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Title: Desert Author: Anonymous Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: critique, green, climate, civilization, civilisation, community, conflict, resistance, capitalism, population, nihilist, nihilism, wildness, wild, revolution, society, ecology, environment, conservation, ecosystems, indigenous, struggle, economics, military, anti-civ, Little Black Cart Notes: A German language translation of *Desert* can be found here: https://anarchistischebibliothek.org/library/anonym-desert][anarchistischebibliothek.org/library/anonym-desert]], and a Greek language translation can be found here: [[https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1607008/][athens.indymedia.org/post/1607008]]. You can also share *Desert* through the link [[http://readdesert.org][readdesert.org]]. *Desert* was first published by Little Black Cart and can be found in book form [[https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=712.
Desertš noun
1. A barren or desolate area, especially: a. A dry, often sandy region
of little rainfall, extreme temperature, and sparse vegetation. b. A
region of permanent cold that is largely or entirely devoid of life. c.
An apparently lifeless area of water. 2. An empty or forsaken place; a
wasteland: a cultural desert. 3. Archaic A wild, uncultivated, and
uninhabited region.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin desertum, from neuter
past participle of deserere, to desert; see desert².]
I have written Desert as a nature loving anarchist primarily addressing
others with similar feelings. As a result I have not always explained
ideas to which I hold when they are, to some extent, givens within many
anarchist and radical environmental circles. Hopefully I have written in
an accessible enough manner, so even if you donât come from this
background you will still find Desert readable. While the best
introductions to ecology and anarchy are moments spent within
undomesticated ecosystems and anarchist communities, some may also find
the following books helpful â I did.
(London: HarperCollins, 2008).
Red, 1983).
Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990).
1991).
Something haunts many activists, anarchists, environmentalists, many of
my friends. It haunted me. Much of our subcultures tell us itâs not
there, that we canât see it, hear it. Our best wishes for the world tell
us not to see it. But for many, despite their best efforts â carrying on
with the normal activism, the movement building, living both according
to and as an expression of their ethics â despite all this, the spectre
gains form. The faint image grows more solid, more unavoidable, until
the ghost is staring one in the face. And like many monsters of past
tales, when its gaze is met â people freeze. Become unable to move. Give
up hope; become disillusioned and inactive. This malaise, freezing, not
only slows âactivist workloadâ, but I have seen it affect every facet of
many of my friendsâ lives.
The spectre that many try not to see is a simple realisation â the world
will not be âsavedâ. Global anarchist revolution is not going to happen.
Global climate change is now unstoppable. We are not going to see the
worldwide end to civilisation/capitalism/patriarchy/authority. Itâs not
going to happen any time soon. Itâs unlikely to happen ever. The world
will not be âsavedâ. Not by activists, not by mass movements, not by
charities and not by an insurgent global proletariat. The world will not
be âsavedâ. This realisation hurts people. They donât want it to be
true! But it probably is.
These realisations, this abandonment of illusions should not become
disabling. Yet if one believes that itâs all or nothing, then there is a
problem. Many friends have âdropped outâ of the âmovementâ whilst others
have remained in old patterns but with a sadness and cynicism which
signals a feeling of futility. Some hover around scenes critiquing all,
but living and fighting little.
âItâs not the despair â I can handle the despair. Itâs the hope I canât
handle.â [1]
The hope of a Big Happy Ending, hurts people; sets the stage for the
pain felt when they become disillusioned. Because, truly, who amongst us
now really believes? How many have been burnt up by the effort needed to
reconcile a fundamentally religious faith in the positive transformation
of the world with the reality of life all around us? Yet to be
disillusioned â with global revolution/with our capacity to stop climate
change â should not alter our anarchist nature, or the love of nature we
feel as anarchists. There are many possibilities for liberty and
wildness still.
What are some of these possibilities and how can we live them? What
could it mean to be an anarchist, an environmentalist, when global
revolution and world-wide social/eco sustainability are not the aim?
What objectives, what plans, what lives, what adventures are there when
the illusions are set aside and we walk into the world not disabled by
disillusionment but unburdened by it?
global collapse
The idea of Progress was central to the modern Western paradigm and the
presumption that the entire world was moving ever onwards to a better
future was dominant. The idea of the inevitability or possibility of a
global libertarian future originates from that belief.
In many ways Anarchism was/is the libertarian extreme of the European
Enlightenment â against god and the state. In some countries such as
turn of the Twentieth Century Spain it was the Enlightenment â its
militantly pro-science anti-clericism being as much an attraction as its
anti-capitalism. Yet the rubbish of history is not so easily discarded
and âprogressiveâ revolutionary movements have often been, in essence,
form and aim, the continuation of religion by other means. As an
example, the belief that universal peace and beauty would be reached
through apocalyptic tumults of blood and fire (revolution/the
millennium/the collapse) indicates firmly that as an enlightenment
ideology, Anarchism has been heavily burdened by its Euro-Christian
origins. John Gray was talking about Marxism when he said it was a â...a
radical version of the enlightenment belief in progress â itself a
mutation of Christian hopes... [Following] Judaism and Christianity in
seeing history as a moral drama, thatâs last act is salvation.â [2]
While some anarchists never fell for such bunkum, many did, and some
still do.
These days Progress itself is increasingly questioned both by anarchists
and across society. I have yet to meet anyone today who still believes
in the inevitability [3] of a global anarchist future. However the idea
of a global movement, confronting a global present and creating a global
future has many apostles. Some of these are even libertarians and look
hopefully to the possibility of global anarchist revolution.
The illusory triumph of capitalism following the destruction of the
Berlin Wall lead to the proclamation â more utopian [4] than real â of a
New World Order â a global capitalist system. The reaction of many to
globalisation was to posit one from below, and this was only re-enforced
by the near simultaneous public emergence of the Zapatistas and the
invention of the Web. The subsequent international action days, often
coinciding with summits, became the focus for the supposedly global
anti-capitalist âmovement of movementsâ. The excitement on the streets
enabled many to forestall seeing the spectre by looking in the direction
of the âglobal movementâ. But there never was a global movement against
capitalism, then [5], or ever [6], just as capitalism itself was never
truly global. There are many, many places where capitalist relations are
not the dominant practice, and even more where anti-capitalist
(nevermind anarchist) movements simply donât exist.
Amidst the jolly unreality of this period of âGlobal Resistanceâ some
could get really carried away: âWe have no interest in reforming the
World Bank or the IMF; we want it abolished as part of an international
anarchist revolution.â [7] Such statements are understandable if written
in the drunk-like exuberance one can sometimes feel on having defeated
the police, but they are found more commonly. The self-description of
one Anarchist Federation reads: âAs the capitalist system rules the
whole world, its destruction must be complete and worldwideâ. [8]
The illusion of a singular world capitalist present is mirrored by the
illusion of a singular world anarchist future.
Anarchists are growing in number. Groups and counter-cultures are
appearing in countries where there were few, or no, social movement
anarchists [9] previously. Yet an honest appraisal of our strengths and
prospects, and those of the communities and classes we are part of,
would show clearly that we are not growing âthe new society in the shell
of the oldâ [10], that someday will liberate the world in a moment of
rupture. The earth has a lot of places with a lot of people; a reality
that can increasingly easily get lost in the web-encapsulated global
(activist) village. [11] To want to rid the world of capitalist social
relations, or further still civilisation, is one thing. To be capable of
doing so is something else entirely. We are not everywhere â we are
rare.
Actions, circles of friends, social centres, urban guerrilla cells,
magazine editorial groups, eco-warriors, housing co-ops, students,
refuges, arsonists, parents, squats, scientists, peasants, strikers,
teachers, land based communes, musicians, tribespeople, street gangs,
loving insurgents and so, so much else. Anarchists can be wonderful. We
can have beauty, and self-possessed power and possibility in buckets. We
cannot, however, remake the entire world; there are not enough of us,
and never will be.
Some may argue that a global libertarian revolution can succeed without
being made, or significantly aided, by overt anarchists so âourâ present
numbers and resources are null and void. While itâs a given that social
crises and revolt are regular occurrences in societies based on class
warfare; to put ones faith in the ârevolutionary impulse of the
proletariatâ is a theory approximate to saying âItâll be alright on the
night.â
There is unfortunately little evidence from history that the working
class â never mind anyone else â is intrinsically predisposed to
libertarian or ecological revolution. Thousands of years of
authoritarian socialisation favour the jackboot... [12]
Neither we, nor anyone else, can create a libertarian and ecological
global future society by expanding social movements. Further, there is
no reason to think that in the absence of such a vast expansion, a
global social transformation congruent with our desires will ever
happen. As anarchists we are not the seed of the future society in the
shell of the old, but merely one of many elements from which the future
is forming. Thatâs ok; when faced with such scale and complexity, there
is a value in non-servile humility â even for insurgents.
To give up hope for global anarchist revolution is not to resign oneself
to anarchy remaining an eternal protest. Seaweed puts it well:
Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any bioregion can be liberated
through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions
unique to it, mostly as the grip of civilisation in that area weakens
through its own volition or through the efforts of its inhabitants...
Civilisation didnât succeed everywhere at once, and so itâs undoing
might only occur to varying degrees in different places at different
times. [13]
Even if an area is seemingly fully under the control of authority there
are always places to go, to live in, to love in and to resist from. And
we can extend those spaces. The global situation may seem beyond us, but
the local never is. As anarchists we are neither entirely powerless nor
potentially omnipotent, thankfully.
For many of us, when the turn of the century anti-globalisation surge
lost its momentum, [14] the global thinking, and religious optimism went
with it. However, in the last few years, an attempt to resurrect the
âglobal movementâ appeared amongst us once again â this time around
climate change.
The mobilisation at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference was
billed by many as the next Seattle [15] and some groups have claimed
they are âbuilding a global movement to solve the climate crisis.â [16]
Greenpeace, for instance, says âclimate change is a global public âbadâ.
