Salonika: Welcome to the FiLiA podcast. I'm Salonika, a volunteer at FiLiA, and today our guest is Esther Figueroa. Esther Figueroa is a Jamaican independent filmmaker, writer, educator, and linguist, with over 35 years of media productions, including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia, and feature film.

 Her activist filmmaking gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and Indigenous knowledge and cultures, the environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films are screened and televised all over the world and taught at numerous universities.

 They include “Jamaica for Sale”, the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and unsustainable development. Her latest feature documentary, “Fly Me to the Moon”, is about modernity and the global aluminium industry. She recently created and co-hosted GEFF 2020, the first online film festival focused on global extraction. Her environmental novel “Limbo” was a finalist in the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards for multicultural fiction.

 So, Esther, it's really great to have you here. So, starting on, could you, like, tell us more about yourself and your work? 

 Esther: I was born in Jamaica to a very large Jamaican family and grew up in Jamaica, England, the United States, and Puerto Rico. I was born in 1957 when Jamaica was still a British colony. Just for context, we were a Spanish colony for about 178 years, an English colony for about 37 years, and then a British colony for about 255 years.

 So that is very much a defining principle that one needs to know about Jamaica. Another thing, since this is an English-based feminist organisation, is that Jamaica was the centre, the most important colony, of Britain and England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and made a lot of British people incredibly rich, as well as a Caribbean…

 And basically the plantation system, which relied on enslaved labor, made the industrial revolution possible. And many British institutions and businesses also gained their wealth from extraction and colonial possession of Jamaica at that time. 

 In 1962, we got so-called political independence from Britain, though we're still a British colony - well, sorry, we're still part of the British Commonwealth, and the Queen is still the titular head of our country. But we got independent supposedly in 1962. Because of the exhaustion and destruction of Britain after World War II, they were basically getting rid of their colonies, and in return we got nothing, no reparations for slavery or colonial extraction.

 Of course, they don't teach these things in Britain, you know. Most people in England still believe that they civilised the world and that colonialism was, you know, British leadership, and owning a quarter of the planet was good for the rest of us.

 So, in the sixties and seventies in Jamaica, much like, you know, many places in the world, it was a very exciting time politically. There was, you know, this moment - that had been started for a few decades, building to independence - was this moment of building the post-colonial nation state. There was the Black Power movement, of which Jamaica was very centrally involved, to try and counter centuries of exploitation and misery of the majority Black population in Jamaica.

 There were Jamaican and Caribbean cultural movements in literature, and the arts, and music, and religion, and all these different things. And there was the burgeoning feminist movement. And in the seventies in Jamaica there was actually an attempt to create a society that was more just, less unequal, and redistribute wealth. But this was interrupted and eventually defeated by many forces, including United States and the CIA.

 So I grew up in a very exciting time, with all these different types of movements and all this, kind of turmoil, and social - attempts at - social transformation. I also… my father was a professor of education at the University of the West Indies, at Mona in Jamaica, and I grew up on campus, which was the cultural hub, and intellectual and political hub for innovation and leadership in these attempts at change, transformation, and imagining different ways of escaping the colonial, you know, decolonising the world and oneself.

 And so I had many models of people, local, regional, international, who did important, interesting, creative work and who lived meaningful lives. And for that I am very, very, very grateful. So, that was pretty much my upbringing. What else would you like to know? 

 Salonika: Could you tell us more about your films and the film festival? 

 Esther: Yeah. I moved to Hawaii in 1981 because my then partner, who is Hawaiian, wanted to go home. And she was involved in television news, and I was at the University of Hawaii studying East Asian languages and literatures, Chinese was my major. We started, we co-founded, the first really, woman-owned and controlled production company in Hawaii. It was called Juniroa Productions.

 In the eighties in Hawaii, again what had been stewing for a long time… For those that don't know, Hawaii is basically a US colony, even though it's called a state. What happened was, there was a Hawaii, a place, it's a number of islands, but there was what was then a kingdom in the 19th century.

 And first - there were various colonial powers that came to Hawaii, but out of the US - first came religious missionaries. And what happened was, as has been said, they came to do good and did very well. Meaning they came supposedly to spread Christianity and save souls and remained to take the land of the people and create plantations.

