Climate Change or Consent Change?
I’m going to share some information from a few recent reports that discuss the relationship between Indigenous peoples’ consent and progress mitigating climate change. My discussion point is that certain dimensions of ‘climate crises’ are perhaps consent crises instead, and recognizing consent crises bears important lessons for climate action.
Here, in my writing, consent refers to Indigenous peoples’ freedoms and unfettered capacities to make decisions about how to conserve, protect, dwell in, energize, and foster sustenance within their lands. Indigenous concepts and practices of land tenure, sovereignty, self-governance, and stewardship are powerful expressions of Indigenous consent.
Consent is also codified as a right, such as the right to free, prior and informed consent that’s now enshrined in various schedules of human rights and international and national policies. Though many Indigenous cultures have diverse traditions of consent making with the non-human world that go beyond consent as a mere right. For example, diverse Anishinaabe/Neshnabé peoples have treaty-making, clan, and subsistence traditions that complex consent relationships with plants, animals, water, ecosystems, and other elements and dimensions of the environment (Simpson 2008, Bohaker 2006, Stark 2010, 2012, Craft 2016, Corbiere 2019).
Let me return to describing the reports and what they convey about Indigenous consent and climate change mitigation. The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) is an organization that includes 150 rights holding organizations that are “dedicated to advancing the forestland and resource rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, local communities, and women from these communities.” In a recent policy brief called the “Significance of Community-Held Territories in 24 Countries to Global Climate,” RRI in collaboration with Woodwell Climate Research Center and Rainforest Foundation US write the following:
Our findings indicate that Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Descendant Peoples, and local communities customarily hold and use at least 958 million hectares (mha) of land in the 24 reviewed countries but have legally recognized rights to less than half of this area (447 mha). Their lands are estimated to store at least 253.5 Gigatons of Carbon (GtC), playing a vital role in the maintenance of globally significant greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs. However, the majority of this carbon (52 percent, or 130.6 GtC) is stored in community-held lands and territories that have yet to be legally recognized. (Rights and Resources Initiative, Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Rainforest Foundation US 2021).
In the context of these 24 countries, recognition and respect for Indigenous consent to how to steward their own lands would have a tremendous impact on mitigating climate change. Failure to respect Indigenous consent means that these territories are at risk for development projects that will contribute to exacerbating dangerous climate change.
In the U.S., The Biden-Harris administration with the 117th Congress has created unprecedented funding for tribal renewable energy through new climate legislation. This legislation sets aside approximately $14B for 574 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages in the U.S. and Alaska, more than $13B from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA-BIP) and more than $720M from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As the U.S. recognizes Tribal nations as sovereigns, there is the opportunity that they could emerge as leaders in the energy transition to renewable energy, changing the face of energy infrastructure in the U.S. [publication information forthcoming].
However, in an unpublished report by a think tank of leaders in Tribal energy, they write that Tribal self-governance and administration continues to be determined largely by U.S. standards. The funding is out of reach for Tribes that do not have shovel ready projects, the funding is not long term and ongoing, and the requirements and federal funding applications are two burdensome for Tribal nations to administer. Tribal nations did not consent to these requirements for accessing funds, and it prevents Tribal nations from moving forward with renewable energy plans. Ironically, the Tribal nations in the best position to access such funds are ones with a history of fossil fuel infrastructure in their territories [publication information forthcoming].
The Indigenous Environmental Network and Indigenous Climate Action, important organizations advocating for Indigenous environmental justice globally, and Oil Change International, published a report in 2021 called “Indigenous Resistance against Carbon.” The report states the following:
[W]e reveal that Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions. The report highlights and analyzes 26 Indigenous frontline struggles in the past decade against a variety of fossil fuel projects across Turtle Island over all stages of the fossil fuel development chain. Our analysis reveals that Indigenous resistance to carbon over the past decade has stopped projects equivalent to 400 new coal-fired power plants, or roughly 345 million new passenger vehicles. Additionally, Indigenous resistance has helped shift public debate around fossil fuels and Indigenous Rights, while averting lock-in of carbon-intensive projects (Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, and Indigenous Climate Action 2021).
