Designing a Green New Deal

River deltas are so named because of their triangular shape, which recalls the shape of the Greek letter Δ. The term emerged among Greek writers around 600 BCE1 to describe the Nile River Delta, whose cyclical floods and millennia of agricultural abundance have very literally given shape to the global imagination of what and who deltas serve. The Mississippi River and its sediments are a primary source of fecundity, as we see in this dramatic collage of ecoregions.

Further south, the North Gulf of Mexico a direct result of the Mississippi River Delta, and that point of convergence between the salt and fresh waters. Along the Mississippi River, the relation to water and empire are explicit in the town names that recall its North African cousin: Cairo, Illinois; Luxora, Arkansas; Thebes, Illinois; Egypt, Tennessee. They are/were places of plenty, buoyed by the meanders and floods of a river coursing through what became – through settler colonialism – the middle of the United States.

The letter Δ is also used in mathematics to denote change, a concept that resonates in a riverine landscape where water shapes land, labor, and resources, and is itself shaped by the land, labor, and resources of the cultures that bind a river and its community. Petroleum, people, cotton, sugar, music, benzene and plastic have made their exodus via the river in a constant stream, carving out channels to new markets, new buyers, new visions of profit, remaking the Mississippi and its people over and over again. You can never step in the same river twice.

Perhaps put more appropriately, the Delta is about to crest its levees, no longer able to sustain the toxic processes and relationships that create wealth elsewhere at the expense of life here. Those at the margins demand – as they have been demanding – to be centered on their own terms. We echo the calls from signatories of the Gulf South for a Green New Deal for self-determination and reparations, for an inversion of how wealth is measured and distributed. The seeds of transformation are already here, this project aims to add just a bit more sunlight. Note: for the purposes of this project, the Delta’s boundaries are considered those of the Delta Regional Authority (DRA), which includes portions of eight states, and cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Jackson.

Winning a Green New Deal for the Delta will have to fundamentally transform the processes, relationships and structures that commodify the land, labor and resources of the Delta. Transformation is a process more than an outcome, and as such procedural justice (the ‘how’) will matter just as much if not more than substantive justice (the ‘what’), particularly because many of these processes don’t ever end, they continue evolving. In that spirit, there are three overarching goals in transforming this region: 

1. Reform and empower systems of resource redistribution and governance to link the local with the regional and national within a culture of respect, creativity and accountability.
2. Invest in processes of care and regeneration that center justice, healing and environmental regeneration that ends the cycle of extraction in the Delta.
3. Incentivize and resource collective and collectivist ventures and organizing structures within a framework that safeguards the right to self-determination and takes land, people, and resources out of commodity markets wherever possible.

These goals are meant to honor and reflect the demands that grassroots and social movement groups in the Delta that have been imagining and building radical alternatives to the region’s extractive economy over decades and centuries. In this moment, we seek to follow the path set out by the coalition behind the Gulf South for a Green New Deal, Movement for Black Lives reparations platform , the Roosevelt Institute’s True New Deal, NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program Goals, Partnership for Southern Equity’s Just Energy equity ecosystem and many others.  

These goals are intended to be abstract enough to guide action at all scales. In the spirit of Adrienne Marie Brown’s guide to emergent strategy, they should be viewed as almost fractal-like, producing similar structures and frameworks for interaction at the scale of a single site design or a Congressional budgeting session. This nested model allows for action at a variety of scales—a kind of intra- and inter-regional operability that’s necessary to build a just, democratic Green New Deal. A site design is not meaningful without the congressional budget appropriation that promises to make it a reality; nor is the closure of a federal prison facility as meaningful if it’s accompanied by an expanded state prison-building program. The national policy shifts called for in HR 109 and the Roosevelt Institute’s True New Deal are in many cases ideal preconditions for the Delta-specific program outlined below. This relationship is not linear or one-directional, however; a holistic approach to meeting these goals at the regional level will create a larger and more vocal constituency for national policy and funding changes, just as national funding, assistance and enforcement would help activate a local constituency to lead and support implementation efforts. Ultimately, our vision is one of agency—for the people of the Delta to wield the power and resources they need to build the kinds of futures they’ve been organizing around for generations.

Using these three goals as framing devices, below we have traced out the potential shape of a new delta, leaning on all definitions of the word. A delta that embraces change, one that orients both upstream and downstream, one that leans into the strength of its triangular shape, imagining land, labor and resources as the three inseparable sides of a Green New Deal for the region.