And to defend this basically plantocracy, the US invaded Hawaii and overthrew the Queen at the time, Queen Lili'uokalani - claiming that they were doing this for democratic reasons, which the US has done all over the world, of course, and continues to do with their regime changes, that are supposed to be for the democratic good of the people. And so Hawaii, though it became a state in the fifties, is really an occupied part of the US.

 So we came to Hawaii, and I began to learn about Hawaii and the Indigenous struggles of the Native Hawaiians. And we started to produce media for and about Native Hawaiians, as part of the attempt to reclaim and energise what had been taken from them and what had been erased, which includes their language, their cultural practices, their religious beliefs. And it was part of an attempt to have, actually, political sovereignty.

 So that's how I got involved in producing media. I had no training in it. I just learned doing it. That was basically my foundations. I moved back to Jamaica in 2006, and when I moved back to Jamaica, I made the commitment to focus on the environment. And so pretty much all my work in Jamaica has been environmentally focused.

 So what happened with GEFF 2020, which I think is how I came to your attention, was that the ongoing narrative during the Covid 19 pandemic and the lockdown, was that this was saving the planet, you know. For the first time, you know, people in Delhi and places like that could see the Himalayas, and people had clean air in Los Angeles and, you know, turtles were able to nest on beaches that there were no people at, and that kind of thing.

 But what was actually happening was that because governments had declared these emergency powers that gave presidents, prime ministers, and other leaders and rulers immense powers, they were basically shredding environmental oversight and laws and things like that. And what was happening was actually an increase in extraction, an increase in things like fossil fuel mining, logging, industrial agriculture, you know, mineral mining, extraction you name it.

 So in the middle of all the focus on the pandemic, I was trying to see if we couldn't make people think again about what was actually happening, that Covid 19 was not going to save the planet, and that the environmental damage and the oppression of all living beings on the planet, human and non-human, was actually increasing.

 And so I talked to some of my network friends, to see if their networks wanted to participate in some kind of action or something, to make the world think about extraction that was going on. And people, for very good reason, you know, had very low energy and low resources, and people were in crises and organisations were in crises. And so the easiest thing I could do was just have an online film festival.

 So I partnered with a friend in Amsterdam, who has an organisation called Caribbean Creativity, and he hosted and we co-curated this festival, which just featured both feature length documentaries, shorts, news products, whatever, that talked about different types of extraction that was going on and had gone on in the past.

 And so we had made available, I think it was 25 feature documentaries. And then I did another, over a hundred titles, that were - tried to choose things that were already in the public domain, that people could easily access. And I also wrote a narrative about what was happening in the world with all these different things from, you know, energy, to industrial fishing, to, you know, the plans to mine the moon, to plans to do deep sea mining.

 Whatever, you know, was going on in the world, you know. Places like Indonesia and the, you know, the unfortunate colony of West Papua in the island of Papua, and all these places that are basically, you know, the natural forests, and the ways of the people are being destroyed to produce palm oil. And in other places it's soybeans and, you know, just all of this kind of stuff. Just bringing attention to this wide variety of issues related to extraction. So that's why I did GEFF 2020. 

 Salonika: Thank you so much for all of the work that you have done and, like, bringing all of the issues from all around the world into focus. And, can you tell me more specifically about the aluminium mining in Jamaica?

 Esther: Okay. Yes. As you know, I've been working on this response to this awful EIA that will allow mining, yes, for the first time in a particular part of Jamaica that is very, very important to us. Jamaica…

 When people think of Jamaica, they probably think of reggae music and ganja and hanging out and, you know, they probably have some ideas of some beaches and Rastafarians and I'm not sure what else, but they probably don't think of industry. When, in fact, for 70 years, Jamaica has been central to the aluminium industry.

 And aluminium itself has been central to modernity. Because it's in everything, it was essential in transportation, of course, you know, it's essential to communications, all the satellites. Extra-terrestrial travel is dependent on aluminium, you know, the gadgets that we use, the food, the packaging. All the things that make electricity, you know. Infrastructure, construction, all those things that make modernity what we know it to be, the modern world and our human comforts, aluminium is part of that story.

