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Title: Black Seed: Issue 4
Author: Various Authors
Date: Winter 2015
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, Black Seed, Black Seed #4, green anarchism, the end of the world, animism
Source: OCR'd via PDF
Notes: https://blackseed.anarchyplanet.org / Editors: Aragorn!, Ceder Leighlais, Peitje, Scéalaí, Zdereva Iwaryn / Photography: Folkert Gorter, Watercolors: Eloise, Linolium Print: Pietje, Centerfold Poster: Ben / This issue of Black Seed was designed in Austin, TX

Various Authors

Black Seed: Issue 4

Is the End of the World Upon Us?

There are plenty of signs that would lead us to believe that this is the

case. In this issue we focus on natural catastrophies, both the

incredibly dangerous ways they're minimized by government agencies and

popular media, as well as our total lack of collective responsibility,

demonstrated by our increasing consumption of finite resources. Our

world has gone mad with profit-for-the- very-few and the political and

social con- sequences of a world with as great a gap in income levels as

there has ever been are dangerous. How will the next economic crash look

compared to the 1930s? Will it take another war to end the next one? Can

we survive such a war? Finally, is the end of the world visible in how

we allow our- selves to be treated by the State? If Black Lives Matter

has taught us anything it is that the human capacity to objectify and

destroy other humans is as high today as it has ever been and that the

rhetoric is even more sophisticated (and not) and even less forgiving.

If the end of the world is a measurable event there is plenty of

evidence that the meter for it is at a near high.

But if we were to predict what is going to happen we would not predict a

technicolor, end-of-the-action-movie, discrete end of the world in our

lifetime. What we would predict is instead something of a whimper. We

would argue that the end of human progress looks like a thousand Space X

capsules failing to make orbit, islands in South Asia disappearing, and

the infamous air pollution in Bejing. The headlines will continue to

scream about the end of the idea that humans are capable of thinking and

acting in big and successful ways about our own possibilities. We will

slowly starve.

The end of the world—just like ideas of human perfectibility or our

progressive future of reasonable solutions to logistical problems—should

be seen for what it is: a construction of the amazing myth machine of

the particular society that we live in. Our four horsemen will not come

with scythe, sword, arrow, and scale. They will just come with less:

less resources, less political stability, and less capacity to see a way

out. This is because ultimately what we call the end of the world will

merely be the end of this particular humanist society, the end of a

Western Civilization that spans the globe, the end of Global Capitalism™

as we know it. It may be the end of neo-Rome but it isn't the end of us.

The problem we face is: who are we without the world as we understand

it? Are we preppers whose future vision is limited to fences and feeding

our (homogenous) children? Are we parochial victims of future strongmen

as prefigured in so many movies and books? Or are we something else?

If rewilding has been worth anything in green anarchist thought and

practice it's been engaging as an intervention into this question. But

along with gaining skills we also need to seriously reassess how we

associate with one another. Perhaps it is too late for city dwellers,

who appear to be no longer capable of caring for one another even in

today's world. We have plenty of examples of what co-existence can look

like, what forms cooperation and mutual aid have taken, but we

experience its impossibility in our daily lives. Perhaps the lesson we

should draw from the upcoming Great Whimper is that we have serious work

to do regarding the depth and sincerity of our interpersonal

relationships. Other people may not save us but they do sometimes make

surviving on less seem like thriving on more, a lesson that becomes more

and more obviously necessary, as we have experienced excess and it has

turned out to be less desirable than we could have imagined.

What’s in this issue?

This issue of Black Seed meets the crisp air of Fall with open arms.

Each Summer seems to drag on longer and longer and our hunger for the

Winter becomes increasingly desperate, but enough about romance. There

was a thought that the theme of this issue would be the end of the

world. There has been enough evidence that it (The End of the World) is

upon us, or at least there was three months ago, but today we have

terror in our headlines and not the orange river in Colorado.

This issue (and the centerfold) has an interest in end of the world

thinking (why it is and is not our thinking) but it also considers a few

other things like animism and the anthropocene, liminal identities and

the failure of the new Bookchinism, and the pleasure of text, trees,

bears, and crows. So not the end of the world in fact, but maybe the

endtime of this civilization. And instead of a concern with how to

manage the transition to a new world (i.e. civilization) a concern with

crows and other natural survivors of the annihilation-machines of this

order.

This issue does seem to demonstrate that our capacity to publish this

paper may be more ephemeral than we had originally anticipated but for

now we still plan on publishing twice a year; it's just unclear whether

it'll be a Spring/Fall schedule or a Summer/Winter schedule. We have

decided to commit to subscriptions at $12/4 issues (or $6/year) and

it'll include shipping and whatnot. Or you can become a special Black

Seed LBC accomplice and get a book a month in addition to a bundle of

each new Black Seed.

We continue to be excited about the potential for this project, the

space for conversations that have never happened before (or at least not

on as large a stage), specifically native and anarchist tendencies

meeting and diverging, and the needed challenge to the self-satisfied

and ideological green thinkers currently best known in the US. We look

forward to your feedback and thoughts!

— The Editors

Anarchy on the Scorched Earth, by Balora

“Social disruption and economic consequences of such a large sea-level

rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts

arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the

planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."

— Eric Rignot

Climate Scientist at NASA

“Its no longer us against ‘Nature.’ Instead, it's we who decide what

nature is and what it will be.”

— Paul Crutzen

There is a famous story that after the Trinity test in 1945, a quote

from the Bhagavad-Gita came to Oppenheimer: “Now I am become DEATH, the

destroyer of worlds." There is another translation of this line that

some claim is more accurate: “I am become TIME, the destroyer of

worlds." Of course, the discovery and use of the atom bomb was not the

first time an event has pushed apocalyptical language into popular

discourse, but the devastation wrought to Hiroshima and Nagasaki

reignited the understandable belief that the end times were at hand.

Eschatology has never simply been a fringe interest for theologists, it

would be a mistake to marginalize what has also been a secular concern.

In this society rationality is prized above all else, and holy people of

past ages would now be diagnosed with any number of psychological

disorders, but perhaps the secular and the religious views of humanity’s

role on this earth are not as distant from each other as they first

might seem. Signs of the end times are no longer hidden knowledge.

Anybody is a click away from seeing these portents. No one ideology or

world view has ever owned end-times discourse. Paul Boyer in When Time

Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture observes

that apocalyptic thought is “chameleon-like," used by both the

subjugated and the powerful, secular and religious alike. Past the

sensational headlines though, the stories are transformed into

statistics and numbers that only the experts can decipher.

Never before have debates between scientists who study rock layers

garnered so much attention, all due to a theory that we are living in a

new epoch that stratigraphers are calling the Anthropocene. Coined by

Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul

Crutzen in a 2002 article Geology of Mankind, the Anthropocene (The Age

of Man) differs from every other marked epoch in that humans themselves

are the geologic force shaping the planet. In a relatively short amount

of time, we have shaped the earth as much as supervolcano eruptions and

meteors have in the past. This has been a controversial theory in

scientific circles, but there is simply too much evidence to ignore the

reality that homo sapiens have dramatically and permanently altered the

earth. Geologists aren't the only ones interested in studying and

debating the Anthropocene. It has now become part of the lexicon of many

diverse areas of study. Everything from economics to gender studies has

been touched by this theory and it has been highly influential in a

diverse variety of academic disciplines including human-animal studies,

philosophy, and history.

Despite the sudden proliferation of the new term in respected academic

journals, which has led some to call the theory a “fad, a farce, or a

hoax," this is not at all a new idea. In 1873 Antonio Stoppani, an

Italian Catholic priest and geologist, wrote “I do not hesitate in

proclaiming the Anthropozoic era. The creation of man constitutes the

introduction into nature of a new element with a strength by no means

known to ancient worlds. And mind this, that I am talking about physical

worlds . . . this creature, absolutely new in itself, is, to the

physical world, a new element, a new telluric force that for its

strength and universality does not pale in the face of the greatest

forces of the globe." Stoppani's theory, ahead of its time, was

considered unscientific, just as similar theories are derided today.

Descriptions of the human impact on earth are awe-inspiring: ‘A single

engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands,

involves moving 30 billion tonnes of earth—twice the amount of sediment

that flows down all the rivers in the world in a year. That sediment

flow itself, meanwhile, is shrinking; almost 50,000 large dams have over

the past half- century cut the flow by nearly a fifth. That is one

reason why the Earth's deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people,

are eroding away faster than they can be replenished." Its not hard to

imagine that this single example of human impact alone is causing

irreversible changes that will prove to be detrimental to the

continuation of civilization, creating a world that we cannot foresee.

Unlike cataclysms of the Zoo wants to build a “frozen zoo" where genetic

material taken from extinct animals is used to bring them back from the

dead. The last of the White Rhinos, surrounded 24 hours a day by armed

guards, will be witnessed through virtual reality. Perhaps one day after

our own extinction cryogenically frozen homo sapiens will be revived and

be the main attraction in a future zoo.

Most people, even the scientists who feel there is no doubt that

humankind is looking down the barrel of a cannon, watching the fuse grow

shorter, continue to be optimistic about their new world. Environmental

journalist Christian Schwagerl believes children should learn about the

Anthropocene for practical reasons: “Students in school are still taught

that we are living in the Holocene, an era that began roughly 12,000

years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. But teaching students that we

are living in the Anthropocene, the Age of Men, could be of great help.

Rather than representing yet another sign of human hubris, this name

change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as

stewards of the past, there will not be a single “collapse" or

catastrophe, and in a way this leads people into a false sense of

security, that the banal statistics will be the key to humanity's

salvation. We are no longer waiting for Christ, we are waiting for the

experts to save us. As long as there are still people with air

conditioning, and all the other luxuries civilization affords them,

there will always be more time to make their society “sustainable."

Meanwhile heatwaves are getting hotter and more frequent and islands are

being slowly swallowed by oceans.

Due to what Crutzen and other environmental scientists have termed the

“Great Acceleration," a second stage of the Anthropocene that begins

after 1945, we are also currently living in the sixth extinction. Much

of the debate about the Anthropocene in environmental circles involves

conservation. People want to conserve, they want to keep nature around

for their own entertainment, or to keep exploiting its resources. They

can't stand to think of a world without the polar bear or the orangutan.

Yet, even more they cannot stand more the thought of existing in an

uncivilized state. They want to watch the Gorilla, not be the Gorilla.

San Diego Earth. It would highlight the immense power of our intellect

and our creativity, and the opportunities they offer for shaping the

future." This is secular society's reworking of the Christian ideal of

dominion.

“This is a solvable problem—if we start now.”

— President Obama

“Time doesn't mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at

your door.”

— Peter Dutton

Australian Immigration Minister

In anticipation of the UN Climate Change Conference hosted in Paris this

November, on August 31st, Obama began a tour of Alaska to ostensibly

bring attention to the dramatic environmental changes happening in the

Arctic state. In reality, it was a promotion for the tourism industry.

As the glaciers recede, so will the cruise ships full of tourists paying

good money to line up on deck to get an instagram-worthy shot of the

magnificent icebergs. Before leaving for his vacation (which included

personal survival lessons from none other than Bear Grylls—no word yet

on whether he had to drink his own piss), Obama made sure to sign over

the final permits Shell needed for oil exploration in the Arctic. Like

so many others, Obama continues to act as though the economy can

continue to grow even as climate change is mitigated. Rather than seeing

the glaciers melting as a sign marking the end, entrepreneurs and

businesses around the world see unprecedented opportunities for

expanding their bank accounts. Even before the President finished his

tour of the imperiled state, he proposed the building of more Coast

Guard icebreakers. “The retreat of Arctic sea ice has created

opportunities for shipping, tourism, mineral exploration, and fishing. .

. . The growth of human activity in the Arctic region will require

highly-engaged stewardship to maintain the open seas necessary for

global commerce and scientific research, allow for search-and-rescue

activities, and provide for regional peace and stability."

As it stands, there are many problems with the Anthropocene discourse,

but there is still something there that is well worth anarchists’ time.

Those on the official Left are already engaged with the topic and

creating their own narrative that merely continues the same line of

thinking that got us to where we are now. Some believe the Anthropocene

is a myth, and that it is not humanity that is impacting the earth, the

only culprit is capitalism. “Socialists cannot ignore a change of this

magnitude, or treat it as just one aspect of our program The fight to

avoid a catastrophic outcome to this crisis engendered by capitalism is

the fight to safeguard the material conditions for survival with dignity

of humankind. . . . Socialism is not possible on a scorched earth."

Unlike socialism, anarchy is possible on a scorched earth. Anarchy

doesn’t rely on exploited resources or the I management and control of

society. If we can cultivate imaginations that extend beyond rewilding

and social and climate justice, anarchy can and will survive the worst

calamities. As the author Roy Scranton points out in Learning How to Die

in the Anthropocene, “The biggest problem we face is a philosophical

one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we

confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can

do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of

adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. . . .

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be

just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new

disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life

we can't sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what

came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the

present offers without attachment or fear." The anthropocene opens up

fertile ground for discussions that should be of interest to anarchists

and wild rebels everywhere. Like the opening of seeds after a wildfire,

this space of death can breathe new life into the stagnant approaches to

anarchism, still bogged down in political struggles. This is no time for

safe spaces and trigger warnings, the Anthropocene is unforgiving and

hostile, but this is exactly where anarchy can be dangerous and thrive.

Let us not forget that the universe was created by chaos! Instead of

positioning anarchism as the world's savior, as technology and

geoengineering are viewed by the experts, let us position anarchy as the

end. If we are to burn in the fires, let us stoke the flames. “We are

become ANARCHISTS, the destroyers of worlds!”.

The Issues are not the Issue: A Letter to Earth First! from a

Too-Distant Friend

EDITOR’S NOTE: In July of 2013, the national Earth First! rendezvous

took place in North Carolina. At the gathering, a former Earth First!

Participant circulated the following essay which critiques the Earth

First! movement from an insurrectionary anarchist perspective. At the

rendezvous, the text prompted many debates about what strategies make

sense in a new era of global resistance. We reproduce this essay,

followed by a debate between the author and a member of EF! in hopes

that it continues to inspire discussion and critical reflection on our

activity.

Once upon a time, I found myself before dawn hiding in the kudzu and ivy

that grew just below the treeline of a mountain gravel road. Time had

slowed down, as it often does in those situations, but eventually the

moment came when a dozen others, armed with locks, a soon-to-be-disabled

car, and a tripod, materialized out of the darkness to block the mine’s

entrance. Looking back up the steep incline to see the barricade lit red

by flares, rendering the further destruction of that beautiful place

impossible for at least a few hours, remains one of my fondest memories.

Eight years have passed since that small experience. A lot of water has

flowed under the bridge. I continue to be involved in struggle, though

more out of a desire for survival, conflict, vengeance, and affinity

than a hope for social change. Nevertheless the return of the Earth

First! Rondy to my home state seemed an appropriate time to renew

certain critical questions, questions that have been raised before by

better writers than I but were seemingly set aside under the constant

pressure to address the newest threat that would destroy The World.

Though certainly a critique, I hope that this can be seen as a gesture

of affinity and communication to people who also want to live wild and

free.

An Image From the Past

The larger world of radical politics during my EF! years was suffocated

by the anti-war movement, which was dominated by the Left and various

socialist sects. These folks were lost in the anti-capitalist riots of

the anti-globe era but at home in the lukewarm waters of

“anti-imperialism.” Anarchists, for the most part, felt awkward and at

odds with this period, especially those of us like myself who sharpened

our political teeth in the street conflicts at the turn of the century.

The anti-war days molded our thinking and our practices nonetheless. We

became sequestered in “community building” and single-issue politics

which could never fully reflect our ideas or desires. Earth First! made

sense in some ways, as the best possible version of that model, so many

of us got involved with eco-defense in this period.

The prevailing winds changed, however: riots broke out in the slums of

Europe, Greece was set ablaze when Alexis was murdered, the black bloc

re-awoke at the '08 conventions, university occupations in '09 refused

to make any demands of Power, widespread and generalized antagonism to

police broke out in the Northwest a year later, Oakland got revenge for

Oscar Grant and a couple years later went on general strike. Many of us

felt like we had come home again. Others remained in the activist house

they had built for themselves, limited but comfortable. Seeking

different experiences, we began to speak different languages that

reflected not only conflicting analyses but, maybe even more divisive,

different desires. This was not fundamentally a conflict over specific

activities or post-rev visions (i.e. infrastructure vs. attack or green

vs. red), but over how the matrix of capitalism, politics, activism, and

“issues,” functioned, and thus over what it meant to try to intervene.

Increasingly it has become difficult even to talk to each other, our

words and deeds passing unheeded like ships in the night.

A Glimpse of the Future

If it was not already, it became clear to many of us that single-issue

politics and its activist campaigns were a dead-end. This understanding

was rooted in the desires of admittedly impatient and unruly

participants, as it should be, but also in a hardnosed analysis of late

21st century industrial capitalism, a system that is always able to

evolve one step ahead of even the most radical demands, more than

willing to replace fracking with tar sands, tar sands with coal, coal

with wind, wind with solar, solar with hydro, hydro with nuclear,

forever leaping from one issue to the next in perpetual

self-preservation.

In reflection, I realized that what was meaningful about these EF!

campaigns to me was not the ever-elusive possibility of reform or change

but those rare accidental moments of rupture, the time when the lockdown

unintentionally became a trampling mob destroying the office lobby, or

when the Appalachian campaign spilled over into locals taking potshots

at bulldozers with their .308s. This was not mere adventurism, but a

real desire to break out of the stranglehold of politics.

I gave up on the idea of gradually increasing our power with small

victories, for this approach had little to no basis in reality.

Insurrections do not erupt on the surface of history via

gradualist-oriented issue-activism. Put another way, Turkey is not

currently exploding to save a tree-lined park; those trees are a

coincidence that provides shade to the multitudes who rebel for a

thousand different reasons against every aspect of capitalist life.

Thousands of people do not riot to save a few trees or, for that matter,

the life of one murdered youth. In this sense the struggle in Turkey is

politically legible neither to Power nor to the social movements that

would manage it, including the country’s radical environmentalists. This

is an advantage.

The camps of Occupy, the Arab Spring, the austerity riots across Europe,

the demand-less explosions which occur every time the police murder

youth, the flash mobs that steal en masse, even just the general

breakdown of civil society, all make it more clear where industrial

society and our resistance are heading. Months after a black bloc

awakens at the heart of a second Egyptian revolution, Turkey explodes,

and weeks later Brazil’s cities are set ablaze by its poorest

inhabitants, explained away by the media as a response to “corruption.”

The time between these moments is decreasing, the ruptures themselves

increasingly violent and generalized. We are entering a period where the

state of exception is increasingly permanent and deterritorialized. This

is our future. In this context, to speak of drawn out, gradually

escalated strategic campaigns against specific ecological practices

makes no sense.

After witnessing and participating in these events, many of us have

tried to find a different path, keeping our love and fondness for the

land while seeking new ways to develop into a social force that can

contribute to a more total break with the society we live in. Like any

experiment, this has been wrought with failures and mistakes. But we

have also undoubtedly interrupted and intervened successfully in many of

the aforementioned rebellions. Much of what was once specific to the

trajectory discussed here has become general features of rebellion

around the world: a refusal to make demands, the creation of autonomous

communal spaces, a hatred of the police, a critique of the media, a

critique of the Left, a critique of direct democracy, a sharpened

understanding of recuperation, an emphasis on attack. To be sure, this

generalization is not something any single “we” can take credit for.

These positions are as much descriptive as prescriptive, less the

product of a certain milieu advocating certain strategies and more a

reflection of modern life and social conditions. But this is our world,

the one that creates us. Our revolt flows inside it, and must evolve

alongside it.

Many of these positions incubated awkwardly during the mid-2000s, but

are now reflected (albeit very unevenly) by everyone from Raging

Grannies to homeless youth to New York Times editorialists. That such

premises have found expression around the globe in so many circles, and

yet stay more or less aloof from the Earth First! activist subculture,

remains a mystery to me. When so much has changed, not just within the

boardrooms of our enemies but in the kinds of revolt present among our

friends, how can a network of creative and brilliant people still be

doing activism and issue politics in the same old ways? When a formerly

middle-class Obama voter can be heard articulating a critique of the

demand-form at an illegal public encampment, how and why does such a

critique elude the militants of Earth First? Do Earth Firsters still

believe they can save the World one forest, one species, one dirty

energy method at a time? Is the change they wish to see merely the

summary of every individual campaign issue?

Nothing Doing and Doing Nothing

Driven by an almost theological morality, many will respond with the

age-old strawman that to not do activism means to do nothing, that to

not try to stop fracking or save the wolves means letting the world

burn. Such a statement may have held sway in earlier, quieter times, but

the events of the past few years have exposed this to be a false

dichotomy. I am not contesting involvement or even engagement with

issues per se, but rather the manner in which it occurs and the

intention behind the activity itself. Put another way, I would argue

that what is exciting about the ZAD struggle in France is not stopping

the airport, which will likely just be built elsewhere in France if the

occupiers “succeed,” but the actual rupture, the mass revolt itself,

represented both by the conflicts with police as well as the network of

communal relationships established via the illegal occupation. The

activist would see the ZAD as a tactic to protect a piece of land; I am

arguing that it should be seen instead as an end in itself, and perhaps

a path to greater insurrectionary possibilities in the future.

One might suggest that this is all mere semantics, that it doesn’t

matter why someone is excited about doing direct action as long as

they’re doing it. This is wrong; that which we find meaningful and

useful about an experience affects the kind of experiences we will

choose to create in the future. It drives the trajectory of our

struggle. If petition drives and scary home demos seem more “realistic”

ways of accomplishing a specific political goal, and that single issue

is your priority, then you’re less likely to make strategic choices

which later put you shoulder to shoulder with a thousand comrades

fighting cops among the trees. If a moment of revolt happens in this

activist context, as does sometimes occur, it is more as a coincidence

than anything else, one which the participants will be ill-prepared to

spread and deepen.

Both literally and figuratively, the activist is often at the back of

the surging crowd in such situations, dragging their feet and

desperately trying to hold back a struggle that threatens to break the

barriers of their carefully chosen issue-narrative. Many Earth Firsters

will personally object to such a characterization, but it is a framework

of doing politics I’m discussing, not the authenticity of its individual

participants. How that framework contributes (intentionally or not) to

techniques of government by sequestering revolt to “issues” is what

concerns me. A more militant or DIY version of the same framework is not

adequate.

Political Identity vs. Affinity

The intention behind our activity also affects with whom we form

relationships. Earth First! is traditionally an ally of mainstream

enviro groups in many campaigns; as the “extremists” they offer a

convenient whipping boy for the Big Greens, but benefit from the

institutional connections and power-broking that helps accomplish their

issue-goals, all while maintaining a radical image. The historical

analogy of MLK and Malcolm X is often made here, but misses the point

that both these men were statists who were highly legible to Power, and

were more or less politicians in their own way. When they ceased to be

so, their relationship both to Power and each other changed

dramatically.

Historically Earth First! itself has contributed to a critique of the

Green Left, but it nonetheless continues to operate in the same

framework. EF!ers are radical environmentalists, no doubt, but they are

still environmentalists, still doing the same politics as Sierra Club

and Greenpeace but in a more militant way. Is it any surprise that so

many older EF!ers get day-jobs with Rainforest Action Network, Sierra

Club, Greenpeace, etc.? A friendly relationship with the institutional

Left makes sense given the group’s issue-focus. This is not an

accusation of selling out—a meaningless epithet in any case—but it is

worth thinking about how the political method we choose affects the

relationships we prioritize.

If, on the other hand, one’s priority is to perpetuate a general culture

(and develop new practices) of revolt, it makes more sense to be

antagonistic to the Left but tight with one’s neighbors or co-workers or

“non-political” friends, whomever one judges might go crazy with you

when the shit hits the fan. Affinity rather than political identity

becomes the center of gravity of the relationship. What someone “thinks

about the environment” is meaningless to me. Do they hate the police? Do

they hate work? Do they hate having mercury stored up in their gut? Do

they hate some aspect of capitalist life? Do they want to knee-cap

nuclear execs? Do we do similar kinds of crime to get by? Could I be

friends with them, and do we have meaningful skills or ideas to share

with each other or teach other? These questions are more interesting.

The Issues are not the Issue

I realize none of this is particularly new. Around 15 years ago now

participants in UK anti-road struggles raised many of the same points,

and in 2007 an editor for the EF! Journal proclaimed “Earth First! Means

Social War” loud and clear, attempting to shift the direction of a

waning movement, writing that, “Political identity and its limited

effects have reached their expiration date. What little autonomy we

carved out by producing EF! as an activist approach is being taken from

us. Whether we call it ‘climate justice’ or whether we relate our notion

of we to a philosophy of biocentricism, we are still failing to draw

lines that are based in reality.”

That expiration date is now long past. The priorities and restructuring

of Capital in the 21st century, along with our own experiences of revolt

of the last few years, have confirmed this fact irrevocably. The enemy

we face is adaptable, flexible, horizontal, a better democrat and better

environmentalist than any Earth Firster could ever hope to be. Likewise,

the experience of comrades from Athens to Cairo has proven that it is

easier to topple governments than to reform them. This can only be more

true when an “issue” strikes at the core of industrial society. The

methodology of campaign activism that Earth First! has inherited from

forest defense and the animal rights movement is hopelessly out of touch

with this reality. Left to itself, would Earth First! as it currently

stands have conducted Occupy as a campaign against corporate tax

policies? Would it see the insurrection in Istanbul as a campaign to

save a few urban trees? Would it reduce the 2008 riots in Greece to a

way to achieve “criminal justice” for Alexis’ murderers? I am left

wondering.

Ultimately, Earth First!, a non-organization full of non-members, is

besides the point. People will continue to intervene in ecological

crises and struggles, as there are certain to be more of them, and the

name with which they do so is irrelevant. But it is time to engage in a

new way, with the conscious intention of breaking out of the barriers

set by activism and issues. Political success is a quantitative thing

that can be known through policy changes, polls, and statistics. It

offers a degree of comfort in its legibility and pragmatism, and makes

its participants feel reasonable. This continues to be the seductive

logic of activism, militant or not. But this cannot be our logic.

The point is not to stop the Keystone Pipeline, for example, but to

expand that struggle so that it becomes unrecognizable to its former

self, so that it is no longer an “anti-pipeline movement” but multitudes

of different kinds of people revolting against intersecting aspects of

capitalist life. Because a pipeline will eventually be built anyway,

even if the route changes a hundred times, because there will be

fracking, even it’s moved to another bioregion due to stronger

resistance here, the center of gravity of our intervention must be

fomenting general revolt, not “winning issues.” A critique of green

capitalism does not alone accomplish this task, if our method remains

enmeshed in issue politics. Building a dam to hold back individual flows

of Capital is not a viable option anymore, if it ever was.

As a proposal this probably sounds ridiculous to at least a few readers,

but it’s not so impossible as it sounds. Every neighborhood reaction to

a police murder, every illegal encampment, every food riot, every prison

fire, every land takeover of the last few years has taught us that any

moment of disobedience has the potential to transform into a general

ungovernability. We can contribute meaningfully to this potential in

myriad ways, from helping a kid tie his shirt into a mask or calling out

would-be politicians to building clever barricades or facilitating

neighborhood assemblies. The skills we’ve learned as Earth Firsters are

still useful, but the orientation has changed.

So I’m suggesting it’s time to take a deep breath and reorient

ourselves. The monster of civilization will not be brought down by

gradualist activist campaigns, small nighttime bands of eco-issue

warriors, or some combination of the two. Nor will industrial capitalism

simply collapse of its own weight, at least not into anything other than

a nightmarish fascism. Accepting these realities does not mean

abandoning struggle, but changing how and why we intervene. I still look

back fondly on the days when I considered myself an Earth Firster, but

as I read the reports from around the world, and think about my own

experiences in the US, I must admit it feels like a very, very long time

ago.

In love and struggle, for good BBQ and insurrection!

— S. T.

Against the Green Left: A Debate About Activism and Identity

EDITOR’S NOTE: The text that follows, borrowed from the Crimethinc

podcast The Ex-Worker #10, contains excerpts of a debate between Neal,

who originally circulated the “Issues Are Not the Issues” text, and

Panagioti, a member of the Earth First! Journal Collective. In italics

is commentary and a final discussion between the two hosts of the

podcast, Alanis and Clara, as they draw out conclusions from the debate

and ask more questions. The full transcript can be found at:

http://crimethinc.com/podcast/10/

NEAL: My name’s Neal. I’ve been involved in anarchist stuff for a long

while. I was involved in Earth First!, especially around mountaintop

removal and the struggle around that for a couple of years when I was

living in a different town. And since then, moving here I got involved

in different projects and followed the currents that seemed to make

sense to engage in at the time. Really I started out with a couple of

nights before the rendezvous, having the desire to reflect on why I was

going. So I was actually trying to suss out personally why I was there

and try and think, well, what has happened in the last seven or eight

years since being involved in Earth First! stuff that has pulled me

away? Because it seems like that’s a valuable thing to think about, both

for people who are in social movements and people who are no longer part

of it, to try and think about what brings people in and what pushes them

away. And so I was trying to reflect on that and it became something

more like a critique of a certain model, or way of doing activism, is

sort of what came out of it. Mainly coming from observations about where

conflict or struggle has been sort of trending, I guess you could say,

in the last few years, especially since 2008 but maybe even before then.

PANAGIOTI: I’m Panagioti, and as folks said, I work on the Earth First!

