Redefining Relationships with Our Planet: Indigeneity, Climate, Land, and Economics with K. Malulani Castro

Embark on a journey through the complex landscape where climate economics meets indigenous sovereignty with our esteemed guest, K. Malulani Castro. This episode peels back the layers of carbon markets and environmental pricing, revealing the critical role of Indigenous stewardship and the clash with global economic frameworks. As K. Malulani Castro shares her scholarly insights, we uncover the challenges of land trusts, the nuances of property rights, and the future of tribal lands amidst the tension with fossil fuel interests. This conversation is not just about the numbers; it's an examination of the very fabric that intertwines culture, nature, and survival.

K. Malulani Castro guides us through a tapestry of indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the precarious balance of sustaining communities while engaging with international policies. From the battlegrounds of carbon credit trading post-COP 28 to the frontlines of tribal land development, we scrutinize the effectiveness of current strategies in preserving both the environment and cultural integrity. Delve into the paradoxes faced by indigenous peoples, where maintaining biodiversity comes at the cost of commodification and where the fight for land sovereignty continues under the shadows of colonial law.

In our final act, we reimagine our connection with the land and each other, envisioning a future shaped by indigenous values and kinship. We confront the pressing need for community resilience, particularly in the face of climate change that threatens to displace populations and disrupt traditional ways of life. K. Malulani Castro's vision calls for a radical shift, urging us to reconsider our educational systems, political dynamics, and the sustainability of our planet for generations to come. Tune in and be part of a dialogue that challenges the status quo and inspires a collective rethinking of our approach to a just and sustainable future.

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to our blog, and today we have Malukasra returning to talk about climate change, environmental pricing schemes, cultural appropriation pricing schemes, relationality and also the limits of at least the first half of that sentence. So that's a lot. By the time I name this, it'll have a more concise name than that, but one of the things that's come up a lot lately I was actually talking to you in a separate context about attempts to price for cultural appropriation and how I considered it like both kind of a completely rational response by elements of the indigenous community to property law, but also a rational response that conceded the validity of intellectual property law in a way that was going to actually ultimately be problematic, and you brought up that that was actually very similar to climate pricing and in the concessions there. So let's talk about climate trypsing and the way indigenous groups have tried to intervene in that. So what is the model for climate pricing right?

K. Malulani Castro: 2:58

now, what's the model on it?

C. Derick Varn: 3:01

Yeah, for climate pricing, carbon pricing, etc. How are people like what are people trying to do with this?

K. Malulani Castro: 3:06

Got it, got it. So before we get started, I'll kind of give some kind of context. I appreciated your point about harmonetics and kind of some of the eco-socialists takes recently. So for the audience, I think I kind of understand where and how I read this research and kind of how I approach this literature. Yeah, I'm a graduate student, kind of studying this at the doctoral level. I've kind of scholarly interests that kind of bring me into line with like policy conditions and questions around this nationally and internationally.

K. Malulani Castro: 3:37

But a lot of this actually kind of is like very practical to me right, because currently, like in the very near term right, I might be serving or kind of operating as a consultant or on a board member for this land trust in Hawaii right, where we might be receiving 56,000 acres right, and in the near term I have to really kind of be thinking through like what are the different financing schemes that I can leverage to kind of, you know, make that property ownership happen, and we can talk about that and kind of how that shapes my reading and kind of thinking about this literature. But when we're talking about like climate pricing or environmental pricing, I think that there's like a few kind of like main pillars I wanted to hit today right. So like I think first there's a kind of a component component around this, around like land claims and like title and property right, a lot of kind of any. I don't say like any, but most attempts at pricing or financing kind of climate or environmental activity right Reforestation, you know, resistance to degradation often require some sort of title or property right. And then in the center of that right and kind of next to that is like well, how are we kind of getting to these values right?

K. Malulani Castro: 4:46

So recently, in 2021, I believe, the UN finally standardized its system for environmental economics accounting and ecosystem accounting right. So that was their attempt at kind of taking this longer and kind of older history of accounting for ecosystem services. Different kind of one off national and even international programs are paying for ecosystem services, things like even like following land post dustbow and stuff like that, taking these and trying to make a standardized approach to this that was in line with the systems for national accounting right. So we recently just had this kind of like internationally standardized approach in 2021, which is also connected to this thing called T, which is the economics of the environment by our diversity right. So if you want to look that up, you definitely should. They kind of give a base, they kind of give a guide on basically the value right and how to transfer the value of these different ecosystem services.

K. Malulani Castro: 5:45

And then the kind of other specter in this room is the carbon market right, and, like you know, I don't think we can kind of talk about pricing of environmental goods or services, climate goods and services without talking about carbon, carbon offsets, carbon abatement, carbon credits, whatever you want to call it, allowances, depending on which system that you're using and how.

K. Malulani Castro: 6:05

That that's still regardless of the kind of massive amount of research and reporting kind of into the real limitations and if not kind of corruption or kind of just negligence within that kind of current system, is still one of the major kind of paths forward.

K. Malulani Castro: 6:22

So right now, again, like there's not any kind of international, like multilateral or even kind of like bilateral system for kind of trading credits. So when we're talking about how communities are facing like my own community facing the question of price, it really depends on the context of are we interacting with the state, are we interacting with the federal government? Are we interacting with a voluntary carbon market right, something like Vera, which is like one of the big nonprofits that kind of manages the big ECMs out there and yeah, so there's a lot there. So there's a kind of this big kind of you know, kind of convergence of a lot of different systems, like rights, property claims, what are the valuation of ecosystem services, and then obviously the question of like carbon credits, and we can kind of get into kind of some of the big issues I see with that for Indigenous people as in particular.

K. Malulani Castro: 7:19

But I think that actually, before we kind of get into that, I kind of want to say that anything I say that kind of pertains to the issues for Indigenous peoples only probably actually has like a downstream concern for basically anyone, because the approach that the elites right be at the state or the market or approaching the pricing of environmental services or carbon has largely been kind of without the concern of the kind of continuation of, like, most non-elite communities or groups right, and I don't mean that that's kind of been like negligent science or whatever. But I think it's just a fair thing to say, right, that it's not like they went to some kind of conservative community in Georgia and were like, hey, how would you like us to interpret the valuation of your fallowed land or something like that right of your forests, right? So yeah, that's the kind of applicability outside, I think, of Indigenous context, right.

C. Derick Varn: 8:13

But yeah, sorry, I don't think I'm going to run it. No, no, no. That's actually. That's an important thing to talk about when we talk about Indigenous context.

C. Derick Varn: 8:22

I basically have a framework of like what happens to Indigenous people is somewhat unique to them, but a lot of the stuff that happens to them will then happen to other marginalized people, and then it's going to happen to poor people, and then it's going to happen to lower middle class people and then it might even happen to middle class people. Like there is a hierarchy of things. Now there's some things that are unique, like the resistive for Indigenous Americans is uniquely shitty, but like, but you know, there's a way in which I've, you know, even from a class perspective, like when you think about like why Black Lives Matter had such purchase before it was recuperated. It very much has purchased, because people can kind of see that like well, even as a white person, this shit's going to happen to my people eventually, even if you think of this in a my people kind of way, and I think that's an important thing to start off of.

C. Derick Varn: 9:18

And then when we talk about the particularities, are trying to deal with this environmental fairness, pricing schemes, both in carbon and in other kinds of quote, environmental justice you really start seeing that there's a bunch of problems. I mean, the most obvious one to me is like well, if you can price for it, then you can still do it. But beyond that I mean beyond like the, the, the most like I'm a freshman in a sociology class. Answer to this what are some of the problems Like? So when we talk about, for example, like pricing for, let's say, fairly compensating for I don't know an oil pipeline going through, I don't know some indigenous land where the, where the land rights are even kind of still recognized by the federal government, one of the where kinds that they did that Um, um how do the issues?

C. Derick Varn: 10:26

yeah, what are the issues? What issues can pertain to that? I mean, there's obvious ones that we see in that, like obviously people can't I'm eluding standing rock. But there's the unobvious ones too, and I'm kind of interested in both.

K. Malulani Castro: 10:39

Right, so, um, we can, so one. There's a really kind of perfect case of this kind of over the border in Canada. You know we talked about British Columbia a lot last time where I was on with Glenn Colthard. Um, if people who are interested in kind of like the best, I think, kind of financing and kind of critical finance capital, kind of research on indigenous issues or First Nations, issues look up Sherry Pasternak.

K. Malulani Castro: 11:02

She's with the Yellowhead Institute, which has done a lot of great work. Um, or she put out a paper that I really like, um, kind of looking at the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion right, which was like huge expansion, uh, through the indigenous communities. Uh, and I'm going to butcher this, but I think it's a second one back, I can't you know.

C. Derick Varn: 11:24

I apologize, I can help you on indigenous?

K. Malulani Castro: 11:26

language no no, no worries, Uh, one of the and I apologize for them, uh, but it's First Nations um there in that community, um, and what's really interesting is when that pipeline was facing kind of the tiny house warriors, kind of blockades, right, and we can kind of I think this was, uh, god, I can't remember the years, but let's say 2016, 2017, around that time, maybe even later Um, and there was a major hit and where the actual uh, I think it was Kinder Morgan was going to pull out, the state of Canada, right, the you know the uh, the Trudeau government went in and said we're going to pick to kind of clear this, right, we're going to take the risk of this nonprofit pipeline, um, and what's interesting in that case, example, is, within that community, um, they fall underneath the aboriginal title that was secured with the Delgamook decision in 1997, right, and that decision basically says that when, in, in cases where aboriginal title has not been clearly extinguished, right, whatever that means um, that they actually operate from a perspective that they have territorial, uh land use approaches to um sovereignty and kind of ownership, right, and this is really important, right, because this extended the actual purview of these communities kind of authority and sovereignty way beyond any kind of personal allotments or like lots that they had or the different kind of band um or kind of sub national structures that were kind of imposed on them by the Canadian government. So fast forward to the, you know, to the TMP. One of the approaches that the uh market, you know that, uh, that the kind of that the Trudeau government kind of impose on on fossil fuel development, was saying, hey, you should go and basically try and secure claim settlements to this pipeline development from individual bands, right, maybe if individual property owners within this kind of checkerboard right Kind of pushing past right this decision in 1997 that said that this community had kind of territorial governments and uh, the, the perniciousness there is that we, the the market or the kind of kind of industry approach to this was like, yeah, like, let's have a mutual benefit agreement. I'm going to go to this particular band with this confined territory and say, hey, I'm going to give you, you know, x development funds or whatever you want it to say, um, will you sign off on me passing this pipeline through, right, but we understand that any kind of benefit that might come from that independently, right, um, even any kind of like kind of carbon abatement that might come from that that they might have invested in independently in that territory is part of a larger ecosystem?

K. Malulani Castro: 14:15

Right that if a pipeline burst downstream or even a kind of like in the band over, right that that that agreement doesn't really mean much of anything. Right, that the benefits that they received from that don't mean much of anything. And that was kind of the take that the community was taking with the tiny house warriors and people like Arthur Manuel for saying, like no, you actually have to negotiate with all of us and we have a right to basically say no to this right, and that we actually have a right to the entire territory. Um, and I think for people who are like non-indigenous, when they're thinking about this right there, what does it mean when the kind of uncertainty of carbon development is something that can be passed on? Uh, to private contracts, right, where your neighbor might be someone who can like take on the contract. But then if you say no, what does that even matter? Right, like that, uh, and that they're they're taking on of that contract gives the kind of industry leverage to kind of say I'm going to push this through, right.

K. Malulani Castro: 15:11

So there's two things there that I think people should take away from is that, I mean, there's nothing stopping eminent domain from happening, right For any of these, either fossil fuel developments or clean energy developments. So the state is more than happy to take on the risk of kind of kicking you off land, right, that's a kind of a common thing. And then when it comes to the kind of uncertainty of either private owners claims or indigenous rights claims to these properties, um, the market is responding and it's trying to develop pretty savvy ways of getting kind of buying you out of your rights, and I think people need to be really careful with that Um. I don't know if that kind of answers your question, um, but I think that that's a kind of a kind of a basic one, um of like what other people might be, like what other communities might expect, right, and we kind of saw that with, um the mountain valley pipeline, um, where I can imagine the different kind of individual kind of member like mutual benefit agreements were received. Um, yeah, sorry.

C. Derick Varn: 16:09

No one there's there's, there's a relationality implied in this that the approach even of a collective, atomized subject and so we're not talking about necessarily an individual person, but let's just say, like the formal representative of a tribe, um are a formal representative of um, any kind of locality, even um, uh, that they negotiate this for the, for the mutual benefit, whatever, but there's knock on effects downstream that will affect them. That's not going to be. That externality, in even a neoclassical sense, will no place be priced right, which is a problem right now, like carbon offsets and carbon pricing basically exist off of people ignoring that in the exchanges, there's probably externalities that are missed in the, in the accounting, no matter what um in that um also. You know, we clearly saw this, for example, with the green transition in Europe, um, where a lot of it was just like we're hiding our carbon use by by having the carbon output happen in Russia before. The before sanctions made that impossible to do Um yeah, international leakage is insane.