And what happened was, when we were a British colony and during the war, World War II, aluminium is an essential. It's called a ‘strategic’ mineral. That means it's essential to warfare, it's essential to the military industrial complex. And during war, it becomes very, very important because it's used in bombs, it's used in explosives, it's used in armour, and of course it's used in the planes and the ships and all the different transportation systems.

 So what was happening was that the German u-boats were targeting and sinking the ships that brought the aluminium ore, which is called bauxite, from South America. At the time, it was coming from the colonies, the French, British and Dutch colonies, that are now Guyana, Guyane, and Suriname, and going to North America to be smelted. So the Germans were basically interrupting the transportation of this.

 So they were looking for something closer to the US, and since we were a British colony, they thought we were politically stable and that kind of thing. So they started doing exploration and they did find bauxite in Jamaica. Then the war ended, bauxite was not developed, but then the US had started the Korean War and they needed, again, aluminium. And that's where Jamaica became central.

 So all the large multinational corporations at the time, which were Alcan out of Canada (Canada being the largest extractive nation in the world), Alco, which was the US-based multinational, and a number of other US aluminium companies, Reynolds, Kaiser, all set up operations in Jamaica. And they owned about 10% of the island actually. And by the 1960s, Jamaica was the main producer of bauxite and aluminium in the world, which is remarkable if you think about what a small island we are. Of course over the years this has changed, and places like Australia are now the leading producers and exporters, but we're still addicted to the aluminium business. 

 Under the British 1947 Mining Act, all the minerals belong to what was then called ‘the Crown’ and has been… now the government of Jamaica has taken on that ownership. So it's invested in the government of Jamaica. So it's… mineral extraction is one of the areas where the government, probably the only area, where the government has full ownership and can get revenues. And so mining is very important to the government.

 So at the moment, we've been fighting for over 20 years to keep mining out of an area called the Cockpit Country, which is an area very important, it's one of our last intact forested areas. It's very important to the supply of water in Jamaica. It supplies 40% of our fresh water. It has incredible high rates of rare species, endemic species.

 And it is very important to our heritage. Because the Maroons - the enslaved Africans who fled their enslavement and set up their own counter-communities - in relationship with Indigenous people who were called the Tainos, they fought the British, and were able to gain their sovereignty several centuries before all of Jamaica got independence.

 So between the historical and cultural heritage, it's also an important part of our food security and our small farming. So this area is very, very important and we've been fighting to keep mining out of it. So currently the government is in a public/private partnership with a company that they have granted a special mining lease to, special mining lease 173, that will extend mining in a very big way into Cockpit Country and for the first time into the parish of Trelawny.

 So they granted the special mining lease, but before they can mine, they supposedly have to get the permits from the National Environmental Planning Agency, NEPA. And before that can happen - though this is not always the case, sometimes the case that there is an environmental impact assessment - so an environmental impact assessment was done, which strongly advocate for the mining company and for the government and strongly advocates for the mining of this area on strictly economic grounds.

 And so I've spent the last four days, and I have one more day to go, probably trying to write my response to this horrendous EIA. It's just bad in every known sense of the word. But it's, you know, it's a futile exercise, but I'm doing it for the record as are other people. It's a futile exercise because even if the National Environmental Protection Agency denies the permits, by law this can be over overridden by the Minister of Mining or the Prime Minister. So that happened recently in another case.

 So even if we respond to the EIA and we show how bad it is and how, you know, all the mitigation method, you know, things that they say will take place, and how mining will be so delicate and, you know, careful, and won't destroy anything, that it doesn't matter.

 If the government wants to mine, because they are 51% owners in this public-private partnership, they will mine, at which point we are going the route of constitutional lawsuits. Those unfortunately take a very long time and are usually very expensive. But it's high time that we sue the government for, basically, the unconstitutional nature of the Mining Act and the types of practices that the government promotes, subsidises, and practices around extraction in Jamaica.

 Salonika: Can you also, like, tell us more about how the local people have responded, around the Cockpit Country? 

 Esther: Yeah. Well, you see, Jamaica's a very fractured society, and there isn't a whole lot that unites a society, because it's very stratified. It's very unequal. There's heritages of racism and just, the horrendous colonial heritages. But one thing that unifies Jamaica is Cockpit Country.