Journal collective. Specifically relating to this text; after reading it

and seeing it circulate at the rendezvous in North Carolina this summer,

my feelings were pretty strong and then escalated as I thought more

about it. The danger of it – and not danger in that cool, exciting,

“let’s be dangerous” kind of way, but in the way that’s

counterproductive to growing a movement, and some concerns that I have

in relation to this and to the history I think it stems from and the

potential future of where it could go are what I hope to present

tonight; in particular that I think it’s misdirected in critiquing Earth

First!. Although there’s a lot of valuable perspectives and opinions in

it, I think that there’s got to be a better way to present the concepts

here without degrading a movement that has a lot to offer and has a

history that’s minimized or sort of ignored by the text.

The debate began with a question about how to respond to the flexibility

of capitalism today, with which our enemies often co-opt or outmaneuver

our resistance (for instance by building nuclear power plants when coal

mining is politically difficult, or vice versa). What can we actually

hope to gain by fighting particular instances of ecological destruction?

NEAL: First and foremost, I think that fighting specific instances of

ecological devastation offers an opportunity that’s not fundamentally

different than any other time that we intervene in some specific

manifestation of the systems we hate as anarchists. The center of

gravity when we intervene in some kind of instance of either ecological

destruction or exploitation or oppression is not to engage in the way

that we’ve been taught that politics typically work, in terms of policy

analysts or a quantitative approach, but the question of: how do we come

out of this with stronger and deeper affinities with new people? How do

we come out of this as more powerful? How do we come out of this with

greater material access to resources than we had before? How do we come

out of this engagement with new tactics that we hadn’t thought of

before?

We’ve been taught that if we stop mountaintop removal on this site,

that’s a victory. And that drives us forward; it gives us a sense of

urgency, and that can propel us to do positive and even courageous

things. But it’s also important to be able to step back and say, “Wait a

second, they just mined the other mountain instead.” It does push us to

reevaluate how we judge success. I think what I’m proposing in a sense

is that we try to start evaluating success when we intervene in a social

struggle in a different way: less quantitatively, oriented towards how

many petition signatures did you get, how many votes did you get, did

you ban this thing or that other thing, are the cages two feet by one

foot wider now, et cetera; and more in the direction of a qualitative

sense of, did we come out of that more powerful than we went into it?

I think this becomes even more urgent on the ecological front when we

look at the ways that ecological devastation is trending now, which is

less and less towards things like, we’re trying to save this specific

acre of forest, or we’re trying to free these 100 mink, and more and

more towards giant totalizing things like climate change, peak oil,

massive droughts and water shortages, disasters like Sandy and Katrina.

Those kinds of instances of ecological devastation really aren’t

instances at all, they’re hugely difficult to grasp patterns that the

traditional methodology that we’ve inherited from animal rights and

forest defense work that Earth First! still largely operates on and has

inherited doesn’t deal with well. A forest defense campaign, thinking

about a problem in the way that a forest defense campaign or a

nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns orient you, doesn’t approach

Hurricane Sandy very well. It doesn’t approach climate change very well,

because there’s not a single target, or a set of single targets. There’s

just one massive social system. And so that forces us to reevaluate not

only the way we do campaigns, but also how we evaluate success. We’re

less oriented toward specific victories in the short term and more

oriented towards opening up spaces of general revolt, because that’s

really all that’s left to us.

PANAGIOTI: I do think that there are some things here. I want to

elaborate on why I initially said that it was misdirected and dangerous

(not in a good way). And that’s because I think that the view is a

little bit, it’s too abstract, which I think has been admitted. And

also, for sounding larger and broader, to me it actually reflects a less

long-term perspective or view on our participation in social struggles.

And I say that because I’ve been organizing under an anarchist model and

essentially, under different banners or slogans or whatever, but for the

past 15 or 16 years, and it’s been enough time to actually see actual

successes and victories on the smaller scale that have rippling effects

and help evolve a sense of strategy. For example, you know, the growth

of an anti-coal movement being popularized and mainstreamed in my

opinion, as opposed to promoting nuclear energy, that gave an

opportunity for organizing against green technology and green

capitalism, because the back end of things were covered. As far as the

trajectory of capitalism is concerned, the old methods were already

under attack by a broader mainstream presence, leaving space for us to

start attacking the other end: biotechnology, solar and wind at the

industrial scale, all these things… fracking and other forms of

extraction that are relatively new and under scrutiny that I think

strategically it would be more important for us to look at how we tackle

those things. You know, maybe setting aside some of the puritanical

aspects of anarchist theory and ideology, and instead embracing some of

the broader and practical elements of, you know, breaking up power in a

practical and real way. Like, if energy companies are the most powerful

companies on the planet, really powerful sources of force on this

planet, more so than governments or other areas of social struggle, then

it makes sense to attack them and fight them and use the tools that are

available and real for us—which at this point in this country primarily

is affinity-group-based direct action, along with smaller cells of

underground sabotage. And I know maybe that’s kind of a cliche formula,

and the text we’re talking about references that a little bit. But it’s

the tools that are present here. And I don’t think that limits us from

participating in movements that spring up like Occupy Wall Street or the

Arab Spring and that current era of movement that’s happening around the

world. I think, on the contrary, that gives us experience, it gives us

an opportunity to deepen trust and courage and skill and relationships

in a way that allows struggle to be more valuable, more threatening to

our opponents. The examples I want to reference are: the nuclear

renaissance that was being heralded five years ago as a response to the

coal backlash is now also crumbling, in part because of public pressure

and in part because the whole economy is crumbling. I think it’s worth

giving ourselves some credit where it’s due, and not just in that realm

of energy, anti-energy extraction work, but also local campaigns. Like

where I live, animal rights folks have been fighting this vivisection

laboratory called Primate Products using the SHAC sort of model which I

think a lot of people have said “Oh, it’s passe,” or “There’s federal

legislation, it’s too dangerous, we can’t do it.” And they just shut

down the primary facility they’ve been fighting, even though everyone’s

been saying that that’s an old model, and they’re scared to use it. So I

think there’s something to that. It’s energizing and motivating and

inspiring to move forward when we actually succeed in the things that

we’re doing.

NEAL: The first and foremost lesson or thing that I’ve seen from maybe

looking at the last few years in the, on an international scale but also

on a national scale in terms of what’s happening with social struggle,

rebellion of an ecological, social, class, race, whatever nature is that

it’s becoming increasingly clear that a gradualist mode of attacking

issues or problems no longer seems even remotely relevant to me. That’s

sort of a shift… the traditional way we think about those things, or

we’re taught to is that as the active radical minority, you sort of

engage with issues that lots of people are concerned about, and you push

it and people kind of agree with you and you can get more radical and

you gradually have more people and then eventually you have a whole lot

of people, and then you storm the Bastille. But that’s not really how

things have been playing out. I don’t know if people have noticed, but

out of nowhere, Turkey explodes. Out of nowhere, Brazil explodes. You

know, Occupy feels like it comes out of nowhere. And of course we know

from being closer to those things that there’s actually all sorts of

relationships—organizational, individual, personal, political—that

result in those kinds of sparks suddenly catching fire. And some of that

is exactly the kind of stuff that Earth First! would be doing or that

any of the rest of us would be doing. But the lesson that I learned from

is that things tend to go from zero to sixty really, really, really,

really fast. And what tends to get left behind in those moments is the

narrowed, the unnecessarily narrow range of how we think about how we

intervene as activists. All of a sudden, the “Well we sometimes do

sabotage, and we do aboveground nonviolent direct action becomes

irrelevant overnight, in terms of the tactical and social options

available to us.

So what I’m proposing is not, like, let’s not do those things. But let’s

recognize the field of possible opportunity about how to possibly engage

is drastically broader than that, and that those kinds of things aren’t

going to get us where we want to go. If you acknowledge that, you go

further.

The discussion went on to examine the relationship between ecological

struggles and broader social upheavals, including the distinctive

contributions made by Earth First! perspectives and tactics.

NEAL: Understanding the limitations of capitalism from an ecological

point of view is one example of how eco-defense can contribute to

broader social upheaval. Another example: presenting a sharp and pointed

critique of the green left. I think Earth First! does a really good job,

and just generally green anarchism over the last 12 years, 15 years, has

done a good job of criticizing green technology, especially in the last

five years, as that’s become more—you know, the green light bulb thing

is everywhere, etcetera, etcetera. But the green left, in terms of these

organizations, has become more of a sticking point in my conversations

with folks, because on the one hand there’s this anarchist critique of

recuperation. There should be an anarchist critique of recuperation.

More specifically, how does an environmentalist group that pressures the

government to ban a specific form of dirty energy actually function to

help extend capitalism’s life span? Does that make sense?

That critique of the green left can be done by people who are outside of

green anarchist circles, but it’s done better by people in green

anarchist circles, because they have an understanding, a historical

relationship with some of those organizations. That gets again into the

question of, who do we have relationships with as anarchists who care

about the earth, right?

Third thing I’d say, sharing skills and popularizing forms of struggle

that encourage a relationship to the land is something that specifically

ecological revolutionaries can contribute that’s uniquely their own. And

also, it’s not just about relationships with other anarchists or other

people who want to struggle, but specifically with the land. And there

are all kinds of really awesome land occupations that I think have

broken through the limitations of activism, and in the process really

encouraged a relationship with the land. ZAD is a really good example,

and some of the free states in North America are good examples.

Fourth, I would say the various tactical skills and concepts that the

eco-defense folks, ecological revolutionaries have, are particularly

useful not just for the more narrow kinds of campaigns that are

currently going on, but actually for all kinds of struggles that we

haven’t even thought of yet. Like, all the different reasons and ways

you could build a blockade apply to a million other scenarios that have

an ecological bent, but maybe don’t fall within what we think of as

eco-defense.

PANAGIOTI: I feel fortunate to have been present at the tail end of the

previous climax when Earth First! organizing essentially facilitated

some of the WTO protests in Seattle by using blockages in the street to

escalate a general protest into a more rebellion-style demonstration. I

organize with the Everglades Earth First! group in Florida, and in

general I’m in touch with a lot of the Earth First! organizing on the

east coast, but I know this happened on the west coast as well, where

Earth First! groups were offering a lot of the trainings and organizing

the direct action component. Our Earth First! group started the direct

action working group at the Occupy Palm Beach group where I live at, and

did really interesting shit. I mean, nothing that’s like, would get

anywhere close to the word “insurrection” or “rebellion,” but for the

context were pushing the envelope. And I would like to see more of that

happening. And if there’s a different avenue or vehicle to do it, then

great. But I think that Earth First! has a lot of tools and resources to

move forward with that.

They reflected on social and environmental struggles in Greece, which is

known internationally as a hub for insurrectionary upheavals rather than

campaign-based struggles.

PANAGIOTI: The current realm that a lot of Greek anarchists are

organizing in is this anti-gold mining campaign model that’s like—maybe

it’s kind of ironic, but it’s one of the most exciting and interesting

things happening in Greece, in part in light of the fact that some of

the primary squats were evicted that were home bases of insurrection in

Greece over the past couple of years. And just in general I think after

like three years of straight rebellion with little to show for it, other

than the intervention that’s obviously really inspiring, and great

photographs with the dog in front of the burning cops and stuff. I mean:

people are like, “Fuck, man!” kind of bummed out. You know? And I think

that the anti-gold mining campaign is this weird refreshing thing that’s

happening there. Maybe because in the past, that style of campaign

organizing hadn’t quite happened as much or hadn’t—although they’d been

fighting gold mining for years, I think that I saw a different and new

energy happening there that I thought was in some ways a lesson or worth

thinking about.

NEAL: When I think about Greece I don’t get that excited about a gold

mining campaign. In the last few years what’s exciting about anarchists

in Greece is that they’ve built up a social force that’s maybe the only

social force in Greece strong enough to overthrow the state—which is

what we wanna do as anarchists, right? And would make the issue of a

gold company somewhat moot. That being said…

Incidentally, if you’re looking for examples of how to break out of the

mold, or never enter into ecological struggle in the mold of activism

and still want to look at ecological struggles in Greece, I suggest

looking at the neighborhoods that destroyed all of the highways going

into their city so that they couldn’t build a landfill. It’s really

crazy and interesting. It would probably be more difficult here, but

it’s an interesting alternative.

PANAGIOTI: The anti-landfill campaign, you mean?

NEAL: Yes, it was a campaign. But…

PANAGIOTI: But it was insurrectionary too, and I think that’s what we’re

getting at.

NEAL: Exactly. That’s what we’re getting at.

They went on to discuss the distinction between political identity

versus affinity as the basis for our shared struggle, while criticizing

institutional green leftist groups. The conversation concluded with

further reflections on the limitations of the campaign model and the

importance of a long view for understanding the value of our

interventions over time.

NEAL: What I would propose, if it seems like a functional model, is

shifting from what I would call a politics of identity or political

identity to a politics of affinity. The questions change, right? So the

question of, are they an environmentalist? What do they think about

fracking or what do they think about the gold mine or what do they think

about this, that, or the other starts to shift into something more like,

do they wanna see the same things I wanna see? Do they have some of the

same desires I have? Am I able to be friends with them? I don’t give a

shit whether someone calls themself an environmentalist. I don’t care

what bumper stickers are on their car, I don’t care how they vote, I

don’t care even if they call themselves an anarchist. Don’t care. What I

care about is when I’m in a situation that calls for—and I want to

intervene in a certain way, do they want to do the same things? Do we

have something, some kind of basis for affinity? And that can come from

a lot of unpredictable places that are totally outside the world of

politics as we tend to have taught ourselves to think about it.

So that sort of gets at the difference between the campaign model and

the model of neighbors forming fight crews that defend immigrants

[against] the Golden Dawn, right? It gets at some of the differences

between actually the land campaign and the gold mining campaign. But

more to our point here, it relies on a really sharp critique that we

need to have of the environmental left. I also think from an ecological

perspective that it’s really important to understand the green left,

because it’s the left that’s gonna sell out the next major social

revolution in this country. You know, if the worker’s left was the left

that sold out the social revolution in the last century, it’s going to

be the green left that does it this time.

If you shift from being worried about what somebody’s political identity

is with reference to specific policies towards an issue of “Oh, can I

act with this person? Do we have some kind of affinity?” If you shift

from one to the other, you end up somewhere in the middle, because

there’s always going to be people with whom you share both political

identity and affinity. But the real issue is affinity, not whether on

paper, are we both environmentalists? OK, cool, I’m just a more radical

version of them. No, we’re something fundamentally different! And so

affirming that means a real strong break with the left. I think that has

to happen.

PANAGIOTI: All right. Strong break with the left. So we were fighting

this campaign against Scripps, this biotech company who wanted to clear

forests for building giant facilities. And their next proposal came up,

and all the people who had compromised on the first victory were like,

we can’t touch this one—we basically told them anywhere but here. So it

was just us who were left, and then the random wingnuts who also opposed

Scripps because they needed $500 million of public money to move

forward. Which left us basically hanging out with people in the fucking

Tea Party, or like fiscal conservative circles. And most of the people I

hang out with were not up for going to those meetings of Young

Republicans and Tea Party people. I did. It mostly sucked, and I feel

like I got to call people out and kind of expose them for their rhetoric

being hollow. But then I’d occasionally find someone who was in the back

of the room who would say “My god, they test on animals, that’s

disgusting!” Or would be critical about the corporate welfare element.

In 2003 when we were organizing for some semblance of a direct-action

confrontation with the FTAA, we also went to the weird AFL-CIO luncheons

and stuff, so we could find out who there was on board for being in a

mass march so we could be present in the streets as well. So you know,

yeah, I think we should break from the left. But the organized right

isn’t that interesting, or something a lot of people want to be part of.

So yeah, hopefully we transcend those categories when we step into the

realm of actually doing shit, you have to find people where they’re at.

And it takes more than who’s hanging out in the break room at your job,

you know?

NEAL: I was sort of searching for a concrete example of this affinity

concept versus identity, and then Panagioti sort of like—that’s exactly

what I’m talking about, really. It’s less a relationship with this

institution or these groups between other groups, between other activist

groups, and more of, well, it sucks doing the hard work of going to this

meeting. But you don’t go to engage with the AFL-CIO boss. You go to

have a conversation with different people, and say, there’s these three

or four people who we have some affinity with and at least they’re gonna

tell us what their bosses are up to, etcetera. And that’s really sort of

what I’m suggesting.

And that’s not a new suggestion; that’s not something that anarchists

aren’t doing. Anarchists already do that all the time when we try and

engage on a community level, locally or regionally, we find ourselves

having to play that awkward game. That happened a lot with Occupy. But I

still think to an extent for whatever reason in ecological circles,

there’s still a fairly strong relationship with a lot of groups like

RAN, even to an extent with Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etcetera. And there

is this tendency where, especially if you look at the spectrum on which

these groups operate, Earth First! really does look like a more radical

version of them.

I’m not proposing that we don’t have a strong ecological anarchist

resistance movement. I’m proposing that any strong anarchist movement of

any kind, but particularly a strong ecological anarchist movement, has

to set as its goal breaking out of the limitations of what has been

defined as activism. And if that doesn’t happen, we start to fail. We

start to ghettoize, we start to specialize, in particular. What we do

becomes more and more specialized: you need 15 different kinds of

special roles to pull off an action. You got your police liaison, you

got your legal liaison… I think we should ask the question, how does

that kind of protest look different than the kinds of moments that we

have found exciting as anarchists?

The point is not to say, “well, if the only place we can start and begin

from is activism, fuck it, I’m not gonna begin, I’m not doing anything.”

That’s not what I’m proposing. I’m saying, if that’s where we have to

start from, fine, but let’s be intentional about that being a model

we’re trying to break out of. And let’s be conscious of why we’re trying

to break out of that model; let’s include an analysis and critique, a

self-critique of the model and how it keeps us where we are.

As long as we remain constrained in this campaign model, we are letting

the way we do our anarchism, our rebellion, be defined by the state,

which will forever keep it constrained. And so the goal has to be to

consciously get out of that even though we start in that place. And

that’s not just an abstract observation; that actually concretely

changes the kinds of things we choose to do and why we choose to do

them, right? So I might not bother with a campaign that I know will end

with a petition drive, even if it will win, right? Because it won’t get

to the points that I want to get to. Because I’m not oriented towards

this immediate policy issue; I’m oriented towards something else.

PANAGIOTI: I might bother with the petition campaign, likely because I

know the people who are initiating it or hoping to see it succeed in

some way. In this recent victory against a nuke plant in Levy County, a

rural county in North Florida, a beautiful place with more freshwater

springs than anywhere in the world, it’s like worth checking out. And

people there really didn’t want a fucking nuclear power plant to be

built in the state forest in their backyard. And in the end, you know,

the victory was mostly credited to the NGOs who hired attorneys to

defeat it. But we were present with our little kind of small-scale

action camp and some level of presence to express solidarity and support

in a rural community that’s probably never going to come to the city to

participate in an insurrection. But it felt valuable and meaningful.

And I think it’s important to figure out how to navigate the

relationship between our feelings of urgency and what’s actually really

happening around us. Because sometimes they intersect and sometimes

they’re too far off to be useful, and I think that just comes with

trying it. You know, sticking around for a couple decades and trying to

see where it goes, where the things that you put effort into, where they

result in ten years down the road. And you know, I understand feeling

urgent and nervous about waiting that long, but… you do what you can,

what seems to make sense to you in the moment, and a couple years down

the line, you get to look at it and see what the results were and try

something new. And if you haven’t thought about sticking around for the

next couple decades in this circle of people in the anarchist struggle,

I hope that you’ll leave here, more than anything else we talked about,

that you’ll leave here thinking about that. OK, I’m going to stick

around for the rest of my life in this and see how it goes.

CLARA: Well, what did you think, Alanis?

ALANIS: Hm... I think they both made solid points, and didn’t actually

seem to be disagreeing most of the time. And certainly I agree that the

new global context means we have to change how we orient ourselves

towards eco-defense struggles and campaigns. But there’s a point that

seemed crucial to me that neither of them really touched on.

Thinking back to our third episode on green anarchism, it seems like the

thing that sets Earth First! apart from most other environmental groups

is their biocentrism—you know, seeing the defense of the wild and living

beings as an end in and of itself, not a means to an end. This

insurrectionary position seems incompatible with biocentrism, because it

evaluates eco-defense struggles based on whether or not they open up new

affinities and ruptures, instead of whether or not they successfully

defend the earth. In that sense, the insurrectionary position is

actually more similar to the green left’s arguments that we should

protect land and wildlife because it’s good for the economy, or tourism,

or recreation, or whatever. In all of these cases, the value isn’t life

for itself, but as a means to something else that’s valued more highly.

It matters very much whether or not you win a particular campaign if you

live in the watershed of the land that’s about to be hydrofracked, or

for the living things in a forest threatened with clear-cutting, right?

For Earth First!ers who value life for its own sake, it seems like you

would reject the notion that eco campaigns are only valuable as a means

to another end—even if that end is anti-capitalist revolution.

CLARA: But I think the critique is that single-issue campaigns, whether

or not they win their goals, aren’t succeeding at catalyzing the kinds

of broader revolts that actually have the potential to topple

capitalism—and isn’t anti-capitalist revolution that halts the ecocidal

economy the only way to actually defend the earth in the long term?

ALANIS: Well, yeah, I think so, and I think both of the debaters would

agree. But that’s a question of the best strategy towards the goal of

defending the environment, separate from the question I’m trying to

raise of whether defending any particular piece of it is a means to that

broader end or an end in and of itself. Either way, we gotta rethink our

strategy for eco-defense, when rebellion and recuperation come at a

faster and faster pace. But I don’t think Earth First!ers are gonna

abandon biocentrism for the idea that these struggles are only

worthwhile as means to an insurrectionary end.

CLARA: I’m still a little unclear about what’s being proposed when we

talk about affinity versus political identity. “Affinity” seems pretty

vague for such a central concept to the insurrectionist critique. I

mean, political identity isn’t in opposition to affinity; it’s a

particular type of affinity, as is living in the same neighborhood or

getting along as friends or whatever else. The question is how useful

any particular type of affinity is as a basis for struggle, right? And I

get that the critique is that political identity, i.e., calling yourself

a radical or an environmentalist or an anarchist or whatever, isn’t the

central basis for affinity in contemporary struggles. The examples they

talked about from Occupy and such makes that clear. But I’m not sure

that I’m convinced that other more informal types of affinity are

actually stronger or more reliable.

Against Resilence: The Katrina Disaster & The Politics of Disavowal,

by John Clark

Part I of II

Forgetting Commemoration

About a week ago, New Orleans went through the ten-year commemoration of

the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In fact, there were several quite

divergent modes of commemoration. At one end of the spectrum there was

the Tenth Annual Katrina March and Second-line, the most serious

political event of the day, which sponsored speeches and performances at

the site of the levee break in the devastated and still depopulated

Lower Ninth Ward. It had a significant turnout, though certainly under a

thousand participants.

At the other extreme was the Krewe of O.A.K, which practiced a kind of

“commemorating by not commemorating” in its annual Mid-Summer Mardi Gras

parade and celebration. O.A.K. stands for “Outrageous and Kinky,” in

addition to “Oak St.,” its starting point at the Maple Leaf Bar. The

parade, noted for its wild costumes and zany ambience, attracted perhaps

10,000 to this Carrollton neighborhood event. According to the

Times-Picayune, the Krewe chose the theme “Tie Dye Me Up,” to evoke the

famous “Summer of Love,” and “bring good vibes to this annual parade.”

It added: “No mention of the ‘K’ word, please.”

Most of the “Katrina 10” activities fell somewhere between the two

extremes, but tended more in the direction of the Krewe of O.A.K., in

that they were overwhelmingly in a celebratory mode. This was certainly

true of the official commemoration that was sponsored by the city

administration and local businesses. It focused on recovery, economic

and educational successes, and, above all, the remarkable “resilience”

of the local community. It presented an upbeat official narrative that

erased many of the ongoing problems and tragedies of the city, in

addition to effacing many of the most significant struggles and

achievements of the community, when these did not fit into the official

story. The major concerns here will be this official narrative, which

pictures the city’s post-Katrina history through the distorting lens of

a politics of disavowal, and the many realities that this narrative

disavows.

What then, is “disavowal?” It is in fact something that is quite common

in everyday experience, and which we have all experienced many times. We

often face two psychological processes in which truth is negated. One of

these, “denial,” is a defense mechanism in which the truth can never be

consciously recognized or spoken. Denial is silence. The other process,

“disavowal,” is a defense mechanism in which the truth is at times

recognized or spoken, but is systemically forgotten or silenced at every

decisive moment, when it really counts. Disavowal is re-silence. The

Hurricane Katrina Ten-Year Anniversary has been primarily a celebration

of disavowal and re-silencing.

Resilence Kills

Much of this re-silencing has gone under the banner of “resilience.”

While this term has been used throughout the post-Katrina period, it has

become a kind of watchword and rallying-cry for the official

commemoration and the politics of disavowal that it expresses. Even

beyond its ideological uses, it is in some ways a strange term to use to

describe post-Katrina New Orleans. Resilience is defined as “The

capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape” and “an

ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”[1]

Neither of these definitions describes post-Katrina New Orleans terribly

well. As for the “strained body” part, consider this. If someone had a

serious accident or disease and after ten years is alive and doing

tolerably well—except at only three-fourths of his or her original

size—we wouldn’t think of that as the most admirable of recoveries.

There are also problems with the “easily” part. Harry Shearer deserves

much credit for defying the forces of complacency and self-satisfaction

and boldly popularizing the term “the Big Uneasy.” [2] Whether New

Orleanians have fully recovered or not, the last ten years have not been

particularly “easy’ for most of them. Maybe these long years weren’t so

hard for those who had the good fortune to be extremely wealthy,

delusional, comatose, or dead. But for a large segment of the rest, they

have been difficult and even excruciating.

But the major problem with the term is its ideological use. In

Post-Katrina New Orleans, “resilience” is associated with tendencies

toward regression and mindless compliance. The voice of resilience says,

“Congratulations, you’re still here! (Those of you who are still here),”

and asks, “How about doing a second line, or cooking up some gumbo for

the tourists?” It asks, a bit more delicately, “How about making their

beds, cleaning their toilets, serving their food and drinks, maybe even

selling them some drugs, and doing a special dance for them at the

club.” It urges, above all, “Be resilient. Be exactly what you are

expected to be.”

The ideology of resilience ignores the extraordinary creative

achievements and visionary aspirations of New Orleanians in the

post-Katrina period, and celebrates survival, bare life. It focuses

instead on the community’s continued existence as a site for imposition

of corporate-state hierarchically-formulated development plans. All the

compliments to the people of New Orleans for being resilient are a bit

condescending and demeaning. After all, it’s not the greatest tribute to

people to compliment them on their ability to survive. “Thank you for

not just giving up and dying en masse. If you had done that, it would

have been somewhat of an embarrassment to the greatest country in the

world.”

The real post-Katrina story is not a story of resilience. More on this

later, but if you want to see the real post-Katrina story, check out the

film Big Charity.[3] It’s an account of heroic courage and dedication to

saving lives and caring for the community. It’s a story of crimes

against humanity that are systematically repressed and forgotten. If you

want to see the real post-Katrina story (in this case, of the larger

region of Southeast Louisiana), check out the film My Louisiana Love.[4]

It’s the story of passionate struggle for the beloved community and the

beloved land. It’s another story of crimes against humanity, and also

against nature, that are systematically repressed and forgotten. Both

sides of this story, the nobility of struggle and dedication on the one

hand, and the criminality and betrayal on the other, are lost in the fog

of resilience. They are lost in the resilencing process. They are lost

in the Official Story. It is versions of this Official Story that were

presented by former President Bush, President Obama, and Mayor Landrieu

as part of the official Katrina commemoration.

The Official Story: The Bush Version

According to Former President George W. Bush’s typically blunt and

non-nuanced judgment, “New Orleans is back, and better than ever.” In

fact, he is amazed by what has happened in New Orleans. This is not so

astounding, since he specializes in being amazed. He was amazed by the

atrocities of September 11, 2001, claiming that “nobody could have

predicted” that there would be an attack on the World Trade

Center—though about ten years before there had been an attack on the

World Trade Center. Hint! He was amazed by the post-Katrina flood in

2005, exclaiming that no one could have “anticipated the breach of the

levees”—though several experts actually did, and it had already happened

in recent memory during Hurricane Betsy.[5] Hint!

So we should not be surprised, much less amazed, by Bush’s reaction to

Post-Katrina New Orleans in 2015: “Isn’t it amazing?” What amazes him is

that “the storm nearly destroyed New Orleans and yet, now, New Orleans

is the beacon for school reform,”[6] But what alternative universe does

he inhabit? On Planet W, “the storm nearly destroyed New Orleans?” But

what storm? Hurricane Katrina didn’t hit New Orleans and even what

missed New Orleans had lost much of its force by the time its winds came

our way. The disaster was not a storm, but rather flooding caused by

criminal governmental and corporate negligence. Furthermore, over a

quarter of New Orleans was not damaged at all by the storm and flooding

and most of the rest could have recovered relatively easily given a

reasonable level of response and support.[7] What should be truly

astounding is that the victimizers of the city made the recovery so

difficult for the victims. Bush should also not be amazed by the

quasi-privatization of the school system, since his own administration

was responsible for promoting exactly the kind of predatory opportunism

and disaster capitalism that produced that system.

