This commentary is by Andrés Oyaga of Middlebury, who is studying environmental justice, political ecology and agroecology at Middlebury College. He is associated with a student solidarity network focused on volunteering for Migrant Justice Vermont.
Middlebury College advertises itself as one of the most sustainable and environmentally conscious campuses in the United States, “leading on the crisis facing the planet” by divesting from fossil fuels (after years of student organizing and public embarrassment) and retaining Bill McKibben as a scholar-in-residence.
Recently, the Energy 2028 plan has taken center stage in Middlebury’s greenwashing campaign. Energy 2028 commits to phasing out fossil fuel use by 2028, transitioning to 100% renewable energy. This has led the college to shift towards renewable natural gas, claiming this will eliminate the use of fossil fuels.
That natural gas comes from an anaerobic digester that officially opened in the summer of 2021 at Goodrich Family Farm, located about 10 miles from the college campus. Middlebury College has signed a 20-year contract to purchase 55% of the gas produced annually from Goodrich, supplying one-third of the energy needed for heating and cooling.
Unfortunately, as Middlebury students have already written, wage theft and farmworker abuses have taken place at the college-partnered farm. Migrant Justice has outlined the violent confrontations that farmworkers endured while trying to obtain withheld wages, which was not an isolated incident.
When Middlebury College refuses to leverage its power and address labor abuses like these, it is capitalizing on the structural vulnerabilities faced by our farmworker neighbors. As quoted in Life on the Other Border by Teresa Mares, former Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin said of undocumented workers in Vermont: “We have always had a policy in Vermont where we kind of look the other way as much as we can.”
Mares shows how ignoring farmworker rights reinforces inhumane conditions that keep migrant farmworkers invisible, their laboring bodies “out of mind” to be perpetually exploited. Looking the other way is all too convenient for the college’s “clean” energy objectives.
Middlebury students are currently advocating for labor standards and human rights as an essential aspect of the college’s contract with Goodrich. However, college officials still question if the “allegations” are true even when the Goodrich family admitted to handling the situation poorly and official Department of Labor complaints. Instead of implementing worker-driven programs in collaboration with Migrant Justice, the college proposes paternalistic solutions that reflect white-saviorism much more than environmentalism.
This is particularly galling, given the Environmental Studies and Environmental Affairs statement in support of BLM: “We will examine … how we allocate our resources in order to re-imagine and, where necessary, replace them with anti-racist policies and practices… We stand with those demanding national, structural change, which must include our own Middlebury.”
Funneling resources into a committed collaboration with Migrant Justice to make labor standards a priority would be actual anti-racism.
Additionally, despite purportedly “divesting” from fossil fuels, Middlebury College continues to partner with the industry through projects like the digester, which prop up larger predatory projects. Since the college needed a pipeline extension between Goodrich and the college to access unethically sourced energy from the biodigester, it has been a strong supporter of the larger Addison Natural Gas Project (or “Vermont Gas Pipeline”) which feeds it. The Vermont pipeline connects the TransCanada Mainline to Vermont, ensnaring our state into a relationship with a fossil fuel giant. You may have heard of TransCanada in the past through its defunct Keystone XL Pipeline Project, which leaked thousands of gallons of fracked oil into wetlands and violated the Lakota Nation’s sovereignty over sacred lands.
Additionally, the Canadian fossil fuel giant, Enbridge, has a controlling share over Vermont Gas and can thus influence what projects are undertaken by the utility. This is concerning since Enbridge is responsible for constructing the Line 3 Pipeline, again violating treaty rights of the Anishinaabeg people and the culprit for one of the largest inland oil spills in history.
One obvious question arises for Middlebury College: Can it really claim to be a leader in sustainability when it chooses not to cut ties with fossil fuel giants?
This web of connections from a supposedly “clean” source of energy all the way to the dirtiest and most degrading energy projects in North America is evidence of Middlebury’s shameless corporatism, which buries the human and environmental costs of its business practices.
Middlebury is but one example of an important contradiction between “local sourcing” and “sustainability” promises and broader systems of environmental destruction and social injustice. Self-proclaimed “progressive” institutions around the globe successfully widen the distance between their energy consumption practices and the violence it sustains against oppressed people, making many of us think we are far away from the destructive sacrifice zones caused by fossil fuel extraction.
We can no longer ignore the blood in the energy our institutions use. This is an invitation to question the organizations and institutions we are a part of, and organize for a just energy transition that doesn’t wage perpetual war against racialized and colonized bodies. We must disentangle the web of contradictions that make greenwashing possible.
The next step is to go beyond performative allyship and become active participants with the people on the front lines resisting human rights abuses that are traced back to institutions we are a part of.
