Relief Remix

The word relief has many interpretations, from remedy, rest, and help to distinguishing contrasts, edges, and surface inequalities. Policymakers, governments, and private technology interests use the term “relief” in a form of Orwellian double-speak to name the harm they cause by the idea of its opposite. By doing this, these entities seek to control the contours and edges of global water and climate transitions, dictating the terms of engagement past, present, and future.¹ The contributors to the 2022 Water Justice and Technology report first came together in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to confront the plethora of relief initiatives that furthered structural inequalities. In our first report, we outlined how relief, and as a corollary, crisis, function in technology-driven water governance to control and limit access to life’s necessities.²

Today we introduce water justice and technology studio and second edition print, Relief Remix, as a response to the ongoing need for justice in the face of expanding technological violence against water.³ “Remix” describes our collective method of policy analysis towards subverting status quo understandings of “relief” and “crisis” by situating water relief policies in historical and geographical contexts to demystify their formations and outcomes. Our approach and methodology of remixing the terms of COVID-19 water relief policies can be applied to natural resource and climate policy at large.

We bring together writers, historians, engineers, activists, and artists to contextualize and critique real applications of water relief policies and technologies across space and time.⁴ Our multigenre and multidisciplinary approach to critiquing status quo water transition terms is inspired by mutual aid practices that have emerged from the longstanding movements and traditions of abolition, decolonization, feminist and disability radical care, queer and trans community, environmental justice and ecological defense, sacred site protection, migrant and refugee solidarity networks, autonomous disaster organizing, de-growth, and anarchist collectives that imagine new futures through collective self-determination and skill sharing while also honoring people and ecologies. 

Our reflection on “relief” is building connections through sharing individual stories about how technologies, including hydroelectric dams,⁵ artificial intelligence,⁶ mining laws,⁷ green infrastructures,⁸ and militia organizations,⁹ are implicated in upholding white supremacy and colonialism and thus hinder the lives and work of those most marginalized. Water relief policies are often cast as solutions to the “four axes of water justice”: water security,¹⁰ water access,¹¹ water affordability,¹² and water scarcity.¹³ However, these humanitarian and developmental aid frameworks overwhelmingly neglect how environmental racism, colonialism, and ecofascism are impacting water around the world. Furthermore, they enable genealogies of white supremacist and colonial policy and law.

In the United States, genocidal mining laws,¹⁴ Jim Crow water policies,¹⁵ and white supremacist efforts to use water as a weapon of death against migrants of color¹⁶ are still dominating current water and climate transition policies. Indigenous and environmental activists have demanded reform to the General Mining Act of 1872, which combines legal enshrinement of the colonial Doctrine of Discovery, with a prioritization of mining as the preferred use of public lands. The act comes complete with tax kickbacks, favoritism for large corporations over individual miners, and substantial difficulties for non-mining centered activities, such as recreation or conservation, to compete with mining claims.¹⁷

One current front in the battle over this law is an enormous open-pit lithium mine proposal backed by the Biden Administration and electric vehicle interests in Thacker Pass, Nevada, or Peehee Mu’huh in the language of the Paiute-Shoshone people who hold the place sacred. The area is a gathering ground for food and medicine, home to several endangered species, and the site of a gold rush massacre of Paiute-Shoshone peoples that remains a sensitive burial ground to this day, an issue that painfully reminds tribal members of the cost of the lithium “white gold rush”.¹⁸ Through the Justice40 Initiative, the Biden administration is pushing for reform to the law in the guise of addressing tribal and environmental issues. However, the president’s proposals focus on promoting mining and will only strengthen the interests of the mining industry over the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples and the environment.¹⁹ 