Does Bush remember anything about what actually happened? Please excuse

the foolish question. Of course, he has no idea, and he’s counting on

everyone else to forget, if they ever knew. As he twice implores of his

listeners, “I hope you remember what I remember.” This recalls the

delusional wife-killer Fred Madison in Lost Highway, David Lynch’s

classic story of monumental forgetfulness. As Fred announces,

unconsciously diagnosing his delusional rewriting of history, “I like to

remember things my own way.” Similarly, Bush’s voice is the voice of

denial. Never even reaching the level of re-silence, it is just dumb

silence about anything that counts.

The Official Story: The Obama Version

Curiously, the same day that Obama visited New Orleans I got an email

from him saying, “Let me be perfectly frank—I’m emailing to ask you for

$5 . . . .”[8] My first thought was, “Why don’t you pass by so I can

give you the $5 in person! That would give me a chance to be perfectly

frank too, and explain how things in post-Karina New Orleans are not

quite as rosy as you’ve been painting them to be.” I was about to send

the email to Air Force One, and then it occurred to me that Obama’s

problem is not really a lack of information, as his Katrina speech in

fact confirmed.

Admittedly, Obama’s speech was infinitely better than the ramblings of

Bush, whose unfortunate native tongue is English As A Second Language.

Obama usually manages to combine a certain amount of intelligent and

lucid analysis (even if it is often intelligently and lucidly deceptive)

with a calculated folksiness aimed at mitigating any sins of excessive

sophistication and erudition.

Folksiness prevailed in his Katrina anniversary address, which gets the

award for more clichés per sentence than any speech ever given here, and

perhaps anywhere else on Planet Earth. In just the first paragraph, he

managed to dispose of many of the obligatory local references, including

“Where y’at,” “the Big Easy,” “the weather in August,” “shrimp po’ boy,”

“Parkway Bakery and Tavern,” “Rebirth,” “the Maple Leaf,” “Mardi Gras,”

and “what’s Carnival for.”[9]

But the agenda was basically about re-silencing. Obama enthusiastically

promoted the neo-liberal corporate capitalist project, including the

quasi-privatization and de-democratization of the local schools. He

actually citied some damning statistics about child poverty and economic

inequality in New Orleans. And he noted that the city “had for too long

been plagued by structural inequalities.” “Had been” before Hurricane

Katrina, that is. But this brief moment of quasi-recognition was lost in

the deluge of upbeat generalization. He told the city that “the progress

that you have made is remarkable” in achieving, among other things, a

“more just New Orleans.” In case we didn’t get his point, he added, “The

progress you’ve made is remarkable.” So we are told that post-Katrina

New Orleans is not only a model of opportunity for entrepreneurs and

developers, as the Chamber of Commerce will enthusiastically inform us,

but also a model for progress in justice.

Obama’s voice is clearly the voice of disavowal. He knows the truth, and

he can even tell you that he knows it. But this truth is consigned to

footnotes and asides to a larger ideological pseudo-truth that is to be

the focus of our attention. The truth is there only to be strategically

forgotten. The dominant discourse remains the verbose but empty speech

of re-silencing. So much for les Menteurs en Chef.

The Official Story: The Landrieu Version

Next, the local political and corporate establishment, led by mayor

Mitch Landrieu, joined in the celebration. For the anniversary, Landrieu

and Walmart, along with other corporate entities, co-sponsored a

“Citywide Day of Service.” It’s unfortunate that the community couldn’t

organize a large-scale volunteer effort itself, as it did after Katrina,

when our state and corporate masters largely abandoned the city, except

as opportunities emerged for incarceration and then exploitation. The

mayor’s version of a “Day of Service” was four hours of service projects

in the morning, followed by an hour of speeches and celebration, and

then a break, before three more hours of speeches and celebration.

From Landrieu’s perspective, there was much to celebrate. On his

“Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans” web site he claims that the Katrina

disaster turned out to be a positive opportunity and as a result “New

Orleans has turned itself around and has built the city that we

should’ve built the first time.”[10] Presumably the city had to wait 287

years for the current experiment in neo-liberal social engineering to

arrive. Landrieu’s boosterish assessment of Post-Katrina New Orleans can

be summed up in his depiction of it as “America’s best comeback story.”

In a blatant attempt to mislead readers, he boasts that “the New Orleans

region has now returned to approximately 95 percent of its pre-Katrina

population.”[11] In fact, as a recent report shows, “New Orleans is now

at about 78 percent of its population before the storm” and the recent

growth rate has been 1.4%.[12] Aggregating the population with

surrounding parishes is a transparent ploy to confuse the public.

Many have not come back to New Orleans because of lack of opportunities

here and because the dominant model of development has created obstacles

to their return. To make them disappear through fake statistics is an

outrage. Landrieu obviously didn’t grasp the ludicrous but painful irony

of calling the post-Katrina era, in which almost a quarter of the

population did not return, “the best comeback story” in US history!

Landrieu’s voice is the voice of denial, deception and delusion. Let’s

be explicit about what is denied, silenced and re-silenced.

Part II will appear in Black Seed Issue 5

The Roots of a New Practice: An Interview With Knowing the Land is

Resistance

I first heard about the group Knowing the Land is Resistance on the

Earth First! Newswire or some other such website. It was at once both a

pleasant reminder that I needed to get off the computer, and a bit of

inspiration that is often missing in anarchy land.

The group is based in the occupied territory currently known as

Hamilton, Ontario. They’ve produced three excellent zines—two called

Knowing the Land is Resistance and a third called Towards an Anarchist

Ecology. The writing—at times beautiful—relates their experiences

becoming (re)acquainted with the land in their area and urges readers to

pursue the deeper questions regarding the alienated and damaged

relationships that many of us have with the land.

OXALIS: What is Knowing the Land is Resistance? How did the project get

started—what initially motivated you all to pursue this path of

exploration?

KNOWING THE LAND IS RESISTANCE: Mostly, we really wanted to celebrate

all the wild spaces we love, how these places sustain our courage in our

lives and resistance. We wanted to encourage other folks to connect with

the health, healing and hope that exist in the land.

We started out by doing workshops, inviting folks to go out into the

then-wintery wild corners of the city and pretty simply just encouraging

them to treat themselves to some quality forest time. We wrote a

report-back from the first workshop and published it in Mayday Magazine,

a local monthly magazine, along with some reflections from talking with

workshop participants about breaking down the alienation imposed by city

life. We continued writing monthly features based on exploring the wild

spaces in the area and those texts became the first two KLR zines.

There was a strong intention from the start to intertwine a love for the

land with an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial dialogue. We knew rooting

these ideas in the land where we live was a good way to make real and

tangible those sometimes– obscure ideas and find ways to weave them into

our everyday lives (not just our days off when we go deep into the

forest).

O: One of the things that I immediately liked about your project was

that the name “Knowing the Land is Resistance” seemed to contain the

answer within it. Your choice eschews the usual approaches of choosing

something cryptic or excessively militant—it suggests a slowness and

sense of reflection that often seems missing from anarchist projects.

Could you explain what you mean when you say “Knowing the Land is

Resistance”?

KLR: The name really goes both ways: resistance without knowing the land

is hollow and so is knowing the land without siding with it and fighting

for it. Settlers today on Turtle Island especially have so much work to

do in developing this connection, as we are possibly the most alienated

from the earth of any humans ever before. We have a lot of respect for

naturalists and their careful commitment to knowing and spending time

with the land, even though it tends to be disengaged and conservative.

We also have a lot of respect and love for the bravery and passion of

anarchists and activists, even though these scenes are usually very

uprooted and not grounded in place. KLR seeks to bridge gaps in those

practices— hence the name.

We also know from listening to older and more experienced anarchists and

land defenders that getting people out on contested land is the best way

to get them caring about it enough to fight for it in a committed and

sustained way. The slowness and sense of reflection you are referring to

reflects the fact that our projects are long-term and take a lot from us

in terms of care and commitment.

O: In your writings, you have suggested a deeper and closer connection

to the land could strengthen existing social struggles. For example, you

speak of gentrification and Hamilton and imply that those efforts could

be strengthened with a more land– based approach. Can you elaborate on

this? Also, what are some social struggles that embody the approaches—or

at least the orientation—that you are suggesting?

KLR: Gentrification, for instance, is very concerned with controlling

space. It wants to rationalize space, strip the wild out of it,

including ungoverned actions by humans, and bring marginal areas back

into the economy. An example in our neighbourhood is the obsessive

mowing of once-healthy meadows to make space for sod and security

cameras – cutting down trees, tidying up vacant lots and alleyways, all

this opens space up to technologies of control and destroys habitat. We

know the people being displaced further east, and we knew the foxes and

coyotes who would follow the tracks here before the massive new commuter

train station came. We know how much less space there is for kids to

play in trees and wild spaces outside of city logic now. In knowing

these things, it’s hard to argue that gentrification and progress is

anything that improves lives. It’s about destroying life and imposing

control, and it’s the opposite of health – we explored this in more

detail in our workshop series, North End Raccoon Walk. This knowledge

was already in people’s hearts, and simply giving folks the space and

permission to love areas that are normally considered blight was enough

for all sorts of ideas to emerge.

It’s tragic to see a brownfield that’s been slowly healing for thirty

years made into a short-sighted condo project, especially when we

understand that developments like this also reproduce ways of life and

relating to the land that are opposed to healing. It’s about placing

land back in the logic of economy, about rationalizing forgotten and

slowly healing brownfields into short-sighted condo projects. Resisting

development on the basis of rewilding and healing is a total refusal –

there is very little possible compromise. It also brings with it a set

of tactics, beginning with walks on sites that we’re normally taught to

fear and escalating towards occupations and blockades. All of these

steps also break down private property and re-establish a sort of

commons.

One example of this right now is in Kingston, Ontario, where folks are

trying to prevent the construction of a new road over a river-side park.

This road would allow the further development of both existing urban

areas and of healing brownfields (and these are some of our favourites

anywhere). Most of the opposition to the road shares its goal of putting

a dirty, weedy park back into economic use, just not a road, but

anarchists there are having traction emphasizing the importance of

collective, ungoverned space, the defense of urban wildlands, and a

watershed-scale understanding that even a former tannery site is

important to the health of the whole region.

We saw other examples of this during our Seeds of Resistance tour, where

we did nature–connection workshops for groups engaged in land defense or

anti-development struggles. In Peterborough at that time, students were

organizing to prevent a wetland adjacent to the university from being

developed into a privately-owned but university-partnered dormitory,

something they saw as a step towards privatization. They wanted to

connect the arguments around privatization to a defense of the wetland,

but by spending time there, they developed ideas around unexpertness

that could attack both universities and development at a much higher

level.

O: While I enjoyed the two Knowing the Land is Resistance zines and the

way that you all have undertaken a specific effort to get to know your

land base (and indeed I feel the approach is one that more folks should

take), Towards an Anarchist Ecology probably made the biggest impression

on me as it seems to be your most theoretical work and had the most to

offer folks outside of the Hamilton area. Can you explain what you mean

by “anarchist ecology” for those who have not yet read the zine?

KLR: Amazing! That’s so good to hear about because that was our

intention. Those first two KLR zines are really specific to here where

we live. They are good examples of what that process can be like, but

unless they inspire you to go and get giddy about the place you live,

the idea might be hard to share because it isn’t easily distilled into

words on a page. After doing that work for four years, we felt like it

made sense to reflect and compile what we learned in a theory-based way:

that’s Towards An Anarchist Ecology. We wanted to celebrate liberatory

approaches to a science, to a process of inquiry, like the cyborg

witches in Spain and the work of some of our most inspiring herbalist

friends.

Ecology is often seen as a progressive discipline in itself, because it

tends to be less reductive and come more often into conflict with

capitalism than other hard sciences. But we feel that the mainstream

practice of ecology does not have liberatory potential and in fact has

come to produce a new alienating hierarchy of experts that primarily

serve to justify more and greener destruction of the wild.

It’s one thing to offer a critique, but it’s a bigger challenge to offer

an alternative. The rest of the zine seeks to lay out five starting

points for an anti-colonial, anti-authoritarian way of connecting with

the land. These starting points are: rooted in relationships, deep

listening, urban ecology, re-enchanting, and unexpertness. We have tried

to identify and avoid the usual pitfalls of cultural appropriation,

de-politicization, escape, expertly arrogance, and hastily jumping to an

energetic or spiritual way of connecting. At the root of it, we believe

that everyone, wherever they are, inhabits a watershed and is a dynamic

living creature that is part of a complex and beautiful web of

interrelationships. We can choose to ground ourselves in this truth, to

connect with the land around us, and let the health of our communities

guide our actions. We hope folks who pick up this guide find something

in it to help you in breaking with this stifling society of control and

in finding lives of freedom and wildness.

O: One thing I noticed while reading is that while you all speak to the

importance of anarchy and anarchist approaches, there aren’t a lot of

direct references to the green anarchist tradition. Do you all have any

connections to that trajectory of thought and has it influenced your

project in any specific way?

KLR: We’re definitely very influenced by green anarchy and see ourselves

as part of that tradition. Particularly, we value the analysis of

alienation from the wild and from each other as a state that was

deliberately produced over centuries, and the anti-civ critique.

However, one of our starting points for KLR was a sense that the green

anarchist space was too ideologically motivated and not strongly rooted

in place or personal connection. Flipping through old issues of GA, it’s

interesting how much the placelessness and focus on intellectual proofs

in most of the articles recreates the kinds of alienation they set out

to smash.

We set out to strip away some of our own ideological baggage and see if

we couldn’t reach green anarchist conclusions by developing our

connection with our local landbase. The first two KLR zines are a pretty

good description of what this project looked like for us, here between

the escarpment and Hamilton Bay. We found that not only could we reach

similar conclusions (industrial civilization is killing the earth) but

those conclusions often came along with concrete ways to ally with the

health of the land.

A lot of other people set off from the green anarchist space in pursuit

of rootedness around the same time we did, often by developing what’s

called primitive skills, and a lot of them ended up strongly influenced

by the Wilderness Awareness School. Although we definitely draw from

some of their ideas, we have some big wariness of the WAS, especially as

it is explicitly hostile to struggle, glorifies colonization, and

recreates a settler survivalist attitude. We have tried to offer a

sustained critique of their practices while also pirating their best

ones and creating alternatives.

Some of us have been spending time in EF! spaces lately, and we think

there is a lot of potential there to relate more to the colonial history

of the land and rooting direct action in a deeper relationship to the

land. People there strongly desire that relationship and have a lot of

courage, but there’s not always a lot of willingness to consider

meaningful decolonization and to face up to just how alienated we are

from the land. Unfortunately, adopting green anarchist principles on the

level of ideology, rather than the level of relationships, seems like it

can actually make it harder to develop that relationship to the land,

because of the sense that we do or should somehow just already have it

by virtue of our identification with those principles.

O: Moving beyond writing and ideology, what for me seems most exciting

about Knowing the Land is Resistance is that you are thinking through

some of the big questions, for example, asking how we can develop

relationships with the land and what that means when many of us live on

land that has been wrecked by cities, civilization, and colonization. I

was particularly struck by the way you talk about the importance of

finding land and wildness in urban places. How have you all done this

with your project and why was this an important to you?

KLR: It’s so hard to face up to all the destruction and loss, but also

so important. Even in the hearts of cities, the wild is always there,

pushing back, waiting for us to return to it. Even on Hamilton’s

industrial piers, we find coyotes, seedlings, and brave poplar trees.

The myth of the pristine wild space actually harms us at this point,

because it devalues all the other land that is considered damaged. Yes,

we need to protect those few remaining least-devastated spaces, but for

the most part, that’s not what wildness on this planet looks like any

more. We need to grieve this loss while still centering ourselves around

interconnected systems like watersheds. Looking at the health of a whole

watershed makes it obvious that the patch of Junk Trees in the parking

lot is doing important work to create health and habitat for the whole

system. The myth of pristine wilderness always has us looking elsewhere

for wildness, and feeling like we need to uproot ourselves in order to

go find it, when in fact this is the opposite of useful. It sets us back

in our own relationship to the land, and also is frequently damaging to

those few remaining old growth places.

Having a connection to the land, even and especially in cities, helps us

stay grounded and committed, even when things feel hopeless. It reminds

us that amazing things are possible with a slow push towards deep

relationships and a rejection of civilized ways, aligning our hearts to

the moss and mullein creating soil on the concrete pads of abandoned

fuel storage terminals…

O: Beyond personally becoming acquainted with the land, your collective

has also toured Ontario and given numerous workshops that expand on the

themes you raise. Your workshop guide—Learning from the Land—is quite

impressive and is something that I could see being useful for a lot of

readers of Black Seed who are interesting in encouraging similar

conversations and processes in their own areas. How has the response to

the workshops been among participants? Have there been any successes or

challenges that stand out? How have these workshops continued to

surprise or excite you?

KLR: Probably the biggest surprise and most important challenge was how

much fear and trauma can be brought out by engaging with our senses in

the forest. It’s not easy to enter the forest – sure, we can just walk

in, but to really quiet our minds and be present can bring up

overwhelming feelings of loss, inadequacy, alienation, fear, as well as

traumatic memories. We need the voices of trees, the cool breath of the

forest, and the presence of stars to feel healthy and strong, but when

we begin to open ourselves to these things, we first encounter how much

we’ve been hurt.

In each of our first several workshops, one or more participants would

need to leave or would cry because of what was coming up for them. Once

it was tied to memories of a childhood forest or meadow that became a

clearcut or mall, another time it was a more recent lost land defense

struggle, with the trauma of police violence combined with watching a

piece of land and the life you had with it be destroyed. Other times it

was less directly connected to specific stories about land, a more

abstract despair or fear. In this way, our workshops came to focus on

building relationships, with ourselves, with each other, and with the

land. Can we find space to build some trust among strangers? Can we

transform hurt and alienation back into possibility and wonder? Can we

make this healing part of movements in real, physical defense of the

land, and what does it mean to do so?

O: I find great affinity with the ways in which you all have chosen to

write and talk about our relationship with the land, both in your

writings and in your workshops. You use words like “wonder,” “joy,”

“play,” and “enchantment” to talk about how we relate to the land. I

also liked how you de-emphasize “expertness” and formal plant names,

stating that answers terminate thought and discussion, while questions

lead to more questions. Could you elaborate on this a bit and how this

philosophy relates to your overall approach?

KLR: It sounds like you know about the immensely fulfilling joy of

connecting with the land, too! We talk about re-enchantment a lot,

because we all have that freedom, play, joy and life inside of us. It’s

a constant struggle, for us and maybe everybody, to keep that stuff

stoked and alive in this world. One way to push back is to reject the

ugly, stifling idea of expertness. We find un-expertness inspiring

because it destroys the myth that “someone else” is better equipped to

deal with the massive, ongoing ecological destruction. We also want to

go beyond the pretty toxic expertly behaviour that narrowly celebrates

names and taxonomy in more naturalist-y spaces. We often hear people

describe the reason they don’t engage with wild spaces is because they

don’t know enough.

Finding time to be present, think deeply, and feel joy in connecting

with the land can get us out of our heads and into our bodies.

Generally, anarchists could use some more joy and play.

O: I also like how you talk about spirituality and encourage people to

approach it cautiously. Black Seed has been interested in fostering a

conversation about spirituality and green anarchy. Why do you urge

caution around this topic?

KLR: It’s pretty understandable that people seek to fill the void of

alienation created by this society with something positive, something

that promises a deeper connection to the wild. However, our experience

is that often people want to rush to talking about magic, animal

spirits, literally hearing words from trees, that sort of thing, while

skipping over the long, hard work of getting to know their landbase on

its own terms. Similar magical practices exist in various indigenous

landbased traditions around the world, but for settlers (especially

white settlers) living in the land called North America, we need to

appreciate just how gone those traditions are for us. They are really,

really gone. There isn’t an older, earth-based culture for settlers

still clinging to existence on the margins of industrial society, the

way there was in Europe until the end of the 1700s. There is nowhere for

us to escape to when we realize the lives and worldviews we have been

given are crap.

The project of rebuilding a land-based tradition for uprooted people is

a beautiful one, but it can only be a humble and slow starting place for

settlers, and potentially a multi-generational project. Around the

world, spiritual knowledge is held and passed on by wise elders, drawing

on knowledge and traditions accumulated over generations and rooted in

intricate knowledge of the relationships between the plants, animals,

waters, and lands of their territories. It isn’t respectful to the

beauty of earth-based cultures to think we can somehow get around the

absence of elders and traditions just by wanting to. We believe that

learning to really pay attention to the wild, to observe it with our

physical senses, learning to read the land and understand how to ally

with its health is the best starting point for this exploration.

O: I see the conversation around spirituality as being quite connected

to how we talk about colonization and what it means in the context of

folks living on stolen land. I also feel as though it—spirituality for

lack of a better term—has at least some type of relationship to science

as an alternative way of looking at the world. In your writings you have

been critical of science and what you call “dominator ecology.” What do

you mean by “dominator ecology”? At the risk of setting up a simplistic

binary, do you see criticisms of science and discussions of spirituality

as being connected?

KLR: We decided to describe the mainstream science of ecology as

“dominator ecology” to refocus attention on the power relationships

created by the practice of science as it is commonly carried out. “[It]

is the ecology of management from a distance, and of remote expertise,

that sees itself as fundamentally separate from the land, inhabiting a

present without a past or future.” In Towards an Anarchist Ecology we

further trace out how the practice of dominator ecology upholds colonial

and capitalist structures while enforcing our alienation from the land

by situating it as the realm of experts. We see reclaiming inquiry and

the roots of science as absolutely vital in rebuilding a connection to

the land, which will lay the groundwork for any land-based spirituality

that might arise.

We need to critique and fight dominator science to create space for us

to trust our own experiences again, while reclaiming from it the tools

we might need. We also need to prevent the space created in this way

from being hastily filled by a supposed spirituality that projects our

assumptions about the land back onto it, recreates our own alienation

from it by trapping us in our own egos and imaginings, and supports new

claims of unaccountable knowledge.

It might sound like we’re being really hard on spirituality, but it’s

because we consider it to be too important a project to move hastily.

There is a huge grief involved in recognizing that we truly are

alienated from the land, that there is no easy way out, that we really

are so ignorant. We need to truly feel that and cultivate humility in

the sorts of knowledge we claim access to. Our experience is that

observing the wild closely and honestly leads inevitably to action in

its defense and to clashes with power—the more these clashes are

collective and sustained, the more we build a community that orients its

values in line with the health of the wild. Such a community is the soil

from which any spiritual practice might (re)grow.

In particular, we’ve found close observations of healing wildlands to be

full of profound truths about how to live in this world. Take a walk

down the traintracks, through old brownfields, rewilding farmlands, old

quarries, around abandoned houses and buildings, and you’ll see the

plants and creatures who are courageously facing up to the utter

devastation and who are working hard to recreate health and resiliency

even in the most damaged places. Learning to appreciate the work being

done by plants with deep taproots like chicory, burdock, and curly dock,

for instance, not only inspires us to fight for health in hard

situations, but gives us practical ideas about how this can be done.

These are the roots of a new practice.

O: Finally, what has your collective been up to recently? How do you see

your work continuing in the future?

KLR: We haven’t been that active as a closed collective in the past few

years. One big reason why we stepped back from KLR (at least for now)

was it felt like we were beginning to occupy an expert-like role— it

felt pretty silly to let ourselves become the experts in unexpertness.

Our goal as KLR was to develop and then freely share simple practices

for an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist way of connecting to the land,

and we felt that through thirty or so workshops, our zines and posters,

and the Learning from the Land guide, we had got some of these ideas out

there. Continuing in the way we had as a closed collective didn’t feel

like it was in service to this goal.

These days, we like to encourage and support anyone who sets out to

connect with the land, especially those who are determined to act. We

continue to distro our resources and to support others in putting on

workshops or developing actions. We love taking part in conversations

about land defense, especially about spreading the practice of long-term

land defense occupations in settler communities as a way of developing

collective knowledge and practice of allying with the health of the

land. We have also been prioritizing modeling good security culture and

encouraging people to take this seriously in land defense.

Corrosive Consciousness — Part I: How One Might Profane Green

Platonism, by Bellamy Fitzpatrick

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a selection from a failed debate with Kevin

Tucker intended to be published in issue #2 of Black & Green Review. KT

rejected this because he desired the debate to be constrained to the

question of egoism (pro or con) and the author desired to make a broader

case. We will publish the rest of this argument, the author’s positive

case for egoism, in Black Seed Issue 5

“The primal war is a spiritual war. It began as the spirit of wildness

was buried. . . .”

-Kevin Tucker, “Egocide”

“To be sure, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing

truth on her head and denying perspective itself, the basic condition of

all life.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil [13]

The history of Western philosophy can be divided, very crudely but

nonetheless meaningfully, into two[14] broad strands depending on

assumptions, or lack thereof, about lived experience. One

tendency—calling itself in its various incarnations Realism,

Christianity, scientific materialism, and so forth—begins not from the

real of our lived experience but instead with a presupposition about

what the world is really like, positing something greater, deeper, or

truer than what we feel. It follows from a presupposition like this one

that our lived experience is only a pale reflection or echo of what is

seen as the fundamental truth. This speculative, reifying mode “finds

its origin in Platonic philosophy and has been dominant from the very

beginning.”[15] I will call this mode of thinking, broad and varied as

it is, Platonism, for the purposes of this essay, as I think its roots

are meaningful and highlight its tendency toward reification and

morality.[16]

The second tendency—a perpetual minority that has been called or has

called itself perspectivism, egoism, existentialism, nihilism, and other

names—considers phenomenality, lived experience, to be prior to and to

take precedence over any such reifying speculation. Knowledge and value

come from phenomenality, are felt in the flesh, and are always

instrumental and provisional rather than aiming at an imagined ultimate,

objective reality disembodied from moment-to-moment existence. I will in

this part of the essay analyze Anarcho-Primitivism from this

perspective; in part two, I will argue that this second tendency is an

essentially anarchist mode of thinking.

Exiting the Madhouse: Moving Toward a Truly Critical Theory

“Man, your head is haunted. . . . I regard those persons who cling to

the Higher . . . almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools,

fools in a madhouse.”

-Max Stirner, The Ego And Its Own

The madhouse is civilization,[17] and the fools are those who, not only

in their actions, thinking, and language; but also, unfortunately, in

their critical theory, spend a great deal of their activity reproducing

it every day.

History is rife with examples of critical theory that purport to

liberate humans (and, rarely, nonhumans) from domination, exploitation,

and alienation. Nearly all of them, however, criticize “particular forms

of enslavement merely in order to substitute other forms of

enslavement.”[18] In order to be consistently and thoroughly liberatory,

then, a critical theory cannot simply effectively critique one aspect of

civilization or a particular manifestation of it, nor can it stop at

critiquing every aspect and manifestation of all extant and historical

civilizations.

Instead, thoroughgoing critical theory must effectively critique all

possible forms of domination, exploitation, and alienation—it must

provide a moment-to-moment practice of critique that allows for

perpetual yet always provisional analysis leading to potentially

immediate action. In doing so, it allows one to be critical not only of

present civilizations, but also possible future iterations of domination

and exploitation, the reemergence of alienated lifeways and modes of

thought, and the inadequacies of present and future partial liberation

theories.

Anarcho-Primitivism (AP)—in spite of contributing importantly to the

anti-civilization critique—fails in this regard because it does not

break free of the speculative Platonic tendency, that essentially

civilized mode of thinking. AP therefore seeks totalizing truths that

render the world absolutely knowable, recapitulating an ideology of

control and measurement; draws sacred moral lines where they do not

exist in the biosphere; posits objective and transcendental values and

entities, reifying aspects of our phenomenality; and succumbs to the

same dualistic logic that has characterized classical anarchism. I will

examine only a few specific instances of these issues here, due to

constraints of scope: the vagaries of domestication, the mystification

and sacralization of wildness, and the Manichaeism that motivates and

unites both.

The Vagaries of Domestication

It is seductive to talk of domestication in anarchist theory: it applies

ideas of domination we have already come to understand in a new

dimension. The idea that our present crisis is caused by dominating

Nature—or burying the spirit of wildness, as you prefer—implies, when it

is not already explicitly stated, that we might exit this nightmare by

simply learning how to stop dominating and somehow negating those who

refuse to stop. It is thus a recapitulation of egalitarian tendencies of

thought that consider liberation to be tantamount to the elimination of

power. It is easy to talk to anarchists about power; for many, it is

already a placeholder for bad. Indeed, Tucker, at the 2014 Philadelphia

Anarchist Bookfair, summarized anarchist theory as the search to

identify and eliminate power; green anarchy’s contribution, he

continued, has been identifying that power with agriculture, with

domestication—it is a pleasingly elegant, readily comprehensible

critique that implies the familiar Manichaean theme.

To effectively avoid doing something, one needs to know clearly what it

is; but when it comes to defining domestication, APs have been vague,

tending toward moralistic, quasi-religious, and maudlin language. John

Zerzan has defined it at his most sober as “the attempt to bring free

dimensions under control for self-serving purposes”[19] and elsewhere,

with metaphysical adventurousness, as “a cosmic change”[20] —sacred

lines are being crossed, one is to understand. Kevin Tucker has been

more erratic, either clearly defining or vaguely gesturing at

domestication in a wide variety of ways:

• Though Kevin at times appears very conscious of the accusations of

religiosity that have fallen on AP, he nonetheless endorses Chellis

Glendinning by saying “the original trauma of domestication is a deep

wound.”[21] Here, domestication is perhaps our Fall.

