The Kalamazoo River, polluted with stormwater runoff from the slated Ford BlueOval MAJOR megasite in Marshall, Michigan, July 2024. Image taken by the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi.

The “Green” Industrial Buildout is Corporate Colonialism

marjorie steele
8 min readOct 25, 2024

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In March of 2023, I was recovering from burnout and keeping chickens in the country, when I learned that an EV battery factory was slated to be built by a company named Gotion a few miles from my house.

More specifically: the house my father built, on land purchased by my grandparents in the 1970s, which my mother loves. A house and land that my peers could never dream of owning on their own, barring generational wealth. A home that I, myself, could never afford to replace.

Far more irreplaceable than the house is the land itself. A ravine runs through our 35 acres which spared a narrow section of old growth forest from the clear cutting of Michigan’s logging days, over a century ago. It’s brimming with rare native ecologies, as are the wild apple orchards around it, and the adjacent field is rich with wildlife. I grew up helping my father make maple syrup every spring in his 40 gallon wood-fueled evaporator; it’s a practice I picked up after his death, and which I’ve continued each spring since, like a meditation. On the woods. On my father. On the Anishinaabe who made sugar on this land before my family was here.

It is, in short, a very sacred place, to me. My grandmother, Marjorie, loved it. My father loved it. And I love it.

Four years ago, we had to re-drill our family’s well. The original well my father dug 40 years ago was 90 feet. When we re-dug, it was 190 feet.

It’s probably relevant to mention that Nestle’s Ice Mountain water bottling plant–the one that got some national attention a decade ago–is in a town less than 30 miles away.

Gotion proposed to take 715,000 gallons of water per day, which is more than double what Nestle is taking right now. A potash mine in Evart, a 25 minute drive north, named Michigan Potash Company has a permit from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) to withdraw up to two million gallons of water per day, and they’re slated to begin doing so within the next year.

So you can understand my alarm, when I learned about the EV battery plant last March. It wasn’t a hypothetical concern; it was a very concrete and practical concern about my family’s ability to rely on local aquifers for our water. And concern for the desertification of my beloved forest, and the ecologies around us.

This, my neighbors, is what led me down the rabbit hole of learning what so-called “green” industrial energy developments are doing not just to my local community, but to Michigan, the US, and the entire world at large. Most often, as is the colonialist pattern, in communities that lack wealth and social status.

It was a bleak, terrifying picture. May my readers forgive the tired reference: I can’t blame people for not wanting to take the red pill. When it comes to the reality of what energy lobbyists and their captured policymakers have labeled “renewable” energy, ignorance is bliss. From their supply chains to their waste stream, industrial solar, wind, electric vehicles, semiconductor manufacturing, and their associated grid buildouts are toxic, desertifying, and slated to turn the world’s last green paradises into wastelands.

You cannot imagine how much water these projects consume. It boggles the mind. In one township on the east side of Michigan, state economic developers are trying to build a semiconductor plant that could take up to 54 million gallons of water per day.

From just one plant. They want to build these semiconductor, EV, and mineral mines all over Michigan. And the southeast. And the southwest. And the northwest.

Environmental impact studies (EIS) are not being performed. Local stakeholder feedback is not being collected, and the groundswell of resident protests are being ignored and actively suppressed. Wetlands and prime farmland are being bulldozed, and rural communities are being sold to foreign investors at an alarming rate.

If all this isn’t bad enough, these projects are all being subsidized by American taxpayers, at a federal level, at a state level, or both. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation and Michigan’s legislators have handed out billions in taxpayer subsidies for these projects, even as local residents cry out and beg them to stop, month after month.

US federal land managers have decided to open up 32 million acres of public land for solar field development. 32 million acres. And don’t even get me started with the insect populations and agrivoltaics–they’re not doing agrivoltaics. These profit-driven energy developers are taking millions in federal and state funding, and they’re dumping gravel onto farmland, or they’re just digging up the land and letting sediment and water flood the area.

You know that “what I ordered on Wish vs what I got” meme? Well, picture happy sheep grazing around pristine solar panels and buzzing bees as what we’re being sold, and rivers of sediment-laden water flooding your basement and washing away local farmland as what we’re actually getting.

And we haven’t even talked about the impacts of exponentially increasing lithium, cobalt, manganese, tellurium, and rare earth element mining, nor have we addressed the short lifespan and low recyclability of wind, solar, and EV products. Policymakers, energy lobbyists, and the media have been myopically focused on the “clean” energy production of wind, solar, and EV because they don’t emit atmospheric carbon when they’re producing energy.

What all the adults in the room seem to have missed is that manufacturing these products emits massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, and they consume vast amounts of water which has already desertified and toxified entire regions. These development projects are primarily targeting greenfield sites–i.e. undeveloped habitats with carbon-rich soil. The loss of carbon storage in woodlands, grasslands, and wetlands is not being accounted for in the “renewable” energy equation, despite the emerging science on biotic pump theory and these ecosystems’ and the soil’s role in managing global climate cycles of wind and rain.

