EcoWatch, January 2021
When Shalanda Baker stopped in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2009 to brush up on her Spanish before heading to Colombia, she didn’t realize it would be a life-changing event. She’d just left her job at a corporate law firm with the hope of lending her expertise to communities fighting coal mines or other dirty energy projects in South America.
But in Oaxaca she met Indigenous community members fighting a different type of energy project: large-scale wind development. “Their struggles echoed the stories of countless communities around the world affected by oil and gas development: dispossession, displacement, environmental harm, unfair contracts, racism and a litany of concerns about impact to culture and community,” she writes in her forthcoming book Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition.
And she realized that in the pursuit of clean energy and climate solutions, we were on course to replicate many of the same injustices of the fossil fuel economy. “I knew, in that moment, that this tension — between Indigenous rights and clean energy, between the rush to avert catastrophic climate change and social justice — would form the foundation of my work as an activist and scholar. It would also become my life’s work,” she writes.