• Elsewhere, he seems to agree with Zerzan’s “cosmic change”, describing

it as relating to metaphysical erasure or transformation: “Domestication

is the destruction of the soul.”[22] or “Domesticated plants and animals

replace wildness.”[23]

• Domestication also seems at times to be naturalized, synonymous with

socialization, as when “Our submission to the system is our

domestication,”[24] described as “the internalized system: the cop,

missionary, politician, economist, and worker in our heads.”[25]

• Most mundanely, Kevin often refers to dependency, perceived

dependency, and control to characterize domestication.

How is domestication so many different things? If it is, then is it

actually a useful term? At times, domestication is even contradictory

things, as when “Our own self domestication has not changed who we

are”[!] [26] – so it does not seem to create or prescribe different

metaphysical categories, after all – or “domestication is not some

monolithic and irreversible event in the past, but a constant reality

that we recreate daily through our own lives”[27] – and so it is

therefore not an original trauma or Fall, which is a decidedly singular

event.

Domestication, then, as Kevin deploys it, is a margarine-word, a word

“whose function is to circulate, not to mean.”[28] It is used less to

convey information than to indicate the user holds a certain moral

position. This residue gleams clearly in certain moments, as when Kevin

writes: “The one message that I hope people can learn from the history

of domestication is that humans, like any other animal, aren’t meant to

control the world around it [sic] and dictate its relationships.”[29]

There are things we must not do, and one of them is to control the world

around us; but the phrase “control the world” is as vague as

“domestication.”

We cocreate one another’s worlds: my phenomenality is inseparable from

myself—it constitutes me—and I am therefore a multifarious being

composed of every other being that I encounter. Intimacy and symbiosis

are cocreation, meaning that creatures are continually shaping one

another. But this cocreation is not a lack of control or a surrender of

power, it is a simultaneous competition and cooperation of powers. Do we

not all control each other’s worlds, as we are the constituents of one

another’s worlds? Where does symbiosis end and domestication begin?

I have written elsewhere in greater length and depth that power,

control, and interdependence as well as more one-sided dependence are

rampant among nonhumans: orchids sexually deceive their pollinators,

parasitic barnacles castrate their hosts and hijack their reproductive

organs, and leafcutter ants engage in quasiagriculture.[30] Through

co-evolution and symbiosis, species are constantly shaping and

influencing each other.

I thus cannot take seriously the idea that power, control, and

dependency are what problematize inter-organismal relationships. A

Foucauldian analysis of power, normally understood in terms of

inter-human relationships, seems equally applicable to ecology:

exertions of power characterize all interactions and are

inescapable—indeed, Stirner and Nietzsche seem to have understood beings

as iterations of force and the act of being alive as consisting of

exertions of power, the cessation of which is one’s death. Rather than

run from power, control, and dependency, drawing nonsensical,

life-denying barriers around them; we might instead acknowledge and seek

to understand our power over other organisms, how we are shaping them

and they us. It is not that everything is bad,” but that everything is

dangerous,” and we may thus move toward a “hyper—and pessimistic”[31]

awareness of what our power means and how it can be more life-affirming.

Other takes on ecology contrast with Kevin’s moralistic one—that seeks,

Platonically, to carve nature into joints, the good and the bad—and

refuse this dualism. Permaculturist Bill Mollison famously argued that

everything gardens, that is, every organism exerts power to create a

favorable environment for itself: the bacterium Lactobacillus, for one,

shits lactic acid that favors itself and its conspecifics but inhibits

the growth of many competing molds and bacteria—this act is power, this

act is an effort “to control the world [...] and dictate its

relationships.” Former Animal Liberation Front member Rod Coronado spoke

in an interview conducted by Tucker of being inspired by the way

predators exert a domineering presence.[32] Nietzsche saw life as

continually overcoming itself, always surging forth in new forms. When I

envision the ichneumon wasp injecting its eggs and mutualistic viruses

into a host, seizing control of its body, I am moved similarly to see a

kind of ecstatic and violent act of life overcoming itself.

I of course agree with Tucker that there is a horrific dimension to many

of our human-nonhuman relationships; certainly, he is getting at

something important. To tease out what this horror is more empirically

and less morally, we might paraphrase permaculturist Toby Hemenway’s

definition of agriculture:[33] the process by which ecosystems are

annihilated and turned into human beings and their domesticates,

resulting in an economic surplus that encourages the creation of rulers

to oversee it, slaves to harvest it, bureaucrats to measure it, guards

to protect it, and an ideology to rationalize the whole disgusting

process. And there our focus is revealed: it is not the hazy act of

domestication, inveigled as it is with co-evolution and symbiosis and

fraught with vague and moralistic condemnations like dependence and

control; rather, it is the social and ecological relationships that

emerge from certain forms of power exertion that are problematic. The

recent anarchist interest in M. Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild and the

ideas of permaculturists like Hemenway, Mollison, and Fukuoka seems to

be a healthy recognition of the fact that high levels of human-nonhuman

cocreation, control, coevolution, and interdependence are not only

inescapable but also not necessarily undesirable, as they need not

engender the massive biotic denuding, exploitation, and alienation that

characterize civilization.

The Elusive and Sacred Wildness

“When we learn to open ourselves to wildness […] the organic anarchy of

our beings will flow.”

“That spirit is what connects an individual to the […] wildness around

them.”

“Wildness that flows between living beings . . .”

- Kevin Tucker

For Wildness And Anarchy

“Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one

substance and one soul . . . and how all things act with one movement;

and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things that exist.”

– Marcus Aurelius

Stoic Emperor of Rome

As a foil to domestication, Tucker frequently evokes “wildness,” which

exhibits the same slippery qualities of seeming to define decidedly

different things. With possible self-transparency and hesitation, Tucker

often deploys the word with a vanguard and rearguard of qualifiers and

negative descriptions.[34] Nevertheless, the positive descriptions or

gestures shift freely between vastly different ontological realms. As

above with domestication, I briefly explore a few here:

Sometimes, wildness seems to refer to a feral, unsocialized state or

act: “we fear the wildness we are born into . . . such a savage, primal

state.”

Though Tucker expresses an allergy to “new age oneness,”[35] he

nonetheless also seems to be positing some kind of universalizing force

or essential connective substance as when he refers to “that spirit is

what connects an individual to the . . . wildness around them.” and

“wildness that flows between living beings”[36] —at times, it is even

composed of divisible units, “pieces of wildness.”[37]

And though Tucker agrees with me that “There is no ‘Nature,’ alone and

isolated outside of our grasp,” he does not shy away at times from

describing wildness as some elusive, essential substance of the world,

perhaps independent of any given being as when there is “a war against

looming wildness,”[38] one fought against “the state of wildness,”[39]

being lost as “there isn’t enough wildness left . . . wildness is

running thin.”[40]

Wildness, then, is anything from a propositional attitude to a

quintessence of life that is definitively out there, capable of being

tapped into or destroyed. I have had occasion on Free Radical Radio to

point out that, at his most metaphysically adventurous, Tucker sounds

like nothing quite so much as the Classical Stoics, quoted in the

epigram, who believed in, among many other things, living well by

aligning oneself with Nature. I have noted in those same episodes how

Nietzsche so effectively ridiculed this notion:

“You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? [which is] boundlessly

extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration,

without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain . . .

how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? . . . Is not

living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to

be different? . . . In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you:

while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature .

. . In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature,

to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein. . . .”[41]

The idea of living according to some abstracted idea of life, biology,

or Nature—be it Stoicism, biocentrism (Tucker’s other preferred term),

universal love, or wildness—places one in a peculiar ethical paradox.

One wants not to be anthropocentric or in line with The Culture, opposed

as these are to Nature, and so one attempts to give oneself over to the

way of Life or the Universe. But Life is not actually a coherent,

consistent entity that always strives toward the Good, in spite of

Tucker’s assertion that Nature plays the part of protagonist: though at

times its acts are “unpredictable and chaotic,” we can count on its

consistency as “The only thing they will do for sure is catalyze the

life cycles of all living things.”[42]

In contrast to Tucker’s Platonic portrayal of it, the biosphere is a

complex of biota and abiota that are not only often beautiful, rich,

stable, and fertile; but also often indifferently destructive and

contradictory. Cyanobacteria, the first photosynthetic organisms, may

have wiped out most life on Earth 2.3 billion years ago by filling the

world with atmospheric oxygen, then toxic to most organisms, and went on

to create a 300 million year ice age during which even the ocean surface

may have been slush. Paleontologist Peter Ward, noting that several

similarly apocalyptic events have happened, has put forth the Medea

Hypothesis, suggesting that multicellular life is essentially

self-destructive and therefore periodically annihilates itself. When

philosophers talk about aligning themselves with Nature or Life, they

pretend that cyanobacterial nigh-omnicide does not exist; they focus

instead on the interconnectedness of trees and mycorrhizal fungi.

The effort to cease being anthropocentric, then, ends up merely

recapitulating anthropocentrism by picking and choosing the aspects of

the nonhuman world that humans want to emulate. And why should we be

afraid of this evaluation, as Nietzsche said, for is the act of living

not one of moment-to-moment evaluation? APs, like all Platonists, seem

to fear that a lack of objective, transcendental value would entail

either a total devaluation of the world or else a complete arbitrariness

about what has value—if we do not enshrine Nature, wildness, Life, or

something as the Good, and especially if we show that Nature et al.

sometimes do pointless and destructive things, then, it follows for

them, that there would be no good reason we should not just continue to

monotonously and immiseratingly denude the biosphere. But this

conclusion does not necessarily follow.

The cyanobacterial annihilation of most life was one articulation of

life’s possibilities, just as the present civilized annihilation of much

of the organic is another—as a unique, evaluating being, I am fully

prepared to say, unhesitatingly, that I prefer certain assemblages to

others. Such an act could be called anthropocentric in its refusal to

defer to some imagined, unified will or objective value of biocentrism

or Nature; but I would call it simply a unique, entirely perspectival

and personal evaluation, as it defers to neither an imagined totality of

nature nor to any variation of humanism.

The Persistence of Manichaeism

“the primal war: the refusal and resistance to domestication wherever

and whenever it has imposed itself on life and the world.”

- Kevin Tucker

“Agents of Change: Primal War and the Collapse of Global Civilization”

Both wildness and domestication, then, seem to be vague predicates

referring more or less ambiguously to Platonic Forms. Domestication

gestures at a certain social and ecological relationship, but suggests

that an exertion of power is the primary problem. Wildness refers to

some will or essential rightness of Nature. Domestication and wildness,

then, refer primarily to moral categories, diametrically opposed, and AP

insistence on using them has the function of framing the world as a

cosmic battlefield between essentially opposed forces.[43]

In this way, Tucker has not departed categorically from classical

anarchists, in that he frames the struggle of anarchism in a Manichaean

schema that sees wildness, nature, and humanity in a moral-cosmological

struggle with domestication, civilization, and the capitalist state. It

is replete with a Rapture event, the Collapse, that replaces

Revolution;[44] and a ressentiment aimed at “the domesticators,” who are

our nouveaux-bourgeoisie.[45] Tucker, in spite of significantly

different particulars, is thus in the basic logic of his thinking in

alignment with Bakunin, who understood anarchism as the struggle of

natural authority against artificial authority, the former not being

oppressive because its laws “are not extrinsic in relation to us, they

are inherent in us, they constitute our nature, our whole being

physically, intellectually, and morally.”[46]

We are thus left with a decidedly submissive logic predicated on

externalized value, defined both in submission to an abstract Platonic

authority, nature or wildness, as well as through ressentiment toward

the domesticators and civilization; we have the same self-diminution

with respect to Good and Evil. This leaves one with the same deference

to reification that has characterized all of civilization, precipitated

its creation, and crippled the majority of critical theories waged

against it.

It’s All Falling Apart: Dispatches From the End Times

43 STUDENTS DISAPPEAR

A year later the Mexican State still has no answers.

The families of the missing students have always distrusted the

government’s account of what happened to their relatives on the night of

Sept. 26, 2014. The male students of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College

came under attack several times by Mexican security forces that evening

in the nearby city of Iguala, after they tried to commandeer buses for

an upcoming protest. By the end of the night, three of them were dead

and 43 were missing. The government said the students were abducted by

local police, who handed them to be killed by the Guerreros Unidos drug

cartel.

But the official account of events is riddled with holes and

inconsistencies. The government faced accusations that suspects and

witnesses were tortured and that their refusal to investigate the role

of federal forces amounted to a cover-up.

Source: Huffington Post

OCEAN FISH NUMBERS ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE

The amount of fish in the oceans has halved since 1970, in a plunge to

the “brink of collapse” caused by over-fishing and other threats. “There

is a massive, massive decrease in species which are critical”, both for

the ocean ecosystem and food security for billions of people, he said.

“The ocean is resilient but there is a limit.”

The report said populations of fish, marine mammals, birds, and reptiles

had fallen 49 per cent between 1970 and 2012. For fish alone, the

decline was 50 per cent.

Source: WWF International

SYRIAN CONFLICT AND MIGRANT CRISES ACTUALLY DUE TO COMPETING OIL

INTERESTS

The timing of the Syrian conflict is peculiar: The meddling in Syria

came about immediately on the heels of discussions of an Iran-Iraq-Syria

gas pipeline that was to be built between 2014 and 2016 from Iran’s

giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria. With a possible extension

to Lebanon, it would eventually reach Europe, the target export market.

Perhaps the most accurate description of the current crisis over gas,

oil, and pipelines that is raging in Syriahas was described by Dmitry

Minin, writing for the Strategic Cultural Foundation in May 2013: “A

battle is raging over whether pipelines will go toward Europe from east

to west, from Iran and Iraq to the Mediterranean coast of Syria, or take

a more northbound route from Qatar and Saudi Arabia via Syria and

Turkey. Having realized that the stalled Nabucco pipeline, and indeed

the entire Southern Corridor, are backed up only by Azerbaijan’s

reserves and can never equal Russian supplies to Europe or thwart the

construction of the South Stream, the West is in a hurry to replace them

with resources from the Persian Gulf. Syria ends up being a key link in

this chain, and it leans in favor of Iran and Russia; thus it was

decided in the Western capitals that its regime needs to change.”

Source: MintPress News

IF THE FISH WEREN’T ENOUGH, THE TREES ARE DYING OFF ALSO

Those are the findings of researchers who on Wednesday unveiled the most

comprehensive assessment of global tree populations ever conducted,

using data including satellite imagery and groundbased tree density

estimates from more than 400,000 locations worldwide.

The estimate of 3.04 trillion trees—an estimated 422 for every person—is

about eight times higher than a previous estimate of 400 billion trees

that was based on satellite imagery but less data from the ground.

The new findings leave abundant reason for concern—with people at the

root of the problem.

The number of trees has fallen by about 46 percent since the start of

human civilization and each year there is a gross loss of 15 billion

trees and a net loss of 10 billion, said Yale University ecologist

Thomas Crowther, who led the study published in the journal Nature.

“There are currently fewer trees than at any point since the start of

human civilization and this number is still falling at an alarming

rate,” he said. “If anything, the scale of these numbers just highlights

the need to step up our efforts if we are going to begin to repair some

of these effects on a global scale.”

Source: Reuters

THE WEST COAST WAS ON FIRE ALL SUMMER AND NO ONE CARED

This year, there were wildfires.

Not the typical wildfires, mind you. Not the normal smattering of

(relatively) easily controlled seasonal blazes that nature herself

always ignites to help purge and clear; I mean all the massive,

drought-amplified, state-engulfing wildfires you’ve been hearing about

all season long—nearly all of them larger, earlier, and more frequent

than any time in modern history, ranging from a few thousand acres to

the largest in the country, the Soda fire, currently engulfing upwards

of 265,000 acres in southern Idaho, which joins with all the other

Pacific Northwest fires burning throughout Washington, Oregon and

Montana. And here you thought just California was ablaze.

Do you know about Alaska? Nearly five million acres have burned

throughout that unusually hot, dry state this year, which is a record,

which is something like the size of Connecticut (combined), which is

more staggering than your heart can process. Go ahead, try it. And then

add in Canada’s staggering wildfires, and you hit upwards of 11 million

scorched acres – that’s 17,000 square miles, and still going strong.

That’s terrifying.

The scariest part? Fire season, historically speaking, doesn’t even

begin until September. Did you know 2015 is already officially the

hottest year ever recorded on Earth? Did you know Alaska recorded its

hottest month ever, in 91 years of record keeping, in May? Or that

Washington’s biggest fire could keep burning until it snows? The

worst—as nearly every scientist, climatologist, environmentalist in the

world is all too sick of saying these days—is yet to come.

Source: SF Gate

THERE IS NO FIX TO THE DAMAGE HUMANS HAVE DONE TO THE OCEAN

A new study finds there is no “deus ex machina” way to prevent a

catastrophic collapse of ocean life for centuries if not millennia—if we

don’t start slashing carbon pollution ASAP.

The panel warned of the huge risks with the more invasive strategies to

reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth: “There is

significant potential for unanticipated, unmanageable, and regrettable

consequences in multiple human dimensions from albedo modification at

climate altering scales, including political, social, legal, economic,

and ethical dimensions.”

Source: thinkprogress.org

URANIUM MINING AT THE GRAND CANYON

In June, the Grand Canyon was named one of the “Most Endangered Places”

in America by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But the

designation came just two months too late to possibly influence US

District Court Judge David Campbell. In April, he denied a request by

the Havasupai tribe and a coalition of conservation groups to halt new

uranium mining next to Grand Canyon National Park, just six miles from

the Grand Canyon’s South Rim.

This uranium project could haunt the Grand Canyon region for decades to

come,” said Katie Davis with the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Uranium mining leaves a highly toxic legacy that endangers human

health, wildlife, and the streams and aquifers that feed the Grand

Canyon. It’s disappointing to see the Forest Service prioritizing the

extraction industry over the long-term protection of a place as iconic

as the Grand Canyon.”

Source: EF! Newswire

CHINESE AIR POLLUTION MAY BE KILLING AS MANY AS 4,000 PEOPLE A DAY

A study out just now from Berkeley Earth in California, written by

Robert Rohde and Richard Muller, deserves attention. It concludes that

air pollution in China, familiar to everyone, in fact does more damage

than is generally recognized. The study finds that as a result of this

pollution, some 1.6 million Chinese people per year, or more

dramatically well over 4,000 per day, are dying prematurely.

Source: The Atlantic

THE EPA TRIGGERED A MULTI-MILLION GALLON SPILL OF MINE WASTE WATER

Southwestern Colorado has a lot of abandoned mines and environmental

officials have been in the area for years, working to clear toxic metals

and acidic water left behind.

At the Gold King Mine, EPA officials were using heavy equipment for

their site investigation to learn the extent of contamination. Not only

was there was more mine wastewater than expected, but the water was held

back by a dam of soils as opposed to rocks. While the EPA was digging

around, water gushed out and started to drain down.

“We typically respond to emergencies, we don’t cause them. But this is

just something that happens when we’re dealing with mines sometimes,”

said Dave Ostrander, EPA Region 8 Director of Emergency Preparedness.

Source: Colorado Public Radio

NEAR-COMPLETE MELTDOWN CONFIRMED AT REACTOR 2 IN FUKUSHIMA

RT: How dangerous is the area right now?

KK: Unfortunately we don’t have much information yet after these record

breaking floods just last week, which in a very big way has moved

radioactivity to new places in the environment, or has re-contaminated

places previously decontaminated supposedly. So there is so much that we

don’t know. Certainly there have to be very careful steps taken to

measure the radioactivity in the environment. Any pronouncements by

local mayors or even the Japanese government that they are only

detecting so much radioactivity one meter above the ground—it misses the

point in a very big way. Radioactive cesium, strontium, tritium, and

other radioactive poisons can enter the food supply, and people can eat

the radioactivity or drink it in their drinking water. Very careful

measures to guard against the contamination of the food supply and the

drinking water supply have to be taken. And I don’t know if that is

happening in all places right now.

Source: Russia Today

DROUGHT IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF OUR FRIGHTENING WATER EMERGENCY

The United Nations reports that we have 15 years to avert a full-blown

water crisis and that, by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by

40 percent. But the global water crisis is just that—global—in every

sense of the word. A deadly combination of growing inequality, climate

change, rising water prices, and mismanagement of water sources in the

North has suddenly put the world on a more even footing.

Climate change is another equalizing phenomenon. Melting glaciers,

warming watersheds, and chaotic weather patterns are upsetting the water

cycle everywhere. Higher temperatures increase the amount of moisture

that evaporates from land and water; a warmer atmosphere then releases

more precipitation in areas already prone to flooding and less in areas

prone to drought. Indeed, drought is intensifying in many parts of the

world, and deserts are growing in more than 100 countries.

Source: Alternet

EASTERN PUMA DECLARED EXTINCT, REMOVED FROM ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST

The US Fish and Wildlife Service today declared the eastern puma extinct

and removed it from the list of protected wildlife and plants under the

Endangered Species Act. The eastern puma was a subspecies of the animal

also known as cougar or mountain lion, which is still widely distributed

across the West. It once roamed as far north as southeastern Ontario,

southern Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada, south to South Carolina and

west to Kentucky, Illinois and Michigan.

“Through public and civic tolerance and through reintroduction at the

state level, pumas could be returned to the East to play their ancient

role in controlling deer herds,” said Robinson. “This is a somber moment

to think about what the land under our feet used to be like, and what

roamed here. It should also be a clarion call to recover pumas and all

of our apex predators to sustainable levels to help rebalance a world

that is out of kilter.”

Source: Planet Experts

500 INJURED AT TAWAINESE WATER PARK

Firefighters said the firestorm erupted around 8:30 p.m. Saturday (8:30

a.m. ET), when a flammable powder substance blew up over a stage at

Formosa Fun Coast, according to a CNA report.

Video showed a massive fireball suddenly engulfing the stage, followed

by screaming people running for their lives through flames.

Source: CNN

US POLICE ON TRACK TO KILL 1,600 PEOPLE IN 2015

Looking at the data for the US against admittedly less reliable

information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait, and

one that resonates with protests that have gone global since a killing

last year in Ferguson, Missouri: the US is not just some outlier in

terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar

economic and political standing.

Source: The UK Guardian

CLIMATE CHANGE IS ACTUALLY HELPING WHALE HUNTERS

Meanwhile, the prospect of increased commercial fishing in the region

threatens to reduce the amount of food for the massive mammals. And as

warming driven by fossil fuel consumption makes the Arctic more

accessible, it’s made the estimated reserves of oil and gas in the

region more accessible.

All of those pose threats to whales, which also can die when snagged in

fishing gear, hit by ships’ propellers, or fouled by an oil spill. Ewins

said humans need to come up with “a smarter and better-balanced”

approach to the Arctic before pouring into the North the way they have

swarmed other frontiers.

“Most sentient people agree that humans appear to be crashing along and

are about to set up the same mistakes… Whale populations will need to be

monitored and managed long-term for both those species and the

indigenous Arctic populations that still depend on them for

subsistence,” he said.

“Unfortunately, at the regional and local level, resource-hungry nations

right now are prioritizing GDP as the basis, maximizing economic

growth,” Ewins said.

Source: Vice News

BEIJING CONTROLS THE WEATHER, FOR PHOTO OPS!

Less than 24 hours after the end of China’s massive military parade,

Beijing is back to its usual smoggy self.

Residents woke up Friday morning to find the crystal blue skies that

graced the city nearly two weeks suddenly gone—in their place, the

familiar sight and smell of dour gray pollution clouds. Starting late

August, Beijing enjoyed a rare string of continuously clear days as

authorities took drastic action to ensure an azure backdrop for the

largest parade it’s ever held—a showcase marking the 70th anniversary of

Japan’s defeat in World War II.

Hundreds of factories were shut during this time, while half of

Beijing’s five million registered cars were banned from the streets.

Source: CNN

Prisoner Updates

In each issue, we include news and addresses of prisoners in hopes that

readers will choose a few to write. Sometimes, what is going on behind

prison walls feels foreign to those of us on the outside. However, when

we are in correspondence with prisoners, we strengthen those bonds

between the inside and the outside.

REBECCA RUBIN

In the late 1990s, Rubin is alleged to have participated in a spree of

arsons that caused upwards of $55 million in damages as part of the

Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. She is among the

targets of the FBI’s “Operation Backfire.” She is currently serving five

years.

Rebecca Rubin

98290-011

FCI Dublin

5701 8Th St – Camp Parks

Dublin, California 94568

JUSTIN SOLONDZ

Another target of Operation Backfire, Justin Solondz was indicted for

multiple counts of arson, conspiracy and use of an “unregistered

destructive device” in 2006 for his alleged participation in an arson at

the University of Washington and an arson at the Litchfield Wild Horse

and Burro Corral in Susanville, CA.

On December 20, 2011, he plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy

and a single count of arson for the arson at UW. He was sentenced to

five years in prison.

Justin Solondz

98291-011

FCI Oakdale I

Post Office Box 5000

Oakdale, Louisiana 71463

CASEY BREZIK

Casey Brezik is an anarchist from Kansas City area who is charged with

slashing the throat of the Dean of Metropolitan Community College-Penn

Valley in an alleged plot to attack the Governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon,

during a talk at the college. In 2013, he was sentenced to 12 years in

prison.

Casey Brezik

1154765

Northeast Correctional Center

13698 Airport Road

Bowling Green, MO 63334

BILL DUNNE

Bill Dunne is an anti-authoritarian prisoner sentenced to 90 years for

the attempted liberation of an anarchist prisoner. Bill was arrested in

1979 when he and Larry Giddings attempted to free fellow revolutionary

Artie Ray Dufur. The two were arrested after an exchange of fire with

police as they were fleeing the scene. Bill and Larry were charged with

auto theft and aiding and abetting the escape, for which Bill received

an 80 year federal prison sentence. In 1983 Bill attempted to escape

prison and was given another 15 years in prison.

Bill Dunne

10916-086

USP Lompoc

US Penitentiary

3901 Klein Blvd

Lompoc, CA 93436

MARIUS MASON

Marius Mason is an anarchist, labor organizer, and eco-warrior serving

nearly 22 years in prison for carrying out acts of property destruction,

including an arson at a Michigan State University genetics laboratory

and an arson of logging equipment in Mesick, Michigan. He was sold out

by his former partner, Frank Ambrose, who became an FBI informant.

In 2014, Marius came out as transgender and is currently fighting for a

name change, hormones, and surgery. In a recent update from his support

website, it was stated that he has received almost no mail in the last

few weeks.

Marie (Marius) Mason

04672-061

FMC Carswell

P.O. Box 27137

Fort Worth, Texas 76127

Note: address envelope to “Marie (Marius) Mason”, and the letter to

“Marius.”

JAY CHASE

Brent Betterly, Jay Chase, and Brian Church were arrested just before

the NATO summit in Chicago in May 2012 and charged with “possession of

an incendiary or explosive device, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and

providing material support for terrorism.” Set up by a police informant,

they were sentenced to prison for making molotovs and saying that they

planned to use them to attack police stations, a Democratic Party

campaign office, and the mayor’s home during the NATO summit. Brian

Jacob Church was sentenced to five years, Brent Betterly to six years,

and Jay Chase to eight years. Brian Jacob Church was released in late

2014, Brent Betterly was released in April 2015.

Jared (Jay) Chase

Pontiac Correctional Center

PO Box 99

Pontiac, Illinois 61764

Note: address envelope to “Jared (Jay) Chase”, letter to “Jay”.

THE CLEVELAND FOUR

The Cleveland 4 are four Occupy Cleveland activists arrested in 2012

after being coerced into plotting a series of bombings by an FBI

informant.

Connor, Doug, and Brandon took non-cooperating plea deals. Doug is

serving 11.5 years, Brandon 9 years 9 months, and Connor 8 years 1

month. The judge applied a terrorist enhancement, resulting in longer

sentences and harsher prison conditions. Skelly took his case to trial,

refusing a plea deal. He was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years.

Brandon Baxter

57972-060

USP Atwater

P.O. Box 019001

Atwater, CA 95301

Connor Stevens

57978-060

FCI McKean

PO Box 8000

Bradford, Pennsylvania 16701

Doug Wright

57978-060

Currently in transit

Check cleveland4solidarity.org for more info

Joshua Stafford

57976-060

USP Tucson

P.O. BOX 24550

Tucson, Arizona 85734

ERIC KING

Eric is a vegan anarchist awaiting trial for an alleged firebombing of a

Congressman’s office in Kansas City, Missouri.

Eric King

27090045

CCA Leavenworth

100 Highway Terrace

Leavenworth, Kansas 66048

MICHAEL KIMBLE

Michael Kimble is a black, gay anarchist held captive by the State of

Alabama since 1986 for the murder of a white, racist homophobe, for

which he received a life sentence. After moving away from communism,

Michael turned toward anarchism and continues to struggle as an

anarchist against his conditions. Michael has a long history of

uncompromising struggle against prison and its world.

Michael Kimble

138017

3700 Holman Unit

Atmore, Alabama 36503

“There’s No Place to Go” — An Interview With Dominique

ARAGORN!: I’m sitting here talking to Dominique. I could introduce him

in a variety of ways but I want to start out by asking him how he would

describe himself and why he thinks he’s of interest in the context of

the series of interviews I’ve been having in Black Seed.

DOMINIQUE: Well I think that I’m in a position in the middle in some

ways. Usually people are coming strongly from one side or the other,

either as an anarchist or a Native American. Within the tension between

post left and identitarian positions, I’m like an illegitimate child.

I’m someone who stays aware of what comes out of native theory but I’m

also interested in reading anarchist writers. So as far as identities

go, I would present myself as a reader with bruises, that would be my

role for today.