K. Malulani Castro: 17:28

Right yeah, and so, yeah, sorry, I mean. I mean I think to your question there, there's a few concepts that people should kind of understand when they're kind of thinking about like how something like Vera, which is like in this, like nonprofit, that kind of manages the voluntary carbon standard program, which is like the biggest kind of VC, uh, voluntary carbon market program out there. I think they traded like 446, uh, 446 million credits, I think I want to say in like 2022, maybe 2019. Um, I just read a report on that, um, but um, and you people should look at the reports kind of coming out that are pretty damning about the kind of verification and validation of those credits and the types of methodologies that they allow the different projects to implement, um, in their particular Red Cross programming, right. So when I say methodologies, it's the kind of methodologies of pricing, um, and then also the kind of estimation of carbon, like assessment, right, and I think the two things that you brought up there right.

K. Malulani Castro: 18:29

So there's one thing called like leakage, right, which is like are the activities that you like is there downstream? Or like, by the kind of project implementation, will there be actually kind of carbon use or kind of carbon emission downstream from that in ways that actually kind of nullify the previous offset, right. Um, so there's market downstream like kind of leakage. And then there's like activity leakage, right, let's say I uh, in protecting a forest from illegal loggers, if those illegal loggers go down the road and they start illegally logging another forest, that's activity leakage, right.

K. Malulani Castro: 19:09

Market leakages to that point right now where they're like hey, like actually internationally, you know, whatever this kind of carbon project did results in kind of increased carbon production somewhere else, or I'm actually just changing my supply chain to do that somewhere else. You know, that's the same thing. And when they've looked at the reporting from this program, right, the Vera, I mean the underestimation of leakage, and then basically the like the non-reporting of international leakage was pretty astounding. Um, that like, oh, it was just not something that happened. And then, um, and then there's like a concept of permanence, right, which is like how stable.

K. Malulani Castro: 19:51

And again, this is slightly different than kind of a mutual benefit agreement but like let's just say mutual benefit agreement includes some sort of kind of carbon offset component which is the kind of permanence of that activity to that reduction or that kind of abatement into the future, right, like how, uh, and that's a kind of a tricky thing with carbon credits is like you wouldn't want to invest in a carbon credits, that's in an, into a project where you think that this forest is going to be there regardless. It doesn't. If you're going to protect a forest, it's not going to be torn down. That's not really having an offset. But they also don't necessarily want to identify really high risk.

K. Malulani Castro: 20:34

Um, the question of permanence, credit, carbon credit assets, right, um, and yeah, so I think that there was like kind of two points there, right, so leakage, like literally like leakage from a pipeline, could be considered part of that to write um, and then kind of the question of permanence, which is like how long is that the offsetting components actually persisting? Once I got to say good night to my kid. A few of the kind of metrics that, uh, I think I are important to understand, like why there's like all of this recent criticism around something like Vera, um and their Red Cross Cross program.

C. Derick Varn: 21:11

So in our discussions about this, we also discussed about, uh, something that I don't want to say is unique to the indigenous in the United States, but it, like liberal modalities do not recognize it which is what we might call relational pricing, or pricing to maintain relationships, and by that I do not just mean with people like, or I do not just mean with humans. Let me even be more specific.

C. Derick Varn: 21:42

Um uh, people may notice on the show, uh, that I've talked a lot more about, like different conceptions of persons. But in the Patreon I've talked a lot about, uh, uh, marshall Solland's study on personality, relationality and concepts of what is it is not a person, um, but that one of the things that some people have tried to do in the indigenous context is try to price for this. Um, uh, how has that worked?

K. Malulani Castro: 22:16

Um. So I think there's a few ways that we can kind of understand the kind of question of like indigenous pricing or valuation right Um. One way is and I actually I want to say something that I there's kind of two approaches or kind of traditions of this kind of in this newer kind of novel fear of like ecosystem services, payment and stuff like that is that on one hand I think that there's like a pretty strong question of like what would indigenous evaluation be Right? Well, how could we understand their ability to kind of set a price? What would they be sending the price on? Um, and then the kind of question of power to kind of impose that price Um, and there's a lot of kind of interesting questions around that Um. On the other hand, which I think is more common, both from like an indigenous perspective, um in the, not in the just perspective, but in a, in the, in the context of it's actually being applied now Um and in some of the academic and great literature, is like how do we show um the kind of cost savings of basically not having to pay for like indigenous welfare? That's actually a major approach to this right Um. So there's a lot of research kind of coming out around this from Northern, from the Northern Territory of Australia, where there's a lot of different payment for ecosystem services, um, uh management plans around indigenous protected areas with traditional owners, and some of the reporting I've seen on that is that they're trying to identify both. They're trying to actually monetize, um, or at least put a monetary value to, uh, some cultural ecosystem services right that are kind of actually housed within that larger SEA EA framework. Um, and something to again to keep in mind. Right is that the, the international standard that we're I'm bringing up, the SEA EA, actually has realms or kind of spaces for valuing cultural services, but they're not monetized so just like, look, they're the, they're aesthetics, they're beautiful landscapes and stuff like that. So there's been this attempt by researchers and practitioners to say actually we can show how that aligns with indigenous values and worldviews, um, and we can kind of show how that's monetized. But one of the kind of interesting things there is that and so I kind of run through like a list of some of the issues I've seen.

K. Malulani Castro: 24:37

Right is one that the approach to this is like cost savings. Right is that either by kind of extending or kind of allowing, you know, title claim or kind of supporting title claim which really doesn't cost to say anything they can actually say. Well, all of these indigenous youth are out on the country providing fires and burnings and they're, you know, getting some employment as rangers. We don't have to pay the welfare Right. That's actually kind of like they're kind of interesting, kind of pernicious thread. There is like actually like you can actually withhold public funding on that side and certainly that there's something to be said about like indigenous peoples being out on these landscapes is, you know, healing and recuperative and like meaningful and it allows them to provision themselves in ways that are maybe commensurate to welfare services. But the approach to this when I've seen pricing trying to happen, it's especially around the kind of cultural components, right is around kind of cost savings, travel costs, things that align very well with how to actually save the state money or save an investor money, right. That it's kind of a I don't want to say it's an ROI, but it says like, look how much value you're getting above and beyond what you're kind of putting into this. And this isn't kind of getting into the question of like how payment for ecosystem services have really kind of I can have really negative effects on communities, right.

K. Malulani Castro: 26:09

And I think when people think about like, why, why do indigenous peoples roughly like 370 million of them, whatever that means, who occupy X percentage of land some say 20, some say 40, why are they also in locations where they're kind of conserving or protecting 80% of our biological diversity? And oftentimes it's actually because of the absence or their ability to kind of move away or from the role of pricing and how they operate their society. Right, they may not necessarily rely solely on wage labor as a means of provisioning for their community, right, even if they do engage in wage labor, it might just be for kind of luxury items or something like that. So we have like this weird tension where we know that indigenous peoples and how they kind of organize their societies can allow for high levels of biological diversity and high quality. You know vegetation coverage, all that stuff. But then once these pricing societies come into play, the price you know the role of that price coming in really has a destabilizing effect on those.

K. Malulani Castro: 27:24

You know those kind of labor arrangements or that kind of societal arrangements and there's a lot of research that kind of is pointing to this because there's no one going to these communities and saying, hey, I want to pay for your continuation as a society.

K. Malulani Castro: 27:42

I want to pay for your ability to kind of continue as a society in the way that you want and let me help you kind of invest this capital, let me help you bring this money in in ways that aren't going to completely mess up all of your social relationships. It's really kind of up to the community to kind of have that capacity to actually negotiate that question. But you know, no one's really thinking about like, oh, like when I invest in these communities, like am I saving money? Or like you know, they're not investing in like a language program, right, they're not necessarily investing in. Yeah, these are kind of different cultural programs. And then oftentimes you know so not only are we not investing in these communities in that way, right, or that's like that's not how these monies are being used, but when monies are present, they're kind of pressured to utilize these funds in particular ways, often in purely kind of conservation ways, right, like building a hospital may not necessarily be on the plate of ways that those funds could be leveraged. Sorry, again, long response.

C. Derick Varn: 28:54

Yeah, I mean that's. There's a whole lot there to parse out, like one, that part of why, like you're right, why do indigenous communities often, you know the ones that are allowed to exist I laugh because I don't want to cry on that one are partly allowed to exist because they're in areas where those areas are not highly commodifiable, easily are the cost of commodification is great to the entire planet or whatever but we're not compensating them for that and to some degree, like from a capitalist perspective if you're a liberal ideal, you know, egalitarian, whatever good bourgeois you want to. On the other hand, you don't want to because it's going to cost you money and you're also admitting, in a way, that your that your system is actually dependent on systems that are outside of it and not part of it to maintain, which puts a fundamental tension on the policy in a way. That's that makes it difficult. And when we start, like you know, the reason why I brought up non human persons is that pricing for like relations to wildlife becomes really important.

C. Derick Varn: 30:17

And yet part of that's dependent on exactly the relations to wildlife. That's hard to commodify.

K. Malulani Castro: 30:24

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 30:25

Right. So asking someone to commodify, like and I think this is important when I use the relations here as the way of explaining it because asking someone to commodify your personal relations, which which, yes, they are in fact partially commodified for you too, but it feel that for most people feels inherently wrong and inherently contradictory, like those things are not supposed to be in the realm of commodity relations, which is an interesting tension in the literature around this, because there's all of this anxiety in the writing on this stuff that I've seen, and the reason, the way that it appears, is that they're kind of state.

K. Malulani Castro: 31:08

They want to make relational values, a value of cultural ecosystem services, instead of actually how the valuation occurs. Right, that, like, what would it mean to like actually have like a relational valuation for our community? And I think that those are very different questions. But the anxiety comes around this question of like oh, are we basically paying to create a stock of indigenous peoples? And they get really squeamish around this idea of like treating people like an economic asset, which kind of sounds iridescent to anyone who kind of studies economics or politics or anything like that. Like that, that actually isn't that weird or kind of anxiety inducing.

K. Malulani Castro: 31:52

But because they understand and these are from the people who are, I think, are well meaning, which I think is the scariest part and also not surprising is that the people who are well meaning are like, we know that it's their relational components that allow them to do what we need them to do, but we don't, we know that we don't have the power to change any of these other arrangements that are being imposed.

K. Malulani Castro: 32:16

So how can we measure this from like almost like a psychological perspective? And they're kind of treating it of like are people just happy, like they're having more time with the animals, having more time on the landscape that they have, which you know is good right, and they are kind of allowing for those measures to happen? Maybe I don't know, but it is like this interesting squeamishness where they're like not willing to take into consideration that basically what they're hoping for is the creation of a stock of indigenous people, right, and not, you know, and what I mean by that like literally like a stock, like that's kind of how environmental economists approach this stuff is like can we have a stock of trees? Right, you know that flows to as an environmental service.

K. Malulani Castro: 32:59

Now we're kind of talking about people who are providing the service, who aren't even just providing the service. They're actually part of the stock arrangement, right. And yeah, there's a lot of squeamishness and kind of uneasiness with how to kind of what that means for the downstream buyers basically. And if you ever look up any of this stuff, it's always kind of funny. They're like there's a mountain and there's like a stream and there's like some like tents or like kind of you know like grass huts, and then there's a city and like that's just kind of how they approach this stuff and like the stock is like up here upstream and it flows downstream to the city.

C. Derick Varn: 33:38

One thing I like to point out when I think about this as a modality of like capitalist relations between, say, settler to indigenous peoples, are elites to non-elites, because I think in this case both models are useful. Again, in the model it settler, non-settler, and then model that elites to non-elites, and you'll probably get something like what's going to eventually happen, but that in this you have a whole lot of paradoxes that make people squeamish. So, even though well-meaning people don't like talking about human beings as like animal stock, it's kind of like when people talk about surplus populations they don't really want, they can talk about it in the abstract, but they don't really want to talk about it directly because that makes everybody uncomfortable and icky. But the other there's strong implications about like, as I said, like we need this thing to subsist, that we also kind of want to pull into us. But if we pull it into us it's going to like our own contradictions will, you know, will cause this to become a problem later on.

C. Derick Varn: 35:00

And yet from the indigenous perspective, they're also in a and for any non-elite perspective but again, let's stay with the indigenous here, because I do think maybe this clarifies it is that, on one hand, you want to be open to this because it's a way to continue your way of life in face of an opposed way of life. On the other hand, it also inherently limits you and sets you up to defend something that, by its very defense, is admitted to be something that won't be around forever, because otherwise they wouldn't be pricing for it. Yeah, right, so there's a short term interest and a short term propagation to kind of buy into this methodology, and I, like I said to someone, this is the easiest to see and also of the least substantive factor we talk about, like the shift around cultural appropriation talk, yeah, like originally it was cultural misappropriation and almost nobody has a problem with that. Then we get cultural appropriation. Why did it become that, though?

C. Derick Varn: 36:06

That was actually about property concerns, yeah, and people basically not compensating indigenous communities, because indigenous creations fell out of this idea of individual animized relations, so you couldn't really be copyrighted, so we needed some kind of collective copyright. Yeah, and that makes sense, but in the same way that it also makes it very clear that like, oh, but now you're commodified any things that were not prior commodified and you probably can't do it again. But like now, when you apply that to the environment, where it's a much more long term import, I want to say cultural stuff isn't of import, but like, but like. No one's really going to stop surviving off of someone not getting paid for an indigenous shirt pattern, whereas destroying a river, I don't know, say the Amazon and fuck everything up for everybody. Yeah.

