Statement denouncing the Defense Production Act and Energy Security and Independence Act to extract energy transition minerals

Statement denouncing the Defense Production Act and Energy Security and Independence Act to extract energy transition minerals

The Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice denounces the U.S. federal government’s escalation of colonial and capitalist extraction that causes and irreversible environmental harm to Indigenous lands and waters in pursuit of minerals and metals. We denounce Biden’s executive order invoking the Defense Production Act for battery materials last week and the Energy Security and Independence Act introduced to Congress today. These Acts violently steamroll Indigenous communities with brutally destructive mineral extraction projects. 

The end of fossil fuels must not come at the expense of Indigenous sacred sites & waters. We call out organizations who endorse these Acts for their complicity in harming frontline Indigenous peoples protecting sacred lands and waters from mining. We denounce the greenwashing of immensely destructive mining projects that will destroy rare and finite sacred water sources in the driest desert regions of the Southwest in the name of false climate solutions including electric vehicles and lithium batteries. Desert water is sacred and central to sustaining life. We reject lithium extraction as a false climate solution. 

Don’t fight imperialism abroad with racist and misogynistic colonialism at home. Solidarity against fossil fuel imperialism around the world must not come through further colonialism, racism, and destruction of Indigenous lands, waters, and sacred sites. It is disingenuous to pretend to protect white Europeans from imperialist invasion by committing colonial invasion of Indigenous peoples and lands in the Americas. We denounce the co-optation of the Ukrainian resistance to imperialist invasion as an excuse to plunder Indigenous lands and waters in the Southwest. Indigenous peoples of the west coast have also experienced a long history of Russian colonialism that included genocide and slavery alongside and at times pre-dating Spanish colonialism. Moreover, expanding mining in Indigenous lands will exacerbate the crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Relatives through the expansion of mining man camps. The lives of Indigenous relatives should not be put at risk for false climate solutions and performative gestures against Russian imperialism. Instead, we link solidarity with Ukrainian resistances to Russian imperialism to solidarity with Indigenous resistances to extractive colonialism in North America by considering and acting on dismantling the intersections of colonialism and imperialism through extraction and violence. We denounce colonialism and imperialism everywhere, not just where and when it is convenient to extractivist agendas for the accumulation of wealth. We demand the settler state end policies of gold rush genocide against Indigenous peoples. 

We uplift the voices of Indigenous peoples on the frontlines of greenwashed extraction for the farce of a “renewable” or “just” transition from one disastrous system of extraction to another and urge all those committed to a livable future to listen to them.

Decolonize > Decarbonize. #Decolonize4Climate

Illustration by Sophie Wang & CIEJ (2021)