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LPE Originals

Recovering Emergence: A Nation Within What?

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In the sci-fi short, The Sixth World, filmmaker Nanobah Becker poses the unthinkable: Diné people on a space mission to colonize Mars. Yet, in Becker’s telling, colonizing Mars is not a linear journey into a post-apocalyptic future, but is instead part of a genre of indigenous futurism and “decolonizing encounters.” Ezra Rosser’s A Nation Within follows a different temporality. Moving from “past to present to future,” Rosser offers a rich history of a Nation that emerges in relation to perhaps the most central, kindred actor for Diné futurism: the land itself.

LPE Originals

A Nation Within: Navajo Land and Economic Development

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Demand for land and natural resources has fundamentally shaped both the development of the Navajo Nation government and the relationship between the tribe and non-Indian interests. In this post, Ezra Rosser kicks off a symposium on his recent book, A Nation Within, by offering a brief look at this history, and suggesting that Diné have the power to assert even greater control over the reservation.

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LPE Originals

Energy Price Shocks and the Failures of Neoliberalism

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The global energy price shocks of the past two years have made it painfully clear that energy cannot be treated as an ordinary commodity. They also offer an opportunity to rethink the push to liberalize energy markets over the past forty years, and particularly the use of markets for electricity provisioning.
LPE Originals

The Other Environmental Law: Climate Law’s Police Phase

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The adoption of fossil fuels to power the world economy has depended upon a fossil law that arranges a particular type of market and enforces a particular balance of power. One understudied, but central, aspect of this process is the use of state and corporate violence to compel the extraction and consumption of oil, gas, and coal.
LPE Originals

Communities of Extraction

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In regions marred by extractive industry, a just transition requires redressing the political isolation and subordination of people living at the fenceline.
LPE Originals

A Just Transition for Finance

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The quest for “non-extractive finance” is filled with legal hurdles. This post examines how lawyers can support organizers working to imagine and build a better financial system.
LPE Originals

REDD+ as the Stranger-King

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In theory, REDD+ is designed to be a win-win: it brings capital to economically struggling communities while ensuring that forests worldwide are protected for the good of the global community. Yet as theory of the Stranger King makes apparent, some colonialist approaches are softer and gentler than others — colonizing as invitees, rather than by force.
LPE Originals

The Contested Boundaries of Just Transitions Law

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During the past decade the concept of a “just transition” has expanded far beyond its roots in the labor movement’s concern for protecting displaced fossil fuel workers. Should we welcome this expansion of the concept? Or will this generic use of ‘just transition’ undermine ​its usefulness as a framing device to guide policy and discourse?
LPE Originals

Woke Capital?

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Anti-monopolists are right to worry about the concentrated power of institutional investors, but they are wrong to treat them as all bad. Common ownership presents an opportunity for the left to divide the interests of capitalists.