K. Malulani Castro: 37:11

So this kind of goes back. So I think so for and I have to admit I haven't like looked to see. I mean, maybe the John Bellamy and Fosters of the world have kind of looked into this or kind of like been perspective of this, but it's kind of interesting?

K. Malulani Castro: 37:23

I don't remember, kind of left us really kind of making a lot of like interesting kind of comments around the. The establishment of like a national natural capital account, like that's happening in the US, is like natural capital accounts are becoming but are starting to be established and these are falling in lines again with that ecosystem services account that I was talking about, and nations all over the world are doing this right. They're kind of actually trying to say, like, along with our GDP, we actually want to have, alongside that, a really rigorous accounting of our natural capital and we're going to be diverse about it or whatever that means. And the reason why I bring that up is that one of the to your point about the Amazon River right is that what I think that there is like this kind of interesting kind of like question or kind of concern around like hey, you don't want to mess up this river. Oftentimes there are people there who are like pretty good at maintaining it, who have like kind of like a vested interest in maintaining it. But if you really kind of want to support the maintenance of that river right, let's say that you also just like the river as its own entity, but also the people that maybe have like a long standing relationship to that?

K. Malulani Castro: 38:35

Do they have property rights to that natural capital account, right? And that's a really weird question, right? Because you can't. You know, if I were to go to a community and said, let me establish an ecosystems account of all the ecosystem services that you provide, I could describe it in monetary value, but I actually can't use it as money or something right like this and like that. And that's like the kind of interesting tension there is, like someone else can right, something else can kind of come in either if you look the financing of services and products there.

K. Malulani Castro: 39:09

But I think that's like, that's like why there's like this kind of interesting, like kind of problem fields that surrounds trying to account and price for the environment and how people relate to the environment and property rights.

K. Malulani Castro: 39:19

Is that all of a sudden right, like if you understand that rivers actually provide services, right? Like does the health of the river actually have claim to the value that it's provided? And you know, we could kind of get into kind of questions of like things like the Funganui river out of like New Zealand and other examples of like establishing personhood, like legal personhood for like environmental entities. But I do think that that's kind of fun. Like the accounting question of this natural capital or of these ecosystem services fundamentally kind of comes down to an issue of property rights. And again, like when we're thinking about how a lot of ecosystem services are priced and then paid, they're often done through titling right. So you have to, you have to have a clear determination of property, which for a lot of indigenous groups that's not even how the reservation system is set up right. Maybe the tribe receives it right.

K. Malulani Castro: 40:18

But in a lot of context, in receivership or something, a lot of times, right, right, so this creates a situation, right, if we kind of keep it on this trajectory of you know there's interest in privacy or piracy, but also speculation of like, all of a sudden, like now I want to be the title holder to actually receive the finance to service that river.

K. Malulani Castro: 40:41

And I think that after kind of COP28 that that's kind of my take on like what's going to happen with like the fossil fuel system and kind of regime. It's like they can degrade really high right now and then I mean I think that largely they're going to be put into a position where they can immediately finance their own ability to provide ecosystem services, right, or you know, energy services or whatever. But yeah, I mean I don't think anyone's kind of taking into consideration and it is kind of funny, you know, do you talk about the long term kind of component of these things, right, but for like a lot of these carbon assets, right, they don't take into consideration in their pricing the fact that carbon, like CO2, takes like what, like a thousand years to kind of process through the environment. So the actual like lifecycle of carbon is not currently part of the equation for pricing for any of these assets, right, and I think partly that is due to the fact that that would put people on responsibility for hundreds, thousands of years, and that's just not on anyone's timetable.

C. Derick Varn: 41:46

Yeah, we don't really expect the government to last a long, frankly, right.

K. Malulani Castro: 41:51

So, like, what's like the point of creating these assets and these credits if, like you can't even imagine seeing them through fruition, through like the imagined cycling of, like a carbon particle?

C. Derick Varn: 42:04

that was like released.

C. Derick Varn: 42:06

Yeah well, this is interesting for me to think about like. So you know, in this conversation we had three different contradictions and kind of emerge one we're pricing immediately for something that has consequences downstream for longer than most countries to like existence cycle to. We are, I mean like when you point out about the receivership stuff and like clear property rights and like so we have. We actually have not two but three non compatible situations here. We have standard property rights, we have property as understood through treaty and subject people obligations through federal entities in North America, and then we have how the indigenous people see themselves, which we haven't even mentioned.

C. Derick Varn: 43:02

None of these things are copacetic. And then, to make it all worse, there's a tacit admission in the pricing of this that you're not going to ultimately save it, whether that's what people are admitting or not, because if it was an easily savable resource, you wouldn't price it in the first place. So all this, all of this is implied from the get go in these arrangements and that's crazy to think about like. And I think with carbon offsets and stuff, the standard lefty critique is beginning to get it. But for stuff like when you're mentioning natural wealth funds and like and international conservatives of the Amazon or whatever like. That's another thing. Like lefties are not really on having even been really keeping up with this.

K. Malulani Castro: 43:58

No, like I don't think anyone is honestly, I mean, except for the people who are, you know. And again, like I'm not an ecologist or an economist, because I think, like right now they're kind of converging in interesting ways that are like very novel, and it's like only the people that are doing it are kind of aware of what's happening. Right.

C. Derick Varn: 44:18

Well, yeah, that like economic ecology and ecological economics are a thing, and while the latter has been a thing for a while, the former is kind of brand new and it means a bunch of different things, honestly, but it is interesting because it's some of these things that, like, I've heard wind of some of this because I follow these things, but I, you know, I had no idea that the US was a leader on in that, unlike, unlike national wealth funds like that's natural wealth funds and stuff like that's not Not something that has even been on my radar and I actually read ecological stuff. So it's it's interesting to see. I want to talk to you about this too, where, in another way, we can make this very clear, because a lot of this has come to a head. And in the most recent climate change conference, where, like, a whole lot of stuff came to a head, I think and you know a lot of people who've been way too optimistic about, say, paris or whatever was left forgot- Paris agreement.

C. Derick Varn: 45:25

Yeah, and before Paris have had to come to the, to the real hard look at what it means when they saw this at COP 28.

K. Malulani Castro: 45:34

Like yeah, I mean we can dive through it. I mean there's a lot there, you know, I think the reporting on it has been like really interesting, you know, and I don't. I think that the negative components of it are only surprising to you if you weren't paying attention.

C. Derick Varn: 45:55

Right, yeah, who haven't really been looking at it, like you heard this on democracy now once and didn't really follow up. Yeah, exactly.

K. Malulani Castro: 46:02

I mean, I think the the biggest thing that was actually kind of not talked about and I shared this with you, but basically, like after, right after the meeting I want to say is day after maybe the same day of the end of the meeting was that the UN voted on establishing this kind of multilateral kind of system and also a bilateral system for trading carbon credits right, and that got voted down right, and basically it was the EU against the US on this right, because the EU's had the emissions trading scheme for quite a while, I think, since like 2006 or 2007, and that's a cap and trade system, right. So they kind of for any kind of industry member, they kind of give an allowance and you kind of trade these allowances and you can also apply for the credits to kind of fill up the allowance or whatever. It's much more rigorous, right, and I think at the beginning of this year, the I think the cost for like a credit was like 100, 100 euros per ton of carbon, and then after that decision it's up to 66, like 66 euros, and then the US was like much more, like we need to just like push this through and like start seeing this happen, right, and I don't think people really understand that like, yes, you can look at all the like fossil fuel transition stuff and I love like transition fuels. We could talk about that all day, like you know, liquefied natural gas, it's like. It's like my thing's not a real thing for some reason. So we have that stuff right. We have all of the kind of taxes, the kind of the subsidies and breaks for the fossil fuel sector to kind of transition in this arrangement, right.

K. Malulani Castro: 47:43

And then the major thing again with this kind of carbon and credit thing and I think this is what's really key to people is that this was a kind of a fossil fuel industry, petro State's cop, right, not surprising, but there's a day they snuck it in at the end which is like their major framework for abating carbon and other GHGs right, greenhouse carbon, greenhouse gases is reforestation and forest degradation prevention, right. So we're not only in a position right. So make a long story short. I think that kind of we're in a position right now where basically the only mound of money that's going towards financing these kind of efforts right is private equity and it's like and it's mostly focused, or like you know, in the kind of other private capital, but it's like mostly focused on the same things that we knew weren't working, going in right, and I think the absence even of like a very weak international scheme for this means that we're just going down a rabbit hole where we're going to see more private investments in carbon credits way more than anything, and the kind of solidifying that as like the major framework of this kind of, you know, some public private arrangement and something like that.

K. Malulani Castro: 49:09

And I can kind of get more into the specifics, but I think that was the thing that kind of was like like not on anyone's radar, was that I don't think.

K. Malulani Castro: 49:16

Like I think people imagine that there's like a carbon credit market out there that's like very like you know, standardized and real and that like nations have like a lot of same and it's like you know very highly. No, it's not. And it's like kind of the Wild West out there and this just made sure that it's going to be that case for the next two years and the next two years into the next petro states, cop 28, and Azerbaijan. So like I just I think the reason why I bring this up is like I think people really need to take seriously like not only that we are pricing this, but who's paying for the price? And if private fossil capital is the one that's going to be paying the price for these things, we're really not in a position to respond. Well, and that's not even like talking about the liquefied natural gas stuff, that's like not talking about anything else. Right is up Pricing for ecosystem services, pricing for carbon is, like now, kind of completely in the hands of the private sector.

C. Derick Varn: 50:15

Sorry, yeah, completely in the hands of this private sector and overseen by Petro States. Yeah, I'm like, I mean, you know, I I Don't know the number of of late cap. Well, I always say we say late capitalists because we're being optimistic. Let's be honest, the number of contemporary contradictions that emerge From from this are kind of astounding. Like, oh, we have a more diversified, less Eurocentric view, but though, who gets it now? The Petro States? And and oh, we're pricing for these markets and these exact, except this has been the Wild West the entire time. Look at how Tesla makes money, which, for those of you who don't know, tesla's only profitable thing is carbon offsets. They're not even a profitable car company. Yeah, to basically a property carbon offset rent seeking Coalition for stock price manipulation, and so you know, you see that too, I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 51:22

Finally, people have been talking about the problems of the way Green stuff has been implemented in the United States, both in terms of indigeneity, but also in terms of like, well, it's shittier jobs, like it's hard to get unions aboard because it's shittier jobs, and so, and while that doesn't seem directly related, it actually is, because it tells you where these people's market mind is headed, which is like Pitting green Stuff against labor industry, so that the cost for this are, you know, even if, even if the environment is somewhat Midi, damages somewhat mitigated, the cost is actually priced To poor people and vulnerable people, etc. To the working class, to the, to the indigenous who are having to do labor to maintain it, etc. Etc. And not to the people actually fucking doing everything. So, like it became very clear how this all works and that the standard liberal answers to it, which you know, I mean, I've noticed this for a while, you know, even like good centrist liberals have become more and more skeptical of carbon offsets, but at the same time, like they're always bladdering on about how we need to meet the parasites Accords and I'm like, well, your framework and your framework don't match.

C. Derick Varn: 52:49

Like you see the problems in this part of the framework, but you keep on holding us to this framework. Which ties us to this framework, what you see is flawed and you have no alternative for it. And the longer this goes on, the more we're caught flat footed by stuff like see you at B28. Because it's just clear that that you know, we don't have a lot of power in dictating how this pricing is going to go, no, or where it happens right.

K. Malulani Castro: 53:14

And I think to your point about like green jobs, right, you know, I think it's pretty clear and I haven't looked into this too much and I'd be interested to see Because, again, I'm like working my personal work and a lot of the groups I work with are rural indigenous communities. This is actually a good example. So like if I Go to a tribe in Michigan and I want to do Forest restoration or you know, a forest Resistant kind of reducing forest degradation or something like that, to kind of get payments from the states or some sort of carbon credits, right, I might actually have a worst valuation for the price of that carbon, either for the service or for the carbon itself, because it's in the United States, because of how the pricing and the how the Standards were set between the two kind of things I talked about in the beginning SEA, and the thing is that if you're like an indigenous person in a settler, colonial nation, you're in a wealthy nation. So even if you're in a rural, poor context and you've experienced historical degradation and you're overcoming that historical degradation to provide the service, your price for that specific type of ecosystem. And I can kind of get into the weirdness of like that, how they Identify ecosystems and price it, but how they price for that ecosystem is based upon the nation that you're in, which you know.

K. Malulani Castro: 54:40

When I think about, like this is like the thing that I want to scream at anyone is like hey, they want to make a big deal about how indigenous peoples are providing services to nature. Right, that they live within nature and provide services back. Right, like the, I get paid to do this, but the river gives me fish, so I take care of it, kind of things. Kind of cyclical relationship to it, right, this, whatever. Why can't that like?

