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neonicotinoids
American Garbage
We consume far beyond our means because our military keeps enough of us feeling secure, and we have such a large military because we consume far beyond our means.
Feb 01, 2026
I learned one of my most valuable lessons about US power in my first year as a Brown University doctoral student. It was in anthropology professor Catherine Lutz’s seminar on empire and social movements. I’d sum up what I remember something like this: Americans consume one hell of a lot—cars, clothes, food, toys, expensive private colleges (ahem…), and that’s just to start. Since other countries like China, the United Kingdom, and Japan purchase substantial chunks of US consumer debt, they have a vested interest in our economic stability. So, even though you and I probably feel less than empowered as we scramble to make mortgage, car, or credit-card payments, the fact that we collectively owe a bunch of money globally makes it less likely that a country like China will want to rock the boat—and that includes literally rocking the boat (as with a torpedo).
In classes like that one at Brown, I came to understand that the military power we get from owing money is self-reinforcing. It helps keep our interest rates low and, in turn, our own military can buy more supplies (especially if President Donald Trump’s latest demand for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget goes through!). Our own debt somewhat ironically allows this country to continue to expand its reach, if not around the globe these days, at least in this hemisphere (whether you’re thinking about Venezuela or Greenland). Often when I splurge on a fancy Starbucks latte or a new pair of shoes, I think about how even critics of US military hegemony like me help prop up our empire when we do what Americans do best—shop!
To put this crudely, we consume far beyond our means because our military keeps enough of us feeling secure, and we have such a large military because we consume far beyond our means.
American Trash and the Politics of Consumption
And boy, can we shop! As of August 2025, US consumer debt ballooned to nearly $18 trillion and then continued to rise through the end of last year.
Here’s one consequence of our consumptive habits: We Americans throw a lot of stuff out. Per capita, we each generate an average of close to two tons of solid waste annually, if you include industrial and construction waste (closer to one ton if you don’t). Mind you, on average, that’s roughly three times what most other countries consume and throw out—much more than people even in countries with comparable per capita wealth.
Reminders of our waste are everywhere. Even in my state, Maryland, which funnels significant tax dollars into environmental conservation, you can see plastic bags and bottles tangled in the grass at the roadside, while the air in my wealthy county’s capital city often smells like car exhaust or the dirty rainwater that collects at the bottom of your trash can. Schoolchildren like mine bring home weekly piles of one-sided worksheets, PTA event flyers, plastic prizes, and holiday party favors. Even the rich soil of our rural neighborhood contains layers of trash from centuries of agricultural, household, and military activity, all of which remind me of the ecological footprint we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren.
Not all of us create or live with garbage to the same degree.
To our credit, some of us try to be mindful of that. In recent years, three different public debates about how to fuel our consumptive habits (and where to put the byproducts) have taken place in my region. Residents continue to argue about where to dispose of the hundreds of thousands of tons of our county’s waste (much of it uneaten food) that’s currently incinerated near the scenic farmland where I live. Do we let it stay here, where it pollutes the land and water, not to mention the air, and disturbs our pastoral views? Or do we haul at least some of the residual ash to neighboring counties and states, to areas that tend to be poor majority-minority ones? While some local advocacy groups oppose the exporting (so to speak) of our trash, it continues to happen.
A related dispute has taken place in an adjacent county that’s somewhat less wealthy but also majority white. That debate centers on the appropriate restrictions on a data center to be built there that will store information we access on the internet and that’s expected to span thousands of acres. How far away need it be from residents’ homes and farms? Will people be forced to sell their land to build it?
While many of our concerns are understandable—I’m not ready to move so that we can have a data center nearby—it turns out that some worries animating such discussions are (to put it kindly) aesthetic in nature. Recently, a neighbor I’d never met called me to try to enlist our family in a debate about whether some newcomers, a rare Indian-American family around here, could construct a set of solar panels in a field along a main road, where feed crops like alfalfa can usually be seen blooming in the springtime.
My neighbor’s concern: that the new family wanted to use those fields for solar panels to supply clean energy to their community (stated with emphasis, which I presumed to denote the Asian-Americans who would assumedly visit them for celebrations and holidays). Heaven forbid! She worried that the panels would disrupt the views of passersby like us and injure a habitat for the bald eagle—ironic concerns given how much of a mess so many of us have already made renovating our outbuildings, raising our dogs and chicken flocks, and chopping down trees that get in the way of our homes or social gatherings.