A!: It is funny because when you set up an interview, obviously a lot of

my goal in these interviews is to present a long-form version of a talk

with a native person who the general reader will probably never have

this talk with, and I guess the goal was to say rather than

infantilize/celebrate Natives just because they exist, just talking to

them in a series of talking points (“I’m an activist who’s done prison

work in minnesota, and I’ve had these successes....”), my idea was

always to take Native people who have an interest in anti-authoritarian

politics broadly and contextualize them. In this way you’re an

interesting person to talk to because the previous two people I

interviewed for Black Seed have activist pedigrees. And that hasn’t been

your schtick.

D: I guess I could say who my family is, how I grew up, with connections

to Native radicalism, or talk about being a prison convict, even though

I wasn’t a political prisoner, but I think a lot of times in

anti-authoritarian circles, that’s considered an authentic identity. But

I’m not really concerned with presenting authenticity. I would like to

think that I’m not an activist but I have been involved in doing things

with other anarchists for a long time, for better or worse.

A!: But that’s you responding to activist as a swear word in anarchist

circles or the…

D: The term has some negative connotations. Activism as the obligation

to sacrifice yourself for the cause, to stay busy until judgment comes,

that doesn’t work for me, but I still exist in a world where actions

occur.

A!: ...opposite of a swear word. In other words it’s almost a

meaningless signifier.

D: With the idea of reading in the context of green anarchist

perspectives, I would agree with a lot of critiques of anthropology and

say that it’s a lot more stimulating to me to directly talk to Native

people, as opposed to through a second source, but that you can also

look at indigeneity through literature, and that’s maybe a more

respectful way to go about it.

A!: How do you think about quote unquote literature in the context of

the famous Russell Means essay about spoken word vs written word?*

D: Looking into these issues, I’ve found that there’s more questions

than answers. For someone totally immersed in our American environment

it’s hard to say we are oral, and to argue that in academic papers in

English; it’s hard. I agree that a text is a sort of static conversation

that happens in this alienated way, but I still think that literature is

not an alien thing for natives at this point.

A!: When I think about my own life... I experienced life entirely as an

oral culture until I was six or seven. I can say pretty strongly that my

mother was an incredible bookworm, she loved to read, but she was also

my gateway to Native America. So most of social life was around the

kitchen table until I was old enough to read and then I went into a room

alone and read, but then it was richer when I came back to the table...

I guess my tentative argument is that the slices of our life could have

these different moments.

D: I think that’s what is interesting about Anishinaabe writer Gerald

Vizenor; he’s trying to put the oral culture into literature. He’s

trying to write in a way that is inspired by story telling. Me trying to

describe him or write like that, I can’t do that. But this points to how

important oral traditions are to the Three Fires peoples.But I guess,

also, I mean to talk about my story... I think I’m similar to you in a

way in regards to my family. Like my dad was a Native radical in the

Twin Cities at the height of when that was something people were talking

about…

A!: When America actually cared…

D: It was a time when people conspicuously cared about these issues. My

mom is a non-Indian who is still involved with Native solidarity work so

it’s... it’s a personal thing. I grew up on military bases, so it was

kind of like I didn’t know I was Native until later. I mean, I got the

“you’re Native,” but I didn’t understand what that meant. After going

and meeting older relatives, going to the reservation, it was kind of

like a therapeutic ritual. So what gets transmitted... is the stories.

The stories that people tell you is, I guess, the link where it’s not

merely genetic, you know? It’s not an abstraction, it’s the actual

people in stories... that’s what I got. So it’s important to me…

A!: So... it wasn’t stories about some mythological figure, it was the

stories about the lives of actual people around you that were

mythological? Like, larger than life…

D: I’m just trying to make a point about what’s left of an unbroken

culture, which is already sort of a paradox. Genocide affected more than

just material conditions but there are still pieces of story and

ceremony. Like you hear about Nanabush and the fact that storytelling

still happens... so it leads me to question materialism in a different

way and wonder what it means to accept atheism. I connect the stories

with people and personalities. Post-left anarchists and indigenous

radicals find it hard to talk to each other. I don’t consider Ojibwa to

be an abstraction. When Stirner talks about Ludwig not being a generic

Ludwig when you’re speaking of a person; that’s something I keep in mind

when I talk about Anishinabe—it’s not just the idea of an Indian, it’s a

real people who I’ve seen in uniqueness…

A!: That’s interesting... Just to go back to something that you said

before we were recording that I was really interested in – you said you

were not political. What does that mean? (Like, you’re using a lot of

political terms…)

D: Part of what I’m saying is that I’m not interested in mass

movements... I don’t think that the idea of an american indian movement

makes sense for me or by extension APOC politics... I think that

politics could be something you use in a small group, direct

relationships, I believe all of our language is politicized, and that’s

related to a criticism of Native radicals— that comes from a Native

perspective. These radicals in camo don’t automatically represent

traditions (I would say) and they’re speaking for elders as if the

elders can’t talk themselves. This can also apply to Tribal Councils.

That is one part of the story of why I would reject politics. Vizenor’s

critique of communism has more to do with the communists he encounters

than with historical materialism. The radicals he sees selling papers in

Minneapolis would never laugh because their struggle was so grave. If I

have to give up laughter for politics, I choose laughter.

A!: That’s a great point. So last winter we threw what I’ll call a local

book fair, distinct from the national-scope bookfair that is also held

in the area called the Bay Area/San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair. We

throw what we call the East Bay Anarchist Book and Conversation Event

(we shortened that to EBAB), and it happens roughly in November. It’s a

twopart event, one part traditional tabling for anarchist projects and

publications, and the second part sort of an intentional set of

conversations obviously about the books that are interesting but also

about theory, anarchist ideas, what does it mean and why is it relevant

to be an anarchist in this century. This year the theme was

decolonization, and you did a presentation. Can you talk a bit about

that and start out with the name, which I think for many people was very

provocative.

D: My presentation was called “Native Simulations, Cross Bloods, and

Pre-Left Anarchy.” I’ll start with pre-left anarchy, which was a

response to post-left anarchism. It examines a tendency in Native

radicalism or decolonization (when those overlap) to say that the

pre-contact new world was egalitarian and didn’t have this whole list of

things, patriarchy, capitalism, etc... I’m concerned when people call

for a non-western anarchism. I think it’s interesting the way the

post-left posits that there’s a relationship to the Left that we’ve gone

past. Unfortunately, I think Native Americans are still expected to

share interests with the Left.

A!: we’ve definitely been a victim of the Left for…

D: Right. A lot of these critiques of anthropology could come out of

native experiences, a lot of criticism comes from there. I don’t know

that there was pre-left anarchism that you could easily line up to

categories that we use today. But there were possibilities that pointed

towards anarchy. You can’t generalize about Native Americans but there’s

enough evidence for me to believe that there were different ways of

living, that societies were distinct in their values, expressions, and

economies, and I like the idea of openness instead of trying to put our

categories in other peoples, places, or times.

A!: So let’s unpack that a little. You say you’re uncomfortable or you

don’t like the idea of non-western anarchisms. What are you referring

to, what does that mean? ie are you referring specifically to the

pamphlet called “Non Western Anarchisms,” written by Jason Adams in the

late 90s?

D: The non-western anarchist pamphlet I think was mostly big-A anarchism

in non-western places, but not necessarily a non-western worldview that

is also anti-authoritarian. I’m responding partially to people who say

things like “anarchism is white,” that it is “of no use for supposedly

marginal people.” Anarchism has been a mostly European phenomenon…

A!: By the word…

D: Perhaps we should turn to Marxism? But, seriously I think there was

probably plenty of anarchy on turtle island. There’s anarchistic aspects

to Nanabush who is (I would say) not a generic trickster from a

primordial folklore, but a specific way to tell stories or a certain

spirit. That’s what I draw on.

A!: The other thing I was going to ask you about was what you mean by a

utopian pre-contact world vs the world we live in now. This has a lot of

impact because part of what people mean when they speak about the Left

is something like a utopian future (that’s equality, liberty, and

fraternity since the Left comes out of the French Revolution). So that’s

what they seem to be referencing: “they came to this land and these

things existed and then we fucked them up.”

D: When you’re talking about decolonization, the problem is: where do

you draw the line? What tools are you going to use to decide what things

were like before, or who we were before as Ojibwa people? You have to

use experts like ethnologists for information. Christian missionaries

for indigenous hymn and bible translations. Looking backwards can be

problematic for the colonized. Political optimists use the child to

represent the future. Natives are often times expected to look back on a

lost utopia. We’re supposed to already be dead. That’s sort of my

reaction to some primitive yearnings, that seem to say, “Here’s the

point that we need to rewind to.” I think the drawbacks may be close to

those of other utopias.

A!: I heard a disturbing story from one of my elders recently. They

basically said that the Ottawa (related to Ojibwa but not quite) had a

pretty fixed notion of the great spirit, that was basically an origin

story of a Great Spirit that created but was indifferent. But the Great

Spirit was always referred to, so when the Catholics came, it was a

seamless transition. This obviously makes me very uncomfortable because

it means that my people were okay with the Christians when they came!

Because the world views just weren’t that different. And whoever came,

the Jesuits or whoever, did a pretty good job of “all ya gotta do is

change the name!”

D: Yea, I always like to listen to elders but I’ve never been very good

at hearing what they tell me.

A!: [laughs]

D: But I’ve heard traditional people say that the pipe and the cross are

same thing.

A!: Ooo fuuuuck.

D: That the smoke brings our prayers up to the Great Spirit... I don’t

think they’re the same thing. But if our pre-contact ancestors were

interchangeable with the monotheists we would have to rebel against them

too.

A!: For me the point is that Native America is not one thing. Different

tribes have different ways in which they wore these values, so for me

the disturbing part of the story is that my people, who as it turned out

at some point in the geopolitical story were given this choice of

“convert or walk to Oklahoma,” were really okay with the conversion

(very few Ottawa from Michigan walked to Oklahoma) because mostly they

were okay with... in other words the way they wore their version of the

Great Spirit ended up being—in their own minds—okay with Catholics. And

for me, someone who wants to believe that my predecessors were ready to

fuck shit up... they really weren’t.

D: For sure. This is related to where you draw the line in the situation

that we’re in presently. I would like to consider Christianity as

something that I know doesn’t work for me as a tool. The idea that

natives lived a natural, edenic existence that got fucked up but there

is a way we could get back there, sounds pretty Christian but of course

my rez is Catholic, and I don’t know if the world views match up

necessarily, but colonization wasn’t always one-sided, and that’s part

of the dilemma... that there was an exchange. And how can we leave our

ancestors with agency, if you want to call it that? They were humans who

were reacting, and that’s sort of how I approach anarchism, because it’s

mostly a non-Native thing, but I like to think that I can use it and not

become a European.

A!: Ok. So then, I guess that an appropriate question that I’m supposed

to ask you is what does decolonization mean to you, but I find that

difficult because it seems like a robot question. I don’t even

personally know what decolonization means for myself so I wouldn’t ask

the question but…

D: When people ask me that question my answer is “a lot of burning.”

That is the only thing that makes sense to me if you want to use that as

a metaphor. In The Witch of Going Snake it says “Throw away your guns

and your steel knives and pots. Kill your cats. Destroy everything you

have that came from the white man.” I don’t know where to begin to make

that separation. I don’t know what is colonized inside of myself. It all

seems pretty damaged. Maybe that is what is radical. I can say to

natives in the city, “you can’t go home and find the answer there.” Just

like, me leaving rural areas and coming to the city didn’t change

everything; there’s no place to go.

A!: Meaning you weren’t innocent in the country and spoiled by the city.

D: We can’t always look to what A.I.M did, or to our great ancestors, or

wait for the future for answers, that’s part of what I’m saying, not to

look for something else besides what is here, and what is here sucks, so

that’s the position I’m in.

A!: There was also something in your presentation about Andrea Smith,

who has been in the middle of some controversy recently…

D: I talked about her piece called “Indigenous Feminism without

Apology,” which makes the case that pre-contact societies were

matriarchal and basically anarchistic. I want to see anarchist ideas

reflected throughout societies, but I’m not sure that it’s always true.

The fact that Andrea Smith has been outed as a Native imposter is not

surprising. Apparently there were rumors for a while that she was faking

Indian. It’s difficult because proving that you are an Indian involves

official papers and government bureaucracies. No one really asks if

someone is a “real” white person. But, the Smiths and Dolezals are at

home in the world of simulations. Vizenor says that if Natives are gonna

live, then the Indian as a sign has to die.

A!: Oh, that’s interesting. He means Indian as in tear in the eye of the

crying stoic…

D: The savage, the vanishing tragedy. The natural ecologist.

A!: Right.

D: The post-Indian approach centers specific tribal groups or bands, as

opposed to using Native American as a catch-all, because while the

Ojibwa existed; there’s never been an Indian except in people’s

imaginations. This means stepping away from victimization and

recognition as a way to frame what it means to be Native. The idea that

we all died or that we’re sad and defeated isn’t true and it isn’t

helpful for those of us who are still around. Talking about Vizenor for

me includes a statement against the brown paper bag test [the idea that

if one is not darker than a brown paper bag then one may as well be

white] because he is very phenotypically white. I could talk about

indigeneity without referencing light complexions or dark skin at all,

and I guess mine is somewhere in between. There is more to the story

than just pigmentation. Sure Natives have a phenotype, there is a blood

memory, but Nanabush doesn’t have DNA.

A!: Can you talk about Nanabush?

D: Nanabush is an important Ojibwa character in story telling, usually

credited with creating the world, but sometimes seen as a prankster. I

would say to people reading this, don’t go read a book that’s like,

“Folklore from All Around the World.” Because it’s not really about

that. Nanabush is something that’s indescribable and dangerous. They are

someone playful who breaks taboos, they wouldn’t fit in with a Christian

society, he’s not civilized. In Baedan, they say they want to become

feral—they’re talking about wanting to approach life wildly. I can

relate to that. I think that these queer nihilist identities have

something in common with the person of undetermined race…

A!: Of course.

D: …since we can’t fit in, in either place. so we’re in this strange

position, but maybe that’s not a bad thing.

A!: There’s a thousand things to talk about in that little bit you just

said, not the least of which is how unacceptable it is to break taboos;

in other words we’re talking about a whole set of people who are

proclaiming their liminal status (as anarchists) but no one will break a

taboo. One of the ways I experience it is around moralism... To bring up

a really stupid (and old) example: Bob Black calling the cops. The idea

that this event is such a fetish object 20 years after it happened—many

people, any time they see a Bob Black post or anything about him, will

repost the shitty thing he did 20 years ago. This is the opposite of

celebrating or even appreciating taboo, it’s indicative of a policing

culture. It feels almost puritanical, like we should be wearing corsets

and shouting “shame” at people (which I do sometimes in play, only

because it’s hysterical that people think it means anything). It’s just

strange to me that there’s all this theory that says one thing, but all

this practice that says you cannot do that thing.

D: You could frame Nanabush as a sinner according to Christian values.

He would get called out in the anarchist subculture. He (or sometimes

she) has an tendency to shape-shift. I like crossing lines as a liminal

person, not that it’s a dialectic, but I don’t believe that there’s a

static identity. Earth First! the way it used to be, or seemed to be,

with rednecks and radical environmentalists going out and fucking shit

up, to me is awesome, better than reaching consensus.

A!: Black Seed folks went to the EF! gathering in 2014. This year in

2015 the details are unclear given the report backs, but it appears that

a POC faction denounced the gathering from within, and as a group left

the gathering. That was the 2015 controversy. I know. Very surprising.

D: I would quote Bob Black and say nobody intervenes more to mind other

people’s business than separatists. Like radical feminists, who have

this affinity and want to live by themselves. I can see why that makes

sense, and they should do that. The idea of people choosing who they

want to work with, that totally makes sense to me. For me personally it

means it’s hard to be a nationalist. I can’t find people exactly like

me, so I’m not interested in agreeing on every point before I work on

something with someone. A!: I guess I’m the closest person to you

around…

D: I can relate to you because we share a certain double burden of

concerns... I could go back around now and say how I got here. Being a

prisoner and being poor, that’s not what makes a Native, but it was part

of my experience, There were a lot of Native prisoners in the prison

where I was.

A!: Because it was in…

D: South Dakota. They automatically put you in a cell with someone of

your own race. It’s rigidly segregated . And that’s part of why I felt

an uneasiness about Oakland scene politics, because I had already had to

live in a violent racialist environment. While I was in prison I

recieved free copies of Green Anarchy magazine and read a lot of other

radical texts. At the same time, I was also confronted by racist

nationalists of different stripes. It was all sort of coming at me, so

it made sense to view the ideologies as stories. When coming to the Bay

Area... that’s another thing that’s important for what I’m talking about

is that I talked to actual anarchists in person. This is me doing the

anthropological fieldwork with existing anarchists, and it’s important

because it made me see the ideas differently, what the scope is,

different from being in prison, reading essays. It’s a different

terrain. For example labels such as a snitch, pedophile, white

supremacist etc. are used less frequently and carry a different weight

in prison than when used by some anarchists.

A!: One of the things that’s really different is an urban setting,

especially a big city, in something like what we could call the APOC

scene. Almost no one talks about their childhood, because if they did

the coherence of their political position today, and the difficulty of

reconciling that with an actual life story, would all fall apart. Let’s

go on talking about your presentation. Say more about liminal identities

and Vizenor in general. He’s written dozens of books?

D: Almost 50. You could situate him as writing speculative fiction. He

sometimes gets put on the science fiction shelf or in the slipstream

genre. He has written short stories, novels, poetry, and non-fiction. He

gets lumped in with postmodernism. I think it’s because it’s hard to

frame what he’s writing about.

A!: How would you compare him to Sherman Alexie, another well known

Native story teller, with fantastical elements?

D: “Magical realism” is usually how people refer to writers like Sherman

Alexie , but I would say that Vizenor is different because he’s

interacting with continental philosophy, if not always directly.

A!: Less sex?

D: More sex than you might expect. Taboo themes are often featured in

Native fiction. In a strange way it is sexy. Native people aren’t

necessarily puritanical. So in these stories by Vizenor and others like

N. Scott Momaday there is transgression, wastefulness, incest, people

having sex with two dogs or a bear, and it’s in the frame of Native

storytelling, and it’s not speculating like “i can imagine a world where

you could hump a dog;” it’s more like, “what if the line between human

and animal isn’t a real thing?” Definitely there is sex and it’s great,

and I guess people could think of Vizenor as sort of like Samuel Delany?

But maybe a little harder to analyze.

A!: How many of his books are books of essays?

D: That is a lot of what he writes. He started off in Eastern Studies,

studying haikus, and I believe he spent some time in Japan. I just think

he’s a strange character, and the idea that he’d be into Japanese things

makes as much sense as anything one would do in university. Ojibwa dream

songs have a similar structure to haikus and may have developed earlier.

He explicitly talks about his ideas outside of fiction and I enjoy that

too. He has several collections of essays some of them touching on

Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Albert Camus…

A!: Does he have a similar story of one Native parent, one white parent?

D: Yes a similar story. He was raised by his Grandmother on the White

Earth reservation in Minnesota. We’re related because we’re both related

to Nanabush, coincidentally. He also taught at UCBerkeley.

A!: Is he retired now?

D: He is a professor emeritus at Berkeley; but that’s the thing... I’m

not a philosopher and I don’t think that ethnic studies is a position of

strength. But just like people use anthropology as an anarchist

practice, I enjoy reading. Other fictions like the works of the Dark

Mountain project are great too. They share stories that don’t spoil the

ending.

A!: ...So, liminal identity.

D: For me I can say I’m half Native and half white, but I don’t always

want to do that because I don’t think it’s too symmetrical, and there

are automatically issues at least for my tribe where it gets into

conversations about blood quantum and genetics and I’m not interested in

that. Also I’m enrolled in a federally-recognized tribe but I don’t

think that is the way to tell who is Native or not. Either through the

government or through hereditary science. None of that really matters.

A!: Just a side bar, I have a Canadian Ottawa grandfather.

D: Oh shit.

A!: It doesn’t count.

D: Yea. [laughs] Vizenor uses the term cross bloods for mixed-race

Indians. it means that you’re part of two worlds and don’t really walk

in either one of them. The scruffy rez dog mongrel comes to mind. There

are some Native science fiction writers who talk about Metis identity,

and frame it as “we’re have Louis Riel as our messiah figure, and mixed

blood people are feral and wild.” I don’t know if I necessarily live up

to that…

A!: It would be nice…

D: Sure. Liminality means that things don’t have to be this or that, I

guess. But it’s not necessarily a synthesis either. The two sides might

not ever be reconciled. It opens a space for questioning the value of

identity altogether.

A!: What’s nice about it is that liminal evokes a twilight area where

things are indistinguishable from each other, and could be a whole bunch

of things.

D: I was recently reading an HP Lovecraft story called “the Mound” that

is basically about a haunted Indian burial ground.

A!: I’m sure HP dealt with this with total sensitivity…

D: Of course... The narrator is an ethnologist studying people in

Oklahoma. I guess when we talk about queerness, it’s like it can mean

you don’t want to reproduce, you can’t get married, you’re not a normal

part of society, so you’re in the shadows. and I like that idea—you

could apply it to liminal people. But in the Lovecraft story, it’s one

of the only times that he vividly describes the Cthulhuian underworld,

and he could be describing modern American cities. I mean everything is

covered in slime, or whatever, but to the point of Lovecraft looking in

shadows, and looking at ambiguity as something that’s a complete terror.

So I’m thinking about shadows not being horrifying, but also that being

horrified is not necessarily something to avoid.

A!: To go back, we sort of touched on her for a second and then I

distracted us with the controversy. In Andrea Smith’s work you got some

points that were worth talking through? So what were those points, and

how does that change now that we know that her “quantum doesn’t

correspond to her points.”

D: Yea. Well it seemed like she was trying to do something similar to

your explorations into indigenous anarchism, in trying to de-center

Europe, and looking at ways that traditional societies were more

anarchistic and especially in Latin America, groups that are saying “we

are for anarchy and it has to do with our traditions.” I think that’s

worth talking about. I don’t know what to say about her non-existent

blood quantum. I want to say that it doesn’t really matter; but I think

it does matter in a way. The question is do Indians think differently?

Academic writing can be so abstract that the words are interchangeable.

The identity doesn’t matter because there’s too much distance. If you

can switch “indigenous” with “queer,” “disabled,” or “woman”... cut and

paste, and it would be saying basically the same thing. I think that is

a problem.

A!: This corresponds with your general point which is that specificity

matters. In other words we don’t need a new Native American movement, we

need a new Minnesota Ojibwa movement.

D: I’m not sure how to respond to that, because I’m not really even

concerned with…

A!: ...the politics of it.

D: Things are going on now that are political, and it’s not really

interesting to me but, a lot of Minnesota tribes are changing from blood

quantum to descendency. Currently there is a percentage of blood

required to become a tribal member, and they want to change it so that

you can enroll if you have a distant ancestor. It has to do with

resources really. You could make a connection between tribal

organizations’ preoccupation with funding and the relationship of Native

radicals to white activists; there’s already an imbalance but people

need the help. Native solidarity activists are always going to talk

about how much they hate the allies, but they are always going to invite

them to come back. Self determination in the case of the Red Lake Ojibwa

means living by themselves and practicing traditions. It doesn’t need a

defense, they’re doing it, they don’t need help from academics in the

cities. Environmentalists are always going to want to talk to Natives,

really, so that’s why I feel like I have something different to say.

Maybe I‘m just offering another fictitious image?

A!: Does Vizenor use the term “simulation”? Obviously I know about

Baudrillard using that word…

D: He does draw on Baudrillard, so if people aren’t familiar with the

concept, it refers to the making of a map that is 1:1 in scale, where

the representation replaces the actual thing. It’s easy to see that none

of the shit on TV about Indians is real. Representation is an enemy, so

I’m not positing that there’s a right one. Every movie... it’s a

mythical thing, it’s not real. Its just spectacle. Vizenor is saying

that the real thing is the Ojibwa spirit of survival and we lose

something when we learn to identify with the Image. I don’t know if

there’s a real thing under everything, I guess.

A!: Right. This reminds me of watching Natives who I respect get all hot

under the collar about the feather headdresses that the sexy people are

wearing to concerts... I totally accept that this is the same thing as

wearing blackface or whatever... and privileged people do that. That’s

almost the definition of privilege, that you get to wear the scalps of

your enemies around your neck or whatever [laughter]. I guess there’s a

liberal thing at the heart of this that says “yes, colonization

happened, yes there’re horrific class differences, yes, racism by some

definition is at the heart of the american engine… and we should hide

it!” In other words the fight against the headdress isn’t the fight. Not

at all. But a lot of people get so wound up about these being the

fights. And especially the headdress... I mean, it’s not my culture...

this is not the universal sign of Natives. Anyways, something of a

sidebar, sorry…

D: No, that is something that I think about. I question what kind of

understanding of racism includes the idea that you could just ask

someone not to be racist, and they’ll be just like, “Oh yea, you’re

right. What was I thinking?” It’s not about winning moral arguments.

When it comes to headdresses, it’s possible people on your reservation

did wear headdresses during the time when that attracted tourism. I’ve

seen old pictures at Red Lake with men in headdresses, and it shows

you... it’s not always about calling other people out. I also see how

much we’ve been affected by these images as well. They had to wear

headdresses because that’s what people thought natives did. But you have

to give up anything left of the Ojibwa to become an Indian.

A!: This is a big topic of conversation in my family because we were

involved in putting on powwows in the area. Of course a traditional

powwow would be acorns and raccoons, it wouldn’t be flashy looking at

all. It would look like woodland stuff, which is drab and dark colors,

no yellow feathers or spears...

[laughter]

…and tomahawks and all that nonsense. So of course that wouldn’t bring

any of the white people with deep pockets who will spend $500 on a

necklace. Or, you’d get people for the cool baskets, but…

D: I think what you’re describing also applies to Native radicals. You

have to present yourself as a Native to non-Natives, so you’re going to

have to simulate. To me that’s humiliating.

[laughter]

A!: What we’re talking about are complex deep problems that are not

solvable, and those kind of questions tend to get called postmodern. So

how is the direction you are taking this conversation in, not

postmodern?

D: Well... By default it is postmodern, but it’s not coming from France.

One sort of becomes postmodern if you’re living in this society with

cultural schizophrenia. You could line up these categories, like

multi-centeredness vs centralization, there are certain concepts that

line up with postmodernism, like the postmodern premise that there are

many stories, not one central truth. While the Ojibwa compromise is

“there’s science, but we can still tell our stories, which are not

invalidated.” There is also an obvious indigenous influence on French

theory going in the other direction, in the form of Pierre Clastres’ war

machines, Situationist potlatch, and so forth. We could also reach the

conclusions of animism using object-oriented ontology—the idea that

humans are not the center of the universe. But I wouldn’t say it’s

postmodern. Not an easy answer I guess.

A!: I would say that people calling this postmodern is basically

name-calling, and is really a complaint about not knowing what to do,

and wanting to be told what to do.

D: I think the way that the question is asked already limits how we can

answer it. I’m not convinced that we can have the right ideas, and then

go forth and change the world. I think I’m part of the world and the

world changes me. I don’t think that we have special consciousness we

can bestow on other people. Or that there’s a way forward. And maybe

that there’s not a way backward either. My only answer is that it’s

complicated. If the idea is decolonization (that is, understanding

Native people) be cautious when someone tells you that they have the

answer, that they know the right approach for working with Native

people. Skip the anti-oppression workshops. There’s not one way because

there’s not one Native society. So there’s not an easy solution. If you

want to learn from Indians, consider caring about the people close to

you right now. Try to get to the point that what you’re doing is

revolutionary, without waiting for some kind of break.

NOTE * “For America to Live, Europe Must Die!” starts out with this

passage: The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that

I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of

“legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied

the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I

ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of

destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an

abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

Nihilist Animism, by Aragorn!

Ultimately everything I do, every project, everything I build, every

relationship I start is going to fail. The world, to the extent that I

am part of it, is also dissolving. This building/destroying is my

expression of a feeling that lives somewhere between the Protestant work

ethic, the will to inflict anarchy on the world, and an attitude against

the projects of Man. I am satisfied living here, in this unstable place,

continuing to do things that will blow away as soon as the center stops

holding. I’m satisfied to call this nihilism, not because that is what

it is, but because our culture is into naming things and I am into

sending lemmings off of the cliffs of their own creation.

There is a current that breezily uses animism as a solution to the

“problem of spirituality.” I have concerns. An older article on the

topic, Sarah Anne Lawless’ “The Song of the Land: Bioregional Animism,”*

both demonstrates and refers to the problems of immediatist spirituality

rather well. On the one hand we benefit from the knowledge (mostly from

anthropological data) of the seeming parallelism between many peoples

(i.e. that everyone, in the past, was an animist) and on the other hand

any attempt to practice animism either suffers from being a sort of

cultural appropriation or a hokey stab in the dark that does not

immediately satisfy a cultural need and feels embarrassingly small

compared to the greatness of the whole earth.

There is a painful gap between being (or naming yourself) an animist and

feeling the glory of the profane (and holy) things around you. This gap

is enormous. It is filled with the mono-culture religions, civilization,

and technocracy. This trinity makes the compelling claim that the holy

holy is in fact achievable by ritual, law, and blinking lights. It

claims this with the promise of personal salvation and potential of

private revelation by way of priest, urban living, and new cell phones.