One of the takeaways of the report is that Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel dependency is a struggle to protect Indigenous consent to their territories. The report has a section on consent that states that “Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is a specific right pertaining to Indigenous Peoples that is recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It allows Indigenous Peoples to give or withhold consent to a project that may affect them or their territories” (3). Were Indigenous consent actually respected, the impacts would be more wide ranging given that collective resistance would not be required to transition away from fossil fuel dependency.
In each of these reports, the speed by which Indigenous peoples can enact their own solutions to climate change is a function of their consent. That is, the degree to which dominant actors – especially nation states, corporations, and large non-profits – respect Indigenous peoples’ consent affects the degree to which Indigenous peoples can exercise leading solutions to climate change. In the first report, Indigenous consent is critical for immediate protection of major greenhouse gas sinks and reserves. In the second report, Indigenous consent to how energy will be administered on their lands will empower Tribal nations to manage billions of US dollars in renewable energy investments. In the third report, Indigenous struggles to secure their consent to development in their own territories has ended many dangerous fossil fuel projects. The implication I’ll draw from these reports is that respect for Indigenous peoples’ consent – from land tenure to sovereignty – is an immediate solution to ending fossil fuel dependence and transitioning to renewable energy. It’s important to consider what it means for climate change mitigation to operate at the speed of consent.
What is the Speed of Consent?
I’ve been in some rooms where business, scientific, and government leaders expressed concern that respecting environmental justice will slow down climate action to mitigate the most dangerous forms of industrial caused climate change. The concern centered on consent. They conveyed Indigenous resistance to large-scale wind and solar power, carbon capture and storage, dams, and hydrogen projects will impose financial, legal, and political burdens on these projects that will lead to their implementation being slowed or completely stopped. I’ve also seen some different research proposals out there that would explore the relationship between carbon reduction and environmental justice, the idea being that there must be some type of tradeoff.
The speed of consent can be thought of in a lot of ways. The most rudimentary way is the way just discussed. That is, consent is a check on any force for climate mitigation. Consent can stop that force from achieving its end. This notion of consent treats it as an isolated, ahistorical moment. It is a moment where one or more parties seek to do what it takes to mitigate climate change – harnessing all of the industrial, capitalist, and colonial powers that be. When they go to implement the ‘much needed projects’, the requirement for Indigenous and local community consent presents a potential barrier to project completion. In cases where energy projects will increase air pollution, fossil fuel reliance (e.g. numerous types of carbon capture), new pipelines, degrade landscapes, and fail to share profits fairly, I know some scientists who have stated that Indigenous peoples should simply shoulder that burden because it’s for the sake of the planet.
But consent is not a mere act that happens in moment and whose speed is primarily a function of how much it slows certain types of industrial projects. Not only is this assumption about consent ethnocentric, but it treats consent as an impediment without considering it as a possible solution – a solution that could occur at varying speeds. Regarding climate change, consent actually has deep connections to the origin of what many people everywhere are calling ‘the’ climate crisis or climate crises. The reason why industrial causes of anthropogenic climate change were able to rapidly grow in their emissions, unchecked, was because colonial nations, using exploitative forms of capitalism, violated the consent of people on whose lands fossil fuel infrastructure was established. Land left, land grabs, and the seizure and destruction of Indigenous and diverse communities’ cultivated ecosystems drove the quick rise of high carbon footprint economics.
Colonialism, among other things, is a form of consent denial, where it seeks to generate institutions that make it impossible for colonized populations to consent to anything that affects them. Entire traditions of international consent, consent-based diplomacy, and consent relations with non-humans and ecosystems was ended or severely curtailed during the most recent centuries. The result is a world in which Indigenous peoples and diverse communities do not have access to respectful consent-based relationships with the parties seeking to launch industrial solutions to climate change, such as the aforementioned climate mitigation strategies. Based on my understanding, I think that many Indigenous persons have long, deep memories of the violence, suffering, and harm caused by the erosion of consent that has occurred over the course of successive generations. The struggles that many Indigenous peoples face today are all traceable to abuses of Indigenous consent over education, the structures of families, parenthood, and intergenerational care, conservation and environmental protection, energy, building and infrastructure, living spaces, travel and migration, and economic development.