Just as the genocidal afterlife of settler colonialism is visible in the struggle to protect Peehee Mu’huh, the afterlife of chattel slavery and Jim Crow continues to cast a shadow over predominantly Black communities like Jackson, Mississippi, that struggle for access to clean water. In August 2022, heavy flooding from climate change-powered floods on the Pearl River caused damage to water treatment plants that resulted in a loss of safe drinking water for both the majority Black city of Jackson and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians from a broken water system plagued by deadly bacteria outbreaks and lead poisoning in recent years.²⁰ A year later, residents claim that Jackson tap water still has discoloration, “stuff floating in it,” and bad smells.²¹ Decades of problems with the Jackson water system stem from a legacy of racism: white-flight from the city after civil rights movement gains, eviscerated tax revenue, efforts by the white Republican state government to chastise the city’s progressive Black leadership, massive pipe leaks that have gone unaddressed for years, and the intervention of opaque and undemocratic federal oversight.²² The felt impacts of this politics of abandonment, redolent of the Flint water crisis, primarily affect the city’s Black residents. The Jackson water crisis is yet another separate and unequal legacy of Jim Crow.²³

Meanwhile, the state of Texas is literally trying to kill people by placing deadly weapons in the Rio Grande to deter both legal asylum seekers and undocumented migrants.²⁴ In July 2023, Texas governor Greg Abbott, following a history of white supremacist political stunts,²⁵ ordered the state to place strings of massive orange balls the size of an adult torso and covered in deadly razors in the center of the river, in areas where strong currents are already known to drown those attempting to cross the waters.²⁶ He also signed a bill during a heat wave from the hottest summer on record in modern history to ban water and cooling breaks for outdoor workers, a policy that unions say is a literal death sentence for workers in industries such as construction that already face health risks from heat exhaustion.²⁷ 

We offer these examples to illustrate the stakes of this work because “water is life” is more than a catch-phrase: it is a brutal reality for many of our communities who face shortened life spans due to water injustice. Collective change requires collective critique and shared imagination and creativity.²⁸ By remembering how and why technologies are built, how they change over time and relate to place, we remix the terms “relief” and “crisis” to deepen our collective power for water justice amidst climate change. We hope our water stories will be of use to your conversations, classrooms, and communities.

LEGACIES OF RELIEF 

Over the last year and a half, authoritarian and fascist governments have continued to use water to reify colonial and white supremacist resource laws while repudiating environmental protections and NEPA-era legal protections. This past summer SCOTUS disavowed Navajo Nation’s Winter’s rights,²⁹ further undercutting Diné water, land, and governmental sovereignty. With the 2023 Sackett v. EPA ruling, SCOTUS dissolved wetland and nexus waterway protections,³⁰ enabling indiscriminate dumping and polluting, while weakening the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the regulatory power of the EPA.³¹ State sanctioned ecocide and human suffering is exacerbated by increasing climate change events around the world. Taps are running dry in Palestine as extreme heat converges with Israeli settler’s stranglehold on water in Gaza and the West Bank, following a century of water apartheid in Palestine.³² This year marks the sixth consecutive failed rainy season in the horn of Africa, a drought which experts debate is either the worst in forty years or the worst in modern recorded history, but that is largely agreed to be the result of climate change.³³ In 2023, colonial and tech interests did not wait for Lahaina’s ashes to cool or victims to be located before launching massive land and water grabs.³⁴

Industrial policy with roots in histories of development is predicated on perpetual crises. Technological innovation, scaled around concepts of efficiency, optimization, and demands for energy, is not usually designed to relieve the crisis.³⁵ Rather, technology is designed to facilitate extraction of natural resources in order to make more products and profit. In this context, aid and relief are deeply paternalistic and colonial impulses. One of the beloved elders we lost to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva, founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, advisor to the Zapatistas, and a leading thinking of post-development and degrowth, taught us that the concept of development was originally conceived as “aid” flowing from the Global North to the Global South to promote the spread of capitalism and to challenge the decolonization initiatives of colonized peoples in the aftermath of WWII.³⁶ One way so-called “aid” was distributed was through high-interest loans and Euro-Western technical assistance for large infrastructure, especially dams and irrigation projects, in the Global South. These projects-often resulted in enormous profits for European and U.S. consulting and engineering firms.³⁷

In reaction to post-WWII third world independence movements around the world–that sought to throw off the chains of imperialism and colonial dependence–European nations used the concept of development to legitimize a hierarchical distinction between white and non-white nations by shifting from ranking race to ranking industrial development. Formerly colonized peoples who sought liberation from empire and systems of oppression were now “impoverished” and “in need” of developmental aid. In the era of global development, scarcity of basic needs and resources now required more dependence on colonial governments and industries and less self-determination for the oppressed.