It an enormous provocation to say that kneeling alone by the bank of a

river and being cleansed by the sacred is a pure, unadulterated animism.

It may be a true moment (especially to someone enveloped in spectacle

and lies) but it is not a complete one. At some point one packs up the

REI equipment in the Subaru and drives back home. Sometime later one

posts about it on Tumblr. One is not complete in the moment, but instead

is an observer of one’s own life. That life can feel like a series of

real moments punctuated by gaps of disconnection that look like daily

life. Living can be like a problem that can be solved after retirement

or whatever.

Animism (grand, capital A) began to die as the City was being born. This

does not mean the urge died, but that urge primarily moves us against

ourselves and towards camping trips, Eschatology, and faith– based

approaches to the sickness of this world. Our question is whether

mediated experiences are the only ones we are capable of. If that is the

case, as is likely, then our capacity for revelatory joy is similarly

curtailed, all arguments to the contrary. If we are indeed broken are we

capable of NOT being broken? As anarchists who have an interest in how

the world operates, and perhaps how we could perform as wooden shoes to

it, we are naive about what grinding gears mean today. We think it is

enough to change the world without realizing that troubleshooting gears

is a quarter of what the world does. We have urges but little wisdom

about the unforeseen consequences of our small strategies. This is the

reason why we are so hungry for the possibility of animism, a spiritual

practice where desire and capacity are mapped perfectly.

The reason we will not solve this problem like the little special

snowflakes that we are is because of exactly that. Just as monotheism

has succeeded in the deception that it represents a personal

relationship between you and the almighty (parsed and mediated by

priests, ministers, and the dining room table) animism needs a social

fabric, outside of the civilized order, to keep warm. This social fabric

isn’t as simple as playing outdoors with other children, starving for

life lessons from the kitchen table where the elders sit and talk, or

rituals that help you understand that you are a part of something large.

But one can imagine such simplicity. One can imagine life without

screens as that life just passed us by, but that is only a fraction of

what it would take to live a whole life. While the cell phone may itself

be sacred and alive, the things we see on it are mundane and ordinary

and make us the same.

It is on infertile land that future spiritual practitioners attempt to

live. These are hardscrabble lives, devoid of community or anything but

scraps of information of how others did what you are trying to do. In

this context it makes perfect sense that racial, silly, or fantastic

elements (often the same thing) often infiltrate what is an impossible

effort. It’s not that we can’t “go back,” it is that doing so is just as

difficult as marching to somewhere completely new (whether Narnia or

into the Star Wars universe). The new just seems easier.

What I would propose, what a nihilist animism would entail, would be an

acknowledgment that a spiritual endeavor must come from a sociable

practice. This might be a conversation between seven of us in the woods,

or different sets in different places but it has to pass the test of the

I/we. If you can find a group of people who are willing to ride the

tension of being individuated, having undergone the great pain of core

alienation in the modern world, while not privileging one’s own

experiences in a group then you could begin. This would look like a long

waiting, while the traffic passes overhead, while your devices beep,

bop, beep in your car, when you could be doing other things, for the

world around you to expose its language to you. This would not happen

quickly. It would probably take years and then it could shape a set of

principles, a path to walk, that would make sense to your set of people.

This is why it is impossible to imagine in this world, the context has

shifted too radically to imagine building a set of tools over years

before even thinking about using them. The context has shifted too

radically to imagine doing anything so long term with sociability.

This long listening project does not make sense in a world of traffic,

screens, and bullshit dichotomies like I and we. But this is the start.

One, find a set of people, two, find a language. That language should

probably not be a public one because the task that comes next is all too

vulnerable. We are talking about creating something that the history of

the current order has done a bang–up job of genociding, mocking, and

parading in front of the slavering consumers of modern spectacle for

their amusement. Keeping this language secret will be nearly impossible

in a world of social media but the task isn’t nearly complete then.

Finally this language has to become meaningful. With it a set of people,

who will have to become multi-generational, have to disassemble and

recreate a world that does not suffer from monotheism, civilization, and

modern technology.

That impossible task set I share with you is the closest thing I would

put forward as a recommended practice. A worldweary rebuilding of the

very reasons we should do things together at all. A practice I am myself

incapable of participating in because I have been broken by the same

things as you. My mind is no longer limber enough to learn a new

language. My heart is too scarred to do something so honest with a group

of new people and too experienced to do it with the monsters I surround

myself with (for other reasons). To go deep enough to subvert the

conditioning and violence of this world is just impossible enough that I

can imagine the kind of person who would attempt it but I have no idea

what will result, even in a best case scenario.

I dream of free actors who live without fear. I imagine words that speak

beyond comprehension. I imagine the same goals that I have expressed

lived by people who care for one another, who laugh at the empty

sociability of our era, who are the anarchy unleashed unto the world. I

imagine connections to the world that I am not capable of. This

impossible set of conditions and potentials is why a nihilist animism

appeals to me at all. It names capabilities I don’t have in a world I

can’t imagine living in. That’s all one can ask of oneself.

NOTE * http://sarahannelawless.com/2014/02/21/

the-song-of-the-land-bioregional-animism/

Spacious Treeline In Words, by Gerald Vizenor

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Spacious Treeline in Words” by Gerald Vizenor is from an

out– of–print collection called Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed

Descent.

“Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of

the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book.

Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is

never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. . . . Every exit

from the book is made within the book. . . . If writing is not a tearing

of the self toward the other within a confession of infinite separation,

if it is a delectation of itself, the pleasure of writing for its own

sake, the satisfaction of the artist, then it destroys itself. . . . One

emerges from the book, because . . . the book is not in the world, but

the world is in the book.”

— Jacques Derrida

Writing and Difference

Holding forth at the spacious treelines with the bears and the crows,

the best tellers in the tribes peel peel peel peel their words like

oranges, down to the last navel. Mimicked in written forms over winter

now, transposed in mythic metaphors, the interior glories from oral

traditions burst in conversations and from old footprints on the trail.

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me,” writes Roland

Barthes in his book The Pleasures of the Text. “This proof exists: it is

writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language. ..

. I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. . . . The

language I speak within myself is not of my time; it is prey, by nature,

to ideological suspicion; thus it is with this language that I must

struggle. I write because I do not want the words I find…”

The most imaginative tribal writers seldom peel peel peel peel their

oranges at random, not even in the ritual darkness, but untribal

translators and talebearers march march march their words down mission

rows in perfect grammatical time, building word castles here and there

in the sacred sand, territorial and colonial verbs, fabricating their

words in prestressed phrases, interior mechanical landscapes, separating

tribal orchards from the sacred. The written word leaves a different

footprint near the treeline. The oral tradition is a visual event, but

in written form stories are formed as scripts, struck into print from

grammatical philosophies, so that the reader, trained to read with

critical class expectations, becomes the master of sand castles, a

teller and a listener in a single interior voice from a written

template. The reader remembers footprints near the treeline, near the

limits of understanding in written words, but the trail is never marked

with printed words. The trail is made as a visual event between

imaginative creators, tellers, and listeners: we hold our breath beneath

the surface, the written word, but we know that respiration and

transpiration are possible under water.

“The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own

ideas,” writes Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text, “for my body

does not have the same ideas I do. . . . The pleasure of the text is not

the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In

these cases, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling: the entire

excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ ... or in

knowing the end of the story. . . . Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is

not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions

I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in

again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of

bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality

of its reading. ...”

These imaginative narratives are written in double visions, peeled from

visual experiences on the trail near the spacious treeline and

transposed in tribal visual word cinemas. The four interior scenes, the

stories within stories and between tellers and listeners, are satirical

mind theaters staged at the crossroads near the orchards, near the

windmills on distant moors, mountains, and in classrooms.

“The imagination is always aware of the present. . . .” writes Mary

Warnock in her book Imagination. “Neither understanding alone nor

sensation alone can do the work of imagination, nor can they be

conceived to come together without imagination. . . . Only imagination

is in this sense creative; only it makes pictures of things.”

The scenes in these stories, in these word cinemas, are visual dream

flights, untimed in unusual places, with terminal believers and urban

shamans and landfill meditators. The word indian appears in lowercase

letters in these stories.

Classroom Windmills

Tulip shares her dreams with me at dusk. She is fascinated with natural

power, wind through windmills, the moon through pine boughs, white water

down the mountain, salmon in the sun, crows over the prairie. She builds

miniature windmills, and she has transformed our tribal resource center,

one of several special ethnic libraries on campus, windows opened wide

to the ocean, into a palace of whirrs and wind rattles.

Tulip reveals no secrets, and she bears no confessions from her tribal

origins. She is more beautiful than the wind from all directions and she

is my weakness, but her weakness has never been me. She has but one

weakness, it is her pure hatred for indian men, parts of me included,

mixedblood or whole; and, though she is obsessed with natural power, she

is inhibited about the instinctive power of sex. Most offensive to her

is the language of sex.

Tulip finds much more pleasure and awareness in water and wind than she

does in masculine muscles or an erect penis. The copper blades on her

miniature windmills, white water, sandpipers, wounded killdeer, the

motions and sounds from the earth, morning in the cottonwoods, but not

indian men, speak the natural languages she understands. Tulip trusts

me, rather, she trusts the secrets and silence in me, and she shares her

dreams with me when we are alone.

Histories harden like prairie mud and disappear in her memories. The

first time we were together she was a flower, the wind was gentle over

the meadow, and the shamans and the tribal clowns at the borders of

sexual reversals burst over the earth, through the wet leaves in the

summer ceremonies of the sun. Sexual contradictions are like the changes

in the wind, enchanting, wind and rain on the leaves, the pleasures are

tacit and preternatural. We touch with words, but she believes that the

words on sex are demeaning, metaphors from violence and domination,

reductions from natural experiences, the opposites from nurturance. She

demands silence in sex, restraint like birds in magical flight, control,

too much control, wordless and breathless at the most ecstatic moments.

Not a thunderstorm in her, but a warm hesitant rain on the cedar and

fern, no more than whispers. She is not a shadow, she is the moon.

Tulip has sound reasons to hate indian men. As a child, a beautiful

natural creature like a fur salmon upstream, and as a young woman, she

was abused by several indian men. Living in a small shack on the

reservation, she watched drunken indian men lust for women, word pits,

scored brown books, and she heard the harsh and violent sounds of sex

over her mother and her sisters.

Tulip has the haunting face of a woodland animal, soft skin, smooth

black hair. Her smile flickers from the first dream fires of the tribes.

She chooses to be alone, to be silent, to live with secrets, to be with

her winds like a windmill near the ocean. Tulip is the wind, she is

nature, and I am a fool.

Tulip is in my dreams.

The sound of the windmills reminds me of her power.

Tulip is also a victim of what she remembers and avoids. Behind her

desk, through a thin plaster wall in the next office, she can hear,

three or four times a week, the uninhibited and unabashed sounds of wild

sex.

Satirical Stallion

Twice a week in the afternoon, two hours before his special seminar on

tribal literature, Pink Stallion has loud sex with blondes in his office

next to the tribal resource center. The windmills, even in a stiff wind,

do not rise above the sounds of sex. Tulip cannot avoid hearing these

smut events through the wall behind her desk.

“Blondes stimulate ideas,” asserts the Pink Stallion. When we hear

blonde laughter coming through the thin wall from his office, moaning

over the sound of the windmills, the center turns silent. Even the

windmills seem to slow down to listen. Lips open and close with special

care, books drop closed, pens poised, while we wait to hear the final

cries from the blonde resurrection of General George Custer.

Tulip hears the first sounds near her desk. The opening of the couch

against the wall, a thud, a moan, curses, hard breathing—all drive her

to pack her books and wind charts and leave for her apartment in the

hills. She dreams there, flashing her fur upstream in the sun.

Pink Stallion bridled his mixedblood horse in time for our seminar on

tribal literature. Twice a week he appears with flush cheeks, lecture

notes in hand. From the curve of his smile like a trickster he must know

that we listen in on his time with blondes.

“This week,” said Pink Stallion, opening the seminar, “we will discuss

the meaning of culture, mythical opposition and resolution, sacred

connections and secular separations, and experiences in the oral

tradition, as discovered in several indian novels, and in Landfill

Meditation, a collection of skin stories about an urban shaman.”

“Shall we begin with these questions, please: What use is culture if it

does not support our dreams and visions? As a form of consciousness, is

culture a denial of mortality? The denial of the earth in us? Should we

be at war, word wars in opposition with a culture that invalidates our

dreams and visions?”

Silence.

We were bored; after the sounds of sex through the wall we were bored

with seminars and trick questions. Bound in urban rituals, we were bored

with words; material magic and street chatter limited our imagination.

We were unable to respond to metaphors with more than passive political

rhetoric and disconnected curses.

“Shit, man, culture? What culture you talkin on, brother?” carped Bad

Mouth, the first and the last to speak. Her words were broken arrows.

She resisted ideas, and from her passive resistance she found personal

power in symbolic opposition. Mixedblood and urban, she was immortal in

word wars.

Bad Mouth never reads. She frowns and sulks. She hates books, white

people, and insects, in that order. The whirr and rattle of the

miniature windmills sound to her like thousands of insects, and she

hates the wind too because of the windmills. She prevails with hatred

and insists that what sounds evil must be evil.

Pink Stallion resists the world in a different manner. When he was first

asked to teach a seminar on indian literature for indians, he resisted

because there would be no white students there, which meant in

translation, no blondes. He called such a seminar “bone head literature

for racists,” but as the power of the indian students increased, he

turned the indian seminar idea into an act of survival.

Pink Stallion leaned forward, mounted his white-framed reading glasses,

and read from Myth and Meaning by Claude Levi-Strauss: “Mythical stories

are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem

to reappear all over the world. . . . Each of us is a kind of crossroads

where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens

there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no

choice, it is just a matter of chance.”

Silence.

The students looked out the window.

The windmills whirred.

Pink Stallion looked out the window, looked toward the ocean with the

students, while he continued his lecture: “The invented indian in us has

become a perfect victim, separated from the living, an object with no

sacrificial significance, objet-trouve, a word icon, perfect inventions

from romantic literature. The invented indian is thrown in us from a

white wheel, a white ceramic creation without nurturance.”

“You always talk about that shit, man, what white people are thinking,

how about talking about what indians are thinking for a change?”

demanded Injun Time, who was the brightest in a pride of tribal fools.

She received an urban vision and was given her sacred pet name by the

leader of the San Francisco Sun Dancers.

“Did you hear me?” asked Injun Time.

“Why do you always quote white people? Quote some indians for a change.”

“Language, as we have discussed it in the past, structures our

perceptions of the world,” Pink Stallion explained. Looking toward the

ocean, he pinched his lips until the skin turned white.

“Did you hear me the second time?” demanded Injun Time. “How come you

never find out anything that indians write and think about?”

“You are quite right, Miss Injun Time,” said Pink Stallion, leaning back

in his chair at the head of the seminar table. His eyes returned from

the ocean. “Your timing is perfect, because, it is now the time and

place to consider indian authors, but first, let me make a check around

the room to see who has read the indian materials.”

Silence.

Fast Food, short, fat, and flush, true to his urban dream name, was the

first to respond while he munched on corn chips. He brushed the crumbs

from the seminar table in front of him, and mumbled that he had not read

“all of the stuff, the stories.”

“Which parts did you read?”

“The best parts that are indian.”

“Name one part.”

“Sure, the part where the white man gets what he’s got coming to him,

that’s the part that I liked the best,” said Fast Food. Token White,

lips and cheeks twitching from the opposition in her consciousness

between tribal traditions and her word place in the urban world, said

that she had read the stories, but she wished that she had not done so,

because, she explained, indian author or not, she thought the tribal

people in the stories were made to look foolish.

“Have you ever heard of satire?”

“Satire is not sacred,” answered Token White, fulfilling the meaning of

her romantic name. The students used their descriptive pet names from

the urban sun dance. Token White stands tall, white, angular, absorbed

in indian dreams, and tribal by serious practice.

“Mother earth is satire,” said Pink Stallion.

“No, never,” said Token White.

“Never, never,” said Fine Print, moving his lips in silent recitation,

passive and distant. He confessed that he was not a reader, never read

prose, he explained, because prose is not traditional and because he is

a writer of poems. The manner in which some students avoid linear

thinking is linear.

Bad Mouth, slouching in her chair, sneered behind dark sunglasses,

curled her upper lip, and cursed. “Shit, man, it never mean nothin to

me, no how, man, indians never write that shit, man, indians got an oral

tradition, man.” Bad Mouth survived in the world with hatred. Invectives

were the source of her urban visions, and her dream name, but she has

not been an indian for long, which makes it difficult to know where and

when the indian hatred begins and ends. Three years ago when her mother

told her that her grandmother was a mixedblood indian from Mission La

Soledad, Bad Mouth demanded that the Bureau of Indian Affairs make her

an indian and give her a scholarship to college. Before her indian

enlightenment she told her friends that her parents were both Maoris

from New Zealand. “The third world is all the same,” she said, and

boasted that her father was a leader in the Northern California Hau Hau

Movement, a sort of sacred urban cargo cult.

“What was that?”

“Shit, man, third world, man.”

“Third world where?” asked Pink Stallion.

“Right here, man, shit.” Bad Mouth was scheduled to graduate at the end

of this quarter, but Rubie Blue Welcome failed her ass in a seminar on

tribal languages, which is a degree requirement in indian studies. She

did not wait long on the rim. With Doc Cloud Burst and the San Francisco

Sun Dancers, Bad Mouth is leading a movement to control the department

with urban indian spiritual power and eliminate the courses she did not

pass.

Touch Tone, in braids and plastic bear claws, could have been named for

plastic, but because he is best known for his long distance telephone

conversations back to the reservation, he was named in a dream for the

fastest dial. Wherever he visits he leaves a trail of long distance

telephone bills. Aiming his water pistol around the room, he said he

never did read what the indians wrote because indians live in oral

traditions, and a real indian teacher would tell stories and not make

indians read stories, “what is there to read in the indian world?”

“Perceptive question,” said Pink Stallion.

“Shapersons are the best writers,” said Injun Time. She tells stories

with the voice of a shaman, or as she insists, a “shaperson.” She sees

auras and speaks about magical flights to other worlds where she learned

the languages of plants and animals and birds. She knows about animals,

and medicines from plants. Animals come to her on the streets and tell

her stories, complain about their health in the cities, and laugh about

their foolishness. Injun Time bears vitamins in her medicine bundle, a

common practice among the members of the San Francisco Sun Dancers.

“When indians write, indians write,” said Injun Time, fingering her

leather medicine bundle around her neck, “and when indians read, indians

read, and when this indian reads she reads what she likes to read, and

she likes the short stories she read about the landfill meditator

because he had a shit load of visions.”

Silence.

The windmills whirred.

Injun Time smiled.

Pink Stallion slapped his thighs.

Transformations are not uncommon in the tribal world. Pink Stallion

wished that he could become a large bird or a dark bear during his

special seminar for indian students and flash his fur on the wind. He

appeared now, chin in hand, to be soaring, but he explained later that

he was transfixed with boredom and repressed hostilities about some of

the indian students. “Tulip is a shorebird, and she transforms me from

boredom with her windmills,” he said, but then he changed her metaphor

to a small animal, one he could mount no doubt.

“Have teachers become the ceremonial victims,” Pink Stallion whispered

over the windmills, and then he bounced from his hands and pawed through

his notes and papers like a bear at a picnic.

“In time, all in good time, now, let me show all of you fine oral

scholars, avid readers of indian literature, how to read, since this is

your seminar and my survival,” said Pink Stallion, turning the page in a

collection of short stories written by indians. “Landfill Meditation has

an outside and an interior observer, or an omniscient narrator who goes

for it and knows what is coming down. The story starts with a teacher

telling stories and then one voice leads to another, as stories did in

the oral tradition, from teller to listener to listener and more. We

move through time with a shaman until the end when the writer delivers

us back to the classroom where we started as readers and listeners.

These stories take place in a house of word mirrors, with the denouement

being little more than the return of the narrator to our interior

space.”

“Shit, man. ... “

“Shit, what, woman,” responded Pink Stallion.

“Shit, man, you done teaching here.”

“We were done when we were invented,” countermoved the Pink Stallion

from behind the windmills. He remounted his reading glasses and cleared

his throat. “These Landfill Meditation stories begin with Clement

Beaulieu, a mixedblood character from the White Earth Reservation in

Minnesota. Beaulieu conducts seminars on Native American philosophies

and tribal meditation, environmental fantasies, animal languages, and

talking and walking backward, one night each week at Shaman High, which,

as you know, is a transcendental college in Marin County, California.

Bad Mouth stopped two windmills before she shouldered her red pack, and

leaving the seminar and cultural resource center, she slammed the door

three times.

Injun Time straightened the blades on the windmills.

Pink Stallion looked out toward the setting sun over the ocean. The wind

was cool on his face, and he remembered the stories he would tell about

the urban shaman teacher. He looked down at his book and began to read

about landfill meditation and tribal transformations.

The windmills whirred in time.

Bad Mouth returned to the seminar table, mean as ever, with three new

urban sun dancers to hold her evil line.

Urban Shamans

Last week, when the in teaching trickster entered the classroom,

conversations stopped in the middle of sentences. He removed his leather

coat with unusual caution, walked backward moving his head from side to

side like an animal at the shoreline, smiled, turned out the overhead

fluorescent lights, and then he waited near the open window in silence.

There, in his woodland visions, he followed the water moons backward

over the mountains on familiar tribal vision faces. Traffic over the

Golden Gate Bridge roared down the word maps and sacred place names in

the distance.

Pink Stallion stopped reading and looked around the table to see who was

listening. Fast Food was munching corn chips as usual. Touch Tone was

sleeping with his head back and his mouth wide open.

“How does he know that sacred stuff?” asked Token White, strumming the

sinew on her favorite bow.

“Sacred memories.”

“But his stories are like entertainment,” Token White insisted. “How can

that stuff be sacred?” “Memories have no unconscious forms,” explained

Stallion. “Entertainment is not a categorical experience we seldom

remember events in forms.”

“What was that?”

“When we tell about our experiences we remember events outside the forms

in which the experiences first occurred”

“Shit, man.”

“Remember sex first and the backseat later.”

“Now we meet the characters in the stories,” said Pink Stallion. The

trickster told stories backward about the four directions and the four

tribal characters who traveled with him that night from the window:

Martin Bear Charme the landfill meditator, Happie Comes Last the demure

gossiper, Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf the metatribal moralist, and Belladonna

Winter Catcher the roadwoman with terminal creeds.

The following is an imaginative translation from the drawkcab, or

backward patois, in which these stories were first told and recorded:

“Backward what?” asked Token White.

“Patois means a special language, street talk, for example, or a common

dialect which is different from the standard language,” explained Pink

Stallion.

Martin Bear Charme owns a reservation, the teaching trickster told

backward from the darkness, teaches a seminar on refuse meditation, and

circumscribes his own unusual images in the material world.

Charme commands us to believe that imaginative meditation means walking

backward through the refuse and telling visual stories to writers who

never take notes, but not, he said twice, but not speaking to be

recorded or smiling to be photographed.

Words are rituals in the oral tradition, from the knowledge of creation,

little visions on the winds, said the old tribal scavenger to his

students, not electronic sounds separating the tellers from the

listeners. Landfill meditation restores the connections between refuse

and the refuser.

Charme, mixedblood master meditator who tells that he walked backward

down from Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, is much more vain

than astute about his photogenic face and emulsion visage. He has an

enormous nose attached to his smooth face, and in his stare is the power

of the bear.

Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf, autonomous mistress of metatribal ceremonies,

started soughing on stage at the Unitarian Church in Berkeley under the

sounds of automobile traffic, about the guardians at the heart of mother

earth, while a disciple in sparrow feathers, bearing a pacific smile,

held open the double doors for one more cash contribution to balance the

earth at the fault.

“Shit, man,” said Bad Mouth.

“She did not explain her identities,” said Pink Stallion who was at the

meeting, filled with cedar smoke and terminal believers, “but she said

she was authorized to speak for mother earth.”

Happie Comes Last, reservation born laborer in a healthfood cooperative,

a horsewoman, and columnist for the Mountain Meditator, a critical

tabloid on meditation and holistic healing, would have been the last

cash donor, but there at the double doors, sorting through the cards and

letters in her leather pouch like a marsupial, she found a free press

ticket and a caricature of the refuse meditation leader. Flashing the

ticket and caricature, she asked the disciple, as she moved beneath his

feathers and outstretched arms, where was the refuse meditator sitting?

Charme sits over there, the disciple said, pointing with his chin and

blond head; he is in the white pants, the one with the oil on his nose,

in the back near the window.

Comes Last leaned back to gossip with the attractive blond disciple: Did

you know that he walks and talks backward? He never answers interviews

but in public places like this. No, the blond disciple whispered back

over his shoulder, where are his private places? Martin Bear Charme,

founder of the Landfill Meditation Reservation and the seminar with the

same name, scooped the oil from his outsized nose with his dark middle

finger, his habit once or twice an hour, and spread the viscid mounds

over his cuticles. Sitting near the window, one would never know,

watching his smooth hands in backward speech, that the refuse meditator

was reservation born, once poor, and undereducated for urban survival.

“Right on, man,” exclaimed Fast Food.

Nose Charmer, his tribal pet name on the reservation, hitchhiked to San

Francisco when he was sixteen and settled in a waterfront hotel. He

studied welding on a federal relocation program, but scrap connections

bored him so he turned to scavenging and made a fortune hauling and

filling wetlands with solid waste and urban swill. Once a worthless mud

flat, his lush refuse reservation on South San Francisco Bay near

Mountain View is now worth millions.

Charme and his legal advisor, Bicker Becker, have petitioned the federal

government for recognition of the reservation as a sovereign tax-free

tribal meditation nation, a place where laws and liens are intuitive.

Petulant Becker, titular dean of the California Meditation and

Levitation Law School, argues that even individuals in shamanic flight

and astral projections should be recognized as duty-free ports.

There never was refuse like this on the reservation, Charme told his

seminar, because on the old reservations we were the refuse, we were the

waste, solid and swill on the run, telling stories from a discarded

culture to amuse the colonial refusers. The blond disciple dropped his

arms and his smile, and the double doors wagged closed on the traffic

sounds. Oh Shinnah, her hair bound back in tight braids, cut counter

shapes around her head in abstruse hand rituals and then snapped two

match heads together four times, igniting a small cedar bundle of her on

the floor.

Comes Last, smiling and nodding with embarrassment, broke through the

silent aisles while the little chapel filled with thick, sweet smoke.

Down the back row she cleared her throat and then perched on the last

chair, not knowing that the old scavenger commanded the last place near

the window, his escape distance from spiritual faults.

Chanting wanaki nimiwin wanaki, Charme scooped his nose oil once more

while Oh Shinnah focused on the visions in her crystal ball, and then in

perfect tribal trickster time he rolled with his chair past Comes Last

in magical flight toward the window, a movement she later described in

her column as soaring backward on a shaman chair.

Pink Stallion paused to tell us that he was there too, at the meeting,

sitting near the shaman in the back of the chapel. He explained that

magical flight was a common shamanic tribal experience, moving through

other times and places, other lives and spaces in creation.

“Shaman understand the language, what was that word special languages?”

asked Injun Time.

“Patois.”

“Shaman understand animal and plant patois too, but what do the indian

words mean, the ones you told?”

“Wanaki means peace and nimiwin means dancing, in the tribal language of

the anishinaabe,” said Pink Stallion. He continued reading.

The first time Comes Last called on the refuse meditator at his urban

reservation he was sitting in a room filled with trash. She asked him

about his place of birth and his theories on the mind, but he said

nothing more than wanaki nimiwin wanaki. She asked questions four times

before leaving his reservation.

Martin Bear Charme smiled, nodded his head four times backward, and then

laughed, throwing his nose back like a bear at the tree line ha ha ha

haaaa.

Looking up from her ball and turtle fetish, Oh Shinnah stopped her

invocation on mother earth between the words intuition and compassion to

explain that she had serious business on her mind front about and in her

heart about mineral companies and progressive reservation governments,

and, she said, we will not compete with the animals.

Pink Stallion added that several animals were walking around the chapel,

panting, snorting, and thumping on the wooden floor, which interrupted

the speaker.

“I was sitting near the window, in the back where Martin Bear Charme

soared backward,” said Pink Stallion. “A calico cat leaped through the

opened window into my lap. Well, I was startled, but being around so

many shamans, I pretended that cats come to me all the time.” The truth

is that Pink Stallion hates cats, but cats seem attracted to him.

Wanaki nimiwin wanaki ha ha ha haaaa, Charme throwing his voice backward

from his escape distance window. Who would believe you were a meditator,

tribal no less, Comes Last whispered out of the side of her mouth. She

shifted from side to side on her perch. She is a bird who appears

perched wherever and on whatever she sits. When she speaks she thrusts

her lips out like a beak, giving rise to her sickle feathers, an avian

illusion in the willows.

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

Wanaki nimiwin wanaki over and over.

Four skins lost in dreams ha ha ha haaaa.

Not foreskins, she said through her tense lips, indians never did

circumcisions, tell the truth now, what does it mean?

“Shit, man, real indians never talk like that, man,” snapped Bad Mouth

as she shouldered her red pack. She slammed her chair to the table,

stopped several windmills again, slammed her chair to the table, and

then slammed the door when she left the resource center with her three

urban sun dance followers.

Wanaki peaceful place, nimiwin wanaki dancing in a peaceful place ha ha

ha haaaa, said the landfill meditator to the bird sitting near the

window.

Where?

Landfill and summer swill.

