“Empire takes oil, natural gas, lithium, canal access, and everything else under the banner of green. At its core, empire is the rancor that weakens our connection with place, banishing lifeways that tether humans to the sense that we come from somewhere.

…

The “lesser evil” choice between killing whales with industrial wind energy versus by global warming is the barter when a society forgets where they come from. Memory loss is requisite for a false double bind, presenting us with only two possible paths. Expected to choose the wind energy path, we are handed a palliative solution that obscures our dependence on industry and the wound that it creates. A protean trickster, industry changes shape and name, but the blight it forges belongs to a legacy that arose long before industrial fossil fuel extraction. This solution promises salvation, cloaked by a technical language that leaves one hoping that the experts will soon be arriving. Hidden beneath the false double bind are countless ways that communities could re-localize and become more aligned with Earth.”

@Erica Shugart lives on a narrow peninsula between Humboldt Bay and the Pacific Ocean. She is a member of the Protect The Coast PNW Campaign, a grassroots movement to protect the Pacific Northwest from offshore energy development.