K. Malulani Castro: 55:06

I think that there's like a real danger where I'm like hey, for anyone in a city, you also exist in an ecosystem that has services that provide services directly to you, right, we don't necessarily approach the management or the maintenance of those ecosystems from the same way and actually think that that's just a missed opportunity, right, which I think is just kind of like a funny thing. It's just like no, like well, what would it look like to actually diversify or kind of transition yeah, fossil fuel energy production, you know labor like that, labor markets into other jobs, you know that's to kind of transition those people into those, right, I don't think the training is there, but like it's a different solution than like, hey, miners, go become like energy techs and, like you know, solar energy techs and install these farms, you know, out in Idaho or something like that. It's like no, like what if we could actually approach this from like we need to start thinking about the services within our urban centers that also require services from us to maintain, and I think that that's a good. Again, it's like a basic missed opportunity. Yeah Well, yeah, I mean, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 56:20

You know, one of the secret of sessions with varland is the rule urban divide in the town and country divide in terms of Organizing and thinking about these problems. He actually bring up another problem and another Varvabhagadu that no one else seems to talk about not saying the only person who talks about it, but weirdly, the only people I know who talk about it are liberals. And that is the bizarre outcomes of methodological Nationalism. When you're dealing with stuff like, I don't know, core and peripheral relations within said nation, as opposed to outside of it, like In an international framework, like oh yeah, the US is rich, so clearly we don't need to pay as much for this. They're not, they've already offset off.

C. Derick Varn: 57:02

This is third one anyway, except, by the way, except that if you're in a Black community in Augusta, georgia and I say that because I used to live across the street from one or if you're in any res, ever anywhere, ever Almost maybe there's some ones I don't know about that aren't in this situation, but like Everyone I've ever seen has been, you're in like both a rural, a rural area, but also usually in something that's been affected negatively by some environmental justice concern, and yet you're gonna get priced as if you're from, I don't know, not even a city, but like from like suburban Vermont, you know, like, where things are almost idyllic, like it's just, it's absurd, yeah, but on the same token, it also perpetuates the time in country divide. Because, you're right there, like Urban environments are still fucking environments and like there's animals in them, there's all kinds of stuff like Increasingly, we're gonna have to figure out how to do urban agriculture. Like it's just, it's just something that yet these frameworks just do not fundamentally do not handle this at all. They actually weirdly kind of assume, like mid, mid 20th century western rural areas, eastern rural urban developmental patterns which I don't even think are universally on that truity more so, like yeah, yeah, it's bizarre and definitely aren't true.

C. Derick Varn: 58:39

I'm like you know, for example, we're talking about these carbon states, but if you ever been to the UAE, like that's not a, like that's, that's like the environment is not even that rule, like a pastoral Landscape with malls on the moon, like it's basically where that place is and you know how would you environmentally price for that? I don't know, because it's not like the environment in the UAE is particularly great, but it's also like I mean it is affected, but it's not particularly environmentally, the greater it was already done, so it just seems to me absurd to look at it this way, like these ownership claims are far too discreet a mechanism to ever actually capture all this, and yet I still, I'm still with you like an immediate practical sense. What do you do? You have to operate in this framework, like yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 59:36

You know like I mean, if you are, yeah.

K. Malulani Castro: 59:40

No, I mean, I think that that's like the thing I'm facing right, and I think we haven't even addressed the question of like. Should we try to account for all of an ecosystem?

C. Derick Varn: 59:48

like what does that?

K. Malulani Castro: 59:49

even like mean, like what? Does it mean to try to account for, like all of our also human land relationships, like Even not necessarily going to monetize way, but like in any kind of like quantified way, like what is that like? What is that kind of data crunching look like? And like the kind of energy costs for that, and is it even like the most energy efficient way for managing ecosystems? Actually don't know if that's the case.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:10

Yeah, this was. You commented on an episode of my show with Ingalls de Mora and we also are like hey guys, when we talk about this we don't even actually factor factor the carbon cost of monitoring carbon costs all the time like it's which is a thing, is like not, are the environmental destruction costs to getting samples to measure environmental destruction, which is a, which is a rare thing, so you should like there is a sense like how would you even come modify it in this atomized way, like I don't even know that you can, and if you do, alright, who pays the cost of the environmental cost, of monitoring the environmental cost?

K. Malulani Castro: 1:00:56

Yeah, and I mean I think that there is like this question, right, that it's like and that no one I mean of course we're not the national level or the kind of international levels like trying to deal with this, but it's just like like what if we can't? What if we can't measure? Like that's like a fundamental, like philosophical question, like what if we can't account for everything? And then if we can't account for any everything, does that actually creating accounts? Why do we actually have a belief that this metaphor or this model of human land relationships is going to In gender, the kind of management that we want to have? And then you know, I think you know history is showing that like and I appreciate the demoral conversation, I did watch that because I think, yeah, like you know, in real world, kind of like socialist states, like they definitely did like a very different type of kind of like ecological planning, and I appreciate his kind of history on that. But I think that there's just something to be said of like kind of now, right, where we're at now is like I don't really understand any kind of imagination that we're just like we're making bad environmental choices because we don't have enough data, like that's not what's happening, like, we're not like and that any amount and I think this is this is something I get mad at when I get talked to my collaborators or my colleagues where they're like well, let's show the risk, like, let's show how much carbon indigenous communities are sequestering through their kind of common practices right, let's look at the risk of. Let's look at how much that carbon is at risk. Let's look at all. Let's try to make indigenous life and life ways either too profitable like so profitable that they'll be invested in or too risky to be breach.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:02:43

And I'm like that's why are we thinking that that's actually a winning position? And I actually think this is a good position, for most people is actually like why do we believe that we can just show that climate change or these kind of ecological impacts are either too risky and that somehow the response to that risk is going to be greater responsibility? Right, that's just not how that's going to happen.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:13

No, if anything. One of the things that I've been quite frustrated on is like, hey guys, the more you actually see the outcome of the climate change, the more doubling down from cognitive dissidents you see, from deniers, like like the closer we've gotten to see an effects of climate change, for example, and the higher the risk are, the people who say no are more likely to say no because you're triggering a safety defense response like like to me. It's like In some ways it's like, yeah, this is like cognitive feedback loop one on one, and yet you can't get it through. No, I would love to say it's just liberals heads, but it's not, it's anyone's head. And the analogy here, I mean, tell me if you think this is a stretch, but it's like to the fact that, like all the liberal jurists in law decided one day that they were going to come up with a liberal form of originalism to fight like the conservative originalism. When you're like both of the entire paradigm that you're adopting is fucked, and like by adopting it and trying to make a liberal version of it, you're actually conceding a point that dooms you in the first place.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:28

And I think that's actually kind of true with this like let's, let's, let's, let's account for all these risks and monetary terms and then like try to do is to cost savings analysis and I'm like, well, honestly, the stakes don't work that way, like environmental damage don't work that way and you can't. I mean like it's interesting to me because people have gotten big in the pricing this, the very time moment in liberalism like, well, we can't, we can't place things that have this, you know, this kind of high externalities on them, because because, like healthcare, because because it leads to market failure, and then like, why the fuck are you trying to do with the climate change? Because that's got even a higher? Like this reward, slash externality costs, like it's yeah, that's absurd. Maybe we should.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:19

Just, you know, I don't want to say that like hey, maybe we have to change the whole paradigm, because that leads to people thinking like, oh, we can just change the way we talk about it, yeah, but in another sense, like yeah, maybe we have to change the whole paradigm and like, change the way, like this way of talking about the environment, which treats it as an unvalorized commodity, isn't gonna have I can help us at all. Not, you know, and you know I mean. That doesn't mean I have an easy answer for, for how to how to spin this, but I want to. I want to talk about you know this is a very real online question for you, as somebody deals with this in the context of Hawaii and in Pacifica, like cultural problems in general. We've just had an instance of Hawaii getting the shit end of the of the environmental feedback loop stick, and I mean the federal government has handled it as poorly as I would have expected it to. But what can we learn from that situation?

K. Malulani Castro: 1:06:35

That's a good question. I so I think something that was really and I'm pretty closely kind of in raptured in that situation. Right, I was there. I was actually like on the mountain where the fire happened the day before the fire happens.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:52

Holy shit Okay.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:06:53

Yeah, and then I was like across the channel on the island I'm from Oolukai, doing forest restoration on like a deserted like, largely destroyed, a vibe like, kind of like mounted face facing Lahaino, and the winds were hitting us and we're covered in dirt and we could see just like the probably tons of like of just dust going into the ocean, into the air and just feeling it. And then we got off the mountain, we got cell service and then we saw that the fires are happening and then immediately people jumped into action. So I think that there's a few things to learn from Lahaino. Right, as I think that I mean, hawaii is a kind of a unique case. I think what was interesting is that people imagine that mutual aid networks while and again there was a really powerful mutual aid network that kind of arose out of that condition Are going to be able to quickly respond and mobilize to deal with kind of climate crises, not just from like the kind of mutual aid component.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:08:02

But in that moment I remember being on several calls where people are like we need to immediately set up a land trust to start buying up these lands.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:08:11

Right, because Lahaino wasn't one parcel, where it's hundreds of thousands of parcels right, a lot of it is local families, but a lot of it were kind of not is a non occupied ownership right, so a lot of external owners who use them as TV or as a temporary vacation rentals.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:08:30

And we were like we need to be in a position to actually just kind of do land back, or land for whatever you want to call it and get all this land really quickly. And I think the biggest lesson learned and I remember having this interaction with people was like I I know that this feels like the right moment to respond, but we are. I think it's really easy to underestimate the trauma of the shit when it's happening and the ability to actually mobilize afterwards. Right and now Lahaino is in a position and they actually established a land trust and start getting some of these lands back. But people were like imagining that we could do it within 48 hours of like hey, we should start talking. I know they're like we need to do this now because all of a sudden, all of these private investors are going to jump in.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:16

To be completely fair to them during BLM and some of the moments in COVID, even I would get swept up. I'm like we can do this really quick and then I'm like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:25

I know better, I know better. But in the moment the urgency plus the trauma kick in and you're just like we got to do what we got to do, we got to believe what we got to believe to be able to do this and I don't know if I have to fool myself, but God damn, I'm going to do it Right. And I think trauma ties people to make that decision about themselves is not necessarily the best fucking like Go about that either. I mean.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:09:52

So yeah, so that happened immediately and then, I think, in the long term of it, I think the difficulty has been that there wasn't.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:10:00

You know, again, the island I come from is a very different context and I can kind of talk about why that context is different and why people were like looking to us to be able to provide guidance and I was like it's just, you just haven't been doing this, but this like this, the I don't think people understand how far their political capacity is. From dealing with questions of zoning, dealing the question like what's questions of taxes, property taxes, whatever you want to deal with it, property acquisition, like they just I haven't seen a lot of robust.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:10:35

You know I'm not going to generalize to the left, but like that is actually a hard, or like a growing edge, if you want to say. And then we've seen in the, in the immediate response to this, right, there was a political attack on a native Hawaiian Judge who supported community water authority because up until then, the plantation system had been established and was allowing kind of large Canadian, a large Canadian pension fund, to pass through the water. There's a, there's a whole story there, right, but that was going to happen, right. And then, in the other terms, right, there was this kind of solution, which is so. Most properties on Maui are owned externally or owned from the people who do not live there, right, right, a lot of them are temporary vacation rentals, so these are Airbnb's, right.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:11:24

So the mayor and the governor were like, hey, we'll give you. I forgot to look this up, I apologize, but they're basically like look, will, you won't have to pay any taxes on these lands or on your property. Can you reduce these prices and actually make them long term rentals? And when you're looking at the margins on, like what you know, we can imagine maybe the margins on some of these when you're talking about someone who can put an Airbnb up for way more than you could ever imagine, right, this is just like not a fix, and it's kind of laughable that they kind of you know that, instead of mandating that all of this housing actually be used, all this housing stock that's basically just used for vacationers, actually receive the population that that was not on the table.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:12:10

So this is just to say, like I think people really need to be prepared that when you're looking at the level of mass trauma that comes with environmental crises and organizing in response to that, I mean that just takes years of preparation, right? And even then, you know, I think we have to think about how to be savvy and I don't know. Yeah, I mean, cause it is an opportunity to change things, right? You know, maybe people can interpret it that way, but it's very different than like something like BLM, right? Or you know, when George Floyd happened, like when a thousand people die, or 2,000 people die, or 4,000 people, like when, you know, several thousand people don't have houses anymore. That's a very different organizing question, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:59

Yeah, I lived through a flood in Central Georgia in 1992, where, like, we didn't have running water, like I don't think that many people died I think maybe 50, 60 died but like we didn't have warning water for two whole fucking months, and also like there was massive displacement of homes for up to two or three years. And even that is more trauma than I think people are used to. And people are like, oh, traumatized communities. I'm like, yeah, but it's not the same. Like it's. This is acute. You know, on one hand, I completely agree with you. It's not like BLM, and BLM is like that's a bubbling up of something that's under the radar. It comes from trauma, but it's a different kind of thing. This is like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:57

But Katrina is an example of like where this can go real self, real fast. And you know, I was involved in Katrina restoration work and that got heated for a variety of reasons, but it was, like you know, even and that was not even that was one of those areas where mutual aid wasn't even partisan for once. Like you know, you get everybody out there and yet it was another fucking shit show and we didn't stop any neoliberalization from happening and like we got side flanked on, like every major infrastructure, including education, like it was something to think about. Yet the other challenge I have with these people is like well, the other way people go, they go. Well, mutual aid doesn't work, let's go this electoral route.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:48

And I'm like that's not, then do anything for Hawaii. It doesn't do anything for you know for that situation and it wouldn't Like. So what are you gonna do? And I think the one thing that we have to do is start preparing that one. This is gonna be common, so we need resistant, non-ngo, probably non-party political organizations that can handle this, that also are very locally embedded, because one of the other problems that you have is I can't take the context from me here in Utah to you in Hawaii in any meaningful sense.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:29