Many such concerns are raised sincerely by people who care deeply about land and community. However, the fact that, to some, solar panels are less desirable than the kinds of crops that look nice or feed our desire for more red meat should reframe the debate about whose version of consumption (and garbage) should be acceptable at all.
Indeed, not all of us create or live with garbage to the same degree. Compared to white populations, Black populations are 100% more likely and communities of Asian descent 200% more likely to live within 6 miles of a US Superfund site (among America’s most polluted places). Such proximity is, in turn, linked to higher rates of cancer, asthma, and birth defects.
Nor do whites suffer such impacts in the same ways. According to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency—and let’s appreciate such an analysis while we still have access to it, since the Trump administration’s EPA just decided to stop tracking the human impact of pollution—Black Americans live with approximately 56% more pollution that they generate, Hispanic Americans experience 63% more than what they create, and—ready for this?—white Americans are exposed to 17% less than they make.
Military Contamination
Our military, far from being just another enabler of unequal consumption and suffering, contributes mightily to the waste we live with. In the US, hundreds of military bases are contaminated by so-called forever chemicals, such as PFAS, in the drinking water and the soil. We’re talking about chemicals associated with cancer, heart conditions, birth defects, and other chronic health problems. The civilian populations surrounding such bases are often low-income and disproportionately people of color. Of course, also disproportionately impacted are the military families and veterans who live and work around such bases, and tend to have inadequate healthcare to address such issues.
An example would be the Naval Submarine Base in New London, where my family spent a significant amount of time. Encompassing more than 700 acres along the Thames River, that base was designated a Superfund site in 1990 due to contamination from unsanctioned landfills, chemical storage, and waste burial, all of which put heavy metals, pesticides, and other toxic substances into the environment.
Rather than bore you with more statistics, let me share how it feels to stand on its grounds. Picture a wide, deep river, slate gray and flanked by deciduous trees. On the bank opposite the base, multifamily housing and the occasional restaurant have been wrought from what were once factories. After you pass the guard station, a museum to your left shows off all manner of missiles, torpedoes, and other weaponry, along with displays depicting the living spaces of sailors inside submarines, with bunks decorated with the occasional photo of scantily clad White women (presumably meant to boost troop morale).
To your right, there are brick barracks, office buildings, takeout restaurants, even a bowling alley, and submarines, their rounded turrets poking out of the water. Along roadways leading through the base, old torpedoes are painted in bright colors like children’s furniture and repurposed as monuments to America’s military might. The air smells like asphalt and metal. Signs of life are everywhere, from the seagulls that swoop down to catch fish to the sailors and their families you see moving about in cars. It’s hard to comprehend that I’m also standing on what reporters have called “a minefield of pollution… a dumping ground for whatever [the base] needed to dispose of: sulfuric acid, torpedo fuel, waste oil, and incinerator ash.”
Empire of Waste
When I say that our military produces a lot of garbage, I don’t just mean in this country. I also include what it does abroad and the countries like Israel that we patronize and arm. Last summer, I corresponded with anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, who spent more than a year documenting the human casualties and costs of what the Israeli military and other Israelis have done in Israeli-occupied Palestine. That includes the mass dumping of garbage there from Israeli territories and the barricading of Palestinian communities from waste disposal sites, all of which have led to environmental contamination.
I think progressives would do well to consider how important it is that our signs, our social media posts, our political speeches, and even our patterns of consumption send a message—that many are welcome here, skin color, pronouns, and even specific brands of left-wing ideology be damned.
For example, Stamatopoulou-Robbins visited the 5,000-person Palestinian village of Shuqba, surrounded by open land on all sides and controlled by the Israeli government. Nearby cities and settlements dump waste, including X-ray images, household appliances, broken electronics like cell phones, industrial waste, wrecked vehicles, and car parts right in its neighborhood. One young man told Stamatopoulou-Robbins that he and his wife couldn’t have a baby because of the toxic environment. Many others, he told her, experienced the same problem, along with higher-than-average rates of cancer and respiratory and skin problems. His story, Stamatopoulou-Robbins wrote me, was one of many similar tales in Shuqba, tales that multiplied across the West Bank, where Israeli settlements and trucks from Israel, as she put it, “regularly dump their wastes in proximity to Palestinian residential areas and farmland.”