 And those of us that have been part of organising for the last number of decades, realise that for many, many different reasons, even - Jamaicans whether abroad or in Jamaica, or residents of Jamaica who aren't Jamaican - even if they've never been to Cockpit Country, they've heard about it and they have a spiritual connection or an emotional connection, or they identify with it in some kind of way.

 And they also know that it doesn't make sense to destroy the place that supplies the water to, you know, a large part of Jamaica. And it doesn't make sense to continue to displace, you know, destroy, local agriculture. So bauxite mining and the aluminium industry have been basically the largest cause of rural displacement in Jamaica. 

 Which again is important for people in Britain to understand. Because the so-called Windrush Generation, the people from the Caribbean that came to save England after the war and rebuild it and became the, you know, the conductors of buses and worked in the ports and the factories and, you know, did all the labour that rebuilt England and who are currently being deported...

 We just had a flight recently where these people who came and saved England have been deported for being illegal, illegal residents, which is just completely outrageous. Anyone from the Commonwealth should be able to go wherever they want in the British Commonwealth because they owe us.

 But anyway, one of the reasons why there was such a rush amongst the Windrush Generation and those that followed, to migrate to the United Kingdom and North America, was because the rural areas where basically the farmers and the residents were being displaced by bauxite mining.

 Remember that I said that in the beginning, in the fifties and sixties, the multinational corporations owned about 10% of the land. And so aluminium industry in Jamaica and bauxite mining is one of the reasons why there're Jamaicans in Britain. So that, again, is a little interesting fact.

 So, Cockpit Country, the people in Cockpit Country are very varied. It's a very, very varied place. But one thing many of them have in common is self-sufficiency and a continuity of, you know, African and Indigenous practices, a continuity of a connection to land, which is very rare in Jamaica because of plantation enslavement, and the fact that such a large percentage of the population was imported from other places.

 And the fact that enslaved Jamaicans, after emancipation, the plantation owners were compensated by the government of Britain. They just paid off their loan for this compensation a few years ago. But the people who had created the wealth, that is the enslaved Africans who created that wealth, they received nothing and they were landless after emancipation.

 So Jamaicans don't have a very close connection to land, often, and actually sometimes have a hostile relationship to nature and land, just because of this traumatic colonial history that people have lived through. But in the Cockpit Country there are people, because they still farm the land, because they're living in places they have lived for generations, because they identify with those places. So of all the places in Jamaica, it's probably the most Indigenous, in many ways.

 So there are lots of reasons why they would fight to keep and preserve and conserve their way of life, and the land, from being destroyed. And so communities have organised, they have protested, they have petitioned, they have done all sorts of things to stop mining. Unfortunately, despite their efforts, mining has continued to expand into their communities and their homes.

 And the reason for this is again, because this law grants the possession of minerals to the government, they basically give a lease to a mining entity. And that mining entity can come onto your land and mine, whether you want them to or not. That is the law.

 It's not just Cockpit Country. Mining takes place, bauxite mining - and then there are other types of extraction, of course, of which limestone is a big push at the moment - but bauxite mining in the aluminium industry takes place in six parishes in Jamaica. And so it's not just Cockpit Country, it's across the island.

 And we've organised around Cockpit Country to try and stop mining there. Mining is about to start there, unfortunately, and it will be basically the actions on the ground by community members to stop it that will make a difference, as well as the law cases and the other things that we're trying to do. But this applies to all people in all mining communities in Jamaica, not just Cockpit Country. 

 Salonika: Thank you so much and well, this provides a link to what I was going to ask next. So you released a manifesto in, like, November 2020. And in that you said that how the colonial powers have, like, defined poverty as the problem, the global problem, and when in fact wealth should have been described as the problem and wealth eradication should have been the goal.

 And so you see that we're both from a so-called “low income”, or “developing” country- 

 Esther: No, no. Jamaica is “middle income”. Sorry! 

 Salonika: Oh, sorry!

 Esther: We can't get anything! Sorry. Go on. 

 Salonika: Okay. So yeah, so we've seen that this paradigm of, like, wealth creation and development is strong among both the governments and the people. And, like, anything that is… anyone who opposes this paradigm is deemed as anti-national, or even, like, bought by the more developed countries. So would you like to share any thoughts or, like, do you have any experiences regarding this matter? 