To solve it requires global collective action... We have no alternative
but to build a global grassroots movement, move politicians forward, and
force corporations and banks to change direction.â [17] Iâll take it as
a given that you the reader understand the naive unreality of such lobby
groups but itâs worth looking at those at the less institutionalised end
of climate change campaigning.
There are three main tendencies, and sometimes folk wander from one to
another. Firstly, there are those that have similar beliefs to
Greenpeace â i.e. âdirect actionâ as an awareness raising/lobbying
strategy. Secondly, there are those who use the discourse around climate
change to aid mobilisation in local campaigns which, though unlikely to
have any effect on climate change, at least have practical and sometimes
achievable objectives in mind i.e. halting the destruction of an
ecosystem/the worsening wellbeing [18] of a community or simply
increasing self-sufficiency. [19] Thirdly, there are those nostalgic
anti-capitalists who envision âclimate justiceâ as a metamorphosis of
the imagined âalter-globalisation movementâ [20] (notice itâs
increasingly no longer anti-globalisation). An anonymous writer
described the last tendency well:
[When activists] try to convince us that itâs the âlast chance to save
the earthâ... itâs because theyâre trying to build social movements...
There is a growing and disturbing trend that has been lingering around
radical circles over the last few years, based on the idea that blind
positivity can lead to interesting and unexpected successes. Michael
Hardt and Tony Negriâs books have provided some of the theoretical bases
for this, and it has been taken up by some who want to unite the masses
under the banner of precarity, organise migrants and mobilise for
summits. For many coming from the left wing tradition, it has been the
message of hope that they were wanting to hear, at a time when their
ideologies seemed more moribund than ever.
...Theoreticians who should understand capitalism well enough to know
better, write that a global basic income or free movement for all is an
achievable goal. They may not believe it themselves, but ostensibly want
to inspire others to believe in it, claiming that the âmoments of
excessâ generated by such Utopian dreams will give rise to potent
movements for change. Climate change... is certainly a suitable testing
ground for the politics of manufactured hope, being so alienated from
our actual everyday realities. But whilst the new movement politicians â
facilitators not dictators â watch their movements grow, there is still
a case for living in the real world. [21]
Outside the convention centres the new stars appear more and more like
those within. Inside and out the message is that a global future is
winnable if only we organise. However, the reality both within
ecosystems generally and peoples stomachs in particular is that there is
no global singular future [22] and no imaginary community, either of
states or âmultitudesâ (or both a la Cochabamba) [23] can stop climate
change.
Given our obvious inability to re-make the entire world the way we might
like it to be, some replace the myth of âglobal revolutionâ with a
belief in imminent âglobal collapseâ â these days usually some mix of
climate change and peak oil. As we shall see later (both in the next
chapters and our future years) global heating will severely challenge
civilisation in some areas and probably vanquish it in others. Yet in
some regions it will likely open up possibilities for the spread of
civilisations rule. Some lands may remain (relatively) temperate â
climatically and socially. As for civilisation, so for anarchy and
anarchists â severely challenged, sometimes vanquished; possibilities
for liberty and wildness opening up, possibilities for liberty and
wildness closing. The unevenness of the present will be made more so.
There is no global future.
One recurring theme in environmentalism is that the apocalypse is always
imminent but forever deferred. Every generation seems to have one last
chance to save the planet. Biologist Barry Commoner said back in 1970:
âWe are in a period of grace, we have the time â perhaps a generation â
in which to save the environment from the final effects of the violence
we have already done to it.â [24] Similar pronouncements can be heard
today but the period of grace is probably over. Back in 1990 the editors
of The Ecologist set out a general evaluation of the state of the earth
in 5000 Days to Save the Planet:
Today we are told that our planet is in crisis, that we are destroying
and polluting our way to a global catastrophe... We may have as little
as fifteen years, perhaps as short a time as 5000 days to save the
planet... One of the major concerns arising out of the Gaia theory is
that we are pushing natural processes beyond their capacity to maintain
an atmosphere fit for higher forms of life. Beyond a certain point, the
system may flip to an entirely new state which would be extremely
uncomfortable for life as we know it... once triggered, the change to
the new state could occur with extreme rapidity. [25]
By 2005 the countdown envisaged in the title had reached zero and the
originator of the Gaia theory, James Lovelock, was writing The Revenge
of Gaia where he would state that he thought the living earth was
probably now moving irrevocably to a hot state. Lovelock came to this
conclusion primarily as a result of seeing scientific observations of
climate change surpassing what most predictions said was meant to be
happening. In an address to the Royal Society he stated:
The positive feedback on heating from the melting of floating Arctic and
Antarctic ice alone is causing an acceleration of system driven heating
whose total will soon or already be greater than that from all of the
pollution COâ that we have so far added. This suggests that implementing
Kyoto or some super Kyoto is most unlikely to succeed... we have to
understand that the Earth System is now in positive feedback and is
moving ineluctably towards the stable hot state of past climates. [26]
Lovelockâs public advocacy of nuclear power, [27] disbelief in wind
farms as a panacea and his clear statements that massive climate change
is now probably inevitable has made him unpopular with many greens. Heâs
definitely âoff-messageâ. Itâs rather inconvenient, then, that heâs got
such a good environmental and scientific pedigree. As a polymath in his
nineties he has worked in many fields. Notably, he invented the Electron
Capture Detector that made the discovery of the Ozone Hole and the
writing of Rachel Carsonâs Silent Spring [28] possible. His initially
heretical Gaia hypothesis, of a self managing living earth, is now
widely accepted under the title Earth System Science. Heâs long argued
for wild land expansion and been sympathetic to ecological defence
actions. As an avid hiker he even carried out a personal bombing
campaign around the right to roam way back in the 1930s! His detractors
often admire his pioneering work but say (in a somewhat ageist manner)
that he has now gone a bit batty. The real problem, though, is that he
has made a professional career of being beholden to no-one elseâs
ideology or pay-packet. As such he has the capacity to say what many in
scientific and environmental institutions are thinking but are afraid to
say so directly in public. Lovelock thinks that a range of factors have
led to a consistent under-diagnosis of the extent of human effects on
the earth. These factors include:
cannot keep up with.
self-regulating system.
dimming. [30]
Itâs beyond the scope of this text to give an overall summation of
Lovelockâs thinking, never mind the wider science around global heating.
Part of the nature of the problem is that by the time you read this the
science will have moved on considerably. If you are interested have a
look at the sources I have referenced and read wider yourself. However
while the details may vary the inexorable direction of much of the
science seems to be that we are probably heading to a considerably
hotter earth, and fast. Recent observations put us further down the road
than many of us thought even a few years ago. Decades later down the
road. Combined with inertia around reducing carbon emissions this makes
the chances of âstoppingâ massive climate change probably rather slight.
While NGOs are still babbling about stopping a two degrees warming,
increasingly many climate scientists are discussing a four degree
warming by end of the century or even as early as 2060. [31] This is by
no means a fringe worry. The 2007 IPCC report predicted a rise of
between 2 and 6.4°C this century. Bob Watson, its former chairman has
warned that the âworld should work on mitigation and adaptation
strategies to âprepare for 4°C of warming.ââ [32] This is bad enough but
Lovelock goes further and cites a number of feedback mechanisms he
thinks are already moving us to an even hotter state, of which the
melting of sea ice mentioned above is the most well known. What could
this new hot state look like? Some highlights:
and even some of central Europe.
frontier land in Siberia, Scandinavia, Canada, Greenland, Alaska and
even to a certain extent in the Antarctic.
areas.
Lovelock puts it rather bluntly:
Humans are in a pretty difficult position and I donât think they are
clever enough to handle whatâs ahead. I think theyâll survive as a
species all right, but the cull during this century is going to be
huge... The number remaining at the end of the century will probably be
a billion or less. [33]
Of course, I donât know this is a true picture of present and future
climate change. The true complexity of the Earth System (and human
social dynamics within it) is probably beyond our comprehension
(definitely beyond mine) and models should not be confused with reality.
My informed hunch (thatâs all one has in the fool-making business of
describing the future) is that the picture painted is probably a
reasonable approximation. You may not think so, but I would ask that you
run with me as itâs a possibility worth considering. That hunch is as
much informed by an anarchist critique of capitalism as it is a reading
of climate science. Looking around me, itâs a lovely bright day and the
leaves of the trees are almost shining; but little in the society in
which I live indicates to me that a problem of the scale and complexity
of climate change is going to get fixed. Given that, I feel that the big
question posed is not so much if we will reach a world somewhat
resembling that outlined above but when.
Lovelock is seriously proposing that such a world (or to be more
accurate, such worlds) will emerge by the end of this century, and that
emergence trends will start to become obvious by mid century. It could
take longer, but either way it may be advantageous to take such shifts
into consideration when thinking about what we want to achieve in our
lives.
Here, to be clear, we are not talking about a millennial apocalypse,
though it may feel like that to some caught in its more horrible or
exciting moments. Rather we are talking about massive accelerating
change. James Hansen (NASA), comments:
If we wish to preserve a planet similar to that in which civilization
developed and to which life adapted, Palaeolithic evidence and ongoing
climate change suggest that COâ will need to be reduced from its current
385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. [34]
Chances are it wonât be. The environmental niche that civilisation
(class divided agriculturally-sustained city culture) developed in is on
the way out. With it will probably go many of civilisationâs citizens.
And there are many, many citizens.
Integral to the growth of industrial capitalism has been a vast increase
in human population. There are now around seven billion of us compared
to around 600 million at the beginning of the 18^(th) century. That jump
has happened in 13 generations [35] and in large part it was no
accident. Silvia Federici has clearly laid out that a key foundation of
early capitalism was the destruction of womenâs control over their own
fertility: â...wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the
state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist
accumulationâ (see box below). While it was capitalism that first
enforced and then enabled this most recent mass expansion, in doing so
it was/is singing an older anthem of civilisation [36] â this time,
though, with mechanical amplification.
