Green New Deal is reliant on racial capitalism and strengthening the same environmental violence and racism it seeks to solve.

With recognition of the underlying violence of primitive accumulation out of which the modern American liberal state still functions, Pulido (2017) brings up the issue of there being no apparent alternative to the state in which to search for justice, environmental or otherwise. This is indeed a large issue to confront since it is a key reason why those in the EJ movement and others continuously turn to the settler state as a means through which to acquire the justice they seek. Pulido writes that “if environmental racism is part of racial capitalism, then its regulation becomes the province of the state” (p. 529). In the interest of maintaining firms’ competitiveness on the world market, the settler state becomes not only complicit in environmental racism but is responsible for the creation of difference and devaluation of nonwhite people that is intrinsic to racial violence. Environmental racism can be seen as inevitable under the settler state as forms of racial difference are produced to devalue communities, thus allowing the pollution and dumping of waste outputs as capital accumulates in a linear fashion. But inherent state violence and inevitability of environmental racism, as Pulido suggests, would necessitate other ways to seek justice that do not involve the settler state perpetrating the violence. Continuing to try to work through the state could be seen in many ways as a crisis of imagination. A crisis of imagination should not determine decisions to view the state as an ally or neutral force, however, as this may contribute to the failure Pulido is recognizing in EJ; that of the perpetuation of environmental racism at full force, despite the movement’s activism. Recognizing that the state is a racial capitalist state suggests an approach to EJ that sees the state “as an adversary that must be 40 confronted in a manner similar to industry” (p. 530). This is of course no easy task, but Pulido is right to assert that the potential further co-opting of the EJ movement by the settler state, through state actions of going through the motions of regulatory activity and participation, as well as EJ’s failure to not theorize environmental racism as racial capitalism, is too large a risk to take.

Extending this argument to involve Green New Deal discussions, racial capitalism cannot be resolved by “tinkering with policy,” Pulido notes (2017, p. 526). This is a central takeaway for those concerned with the large task of even getting the GND passed and implemented without any major concessions. And while the GND is definitely not to be considered as “tinkering with policy,” we can begin to think about where lines should be drawn among the policy sphere between projects deserving of the critical support of the EJ movement and those that definitely risk reproducing the same racial capitalist state that they may appear to be contesting. This is not to say that policy gains are not important and represent hard-fought victories for decolonial environmental movements per se, but rather that there should, and indeed must, be a space in between a full faith in policy and denouncement of the state. It is from this space that one can better work and theorize about moving through the climate crisis while affirming marginalized peoples’ rights to dignified lives.

Digging even further into the fraudulent nature of the state and working to find a way for environmental justice activism beyond the settler state, Pulido and DeLara (2018) situate EJ as a place of convergence. They argue that there is a long history of abolitionism connected to the struggle against environmental racism and EJ can be a place of convergence in the sense that different radical epistemologies can come together and create spaces for meaningful solidarity outside confines of the liberal state. They further argue that “decolonial border thinking and abolitionist thought . . . each acknowledge the central role that nature, space, and the state have 41 played in the entrenchment of racial capitalism” (p. 77). The key point here is that if there is underlying systemic violence because of a society rooted in racial capitalism, this violence cannot be overcome with state-led solutions, specifically those that are process oriented and juridical. This is not to say that the state itself cannot be a site of contestation entirely, but that focus should be placed on attempting to address the underlying violence of racial capitalism as rooted in the settler state specifically. If capital were subservient to the state as opposed to the state being subservient to capital, underlying capitalist violence could perhaps be addressed through state-led juridical processes, for example. This understanding is not necessarily addressed by Pulido and DeLara though. Yet again, this lack of meaningful justice is a fear for a project like the GND: that it may not fundamentally change any of the underlying conditions of the settler state and its reliance on racial capitalism that cause and perpetuate environmental violence. Connections between abolitionist thought and environmental justice may seem clear on the surface, but, moving beyond the 14th Amendment, Pulido and DeLara illustrate just how much abolitionist thought can be used to help further the connection between abolitionist epistemologies and those of decolonization, both having roots in the initial theft of land and projects of colonialism. They write: “abolitionism provides a way to imagine a political project of liberation that extends the struggle for Black freedom to abolishing the same racial and capitalist relationships of power that produced the colonial project of plunder and dispossession in the Americas” (p. 78). At stake for not theorizing EJ as a place for abolitionist and indigenous epistemologies to converge is a larger and more holistic vision of justice that transcends what is possible through the state, but immediately gets to the core of the underlying violence of the state and its inevitability. As a final note, Pulido and DeLara acknowledge the popularity within the EJ movement of recognition and rights-based strategies in collaboration with the state that, while 42 perhaps having good intentions, “only validate the underlying injustice of racial capitalism and colonialism” (p. 92). All of this would suggest that achieving meaningful justice through the settler state is entirely tricky, if not impossible; a task the GND may not be equipped to take on. Colonial Eco-Social Relations and the State