Green Colonialism Is Still Colonialism

How Tech Utopians Are Rebranding Empire—And Who’s Standing in the Way

(A short rant inspired by Gavin Mounsey’s report on Sámi land defenders)

Let’s stop pretending.

Stop pretending that mining lithium is going to save the planet. Stop pretending wind farms built on stolen land are "clean." Stop pretending data centers sucking rivers dry and grinding reindeer migration routes into concrete are “sustainable development.”

I just read

Gavin Mounsey

’s breakdown of what’s going down in Sápmi—ancestral Sámi land—and let me be absolutely clear:

This isn’t a climate solution. It’s war.

Geoengineering the sky? That’s not science—it’s sacrilege. Blasting mountains for “critical minerals”? That’s not a green transition—it’s techno-feudalism with a nice UX. Turning wilderness into sacrifice zones for your smart cars and your cloud storage is still colonization, even if the ad campaign features wind turbines and a recycled logo.

Let me break it down for the folks in the back:
You cannot extract your way to harmony.
You cannot innovate your way out of a death cult.

Civilization didn’t become a predator just because it had a bad century. It was built on extraction, and its only growth strategy is more: more land, more labor, more control, more silence. What the Sámi are facing is the latest mutation of empire—a "green" empire, sure—but it’s still empire. Just with better branding.

And yet—the Sámi are resisting.

Not with tweets. Not with thinkpieces. With presence. With refusal. With land and language and reindeer and memory. They stopped a Gates-funded geoengineering experiment. They’re saying no to mines, no to wind farms, no to billionaires making planetary decisions without even asking the people who actually live on the land.

Do you understand what that means?

It means there are still people who haven’t forgotten how to say enough. Still people who know that when your land is under attack, your duty is to fight—whether with lawsuits or blockades, with storytelling or sabotage.

And here's the kicker—they’re right.
They’re not extremists. They’re the only ones thinking clearly.

If you’re still romanticizing clean tech while ignoring who bleeds for your batteries, you’re not progressive—you’re complicit. You want real sustainability? Start by listening to the people who’ve been sustainable for 10,000 years. Start by standing between what’s sacred and the machines that want to grind it into rare earth dust.

The Sámi are showing us the way. Not back in time, but forward—toward sanity. Toward sovereignty. Toward resistance with teeth.

And if that makes you uncomfortable?

Good.

That discomfort is the first crack in the story you’ve been sold. The one that says we can consume our way to freedom. That there’s a clean way to keep the machine running. There isn’t.

The Sámi aren’t just protecting reindeer. They’re protecting the possibility of living in a world not based on domination. And if we don’t have their backs, we’re not just letting them down—we’re writing our own extinction in real-time.

So if you feel that fire in your gut, that flicker of “hell no,” don’t stuff it down.

Fan it. Feed it. Act on it.