The “green” technological revolution is a lie. There is nothing “clean” about this technology, and its manufacturing and supply chain. Not even compared to fossil fuels. No amount of Peter Pan accounting can change that reality. Two wrongs do not equal a right.

And the plain fact of the matter that everyone seems to be ignoring is that there can be no possible justification for the widespread destruction of drinking aquifers, watersheds, carbon-storing wetlands, woodlands, farmland, habitat, and the self-determination and self-sustainability of the residents of this rural land.

You don’t bulldoze the wetlands to save the planet. You don’t destroy the water and earth to save the air. You don’t destroy people’s tie to the land in order to save them.

It doesn’t make any damn sense.

When you’re close to these developments, it’s really hard to stay unemotional about the reality they represent. As you can already see: just describing the details makes me sound like a nutter.

But I’ve seen what Gotion has proposed for my community. I’ve seen the literally unbelievable lack of due diligence that’s gone into the project on all fronts, and the openly hostile way the company’s representative and profiteering local officials have behaved towards us residents. The way our taxpayer rights are being systematically stripped of us, and our right to local self-determination sacrificed on an ever-hungry altar of “the Greater Good”. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s been like war has been waged. Against the Shire. We Michiganders and hobbits do share a lot in common, for good and bad.

I’ve also seen the same pattern playing out in communities across Michigan, Georgia, Illinois, Tennessee, Oregon, Arizona, and abroad in Turkey, the Congo, Argentina–the list goes on and on. Here in Michigan, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the grassroots leaders in communities across the state, and while we don’t all share the same political views or religion, we share a love for our water, our ecologies, and our rights to self determination. And they’re some of the hardest working, most critically thinking, capable people I’ve ever met.

Over the last 18 months, I’ve heard what green technology advocates have to say about we local residents fighting the industrial “green transition”. The points always boil down to these four: 1) we’re ignorant, 2) we’re misinformed, 3) we’re captured, and 4) we’re from outside the local community.

Point 3 accurately identifies the political profiteering which some of these megasite communities have attracted–which has been a very real factor. But what it misses is that astroturf (that is, fake grassroots) can’t happen in a vacuum; in order to capture a movement, you must first have a real, genuine grassroots movement.

As to point #4, the only thing coming in from outside any of these communities is money. This accusation is particularly ironic, considering the economic developers and their lobbying partners pushing these projects are not local stakeholders, and they’re marketing and selling rural land to international corporations.

But it’s the first two points that indicate what I think is really happening here.

We locals who are fighting against these destructive heavy industrial developments are doing so because we are ignorant, and misinformed.

Is it ignorant, to be concerned about one’s family well water?

Is it ignorant, to be concerned about light pollution clouding your family’s view of the Milky Way and disorienting the flocks of migratory birds which pass above each spring and fall?

Is it misinformed, to hear farmers’ firsthand tales of the nightmare of trying to grow crops within the light disturbance radius of a wind turbine?

Is it misinformed, to read what the EPA and OSHA have to say about the forever chemicals in EV battery and semiconductor manufacturing wastewater discharge?

Is it ignorant, to love my forest and my family more than I love an abstract technological Utopia painted by lobbyists and policymakers?

What these accusations are actually saying is that our views and our connection to the land don’t matter. Because we agricultural rural folk don’t produce a lot of what policymakers and lobbyists care about the most: money. And because they believe their priorities are superior to ours.

Like indigenous populations that have come before us for millennia, we rural Americans produce little wealth for the bourgeoisie because we value our self-determination and our connection to the land. And, as has happened countless times before, at some point, the bourgeoisie decides that the land we occupy is too valuable to be held by ignorant indigenous communities, and will be better managed by industrialists.

In the 1970s, Native American poet John Trudell told people that the new colonization was at hand, except that this time it wasn’t the cavalry; it was bankers, and instead of driving out the Indians, they were driving out the farmers.

What Trudell saw five decades ago is in full effect now. Multigenerational farmers are being forced to decide whether to lease their land to solar companies or to face another ten years of an ever more competitive commodities market. Folks who have lived in the area for more than seven generations have had their land increasingly divided by freeway development, industrialization, and outsourced agricultural production.

And the solution we’re now being given is toxic factories and lithium mines. Low-wage, third shift factory jobs are not what our grandparents dreamed of for their great-grandchildren. We Hobbits do not want to spend all day working in factories while our gardens go dry. We do not want to be separated from the land.

There are solutions to the ecological and climate crises this planet is facing. But those solutions do not lie in perpetuating systems of violence against the Earth and her inhabitants. They lie in listening to her indigenous populations–her most qualified stewards.

The science has become quite conclusive. If we remove the blinders of limitless growth, and instead acknowledge the closed-loop cycles of nature’s ecologies, the clear solution to both planetary and human health is soil-restoring regenerative agriculture.

You can’t drink energy. You can’t eat batteries.

This essay originally appeared on edraofmi.org.

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marjorie steele
marjorie steele

Written by marjorie steele

poet, educator, hillbilly gnostic pagan. teaching business to designers.

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