If you can’t walk away, you aren’t free. Freedom requires not depleting nonrenewable resources.
If someone orders you to do something but you can walk away without risk or loss and they can’t coerce or force you to do what they order, you’re free and their orders are just words.
Freedom means you can walk away.
What if your life depends on resources others control, so that the only way you can access them is if they let you? Then you can’t walk away. Are you then free? It doesn’t look like it to me.
What if a nation depends on resources others control, so that the only way it can access them is if those other let it? Then it can’t walk away. Is it then free? It doesn’t look like it to me.
A post What We Learn When Indigenous People Fight for their Land by podcast guest Christopher Ketcham describes such a situation. Though it is one situation, it describes any society that depends on resources that it is depleting. (Here is his book, which I recommend):
In the new piece, Chris writes:
But Mount Tijmali is also rich in bauxite, the precursor ore for the production of aluminum, demand for which is skyrocketing, driven by industrial growth worldwide, including the breakneck construction of aluminum-devouring data centers. Vedanta Resources, a $22 billion global giant headquartered in London and helmed by a British national of Indian origin, has long eyed the mountain as a prime site for a bauxite mine. Vedanta won the lease for what is called the Sijimali Mine Project in 2023 and now the company wants to proceed with the first tranche of forest clearance and begin digging.
The Kondh Adivasis and the Doms refuse to allow this to happen. “We are children of Tij Raja, how can we allow our Tijmali to be mined?” said villagers in a prepared statement during a public hearing in Odisha in 2023. “Tijmali is our soul. How can we live without our soul? Mining will destroy not just the streams but our identity. We shall fight and will not let Vedanta mine our soul.”
The company that wants the people’s resources can’t walk away. It’s not free. It’s as dependent as an addict. Instead of walking away, it violates people’s property rights and autonomy. It coerces.
The pattern happens everywhere. We who pollute and deplete fund that coercion.
The blockade on Tijmali to stop Vedanta’s workmen from accessing the mountaintop has yet to be broken.
But how long can these people hold out, armed with axes, sickles and sticks, and bows and arrows, when faced with the monopoly on violence the state leverages against them? It appears the government of Narendra Modi has lost patience with these recalcitrants and is determined to end the blockade – even if it means killing a few of them, and arresting many others to fill the jails and clog the criminal courts.
I prefer freedom to coercion.
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