The tenacity it takes to engage in Indigenous advocacy then, when faced with the myriad problems that many of our communities endure today, is an experience of time that – along one dimension – is an experience of the long haul it is to redress decades and centuries of abuses and desecration of consent relationships. Again, this is an experience of time. Indigenous advocacy, including the organizing, movement building, leadership, and infrastructure and institution building it takes, is a concentrated duration of compounded consent violations. And I’m just discussing one dimension of time here as it relates to a certain form of consent. By the time we arrive at climate change mitigation, I certainly do not experience consent in the same way that someone at the World Bank, or Exxon, a carbon capture research center, or the White House does. Rather, I see disrespect for consent as a major cause of dangerous climate change and a major cause of other risks, harms, and violence. Historically, colonists, capitalists, ableists, and patriarchs were addicted to doing things without respecting the consent of those affected. While I understand that many more people are increasingly wanting to halt addiction to fossil fuels, I have not seen a similar effort to halt the addiction to doing things non-consensually.
But if consent was unlocked as a solution, action to curb dangerous climate change could be swifter. Indigenous peoples could restore their rights and freedoms to consent over their own lands, putting abrupt ends to fossil fuel enterprises. They could fix administrative hurdles and directly protect their territories from development projects that are financially exploitative and that maintain fossil fuel dependency.
There are slow and fast forms of consent, then. But to speak of fast and slow is to orient oneself first around some understanding of speed, and then see where consent fits within that understanding. Consent itself has to do with place and time.
Kinship, Both the Quickest and the Slowest
There are different types of ‘timings’ of consent. By ‘timing,’ I just mean how one experiences consent as part of their bonds with living beings and the environments. Bonds are the emotional connections and commitments to behave in certain ways. Within one’s experience, diverse emotions – such as love, fear, siblinghood, superiority, humility, and anger, among others – characterize one’s emotive investment in connections with others. These connections, in turn, are linked with one’s commitments, that is, one’s senses of what things have rights, what relationships require nurturing and cultivation, when or if violence is morally acceptable toward some, and to whom one has responsibilities for and accountability to, among other commitments.
The focus here will be on the timing of consent through emotional connections and commitments of kinship. For the sake of this essay, kinship bonds are particular relationships to living beings and the environment that serve a rare purpose. When one exercises their kinship with others, they are maintaining relationships that have an elevated role in fostering the moral animacy of a society to respond in the best ways to all that is happening around it. Bonds that play this role must be very powerful. They include trust, reciprocity, and, for our purposes here, consent.
When faced with crisis, there are different questions that can be asked. I find myself often in situations where the predominant question being asked is “what do we do?”? For me, this question seems to focus on determining what actions or measures must be taken to reduce the crisis. It pushes me to think about the acts themselves. When confronted with the feasibility of the actions, I then rely on the back of the napkin analyses to figure out the numbers.
For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ran models on different scenarios for climate mitigation. Some of the scenarios featured carbon capture as one of the factors mitigating climate change, and many interpret the IPCC report as recommending carbon capture. But the IPCC’s analysis of carbon capture was entirely a bird’s eye view, entirely theoretical. It was not grounded in the actual engineering of carbon capture, which would have had to include the actual knowledge of the success rate of carbon capture, the additional fossil fuel energy production that needs to be built and fossil infrastructure, the new pipelines for transport, and the massive increases in air pollution. These are issues of consent.
The IPCC did not consider climate change solutions by thinking about the pace of consent. Rather, a bare assumption about the impacts of a technology was fed into a set of other factors that would produce philosophical ideas about climate change mitigation. But had consent been the focus of modeling, a different dimension would have been revealed. Since consent involves knowledge of on the ground conditions and the relationships needed to make things happen, the engineering, law, politics, health, and risk of carbon capture would have been featured, along with all other solutions and business-as-usual assumptions.