Talk sense, Comes Last demanded, opening her leather-bound notebook. How

are those words spelled? she asked.

D R A W K C A B N A M A H S

Mister Charme, she said, shifting her head to the side to see his nose,

what does it mean, landfill meditation? Please in a phrase or two, speak

slow now.

Unstable.

Unstable what?

Unstable in an earthquake.

Be serious, please.

Stable.

Stable what?

Stable on a windmill in a mindswell.

Never mind, she said, closing her leather notebook. Damn fool, what do

you know about meditation? Nothing!

Refuse meditation cures cancer with visions. Some people clean their

kitchens better than others too, said the solid waste magnate.

Mister Charme, please, you are speaking to a healthfood worker, she

said, brushing lumps of leather from her black dress, not one of your

meditation victims.

Charme scooped the oil from his nose and continued. Clean minds and

clean kitchens are delusions, unrewarded altruism. When our visions are

clean we seem to feel much better, but no less insecure.

Comes Last turned her head, avoiding the meditator, pretending not to be

interested in what he was telling. Stop talking at me, she said,

bouncing in her chair. But you listen so much better when you are not me

ha ha ha haaaa. Pretend you are not interested.

Damn fool.

Once upon a time taking out the garbage was an event in our lives, a

state of being connected to action. We were part of the rituals

connecting us to the earth, from the places food grew through the house

and our bodies, and then back to the earth. Garbage was real, part of

creation, not an objective invasion of cans and cartons.

Refuse meditation teaches us to turn the mind back to the earth through

the visions of real waste, the trash meditator continued. His voice

distracted the celebrants sitting in the next row. Faces turned and

scowled. The old scavenger smiled back and resumed his stories.

We are the garbage, the waste, we make it and dump it, to be separated

from it is a cancer-causing delusion, he said, but with some doubt in

the tone of his voice. We cannot separate ourselves clean and perfect by

dumping our trash out back. The earth is a victim of our internal trash.

Pink Stallion pointed out certain ironies and the references to ideas

derived from meditation and holistic health. “The earth has become a

sacrificial victim,” he said, “because the white man has lost his mythic

connections with the earth, like families abandoned on the interstates.”

Stop this now, Comes Last insisted. You made your fortune on trash, and

now you are making me sick with it. Let me sit here now and not listen

to you.

Sickness is one of the best meditation experiences. Think about being

sick, focus on your stuffed nose, make your mind an unclean kitchen.

Now, said the old scavenger, rather than hating to clean up the kitchen,

making it smell different, get right down with the odors. Focus on the

odors in the corners, take the odors in, you know, the same way we smell

our underarms and feet, because we are the bad smells we smell separated

from our own real kitchens in the mind.

What was that?

Never mind . . . and the clean words that part us from the real smells

leave us defensive victims of fetid swill and cancer. Take on odors in

the same way we take on what we fear, become the opposition, become the

swill. Did you understand that part? Ha ha ha haaaa.

You are sick, what you need are some clean words in your head, said

Comes Last, moving two chairs down the back row out of his bad breath

range.

Cancer is first a word, nothing more, a separation without vision, he

said, following her down the row. We are culture bound to be clean, but

being clean is a delusion and a separation from the visual energies of

the earth. Holistic health is a harmonious vision, not an aromatic word

prison.

Listen, we are the dreamers for the earth, he said in a deep voice.

Turning down the dreams with clean words, defensive terminal creeds,

earth separations, denies odors and death and causes cancer.

The celebrants turned toward the old scavenger in the back row and told

him to be silent. One woman wagged her hand at him, warning him not to

speak about diseases during sacred ceremonies in the cedar smoke.

We are death, said the refuse meditator to the woman in the next row.

Unabashed, he stood and spoke in a loud voice to all the celebrants in

the chapel. We are rituals, not perfect words; we are the ceremonies,

not the witnesses, that connect us to the earth. We are the earth

dreamers, the holistic waste, not the detached nose pinchers between the

refuse and the refusers.

Go to a place in the waste to meditate, chanted the refuse meditator.

Come to our reservation on the landfill to focus on waste and transcend

the ideal word worlds, clean talk and terminal creeds, and the disunion

between the mind and the earth. Come meditate on trash and swill odors

and become the waste that holds us to the earth.

Injun Time asked Pink Stallion to read that paragraph again. “The one

about clean talk and terminal creeds. . . . That man must be a word

skin.”

Go to a place in the waste to meditate. . . Focus on waste and transcend

the ideal word worlds, clean talk and terminal creeds, and the disunion

between the mind and the earth. . . .

Pipe down in the back.

Oh Shinnah raised an eagle feather and told the mother earth celebrants

that her feather made her tell the truth; should I not speak straight,

the feather will tremble. Now listen, we live in a retarded country. . .

. we vote for a peanut picker looking for a way to freedom and look

where we have come. People are tearing up our land without examining it.

Hang with mother earth, she said, raising her fist; if the four corners

tribal land is destroyed, then purification comes with a closed fist. If

the electromagnetic pole at the four corners is upset, the earth will

slip in space, causing the death of two-thirds of the population, no

matter where you go to hide.

Oh Shinnah makes more sense with cedar smoke and fetishes than you do

with all that double back talk about meditation, Comes Last declared,

raising her chin.

Silence.

The lights flickered several times, and then out. The celebrants

whispered in the darkness until the smell of cedar smoke in the chapel

turned to the odor of landfill swill, or what Comes Last described in

her column as a mixture of human excrement and dead animals. At first

whiff the celebrants took cover in clean words, thinking the person next

in row had passed bad air. But later, when the chapel filled with the

scent of wild flowers, one celebrant allowed how terrible was the smell.

While the others praised the passing of the bad odors, Comes Last, whose

nose had not separated from the world of animals, smelled a bear in the

darkness.

Listen ha ha ha haaaa.

Martin Bear Charme moved around the chapel in the darkness, from row to

row and chair to chair, telling stories about terminal creeds. His voice

seemed to rise and waver from the four directions. Words dropped from

the beams, sounds came from under the chairs, and several celebrants

were certain that the stories he told that night were told inside their

own heads.

Listen ha ha ha haaaa.

Pink Stallion paused once more to explain how the author shifted to a

different time and place. “We started out at a seminar, then moved to a

church, and then to the landfill reservation, back to the church, and

now to a place, as you will hear in a moment, named Orion, which is a

town framed in red bricks and a constellation showing the figure of a

hunter with a sword.”

Terminal Creeds

Orion was framed in a great wall of red earthen bricks, said the refuse

meditator. Within the red walls lived several families who were

descendants of famous hunters and western bucking horse breeders. Like

good horses, the sign outside the walls said, proud people keep to

themselves and their own breed, but from time to time we invite others

to share food and conversation.

Belladonna Winter Catcher, who was born and conceived at Wounded Knee,

her traveling companion Catholic Bishop Omax Parasimo, and several other

tribal pilgrims knocked at the gate. We are tribal mixedbloods with good

stories and memories from thousands of good listeners. Open the gate and

let us in or we will blow your house down.

Listen to this, said Belladonna who was reading the sign on the red

wall: Terminal Creeds are Terminal Diseases. . . . The Mind is the

Perfect Hunter and Narcissism is a Form of Isolation.

The metal portcullis opened, and several guards dressed in uniforms

escorted the pilgrims through the red wall. The pilgrims were examined.

Information was recorded about birth places, education and experiences,

travels and diseases, attitudes on women and politics. The hunters and

breeders welcomed the visitors to tell stories about what was happening

in the world outside the walls.

The pilgrims followed the hunters and breeders through the small town to

one of the large houses where dozens of people were waiting on the front

steps. Introductions and questions about political views were repeated

again and again.

Thousands of questions were asked before dinner was served in the church

dining room. Bishop Parasimo was the first to shift the flow of

conversations. He asked the hunters and breeders sitting at his table to

discuss the meaning of the messages on the outside walls. What does it

mean, narcissism is a form of isolation? Please explain how the mind is

the perfect hunter.

Narcissism rules the possessor, said a breeder with a deep scar on the

side of his forehead. Narcissism is the fine art that turns the dreamer

into paste and ashes.

The perfect hunter leaves himself and becomes the animal or bird he is

hunting, said a hunter on the other side of the table. He touched his

ear with his curled trigger finger as he spoke. The perfect hunter turns

on himself, hunts himself in his mind. He lives on the edge of his own

meaning, the edge of his own humor. He is the hunter and the hunted at

the same time.

The breeders and hunters at the table smiled and nodded and then turned

toward the head table where the bald banker breeder was tapping his

water glass. Belladonna was sitting next to the banker. Her nervous

fingers fumbled with the two beaded necklaces around her neck.

The families applauded when the banker spoke of their mission against

terminal creeds. Depersonalize the word in the world of terminal

believers, and we can all share the good side of humor. . . . Terminal

believers must be changed or driven from our dreams.

Belladonna could feel the moisture from his hand resting on her

shoulder. He referred to her as the good spirited speaker who has

traveled through the world of savage lust on the interstates, this

serious tribal woman, our speaker from the outside world, who once

carried with her a tame white bird. Belladonna leaned back in her chair.

Her thighs twitched from his words about the tame white bird. The banker

did not explain how he knew that she once lived with a dove. The

medicine man told her it was an evil white witch so she turned the dove

loose in the woods, but the bird returned. She cursed the bird and

locked it out of her house, but the white dove soared in crude domestic

circles and hit the windows. The dove would not leave. One night, when

she was alone, she squeezed the bird in both hands, but the dove seemed

content. She shook the dove. Behind the house, against a red pine, she

severed the head of the white dove with an ax. Blood spurted in her

face. The headless dove flopped backward into the dark woods.

We are waiting, said the banker. Belladonna shivered near her chair,

chasing the dove from her memories. She fumbled with her neck beads.

Tribal values and dreams is what I will talk about.

Speak up ... speak up.

Tribal values is the subject of my talk, she said in a louder voice. She

dropped her hands from her beads. We are raised with values that shape

our world in a different light. . . . We are tribal and that means that

we are children of dreams and visions. Our bodies are connected to

mother earth, and our minds are the clouds. Our voices are the living

breath of the wilderness.

My grandfathers were hunters, said the hunter with the trigger finger at

his ear. They said the same thing about the hunt that you said is

tribal, so what does that mean?

I am different from a whiteman because of my values, she said. I would

not be white, never white. Do tell me, said an old woman breeder in the

back of the room. We can see that you are different from a man, but tell

us please how you are so different from white people.

We are different because we are raised with different values, Belladonna

explained. She was fumbling with her beads again. Our parents treat us

different as children. We are not punished. We live in larger families

and never send our old people to homes to be alone. These are some

things that make us different.

More, more.

Tribal people seldom touch each other, said Belladonna. She folded her

hands over her breasts. We do not invade the personal bodies of others,

and we do not stare at people when we are talking. . . . Indians have

more magic in their lives.

Wait a minute, hold on there, said a hunter with an orange beard. Let me

find something out here before you make me so different from the rest of

the world. Tell me about this word indian that you use, tell me which

indians are you talking about, or for, or are you talking for all

Indians? And if you are speaking for all Indians, then how can there be

truth in what you say?

Indians have their religion in common.

What does indian mean?

Are you so stupid that you cannot figure out what and who indians are?

An indian is a member of a tribe and a person who has indian blood.

But what is indian blood?

Indian blood is not white blood.

Inventions, that must be what indians are, inventions, said the hunter

with the beard. You tell me that the invention is different from the

rest of the world when it was the rest of the world that invented the

indian, right here on this land. We invented you and that must be why

you hate us so much, because you have taken to believe in the invention.

An indian is an indian because he speaks and thinks and believes he is

an indian . . . The invention must not be so bad because the tribes have

taken it up for keeps.

Mister, does it make much difference what the word indian means when I

tell you from my heart that I have always been proud that I am an

indian, said Belladonna. Proud to speak the voice of mother earth.

Please continue.

Well, as I was explaining, tribal people are closer to the earth, to the

meaning and energies of the woodlands and the mountains and the plains.

. . . We are not a competitive people like the whites who competed this

nation into corruption and failure.

When you use the plural pronoun, asked a woman hunter with short white

hair, does that mean that you are talking for all tribal people?

Fine Print leaned forward at the seminar table, moved his lips in

silence for a minute or two and then asked: “What is all that shit about

grammar, anyway?”

Most of them.

How about the western fishing tribes, the old tribes, the tribes that

burned down their own houses in potlatch ceremonies?

Exceptions are not the rule.

Fools never make rules, said the woman with white hair. You speak from

terminal creeds, not as a person of real experiences and critical

substance.

Thank you for the meal, said Belladonna. She smirked and turned in

disgust from the hunters and breeders. The banker placed his moist hand

on her shoulder. Now, now, she will speak in good faith, said the

banker, if you will listen with less critical ears. She does not want to

debate her ideas. Give her another good hand. The hunters and breeders

applauded. She smiled, accepted apologies, and started again.

The tribal past, our religion and dreams and the concept of mother

earth, is precious to me. Living is not important if it is turned into

competition and material gain. . . . Living is hearing the wind and

speaking the languages of animals and soaring with eagles in magical

flight. When I speak about these experiences it makes me feel powerful:

the power of tribal religion and spiritual beliefs gives me protection.

My tribal blood is like the great red wall you have around you here. . .

. My blood moves in the circles of mother earth and through dreams

without time. My tribal blood is timeless, and it gives me strength to

live and deal with evil. Right on sister, right on, said the hunter with

the trigger finger on his ear. He leaped to his feet and cheered for her

views.

“Right on, sister,” chimed Token White.

“Four skins win,” said Touch Tone, nodding his loose head in agreement

as he shot spurts of sacred water in the air with his red water pistol.

Pink Stallion continued reading.

Powerful speech, said a breeder.

She deserves her favorite dessert, said a hunter in a deep voice. The

hunters and breeders do not trust those narcissistic persons who accept

personal praise.

Shall we offer our special dessert to this innocent child? asked the

breeder banker. Let me hear it now, those who think she deserves her

dessert, thank you, and now those who think she does not deserve dessert

for her excellent speech.

No dessert please, said Belladonna.

Fast Food said, “give it to me, then.”

Now, now, how could you turn down the enthusiasm hunters and breeders

who listened to your thoughts could you turn down their vote for your

dessert?

The hunters and breeders cheered and whistled when the cookies were

served. The circus pilgrims were not comfortable with the shift in

moods, the excessive enthusiasm.

The energies here are strange, said Bishop Omax Parasimo up his sleeve.

What does all this cheering mean? Quite simple, said the breeder with

the scar. You see, when questions are unanswered and there is no humor,

the messages become terminal creeds, and the good hunters and breeders

here seek nothing that is terminal. Terminal creeds are terminal

diseases, and we celebrate when death is inevitable.

The families smiled when she stood to tell them how much she loved their

enthusiasm. In your smiling faces I can see myself, she said. This is a

good place to be, you care for the living. The hunters and breeders

cheered again.

But you applaud her narcissism, said the bishop to the breeder with the

scar. His hands were folded in a neat pile on the table. She has

demanded that we see her narcissism, said the breeder. You heard her

tell us that she did not like questions, views; she is her own victim, a

terminal believer.

But we are all victims.

The histories of tribal cultures have been terminal creeds and

narcissistic revisionism, said the breeder. The tribes were perfect

victims: if they had more humor and less false pride, the families would

not have collapsed under so little pressure from the white man. . . .

Show me a solid culture that disintegrates under the plow and the rifle

and the saw.

Token White pounded on the table.

Pink Stallion stopped for a few minutes, looked around the table at the

students, and then continued reading in a much louder voice to the end

of the stories.

Your views are terminal.

Who is serious about the perfections of the past? Who gathers around

them the frail hopes and febrile dreams and tarnished mother earth

words? asked the hunter with the scar. Surviving in the present means

giving up on the burdens of the past and the cultures of tribal

narcissism.

Belladonna nibbled at her sugar cookie like a proud rodent. Her cheeks

were filled and flushed. Her tongue tingled from the tartness of the

cookie. In the kitchen the cooks had covered her cookie with a

granulated time release alkaloid poison that would soon dissolve. The

poison cookie was the special dessert for narcissists and believers in

terminal creeds. She was her own perfect victim. The hunters and

breeders have poisoned dozens of terminal believers in the past few

months. Most of them were tribal people.

Fine Print cursed white people.

Token White strummed the sinew on her bow.

Belladonna nibbled at the poison dessert cookie, her polite response to

the enthusiasm of the people who lived behind the wall. She smiled and

nodded to the hunters and breeders who all watched her eat the last

crumb.

The sun dropped beneath the great red earthen wall when the pilgrims

passed through the gate. The pilgrims were silent, walking through the

shadows. Seven crows circled until it was dark. Belladonna was chanting

her words. My father took me into the sacred hills. We started when the

sun was setting because Old Winter Catcher had to know what the setting

sun looked like before he climbed into the hills for the night. The sun

was beautiful; it spread great beams of orange and rose colors across

the heavens. My father said it was a good sunset. No haze to hide the

stars. He said it was good, and we climbed into the hills. It feels like

that time now; we are climbing into the hills for the visions of the

morning.

We walked up part of the hill backward, Belladonna said with her head

turned backward. Then he told me that the world is not as it appears to

be frontward, not then, not now. To leave the world and to see the power

of the spirit on the hills we had to walk out of the known world

backward. We had to walk backward so nothing would follow us up the

hill.

My father said that things that follow are things that demand attention.

Do you think we are being followed now?

No, said Bishop Omax Parasimo, looking behind.

When I do this we are walking and talking into the morning with Old

Winter Catcher, she said, walking and talking backward down the road:

noitnetta ruo no sdnamed on htiw gninrom otni emoc ot tsrif eht

Fast Food asked for a translation.

the first to come into morning with no demands on our attention

Shaman High smelled of wild flowers and bears and landfill swill when

the teaching trickster stopped his stories, and then soared backward out

the window in the darkness and laughed ha ha ha haaaa over the mountains

and familiar tribal faces on the woodland water moons.

Pink Stallion removed his reading glasses, bundled his books and papers

under his arm, laughed ha ha ha haaaa, and then walked backward from the

seminar table in the resource center through tribal fantasies and

backward through the whirr and rattle of windmills, backward from the

present to his appointment with a blonde in his office next door.

The windmills whirred.

Backward through the door he slammed the door.

The windmills whirred.

The students and mythic memories from the stories hunkered out of time

near the thin wall and waited to hear the familiar pleasure moans and

sex sounds of the Pink Stallion mounting the resurrection of General

George Armstrong Custer in the office next door. The Little Bighorn

loomed in primal dreams of tribal vengeance.

The windmills whirred while the students shared new trickeries and

terminal resurrections and turned from their remembered past to mount

the blondes on campus for the last ride home.

Wild Intervention

ESCAPED TIGER KILLS MAN IN TBILISI

A man was killed by a tiger who escaped from a zoo in the city of

Tbilisi, Georgia. The tiger was one of seven who escaped from the zoo

following severe flooding in the former Soviet republic. In addition to

the tigers, eight lions and three jaguars escaped from the zoo but

eventually perished in the flooding.

Source: Vice News

NORTH CAROLINA TEENS INJURED IN SHARK ATTACK

Two North Carolina teenagers were attacked by sharks while swimming near

Oak Island. Each victim lost an arm in the attack, one of several that

have happened recently. Biologists were quick to proclaim that such

attacks are quite rare stating that “. . . having a series of injuries

so close to each other in time and space makes this unusual.” They

speculated that “it might suggest a single shark has been involved.”

Source: CNN

ADDITIONAL SHARK ATTACKS IN THE CAROLINAS

Just a few weeks after biologists described shark attacks as being quite

rare, three additional individuals were attacked. A 17-year old received

injuries to his right calf, buttocks, and hands while swimming at Cape

Hatteras National Sea Shore. A day earlier, a 47-year old swimming in

the same area was bitten on his right leg and back. That day a man was

attacked by a shark at South Carolina’s Hunting Island State Park as

well.

Source: CNN

BISON ATTACKS WOMAN ATTEMPTING SELFIE

A 43-year old woman was attacked by a bison at Yellowstone National Park

while attempting to take a selfie. The woman and her daughter—who were

standing 6 yards from a bison—turned her back on the animal and tried to

take a photo with it. According to the National Park Service, “They

heard the bison’s footsteps moving toward them and started to run, but

the bison caught the mother on the right side, lifted her up, and tossed

her with its head.” The woman was the fifth person this year injured by

bison at Yellowstone and the third to be injured while attempting to

take a photo with the animals.

Source: CNN

TEXAS MAN SHOOTS AT ARMADILLO, WOUNDED BY RICOCHET

An East Texas man was wounded after he fired a gun at an armadillo in

his yard and the bullet ricocheted back to hit him in his face, the

county sheriff said on Friday. Cass County Sheriff Larry Rowe said the

man, who was not identi fied, went outside his home in Marietta,

southwest of Texarkana, at around 3 a.m. on Thursday morning. He spotted

the armadillo on his property and opened fire. The animal’s hard shell

deflected at least one of three bullets, which then struck the man’s

jaw, he said. The man was airlifted to a nearby hospital, where his jaw

was wired shut, according to Rowe. The status of the animal is unknown.

CHIMP ATTACKS DRONE

In April, a chimp at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands swatted a

camera-laden drone, knocking it out of the air. A television crew was

hoping to use the drone to film chimps at the zoo. However, as soon as

they started using the drone, chimps began collecting branches,

positioned themselves strategically, and subsequently attacked the

drone. The journal Primates studied the incident and concluded with the

obvious: the attack was intentional.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

GOLFER DIES FROM BEE ATTACK

A 64-year old man playing golf at a northern Michigan resort died after

being attacked by a swarm of bees while looking for a ball in the woods.

The man was stung more than 20 times on the head, neck, and shoulders at

Treetops Resort in Dover Township according to Michigan State Police

Sergeant Mark Tamlyn.

Source: Reuters

CHIMPS AREN’T THE ONLY ANIMALS ATTACKING DRONES

The blog Schneier on Security has noted the proliferation of animal

attacks on the drones and the subsequent posting of videos of the

attacks on YouTube. com. Among the animals attacking drones are ravens,

hawks, geese, and kangaroos. One attack by a ram disabled a drone, and

when the operator went to retrieve it, the ram attacked the man flying

the drone.

Source: Schneier on Security

BEAR SELFIES CAUSE COLORADO PARK TO CLOSE

A Denver, Colorado-area park was closed over concerns that visitors

would be injured while attempting to take selfies. Brandon Ransom,

manager of recreation at the park, reported that he has “seen people

using selfie sticks to try and get as close to the bears as possible,

sometimes within 10 feet of wild bears.” The park’s operators were

concerned that people would be unable to resist bothering the bears in

order to get the perfect Instagram shot.

Source: CNET

Reviews

Dixie Be Damned

By Neal Shirley & Saralee Stafford

AK Press • 280 pages • May 2015

Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South is the

product of years of research by the folks who brought us the North

Carolina Piece Corps, a zine distro with a focus on hidden tales of

southern revolt and contemporary stories exploring the theoretical

acceptance of violence. Pamphlets such as “Politicians Love Gun

Control”, “I Will Not Crawl” (excerpts from Robert F. Williams’ Negroes

With Guns), and “Piece Now, Peace Later” draw upon histories of struggle

where the debate around violence and arms has played a pivotal role in

either emboldening rebels who accept what is now referred to as a

diversity of tactics or disempowering those who walk the line of

pacifism. In my early years of being an anarchist, I considered myself a

pacifist and ideologically found myself against the use of arms, mostly

due to my fear of them and misunderstanding of the use of violence.

“Politicians Love Gun Control” shook my political foundations and

encouraged the sentiments that had already begun pushing me toward

anarchy.

When I was initially approached by one of the authors to write a review

of the book for Black Seed, I expected that it would be a stretch to try

to relate a book of rebellious Southern history to a journal of green

anarchy. I was wrong. I found this book at once to be an attack on

popular notions of progress and history that, although permeating

throughout radical histories, lend themselves to the story of

civilization just the same. Dixie Be Damned features stories of outcasts

and runaways who formed bands to attack plantation and slave society.

Notably, they retreated to seemingly uninhabitable swamps and forests

that could not be traversed by those who would hunt them down. It is the

close ties to these “unforgiving” lands that give these rebels the upper

hand in combating militarily superior forces, and it is this dependence

on land that the State uses to crush its opposition by way of creating

new ways to govern and harvest these lands.

Yet, a hole in these stories, specifically that of the Ogeechee

Insurrection and the chapter on the Lowry Gang, must be addressed,

considering that what is being discussed is a history of revolt against

empire and colonization. The topic of indigenous people in the region

goes hardly addressed throughout the entire book. Who were the

indigenous people of this area? What were their names, and where did

they live? What were their roles in any of these histories? The chapter

on the Ogeechee Insurrection pays lip service to this topic, and the

histories of the Lowries are explored only insofar as it paints a story

of cross-racial solidarity, like when white store-owners bought

obviously stolen arms and ammunition from runaway slaves or how the

Lowries themselves seemed to be a tribe of castaways and escapees with

an incredibly mixed background (runaway slaves, colony deserters,

survivors of Indigenous genocide, etc). For a collection of histories

that begins with the colonization of North America and that borrows

terminology from Marx (albeit altered with Silvia Federici’s expansion

of “primitive accumulation”), I expected those stories to be highlighted

more.

Another reoccurring theme throughout the book is the unusual blending of

spiritual practices that unite large groups of rebels and furthermore

instill a sense of cultural belonging across a large mix of identities

and backgrounds. From the chapter “A Subtle Yet Restless Fire: Attacking

Slavery from the Dark Fens of the Dismal Swamp”:

“The spiritual messengers were an opaque force, unregistered and

unmarked by plantation society, but highly respected by slaves and

maroons alike. Their religious orientation varied greatly, ranging from

Christian Methodism to a variety of traditional West African folk

spiritual practices and magic. These practices had evolved for over a

hundred years in the Great Dismal Swamp, resulting in the blending of

the strange mixture of Quaker ideas and Indian religion that had come

earlier, with the spiritism and mysticism of more recent Black maroons.”

(pg. 43)

Spirituality has been a topic that Black Seed has made attempts to bring

up in each issue, and this story brings up one such reason why I

personally think it’s an important conversation. Although the context

can be seen as differing greatly from where anarchists and antagonists

orient themselves presently, the lesson to be learned here is that there

was a widespread acceptance of varying spiritual practices, and those

practices had much to do with harboring a culture of attack and

resistance to plantation society. In one example, songs were sung to

portray and encourage feelings of revolt. In “Ogeechee ‘Til Death:

Expropriation and Communization in Low Country Georgia”:

“The songs were sung mostly in the present tense, with urgency. As Peter

Linebaugh interprets, jubilee songs proclaim ‘Now is the time. It is not

a question of time being ripe, or of objective circumstances being

ready.’”(pg. 77)

As an anarchist, I am more interested in how these beliefs, practices,

origin, stories, and cultures can play a role in entire lives of revolt.

The prominent early theorists of anarchism were arguably atheistic and

eager to put down religion entirely in favor of a

scientific-progressivism. While these sentiments may have led to a

critique of institutionalized spirituality and religion, and rightly so,

what would a rebellious spirituality look like? Looking back, we can see

examples, and perhaps piece together elements that make sense to

ourselves, individually. Furthermore, how would one do this without

simply just stealing cultural identifiers from those in rebellion? I’m

not interested in tracing a lineage of blood and ancestry to establish a

legitimacy in who is allowed to practice what spiritualties, but how

does one pick up a torch that was put down so long ago?

Another critique I have of this book relates to the definition of an

insurrectionary activity. Numerous times throughout the book, too many

to count, partisans of revolt and rebellion, acts of sabotage and

attack, are all referred to under the umbrella of insurrection or

insurrectionary. It left me with the question, who is an

insurrectionary? What is classified as an insurrectionary act? In my

understanding, an insurrectionary is not just simply someone who carries

out an attack against physical manifestations of capitalism and

politics, but someone who believes in a specific practice and theory of

anarchism. And an insurrectionary act is not just any attack or uprising

against a physical manifestation of the currently standing social order,

but one that does not wait for the ripe moment or the correct amount of

participants and acts on the basis of the need for attack. Often

throughout the text, the term insurrection is used to identify a

months-long coordination or build-up of antagonism that leads to a great

calamity of what I would refer to as a rebellion, while those who

participated are referred to as “insurrectionaries.” Through reading all

of the stories presented in this book, it became easy to see that this

word had become a catch-all term for any of the activities the authors

wished to write about. Does writing an “anarchist-historiography” differ

really so much from other histories, painting stories from the past with

the brush we would like to see them with? The authors have set out to

ask and perhaps even answer an impossible question, an effort I truly

enjoy and hope to participate in myself.

Black and Green Review No. 1

Black And Green Press • 128 Pages

Kevin Tucker, best known for his Species Traitor journals and regular

appearances on John Zerzan’s Anarchy Radio, released a new journal this

year called Black & Green Review (BAGR). Having been largely without new

Kevin Tucker writings since 2005, I was excited to hear about Black &

Green Review. As soon as I could, I ordered a bunch of copies for my

local infoshop and eagerly began flipping through one. I loved Kevin’s

writing style in the early 2000s as I was beginning to question

civilization and technology, and I still do today, but much in his new

publication falls short.

