These operations of extraction have roots that trace to the early 1500s, when Europeans started to divide and industrialize the natural resources in South America. The Portuguese and Spanish arrived, followed by the English, Dutch, and French. They viewed the colonies as places for extracting gold, silver, sugar, coffee, and other returns on land investments. That model depended on slave labor. When indigenous peoples refused to work and disappeared due to a variety of causes (running to remote regions, epidemics, cruelty and massacres), the Portuguese and Spanish built an Atlantic African slave trade. The English and French intensified that slave labor regime.

Current situations with logging, mining, and ranching have to be understood as the legacy of colonial extraction as well as a modern practice of global corporations. So they have to be understood in terms of labor. These sprawling industrialized operations reach far beyond and destroy ecosystems faster than what anyone could have imagined 50 years ago, let alone 500 years. But some basic principles are consistent—the labor remains exploitative, cruel, and serves remote investors far more than the local communities. Cut off two sources of that labor: the desperation of poor people to survive and the drive of working people to have stable jobs.

Poor working people need income if they do not have arable land or other access to resources. They will take jobs with regional managers for these massive operations, often men of a similar ethnicity who appear to offer good things. Environmental activists and climate change organizations that press for immediate fire control and industrial bans cannot fight the illegal and widespread destruction until they create viable and meaningful options for the working poor. They do the hard labor, including the burning and cutting of the Amazon forests, for these immense extractive corporations with investors from around the world.

Residents can understand the catastrophe; global outcry can condemn the industries; political elites can obstruct Brazil’s president; climate change scientists can expound on the data; governments with revenues can pay for firefighting. All necessary in the short term—then working poor people need sustainable economic development. The indigenous peoples understand and assert these interconnections, so they block industrial equipment, demand government oversight and protections, and actively preserve their social and cultural practices that give their communities sustenance and survival in all ways.

We cannot mimic or appropriate the ways of indigenous peoples. But we can shift our organizing to their model, with its sustainable living practices for everyone. That includes reliable ways for working poor people to have meaningful existence. Not temporary training, not random grunt work or Sisyphean cleanup jobs—sustainable meaningful work in local farming, renewable energy, public transportation, environmental conservation, ecosystem rehabilitation. Such efforts will take a massive coalition that encompasses unions and worker groups, a substantive plan, relentless outreach to rural villages, a platform to oust the current right-wing Brazilian government, and increased taxes as well as private fundraising.  Corruption will happen, as it always does—then correct and move forward with decades of consistent efforts to sustain the links between jobs for working poor and nurturing the Amazon rainforests.

The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize, and glean insights that enable him or her to make the invisible visible.

Andrew Grove

The post Reduce Fires in the Amazon with Jobs first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

In the case of each colony (sometimes called territorial possession), the U.S. government has determined the form of governance. Although Puerto Rico had an autonomous constitution and government within the Spanish Empire, the U.S. ended that system in 1898 and imposed a series of U.S. military generals as governor. From 1900 to 1946, U.S. presidents appointed mostly civilian men from the mainland, with some Puerto Rican men serving as interim. Jesús T. Piñero was the first Puerto Rican man appointed by a president and served from 1946 to 1949. That year, the U.S. government in collaboration with Luis Muñoz Marín and the Partido Popular Democrático/Popular Democratic Party (PPD) arranged for the first gubernatorial election.

Muñoz Marín served as governor for four terms due to his lifelong political and economic activism in Puerto Rico, his regular contact with elites in the U.S. government, and the dominance of the PPD. As with all systems of governance, elites overlapped and cooperated as well as competed and debated. The elites in the Puerto Rican insular government did not arise from a blank void, but rather from decades of U.S. colonial relations that had intersected with and adapted Spanish imperial hierarchies of race, gender, class, and status. Elected insular governors have been white Puerto Rican men from affluent families, except for one white woman, Sila María Calderón.***

Residents of Puerto Rico and their loved ones in diaspora have repeatedly attempted to claim more autonomy or independence for Puerto Rico. Their political disagreements and decisions must be engaged and made by them—but mainland non-Boricuas have an obligation to understand. While Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s corrupt dealings, autocratic administration, and derogatory communications are his own, the institutional position has been constrained and manipulated by the U.S.

The U.S. federal government constructed the island government, and U.S. investors and corporations have benefited from the colonial possession. Puerto Rico has been a site of investment experimentation and tax exemptions since 1898. The U.S. exempted the island from many tax, labor, and environmental regulations, allowing sugar investors, apparel corporations, defense contractors, and pharmaceutical companies (to name a few) to do things in Puerto Rico that they were not allowed to do on the mainland—all while evading tax obligations and shifting money through the Caribbean. Some members of the insular government were entwined with the politics and finances of these colonial arrangements; some members contested them.

Current demonstrations, with their demands for access to power and challenges over who has gained that access based on intersections of race, gender, and class, emerged from 120 years of U.S. colonialism. The unfolding events are both an island and U.S. issue that should be understood by people on the mainland. Not so we can make decisions for Puerto Rico—residents need to do that. But so the vested interests of many linked mainland-Puerto Rican-Caribbean corporations, finance banks, investors, shipping lines, bureaucrats, and elite politicians cannot keep making decisions without full visibility and accountability.

* Some Puerto Rican activists now call the archipelago of Puerto Rico “our mainland,” but I will stick to academic geography terms to avoid confusions.

** The U.S. had possession of other colonies during the past 150 years as well.

*** Meanings for race categories are different across regions, ethnicities, and eras. People considered “white” in the Caribbean today might not be considered “white” in the U.S. mainland. This reveals how notions of race are very potent but also created by societies and their histories

The post Puerto Rico’s Governor: An Issue for PR and the US first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.