💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › seaweed-riotous-ecology.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:09:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Riotous Ecology
Author: Seaweed
Date: June 5, 2020
Language: en
Topics: ecology, riots, green anarchism
Source: https://anarchysecessionsubsistence.blogspot.com/2020/06/riotous-ecology-fires-either.html

Seaweed

Riotous Ecology

Fires, either intentional or from lightning, have been a component of

many ecosystems for millennia. We know that prior to colonization on

Turtle Island, controlled fires were used by many indigenous peoples to

alter their habitats in favourable ways. It helped facilitate travel by

eliminating thick underbrush, increased the numbers of game animals and

helped nut trees be more productive, among many benefits. It was a

subsistence tactic that had been honed for generations.

To the outsider arriving from dense, sedentary Europe, most of what we

call North America appeared as pristine wilderness, large tracts of

untouched or barely touched land. In reality the whole continent was, in

a way, a vast permaculture complex consisting of an incredible number of

variegated habitats maintained through a variety of practices, including

controlled fire, which, on a very large scale, was also instrumental in

helping set and maintain the boundaries between prairie grasslands and

forests.

All life forms need habitats, but cities are not habitats. Beneath the

pave is the forest floor, the potential garden, the smothered berry

patch, the drained estuary, the buried salmon bearing creek. A city is

not merely a different habitat form, a giant efficient nest. It is not

the loci of everything advanced and complex and progressive of the human

story, of freedom, creativity and self-consciousness. It is the elite’s

lair, a place of dispossessed captives, where repressive apparatuses are

ubiquitous, beginning with the town clock which helped ensure that the

activities of potentially self-organized, self-directed and freely

self-creating individuals are synchronized in the interest of the elite,

of economic and political efficiency.

Imagine living in a hell world where you can’t eat when you are hungry,

nap when you are sleepy, drink when you are thirsty, relieve yourself

when you need to, because an instrument is what dictates when you are

allowed to fulfill these basic animal needs. That is urban-capitalist

civilization- millions of people jarred out of their rest and dreams by

an alarm and then all synchronized to follow the same daily patterns so

that economics can prevail over individual bodies and their processes

and desires.

The insurrectionary arsonist who burns down not only the bank, the

corporate headquarters or the police station, but random buildings,

becomes, as that primal and deeply honest gesture unfolds and manifests,

both an ecological and a spiritual person. It is a communitarian act in

so far as it stands up against Power and injustice and in defence of

their kin and neighbours. It is an unmasking act as it tears away the

veil that camouflages the monstrous social order that is behind

centuries of elitism, injustice and violence.

We need to reject, renaturalize or destroy the city, the central site of

authoritarian control and the ideology that prioritizes property over

life, hoarded wealth of the few over communities based on sharing, of

obedient and weak captives over self-assured and strong individuals.

There is no future if we don’t stop adapting to capitalism and start

adapting to nature. And every molotov thrown has a message inside the

bottle that reads: “ I am sick of adapting to capitalism, of adapting to

a world of bosses and landlords and elites, of supremacist thinking, of

pavement and concrete and vistas denuded of life.” Sure it might not

explicitly state that the preference is to adapt to nature, but if all

coercion is removed, don’t we end up living closer to the way we’ve

evolved, closer to nature?

And so I make this connection between ecology and riots, between making

space for healing and regeneration and the arson of the present

insurrection.

Make no mistake about it, I know that this uprising was instigated by

black people responding to a world that has been violently anti-black

for 400 years. I don’t want to twist that truth to fit a personal

outlook, thereby erasing collective black suffering and agency. It isn’t

to claim that this insurrection is actually located within an ecological

impetus. It is to note that we are always ecological beings and as such

when we revolt we also do so against our conditions as potentially free

beings living in healthy habitats who are presently captives in the

giant work camps and prisons which are cities, many of us, especially

POC, literally in cages.

When you want to build a dojo or a shelter, or to plant squash or corn,

when you want to build a communal storehouse for preserves or an arsenal

for your clan, you need to clear an area. Be it a seasonal campsite for

subsistence practices or for a more sedentary eco-village, we need to

make space. Destroying urban property while rioting is the same urge. It

is both an act against and one for. How else to set our imaginations

free, to visualize not anything specific, but to envision Possibility?

If the terrain is completely occupied by the designs and interests of a

select few and has been for a long time, then space must be cleared, and

probably in a frenzy of resentment. Regeneration is impossible without

death. Fires have been used to clear areas for food production, to make

travelling easier and for other subsistence practices. I believe that

riotous arson can be seen through this lens as well. What better way to

confront our alienation as dispossessed captives, as living beings

without freedom or habitats, than to burn down not only the guard towers

and prisons, but everything in the way of sustainable food production,

local potable water, a returning woodland for birds, etc?

Capitalism prioritizes commodities and private property over life.

Ecology is prioritizing reciprocity and life over private property and

commodities, therefore looting is taking action against a system that

erases life and for a system that prioritizes it. Riotous looting is a

way of transferring wealth. A way of immediately using things which are

on their way to the landfill anyway. A healthy community would only

produce for need or for pleasure and everything within it would be

freely shared, so looting commodified objects is really just direct

action against capitalism.

Vandana Shiva said that as capital grows nature shrinks. So in that

sense decommodifying is an ecological act…because the opposite is also

true. As capital shrinks nature heals. So in fact the more arson and

looting, the more refusal — to work, to accept normative ideas, to live

in the desolate, concrete lairs of trade and political authority, the

better chance nature, which includes us of course, has a chance to heal

and regenerate.

Cities rest on a set of violent arrangements — landlord/tenant,

rich/poor, police/citizen, included/excluded, etc. Within them nature

has been violently destroyed. The automobile dominates all design

imperatives. It’s inhabitants are alienated, atomized, ghettoized, with

the vast majority seemingly sick with Stockholm Syndrome, giving and

taking orders, obediently spending their lives producing and consuming.

Complex and healthy eco-systems that can support large numbers of life

forms are destroyed by cities, so destroying cities, and the bourgeois

and racist myths of progress that support and justify them, is an act on

the side of nature, of the primal, of the urge for self-preservation.

Riots can pull back the veil and help put on display the violent glue

that holds the city form together as well as the results of such

(coerced) social arrangements: police, laws, hierarchy, political power,

racism, surveillance systems, military-industrial logic, poverty, mental

illness, destroyed eco-systems...not to mention that virtually every

city was once the home of anarchic people because they had the

ecological wisdom to make intelligent decisions about where their

settlements should be located. Toronto, Manhattan, Ottawa, San

Francisco...I saw a photograph of downtown Vancouver Canada that was

taken in the early 1900s. It was still an old growth forest and Salish

people were still trying to hold onto their territory. I believe that

decolonization means not thinking differently, but living differently.

Cities — and the ideological foundations they rest on, are to anarchic

impulses what heteronormativity is to queer liberation. Just as we are

taught by the school system, popular culture, by Power and Official

History, that heterosexual relationships are normal and necessary and

that anything outside that belief system is suspect, perverted, hostile,

threatening to societal stability, we are also taught that cities, from

ancient Babylon, to Athens to New York, are the apex of human

achievement, the centers of Progress and enlightenment, a step ahead of

the ‘savagery’ of traditional indigenous life ways, of hunter gatherers,

of nomads and experimenters and village dwellers.

It makes sense to want to destroy what is ugly when the potential for

the beauty of nature to manifest is a memory in all of our bodies and

psyches. I don’t want cities, I want Wild-Life habitats for me and my

kin.

We should hope that the tiger can escape its cage and celebrate when it

does.

We need an era of greater and greater fire frequency.