I'm in Michigan, but yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I actually know that, but like we're using Hawaii as a platform, but actually me here in Utah, you in Michigan, like your problems are different than mine, like there's environmental degradation problems in both places. You got water and I don't.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:15:48

Depending on who you are right, yes, but like, the water exists where you are. Yeah, that's true, that's true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:53

The water does not exist here. Like, we got one respite from the Uncoming Arsenic Cloud because we had a good snow year last year, but we're still actually beneath. We're still actually like not in any way undone from the otherwise five years drought. And it's one of those times when, like when I lived in Georgia and people were talking about, well, it's a drought for, like, we've been in drought for 20 years and I'm like, if you're in drought for 20 years, you're not in drought anymore. Yeah, you just live in a different place.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:16:29

Yeah, in a different place.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:31

But like the world has changed, like you can't blame that on La Nina or whatever.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:39

So like I, mean actually and actually, in the case of Georgia, to even get more environmentally cynical. Part of the drought problems isn't even the environmental problem, but it's the fact that, like it's almost impossible to go and fix the infrastructure the way they want to fix it. So, like you just have, you have increasingly more people on increasingly less infrastructure and the infrastructure is super, super shitty, but it costs more to pull up the infrastructure than it does to just let it all collapse. So like that's what's going on around Atlanta, but here, like that's not the problem. Here in Utah, all the infrastructure is fairly new. Our problem is that we're a fucking desert and people keep on moving here and you know. And then Michigan, you have these curtailment of water rights Also. You have that here, but how it looks is very different. We had to fight to not lose the right to like collect water for our gardens because the way water rights work. By the way, owning land in Utah does not actually entitle you to either ground or air water.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:17:48

Oh, that's awesome.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:49

Like so, like it's great, so like, even as a property owner, you're kind of fucked. Oh yeah, those are separate rights which have to be bought separately and they finally conceded to us being able to collect rainwater for gardening, but you know they were stewing people for that. And what's funny is like I would hear about that shit in like Bolivia when, like US corporate, but like no one would talk about it it's happening in communities here, like it's just developed from state to state and if you try to do this from a national policy perspective, you probably don't know that, because, I mean, the one thing about the United States is like we're a wildly federated country, but I also think, like, even if we weren't, you shouldn't expect to be able to do good policy management from DC for landscapes as different as the high desert, pacific islands, the Great Lakes basin and the Southeast coastal area Like those are radically different things on something the size of you know, actually, when you throw in the Pacific islands, larger than a continent. So yeah.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:19:08

Yeah, Like yeah, go ahead. One thing I love and this is a kind of a fact to it is that the parcel of land that we're trying to get back in Molokai is larger than DC and that's wild to think about. But I think to your point about this and I don't have kind of like a. So what I'll do is I'll kind of describe the context that I'm working in so that maybe people understand why I'm kind of concerned about these things, right? So the reason why the island of Molokai you can actually begin in this process of like trying to acquire this land is because you have a population of like 7,000, give or change right Roughly 60% native Hawaiian, a large kind of like Asian, like descendant of migrant farmer per population, and then a mix of like European, canadian snowbirds or US snowbirds and stuff like that. And something that's really interesting, there is one third of the population is on food stamps, right, and then when you look at the native Hawaiian population that 60% they get about one third of their food.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:20:16

Theλο gloves are the amounts of land in the indigenous region and there's like less than 2,050,000 on goods, and so we've had too many of these and we only talk about that at home. There's nobody who understands what is a China touchdown. There's nobody who understands how I took care of it, and so I had to find it. I had to identify the signs, that just expressions, and the big concern I have is that we're about to get this land right, and this is kind of where I think a lot of efforts kind of tumble, especially a lot of land back efforts, a lot of indigenous efforts is. You get the land All of a sudden, you have a spreadsheet, or you have a budget that you need to manage, or you have infrastructure you need to manage.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:21:04

You have to incorporate your charter and those relationships that actually provided you the context of getting there right. Like, the reason why this land is being sold is because we pushed out a Hong Kong based like wealthy private equity firm. Right, we've like basically prevented them from developing here so much that they're like forget it, we don't want to be here, right, and there's kind of some shenanigans there, right, but like, basically, that's like what's happened. And now that we're in a position to actually get it, I'm actually more concerned for the community. Right, I'm actually like shoot, like once we get the land, once we actually have to start managing and planning ourselves with being land rich and or cash rich. Right, we actually have like a cash flow all of a sudden. Why we should not presume that our social relationships, our kinship networks, our subsistence networks are actually robust enough to survive the penetration of money, and I think everyone kind of has to accept that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:58

Yeah, this is a. I hate. This is an overused white person metaphor about indigenous life, but in this case it is a good example. What happens when the casino comes to the res and the res is flush with cash? Like, but not anything else. Like it's, it's a, it is a real, it is a you know and also like hey, now that you I talk about this a lot in another context.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:28

And decolonization like I'm always like you know the great irony of decolonization in places like Africa and the Middle East. And it's like they weren't nations there beforehand and then there were nations and then they somehow had to make that work and also decolonize. But the only reason there are nations there at all is a synthetic importation to to actual colonial international law frameworks. And also like because you have to act like the colonizer to be able to participate in the system, in which case it reduces some of this to gentleman's agreements and like it all gets very ugly very quick. But in you know, like you know, you guys are doing land back, more piratid. I'm glad you know, like in the capitalist context, I'm all about that. Yet also, well, now you own property like a colonizer.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:25

Like under their law. So, like, like you know and, and and you know like, I know that the superficial conservative is like got you, we were right on the dog, and that's not what I'm saying. I'm like there's not no, like there is a way in which you are stuck with that, like you do have to live in that context and like, if we expect you not to, we're setting you up to fail. But also it has effects that will change your, your kinship relations and maybe even make you look, I don't know Like. I always think of, like Amy Cesare, who always talks about like, like the colonizer society is also, the colonizing society is also sick. Like, like in and of itself, and I'm like man, do you want our illnesses or not? Like, and and that's always something to to in different groups handle it differently. I don't think it's inevitable. That goes poorly, but it is going to do something.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:24:22

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:23

Right, and you know that's normally when I throw my pitch for our way out of it is socialist revolution, comrade, but like even that I'm beginning to be like I don't know In the back of my mind. The example that I was talking to my friend Sean of Antifota about was was, like you know, the Bolsheviks really tried to give everyone a nation, except for those pesky non-national Siberian indigenous. Like they can never figure out what the fuck to do with and what did they do with them? Pretty much the same thing that the US and Canada did with its indigenous was like a rush of vacation or some kind of like well, pick a nation, goddammit, yeah, like we don't care that. That's not who you are and that's kind of been on the back of my mind because I'm like okay, that like so we say we're going to get out of the settler framework, but but you know, this came up in the context of our land back or land forward or whatever you want to call it. Like like we most indigenous people both know by sheer law of large numbers and also get that it's not that that most people want blood and soil nationals and yes, some people do. We can't, we can't flatten that out, but most people don't, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:46

Yet as soon as we talk about this framework, that's automatically where we go, because that seems to be the only European framework for it. And then, like, what do you do? Yeah, like, and I don't have an easy answer for it. I do think like one thing that maybe we should do is shut the fuck up and actually start listening to each other and also, to some degree, maybe start thinking about the problems of accepting the framework in the first place. But when it comes to financial stuff, I don't know how. You don't Like mutual aid. God bless it, I'm all about it, don't get me wrong, I'm not an anti mutual. Later, I'm not like oh don't, don't do mutual aid Give money to the electoral campaign.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:26:29

Yeah, I think my point about the mutual aid was that, like you're talking about a context where that like, For some reason right, and the high note has a lot of like, even though it's like a large kind of tourism component of Maui right, Still relatively like close to a community, and I'm like for people who are experiencing or going to experience climate crisis. Are you like, Do not rest on your laurels. You know to some extent and like you know, and even kind of, even if you feel like you're far away from it, do not rest on your laurels. I think again, like you should just be assuming that if you can't even make that happen, you probably can't make the other thing happen, Right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:08

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I do think there's a whole Rebecca Sona article like people come together in crisis and I'm like, yeah, we do, but that doesn't mean that when we come together we're thinking clearly, yeah, like, are that, we're realistic. A lot of times, hope rains supreme and sometimes hope is fucking dumb. Yeah, you know it's, it's. And even I, like you know, mr Me being usually pretty OK with being the cynical one in the room when someone's mourning the loss of I don't know 100,000. Yeah, 2000 of their community members. I'm not going to shit on their hope, but I'm also like and I'm not going to not be tempted to to do it myself like those moments it's real hard not to like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:57

I've seen, like I've seen many times where communities face something like this and they come together and that's all good, but the shadow side is like they're traumatized and that can cut in a million different ways.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:12

But a lot of those million different ways are bad, like, probably more than are good. Yeah, from skate goading to, to, to, to like dreaming big in ways that make you, to make you know short term irresponsible decisions, to being outflanked because you're not being cynical enough about certain parties in your mind, like, all this is all reality that's going to come up. And when it comes to climate change, yeah, and to bring it back to our original context, how the fuck are we supposed to price that? Yeah, like like I was actually thinking about this the other day in the context of how I am like like, what kind of FEMA check can I possibly throw at you that does anything Like really Like you know, yeah, I mean, I think this is like kind of what's funny with like kind of I don't know natural capital accounting or natural wealth accounting and kind of extending it to ecosystem services, and then like flirting with like valuing and pricing culture is like.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:29:13

I like the idea that people imagine that like indigenous communities are going to be like Allow to bring their bill, so like it's kind of like the imagination. I was like I'm going to, like they're going to just show up and be like here's the bill, not even for the last 400 years, just for the last 10 years.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:29

Yeah Right, three million dollars of pain and suffering, please.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:29:37

And it wouldn't be wrong. But what does that mean, Like, what does that matter? And that's never been the point of these things, right, and you know, I yeah it's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:52

It's the point like, like I think about the most corrupted in a reparations discourse section, and I always think about that example of that ask which no one intended to give in San Francisco and they're like we're going to give all indigenous people a million I mean all indigenous, all all black people who can prove their stay here, but which, by the way, would be all of 60 people, right, but like a million dollars, and which, of course, is also going to raise the tax rate, like 50% for everybody, which is also going to make them hate. Like it's just, it's everything about that, but of course, no one ever intended to do that. Yeah, but it comes to indigenous stuff, it's like I always think about it. It's like, how do I price that? Who gets like? Who gets to represent it?

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:37

Like to some ways, like, ok, you know, we talk about like the, the, the peoples of the, of the Eastern seaboard in the United States, like we're talking about like five people Sometimes we can prove have any actual relation to these historical peoples and you know that's kind of an exaggeration, but it's not much of one and and like, what do we do about that? And what is, how do I compensate the annihilation of most of your culture and persons. I just don't, I don't know how to do that. Yeah, like, and I don't even know that I should.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:31:14

Well, people are, and I think that that's what's funny, and I think they're trying to do it in the positive sense, right. I think that they're like look, we can't pay for what's lost, but we can pay for what's here. And they're like OK for the community. And again, what ends up happening which kind of feeds into this nationalism, blood and soil nationalism question, and like kind of how indigenous people get wrapped up into this is that for communities that look a certain not even like physically look, but kind of like how their society operates let's say you're in the Uke Tan, right. Let's say you're in Oaxaca or something like that, right, and there's multiple dozens of indigenous communities there. But for some reason, your community pastoral farmers right, you raise cattle, whereas other people are like forest dwellers All of a sudden, the ways in which this green finance happens is like oh, I really want to finance the language immersion programs, the cultural practice and the maintenance of the forest dwellers. And then for the cattle farmers, I'm going to-.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:15

Yeah, fuck those sapotecs down the street.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:32:18

Yeah, exactly Exactly what I was thinking of.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:23

I've spent enough time walking to know you.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:32:29

But yeah, so you get these situations right, which creates that's one kind of contradiction in these things. Where it really does. This is like a now this new form of pricing will create indigeneity or create and that's to say that I think indigeneity has kind of always been about the question of price, especially with land that's never been separate and treaties and kind of that question. But it's a new formation of this right and I think that there was a question of like-.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:04

Do you trust us to price when you couldn't trust us with treaties?