I was born in the mid 1970s when the human population was four billion;
by the time I die (hopefully not before 2050) the UN estimates that the
earthâs human population will be over 9 billion. [37] This estimate,
though, presumes âbusiness as usualâ. Whether this happens or not will
depend on three interdependent factors: birth control, death control and
food supply.
Worldwide, despite the continued edicts of cult patriarchs such as the
Pope, many are increasingly using birth control to limit family size.
The continuing power struggle to enable us to do so is a key battle and
one around which many anarchists â amongst others â have organised. [38]
However the spread of birth control â and the fight for womenâs
liberation [39] more generally â will not stop the probable doubling of
human population in my lifetime. With decreasing family size already a
global norm in much of the world, it is the ability of industrial
medicine and hygiene measures to enact death control that is now key.
The human population, at least in business-as-usual projections, will
continue to rise until at least 2050 as long as those alive today live
their expected lifespans and have the expected number of children.
However, we do not have to wait until then to overshoot the planetâs
human carrying capacity (its maximum permanently supported load) as we
have probably done so already. Industrial civilisation has managed to
push up food supply by both colonising ever more wild land for
agriculture and developing fossil fuel reliant âgreen revolutionâ [40]
agro-technologies and transportation. Essentially, industrial
agriculture relies on the harvesting of ghost acreage [41] (the
fossilised photosynthetic production of ecosystems millions of years
ago) to produce food at the present rate. This can be only temporary,
for unless one is a believer in the cornucopian myth that resources are
limitless, someday the fossil-fuel hunting will draw a blank. When this
will happen no-one really knows, though many argue that we have already
passed âpeak oilâ. Some may counter that hydrogen fuel cells, solar
power, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and green goo will somehow
avert a population crash. These apostles of progress more and more
resemble cargo cults in their belief that technology marshalled by
either the market (if capitalist) or state planning (if socialist) will
provide all that is needed. In the unlikely event that theyâre right,
and the food supply does keep up with population growth, the highly
managed nature of the provision will guarantee that the âfreedom supplyâ
(for both humans and other animals) is increasingly scarce.
So the rapidly growing human population needs fossil fuels to stay
alive. Most of us are eating oil and illness is largely controlled with
high energy reliant technologies. Here is yet another reason I doubt the
ability of activists, or states for that matter, to convince society to
decarbonise. It sounds nice, but for millions, if not billions, it would
mean shorter lives if humanity stopped importing from the past.
On a significantly hotter globe a major human die-off could be on the
cards even if one does not go along with the ideas around peak oil. As
much of the majority world becomes hotter and poorer, farmers will be
unable to afford the petro-chemical based imports necessary for
continued production even if fossil fuels donât run out. Further, while
industrial agriculture has temporarily increased landâs carrying
capacity, in the process much âproductiveâ land has been denuded and
without the application of fertilisers would now be unable to produce as
much food organically as it did originally. Even Southerners âluckyâ
enough to still have access to fossil fuel inputs will find magic
potions lose their powers when soil dries, bakes and blows away. With
little nutrition or medicine disease will harvest much of the hungry.
It would be nice to imagine that those countries still able to produce
considerable food quantities (in part thanks to improved growing
conditions â more of that later) would gift it but I wouldnât hold your
breath. A billion people on earth are hungry already. [42] Rather than
the spectacular mass death of whole communities this mostly causes
increased childhood mortality and decreased overall lifespan. Yet
capitalism has, from the beginning, had definite âformâ, (just ask the
Irish) in allowing (and causing) millions to starve more dramatically.
Mike Davis reminds us of an often forgotten example when he writes (in
Late Victorian Holocausts ) of the 30â60 million people in the later
part of the 19^(th) century who starved to death, ânot outside the
âmodern world systemâ, but in the very process of being forcibly
incorporated into its economic and political structures.â [43] Similar
hungers have taken their toll throughout the following century, many
engineered by state socialists, those most attentive students of British
Empire.
It would be hopelessly Utopian to believe that hunger could be exiled
from the human condition but mostly those dying today of starvation do
so whilst others in their societies keep eating. Hunger is the language
of class warfare. Power has many levels and amongst much of the poorest
starvation in the future is likely to be played out as gendered
violence, as it is now. [44]
I will leave it to others to argue about the relative contribution of
population numbers or industrial consumption patterns (as though both
are not now intrinsically linked) to global heating. Today, global (and
local) population growth is a barrier to any significant
âde-carbonisationâ. Tomorrow, capitalismâs present inability to
out-engineer its addiction to fossil fuels will likely result in a
massive population crash.
Global heating, population growth, peak oil and other environmental
limits are probably not the apocalypse that will end the reign of
capital and the state everywhere. The global collapse is probably no
nearer than the global revolution. Nevertheless it does mean that a
totalised global capitalism, enclosing all relationships within it,
becomes even less likely. The Western project of cultural expansion
faces its limits. As part of that, the libertarian movements which
capitalism has carried on its coat tails also face the real limits to
the growth of Anarchism. Yet just as the establishment of a one world of
Anarchism is foreclosed so the possibilities of many new/old worlds â
some anarchies â becomes widespread. Some of these possibilities will be
opened up by conflict, some will be closed by conflict.
The very nature of states is to control populations, but many of the
billions will not hunger quietly. Yesterday the late Victorian
holocausts triggered millenarian uprisings amongst those being swept
away by the spreading flood waters of the âworld systemâ. Tomorrow, as
the tide retracts and surplus populations are left on the (desert) sand,
we seem set for yet another, if anything more brutal, century of wars
and insurrections.
Whilst politicians of both states and social movements repeat
platitudes, smile at their constituents and face off against each other,
some realists are looking to a climate changed future less as something
that can be avoided and more as something that will need to be policed.
In National Security and the Threat of Climate Change leading thinkers
and actors from the US military investigated a wide range of scenarios.
Their first finding was that âprojected climate change poses a serious
threat to Americaâs national security.â How?
In already weakened states, extreme weather events, drought, flooding,
sea level rise, retreating glaciers, and the rapid spread of
life-threatening diseases will themselves have likely effects: increased
migrations, further weakened and failed states, expanded ungoverned
spaces, exacerbating underlying conditions that terrorists seek to
exploit, and increased internal conflicts. In developed countries, these
conditions threaten to disrupt economic trade and introduce new security
challenges, such as increased spread of infectious disease and increased
immigration. [45]
As well as seeing climate change as âa new hostile and stressing factorâ
that will produce novel threats generally, they also saw it as
exacerbating existing specific ones.
Climate Change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of
the most volatile regions of the world. Many governments in Asia,
Africa, and the Middle East are already on edge in terms of their
ability to provide basic needs: food, water, shelter and stability.
Projected climate change will exacerbate the problems in these regions
and add to the problems of effective governance. Unlike most
conventional security threats that involve a single entity acting in
specific ways at different points in time, climate change has the
potential to result in multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally
within the same time frame. Economic and environmental conditions will
further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean
water becomes increasingly scarce, and populations migrate in search of
resources. Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin
of survival, foster the conditions for internal conflict, extremism, and
movement towards increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies...
Because climate change also has the potential to create natural and
humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today, its
consequences will likely foster political instability where social
demands exceed the capacity of governments to cope. [46]
Similar nightmares and fantasies are talked about by military experts
elsewhere. [47] It should be remembered that armies plan for what could
possibly happen, not what will definitely happen. Additionally, there is
institutional self-interest in thinking the world is getting more
dangerous if your job is providing enforced order. However, it is worth
taking their predictions of strife seriously not least because when
policy recommendations such as theirs are enacted, shadows of their
dreams can become reality. Just as âgenerals are always fighting the
last warâ, so too their vision of future ones are shaped by present
conflict. It should come as no surprise then that much of the military
discourse around climate change is centred around hot wars, failed
states and the political violence that can emanate from them. Potential
cold wars, within the global north and extreme south, are given less
prominence. I will follow this convention for now, though I will return
to such possibilities later.
Looking at conflicts today there is already an obvious Equatorial
Tension Belt which is expected to significantly expand. Its existence is
due to a whole host of variables not least of which are the accumulated
environmental impact from collapsed civilisations, the legacies of
direct western colonialism, high population levels, the presence of
âresourcesâ useful to capitalism and habitats that are on the margin of
agriculture viability. [48] Given what the US generals describe above
some governments in these regions will fall, whilst others, to varying
degrees, will âfailâ. Some states will retract back to their (maybe
shifting) capitals leaving the rest of their supposed territories in a
mosaic of war and peace, others will be engulfed in civil war,
revolution and inter-state conflict. There will no doubt be much horror
but also much potential for constructing free lives.
Unsurprisingly, there is division among military thinkers on what the
great powers of today will be able to do. Some argue that they: â... may
be drawn more frequently into these situations, either alone or with
allies, to help provide stability before conditions worsen and are
exploited by extremists.â And that they â...may also be called upon to
undertake stability and reconstruction efforts once a conflict has
begun, to avert further disaster and reconstitute a stable environment.â
[49] Others predict a markedly reduced planetary policing role in an
effective end to the New World Order declared by the US which, âlacking
the means to help local authorities restore order, âwill likely fall
back on a combination of policies that add up to quarantine.ââ [50]
Social movement anarchists in these regions might want to think
seriously about what practical preparations can wisely be made for
self-rule, civil war, survival and the unfortunately inevitable
emergence and strengthening of authoritarian forces and inter-ethnic
conflict. âWe must have the ability to defend ourselves, survive, and
exploit crises in society including capitalist attempts to destroy us.