The main problem with BGR is that it’s exactly what you would expect it

to be. From the voices (Kevin Tucker and John Zerzan, among others who

share their style), to the moralistic calls-to-action, to a tired

glorification of hunter/gatherer ways of life, BGR is simply more of the

same. The dream of the ‘90s is alive in Black & Green Review. It’s

difficult to say something new, to push the conversation further or in a

different direction. As a Black Seed editor, I was a part of many

conversations in which we asked ourselves over and over again “do we

really have anything new to say?” We deliberated throughout the process

of producing our first issue, trying to articulate the gap that we knew

existed in green anarchist publishing. Since the end of Green Anarchy in

2008, there hadn’t been a large–print–run green anarchist periodical,

though there was a slew of interesting projects. We were trying to make

sure that we weren’t just making something simply because we could. It’s

hard to know whether we successfully avoided this pitfall. When Black

Seed Issue 1 was published, I heard that it was received badly by Kevin

Tucker. Because his rants mostly took place on Facebook, I heard about

them second hand, but boy, did I hear about them, and from several

sources. Black and Green Review was Kevin Tucker’s response to what he

percieves as Black Seed’s shortcomings.

Beginning with the opening editorial, Kevin reveals himself to be

majorly out-of-touch with contemporary green anarchist publishing. His

first paragraph ends with the statement, “things have been awfully

silent lately.” Aside from not mentioning Black Seed as a new green

anarchist publication (which I tried not to take personally), Kevin had

to overlook nearly all other projects, writings, and gatherings to make

such a statement. Desert, published in 2011, turned much green and

ecologically-focused anarchist thought on its head by asking what many

feared to ask: “what if the collapse doesn’t come?” Then there’s the

Dark Mountain project, a network of writers and artists who came

together in 2009, attempting to use their media to grapple with

questions about civilization and collapse. You can find an excerpt of

their manifesto in our last issue. While Kevin (and probably most

readers of Black Seed) have a bone to pick with organized religion, he

of all people, having been interviewed by them, should be well aware of

the multiple editions of In the Land of the Living: a Journal of

Anarcho-Primitivism and Christianity that have been produced in the last

decade. And what of the Bædan journal? Issue Two in particular brings

sources together into a coherent critique of gender-as-domestication

previously unseen. His assertion of silence on the part of

anti-civilization thinkers is not only insulting and inaccurate, but I

believe it also sheds light on Tucker’s bias. These are but a few

examples; the theories related to green anarchy have been far from

silent. Much anti-civilization thought has been put to paper in the last

decade, it just hasn’t been the kind that Kevin likes.

Anyone reading Black Seed knows that we are far more interested in

asking questions than in claiming to have answers. That said, I

appreciated the question at the end of BGR’s introduction: “how do we

have discussions again that matter?” I want to know that too! Reading

that as the project’s purpose gives me a bit of hope that we may be

complementary publications to some degree. I have my roots in

anarcho-primitivism. I am largely sympathetic to anarcho-primitivism as

a critique and take rewilding pretty seriously as a practice. I’m a

sucker for that shit. So, when I read the main essay in BGR, “The

Suffocating Void,” I was immediately drawn in by Kevin’s take on the

effects of social media. I found myself underlining things, writing

notes in the margins, getting excited about distancing myself from

technology in a way that reminded me of when I first read Ellul, or

Mumford, or Mander. As the piece wore on, however, I began asking myself

something: was I excited because Kevin was saying something truly new

here? Was he pushing his ideas to places they’d never gone before? Or

was I simply reliving the same feelings I’d had while reading Mumford,

who wrote Civilization and Technics in 1934, or Mander, who wrote Four

Arguments for the Elimination of Television in 1978? It’s not that I

think these works are irrelevant—quite the opposite—I would that

everyone read them. My point is that “The Suffocating Void” says nothing

new, but is written as though it has the answers. Old ideas are

important, as is synthesizing these ideas for a new audience; I largely

agree with what Kevin is saying. Anything written in such grandiose

terms, however, should have something groundbreaking to say. Sure, it

updates the language, replacing the “automation” and “screens” of Mander

and Mumford with social media and smartphones, but the argument remains

the same. Yes, I think our generation faces a new and different

attachment to technology; yes, I want as many reminders and cautions as

I can take; yes, I want suggestions on obtaining that critical distance

necessary for critique. However, “The Suffocating Void” came up short

for me in these regards, not to mention at times erring on the side of

sounding conspiratorial in its constant reference to “the

domesticators.” Just who are the ones doing the domesticating? Though we

resist, are we not complicit?

Later in the journal, an essay by Four-Legged Human entitled “The

Commodification of Wildness and its Consequences” left me with a bad

taste in my mouth. In an attempt to elucidate the ways commodification

pervades modern society, FourLegged Human ends up targeting pastoralists

and poachers, seeming to blame them rather than acknowledging that

survival in the modern economy has necessitated the abandonment of

traditional ways of life for most of us on the globe, himself included.

It’s easy for us, whose societies were colonized in the distant past, to

point the finger at those people for whom commodification is a recent

development, but it’s also quite hypocritical. Do I think it’s awful

that people are poaching rhino horns rather than living in

hunter/gatherer bliss? Of course I do, but what if instead of filling

their article with examples from around the world the author instead

filled it with examples from their own life? The entire thing came off

as more than a little-self righteous to me.

Probably the strongest piece is Autumn Leaves Cascade’s “To Rust

Metallic Gods.” The piece details Western paganism from the Neolithic to

present-day neo-paganism and Wicca. Not only is it well written and

extremely detailed for such a short essay, it somehow combines

historical detail with a personal tone and realistic suggestions

obviously gleaned from the author’s own practice. And you have to love

an essay ending with the pithy epithet: “for ruins, not runes.” I highly

recommend it to anyone struggling with the pull of getting in touch with

their European pagan roots. It’s relevant especially in light of the

conversations we’ve been having in Black Seed about spirituality with

pieces like “Childhood, Imagination, and the Forest” and “The Continuing

Appeal of White Nationalism.”

Upon first picking up BGR and skimming through it, I think I gave a

vocal “ugh” when seeing an article titled “The Ferguson Insurrection.”

Everyone has to have something to say about Ferguson, and most of the

ones doing the theorizing are far removed from the action or the

realities leading up to it. It’s not that I think Ferguson is

irrelevant, it’s that so many people who were there—or who are closely

connected to that struggle— have written thoughtful essays on their

experiences. The pamphlets “Guns, Cars, Autonomy” and “No, We Won’t Go

Home” come to mind. If you’d like to zoom out and see Ferguson in a more

theoretical light, I’d recommend checking out afro-pessimist thinker

Frank Wilderson’s interview, “We’re Trying to Destroy the World,”

available on audio and in print. Black Seed has been silent on this

subject. That silence may not have been the best approach (I believe it

wasn’t), but perhaps we were silent out of a fear of doing exactly what

Kevin Tucker did: again, saying something for the sake of saying it.

I was and am still excited that Kevin Tucker is putting together Black

and Green Review. I can only hope that through this project he finds a

way to connect with those outside his insular anarcho-primitivist

circle. First issues aren’t easy, and I look forward to reading Issue

Two, which should be out by the time this article is published.

On Killing the Undead: Issues 1 and 2 of Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Post-Scarcity Economics

postscarcityeconomics.wordpress.com

Issue 1: 33 pages • Issue 2: 31 pages

For some, Murray Bookchin was simply never relevant. Whether for his

zany yet boringly liberal mix of ecological concern and technological

optimism, his bizarre obsession with Classical Athenian democracy, his

cantankerous screed Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An

Unbridgeable Chasm, or his late-life and ressentiment-fueled (yet

entirely appropriate) eschewing of the label anarchist; some anarchists

(including this one) never found Bookchin’s ideas to have much life to

them from the start. For many more, Bookchin was pushed further into the

grave when he was taken to task by a number of anti-left or

anti-civilization thinkers, including Dave Foreman, John Zerzan, and

(most amusingly and thoroughly) Bob Black. One might have hoped that the

man’s actual death would mean the end of such utterances as “The modern

tractor . . . is a work of superb mechanical ingenuity. . . . Large

tractors . . . are likely to have air-conditioned cabs.”[47]

But with the irritating tenacity of a revenant, he keeps rising from the

dead. Bookchin’s ideas received a shot in the arm with the recent

militant actions of the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party), whose leader

Abdullah Öcalan, after decades of armed struggle against the Turkish

state, recently has begun advocating for a “Democratic Confederalism,”

drawing heavily on the Bookchin he has been reading while incarcerated.

And Bookchinism has subsequently received what appears to be some

youthfully exuberant theoretical engagement from the authors and editors

of Post-Scarcity Anarchism (PSA), with its insipid and revealing

subtitle: Influenced by Social Ecology.

Being “influenced” apparently means depicting your patriarch in proud

portraiture within the first two pages of both issues, coupled with

reprinting his “What is Social Ecology?” in the first. This essay is

seemingly meant as a framing piece for the first issue, if not the zine

in general. With the laboriousness of tossing anvils, Bookchin devotes

four paragraphs—more than half of the piece—to ensuring his apparently

wide-eyed and unwashed reader grasps the elusive notion that social and

ecological problems are related. It was a finding revealed through the

subtleties of the dialectic, I am told. Undoubtedly groundbreaking in

1993—having been preceded only by Fredy Perlman, Chellis Glendinning,

Voltairine DeCleyre, the aforementioned John Zerzan and Bob Black, the

anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee...—the piece

can only have appreciated in the twenty-two years since. More

excitingly, a review of the piece primes the reader to appreciate the

awe-inspiring power of sneer/scare quotes employed liberally by

Bookchin, including, inexplicably, on one of his own arguments. The

zine’s authors will follow their forefather’s tendencies toward

irrelevance and poor writing: an enthusiastic sophomorism shines forth

throughout the two issues via technological naïvité; creepily

systematized prefiguration; trumpeting moralism; and an abundance of

misspellings, punctuation errors, and incoherent phrases.

For people pushing a highly-organized, rational, and technopostivistic

society, the PSA crowd appears awfully lacking in editorial oversight.

The zines have a

we-finished-it-at-4-AM-after-four-cupsof-coffee-and-a-couple-of-beers

feel, with redundant, incoherent, or tautological sentences like

“Anti-authoritarian collective property is a way of collectively

managing that which is used by a collective in a non-authoritarian way.”

There are commas at the end of sentences and misspellings like

“comradery.” Exceeding Bookchin, sneer quoting is taken to its

apotheosis, a practice beyond mockery that becomes reflected back on

itself and collapses into total incoherence, as when one PSA author

references “capitalism’s ‘dismal’ history” and “disgusting

‘entrepreneurs.’” Do the authors want to imply to us that capitalism’s

history is in fact illustrious, that the good name of entrepreneurship

is being sullied by a few bad apples?

Moreover, the PSAs more than once play the part of the ingénue,

presenting information or making suggestions that are appallingly naïve

or inaccurate. One author, citing NASA and the UN, introduces them as

“politically un-biased [sic] entities that merely collate data and

information”—in a genuinely baffling statement, attempts at the

expansion of capitalism beyond the planet Earth and the hegemony of

economic globalism and nation-states are presented as politically

neutral by a collective of anarchists (or is it “anarchists”?).

Similarly, another author opines that the “Featured PSA Project” of

aquaponics[48] will provide a “closed loop, sustainable system that

continuously produces food forever, for free [emphasis added].” They

style this iteration of agriculture a “living ecosystem”; as opposed to

the dead rivers, ponds, and wetlands, I suppose, living ecosystems are

made with LED lights, plastic tubs, and glass houses. I would like to

charitably assume that the PSA crew, with their techno-optimism, have

considerably more technical/engineering knowledge than an

anti-civilization wingnut like me (my computer might as well be powered

by alchemically-bound machine spirits for all I know); but statements

like this one read like parodies of technological religiosity. Plastics,

electricity, rare earth metals, and so forth apparently drop from

heaven, limitless and without the consequences of toxicity, drudgery,

and land despoliation.

The author goes so far as to boast that although one might normally

associate agriculture with “healthy soil, and lots of space for

sunlight” (rather than topsoil loss and CAFOs[49], apparently),

aquaponics “utilizes our understanding of nature[?] to allow the growth

of plants without the need for sunlight or even soil.” Such an

alienated, humanist understanding of the Good is surely the stuff of

Bookchin’s conception of “the ecological use of technology” to “make

man’s dependence upon the natural world a visible and living part of his

culture.”[50] The human organism, a walking elaboration of soil and

sunlight, sighs with relief as it can finally use its “liberatory” (I

can’t stop myself from using them now—it’s so much easier than actually

making arguments!) technology to put those tiresome things behind it.

But perhaps I am expecting too much from people who self-reportedly

“comprehend the emergent nature of our understanding of the natural

world,”—they are, after all, presently fixated on comprehending their

understanding of the world, which appears to be a rather poor one; they

may think less reverently of aquaponics once they work toward

comprehending the world itself. To be fair, I am struggling to

comprehend their understanding of the world, too!

Only pages away is a paean to wave energy generators, again embraced

utterly uncritically in spite of extant evidence that their installation

entails “tremendous disturbance to the seabottom sediments” that “would

result in the loss of habitats for marine infauna” and their generation

of electromagnetic fields during operation results in “decreases in

fertility of marine animals, . . . interference with migration and

navigation, detection of prey or escape from predator, [and] chronic

negative impacts that influence organism growth and/or

reproduction.”[51] Again, we see the belief that merely exorcising the

demon of capitalism somehow redeems the industrial body.

It is implied in the way the PSA collective offhandedly say that they

“aren’t much concerned with precisely what shade of green [their]

politics is [sic]” that they perhaps care only somewhat what the

collateral damage is of achieving Bookchin’s neurotic fantasy of

portable, personal, self-creating factories.[52] Indeed, in a part of

the “Glossary” section I had to read twice to confirm it was not a joke,

there is a suggestion that the dream is now realized with the advent of

3D printers, which are hailed as a way to avoid “pay[ing] some

money-grubbing capitalist for cheap plastic crap from China.” Anarchy

means you make your own cheap plastic crap, presumably so that you may

identify with it more completely; I assume the alienation dissipates at

some point when the self-creating factories are sufficiently widespread

so as to become unnoticeable. Of course, an alienated, humanist project

is exactly what the thankfully obscure PSA crowd is pushing, and they

toss some anvils your way, “What is Social Ecology?”-style, to ensure

this comes across unambiguously. We are told of a “universal humanistic

conscience (what we know to be right and wrong) [sic]” that should be

our guiding principle. I am still trying to locate this conscience so

that I can have a listen too; perhaps I should contact NASA to see if

they are willing to apolitically share any date they have collated on

whether it is hanging about in the upper atmosphere somewhere. Though

the PSA crowd do not say it explicitly, the invisible humanist amoeba

that engulfs us all preaches utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a subset

of consequentialism, a set of ethics with a very long and rich history

in Western philosophy. Put succinctly, consequentialists argue that the

goodness or badness of an action should be judged only by the

consequences of that action (rather than the nature of the action

itself, the intentionality of the actor, the character of the persons

involved, etc.); in the case of utilitarianism specifically, the best

action is considered to be the one that maximizes collectively aggregate

happiness, pleasure, or wellbeing and minimizes suffering. Casual and

aphoristic ways of expressing these ideas are everyday phrases like “the

ends justify the means,” “we need to think about the common good,” or

“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Utilitarianism

has been taken up by radicals, including anarchists, many times as

justification for radically restructuring the world. The PSA crowd

reveal themselves, however wittingly is unclear, as the latest in this

tradition when they make statements like “[our] goal is maximizing

wellbeing [sic] of all.”

A full critique of utilitarianism is very far outside this review’s

scope, so I will confine myself to this pithy one. Thoroughgoing

utilitarian decision-making would mean that the proper person would be

constantly employing a hedonic calculus, going from this moment to that

while trying to quantitatively maximize good times for the collective.

Sentient beings take on the appearance of shifting clusters of pleasure

and pain units, each contributing a small part to a net gain that must

be pursued. Though more sophisticated utilitarians have acknowledged

that the quality, and not merely the quantity, of experiences is

important, the focus on numeralization and maximization remains intact,

only elaborated.

This system is thus the gaze of the bureaucrat, reductionist and

managerial, treating beings as fungible and experiences as

standardizable. Besides the depersonalization and flattening of affect

inherent in such a gaze, I find revolting any ethical system that would

label my times of pain, sorrow, and despair as objectively negative and

to be avoided at all costs, as I consider these to have been at least as

enriching to my life as those of positive affect. It is unsurprising

that the originator of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, was, among

progressive/liberal pursuits, a legal scholar and a prison designer.

The PSAs gift us with a glimpse of what a concrete implementation of

this moralist, technopositivist, urban, and globalized society might

look like. In typical I-promise-we-can-manage-the-world-better fashion,

the essay “Anti-Authoritarian Property Relations” (featuring the silly

tautological sentence quoted above) begins with a nice promise that

widespread adoption of PSA philosophy will mean universal wealth coupled

with relief from labor, all of which will be non-authoritarian in its

administration. Perhaps skeptical, we are assured that the negativity of

authority is really only the product of specific institutional

frameworks—like formal, top-down decision-making—and can therefore be

addressed through a different formalization. By way of example, we are

asked to consider the apparently harmless authority residing in

relationships with “a teacher, a parent, an [sic] or an expert,” of

which we of course have only fond memories. Such hand-waving complete,

it is only a short leap to the assertion that “collectives remain non

authoritarian [sic] by practicing participatory democracy.” Again, a

thoroughgoing critique of democracy is beyond this essay’s scope (though

I can certainly recommend Bob Black’s “Debunking Democracy” for this

purpose), so let this little one suffice. Democracy, ungenerously

described, is the political idea that one should or should not do what

most people tell them to do or not do—it is thus nakedly authoritarian

in its raw form. It is, moreover, an “affair of worriers,”[53] a

neurotic obsession with formal process as the gateway to liberation.

Sophisticated enough to recognize these obvious issues, the PSAs assure

us that they have evaded them, as “everyone retains self-management

within the association and is free to leave the association at any

time.”

Free to leave, sure, but to go where? The PSAs imagine a world totally

federated, agricultural, and industrial on a scale comparable to if not

in some ways greater than what we have now. What place is there for

those who do not want to be agricultural industrialists, who do not want

a compulsory moral system? What about those for whom anarchy means

living in very small groups, or even alone, and as part of their local

ecology? The PSAs exalt wave energy generators and wind power as though

these systems have not historically and are not presently destroying

indigenous lifeways and contributing to toxicity. The benign face of

participatory, sustainablity-oriented democracy is capable of the same

assimilationist and expansionist tendencies as the more obviously

ruthless one we inhabit now. Indeed, the PSAs promise us in their world

there would be “rules without rulers,” “which doesn’t mean no

authorities,” and “graduated sanctions for rule violators,” including

“non-authoritarian rehabilitation or restraint” and “non-authoritarian

therapy”. Promulgating ideology is all in the naming, you see—if you say

“non-authoritarian” one hundred times before bed each night, you will be

free.

But what is most disappointing about these zines is not their

crypto-authoritarianism or their seemingly non-existent editing—it is

that the editors appear to have chosen to be in dialogue with their

critics and contemporaries almost not at all. Aside from a few derisive

jokes about anarcho-primitivism and libertarianism, the only anarchists

they address in any circumspect way are CrimethInc., toward whom they

give a familiar (and very Bookchinist) criticism of their alleged

lifestylism (goddamn privileged kids personalistically dropping out) and

some applause for moving away from it more recently. Much of what I

critique them for here—the PSAs’ moralism, humanism, democratism, and

techno-optimism—is not new flak for Social Ecology, as I indicated

above; I am merely specifying it to this particular articulation. But

Bookchin’s ghost struts about as though almost unaware of these issues.

A serious and good faith effort to revive Social Ecology would involve

some response, or at least some recognition, of post-left,

anarcho-primitivist, and other criticisms that have been fielded and to

which there has yet to be an adequate response. Where is their defense

of urbanism, organizationalism, mass movements, green energy, or

democracy? Anarchist critiques of all of these are widely known, and, if

perhaps not widely accepted, are certainly held by an active and

significant minority of American anarchists.

So whom do the PSA see as their audience? Certainly, it is not merely

the already-converted, given that their “goal is maximizing wellbeing

[sic] of all” according to their “biopsychosocialecotechnological

[...sic?] model of human behavior.” Do they want to inculcate the People

to the Right and True path before they are exposed to the defiling

influence of anti-left/anti-civ anarchism and so feel no need to address

these issues at all? Perhaps the PSAs can indulge me by addressing these

questions and critiques in their next issue, or perhaps enough damning

questions will amount to the decapitation and mouthful of holy wafers

that Bookchin needs to stay in his grave.

— Bellamy Fitzpatrick

----

Different people use different priority-setting systems to choose where

to plant their spears, with the commonest being the simples - where can

I reach and where do I love? For many, the answers to the questions of

how and where to defend the wild will be obvious, the local agents of

destruction clear, communities roused, places to be occupied available,

stuff to be destroyed visible. The thing then is simply to act.

— Desert

[1] “Full definition of Resilience” in MerriamWebster Dictionary; online

at http://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/resilience.

[2] See the website for his film The Big Uneasy; online at

http://www.thebiguneasy.com/.

[3] See the website for Big Charity: The Death of America’s Oldest

Hospital; online at http://www. bigcharityfilm.com/.

[4] Website for My Louisiana Love; online at http://

www.mylouisianalove.com/.

[5] Hurricane Betsy was a larger hurricane than Hurricane Katrina and

hit New Orleans directly, with the latter passing slightly west of the

city. .

[6] Cain Burdeau and Jeff Amy “George W. Bush Visits Disaster Zone, 10

Years After Katrina” (Associated Press, Aug. 28, 2015); online at

http:// hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_KATRINA_

BUSH?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.

[7] It is significant, and not widely known, that 28% of housing units

in the city were not damaged, and 58% were not damaged seriously. See

Rachel E. Luft with Shana Griffin, “A Status Report on Housing in New

Orleans after Katrina: An Intersectional Analysis” in Beth Willinger,

ed. Katrina and the Women of New Orleans ( New Orleans: Newcomb College

Center for Research on Women, Dec. 2008); online at http://

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=-

cache:jd9AwzZZSWgJ:https://tulane.edu/

newcomb/upload/NCCROWreport08-chapter5. pdf+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us.

[8] Barack Obama, “important (don’t delete).” An email from Barack Obama

at dccc@dccc.org to John Clark at clark@loyno.edu (Thu 8/27/2015 11:59

AM).

[9] “Transcript of President Obama’s Katrina speech” in NOLA.com (August

28, 2015); online at http://

www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/transcript_of_president_obamas.html.

Fortunately somebody caught him before he told the crowd “jockamo fee

nané.”

[10] Polly Mosendz, “New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu on the 10th

Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina” in Newsweek (August 29, 2015); online

at

http://www.newsweek.com/new-orleans-mayor-mitch-landrieu-10th-anniversary-hurricane-katrina-367046.

[11] Mitchell J. Landrieu, “About the Project,” in Katrina 10: Resilient

New Orleans; online at http:// katrina10.org/about-the-project/.

[12] Jeff Adelson, “New Orleans area population still growing

post-Katrina, but slowly: Post-Katrina increase slows to a plateau,” in

The New Orleans Advocate (March 28, 2015); online at http://www.

theneworleansadvocate.com/news/11941581-172/

new-orleans-area-population-still.

[13] Special thanks to Roufus H. Byrd for reminding me of this line and

for a wonderful conversation that contributed to this essay.

[14] This taxonomy may, and I suspect does, apply to philosophical

thought in general, beyond the Western tradition. I am framing it this

way due to my relative familiarity with Western thought and relative

ignorance of non-Western perspectives.

[15] Bell, David F. Introduction to Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy

of the Real by Clément Rosset.

[16] Note that, by this definition, most anarchists are Platonists, as

most engage with some kind of alienated conception of the Good, like

Humanity, Justice, or Social Progress.

[17] Many discussions of civilization are hampered by a lack of a clear

definition of the subject. Briefly, by civilization, I mean a way of

human life characterized by the growth of cities, areas of urban

population sufficiently dense as to require the routine importation of

food from corresponding rural surroundings characterized by agriculture.

Civilized life generally includes all of the following, to varying

degrees: collective activity tightly organized around a linear and

numerical conception of time; a high level of ritual and symbolic

culture; complex and explicit social hierarchy; political

representation; the formation of a State, which attempts to monopolize

the use of physical violence and delegitimize non-State violence;

bureaucracy; compulsory labor (work); and societal mores and ideology

rationalizing racial or cultural supremacy, dominance of nature, and

social progress. As I will argue later, an additional important

characteristic, which subsumes all of the above, is highly reified

thinking and social roles.

[18] McQuinn, Jason, “Critical Self-Theory,” Modern Slavery, volume 3,

C.A.L. Press.

[19] Zerzan, John. “Enemy of the State: Interview with John Zerzan,” by

Derrick Jensen. Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization.

Feral House, 2002.

[20] Quoted from his public debate at Stanford University with

transhumanist Zoltan Istvan. Available on YouTube as “Zoltan vs Zerzan.”

[21] Tucker, Kevin. “Egocide,” For Wildness and Anarchy. FC Press and

Black and Green Press, 2010.

[22] Tucker, “The Witch and the Wildness,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[23] Tucker, “Agents of Change: Primal War and the Collapse of Global

Civilization,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[24] Tucker, “The Disgust of Daily Life,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[25] Tucker, “The Witch and the Wildness.”

[26] Tucker, “Agents of Change: Primal War and the Collapse of Global

Civilization,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[27] Tucker, “The Forest Beyond the Field: The Consequences of

Domestication,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[28] de Acosta, Alejandro, “To Acid-Words,” The Impossible, Patience,

Little Black Cart (Ardent Press), 2014.

[29] Tucker, “The Forest Beyond the Field: The Consequences of

Domestication,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[30] The piece is written but presently unpublished. It will be

published in an upcoming Enemy Combatant pamphlet on egoist conceptions

of ecology. It is a response to John Zerzan’s “Animal Dreams,” which was

printed in the first issue of Black Seed.

[31] Foucault, Michel. Interview, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An

Overview of Work in Progress.”

[32] “The Resilience of the Wild: Talking and Stalking Wolves with Rod

Coronado,” Black and Green Review, vol. 1

[33] From Hemenway’s “Toward a Horticultural Society” presentation.

[34] He writes, for instance, in the piece “Egocide”: “I can’t say what

it is that I feel […] I can say that I feel something.” and “I’m not

talking about some new age ‘oneness.’”

[35] Tucker, “Egocide,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[36] Tucker, “The Forest Beyond the Field.”

[37] Tucker, “The Spectacle of the Symbolic,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[38] Tucker, “The Forest Beyond the Field.”

[39] Tucker, “The Spectacle of the Symbolic.”

[40] Tucker, “The Forest Beyond the Field.”

[41] Nietzsche, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” Beyond Good and

Evil, Penguin Books, 2003. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale.

[42] Tucker, “The Creation of Disaster,” For Wildness and Anarchy.

[43] Indeed, John Zerzan has, more than once, on Anarchy Radio as well

as in personal conversation, expressed contempt for an anti-civilization

perspective that does not base itself on a Civilization/Nature dualism,

regarding the refusal of such a metaphysic as implicitly capitulatory.

In spite of his important recognition in the 1980s (essays collected in

Elements of Refusal) that one of the driving aspects of civilization is

reification, Zerzan demands at least some level of Platonism.

[44] Though Tucker is circumspect in extolling present action and

emphasizing that he does not perceive collapse as a discrete event, he

is still prone to endorsing this millenarianism, the ultimate in

delayed-return anarchy. The introduction to Black and Green Review, for

instance, frames our present context in terms of collapse. Tucker is

perhaps unaware of the degree to which some anarcho-primitivists base

their entire perspectives, and entire lives, around waiting for this

deliverance while learning primitive skills. This practice recapitulates

Marxist-Leninist revolutionary discipline, training one’s mind and body

to be prepared for when the Revolution comes.

[45] This ressentiment-fueled analysis places blame for our situation on

a tiny politico-economic elite with nefarious motivations. While I can

certainly sympathize with disgust for the behavior of specific persons

and attitudes among said elite, I find this kind of unqualified

vilification distorts the reality of the social machine that creates a

qualitatively and quantitatively different enslavement and imprisonment

for each person in civilization as well as mutual co-dependence among

us.

[46] Quoted in Newman, Saul, “Anarchism and the Politics of

Ressentiment.” Thanks to Nicola for pointing this connection out to me.

[47] Bookchin, Murray. “Towards a Liberatory Technology”.

[48] Aquaponics is a discipline of agriculture. The word is a

portmanteau of aquaculture, the husbandry of aquatic animals, and

hydroponics, the soil-less cultivation of plants in nutrient solutions.

In aquaponics, these organisms are placed into a simulated, simple

mutualism by allowing the excretions of the animals to feed the plants,

who in turn ensure the animals are not poisoned by their own shit.

[49] Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are one of the nightmarish

manifestations of modern agriculture in which domesticated animals are

concentrated in incredible densities and kept alive only through such

grotesque measures as regular doses of antibiotics and antihelminthics

and the creation of anaerobic lagoons, literally artificial ponds for

their shit to fill.

[50] Ibid., Bookchin.

[51] Lin, Lan and Yu, Haitao, “Offshore wave energy generation devices:

Impacts on ocean bio-environment.” Elsevier, Acta Ecologica Sinica 32

(2012), pp. 117-122.

[52] Ibid., Bookchin.

[53] The Invisible Committee, “They Want to Oblige Us to Govern. We

Won’t Yield to That Pressure.”, To Our Friends. Semiotext(e), 2015.