I wonder if there are better questions out there. What if instead of asking about what to do, we asked instead “What’s the status of the relationships that will be needed to address the crisis?” If talking about climate change, this question would point us to whether consent and other important qualities of relationships are in place at sufficient levels to be able to motivate swift and genuine solutions to crises.
Asking this question moves directly to the heart of whether there are relationships in place to get done the type of drastic measures needed to respond to violence and disruption. Is there enough trust? Is there enough consent? Is there enough reciprocity? Do these, and other qualities of relationships, exist in coordination with one another?
The second question would push me to consider whether I am part of clusters and networks for relationships that are capable of acting suitably in the face of crisis. But, of course, my reasoning may change here as I investigate the question. If it turns out that relationships of consent, for example, do not exist sufficiently for coordinated action, then there is a deeper crisis of consent existing apart from the climate crisis. Each parallel and subsequent crisis will maintain and perhaps worsen the consent crisis the more dominant actors violate consent and fail to repair consent relationships, some of which have been compromised for centuries.
Each crisis question suggests different ways of understanding the speed of addressing problems. But how do we understand fast or slow? For people whose exercise of self-determination has been violent and harmful to others, perhaps there is always the temptation to understand matters through the domineering idea of ‘give us one more chance to make things right’. The speed of action is a mirage, it is no different from someone who does wrong and too hastily moves to make up for it.
Climate action at the speed of consent is, then, a strategy that involves both slowing down and speeding up. Climate change mitigation will be slow when the relationships are not in place – including consent relationships – to foster the mobilization needed to end fossil fuel dependency and engage in non-exploitative economic transactions. Generations of violations of kinship, including trust, reciprocity, and consent, will take time to reconcile, restore, and create anew, depending on the time and place. However, if what at least people are acting on is the understanding that climate change is causally rooted in crises of consent and kinship, then acting to foster kinship is the fastest thing that one can do.
But, returning to the reports that I started with, I’ll also claim that there is a fast consent. If dominant parties would respect Indigenous consent, the studies and data available shows that there would be an immediate curbing of many causes of climate change, and there could be the beginnings of a correction in climate leadership that would involve Indigenous peoples leading more prominently in protecting carbon sinks, conserving biodiversity, and hosting renewable energy. Climate at the speed of consent means moving away from ahistorical, linear timings of consent. Instead, consent is embraced in its history relating to climate change, its experience for people of communities who have been subjected to generations of desecration of their consent, and the implications of how respect for consent supports Indigenous land tenure, sovereignty, self-governance, and stewardship.
References
Bohaker, Heidi. 2006. “” Nindoodemag”: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701.” The William and Mary Quarterly 63 (1):23-52.
Corbiere, Alan Theodore Ojiig. 2019. “Anishinaabe treaty-making in the 18th-and-19th-century northern great lakes: from shared meanings to epistemological chasms.”
Craft, Aimée. 2016. “Giving and receiving life from Anishinaabe nibi inaakonigewin (our water law) research.” In Methodological challenges in nature-culture and environmental history research, 125-139. Routledge.
Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, and Indigenous Climate Action. 2021. Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon. Washington DC, USA: Oil Change International
Rights and Resources Initiative, Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Rainforest Foundation US. 2021. Significance of Community-Held Territories in 24 Countries to Global Climate. Washington DC, USA Rights and Resources Initiative
Simpson, Leanne. 2008. “Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa: Precolonial Nishnaabeg diplomatic and treaty relationships.” Wicazo Sa Review 23 (2):29-42.
Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik. 2010. “Respect, Responsibility, and Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe Treaty Making with the United States and Canada.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34 (2):145-164.
Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik. 2012. “Marked by Fire: Anishinaabe Articulations of Nationhood in Treaty Making with the United States and Canada.” The American Indian Quarterly 36 (2):119-149.