Her research drives home how we experience pollution all too often depends on who we are. I’m a case in point. My family and I pride ourselves on being the first to inhabit our sprawling rural property since the family whose ancestors built a home on it in 1890 and passed it down to two subsequent generations. In 2020, when we initially came to look at it, we couldn’t afford the asking price. However, the older couple who, in the end, sold it to us wanted a family in the house who would raise children there as they had. As they put it flatteringly, we were a “salt-of-the-earth” family (and the feeling was mutual).
Trash and Belonging
Nowadays, the news abounds with references to who is a “real” American, and who belongs beyond our borders. References to purity and contamination apply not just to our growing piles of waste but to human beings, too. Consider candidate Donald Trump’s promise, at a 2023 campaign rally, to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” or his claim that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and other Somali immigrants are nothing less than—yes—“garbage.”
And it’s true that what (or who) we consider garbage, and what (or who) we tolerate in our field of vision matters. My family recently renovated an old cabin behind our house to serve as an office for me to see my psychotherapy patients in person. The idea was that the veterans and military families who come to me for help with trauma, many of whom themselves are lower-income people of color, would have a peaceful place to process it.
As we demolished an outer wall to add a bathroom to my new office, something fell out of that wall: an old paper advertisement for black licorice candy (“Licorice Bites”) that depicted a Black baby, eyes wide in the stereotypical fashion of Jim Crow Era ads, trying to crawl away from an alligator, its mouth gaping open. Good thing, I thought, that it hadn’t fallen out of that drywall when a patient of mine was there. The experience, while fleeting, reminded me of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s point that Americans so easily minimize foreign genocides because we’ve done such a striking job of burying (in the case of my house, literally!) the atrocities of slavery, the segregated world that followed it, and their role in our country’s expansion.
Whoever put it there, that ad in my cabin wall—just like local gossip about that Indian-American family—is a reminder of who belongs and who doesn’t in this country. Like an Egyptian pyramid filled with a pharaoh’s possessions, remnants of American lives remind us of how some of us are kept sick, intimidated, and belittled, while feeding the appetites of others.
In the meantime, I think progressives would do well to consider how important it is that our signs, our social media posts, our political speeches, and even our patterns of consumption send a message — that many are welcome here, skin color, pronouns, and even specific brands of left-wing ideology be damned. Who is “of this earth” is questionable at best.
We should also ask why pictures denigrating Black people and half-naked women, and monuments to weaponry, so excite the patriotic souls of enough Americans that it’s easy to find them throughout our land. We cannot continue to allow the other side’s exclusionary ideals to dominate today’s political messaging.
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Rent Control Is the American Way
Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way.
Feb 01, 2026
The real estate industry doesn’t want you to know an important fact about rent control: Since World War I, rent regulations have protected poor and middle- and working-class tenants against skyrocketing rents and predatory landlords. Rent control, in other words, has long been a part of the American way.
Soon after World War I, elected officials understood that they needed to protect tenants against sky-high rents due to a worsening housing shortage. Fair rent committees, with an emphasis on “fair,” were set up in 153 cities in the United States, and those committees routinely reached out to landlords to stop unreasonable rent hikes. In Washington D.C. and Denver, rent commissions determined fair rents, and, in New York, state legislators passed emergency laws to control sky-high rising rents.
Politicians knew that they couldn’t allow the status quo of unfair rents to continue, and they knew that they had the power to do something about it. So they stepped in to help hard-working Americans.
During World War II, politicians again did the right thing and expanded rent control. The federal government established rent control for around 80 percent of rental housing in the U.S. in response to housing shortages and rent gouging. When that federal program was phased out, some states, such as New York and New Jersey, established their own rent control policies in the early 1950s.
If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire.
Throughout this period, elected officials understood that tenants needed stable, affordable housing that would not force renters to choose between eating or paying the rent or paying medical bills or paying the rent. Americans’ well-being was at stake.