This ranking positioned nations most responsible for the climate crisis vis-a-vis colonial domination as existing in the present / future temporality of human history while framing regions that had yet to be industrialized as existing in an inferior past tense: as “backwards” and undeveloped or unmodern. The logic of false need by which former colonial states remain dependent on colonial empires constitutes what water justice scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality.”³⁸

Recent climate legislation in the U.S. follows a similar pattern of limited, short-term relief for historically-rooted crises that ultimately does little to dismantle structural inequities and, in fact, may reproduce the harms of colonialism. In 2022, following the CARES ACT and ARP—major US relief policies of the early COVID-19 era—the Biden administration released the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as the most sweeping climate crisis remediation policy package in US history. The IRA is designed to supposedly address two crises: inflation and carbon emission-producing climate change. But hearkening on the impulses of colonial development, the IRA is riddled with give-aways to technology industries, electric vehicle producers, and lithium mining markets. Much of the hyped actual consumer-cost inflation measures in the bill focus on the pharmaceutical industry to address drug costs. However instead of creating an across-the-board system for negotiating drug prices, the bill creates a cumbersome and opaque system to focus initially on only ten drugs, with cost reductions years away for patients.³⁹

For our focus on water justice, the climate change provisions in the bill are even more disappointing. Earthworks notes that, “where the IRA does actually seek to encourage a transition toward clean energy technologies, it does so with an increase in mining activities that fuel the climate crisis and disproportionately impact many communities, especially Indigenous communities and their resources.”⁴⁰ In the IRA, there are provisions to fund the cleanup of superfund toxic pollution sites, some Department of Agriculture funding that is strategically phrased to focus on energy pursuits, and some rural development and conservation funding, that also prioritizes meeting energy demands. There are some loans and grants to the Department of Housing to address water issues and air quality but that, again, structure energy as a priority. There are also some resources offered to plan for and track natural disasters such as wildfires and to address greenhouse emissions and air pollution.⁴¹ But the vast majority of the legislation is focused on what it calls energy security, clean fuels, and clean vehicles.

Despite this, the IRA includes several provisions to increase fossil fuel production, such as bringing back oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico that had been canceled by the courts and requiring the Interior Department to offer “at least 2 million acres of public lands and 60 million acres of offshore waters for oil and gas leasing each year for a decade as a prerequisite to installing any new solar or wind energy,” according to analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity.⁴² The bill also provides $3.23 billion in carbon capture credits to fossil fuel industries, a disproven method of masking oil production as carbon reduction.⁴³ The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) has been particularly harsh in their critique of the IRA, referring to it as a Trojan Horse that co-opts the language and demands of the environmental justice community to fund fossil fuel corporations and structures the grant process for energy and environmental projects funded in the bill to favor applications from mining interests and corporate nonprofits.⁴⁴

IEN also notes that the majority of the bill’s provisions fund false climate solutions disguised as mega relief policies, such as increasing funding to nuclear energy, hydrogen, biofuels production, and lithium mining. The critical mineral extraction provisions of the IRA force electric vehicle and battery producers to source materials from North America, a move seen by Indigenous communities as a humongous green light to destroy extremely rare and finite desert water resources for Hualapai, Paiute, and Shoshone peoples.⁴⁵ Overall, the IRA will exacerbate water pollution and scarcity via its funding of mining projects and automobile production in order to prioritize the energy demands of the military and consumer markets. Instead of providing meaningful relief, the Climate Justice Alliance argues, “the harms of the bill… outweigh its benefits.”⁴⁶

