed a huge debt to indigenous people which should lead to Canada not getting a AAA credit rating and this is part of Arthur's genius to come up with these sort of pressure points in capital to think about how you could exert pressure but this was a real revelation for me because watching how standard and pours responded to him this is on wall street they they they they clearly knew they had been following a lot of these recent court rulings and basically said to him we don't think you have the power to get this enforced and it was essentially you and you and what army is going to enforce this and so I you know this this speaks to movement building and why I think coming back to the book it's so important because it holds the potential for broadening the movement and the coalition engaging constituencies that are maybe engaged on reparations but are not yet engaged on climate justice to see how we can have built a broader more powerful coalition um and just build power thank you so much Naomi the relationship is about building power I want to have that inside of my eyelids um so I never forget those words uh Sabina does it like as Femi was just saying the whole thing that the distinction is a result I had written while territory and like the geopolitical scenario they're also not a binary right they're very much connected in the sense that geopolitics is built out of this disputes over territory so like in the book when you're talking about like the first advantage like that was coming back to me like a lot of times like territory as this first advantage and then you build things around it and one of the main points is to actually like appropriate it in such a way that the territory is no longer a place where you build a living in the community and like in a different world view right just becomes something that you can you know commodify and you can take natural resources from it and you can build things on it you can take things out of it it becomes like something very much uh enmeshed in this capitalist system right but in a way like we already see a lot of alternatives that I built that kind of like go beyond that so some of the discussions around what would be a great new deal in in Latin America they come from perspective like a like an eco social pact from the south so it's already regional so it's already bridging a lot of uh demands that go across borders that because of that you will have to deal with some treaties you have to deal with some international institutions but you can also have you know parallel power in a sense and build actual power uh beyond that and we have that also like you know like a lot of the the indigenous associations they work that way uh when we're talking about a Campesino like which is like where my my work is a lot closer but like you would have like the Lenders workers movement in Brazil but it also have like Via Campesina that's spread out everywhere and it's doing like very hands-on internationalism and really influencing the perspectives from the other places when you kind of have to go like get on the table with everybody else but I'm actually like very depressed when I think about you know like the prospects of these climate negotiations when it comes to the UN but I don't think we should boycott them I think we have to be there we have to like make our voices heard we got to make sure that we don't get like extra setbacks because if we just like stay away then they're just going to like the corporations are already so enmeshed in the system they're just going to like play along it's going to be way easier for them so we've got to make their job harder in the international institutions so it's not as easy for them to like bring in false solutions around green capitalism but we also have to be building what what is this like alternative geopolitical framework that we want out of territories and it means you know bridging these communities across different places not necessarily having to go through the state and I think we have a very rich history of doing this in many places both in the global north and in the global south because we do know that these borders are artificial in the first place we do know that they come from you know a way of just trying to divide the pie in the whole system of domination so if we're talking about global empire that's precisely what it is so like the history of struggles is also is always a history that has kind of shown that like there's no legitimacy in the way that you know you just sign a treaty here and there especially because most of those things have been signed throughout the years throughout the centuries actually have been to actually differentize people right thank you serena we have to build an alternative geopolitical framework yes um okay so we started a bit late with the Berkeley improvisation Berkeley time we're going to take that forward Naomi unfortunately had absolutely had to go she had another meeting um but the other panelists have really kindly agreed to spend just a couple more minutes so we'll go to around you know 140 145 our pacific time so another about 10 minutes so the good i've got a chance to make a little closing statement so i'm gonna throw it to you jackie then we're gonna have one last little round to pick up any final threads that you wanted to speak to um and then i'm gonna close this out um jackie thanks daniel we'll just bring it back to the beginning of the book um for me you put in a great quote to to set the stage for this book from dr martin luther king jr and i'll i'll read a little bit of it which is all men are interdependent we are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women when we arise in the morning we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a pacific islander we reach for soap that is created for us by a european then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a south american or tea by a chinese or cocoa by a west african before we leave for our jobs we are already befold into more than half of the world and that is i hope um a call to action for wherever you are i think that's been the common thread in uh the panelists responses is that um we do have to think global and and there are way more invitations for um international solidarity and certainly being in the us and i know even for me um having inherited some liability for um our current economic and racialized capitalist system um it is incumbent upon myself and um a lot of my friends and community to advocate for those who are not represented in this constituency um i can most concretely think about where we're going to source our minerals for the renewable transition um so much amazing work especially by a good friend of ours the aria francos uh looking into the uh indigenous front line experiences of this new uh kind of and and skyrocketed demand for precious minerals um and i'm currently trying to wrap my head around how we do that in san francisco how do we honor indigenous peoples across the world and other frontline communities who are going to and currently bearing the brunt of extraction as we enter our new green economy um but really there's there's a role for everyone and even if you are not excited by the promise of politics um i believe everyone has a talent art or a hobby or um some time or or another skill that it's up to you to really match to the call to action um so i'll just leave with that and thank you all so much thank you so much jackie okay now finally i'm going to reverse the order of the flow i'm going