 

Prior to 1492, the indigenous nations of the Mississippi Delta were an integral part of trade routes spanning the continent and had class structures, communal land ownerships and large settlements similar to those of the more well-known Aztec and Maya. European colonizers enacted sequential waves of genocide that reduced the number of native people in the region five-fold from 1492 to 1692. What the Spanish and French started, Thomas Jefferson continued and Andrew Jackson finished through the Indian Removal Act of 1830 where ancestral Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek and Choctaw lands were violently appropriated for cotton, and surviving tribal members were forced to walk to lands in Oklahoma along the infamous and deadly Trail of Tears.

Stolen lands were drained and leveled, providing sites for plantation capitalism. Monoculture farming, chattel slavery, and land and wealth monopolies took root in the rich soils along the Mississippi River, becoming integral to the process of colonization. Planters, who have long formed a powerful bloc of wealth and political power, turned to white supremacy and paternalist authoritarian narratives to structure institutions and culture. What followed were a series of intermittent attempts to pry the planter bloc and their allies from their stranglehold on the area's land, labor, and production and inevitable counter-attempts to re-solidify that power by the bloc.

Between Emancipation and the Great Depression, thousands of former slaves were able to secure tenuous footholds as landowners, fighting the fierce current of domination from white planters to secure every available and affordable plot they could, no matter how marginal or hopeless. Through sheer force of will, Black landowners steadily increased their share of land in the beginning of the 20th century, but never attained ownership rates proportional with population composition. Social, political, economic, and legal obstacles persisted and by mid-century black landownership rates declined again in a period some refer to as the Great Dispossession. In fact, the combination of federal agricultural policy and corporate landowners resulted in land loss for small farmers of all races. In essence, “large plantations ballooned into even larger industrial crop factories as small farms collapsed.”

Addressing the first goal in the Green New Deal in the Delta will reform and empower systems of resource redistribution and governance to link the local with the regional and national within a culture of respect, creativity and accountability, by reducing and ultimately ending subsidies for monocultures, especially non-food crops like corn and soybeans. Corn and soybeans are the most widely planted crops in the United States and also are the most heavily subsidized crops by the federal government, costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year. Neither crop is a food source for US residents, since the majority of corn is used in ethanol production or refined products like high fructose corn syrup, while the majority of soybeans are exported outside the country.  

Addressing the second goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will center processes of care and repair that hold justice, healing and environmental regeneration as key guiding principles. Very real physical, economic and psychological harms have been wrought by the systems of extraction described above. White USDA farm insurance brokers pushed Black farm owners into bankruptcy; multinational petrochemical corporations took years of healthy living from residents of Cancer Alley; racist juries and sentencing guidelines put Black people behind bars for decades. The layers of dispossession and trauma call for a multi-decade investment in care and healing for the people and places who have endured the direct and indirect effects of this exploitation. It follows that healing requires 1) an end to ongoing processes that continue to cause harm and 2) reparative measures on terms set by those who have experienced harm.

In the industrial agriculture sector, this looks like…

restructuring the land inheritance system. In order to reverse Black land loss and enable a more robust effort towards reparations, States must pass the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which allows farmers and their heirs who lack clear title to their land to get title without risking that the property will be put up for auction. Clear titles to farmland enable the owners to access a range of USDA loan options, which have historically been withheld from Black farmers using unclear titles as an excuse.

environmental regeneration. The levees surrounding the Mississippi River have created an environment that denies water its central role. Environmental degradation, stronger storms, and deteriorating infrastructure make this system untenable, but like the Green New Deal as a whole, there is an opportunity to address multiple problems with elegant solutions in the overly constrained riverine landscape. Encouraging the use of flood resistant crops like wetland agriculture (paludiculture), expanding the floodplain through buyouts and easements to make “room for the river,” and increasing the prevalence of aquaculture create sustainable ways to live with the water, rather than attempt to remove and control it.

Addressing the third goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will incentivize and resource collective and collectivist ventures and organizing structures within a framework that safeguards the right to self-determination. Addressing climate change and dismantling extractive industries in the Delta will require collaboration and relationships. A legal, economic and social frame that lifts up individual needs at the expense of the collective no longer works. Given that residents of the Delta have been organizing themselves and establishing systems of mutual aid for generations, it is clear that most people don’t want to go it alone when they have the option of operating in community with others. The public sector should recognize the need for collaborative and collectivist approaches and incentivize them where possible.