The divided and industrial nature of todayâs society has already
determined the instability of tomorrow.â [51]
In the depths of crises with social demands âexceeding the ability of
government to copeâ the glory days of Anarchism may be back. âIf climate
change results in reduced rainfall and access to the natural capital
that sustains livelihoods, poverty will become more widespread, leading
to increased grievances and better recruitment opportunities for rebel
movements.â [52] Who knows we may even see scenes as dramatic as the
anarchist armoured trains of Maria Nikiforova. [53] From the steppes of
the Ukraine to the sierras of Mexico and the streets of Barcelona a huge
number of those who ever identified as anarchists did so embroiled in
overt war.
Unfortunately, in most places, rebel movements are more likely to be
statist than anarchist. This is partly thanks to the large number of
established authoritarian political gangs compared to libertarian ones,
but also because in extreme situations people turn to extremist
solutions. In some places this might be self-organisation,
decentralisation and mutual aid, but in many there will be no social
solution possible, just the false promises of despots and prophets.
Thatâs not to say we couldnât compete with them by spreading rival
millennial hopes of a new dawn, but if we are honest with ourselves,
having thrown aside religion, it would be a travesty of our ethics to
pick it up again in the cause of gang recruitment and the joy of
trouble.
Where visible and dramatic libertarian social forces do arise it is
likely that many from other parts of the world will travel to join them.
As the clouds darken, some of our family will run towards outbreaks of
armed resistance â wherever they may be. This comes from a deep felt
love and feelings of solidarity but also because, letâs be honest, for
many conflict is attractive and anti-militarists rarely get the
opportunity for outright war. The nihilistic desire â amplified in an
increasingly complex world â to just get out there and âfuck shit upâ
is, if not a creative urge, definitely a strong one. Thatâs not to say
everyone has it, but many do. Here there is an uncomfortable symmetry
between our emotional drivers and that of fighters generally.
In the ex-territory of failed and fallen states inter-ethnic conflict
will become ever more common, at least until populations are cut back to
a level more fitting a much hotter world.
The failed states have conflict levels so high and persistent that even
baseline changes forecast by the IPCC are likely to worsen livelihood
conditions. The trends suggest more of a social or tribal breakdown than
wars between nations. Climate trends will ignore borders, and failed
states prone to conflict will spread like a disease. [54]
Such forces of inter-ethnic conflict will be far more widespread than
groups organised around European originated political ideologies â
libertarian or authoritarian. They are, after all, able to provide real
solutions (if only temporarily) to peopleâs immediate needs in areas
where the basics for survival are outnumbered by thirsty mouths. This is
done, of course, by wrenching resources from âthe othersâ. Additionally,
inter-ethnic conflicts can erupt when the âcause is hopelessâ but the
emotional driver is strong.
The consoling belief that individuals willingly join conflicts driven
only by rational strategic considerations, family narratives or
historical burdens dissolves when brought into the light of the
expressed desires of many fighters themselves. For a dramatic European
example one only needs to read Mattijs van de Portsâs study of a
community swept up in civil war. In Gypsies, Wars and other instances of
the Wild, he presents voices of people who âin festive mood, took on the
role of barbarians.â
How is this possible in Europe at the end of the twentieth century?â was
the question that played obsessively through my mind... What the war in
former Yugoslavia forced us to digest is the fact that people proved
willing to make a conscious and active choice to embrace regression,
barbarity, a return to the wilderness. Take the Serb fighters who dream
of a return to the Serbia of the epic poems âwhere there was no
electricity, no computers, when the Serbs were happy and had no cities,
the breeding grounds of all evil.â [55]
That some modern day militias reflect romanticist desires whilst
shelling towns, massacring villages and being killed in turn, should
neither surprise us I nor necessarily fully invalidate romance. It does
however suggest â along with the honest expressions of joy in
destruction mouthed by some soldiers in every war as well as many
anarchists â that there is a coupling of some sort between a generalised
urge to destroy and a disgust at complex human society.
Randolph Bourne was right when he said âwar is the health of the stateâ
[56] but this other driver is at work too, especially where the âsidesâ
are no longer states. French anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastresâ
description of war among Amazonian tribes is not directly transferable
to inter-ethnic conflicts involving non-anarchist peoples but
nevertheless an echo does resonate:
What is the function of primitive war? To assure the permanence of
dispersal, of the parcelling out, of the atomization of groups.
Primitive war is the work of a centrifugal logic, of a logic of
separation which expresses itself from time to time in armed conflict.
War serves to maintain each community in its political independence...
Now what is the legal power that embraces all differences in order to
suppress them, which only supports itself to abolish the logic of the
multiple in order to substitute for it the opposite logic of
unification? What is the other name of the One that refuses in essence
primitive society? It is the State. [57]
It is not all hubris and doubletalk when military spin-doctors describe
statist invasions as âpeacekeepingâ. Ethnic diversity and autonomy often
emerge both from mutual aid in community and animosity between
communities. I like to think (and our history backs this up) that
self-identified anarchists will never inflict such pain as the Serb
nationalist militias (an example I purposely chose for its repugnance)
but we should admit that our wish to âfuck shit upâ is partly driven by
the same urge to civilisational dismemberment as can found in many
inter-ethnic conflicts, and in the minds of fighters more generally. As
central power is weakened in some areas, possibilities for anarchy in
both its happy and its horrible meanings will open up.
Climate wars to come may wipe out many anarchists but is unlikely to
kill off Anarchism, which as a political movement has survived
significant culls of its adherents in past local apocalypses. [58]
Despite all the horrors of the last 200 years, Anarchism is, as the New
York Times put it, âthe creed that wonât stay dead.â [59] This is
heartening, but we are not ideological machines. It does matter that
anarchists themselves â i.e. you, me, our families and friends we have
yet to meet â keep on living â not just âthe idealâ. It matters to me!
Give or take the particularities of the local, we may have twenty years
(probably more) to prepare for these ruptures, not as an alternative to
other tasks at hand, but as an integral part of a long term
multi-pronged strategy. For some, it will also be a matter of life or
death.
While future climate wars will be an extension of the present conditions
they are likely to be far bigger and more extreme. In some places
peoples, anarchists among them, could transform climate wars into
successful libertarian insurrections. In others the battle may simply be
for survival or even death with dignity and meaning. Those in relativity
stable social environments â politically and climatically â will
probably be faced by an increasingly oppressive surveillance state and a
âmassâ which increasingly fears âthe barbarism beyond the wallsâ.
What actual practical stuff needs to be done will depend largely on
where and who you are. While we may have some shared aspirations,
climate change reinforces the basic truth that we do not have one shared
global future. While everywhere the enemy is estrangement and
domestication, [60] the situations in Basingstoke and Bangladesh are
different in the present and will be in the future.
During his lecture at the Royal Society, Lovelock stated:
We now face the stark choice between a return to a natural life as a
small band of hunter gatherers or a much reduced high tech
civilisation... [61]
Rather than a choice, there is likely to be both sorts of survivor (as
there is now) â high-tech industrial citizen and low-tech
gatherer-hunter anarchist. In between these two extremes will lie,
buried or hungry, the âmuch reducedâ (many from climate wars) along with
those eking out a possibly freer (or not) life on the margins of
agricultural/pastoral viability. Letâs look then at what possibilities
there may be for liberty and wildness in some of these diverging life
ways.
To examine future possibilities for liberty in peasant life, letâs, as
an example, look to the continent most often written off. These days
âAfrica has an image problemâ [62]: war, famine, disease and charity
appeals. As time goes on, this skewed view of a diverse continent will
be further exaggerated by worsening climate change and the interventions
of disaster capitalism. [63] In the previous sections we saw that
climate change will cause and exacerbate civil wars largely through
increasing the scarcity of food, water and cultivatable soil. Many
envision these future conflicts as a generalisation of the image they
hold of present day Africa. In doing so they are mostly mistaken.
Most of Africaâs wars today are fuelled more by the presence of
resources and less their scarcity. [64] Retractions in global trade
should deny oxygen to some of these fires. For instance, as the oil runs
out, areas such as the Niger Delta, under siege by state/corporate oil
interests, are likely to become once again backwaters rather than
battlegrounds. I take it as a given that we will not see an African-wide
conversion to Western-originated Anarchism, so what societies evolve
into will, in large part, be defined by what they are now. And here is
some good non-news from Africa â in many places and on many levels its
cultures have significant anarchic characteristics, with a minority
being functioning anarchies. Iâll hand over for a moment to Sam Mbah, a
Nigerian anarcho-syndicalist:
To a greater or lesser extent... [many] traditional African societies
manifested an anarchic eloquence which, upon closer examination, leads
credence to the historical truism that governments have not always
existed. They are but recent phenomena and are, therefore, not
inevitable in human society. While some anarchic features in traditional
African society existed largely in past stages of
development, some of them persist and remain pronounced to this day.
What this means is that the ideals underlying Anarchism may not be so
new in the African context. What is new is the concept of Anarchism as a
social movement ideology. Anarchy as abstraction may indeed be [largely]
unknown to Africans, but is not at all unknown as a way of life...
Manifestations of anarchic elements in African communities... were and
to some degree still are pervasive. These include the partial or
complete absence of hierarchical structures, state apparatuses, and the
commodification of labor. To put this in positive terms, [some
societies] were (and are) largely self managed, egalitarian and
republican in nature. [65]
The extent to which Africa is viewed as a âbasket caseâ in âworld
opinionâ is in part the extent to which its societies are anarchic and
not fully enclosed within capitalist relations.
Why have anarchic social relations survived in Africa to such a degree?
Jim Feast, writing for the American anarchist magazine Fifth Estate, has
some answers:
In sub-Saharan Africa, aside from in the minority of countries with a
large, white settler population and valuable resources (such as diamonds
or copper), there was little penetration of capitalist agricultural
forms or government into the interior. In the colonial era... the
imperial powers had only limited goals. There was no desire to invest
resources to ensure the state could project its authority into every
corner of the new colonies... And, after independence, settler states
excepted... Africans remained only marginally affected by the market.