 Esther: Yes. Well, we do, Jamaica, Nepal, we do share this notion, as really across the planet, of development. There is one way to develop, right? And I can really think at the moment of two countries, Cuba and Brunei that have basically opted out of this paradigm. There might be others. There's certainly Indigenous communities all over the world, but they don't have their own nation states - and obviously, nation states are part of the problem - but there are people who are outside of modernity who don't participate in this.

 But in terms of nation states and entities that are participating in global modernity, there are very few that have opted out of this. And it's, you know, our leaders have been educated into this, you know, they've gone to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and wherever the hell, you know. 

 And of course now China is the great moderniser and developer in the world. And that's another story, because China's narrative is very different because they present themself as one of us, right? The so-called “South South”, which I hate, you know, it's like geographically ridiculous, but… 

 So, their model of partnering - Jamaica is very much partnered with China, and I know that Nepal is also - is that they do not present themselves as a colonial power that is, you know, there to extract, but as a partner that is there to help you to develop. And it's the same development model, you know, it's large infrastructure, it's dams, it's ports, it's huge highways going… where? Right?

 It's this notion that human civilisation is at its apex, right, when it has completely destroyed nature and there's nothing left. You know, we compete to have the highest skyscrapers, you know. The country with the highest skyscrapers supposed to be great, right? To have space exploration and exploding bombs and, you know, all of these strange things that signify that you have arrived, you know, that you're part of the, you know, the great civilised empires in the world.

 And so those of us who lag behind, which is most of the world, who have been defined as, you know, poverty-stricken and backward, and, you know, we are always getting these, you know, UN goals that we're supposed to meet. And, you know, these European Union and all these different places, you know, we are always up and down of some index, you know? Some index of, you know, whether we're developing or we're not developing. 

 So what it is, is that it's very complicated. Those of us that are in the so-called post-colonial world are so traumatised, and we have such colonial legacies. Our laws are colonial. Our education is colonial. Even though we pretend otherwise. We have such inferiority complexes. We are producing and reproducing what we have been taught, because we've been taught that we're inferior and that our way of being is savage.

 And there's just so much racism, so much, you know, involved in this, that when our quote unquote leaders or rulers, for them to stay in power and for them to have the populace behind them, they have to present this facade of strength, you know, this facade of prosperity, this facade of struggling towards a better life for all. Right?

 And obviously a country like Jamaica - which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and has been since we were the centre of the English and British Empire - obviously, you know, if a large portion of the population looks and sees that others have what they don't have, right? And participates in media, and travels - Jamaicans are extremely mobile, you can find Jamaicans all over the world - they know that there is some kind of injustice, right? 

 But the solution is no longer a collective solution, that we all have less and share it. It is that we all as individuals strive to have more and more and more. And in a neoliberal system, and by this I mean the world is in a system where governments - it doesn't matter what sort of government, capitalist, fascist, communist, you know, whatever it is - they all are in the same political economy and they all act the same way, which is that they refuse to make the wealthy, including whether it's individuals or state corporations or private corporations or multinationals, pay what they should pay.

 And so what is left? Not much, right? And so, you know, that's why extraction becomes so important, because that's what governments usually own and control, is the permits and the rights to extract, whether it's in the sea, or whether it's in the air, or whether it's on the land, or whether it's below the land, et cetera.

 And so our political cycles and our leaders and rulers have to show, you know, they have to demonstrate to the populace, right, that we are being pulled out of this post-colonial morass and that we're moving towards some sort of first world status. When in fact what is happening is that, as with everywhere else, the wealth gap is increasing. There is, kind of, extreme performances of wealth, you know.

 During this time of the pandemic, you know, the richest men in the world got, you know, trillions of dollars richer, which is just completely immoral and disgusting. And so it's very, very, very difficult, as you say, one is a traitor, one is against development, one is, you know, an elite, one is racist, one is whatever the particular blend is in your own nation, one is working for outsiders, et cetera, et cetera.

 It's very, very difficult to say, “we need to have anti-growth. We need to have steady state economies. We need to have low growth, you know, we need to have everybody be poor again.” That is almost impossible to say. But again, if we look like at a place like Cuba, you know, people like to get outraged, you know. “Do you know how much a doctor earns in Cuba?” 