Enabled by industrial policies like the IRA, tech innovation is expanding in the currents of crisis-and-relief. For-profit tech companies like IBM and Microsoft are expanding AI innovation on the Colorado River in partnership with settler water authorities, while posturing their work as solutions to the colonial megadrought crisis. Mega tech-finance conglomerates, especially Blackstone Investments, are driving the expansion of lithium and hydrogen mining in the US southwest, poisoning and destroying sacred land and water, while labeling their destruction as a green energy transition. Building on legacies of inequitable sacrifice zones in Mexico City,⁴⁷ water innovation companies are claiming to relieve water shortage through extractive SMART water innovations, even while community organizations are working to establish sustainable rain capture programs.⁴⁸ In short, in a world where climate change responses have been captured by neoliberal and colonial institutions that limit possibilities to only policy and market outcomes, the water crisis-relief nexus has become a tool for the continued accumulation of capital at the expense of historically marginalized communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis. This is precisely why it is necessary to situate water relief policy in historical and geographical context: to demystify the violent foundations of water and climate policies that that wittingly or unwittingly perpetuate the status quo.

REMIXING RELIEF: THE POWER OF MUTUAL-AID AND COLLECTIVISM

Among its many uses, relief is often invoked in medical and healing description, as in providing a patient with relief from internal and external maladies and bodily wounds. Relief is necessary to survive and bear our wounds that are portals to larger systemic and cultural violence. Under systems of capitalism and colonialism, our bodies are inflamed,⁴⁹ poisoned,⁵⁰ and dehydrated from overwork and undernourishment. Humanitarian relief policies invoke this pain and promise to relieve it just as they delay and hinder needed care. Our research on COVID-19 water relief policies shows how even in rudimentary water repayment relief cases, funding delays and denials, confusing water application systems, and paternalistic oversight hinder these solutions from working.⁵¹

The “good intentions” of crisis-and-relief policies only treat the symptoms and not the causes of injustice, and often make the symptoms worse. In other words, the real world dynamics of relief policies can cause more harm than remedy. But even as the violence of relief policy can reside in false promises, artificial futures, and perpetual waiting–there are alternatives to giving our time and power away. In the face of crises, we have turned towards each other. In response to deleterious relief policies in water, environmental justice, labor, and more, we are seeing increased power against crisis-and-relief manipulations and deleterious tech-driven policies through coalition building, collective self-determination, and mutual aid.

Labor union organizing is surging in response to broken contracts, pay manipulations, safety issues, and the impacts of tech expansionism and industrial policy. This past year, the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes made an unprecedented move advancing labor rights against AI-aided monopolies.⁵² The Graduate student workers have has won extraordinary gains in recent years in terms of both contracts and organizing methods, and auto workers are now on strike, demanding a variety of things such as a four-day work week which could have major influence on labor standards as a whole.⁵³ Organizations like the Debt Collective, which are not labor unions but that center shared experiences of economic precarity felt across a wide variety of communities, are turning debt relief into collective power through organized demands, sharing tools and lessons learned, and creating spaces for processing and collective healing. They are teaching us that canceling student debt is totally legal and that we have a right to lasting and meaningful social change.⁵⁴ 

All relief policies derive from stratified histories of injustice that when understood, make clear the need for knowing and acknowledging the past and growing collective self-determination. For example, debt is a market technology and system of indentured servitude⁵⁵–there are currently 43 million borrowers, with $1.7 trillion dollars of combined student loan debt.⁵⁶ With the creeping rhetorics of “debt forgiveness” and “societal burden,” this technology stimulates internalized shame and upholds the racial wealth gap that has only grown since the 1945 GI Bill enacted de facto resource policies for prioritizing a white middle class at the expense of of marginalized communities.⁵⁷ Due to this history of structural disenfranchisement, after four years, Black students owe on average 188% more in student loans than white students.⁵⁸ Congress’s rejection of the Student Loan Forgiveness plan and the Biden administration’s refusal to honor the 1965 Higher Education Act are blatant policies of class warfare. The reaction to the failure of student debt relief has been a move to organize students, graduates, and parents to engage in collective struggle demanding justice for education inequality.