K. Malulani Castro: 1:33:08

I don't yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:09

You might just want to like like in a very simple sense. It's like you price treaty, both agreements under law Do you think we're going to do a whole lot better? I mean we might, but like there's more awareness. At the same token, like I'm just I don't know, I'm fundamentally skeptical of this pricing regime stuff, but at the same time, but on the other hand, I'm also like, but like I am sympathetic to, like me saying that pricing sucks, so we should do nothing is also fucked up.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:47

So it's like it really is sort of like how do we like? What do we balance here? What's the next step? What's the next step? And then and then, when I think for this, like you're right, like we also have, like this creates a scale of indigeneity that's weirdly kind of I mean, orientalizing is the wrong word, but it's the analogous concept Like the more exotic and primitive you are, the more likely we are to pay you, yeah, which will set up all kinds of bizarre hierarchies within indigenous groups who maybe didn't have tensions before it. It's not like you know, that hasn't happened before. So it's just and in the long run, I start thinking about what happens when we have to start dealing with this with all the populations, like when you can't when you can't just be like well, there's this historically agree group.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:45

Yes, we go down to the next historically agree group, which is marginalized people like black and brown people, but then eventually you're like, like, I point this out, it's been implicit in my debates with a certain Mr Drum, our Dr Drum, where I'm like Respect the name the good, respectable Dr Drum, where I'm like, well, but like you talk about white supremacy and you're absolutely correct. I have no disagreement with you on the prevalence. It's real and it's improper in relations or whatever. But like, while there are benefits to whiteness that occur to all white people absolutely, you know, I get it you can't say that property accumulation is one of them. In the same way and in a way that's going to eventually manifest in the quote dominant group unquote, because the class relations will become very clear.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:41

I mean, to me it's like you already see this with environmental justice stuff and health justice stuff in the rural and ex-urban south. Yeah, like, where you're just seeing like people's life expectancy. If you live in these areas, you're just dropping the shit and it's like well, you know, we got rid of the black, white, poor gap by just letting poor white people die. So you know, I guess that's equality. We're all equal in death, I suppose, and that's I don't think that's what anybody wants. I mean, I really don't think that's what the great majority of indigenous people want. And one of the weirdest things about the current indigenous discourse is like and I mean this in the nicest way possible Malin.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:36:34

You're safe. It's a safe place.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:37

But sometimes I'm like we only talk to the indigenous people who speak white activist language.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:36:43

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, like, like, like I know a lot of super conservative Well.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:49

I'm just, I've actually like totally looked at the stats for what reds politics are and that would it would dramatically surprise people. But you know, but in another way, you know, I always think about it like I'm not. This is not a gadget. For me it's like well, what, what, how do, how would you talk to them and what do they want? And why are they that way? Because because I actually don't think indigenous conservatism actually looks like like white elite conservatism at all, but it is like rural priorities versus urban priorities and who are they likely to like listen to? And for reasons that I think have come up in this, like we don't have a good response for that. Like at all, like absolutely not, and yeah, yeah, so there's two things there Because, like.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:37:43

So I think the first thing, right is, if anyone's like listening to this and like wants to take a lesson away from this, like why you should care about pricing for these services, why you should care about pricing of nature, is that you're not being asked, you're not engaging, you're not part of that pricing evaluation process either, right, like almost no one who's listening to this is you know if anything indigenous peoples might be closer because they actually have some form of national sovereignty or kind of collective recognition, right? But I think that that's actually the canary in the coal mine. Is that, hey, this thing's happening at global, national and even, to some extent, state scales because, like, california has a emissions trading scheme, and I'm like, no, we should all probably be pretty concerned with what's like these prices are, and I think if you asked anyone like what is fresh air to your child? Like what is that worth, you'd actually probably get a pretty similar response across Like, mostly everything.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:38:44

Yeah, like everything. What do you mean? Like was that? Even I should be prickly, so there's that right, and I think people need to take it seriously. Is that you're like it's not like that's on, like any kind of national ballot. It's not on any kind of state ballot. No one's coming to you and being like let's vet this valuation process Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:05

Yeah, they're not even asking you to pick the people who decide it.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:39:08

No, they're not doing that either. So there's that. And then, when it came to the question of the conservatism components, right, and I think people who don't understand indigenous tribal history and kind of the history of tribal law, which is like the most thing is that Republicans actually generally were better for us, or not us right, but better for the GOP is better at respecting tribal sovereignty because they're better at respecting sovereignty in general.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:39

And also I know I talk about this a lot on the show and it makes everyone uncomfortable that there's a whole like in the 19th century. You can be good on indigenous issues or you can be good on black issues, but I'd never found anyone. Yeah, it's like the Confederacy weirdly good on tribal recognitions in a way that's disturbing. And then you know Mark Twain, great on black people for the time. Not so much by our standard, definitely for the time.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:40:14

Terrible on indigenous people, but like really good about international imperialism if you ever read any stuff on like the US, spanish stuff and kind of the Philippines and even Hawaii. That's like slightly better. But yeah, he's pretty bad on indigenous stuff but like yeah, he was a critic of incorporating Hawaii.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:33

I mean, he was part of the anti-imperialism league, but and also that's a league Like everyone's like, oh, they're all Marxist or whatever that might know. Half of them are like basically half of them are progressives who are not on the like Teddy Rota, Roosevelt, proto fascist progressive is trained, and then the other half are basically fucking neoconfederates like, who are like afraid of letting more brown people in. And so they're just like let's stop this imperial project because, like, we have enough brown people to stop it. And I mean I was talking about this with the, with the Polk plan to take all the, take Mexico all the way down to Mexico City, like it. Basically we like, well, haka, chiapas and the, the Eucatam was in part of Mexico, yet so yeah, and I'm like you know, stop that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:25

It's a mixture of like one guy who felt bad for for what we were doing, because he went down as the ambassador and like saw what was happening and when he came back up he teamed up with a bunch of racist to like stop the expansion at the Rio Grande. Yeah, like, I'm just like, so I point that out because if you know that history, the actual tribal politics is like it's not as irrational as you think. Plus, it's just like I'm like. I like to tell people like most resists are super fucking rule, rule. So their concerns are rural and Democrats have not, outside of the farm bill in the 30s, had a good rule policy at all.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:42:10

Also religious, like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:12

So some of the biggest centers of like religious like density Same with Hawaii, right, you know, at least amongst its indigenous population, I mean, the island I come from is like one third Mormon, I think, and I think they're like I always forget about the weird Mormon thing with the Pacific Islanders, like when they decide this is, this is a fun thing, because one of the interesting things if you ever come to Salt Lake City is there's a bunch of fucking Samoans and Tongans here and you're just like why, how the hell did you end up here? Yeah, and then you discover like oh well, when the when the Mormons were deciding that they were getting over their curse of ham stuff and their lame and I cursed stuff I literally did a show on this. You guys can go and listen to it and they're lame and I cursed stuff they decided to like go to the Pacifica people because they were indigenous as but you know, we haven't tried to genocide them, so we don't have to like answer for that and also like maybe they can become white and delight some.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:43:13

Yeah, so so I mean it's like also because, like, how do I say this? Like, how do I say this? The other Protestants had already done a lot of good work across the continent. It was like there was, like you know, and the Protestants were pretty good going out imperialy right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:36

But, like some, christian group had already reached you if you were a little indigenous, like but the Mormons are like we're ready to go.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:43:43

You know, we need to find our spots.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:46

Hawaii, Tonga and.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:43:47

Samoa Right and a minute. So I think to that question and actually I think this is like where someone like Colin Drummond is really useful right Is, when it comes to like this tension of like why Democrats versus Republicans on what we understand as like black issues or like a kind of like black racial issues prior to in the 19th century, eight to the 20th, and indigenous issues, why are they kind of not mixing, right it's. I think it does kind of come down to this like fundamental, like difference in this tension of like property rights and kind of sovereignty and, like you know, again, these people receive the imposition of that, those different ideologies, right, but that's kind of been the battleground between what we might understand, the difference between even civil rights and indigenous rights. Right, there's actually kind of differences in like one's kind of a property arrangement, one's not to some extent and not having a language of like having to deal with that.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:44:46

And again, I think that this is why, you know, I always harp on people. I'm like you know you should be really concerned with kind of the most boring, many like menial, kind of exhaustive questions of like zoning, taxing and property in your like locale right Like how do I say this Like municipal bond law right, yeah, I mean. Detroit I mean seriously right, california, right, I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:12

I mean, I've been harping on this lately, but it's like like, really, really, guys, learn your municipal bond markets, your zoning, your zoning rules and like and like, how, how you fund shit, what taxes go where.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:25

Now, I haven't advantageous, haven't been a teacher and been like, hey, we can open the school, but we can't staff it, because the school comes from one line and the staffing of the school comes from a completely different line of taxation. Like in 2017, 2008, Malo, that led to some very weird situation. We're like we had to lay off 25% of our staff, but we have to open a new school and we got a staffer with like five people, yeah, so, and that's purely because people don't understand how the tax lines go, Like they're like well, I approved, you know, X sales tax for whatever, and I'm like yeah, but that's that's for, that's specifically for the specific line item. You can't touch it. And honestly, also, when people think, oh, progressive funding of schools, some of the most progressive funding of school states are red states and they're actually that way because of the problems of rural schooling. So, for example, Utah equalizes its school funding.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:46:36

I love that. It's so cool.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:39

Like, like the state level. Yes, local taxes go to local things first, but all the rest of the funding is equalized and it's equalized per student as of like Sweden. So, like we have, we have competition for students that leads to FD stuff. We all get paid the same amount and I'm like, and that's so much more progressive than New York state which, like you know, your immediate like municipality, like borough, actually like or something I don't even know, it's not even a borough, like funger school, and also it's led to the most segregated, segregated and like and wealth non-integrated school system and the public school system on the, I think, on the planet, and it's just like, so these things don't cut the way you think they do, because you often don't understand the difference between how, like, urban and rural states work, which is not me arguing that like rural states are great, trust me, I live in Utah but like the problems are different.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:40

And when you get really, I think, when you realize that all of a sudden, like, like the tribal politics makes more sense, and also when they cut over, like why did the? Why did the DNA? Why did the Navajo nation get woke? Like it wasn't because they all of a sudden became good Democrats it's because they saw the policies leading to mass Navajo death rates during COVID, yeah, and the Democrats were slightly better, so they voted for them Like but but that was a historic, that was like a shift.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:48:11

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:13

That no one even really paid, like people paid that much attention to. But they thought it was ideological and I'm like, I'm like it's it's not, because it's it's not ideological in the way you think. It's literally like it's really like a health policy issue.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:48:27

Like, yeah, they can to some extent. I mean again like and then we talked about this before, maybe we've mentioned this in passing in some other ways is like I don't think indigenous people is our special, like there's nothing special about indigeneity. I would like kind of admit that I don't want to be indigenous. I don't like it, I don't want to, I wish it didn't have to be. But what we do, like if there is anything unique about indigenous peoples and like why we should be gauges that we one we just have like different memory. We just we just remember different things. And then part of that is we sometimes have different formations, like political formations, kinship formations, social formations.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:49:03

And I think what you're talking about which we also saw here in Michigan in the previous election right During COVID, where we got the Democrat trifecta which has kind of screwed us actually was that when they want to move as a political formation, they can actually move as a political formation. Right, then that can actually happen. And then like, okay, we're all shifting, we're all want to, we're kind of all kind of so aware and kind of concerned about our elders and these guys are trying to kill us. Okay, we're just going to vote for the other person, and then it just happens, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:33

Right, but the the democracy is over that you have to deal with this Democrat trifecta.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:49:38

Yeah, and then you have to deal with the Democrat trifecta and they're completely, they're almost, like you know, I, I, I like to do that and describe them as, like you know, really interested in losing in the state Right they probably should.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:51

Now, now Michigan is one of those, is one of those states where I'm just always like, you know, this shouldn't be that hard. Yeah, michigan should not be hard, like it shouldn't be harder than, say, georgia for Democrats to win. Although you know, you speak about the, the memory, I think, one of the things I will give any traumatized people Palestinians, jews, indigenous Americans, etc. Our indigenous people they don't even want to be Americans. I'm going to give them that benefit. It's fine for you, but you can't forgive me for everybody. So, like that's true, I shouldn't do that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:34

There might be some Sue guy out there who's like fuck that bar guy. So you know, I accept that. But my point, my point on that is like we are seeing these coalitions change so fast. The people who have, who tend to be shut out, tend to have a longer institutional memory than everybody else. Because, like, for example you know, I point this out in the case of the South, like people assume that the South has always been super conservative and in some ways it has. But like the, the the whole fucking Southern strategy wasn't achieved until 2001 or 2002 in some states and it's barely stuck Like like Louisiana, georgia, the Virginias, like they're kind of, they're kind of always, like they're kind of in play and it's only when, like you know, some weird progressive coalitions like well, we can ignore those guys. They come and where they fall out of play. And I'm not saying this because to me it's like well, there's a fundamental misleading this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:43

If you think the partisan affiliation of a state actually tells you about its character. Georgia's still kind of fucked up. Michigan you know, you live in Michigan, my, my, my partner's family's from Michigan and I have a great number of friends from Michigan because in the, the reverse great migration which started with black people but ended with with white people. There was a shit ton of Michiganders who came to Georgia and then like got screwed there too, because once they moved to the South, our economy collapsed and the recession never returned. But but nonetheless, like you know, like, as I said, michigan Michigan, a very pretty state which basically exports people in tears.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:39

It's interesting to me that people who come from these more marginalized communities, like the black community, like in the South, like you know, I complain about old college educated black women in their seventies being super conservative all the time because they are the just Democrats but and not everybody, obviously but but at the same time, they do have a long institutional memory and that's one of the reasons why they don't tend to jump on the progressive trains, because they're like how many times have we seen you say this and how many times have you delivered on it? I've been around since the sixties and my, my weird, vaguely conservative political machine not just has survived but actually took over part of the Dixie Crut machine, whereas you have literally never delivered anything to us. And you know what? That's a fair fucking argument.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:53:28

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:30

And if you don't have a long memory, you can't construct a long, direct answer to that. Well, either in terms of policy or in terms of even the argument, or basically organizing. Right, yeah, like, how do you go into those communities and and and whatnot? Like you know, my favorite one is if you're in the South, in your church averse, and you want to get to the black community, good, good luck.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:54:00

Like not even like I mean that that South goes all the way up to the Mason Dixon. I mean I used to do a lot of faith and action stuff in Baltimore and Maryland, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:09