They increasingly traded in the market, but their base was still a
homestead and family farm where a subsistence ethos prevailed... The
salient points are these. No matter how wide the impact of world
capitalism, much of sub-Saharan Africa has not been effectively shaped
by state or market power. Moreover, while in ... [many parts of the
planet]... there is a struggle to develop an alternative economy, in the
parts of Africa under discussion, a robust subsistence economy,
unconcerned with profit and capital expansion continues to exist. [66]
While anarchic elements are pervasive in Africa there are also entire
anarchist societies. [67] Some of these exist surrounded by more
incorporated populations, while others are truly remote from external
power â through luck or active avoidance. Environments which are not
conducive to empire are a significant factor behind the survival of some
of these cultures and their ability to defend their autonomy.
A number have remained anarchic within themselves whilst superficially
accepting outside power. This should not necessarily be seen as
assimilation. Governments donât like to let outright opposition go
unpunished lest it encourage others. Yet they donât always have the
capacity to fully internalise pre-existing or maroon societies,
especially wily ones. For the community, the âstate power and the alien
political culture... are so different and so powerful that... direct
resistance soon proves to be unaffordable; passive accommodation is
impossible as well. The most acceptable possibility is some kind of
collaboration that allows things to continue almost as before, with the
idea that âwe were here before them and we will be here after themââ
[68] In some situations this is as simple as unspoken contracts
approximate to âWeâll pretend youâre governing us, you pretend to
believe itâ. In other situations âoutwitting the stateâ may involve a
complex set of tactics including providing key functions,
retraditionalisation, regular movement and manipulating the balance of
competing external powers.
Some may object that these anarchies are not those âweâ would design if
âweâ were to sit down and plan the âidealâ society for them [69] â but
they are anarchies none the less. Though far more egalitarian than
surrounding societies, they usually have some level of sex and age
stratified power relations, a division of labour and sometimes rely on
animal slavery. I donât view any of these things as good but it should
be remembered that to differing extents these are aspects of all
civilised societies. At least these cultures donât have class warfare or
the state! In this sense they are anarchies even if they donât conform
to all the aspirations of âourâ western originated Anarchisms. They
should not be idealised (any more than present day Chiapas or 1936
Barcelona) and you donât have to âsupport themâ. But these are existing
anarchies, the active social creation of millions of people through time
resisting the concentration of power. Any overview of possibilities for
liberty would be foolish to ignore them. Those of us who are freeing
ourselves from authority can find insights, inspiration and warnings
from their examples. [70]
For those in Africa, the fact that anarchies exist and some anarchic
tendencies remain widespread beyond them leaves routes of escape and
survival open which can be utilised as authorities collapse, retract or
are destroyed. It should be noted that many commons-based societies
within Africa are fall-back positions turned to after complex kingdoms
collapsed or were dismantled by invading empires (both Western and
African). While colonial elites often policed through local traditional
authorities, they came to blows with them too. Dominant classes act in
their own interest, not in that of an abstract system of hierarchical
power. The attack on local authority by outside elites opened up
possibilities for anarchy in the past and this pattern continues. Jim
Feast once again:
Hereâs an irony of history. In the last 15 years, in [some parts of] the
industrially undeveloped world, the state has withered away, not because
of its supercession, but due to the extension of global capitalism. Talk
of state collapse on capitalâs periphery doesnât mean governments have
completely vanished, but that many states have diminished from being the
totalized agencies of control we experience in Northern tier
countries...
Since independence, most sub-Saharan African countries have been
one-party states, headed by corrupt strong men who rule by combining
military coercion with the distribution of favours to well-placed
followers... The intelligent strong man sees that not only his immediate
cronies (who staff the state) but regional and tribal leaders of every
significant stripe must be cultivated by financing infrastructural
projects (that offer prime opportunities for graft) in their
bailiwicks... But with structural adjustment policies forced upon these
nations, this form of government has [often] ceased to exist because
funds to sustain the patronage networks are no longer there... In a
movement to shore up elite rule, there has been a widespread morphing
into multi-party democracies. From 1988 to 1999 the number of states in
sub-Saharan Africa featuring multi-party elections went from 9 to 45.
This temporarily and cynically solves two problems for state rule... It
restores a patina of legitimacy to a system that can no longer provide
either patronage or welfare services to its citizens, and reinvigorates
it by dividing clients among the competing parties, so each political
grouping has need to siphon fewer funds since it serves a smaller client
base [71] ...
Another loss of state power is the inability of it to provide minimal
welfare to the citizenry, such as education and medical care, which
structural adjustment programs eliminate as too costly. While some of
these services are taken over by international relief organizations,
most that are continued are done so by groups from the distressed
society itself. In other words, as Thomson puts it, âDeclining state
capacity required civil society to increase its self sufficiency.â The
once-repressed womenâs groups, trade unions, farmers associations, and
other grassroots networks are assuming greater responsibility in social
and economic life...
[So maybe here we are seeing an African road to Anarchism] âwhereby the
money economy and the state, which are in a condition of partial
collapse or withdrawal, cede more and more functions to non-monetarized,
non-statist village communities that are organized on the basis of
mutual aid?â [72]
This is already happening in some areas in a non-newsworthy manner
without overt conflict. In others this revitalization of the commons is
one of the forces filling the power vacuum left by the warring
fragmentation of âfailed states.â The structural adjustment mentioned is
of course time specific. There is an ebb and flow of projects of power,
as the expansion of China into Africa shows, but nevertheless the
process observed is a pointer to what may happen in many places as
global trade retracts in a resource poor, climate changed world.
As well as those we could mischievously label lifestyle anarchists, [73]
Africa has a growing, though still small, number of groups organising
under the banner of Anarchism. These are unlikely to change the face/s
of the entire continent but may play significant roles in emergent
movements and struggles. To repeat the earlier quote from Seaweed: âAny
bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies
based on the conditions unique to it.â Even if we accept the foreclosure
of any possibility of global anarchist revolution, there is no reason to
say a regional anarchist insurrection somewhere in Africa (or elsewhere)
is not on the cards and this is made more likely by the factors we have
discussed already. In probably overly optimistic terms Sam Mbah states:
The process of anarchist transformation in Africa might prove
comparatively easy, given that Africa lacks a strong capitalist
foundation, well-developed class formations and relations of production,
and a stable, entrenched state system. [74]
While a surprising number of African dirt roads lead to anarchy [75]
much of what we have touched on here relates to many rural areas across
the planet to differing degrees. For instance, in his excellent, The Art
of Not Being Governed, [76] James C. Scott recounts numerous examples of
lived anarchies in upland Southeast Asia. Even outside of anarchies,
peasant communities whose self-sufficiency have not been entirely
vanquished, still often retain high levels of autonomy â Land is
Liberty! [77] Sadly in many places communal traditions have been
eradicated, the âcommonsâ (or âwildernessâ) enclosed and farmers
forcefully transformed into wage labourers. In others however, they have
not, for a diverse set of reasons, not least of which is resistance.
States do not always get their own way.
The tide of Western authority will recede from much, though by no means
all of the planet. A writhing mess of social flotsam and jetsam will be
left in its wake. Some patches of lived anarchy, some horrible
conflicts, some empires, some freedoms, and of course, unimaginable
weirdness. As states recede and âfailâ â through entropy, stupidity,
revolution, internal conflict, climate stress â people will continue to
dig, sow, herd and live â most, admittedly, in vastly more challenging
climates, and few with the guarantee of a peaceful life. In many places
commodified land will be reclaimed as commons and new communities will
be formed by refugees from the collapsed economies. Anarchic societies â
old and new â will need to defend their liberty and lives, through
avoidance, arms, flight and âoutwitting the stateâ.
We have glimpsed some of the possibilities opened up (and closed) by
both future climate wars and the retraction of state governance from
rural communities â but what about liberty at the shifting outer borders
of civilisation? And what of liberty beyond those borders â in the wild?
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
âMy name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!â
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
â Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817
Read it in the ruins of Ur and Mu Us, the desertified fields of Wadi
Faynan [78] and the Techuacan Valley. [79] Empires spread deserts which
they cannot survive. Raids, insurrections and desertion often mark the
fall of civilisations but the real ground work for their destruction has
always been done by their own leaders, workers and zeks. We are all
working towards the destruction of our civilisations. [80]
âCivilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a
desert in his footprints.â [81]
The extent to which global heating will cause the expansion of hot
deserts is unknown but that they will do so â and drastically â is a
pretty safe bet. The interaction of soil, climate and civil power will
continue to be a dominant factor determining both history and the
opening up of territory for freer lives. That agricultural systems will
fail as the arid worlds spread means that, once again, civilisations
will have to retreat from much of their previously conquered lands. In
some places this will be total, in others a matter of degrees.
In my mother tongue deserts are uninhabitable, abandoned, deserted ; but
by whom? Not by the coyotes or the cactus wrens. Not by the harvester
ants or the rattlesnakes. Not by the namib quicksteps, the meercats, the
acacias, the tahrs, the sandgrouse and the red kangaroos. Deserts and
arid environments generally are often biologically diverse, though by
their nature, the life is sparser than in other biomes. While some
desert areas are lifeless, in most communities of animals, birds,
insects, bacteria and plants run, fly, crawl, spread and grow in lives
unordered, undomesticated by civilisation. Wildness is in us and all
around us. The battle to contain and control it is the constant labour
of civilisation. When that battle is lost and the fields are deserted,
wildness persists.