In the industrial agriculture sector, this looks like…

collective ownership, both as a legal frame and a cultural frame. In a twist of the “back to the land” campaign, we call for a “land back” movement where land is given back to the people as opposed to people returning to the land. Land taken from corporate landowners that have exploited and destroyed it for decades must be reallocated to farmworkers and governed in collective ownership. As a revival of the New Deal model of transforming former plantations to cooperatively-owned farms, corporate industrial farms will be transfigured into communal enterprises. Land ownership is power and land ownership provides freedom, so shifting control to those who have worked it will empower and transform the livelihoods of the masses in the Delta.

establishing a network of regenerative farms. Transitioning from the current industrially-powered monocultural farming practices to more sustainable, regenerative methods will require and benefit from the formation of a network of farms in collective ownership. Environmental health, social equality, and economic stability are the cornerstones of this network of regenerative farms. Knowledge and best practices of farming in a way that maximizes benefits and minimizes destruction will be passed throughout the system to the mutual prosperity of its members.

The evolution of the carceral system within the Delta serves as a stark example of how exploitative practices reinvest themselves over time. The colonization of Native American land provided the necessary space to engineer a plantation-driven economy, culture, and rule of law. Generations later, this has created a carceral economy that has harmed the livelihood and prosperity of millions of households within the Delta. The region’s over-dependence on correctional related jobs, bloated police budgets, and perpetually high incarceration rates are key to understanding why a final transition from mass incarceration to restorative justice is necessary for the Delta.

Following the abolition of slavery and immediate loss of labor, white powerbrokers conspired to establish the Convict Lease System: a deal in which wealthy landowners rented prisoners at extremely low wages to provide labor for their private development and farms. This program began in Louisiana in 1844 and remained a fixed feature of almost every southern economy and politic until the 1940’s.5 Despite widespread adoption, there was persistent condemnation ranging from literary observations like Mark Carlton’s The Politics of the Convict Lease System in Louisiana to grand jury reports in Mississippi which revealed disturbing details of hospitalized convicts whom were suffering starvation, disease, and brutality after working on farms and railroads. In fact, the report concluded that “God will never smile on a State that treats its convicts as Mississippi does.”

Addressing the first goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will reform and empower systems of resource redistribution and governance to link the local with the regional and national within a culture of respect, creativity and accountability.

Within the prison industrial complex, this looks like…

defunding and disbanding the police, and investing in communities. State and local budgets are increasingly drained by expansive police budgets that increase nearly every year. Within the 17 largest metro areas in the Delta, police budgets command an average 24% of general operating budgets reaching as high as 43% in the city of Carbondale, Illinois and a total of $824 million across these jurisdictions. This issue becomes increasingly apparent when considering that each state in the Delta spends a below average amount on education, most underinvest in health and hospital expenditures, and have six of our eight states have minimum wages equivalent to the federal minimum of $7.25/hour. Grassroots organizations like the Orleans Parish Prison Coalition Reform have advocated against increasing expenditures within the New Orleans carceral system by pressuring legislators to lower the personal jail cap, halt the construction of a prison addition, and find a permanent solution to treating the city’s mentally ill population. While the ultimate vision is to engineer the complete closure of American prisons facilities, organizations like OPPC provide a model for communities across the Delta to take incremental steps towards reducing prison capacity, police budgets, and the ability for legislators to street greater capital into the carceral system.

Addressing the second goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will center processes of care and repair that hold justice, healing and environmental regeneration as key guiding principles.

Within the prison industrial complex, this looks like…

decarceration. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the need for the traditional prison system in America by providing the resources and opportunities necessary to live a prosperous life. In pursuit of the vision towards abolition, there are opportunities to remodel our carceral facilities into sites that are conducive to rehabilitation rather than purely sources of punishment.

Citizens in New York City have already begun to envision the infrastructure necessary for a dramatic reduction in incarcerated persons through their advocacy for the closure of Rikers Island and the construction of smaller, more local prison facilities. In 2019, Mayor DeBlasio’s Office of Criminal Justice proposed that the “city jails population will fall to 3,3000 by 20206. Down from the more than 7,200 people incarcerated today.”6 Accompanying this reduction in the overall prison population would be the closure of Riker’s Island for the construction of new, local prisons in New York City. The closure of this infamous prison, improved location of inmates, and the opportunity to develop better facilities poses an attractive strategy to improve the conditions of prisoners in the short term. Sites like Angola and Parchman come to mind as potential examples where a similar strategy can be implemented. However, to achieve a reduction in the prison population, New York approved state-level bail reform, worked to increase the number of beds in hospitals for mental ill patients, and other measures to reduce the likelihood of individuals being introduced to the carceral system.