Fast forward to the early 1970s. With worsening inflation, rents spiked. President Richard Nixon pushed for temporary rent controls, and that was followed by American cities passing rent regulations, including Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, the deep-pocketed real estate industry pushed back, aggressively lobbying state legislatures across the country to pass rent control bans or restrictions. Landlords and lobbyists went against the American way of looking out for people.
Today, more than 35 states have laws that stop the expansion of rent control while the real estate industry’s profits, through unfair, excessive rents, go through the roof. Between 2010 and 2019, renters paid a staggering $4.5 trillion to landlords in the U.S, according to Zillow.
Recently, Big Tech and Big Real Estate teamed up to charge wildly inflated rents through a rent-fixing software program by RealPage, which brought about numerous lawsuits and investigations. The software allowed corporate landlords to collude and charge outrageous rents that harmed Americans throughout the nation.
If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire. Eviction Lab, the prestigious research institute at Princeton University, found that increasingly unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates. And a wide-ranging study on homelessness by the University of California San Francisco revealed that people ended up living on the streets because of sky-high rents. An urgent way to address these life-threatening problems is to utilize rent control—an American tradition since World War I.
But activists believe that rent control isn’t the only tool to fix the housing affordability and homelessness crises. There needs to be a multi-pronged approach called the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other renter protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for unaffordable luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing.
Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way. Today’s elected officials must continue that work, especially since tenants throughout the country are facing serious risks of death and homelessness. They must immediately utilize rent regulations and the 3 Ps.
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Climate Progress Is Still Going Strong When Workers Take the Lead
Labor in Maine and elsewhere is proud to be advocating for and building clean power that provides affordable energy and good jobs for our communities.
Feb 01, 2026
The first year of this Trump administration has dealt significant blows to the advancement of clean energy and efforts to lower energy prices. The federal government has cut clean energy funding, repeatedly disrupted construction on in-progress wind energy projects, and shut down energy affordability programs. For workers on solar and wind energy projects, there’s been no shortage of bad news.
And yet, there’s also been undeniable progress. In the absence of federal leadership, state and local governments have picked up the slack, and labor unions have taken action.
To see what I mean, just take a closer look at my home state of Maine. In 2025, we had one of the most successful legislative sessions for climate and workers in our history. We passed landmark bills that expanded the state’s ability to build new clean energy projects and committed the state to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2040. Strong labor standards throughout this legislation help ensure every clean energy project we build in Maine creates high-quality, family-sustaining jobs while protecting ratepayers from rising costs. Policies like this are how we can insulate ourselves from harmful federal actions and continue to deliver real benefits. Other states could take note.
Across the country, energy demand is rising for the first time in decades, and we’re not building enough new energy to keep up. This supply and demand imbalance is pushing energy bills to unaffordable prices for working families, who are already struggling to stay afloat. At the same time, we’re experiencing the impacts of climate change with more and more frequency—extreme cold and devastating storms in the winter; scorching heatwaves, wildfires, and smog in the summer.
If we want climate policy to be popular and durable, it needs to do more than reduce emissions. It needs to materially deliver for working people.
This moment of high costs, worsening climate impacts, and a lack of good-wage jobs requires us to build more clean energy, urgently. We simply cannot bring down energy prices without more energy. Labor unions understand this, and we understand that clean energy will and is already creating thousands of job opportunities.
That’s why we so ardently fight for strong climate legislation in our state. It’s why our members were some of the first to speak up against federal cuts to clean energy tax credits. And throughout it all, we’re still building solar panels, installing heat pumps, erecting wind turbines, and upgrading building efficiency—work that makes our communities cleaner and safer.
Labor’s work for climate action will continue on, both in Maine and across the country. If we want climate policy to be popular and durable, it needs to do more than reduce emissions. It needs to materially deliver for working people—with good jobs, higher wages, and lower bills. It’s both possible and necessary to do all of this at once.
This year in Maine, we’re working to push the envelope even further to win bold, worker-led climate policy while driving down costs for ratepayers.
For example, we are advancing legislation that would streamline permitting of utility-scale clean energy projects built in Maine with high-road labor standards, accelerating the pace by which Maine brings clean energy online that is cheaper and lowering our exposure to global energy price volatility through greater energy independence.