Behind the dust, meanwhile, under the vulture-haunted sky, the desert
waits â mesas, butte, canyon, reef, sink, escarpment, pinnacle, maze,
dry lake, sand dune and Barren Mountain. [82]
I remember sitting crouched in the red, under the hot sun, the wind low,
the silence of the desert was absolute... or it would have been if it
wasnât, of course, for all the gossiping. There are people here, not all
deserts are unliveable, but for states a surplus is barely possible. The
sparseness of life favours nomadism â whether by herders, foragers,
travellers or traders.
No one can live this life and emerge unchanged. They will carry, however
faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad. [83]
While the concentration of power can arise in any society with some
level of domestication, overall the more nomadic a people the more
independent they are likely to be. Governments know this as can be
witnessed by the widespread attempts to settle their desert nomad
problems. Whether it is the obstinate survival of Aboriginal life ways
in Australia, [84] the uncompromising resistance of the Apache led by
Victorio or the recent Tuareg insurrection in the Sahara, nomads are
often adept at fight and/or flight.
Helene Claudot-Hawad says in a discussion of Tuareg conflict with modern
states that: âState boundaries have by definition a fixed, immovable and
intangible line, and are purposefully made not to be transgressed. They
separate what are meant to be mutually opposing entities.â [85] That the
resistant independence of nomads is often mixed with a practical
disbelief in borders makes them threatening to the very ideological
basis of governments.
Global heating will stimulate transformations in human land uses. As
noted in the previous chapter, in some places peasant self-sufficiency
will likely replace export orientated monoculture, while in others
withered crops may be replaced by animal husbandry. In the expanding
arid zones a good proportion of those who successfully adapt may do so
by embracing nomadic freedoms and transhumant pastoral subsistence. [86]
In others still, nomadic pastoralists and agriculturalists may revert to
hunter-gathering.
For most of our speciesâ existence, all were foragers and wilderness was
our home. Hunter-gatherer societies include the most egalitarian on
earth [87] and where such cultures have survived to modern times they
have done so in areas remote from centralised power and often unsuitable
for agriculture. For example the Spinfex people of the Great Victoria
Desert have been able to continue their traditional lives despite the
advent of âAustraliaâ, as their homelands are so barren that it is not
even suitable for pastoralism. [88] The !Kung too, managed to live well
and free as gather-hunters in a very harsh environment â the Kalahari.
[89]
When agriculturalists face extreme food stress or external violence,
foraging is an adaptive strategy that has been turned to many times. For
some this may be temporary, for others permanent. Thus, with spreading
desertification we could see, in some places, a spreading desertion from
civilisation to something resembling our original anarchist wild-life.
Whole new bands of foragers may evolve following collapses of
agricultural viability and the retraction of exuberant, energy rich
state powers. Given the present condition of many arid zone pastoralists
and foragers it is more likely that in most cases we will see hybridity
â an increase in autonomous nomadic populations relying both on animal
herding and foraging.
On a more general level, many of those with a longing for wildness and a
need for freedom from authority have gravitated towards the frontiers
often hot deserts and semi-arid regions.
As I wander out in the gentle spring,
I hear a keen call of your roads, O Desert!
I shall leave my home in the dreary hills
How sad are other lands compared to you, O Desert!
â Seidi, a 19^(th) century Turkman poet
Such possibilities are present â and will be more so â in many regions,
Even for those within the walls of the supposed global powers, there
will be an expanding outside. In the already water stressed areas of
southern Europe, deserted farms and villages have been re-inhabited by
anarchists, hippies, cults and others wishing to flee the direct gaze of
authority and desert the prison of wage labour. Similar âdrop outâ
situations are present in the drying heart of Australia and the western
deserts of North America. Here, importantly, aboriginal communities
persist or are re-establishing. The long indigenous strategy of survival
â âwe were here before and will be afterâ â may bear desert fruit. As
numerous contemporary struggles illustrate, anarchists and native
peoples can make good allies.
Some of the oldest communities live in deserts. In the Mojave is a
Creosote bush clonal colony whose slowly widening circle is estimated at
11,700 years old. Recent genetic testing has indicated that the Bushmen
of the Kalahari are probably the oldest continuous population of humans
on Earth. [90] These communities â both plant and human â are inspiring
examples of resilience, but having survived millennia in the hot deserts
they may not survive the still spreading cultural one. The ancient
Creosote bush ring is quite low to the ground and grows on US Bureau of
Land Management land âdesignated for recreational all-terrain vehicle
use.â [91] The Botswana government has forcefully relocated many
Kalahari Bushmen from their homelands into squalid re-settlement camps,
seemingly to enable diamond mining. [92] For free peoples and wild-life
the harshness of our cultural desert is a most threatening of
environments.
Overall, then, as the planet hots up we should remember the nomadic
freedoms of the herders and foragers, the refugia of aboriginal peoples
and renegade drop-outs, the widening habitats of desert flora and fauna.
That arid zones will expand brings positive possibilities as well as
sadness for the diminished, often previously vibrant, ecosystems. [93]
There can still be a beautiful flowering in the desert. I have mentioned
the possibilities opened up by the spread of hot deserts, but course
there are many closures too. Even some relatively anarchic cultures on
or beyond the desert frontiers will become unviable. Species will become
extinct. While there will be survivors in the expanding desert lands
many will choose to flee the heat. Some of these migrations â to some
extent already happening â will be intranational but many will be
international.
In the hot arid world survivors gather for the journey to the arctic
centres of civilisation; I see them in the desert as the dawn breaks and
the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the camp. The
cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke,
dissipates as the heat takes charge... [94]
These are some of the last words in Lovelockâs Revenge of Gaia. As
civilisation and much of humanity flees and/or dies as the hot deserts
expand what of the cold deserts â what of the new âarctic centres of
civilisationâ?
Civilisation expands as the cold deserts thaw
Genocide and ecocide in the âemptyâ lands
Lives of liberty/slavery on the new frontiers
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
â from The Fall of Rome, W.H. Auden [95]
As we evolved in Africa, cold deserts have always been quite hostile to
human endeavour and thus, while increasingly affected by civilisation,
they have remained largely undomesticated. This will not last. Reports
from climatologists, indigenous peoples, sailors, seasonal site workers
and ecologists all confirm that the effects of global climate change are
magnified in the far north. In Greenland Sten Pederson leans down to
harvest cabbages, [96] something unthinkable a few decades ago. Through
the newly ice freed arctic waves survey ships push forward in search of
oil, gas and riches. [97] In much of the far north (with the exception
of those areas scarred by the legacy of Stalinâs gulags and new cities)
the intrusions of civilisation are sparse or temporary but they are
increasing, and many think we are on the brink of a new cold rush.
Buried treasure becomes reachable and previously frozen territory
becomes more hospitable to settlement and agriculture. Civilisation will
expand as the cold deserts thaw.
Itâs a dirty secret that many Northern governments are actively looking
forward to the effects of climate change on the lands they occupy, at
the moment often only symbolically. There will be some winners in the
(increasingly) water rich, thawing Far North just as there will be many,
many losers in the water-stressed hot regions. Climate doesnât believe
injustice. âSome... regions of the world... may experience gains from
global warming in the next 20 to 30 years, such as more favourable
farming conditions in some parts of Russia and Canada.â [98] âThe
northern quarter of our planetâs latitudes will undergo tremendous
transformation over the course of this century, making them a place of
increased human activity, higher strategic value, and greater economic
importance than today.â [99]
This transformation will be fuelled by the climatic effect of fossil
fuel burning and the opening up of new reserves. âThe region could be
home to 90 billion barrels of oil â worth a whopping $7 trillion at the
current oil price â and 30 percent of the planetâs untapped gas
reserves, according to the US Geological Survey.â [100]
Earlier, we looked at climate conflicts and focused on hot wars, but
cold wars over the control of newly accessible hydrocarbon, mineral and
land âresourcesâ are also possible, though they would have a
fundamentally different character. âCold areas are generally
economically developed countries and hot areas are generally developing
countries... Conflict among developed countries might lead to
concentrated fatalities, while those in developing countries might lead
to conflict that is more diffuse.â âWhere the Hot War is characterised
by the breakdown of state functions and internal strife, the Cold War
exemplifies conditions of expanding state control and external
conflict.â [101]
The emergence of a new Cold War â once again primarily between East and
West centres of power, though this time solidly about the Far North â is
on the cards. [102] For now the probability of full-on war in the new
Polar Tension Belt is far less than that in the hot areas of the planet,
not least as many of the countries in question are nuclear powers.
Fracas resembling the UK-Icelandic Cod Wars combined with diplomatic
grandstanding, such as the recent planting of the Russian flag on the
seabed of the north pole, [103] will no doubt increase. The onlyâ thing
that will categorically prevent conflict in the region is if itâs found
there is nothing worth scrapping about. This is unfortunately unlikely â
the opening â up of the very sea itself brings new possibilities for
trade and movement even if little is found below it.
There is a forgotten continent in this story. âAntarctica will see
enormous changes due to terra-forming that will create opportunities for
economic exploitation. With many sovereignty claims in the region, there
is a chance that conflict will be the outcome.â [104] There is a lot of
ice on Antarctica and significant disputes are unlikely to hit until
mid-century if not much, much later, but that does not mean states are
not laying foundations. It is a cruel irony that much of the science
that has enabled awareness of climate change and allowed glimpses of
past climates has come through the sterling efforts of scientists
working in state institutions â the British Antarctic Survey for
example, whose presence in Antarctica is in large part funded to
underline imperial claims over a continent true conquest and
domestication can only come through massive climate change In the
meantime the seas of the Far South â especially around the disputed
Falkland Islands â are increasingly party to oil prospecting.
When the British state declared Australia âterra nulliusâ it was
defining the land as empty. The peoples, the wildness, were to be made
invisible, unbearable. If perceived at all, they were seen, correctly,
as obstacles to progress. In the Far North, as in colonies generally,
much of the land is already peopled and from a wider perspective,
animaled. There are wonders in the tundra that civilisation must lay to
waste in the cause of emptying and occupation. In his beautiful
exploration of the Arctic, naturalist Barry Lopez describes lands he
loves.
