Salmon are a keystone species, essential to ecological flourishing, but they’re also at the core of indigenous identity—diets, ceremonial life, and leisure. When dams inhibit nutrient flows, raise the temperature of water, and block upstream salmon habitats, it is therefore an issue of sovereignty.

Native Americans (from @yuroktribe.bsky.social and others) have fought for decades to restore the Klamath River which runs from Oregon through California to the Pacific. Central to this are salmon which used to be bountiful and are now threatened with extinction.

In the 20th C, humans built a large dam a day. Some are controversial; some are charismatic mega-infrastructure. Many are relatively small.

But damming a river is always a partisan act. What dams offer in electricity, irrigation, or flood control comes with displacement and ecological costs.

Smugglers refused the borders and predations imposed by states. But they also impeded more beneficent efforts to navigate a volatile and unequal world system.

It also discusses the rise of smuggling economies, as well as other activities like 'hoarding' and counterfeiting that were criminalized by states desperate to control how value circulated.

Central to this was what I call "the moneychanger state," through which governments controlled the conversion between 'soft' domestic currencies and 'hard' foreign currencies.

Controlling different types of money produced hierarchies and authority.

it's here!

Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa

my book has arrived.

a brief 🧵