You know, they have one of the best public health systems in the world, you know, they came to the rescue of the world with Covid. They've made their own vaccine, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, it's considered something wrong that doctors in Cuba would not make the same that they make in, you know, North America or somewhere else

 The fact that people would all, kind of, have, you know, a similar level of economic status, you know. That no one really needs huge amounts of money and no one needs all these endless material goods that just create more and more waste, you know. That if we extracted the wealth of the wealthy, no one would be hungry. No one would feel debased and living in some kind of indignity, right? No one would feel that they have to be slaves and enslaved, you know?

 And we would not have this system of destruction, where we are constantly making species extinct every day, where we are basically destroying the planet that we depend on and having crisis after crisis. Whether it's a thing like a pandemic, or whether it is man-made climate crisis that creates droughts and floods and migrations of people who are desperate.

 Or whether it is our stupid money that we invest in the military industrial complex - right now in the US with their supposed bill that's supposed to, you know, stimulate the economy, and save people who have not had work for almost a year. Most of the money is going to the military.

 So it's very, very difficult to tell people who have been oppressed, who have been told that they're less than, and who have been living in states of materiality that before were normal - and I'm not talking people starving, I'm not talking that kind of stuff, I'm talking about living in subsistence and sustained ways, where you didn't have a closet full of shoes, you knew how to grow food, et cetera, et cetera - that that has been pathologised into poverty. And instead, we are all supposed to be on this insane growth matrix that the world, the planet, none of us can afford.

 Salonika: Thank you. Yeah, the developmental paradigm. I guess the greatest victim of this would also be the nature and all of the non-human species that have, well, that have just been killed, and not just killed, that have been driven extinct. So you also mentioned this in your manifesto, so I'd just like to read a part of this, so:

 Ecocide is not a human right. Humans are not ordained or entitled to consume and destroy planet earth, the moon, the asteroids, Mars, or anywhere in the universe. The world is not a natural resource that provides us with ecological services whose value is based on our perceived needs. 

 Everything has its own life under its own terms. No, the billions of gallons of water flowing in a river to the sea are not being wasted, if not diverted for human use. A river is a river and has its own life and intrinsic value completely unrelated to any human conception of a river.

 So, this kind of entitlement that industrial humans have towards anything that's nature, that is one of the requirements for this unlimited pursuit of growth as well. So can you say, like, where - like, show us something about, like - where does this entitlement come from and how can we resist this? 

 Esther: Well, again, we are species-centric, right? And then within being species-centric, we are tribal or clan or regional or something, where, you know, we're always excluding someone else or something else, or othering or, you know, all of that.

 As modern human beings, we've become very addicted to the comforts of modern life. In my lifetime, and I'm sure yours as well, since we both come from these “backward” countries - though you're a city girl, so maybe not - you know, in my time, you know, there were lots of things. I mean, we didn't have plastic bottles when I was growing up. Those were imported some decades after I was born.

 You know, people lived without electricity in a lot of places, and that was seen, of course, as part of the poverty trap. There were… in my life, I've seen us become more and more addicted to more and more things that make our life more and more comfortable. And also there is a human rights narrative, that is also about entitlement.

 The human rights narrative, if you look at it, every day, there's another addition to the long list of human rights. And so when humans are made… when it's human-centric, then human needs are always first. When you make it natural rights, or the rights of nature, or when you think of the world where humans are not God's chosen people or, you know, these belief systems that certain religions have promoted across the world.

 When you think instead about how everything on planet earth and beyond is connected, and what we do ‘here’ affects ‘there’, whether we understand this or not, and how we're all interconnected, you know, not just… in very varied ways, on a molecular scale.

 When you realise that, you know, trees have more importance than human beings. They give more to the world than we will ever do. You know, that rivers, the air, that worms, ants, you know, all sorts of insects that we think are pests. Bacteria, viruses, all these things actually, not only have a role, but in many ways have a greater role and are more important. Things that we think are inert like soil and rocks and features that took millions of years to make.

 These are our ancestors. These are our kin. They are in us, and we are in them. And so if you think that humans are apart from nature and superior to nature, hold your breath, don't drink water, you know, don't eat, and see how long you stay alive, right? So we have diluted ourselves.