The Arctic, overall, has the classic lines of a desert landscape: spare,
balanced, extended, and quiet... The apparent monotony of the land is
relieved, however, by the weather systems moving through, and by the
activities of animals, particularly of birds and caribou. And because so
much of the country stands revealed, and because sunlight passing
through the dustless air renders its edges with such unusual sharpness,
animals linger before the eye. And their presence is vivid.
Like other landscapes that initially appear barren, arctic tundra can
open suddenly, like the corolla of a flower, when any intimacy with it
is sought. One begins to notice spots of brilliant red, orange, and
green, for example, among the monotonic browns of a tundra tussock.
A wolf spider lunges at a glistening beetle. A shred of musk ox wool
lies inert in the lavender blooms of saxifrage... The wealth of
biological detail on the tundra dispels any feeling that the land is
empty; and its likeness to a stage suggests impending events. On a
summerâs walk, the wind -washed air proves deathlessly clear. Time and
again you come upon the isolated and succinct evidence of life â animal
tracks, the undigested remains of a ptarmigan in an owlâs casting, a
patch of barren-ground willow nibbled nearly leafless by arctic hares.
You are afforded the companionship of birds, which follow after you.
(They know you are an animal; sooner or later you will turn up something
to eat.) Sandpipers scatter before you, screaming tuituek, an Eskimo
name for them. Coming awkwardly down a scree slope of frost-riven
limestone you make a glass-tinkling clatter â and at a distance a tundra
grizzly rises on its hind legs to study you; the dish-shaped paws of its
front legs deathly still... [But already, even in uninhabited lands],
one cannot miss the evidence of upheaval, nor avoid being wrenched by
it. The depression it engenders, because so much of it seems a heedless
imposition on the land and on the people, a rude invasion, can lead one
to despair. [105]
The present scale of industrial invasion is merely a portent of the
coming ecocide engendered, as the high latitudes warm, by the peppering
of the Far North with more cities, roads, installations, fields and
factories. This process will also be one of attempted genocide. Herders
such as some of the Sami [106] of Lapland and indigenous of Siberia will
likely find their homelands increasingly fragmented and polluted whilst
those communities living on resource rich land will face eradication â
either by simple dispossession or by assimilation into the industrial
culture. [107] In a few places such as Greenland where much of the
indigenous majority may gain some material benefit from the denudation
of their thawing lands this process may be partly indigenous driven. In
most, however, where aboriginal communities are minorities there will be
familiar patterns of repression and resistance.
This future story of a clash between old cold worlds and new ones warmed
by âthe white heat of the technological revolutionâ is already past and
present. Tales of dispossession and destruction are many, yet so is
resistance. For example, despite few resources, some of the Siberian
tribes have fervently opposed the expansion of gas and oil
infrastructure on their traditional lands. In one action a hundred
Nivkh, Evenk and Ulita blocked roads with their reindeer for three days
against new oil and gas pipelines. [108] In Canada especially, the
government and corporations are faced with indigenous warrior societies
with a strong land ethic and a growing fighting spirit.
While there have been â and will be â victories in the battle to stop
the northern spread of empire and its infrastructure, even the most
resolute peoples cannot halt climate change itself. Indigenous peoples
report that lives, and the survivability of life-ways, are already being
affected. As Violet Ford, an Inuit, says: âWe canât predict the weather
anymore, so itâs very difficult to plan our hunting. It puts a lot of
stress and fear into our communities.â [109] Similar reports come from
the âRussianâ Arctic as well, where changes in ice and snow melting is
causing culture change and endangering the reindeer herding lifestyle of
the Nenet herders on the Yamal Peninsular. [110]
On a bright day on a storm tossed cape I walked with a friend surrounded
by forest, waves, osprey, and orcas. Far from any road or village, the
place felt pristine, but amongst the trees were the rotting remains of a
school. Rusting farm implements littered the undergrowth and former
fields were now the hunting grounds of cougar. Remoteness from markets,
the illogic of politics, and land unsuited to colonisation by an
imported model had led to the evacuation of this coast. It reminded me
that despite the wishes of those who plan worlds, settlement sometimes
fails and the wild wins. This will continue to be true. [111]
Possibilities will emerge as the cold deserts retreat for those who wish
to settle/invade/resist/work. Who will populate these new lands?
Physical landscapes and the social terrains of struggle frame what we
think is possible and thus what we do. In Nineteenth and early Twentieth
Century North America, Individualist Anarchism (especially that
influenced by Henry David Thoreau) was framed directly by the idea and
existence of frontiers and thus the real ability to build some level of
autonomy and self-sufficiency â admittedly on stolen land! In crowded
Europe at the same time there was less âoutsideâ available, and so
despite strong currents with an ecological and anti-civilisation
perspective, many individualist anarchists turned to bank robbing,
insurrection, assassination and art. We can expect the opening up of new
lands within Europe and North America to have a significant impact on
both those who wish to desert civilisation as well as those who wish to
expand it. There will be many possibilities for lives of liberty on the
expanding frontiers, though drop-outs and renegades may themselves lay
the foundations for a wider âgentrificationâ of the wilderness.
It would be lovely to think that a thousand anarchist log huts will
bloom but more prevalent are likely to be workcamps and farmlands
resembling something between Dubaiâs modern gulags and the new Chinese
farming and logging colonies of Siberia. In the UAE desert migrant
workers live in horrific conditions and are bussed in and out of Dubai
daily to build the new super city. They have no rights of citizenship,
no rights to stay beyond a fixed term contract, almost no spouses (or
right to marry or co-habit), families rarely exist, no official
unionisation. Frightened by an âIndian Demographic Time-Bombâ Dubaiâs
rulers have initiated a complex immigration quota system where migrants
are brought in from diverse countries to keep workers socially divided.
In Siberia 600,000 Chinese workers cross the border in seasonal
migration every summer to work the new fields. [112]
So there will be lives of slavery as well as liberty on the new
frontiers and with worsening prospects in much of the warming world and
the promise of hard currency many will choose them. Readers with
anarcho-syndicalist leanings may notice the striking similarity of such
situations with that of the logging and mining camps that were the
battlegrounds of the Wobblies. The IWW was the only workers organisation
that had any successes in uniting âlumpenâ migrant workers of diverse
nationalities in early 20^(th) century America. Culturally divided and
without recourse to legal unions and other organs of social democracy,
militant informal syndicalism could arise in the New North, possibly
even informed by Anarchism.
Parallels between old and new frontiers are laid out well by
climatologist Lawrence C. Smith.
[An] envisioning of the New North today might be something like America
in 1803, just after the Louisiana Purchase from France. It, too,
possessed major cities fuelled by foreign immigration, with a vast,
inhospitable frontier distant from the major urban cores. Its deserts,
like Arctic tundra, were harsh, dangerous, and ecologically fragile. It,
too, had rich resource endowments of metals and hydrocarbons. It, too,
was not really an empty frontier but already occupied by aboriginal
peoples who had been living there for millennia. [113]
While the extent of civilisational expansion in the âNew Northâ is, like
so much in climate change related futurology, presently unknowable; the
trend itself seems a given. In some places it can be resisted, and
successfully. In others the hubris of settlement will simply fail. In
many places its very expansion brings possibilities for those who would
live in new openings or in old, but warmer, worlds of the gyrfalcon.
In 2008 humanity passed a significant milestone â more of our species
now live in cities than outside of them. I wonât even attempt to guess
where exactly â other than ecological denudation [114] â the growth of
cities is leading. It could be the glimmering glass domes of sci-fi
fantasy, the putrid waters of contemporary Makoko [115] or the
jungle-immersed abandoned avenues of Mayan cities. In all likelihood it
leads in the direction of all three, and others. One suspects no one
knows what the present situation is, never mind where it is headed. As
Mike Davis puts it;
Very large cities â those with a global, not just regional,
environmental footprint â are thus the most dramatic end-product, in
more than one sense, of human cultural evolution in the Holocene.
Presumably they should be the subject of the most urgent and
encompassing scientific inquiry. They are not. We know more about
rainforest ecology than urban ecology. [116]
The rate of change is staggering. For illustration take mega-cities,
those with more than 10 million citizens. While there were none in 1900,
by the mid 1970s there were three mega-cities, and between then and 2007
the number grew to nineteen, with the total expected to rise to twenty
seven by 2025. Thatâs 3â27 in around 50 years. Overall, since the
beginning of the 1990s, cities in the (rapidly) âdeveloping worldâ have
expanded by three million people a week. [117] Thatâs roughly equivalent
to a new city the size of Bristol, Bratislava or Oakland every single
day. [118] For now, the urban majorities look set to continue expanding
as people are subject to forces that push and pull them away from
agriculture and towards the freedoms and slaveries of the metropoles.
While the distance between the globesâ financially richest and poorest
continues to widen, UN statistics nevertheless show incredible changes
for much of the worldâs populations; lifestyle shifts that often are not
reflected in any comparable paradigm shift amongst activists in the
âdevelopedâ world. As Hans Roeleing has pointed out, the planet is often
seen as divided between:
... we and âthemâ and âweâ is the Western World and âthemâ is the Third
World. âAnd what do you mean with Western World?â I said. âWell, thatâs
long life and small family, and Third World is short life and large
family.â [119]
Such a simplistic picture always obscured class, cultural and regional
differences but there was some truth to it. Not anymore. The changes in
life expectancy and family size world-wide, are just the most obvious
changes. Alongside them are huge transformations in general health (both
good and bad), [120] child programming and the increasing degree of the
commodification of social relations. Yet even on a planet where road
traffic accidents now kill similar numbers of people as malaria, the old
picture still persists. [121]
In the growing cities especially, tangible social revolutions (such as
the increase in life expectancy) can combine with media propelled myths
of the (non)American dream to produce unrealistic expectations of
âmodern lifeâ. Such expectations encourage attempts at assimilation and
submission to power, even as inevitable clashes of class interests and
the inability of âthe systemâ to come up with the promised goods give
rise to furies. On the positive side, many people will at least have
longer lives to experience the possibility of love as well as inevitable
social dislocation and widening class inequality.