Yeah, I mean really above it too, cause also, like West Virginia is not on the other side of the Mason Dixon line, but you know, you wouldn't know it Are in pencil Tucky, are what I'm like in? Yeah, I'm like, yeah, 15% of all people under 40 are not religious, but like that's actually not true for some of these, for some of these subgroups and also you, you do have to pull on elders to get stuff done. I know, like we would all like to believe that some of us didn't internalize the whole. Like new left, only young people, good thing. But like, if you actually want to move a community as to get temporary activists which are two different things you got to focus on multiple generations at once that reinforce each other.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:55

Or, you know, if all you care about is like activist grunt labor, you have focus on college students who cares, but you're not going to build anything permanent with that and which, traditionally speaking, was the conservatives. Like structural organizational advantage over us. It's no longer for reasons that I'm not I don't quite understand of. You know something about the last 15 years has also broke their brains, so left this patch yourself on the back.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:22

You're not the only people who've gone crazy, but because it does seem like conservatives no longer seem as interested in building long term generational chain chains and para institutions that aren't just trolling or are rentier or rent seeking machines. But they used to and so it's. It's a, it's a thing to look at in this, in this scenario, and I think it's also going to be something where, like you know, for all of my stuff on like working class autonomy and whatnot, this is another place where I think Collins actually actually somewhat helpful is, if you're not actively thinking about this, this will still fall through the cracks, like because just organizing labor, even if it's black and brown labor, does not lead you to like thinking at all about indigenous issues, because they're kind of.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:56:14

Or even like provisioning children issues. I know I mean I listened to the drills conversation and it's just like you know, at the end of the day, like that's kind of it right, like If you can't your thoughts.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:23

Like you just don't get like like I hate to say this, but this is one of my fundamental problems with left wing culture right now is I'm like you win the youth but you don't have any way to sustain yourself with kids in the long run because, like you really don't even think about family policy at all, except in how impressive it is, which means, you know, I get a lot of it. Like a lot of our critiques of the modern standard motions of family. Absolutely fair, indigenous people back you up on how and how fucked up they are. They're not going to back you up, however, not replacing them with some form of kinship. Yeah, like, like. So you're going to have to think about that, and I think about that all the time.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:03

Like we don't think about provisioning children. We don't think about provisioning child. We kind of think about provisioning childcare, but even when we do, it's like from this weird like works perspective, like we need to provision care labor so that more people can go to work, so that we can provision care labor so more people can go to work as part of the service consumer economy, I guess. And I'm like, yeah, that's a very weird way to think about this. Like.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:57:34

I mean, what's kind of sad about this, is it kind of? So? We talked about the 19th century a little bit and kind of the funny kind of divide on it and I've talked about this before, but like, I kind of just like miss the capacity for imagination that some like abolitionists, progressive reformer, had in like late 19th century, where they were like, how about if we build a school and we actually just bring all these indigenous children here and completely cut ties with their families and we could cut their? Like let's just, let's just change, like I think there was an ability to imagine, like how many generations does it take to change a society? Right, and I think we're also very cognizant of the need to change property relationships with that alongside that as well.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:58:16

So like several T in boarding schools happened at the same time, I talk about this a lot but I think it's an important connection and I don't think anyone's like kind of has like the kind I think there's a squeamish initiative against it.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:58:26

With this kind of like anxiety around. It is like, okay, like, how much time, like how many generations, like, could I like maybe move a situation where I could like have start transitioning the children into a different type of society, toward different types of kinship, and then also transitioning them towards, like different types of property relationships, and I'm sure, like that's maybe like outside of the box, but like, if you're, if that's not on the radar, then I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:54

I don't know what you understand as, like, you know as someone kind of coming to what you understand as, like the inevitability of climate change is that those things are just going to happen and if you, regardless, probably most where anyone is, you're going to either be personally displaced or someone's going to be displaced into your landscape, right, yeah, this is, this is one of the dark ironies of the Israeli Palestine situation that I sometimes bring up to just to like really point out like what you have to think and I'm like, okay, let's say we settle this, we get a two state solution or, even better, a bi national, one state solution Not going to happen and if it did, you know great new and peacekeeper force, we settle that in a hundred years everybody stops hating each other.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:38

And then the Levant is inhabitable, like you know, and they're like what I'm like. Well, I want you to look at climate change projections.

K. Malulani Castro: 1:59:50

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:51

Like. So you know, I just if your idea of indigeneity is like blood and soil, nationalism and like and I believe like this is a, I have my one swipe at common. Give my third point you have to look at land. You cannot not look at land. But I'm going to point out that, like you know, some of these, some of these indigenous communities, unless we have a miracle happen, are on non viable land now, Like there's. What are we going to do about that? How are we going to handle the great movements of people without just being like, oh yeah, we're going to let a million brown people die at the US border. That's great, and you know, are are even more likely the Europe's border, because as much as Europe is progressive, it's not on. That never has been so it's.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:49

It's something that I think we really have to rethink in this fundamental way, because, in one hand, we do have to look at the land and, for the other hand, we're going to have to say, like there's going to be traumatic cuts in the land for everybody. How do we reconceive this? This is a point where we can, you know, like it's not likely, but it is a point where we can, and that's when I start thinking about, like, how radical can you think? Because you're right like the residential school system is objectively horrible. But you know what I realized? It realized that if you disconnect kinship relations, you can rewrite the script. Now you know the reverse of that's also true. If you empower kinship relations, you can also rewrite the script, but you have to be radical enough to do that, as opposed to like, well, that's something that we can't touch, we're gonna leave that to market relations. Great thanks, Like way to go, Because I hate to tell you guys, but they're doing a pretty good job of abolishing the family and not replacing it with anything. Great job.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:02:08

So, again, like I think, so we started with pricing right On these kind of different schemes, right, and I think that there is like both, like a tactical need or a kind of strategic needs kind of approach these things, but kind of like a more gapor philosophical thing.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:02:19

Right, it is like for anyone listening you know, especially in the US, where they're kind of really you know the Biden administration's pushing this forward. Right, you know, of doing accounting on national wealth, there's gonna be the kind of deeper penetration of these pricing schemes going into how your manage, like your landscapes are managed, is, and this isn't a kind of like appropriate indigeneity, but of this kind of question of like what does like how much does it cost, how much do you want it to cost? Or in, how much are you willing to pay to provision for your children? And I think, when we kind of want to imagine extending kinship to nonhumans, non, even non-organic entities, is like, how much do you want a provision for, like the continuation or the replication of healthy air? Yeah, right, you know, the provision for the replication of like necessary, like floor and fauna species.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:13

Right.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:03:14

And do you want something other than cows and dogs in your future, and I think you know again, like I, think that that's actually, you know, I don't want to say like popular, but like I can imagine right, if you can put that question to people not as like a green 2.0, but like this question of like hey, like taxes and the pricing of your environment are really important, but no one seems to really be asking you about that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:40

Yeah, how do you have input in it? What would it mean for you to have input in it? Like, how do we, how do we deal with these? You know, the other thing that you appropriately point out is how do we deal with these, like offsets and stuff, both between within nations and between them. And you know, my great thing is, like, I'm not sure these nations survive the next 100 years the way that they currently are. I mean, that's assuming we do. But, like, like you know, let's not take the.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:10

I sometimes think the human race dies out as the cop out of dealing with all these problems. Yeah, so let's assume we don't and then say, like, well, what happens when all these political arrangements that you currently see really don't survive? The stress has some modernity, because most of them actually aren't even that old. Like so, and you know you were talking about this and I'm like, yeah, they can't price for carbon, but they can barely price for the fact they're not even sure the national entities they're talking about are gonna exist in 100 years. Yeah, like, and if we look at the historical examples, they likely won't.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:04:48

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:49

So it's just, it's very hard, like there's a freezing of the moment in this where I actually do think switching over to, you know, a more relational framework actually does get you to see that like, oh no, this stuff is shifting but the relations are going to be there. The nature of those relations may change, yeah, and if you think about your relationship, even our normal language kind of a traces to the natural world you start looking at like okay, this is going to be a shifting thing that we have to think about in different terms, because trying to treat them as static, a historical price things that only price markers can intervene in, with discrete, atomic, you know, actors, I just that doesn't seem to be like a viable way of thinking about the world. It doesn't seem to generate any sort of ethic or subject that could be useful for maintaining this. And you know it concedes. I mean it is kind of interesting to think about. I guess this will be my last point and then I'll let you have the finishing remarks, but like, I have thought a lot about the irony of, like, the same people who, like 10, 15 years ago, said we can't price air, we can't price order, that is beyond pricing as a commodity, are now the people who are like, we got to price it so that people will save it, and I'm like, have you conceded too much already?

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:20

I mean, I know why you get it Like. I know why you're doing it, because if you don't do something, you've done nothing and like we live in this framework. But if this is the horizon limit of your framework, I feel like we're still stuck. And we're still, you know, in all the contradictions we talked about in the beginning, like whereas, like you know, you talk about like Landford and getting this, like what is the larger vision for this, you know, in the context of your community, but also in the context of how you relate to other communities.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:54

And that's a question that's going to have to be answered. And you can either answer it as a community ahead of time, which you might not be able to perfectly live through, but at least you have a plan, or you can answer as stochastically as stuff is forced upon you, and you know there are actually some advantages to the latter approach, but they tend to like favor the status quo, actually. So it's. You know it's very hard for me to like be all prescriptive about this, but it does seem to me that's where a lot of these things lead to. Closing remarks Mollin, yeah, yeah, yeah.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:07:28

So I mean I think, with that point right, I'm actually not against the pricing of this stuff in the sense that, like it's here, like I think it's a viable, immediate, like near term way to like get money to people to do good shit, that like take care of their land or whatever. Again, I think that the question that I've been stressing to people is like where are you in that valuation, like, and like yeah, you're not a nuclear state, but like can you try to intervene in where that, what that pricing is? And like how is that actually the more important thing than like are we able to price, like cultural identity? How would I rather be able to price air more powerfully? They get? Have my culture priced appropriately?

K. Malulani Castro: 2:08:12

I know, that sounds kind of messed up, but like that's kind of my math on this, and then on the flip side, like well, I mean, you gotta breathe even to do it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:25

Yeah exactly.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:08:27

But I mean, I think that's again like, that's like weird to people, right, and I think but again, but then again also at the end of the point, right, like I think so, yeah, anyways, like this approach to pricing, this approach to the carbon credits and all this other stuff is kind of a the holding period is not longer than I think the actual life of the, or the holding period would be required to be longer for these credits than these nations may actually exist. And I think to the question that you had about like how does my community and so I'll answer for, not for my community, but in like what I'm understanding In the near term, right, like in the next 12 months, I might be more than partially responsible for managing 56,000 acres of land, providing water utility to a large portion of the population and dealing with the acquisition of those lands and hopefully putting it into collective management that there is some sort of economic return for people, or so that they're not, you know, because just as much as those people have like high kinship and high subsistence, they're also mostly poor. So, like I'm trying to think through how long can I get money to? Like like I mean this is like I'll try to, because this is me like existing in this I'm trying to think through this is like we need a better hospital, we need better roads, we need better infrastructure, but I also don't wanna completely ruin our relationships. Are there other international indigenous, non-indigenous communities that are also trying to do the same thing and luckily, you know, I've been able to connect to those and develop relationships that allow us to coordinate and then in the near term right or not in the near term, but like in like the more kind of state proximity right of a Kauai like my imagination is never that this is like a place for Hawaiians.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:10:28

I wanna be very clear that this is like a Hawaiian-only context, right, but that this will provide a model for people to approach these issues of property relationships, these issues of like environmental degradation on their own terms, right. And then I do think that if you can give people that, if you can put that question in front of people's faces, if you can actually give that to them, then you do have at least the opportunity for cooperation in ways in like diverse cooperation. And, like you said, like I could be, I could just let the status quo happen, I could just kind of let these impositions happen. But also, like you said, it's probably not gonna work out well for, like an island community and for anyone out there who's like this you require like a military imposition or some sort of like forceful imposition of these kind of climate change initiatives. Yeah then like yeah, look, you can just let that happen. You kind of have to equate where you exist in that continuum. But like I don't think that there's any like harm.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:11:28

How do I say this? I would rather be prepared to negotiate with that imposition than not. And I do think I'm putting myself in my family, where I move my kid there to be in the best position and like honestly, like sorry, this has been a long, kind of meandering last statement, but like I know this was something insane, but like I do think my kid has a better chance of living and maybe like a better quality of provisioning in a community that will teach him how to hunt and fish. Yeah, and I know it sounds kind of like menial or kind of like small, but like at the end of the day it's kind of like why I'm doing this and I think like people should be trying to understand that Like what's going to put your children, your future, the communities that you care about in a better position.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:13

Yeah, I read that John Michael Greer piece and it made a lot of people uncomfortable when I was like, well, you know I don't agree with most of his framework and I think a lot of this is silly. But two things he's right about you don't learn to be a subsistence farmer from being a community gardener. Yeah, as a community gardener, I can tell you that. And number two, like yeah, you need to be in communities that have some resilient attitudes towards nature or towards being able to pivot in urban planning very quickly. And the one thing I can tell you right now that is not common in the United States is that and weirdly it does lead me often to sound like I am both the Marxist revolutionary also conservative prepper.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:12:58

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:59

Where you know like yeah, I'm a vegetarian, but like you should know how to, in a worst case scenario, slaughter meat and store it in lard.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:13:09

Why, why not?