Addressing the third goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will incentivize and resource collective and collectivist ventures and organizing structures within a framework that safeguards the right to self-determination.

Within the prison industrial complex, this looks like…

moving from plantations to prisons to peace. For the past couple centuries, fertile Delta land has been captured by private and state entities as a tool to extract wealth, labor, and livelihood of individuals in the region. As a result, systems of power in the Delta have rarely aligned with the vision and well-being of its residents, nor have they had the opportunity to design a landscape that would suit current and future needs. In imagining an idealized world where places like Parchman Farm and Angola Farm are no longer critical infrastructures for the carceral system it is difficult to envision what to replace these sites. Similar to the toxic soil that taint an ecosystem for generations, the legacy of labor exploitation presents a stubborn fissure in dire need of collective remediation. Prior to the physical design process taking place, components of a just transition will require reconciliation, affirmative apologies on behalf of the state and the many participants that have enabled these institutions to operate in an extrajudicial manner from their inception.

Addressing the first goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will reform and empower systems of resource redistribution and governance to link the local with the regional and national within a culture of respect, creativity and accountability.

In the fossil fuel sector, this looks like…

reducing and ultimately ending subsidies and tax credits for fossil fuel exploration, processing, distribution and marketing. Fossil fuel companies receive $20 billion annually from state and federal governments, which encourages them to “drill, baby, drill” in ever riskier areas without fear of losing profit. This system of subsidies and lax enforcement is facilitated by the close relationship between fossil fuel companies and the politicians they support. According to Oil Change International, “in the 2015-2016 election cycle oil, gas, and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies in total over those same years - an 8,200% return on investment.” Louisiana alone has nine different subsidies for oil and gas, which combined removed $322 million annually from tax revenue. For comparison, the 2019 budget for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources was $60 million and the 2018 budget for the Department of Economic Development was $44 million.

Addressing the second goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will center processes of care and repair that hold justice, healing and environmental regeneration as key guiding principles.

In the fossil fuel sector, this looks like…

investing in physical and social health-supporting infrastructure. The health impacts of living in proximity to fossil fuel infrastructure will last in the bodies and psyches of residents for generations. Measures to address this trauma will need to be on terms set by residents, but will likely include free and accessible health care, improved water treatment, home retrofits to address respiratory health triggers as well as the full remediation of toxic soils.

Citizens in New York City have already begun to envision the infrastructure necessary for a dramatic reduction in incarcerated persons through their advocacy for the closure of Rikers Island and the construction of smaller, more local prison facilities. In 2019, Mayor DeBlasio’s Office of Criminal Justice proposed that the “city jails population will fall to 3,3000 by 20206. Down from the more than 7,200 people incarcerated today.”6 Accompanying this reduction in the overall prison population would be the closure of Riker’s Island for the construction of new, local prisons in New York City. The closure of this infamous prison, improved location of inmates, and the opportunity to develop better facilities poses an attractive strategy to improve the conditions of prisoners in the short term. Sites like Angola and Parchman come to mind as potential examples where a similar strategy can be implemented. However, to achieve a reduction in the prison population, New York approved state-level bail reform, worked to increase the number of beds in hospitals for mental ill patients, and other measures to reduce the likelihood of individuals being introduced to the carceral system.

Addressing the third goal in the Green New Deal for the Delta will incentivize and resource collective and collectivist ventures and organizing structures within a framework that safeguards the right to self-determination.

In the fossil fuel sector, this looks like…

transitioning fossil fuel workers to well-paid, unionized jobs in other sectors. There are upwards of 100,000 workers in the fossil fuel sector in the Delta. These residents of the Delta – like all their neighbors – deserve to count on good jobs. Given the future need for remediation and decommissioning at former sites of fossil fuel extraction, processing, storage and distribution, this transition to new jobs shouldn’t be hard, but will require intention and follow-through, as well as some re-training. One of the keys to this will be working with unions, one of the most important expressions collective will. As the Roosevelt Institute has proposed, sectoral bargaining could help achieve this at scale, rather than trying to implement job transitions site-by-site.