Organizing has a long history in labor and anti-oppression struggles, but the rise of disaster organizing that emerged after 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico marked a new era of disaster mutual aid. It was a reaction to the failures of developmental aid and humanitarian relief, and it has been led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities from long legacies of mutual aid and community self-defense practices.⁵⁹ Disaster mutual aid became a network, a way of living in collective precarity, and an assemblage of survival skills and learning activities shared amongst communities of people trying to figure out how to survive not only climate change but failures of development, state violence perpetrated by police and first responders, and widespread corruption in mainstream and increasingly corporatised aid agencies.⁶⁰ More and more, mutual aid is the first thing victims turn to when disaster strikes and mainstream forms of relief cannot be trusted. In August 2023, in the aftermath of the wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, mutual aid networks sprang up to share lists and contacts for resources, crowdsource emergency funds directly to residents, meet basic needs, and organize demands for justice for the failures of the state to provide sufficient water to fight the fires.⁶¹ The lessons learned from the disaster mutual aid movement, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, is that disaster can strike anywhere at any time and all of us must be prepared to organize together in solidarity because relief from outside our communities, whether from the government, nonprofits, or technological industries, is not a safety net we can count on.⁶²

In examining the struggle for water – we have made visible the difference between the relief aid economy and the deep relationality of mutual aid networks that build community and further self-determination.⁶³ The landmark 2017 study on the impacts of the relationships between the state, philanthropists and social justice organizations by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, detailed how the nonprofit industrial complex disciplined social movements and social justice organizations into doing the work of humanitarian aid while limiting their capacities to challenge power structures.⁶⁴ The case studies in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, such as Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo’s discussion of how feminist resistance to domestic violence has been shifted away from confronting heteropatriarchy towards demanding mass incarceration, demonstrates how social justice nonprofits increasingly perform the functions of the state by transforming social resistance into social service. This takes away our power to create change and to form solutions that are appropriate for the inequities and crises we are facing. Given the ways that social justice organizing becomes so co-opted, we ask what can we do differently to actually achieve substantive change? Can we think outside the box of policy and aid that relief has been formulated into?

While we aim to critique the violence and inadequacy of technocratic responses to socio-ecological crises, we are not opposed to convivial technology. Following the visionary work of liberation theologist and degrowth advocate Ivan Illich, we suggest that instead of furthering extraction and accumulation to benefit the elite, technology should deepen conviviality for those most impacted: it should facilitate mutual aid and bring people together in forms of solidarity that work against oppression and marginalization and towards mutual dignity.⁶⁵ Drawing on his work with urban and rural poor folks in México, Illich argued in Tools for Conviviality that technology should follow the lessons from the ways Indigenous and traditional cultures have created skills and tools that help us maintain traditional knowledge, unique cultures, and individual differences that bring us in better balance with nature and have made people diverse and interesting. The emergence of disaster mutual aid and the reclaiming of life skills for collective survival are areas of hope for water justice.⁶⁶ Many of us are taking this opportunity to learn how to do things for ourselves and for each other. The pandemic fueled interest for many of us to learn emergency first aid, sew our own face masks, learn care work, and make soap. It also brought a rise in popularity to home vegetable gardens and backyard chickens as people sought strategies to navigate commercial food shortages. 

We created our own relief when there was none provided to us. And isolated as we were, through personal networks and internet connections, we did this together. But large-scale problems such as protecting sacred waters and ensuring access to clean water for entire communities will require us to work more collaboratively to demand justice and creative convivial solutions to climate change and the problems formed by development. The pandemic was just a practice run. The marathon still lies ahead. Our report’s methodology of a historically rooted and collective analysis of relief, as a bounded policy mechanism, offers a critical and often missing social component to policy analysis. Our shared commitment to mutual aid and collectivism is what makes this water justice work possible and what will continue to foster deep and meaningful change.