 And the interesting thing about the human species is that we rely on narratives, right? We are a species that make up stories, and our stories are what influence and then sometimes define our values and our cultures and who we are. And what are these stories we're telling ourselves, right? That, “we are the most important thing on the planet.” That, “my needs are more important than anything else and must be met right now.” And that, “I cannot sacrifice anything of my comfort or my wealth, or my material possessions or my potential,” you know?

 Because we all seem to think that we also could one day be billionaires or trillionaires, you know. So that we have to change the narrative in very, very deep ways. And that is why Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and practices that have not been ruined, that have not been completely erased, that come from thousands, tens of thousands, the Aboriginal people of Australia have over 50,000, years of continuous culture. Why is that?

 Because they’re a non-extractive people. They did not build skyscrapers and pyramids. They did not dig out the earth and the seas. They did not make human structures and material things the most important. They made other things more important, other ways of being more important, and their highest technology is their incredible brains that understand things about the world and the cosmology that most modern people are clueless about and would have to Google.

 So, there are alternatives and there are other ways of imagining the world. Radical feminism is part of that. And I know you wanted to talk about that. You know, I've been a feminist from I was very, very young, but the type of feminism that makes a difference and that can create different narratives and that can create different worlds, is not a feminism about equal rights and equal access.

 And basically, you know, having whoever's defined as female, or a woman, or a girl being empowered, right, to basically continue patriarchal, fascist, racist, exclusionary, damaging, wrong, greedy, stupid practices, there's nothing to celebrate. “But now women can be generals or, you know, participate in mass genocide or mass ecocide.”

 To me, feminism is a complete way of looking and being and understanding the world. It's a worldview. And to me, the radical feminism that transformed my life and has basically informed my life, is one that is anti-patriarchal, anti-dominance, that does not see the conquest of any part of the world, you know, there is no distinction.

 There is no hierarchy, you know, where certain males are at the top of the pyramid and certain so-called inanimate objects, you know, like rocks or certain, supposedly, you know, “early evolutionary”, you know, creatures are at the bottom, right? No, we are all part of the web of life.

 And a radical feminism that understands this and that centres, instead of conquest and dominance and destruction and violence, and the othering and exclusion and ownership and property, and all those things, but centres things like caring, empathy, sharing, love, you know, these sorts of things, with an understanding that we are not “God's chosen anything”.

 If we tell this narrative, if we have ways of communicating this story, which is completely different, and which has existed before and exists in understandings in pre-modern and post-modern and non-industrialised peoples, then we have a way of imagining today and tomorrow and beyond, which is not accepting, as inevitable and good and normal, the horrendous world that we're living in.

 So for me, Indigeneity, Indigenous and locally based knowledges, and traditional practices, combined with a radical feminist worldview, those are the things that very much, more than anything, inform both how I feel, how I think, and how I want to be, and how I try to be, in the world.

 Salonika: Thank you so much. So I see green energy in a similar way. Whereas before, ecosystems were being destroyed for fossil fuels, now in addition to that ecosystems are also being destroyed for green energy, and I don't think there's anything to celebrate on that.

 Yeah, that's my understanding of how the patriarchal values and the human supremacist values are linked together as well. Like, the patriarchy imagines a woman in the same way that human supremacy imagines the natural world, that it's the ‘other’ to be exploited. And as you said, it's like, there's nothing to celebrate about a woman being in a General position or a woman being able to commit genocides. Would you like to add something to this?

 Esther: Yes. Well, you know, again, as part of storytelling and narrative, we use words like ‘clean energy’, ‘green energy’, right? We talk about, again, with Covid, we're talking about “build back better,” right? “Build back green,” just the word ‘build’ should make you realise that there's a problem there.

 And then the Green New Deal, you know, many, especially liberal, you know, people within what would be called a liberal movement, but many who might be called left or environmentalists or whatever - these stupid labels that no longer make any sense anymore - you know, have a very, kind of, immediate and unquestioning acceptance of these things, right? And you have to ask why.

 And one of the reasons is going back again, as you say, to the human supremacist notion, is that we do not want to give up our comforts, right? We do not need 24 hours of electricity. We simply don't. We do not need 24 hours of connectivity. We do not need to have available 120 types of breakfast cereals, you know, and every known food and vegetable, vegetable grown tens of thousands of miles away, because it's not grown where you live. And it's certainly not in season, right?