to turn over to sabina for any concluding remarks and then i'm going to make sure that femi has a last word on this panel before i thank you all and close us out okay yes so um i'm going to go back to the issue around the the hurricanes like as a concluding remark because i've been kind of like reading the things that femi uh has published on like in relation to that and that requires us to think about these international institutions again this system of governance around that uh you know and the demand for that cancellation and i think this is like one of the points that's brought out that i think is very feasible it's absolutely very feasible out of all the things that we say like like i was trying to keep up with some things that were being said in the chat while this is really hard we don't have enough time for this and that that cancellation is very simple that kind of stuff can be done with the stroke of a pen and so i think this is the kind of demand that uh unifies um us across borders because when we're talking about that cancellation it means that countries may free up resources to be able to you know invest in their own adaptation projects without all of these little conditionalities that usually come from from these uh like external funders so you also have more autonomy from that and it also uh gets us into the point that we do know that so far when you have the extreme weather events and countries are not prepared financially to deal with the outcome of those that we will have to borrow money right so like it normally happens with with uh with smaller Caribbean states but it's a it's a tendency as the extreme weather events become more and more common so we shouldn't have that go across any of these scenarios like anytime that we're talking about loss and damage that should be out of the table and current that needs to be cancelled and i'm not talking just about the IMF but this also means like freeing freeing up society in terms like that cancellation of shielded loans that cancellation around those who are you know just striving to to keep up with their mortgages and really thinking in terms of society that if you if you actually like free up people from that they will have a little bit more income to reorganize themselves and then we will have an opportunity to think of public services and the public responsibilities and maybe liabilities too to borrow from the conversation they're absolutely necessary so we can go forward beyond this system of financing that's actually dictating how we deal with climate change nowadays because we're super happy with what came out of like Glasgow in terms of the article for negotiations and the carbon market and like and double of setting schemes and now they're even you know going after indigenous community should talk about cryptocurrency and how this is going to be solved around like blockchain and bitcoins because this is where conservation is going to happen and this is how you're going to through the blockchain system then you'll just ensure that it's going to be very sustainable so like the finance the financial system is really leading the conversation it can't do that anymore so if we make sure that that cancellation is one of our absolute priorities will be right in their faces the whole time and that might actually tip the scale in our favor thank you so much that's so beautifully but um Femi so I want to follow up on what Sabrina just said where in the short term you know if we pick the right kind of demand and I agree that that cancellation you know might be very strategic we can address this larger political problem which is you know the institutions that have been most to blame for getting us in this mess you know the parts of the world the actors the organizations that have been most to blame for putting us in the current situation end up positioning themselves as the solution so you know fossil fuel companies do this in a lot of ways and of course the you know financial sector does this in a lot of ways and that cancellation might be a way to challenge that um so I think those are important insights about how we challenge the current moment and I think if we're careful if we play our cards right um and if we do the kind of building across the borders that Jackie was talking about earlier the same technique can you know this same tactic can also be the way that we start to articulate you know not just resistance to how the world works now but a different vision of how the world could work right if the finance if the financiers of the world if the banks of the world and the fossil fuel companies of the world weren't the people in charge of saying what the supposed climate solutions are and if we were instead then how would that go um one of the reasons why debt cancellation in particular really helps with that is because what it does is it expands you know just as Sabrina was saying if you don't have to pay debt then you have extra resources and you get to decide what to do with those extra resources so it's you know the kind of thing that can expand self-determination at the at the individual level at the household level and at the state level a lot of these insights came from anti-colonial movements for national independence and for fighting against different kinds of settler empires and I think that is where the kind of short-term vision of what do we do about today's climate politics becomes the long-term vision as well of what do we do about the global racial empire what do we do about this whole historical set of accumulations of inequality and injustice and I think thinking through those issues together and thinking through those issues in a really practically driven way but also one that is geared and guided and constrained by justice and morality I think that's the task of any generation but in particular in the era of climate crisis it's the special important task of the generations that are here now so I'm really glad to get to talk through all these things with Jackie and Sabrina and Naomi um thanks Daniel for saying it up thanks UC Berkeley for hosting it I really appreciate everybody thanks okay huge thanks to everybody for coming huge thanks to our panel um I wish in a way that we could all have been in person but I think this hybrid event dozens of people in person hundreds of people online panelists from two continents is some of the promise of this new kind of technological setup that we have it does exemplify in some ways the kinds of global politics that we need to construct combined at the same time deeply rooted in community and spreading all over the world um that kind of infrastructure is not free or automatic extremely grateful uh to the roster college of natural resources to Dean Ackerley for helping this to come together extremely grateful to the many many staff uh in this building this infrastructure takes a huge amount of work we're just rebooting um this entire hybrid event kind of modality so a lot of folks in here worked really hard today and in prior days to make it physically possible to have this event so huge thanks to them as well um it looks like Dean Ackerley is going to give us a final close-up but again extreme gratitude this was an incredibly enriching panel no conversation like this can be completed but if public universities are for anything it's to start a conversation like this and then let's see how we carry it forward thank you very much no only to thank Daniel and invite you all for a reception thank you so much Daniel thanks all