Thank you #PublicBooks & Ryan Boyd for this very thoughtful review of #OilBeach!! So honored 😊
"[Dunbar-Hester] makes no promises about the future, and she is not in the business of bromides. But when your economic system is suicidal—when the ordinary business of procuring goods and services is boiling the planet to death—there is no better basis for that than hopeful solidarity, and no option but action"
"If you live along the networks that bring fresh goods to market, commodities might mean you get lung cancer, or your child develops asthma, or your partner suffers from disabling migraines.
Knowledge of this violence hasn’t led to real change to port operations. But it has generated a ton of PR where the promise of “clean” technology, renewable fuels, and fluid silicon logistics will somehow allow capitalism to function without killing what’s left of the world...
"Dunbar-Hester underscores that this is almost entirely bullshit. ..
What would real change look like? Dunbar-Hester, who I suspect is at heart a port abolitionist, doesn’t offer a specific plan of action. But it would be unfair to expect that, because that’s not Oil Beach’s critical intent. Besides, honestly, what is one work of public scholarship going to accomplish if the other side—the side that doesn’t want to change—has all the money and the security services? ...
"However, she does offer glimpses of sustainable, just futures.
All of them are coalitional and collective, and they entail seeing the Southern #California Bight as a contentious, multiplicative, ongoing site of struggle."
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