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:11

Like you know well, I mean it's just like and I'm not just saying that because I know how to, but like it's just something that's like it's a useful skill to have if you need to keep a community alive in a worst case scenario.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:24

Do I think that we're all in that scenario?

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:27

No, but it's no longer out of the realm of possibility for me.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:32

It's like when I talk about, like you know, our elite failure, and I'm like you know it's no longer in the realm of possibility that the United States, in 10 years, is under a military junta that actually didn't even come from Trump, like it's not, it is not even out of the realm of possibility anymore, in a way that, like if I had said that to myself 20 years ago, I would have said to me I'd lost my fucking mind, like, whereas today I'm like, well, you know, that's a small chance, I don't think it's the most likely outcome, but it's an outcome, possibility that's no longer non-zero, and that is weird and I do think we have to think about this. I also think, like, in general, like you were talking about this provision in community, we need to think about building more resilient communities, as is, because the one thing I will say about the culture of the left. We are fragile community builders, like even comparatively to conservatives, who are also pretty fragile. Not gonna lie, they're kind of stuff like that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:31

I'm getting more fragile, yeah, I mean. But what's weird is they're just becoming more like us, yeah, and people like, but I'm like, no, for real like they live in enclosed ecosystems without resilient communities of which they are responsible, and so do we. And you know, I think about that all the time because I have been in scenarios where, like, yeah, I mentioned this but like where, like Muslim brotherhood, people who didn't know who I was, like hid me from a mob and a police, you know that was responding to a police riot, you know, and like I'm really grateful to them. And also like that required strong community bonds that even would protect an outsider because, you know, as an outsider than community, I'm owed hospitality, Like, and when I talk about that, like there are some things about conservative communities that maybe we shouldn't abandon, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:35

So it's those tensions and I'm with you on on like, yeah, I mean if inner city, detroit or wherever, I mean I love Detroit, don't get me wrong, I think Detroit hatred is overstated but like, or some place where you can learn to live off the land, well, you might have to live off the land. I mean like this is just, this is just a reality and civilizations have fallen before. So it's just, it's just the thing. I mean that's kind of a wild way to end this and maybe, maybe, I don't know, a slightly less wild instead of speculation.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:14

But I mean, like, for me, one of the most damaging things about where the left has gone in the past 20 years is it's total dependency on institutions and things that it does not control. And I don't just mean these pricing schemes, but I also mean, like, even like UBI, like you don't really control the like monetary policy or whatnot. Like, come on, like, the more you do that off of just like well, they should be nicer to us, the more I'm like you are seeding yourself to a relationship of dependency. And I do think, to get back to when we were talking about why there's some, maybe a little bit of a special kind of conservatism in parts of the indigenous community is like, well, look at what they could easily say, look at what being a dependent does. I can't get a pothole fixed without an act of Congress or performing done, which by the way it's very stark for them.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:17:11

It's very clear how, being a domestic dependent, which is not entirely different than anyone else's relationship it's just kind of different to the government but it's really stark. And again, like I actually don't think it's like that farfetch or that wild, because I'm not so much concerned with like the collapse of society. I just think people should like try to imagine their ecosystem as a possible ally. Just give that a shot, Just please, just give that a shot, I mean. And like what does that entail?

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:43

Because I think- yeah, I was talking to some of the other day about, like how would we design cities that were actually more, would just more, like we need super dense housing? Sure, fine, agree. How do we make it more conducive for other forms of animal life? Like, and like you're talking about thinking big, like that's a thing in big, like we need to think about that, cause I don't even think what's funny is I don't even think it would be as hard as people think it would be. Like it's like-.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:18:16

We got here again.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:17

Yeah, I mean, but the biggest realization for me and I brought this up now for 10 years was just living in rural Korea with skyscrapers and going like oh, they're maintaining the land for like community and or agricultural use and so they're not wasting it on single person homes because they're on a fucking peninsula, has been cut off by the North, so like they don't have a choice to space the island.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:42

But like this necessity actually gives you a model for rethinking all of this, Cause it's not like people are hunkering down for land space in this, because there's literally communal even though it's like subdivision, communal, that's not like great, but literally communal, public and land spaces Like and I personally found it to be a much more fulfilling way of life, like then me having to have a yard to keep my dog and then like figuring all this other shit out, whereas there it's, like you know, I have this tract of land that's everyone in here, and then I have this little shop over here and like, like I can even go to the shop and we're flooded out and the public services are shit, and like I can eat and my neighbors more or less know me. I mean, korea is a little more anonymous in Mexico or even Cairo. Cairo was an interesting lesson of like a city of 4 billion I'm not billion million people, that would be crazy, but a city of 4 million people could actually have fairly tight knit local communities, like it was.

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:03

Like, hey, you can't just blame this on urbanization people, because like everyone on my street, even though I didn't know them, they all knew who I was and because it was an outsider, but also like there was this relationship of hospitality that was expected into it and I was fairly protected from it, and like it's something you need to model. And I just think, like most leftist organizational thinking right now doesn't think that way. Like they'll occasionally start talking about like neighborhood organizing, but I don't know really what they mean by that. Or they'll talk about 10 inch unions, which I of course support, but I'm like but you need this whole other like community infrastructure that honestly, like at Kalinskiet, community organizing doesn't provide you Like, so you're gonna have to rethink that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:00

And I think, interestingly, when I talked this is where I'm on the you know, like hey, learn from the people who are in the in the most extreme forms of the situation is like indigenous people in the United States, for the most part by necessity, not kind of any special like you know, it's just magic. Like I had to think about this in a different way and they they're like the traumas of, of like us post-Europeans being forced into modernity are mostly 600 years ago or more, Like unless I meant, unless maybe you're in Italian or German in the 200 years ago, but like but the problems for indigenous people is like yesterday, literally so like in, in in some places more than others, Like when I think about, like the liberalization of, say, Guatemala.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:21:58

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:59

It's an active, real, ongoing. We see it right now. You can go and look what this looks like in its utter, in its ugliness, together, and I think that's something we have to think about. And the other thing I wanna my I wanna end off on supporting you on is I don't blame people for taking these pricing regimes either, any more than I blame anyone who has to use the state to do anything Like like. You exist in this framework. You gotta survive in this framework. You have to use this framework. My question for you is can you start thinking about what happens when this framework gets strange, stretched or or dissolved, because that should be how you interact with this, like, yes, I can, I can use this now, but how do I build power that doesn't make me independent?

K. Malulani Castro: 2:22:49

Yep.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:49

And and would be able to deal with massive shifts in national, international and local politics just completely changing.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:22:59

For the market.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:00

Yeah, yeah, other market or whatever Like, because what I see in the United States is and in Canada to to a lesser degree Maxwell, is this assumption that our political forms are just frozen and for good or ill, and we just have to accept that as everything like completely falls a fucking part and I'm like, but all this is relatively. Some of this is extremely recent, yeah, and, and all of this, pretty much none of it goes back before the like. Like literally most of the institutions that we take for granted are not older than the baby boomers.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:36

It's, it's, it's something that we think about Like, so it's, it's, it's going, there's going to be some massive shifts and we're already seeing it Like. So I think that's that's, you know. For people like, oh, that was me entering. I'm like, yeah, it's a big topic, I get it, but like, I guess my takeaways is we have to deal with the system that we're given, but we should also admit the contradiction that the system has and not wider ourself about it, so that we can use it to push for a different set of relations and systems. And that may have to involve an even broader rethinking than just capitalism versus socialism. What do we want this socialism to actually look like? Like, and that ladder question seems to be like a big one that you know, for a lot of people, socialism is just what we have now, but stuff is free, yeah, and I just I don't think that's what we're going to get at all. Like, I just like, no, I don't even think I want it Like.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:24:39

Frankly, yeah, I mean again like I don't want to take too much more time, but like I think, like for people to understand like the context of our approach to stuff, it's like you know, I take very seriously the fact that, like I might have, if I take on this land and I take on these credits, these funds to do forest restoration, give people jobs, I have like a generation to get off of that arrangement.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:25:07

I have like maybe 30 years, maybe 40 years, before that arrangement affects the relationships that are there, that are actually sustaining people in ways that capital can't and doesn't. And I think people just need to take very seriously, kind of, when they make these kind of arrangements or engage in these systems, particularly this new one that's going to be affecting all of us is like, are you even planning to what to transition from? And I think this is like the thing for me is like how are you establishing alternative arrangements that will actually allow you to transition right? And again, I think that the allyship, the arrangement, the provisioning with the ecosystem does allow you to ask this question of like how much more of my time can I spend up with non-wage subsistence or some other kind of communal activity that allows for these things to not buy up so much of my time, so much of my power, and that's something that I think everyone's going to be facing and should be facing, kind of right now.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:26:05

Because I think like when it starts hitting the fan, you get about 20 to 30 years, maybe 40, and then things shift too hard.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:12

Yeah, at risk of going even longer. But I always have warned people like look, we've seen what happened when revolutionary subjects happen at maximum social entropy. They perpetuate the social entropy for a few years, then they stop and stabilize, but usually they've exhausted their subject to the point that they can't maintain their politics and they collapse in two to three generations. I don't know where we've seen that before, but you know, like so you don't want to wait to that point. This is my whole thing. Where the acceleration is, for example, like okay, you want every the contradictions to heighten to the point where everything falls apart and you just think the left is gonna be able to deal with the trauma of society breaking. Now, like I can literally think of twice in the history of ever where that went our way, and even then it was only temporarily, ultimately because those societies don't exist anymore. Yeah, so like this is like that's to me a crazy thing. Yeah, I do think right now is the moment where you actually could dream big and I worry that we're not. We're just not Like.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:30

We're just, you know, we see the pricing, we see the carbon credits, we see the Green New Deal and we just go okay that's it there we go and we're done and I'm just like, no, I don't think we can stop there and I don't think if that makes me an ultra. Our weird right deviation is obsessed with primitive forms. Whatever, I don't give a shit.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:27:56

I want a TV, y'all.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:58

Yeah, like this is the same, like I'm like I clearly do a podcast on the internet, my God you know, and that's even though I don't think, like I'm always harping on about how people don't even figure in the internet cost because they don't really see where the energy's coming from. But like, come on, I just want us I don't want to get rid of our technology I want us to rethink the way we're using it, our relationship to nature and this is where you were talking about my hermeneutics and the eco-socialists, and I have my things. Like they accept human exceptionalism again, because they did it in the 19th century, dammit, or oh, they reject this form of value theory and they're not. But one of the things I do think that they are correctish about is we have to really start radically we thinking our metabolic relationship and I realize that's a metaphor but to the larger society, and it would be great if that was done by the people most affected by it, the proletariat, and then other peoples like the colonized, et cetera, the indigenous, et cetera, et cetera. That would be way better.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:23

But frankly, at this point I'm worried that we're so stuck in our ways in the United States that we're gonna miss a transition. That is possible because, while US imperial power is declining true, you don't get a push from me on that this is still fortress North America. Oh yeah, in a very real sense. And the only reason we can't do anything in that context is, for some reason, since we're not the universal hegemon anymore, which we only really were for like 16 years anyway, we've lost our fucking minds. But it's not because we don't have the material impetus to do anything about it. And this is also where I guess to give Colin a fifth point. Today he's gotten a lot. I only got one question on him.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:30:12

I can't wait for the comments on this one.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:15

There is a sense in which we try, if we try, to reduce this all to like simple, like vulgar materialism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:20

You have a hard time explaining what's happening in the United States because from a vulgar materialist perspective, we're actually doing okay, like, yet we seem like we've lost our damn mind and that element of the United States right now is like we have to get a hold on that. We have to get a hold of ourselves. But I don't like do I expect our quote elites to be able to do that shit right now. Have you seen them lately? Like I literally would trust most college dropout, not even college dropout. I trust most high school dropouts who've had to maintain a job for more than two years more than I would trust the average policy advisor right now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:05

That's actually a new thing for me. That is not my default orientation, so it's something to think about when we think about who's pricing this shit. Because who's pricing this shit are the people that I would replace with high school dropouts who run Ubers, because I trust them more on the pricing than I fucking do. Like somebody who interned at Goldman Sachs and has an Ivy League degree and has the right liberal pedigrees right now, because something is wrong in that world.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:43

Well, and on that note, thank you, Mollie, for coming on, even though, Of course, Not to come up with people, to shit on people with graduate degrees who do activist work, but because it's okay. Well, I mean, that also applies to me. Well, hey, so-. Oh, that's true that's true.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:32:02

I'm barely. I'm a very bad doctoral candidate.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:06

Who, who with any sense isn't, that's true. I am not a doctoral candidate. I caught out and got the MFA, so you know, like I have a terminal degree, that doesn't matter. So I mean, you know, unless you think you need a terminal degree to be a fucking poet.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:32:27

That's actually my wife. Oh well, she got her MFA from Irvine in poetry. I don't know why I didn't wrote that up anyways, but that's all what she said.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:36

That's funny. I am proof of what that does to people.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:32:41

Just no, she wants to be a midwife. She wants to be a midwife now, so you can kind of see how-.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:47

Yeah, I became a teacher. Everybody eventually like we got to write about something, and that usually involves getting a real job, Anyway. So thank you so much, Mollie, for coming on.

K. Malulani Castro: 2:32:56

Yeah, of course, take care.