 So we don't want to give these things up. And so we want to believe the magical, right, the magical narrative, right? There are two narratives that we believe. One is the innocence project, right? We all want to believe that we're innocent, you know, it's those other people, right?

 And this is especially true of the liberal left, you know, they know everything. They are the virtuous ones. And it's those idiots, those Trump supporters or whatever, you know, who are ignorant and stupid and are the problem. And they, driving in their electrical car, and using every gadget under the sun, and eating organic food that came from God knows where, et cetera, et cetera, are virtuous.

 But no, none of us are innocent. It's always about the other person is racist, the other person, you know, is oppressing the working classes or whatever, right? No, none of us are innocent. We have all come out of ecocide and genocide. That's what the Industrial Revolution is. It was made out of ecocide and genocide.

 We all are complicit in what is happening to this planet. So the first thing we need to do is stop the innocence project and stop thinking that other people are the problem and that we are virtuous. Okay, so that's one narrative. The innocence narrative has to go away.

 The other narrative, which is what we cling to, because again, we don't want to give up our standard of living and our conveniences, is that there are magical solutions out there that do not have cost, that are not toxic, that will save the world, so that again, we can continue our human supremacist lifestyle, but this is just not true.

 Whether it is… and it's interesting, because you have so-called progressives, like AOC, who is very much, who signed the bill for the Green New Deal in America, in the US, and who pushes this notion primarily on financial grounds, because these are all economic, they're job creation programs.

 Anyone who talks about the Green New Deal, or build back green, or blah, blah, blah, or, you know, smart cities and all of these solutions, always talks about the number of jobs that will be created. So again, it comes back to the political economy of human neoliberal needs, because where does this technology come from?

 Everything, from the material basis of how it is made to how it's transported, to how it is controlled, all requires extraction. All requires toxic waste. All requires that others are sacrificed, in other parts of the world, you're basically exporting, again, in the same colonial manner, your problems to somewhere else.

 So that children, right, are going through garbage heaps and picking out components to be melted down, right? Or entire people make their living off of other people's human waste, which is killing the oceans and the creatures that live in it. So it's nice, it's a nice magical story that there are clean solutions out there that are innocent, they aren't.

 So what is demanded of us are actually extreme changes and we are not willing to do that. But guess what? When there is an ‘extreme’ so-called climate event, or an ‘extreme’ pandemic, or any of the extreme things that happen because of manmade industrial modernity, we are forced to do without.

 We're forced to do without electricity when the grid goes down, we're forced to do without water after a hurricane or a flood has damaged the infrastructure, we're forced to do without water when there's drought. So the planet will force us against our will to be in extreme situations, and they affect most the people who have the least role in creating this.

 The people who consumed the least, the people who did not create industrialisation, the people who have benefited the least from this, are the people who suffer the most immediate and extensive consequences, and that is a crime against humanity as well as a crime against nature.

 Salonika: The way you elaborated and clarified the links between all of the different kinds of oppression, yeah, that is very insightful. So we are about the end of this interview, so as a final note, is there anything that you would like to tell to the listeners about feminism, or the environmental movement, or just, like, how can people get involved in any of these? Or how can people, like, support your cause?

 Esther: Well, my cause is everyone's cause, right? So rather than looking outside of… I mean, it's good. It would be nice if… we need, for example, in Jamaica, we need international help to stop extraction. Sure.

 But it's best to start where you are with who you are. It's best to stop the innocence narrative, stop the virtuous narrative and start to understand where you are, and how where you are relates to the rest of the world, and what is happening where you are, and how it relates to other places. So learn about yourself. Learn about where you are and learn about how that is connected and related to other people and places and learn about them.

 And then if there are things going on where you are, work in mutual cooperation with others. And if there are things going on in other places that you can help, then do that as well. But the first step is to understand where you are and what is happening where you are, and who you are, and how that relates to everything else. 

 Salonika: Thank you so much, Esther, for your wonderful interview and your insights. And it's been really inspiring. And listening to you, like, I've always been inspired by you, so thank you so much for your time. 

 Esther: Well, thanks for doing this, and again, I look forward to us continuing to work together, and let's see what happens from this.