The onus has certainly shifted to states to lead on climate and affordability; it’s not coming from the federal level. But that hasn’t deterred us in Maine, and it shouldn’t deter the rest of the country either. Even in red states like Texas, our brothers and sisters in labor have pushed for and won local climate progress.
Labor is proud to be advocating for and building clean power that provides affordable energy and good jobs for our communities. With working people at the table, we can drive meaningful climate action and pocketbook benefits for working people—all at once.
Let us not be afraid or resigned in this moment. Maine is proof that we can still create union jobs, lower costs, and build domestic clean energy, but only if we keep fighting for it.
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Waging a Nonviolent Civil War Against Borders
What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it.
Feb 01, 2026
And here I am, an American, staring at the border again... and slowly coming to realize the paradox of it. Borders don’t actually exist. They’re invisible lies. They’re also virtually everywhere.
Consider the border Alex Pretti crossed on January 24, on a street in Minneapolis, as he stepped between some US Border Patrol agents and the woman they had just pushed down. He crossed the border that separates ordinary people from the federal Proud Boys (or whoever they are), the masked invaders who were occupying the city to enforce The Law. Pretti interfered with them! He dared to try to protect the fallen woman, who herself had just crossed the same border. In so doing, they both went from being ordinary citizens to “domestic terrorists.”
“Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders among us, but those among us who never look within.”
The words are those of poet Amanda Gorman, who wrote a poem honoring Alex Pretti after the agents shot him, almost 10 times. Another killing! Oh my God! Another cut to the American soul—a cut, by the way, that comes with complete immunity, according to Team Trump. They’re waging civil war against those who cross the border that separates right from wrong. “Fear not those without papers,” Borman’s poem continues, “but those without conscience.”
Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway.
You know what? As terrifying as the idea of a new civil war sounds, I prefer it to something worse: a great national shrug and acquiescence to the Trump agenda. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as so many people have pointed out, is acting like the Trump Gestapo, as his administration rids sacred (white) America of the brown-skinned other, who may or may not be immigrants. What matters is that they’re different from “real” Americans. Right?
Regarding the whole concept of the border: It seems so real and viable until you start questioning it, which includes looking into its history.
As Elisa Wong and Raymond Wei write:
The way we think of borders today, as firm boundaries that are violently enforced, is a relatively new thing, and we would argue it doesn’t serve humanity’s best interests. While ‘strong borders’ are often argued as a necessity for our security, we think they limit humanity’s potential as a global community.
In ancient times, rivers, oceans, and mountains marked the boundaries of territory... As humans began building kingdoms and empires, more walls began to form, thus more firmly delineating borders.
And in Medieval times, from around 1000 to 1700 AD, European kingdoms started engaging with each other in a state of unending warfare, violently squabbling over the limits of their territory. And plunk! Global borders were created, and whole contents started getting divided almost randomly into European territorial possessions.
“At the Berlin Conference in 1884,” Wong and Wei write, “European leaders met to carve up Africa for themselves, which split local tribes across arbitrary lines and laid the groundwork for ethnic conflicts that still rage today’”
Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway. This is why protesters are flooding the streets in Minneapolis and across the country. This is why they’re enduring pepper spray and tear gas and flash bang grenades. This is why some people are being killed. But the rational—effective—response to violent aggression is not counterviolence.
“Anger and hatred are natural in response to such atrocities,” David Cortright writes, “but it is essential to avoid causing physical harm, to maintain a nonviolent intention and commitment despite increasing government provocation. A major outburst of protester violence would be disastrous, diverting attention from the message of support for victimized communities. That’s exactly what the White House is hoping for—to cover up ICE abuses, reinforce their lies about violent protesters, and justify additional domestic militarization.”
And he quotes—who else?—Martin Luther King: “Hatred multiples hate. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Violence multiplies violence.”
Yeah, that’s the world as we know it: endless war. But America’s new civil war must not—will not—go that way. “Loving ICE” doesn’t mean accepting their actions or their purpose, but rather, challenging it head on, courageously and nonviolently. What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it. Yes, that includes ICE agents. It includes Donald Trump. But loving them also means standing up to them—and handing them their conscience.
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