Those that see these transformations as magically leading the species
towards a convergence based on where these trends led the West [122]
would be deluded, even without the real limits now set by climate
change, resource scarcity etc. For a start, some estimate that even if
one takes these trends as a given there will still remain a rural
population approaching three billion at mid century. [123] Many of these
farmers as well as many of those in the cities will likely be living in
stagnant economies similar to the countries of the âbottom billionâ
today. Additionally, many of these least converging populations are
likely to be in those countries commonly described as failed states.
These countries are unlikely to âgrowâ, not least thanks to the
additional barriers provided by the rise (or more accurately return) of
the global powerhouses of China and India. [124] As noted earlier [125]
the presence of these âlarge islands of chaosâ [126] (Paul Collier,
ex-World Bank) brings positive as well as negative possibilities â at
least from my anarchist perspective. It seems likely, then, that rather
than a global convergence we will see the continued emergence of
radically divergent worlds â both between nations and within them.
Additionally, sudden trend reversals, in health for example, can
surprise. Just look at the unpredicated AIDS epidemic in Africa or the
dramatically increased Russian male death rates in the 1990s. Within
medicine and amongst elite planners there is a widespread, and not
groundless, fear that todayâs mega-cities and food production systems
are becoming perfect incubators for pandemics of possibly unparalleled
ferocity.
A useable (though simplistic and therefore false) summation might be
that many people in the long-industrialised countries tend to still hold
to a vision of a single Third World that is far less industrialised than
much of it is, whilst many in the emerging economies of the global south
view their futures as far more rosy and pre-determined than they
probably are; and finally, those populations that (from a standard
economic perspective) lie at the bottom, will in the medium future look
much like they do now, but will probably be living in less hospitable
environments. The best one can say is that uneven convergence trends in
many of the developing worlds will (for now) continue (but not
universally); that there are no destinations given and the rides may be
bumpy indeed, not least due to inter-power rivalry. The trends I have
mentioned are simultaneously bringing much â but by no means all â of
humanity together whilst breeding limitless division. In the ever
jolly-words of the US National Intelligence Agency, as well as creating
convergence, â...todayâs trends appear to be heading towards a
potentially more fragmented and conflicted world.â [127]
While different places are, by nature, different, one near constant
across the burgeoning metropoli are the slums. At least one billion
people already live in them, a figure expected to rise to two billion
within two decades and three billion people by mid-century. This means
one in three people [128] on earth could be living in non-formalised
urban terrains, in shacks, tents, corrugated iron, tenement and rubbish.
Already in many countries slum dwellers make up the majority of
urbanites. 99.4% in Ethiopia and Chad, 98.5% in Afghanistan and 92% in
Nepal. Bombay is the global slum capital with 10â12 million squatters
and tenement dwellers followed by Mexico City and Dhaka with 9â10
million each, then Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao Paulo,
Shanghai and Delhi all with 6â8 million. [129]
The first night I slept in a Third World squatter neighbourhood I felt
surprisingly at home, as I am sure anyone who has lived in squats
(especially occupations) in the global north would do. The bodged
electrics, the air of cameraderie, the dirt, the dogs everywhere. If the
bright yellow M arches signpost the presence of corporate globalisation
then shelters constructed from fading blue plastic tarps and pallets
also act as global signposts â this time that you are entering squatter
worlds. Waking up with chickens in your face gives the game away
somewhat that you have probably woken in the Third World, but having
said that, itâs also happened to me on-site in South London... The
family I was staying with were lovely and there was so much energy and
creativity and resilience crammed into the shack alleys all around, I
truly felt like I was in a Temporary Autonomous Zone.
A lot of what I experienced in that community made me strangely proud to
be human but those of us who see solutions as arising from autonomy,
informality, self help and class struggle can fall into the trap of
seeing what we want to see in the slums. Donât get me wrong â all those
engines are present, but so too to differing degrees are all the
predictable intra-class divisions as well as deepening class
oppressions. For instance, just because itâs a slum â even a squatter
settlement â doesnât mean it doesnât have landlords. This often starts
at the lowest level with subdivisions, roofs and rooms rented out by
established inhabitants to newer arrivals. As Mike Davis points out (in
his characteristically amazing and frankly harrowing book Planet of
Slums), âIt is the principle way in which urban poor people can monetise
their equity (formal or informal), but often in an exploitative
relationship to even poorer people.â [130] Others, from gangsters to big
developers, politicians, juntas and the middle class also get in on the
act. In the slums of Nairobi for example, many of those who fall behind
on rent, even for a day, face the terror of the landlord and his
henchmen turning up to confiscate their meagre possessions, evict them
and worse. Such landlords are referred to by Kenyans simply as âWabenziâ
â those with enough money to buy a Mercedes-Benz. [131]
If we have said where much of the burgeoning urban majorities live, what
about what they do, where they work, and where they are going? The
answers are, obviously, hugely diverse and I wonât pretend to be able to
tell you. What I will say, is that many slum inhabitants could be seen
and see themselves as in transition. Transition from country to urban.
From refugee to worker. From dispossessed to propertied. From slum
dweller to somewhere else.
This narrative is as old as capitalism. Peasants/agricultural workers
are dispossessed and end up in city slums. In the West, horrors upon
horrors followed, eventually manufacturing the industrial worker [132]
but not before the near century of revolutions born in France in 1848
and dying in Spain in 1938. These insurrections were largely fought by
transitional classes somewhat similar to those today, who in the process
of being proletarianised lived in, âneither industrial nor village
society but in the tense, almost electrifying force field of both.â
[133] While this grand tale of class evolution in early capitalism is
true(ish), the stories playing out today are unscripted and they should
not be presumed to share the same âendingâ.
While many in the slums either already work in the world of wage slavery
or will end up doing so, many, many others survive in the so-called
âinformalâ economy, a sector that in some cities is far larger (in terms
of human captives) than the formal economy. Here we have a potentially
explosive emergence of classes, vast in number, who are not going
anywhere and seem to be surplus to capitalismâs requirements. âA
proletariat without factories; workshops, and work, and without bosses,
in the muddle of the odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an
existence like a path through embers.â [134]
Thanks to lack of sanitation, water supply and drainage; water shortages
and the spread of disease are some of the greatest problems presently
facing many slum dwellers. Even without massive climate change kicking
in, the number of major disasters in urban areas has been increasing
rapidly and most of this growth is from storms and floods. [135] Without
storm drains, the future washing away of many squatter settlements seems
inevitable, sited as they often are in areas most at risk from flooding.
The recuperative power of such communities is incredible, but we can
presume the great floods to come are likely to exacerbate social crisis
and instability.
By far the least pleasant experience I had in the squatter neighbourhood
I mentioned earlier was attending a Sunday church service. I had managed
to dodge others, but this time there was no escape. The church itself
was the biggest building in the neighbourhood and it too was largely
built from salvage. I found it truly upsetting to see so many of the
people I had spent time with venting religious irrationality, enacting
inane rituals and submitting to the authority of preachers, god and
scripture. The church had received some hymn tapes from a Pentecostal
denomination in the USA and thus I sat listening to hundreds of
squatters who, though English was not their first language, sang out
American hymns in psuedo-American accents. In fact, in the country I was
in, not a single bookshop in the capital, (all of which were owned by
churches), sold anything mentioning evolution, nevermind anarchist
revolution. Itâs easy for those of us from societies with high
percentages of atheism to underestimate the level of religiosity that is
mixed in with industrialism in the global south, where, amongst the poor
at least, they are often jointly re-enforcing.
Much of radical politics is religion by other means, but in the slums,
and amongst the dispossessed generally, the old gods are growing in
stature. While sects may differ in their degree of quietism or
militancy, they share an unreality that is unlikely to aid the
map-reading ability of the downtrodden in truly confusing times. The
wider case against religion has been argued well elsewhere [136] so I
wonât bother, but it is worth noting that while western anarchistsâ most
organised intra-class âcompetitorsâ are political groupings, in many
third worlds, anarchists are faced by the strengthening ranks of
theocracy. Thatâs of course in those places where anarchists do exist,
which â though growing â are still not many. In contrast, religious
authoritarians seem to be gaining converts everywhere, and, generally,
the more social dislocation, the better the recruitment. [137] In
chapter 4 (African Roads to Anarchy) we looked at the expansion of
non-state social provision as governments retract from previous
commitments â in part due to structural adjustment and the like. Amongst
the obvious pain this creates, I pointed to the possibilities this opens
up for libertarian social forces. Unfortunately, in slums from Kinshasa
to Gaza, it is religious authoritarians that are most often taking
advantage of this potential to build dual (or multi)power through the
provision of heath and general care, and this is often done alongside
the build-up of armed capacity. The terrible inheritance of leftist
failures and success has only left the field open for the growth of
millenarian theocratic authorities amongst the slums and âlarge islands
of chaos.â
If much of the poor are living in hellish conditions, and putting their
trust in the millennium or the afterlife, the elites and middle classes
are increasingly living in guarded heavens modelled on the gated suburbs
of the USA. Here, Mike Davis argues, they are constructing (or more
accurately having constructed for them) Blade Runner style âOff-worldsâ
away from the disordered and dangerous worlds of the dispossessed.
Whilst some such âoff-worldsâ are so âoffâ the poor are far, far away,
most are potentially within reach. Like Apartheid South Africa (or South
Africa today for that point) these heavens still need workers â
cleaners, gardeners, van drivers and security guards â many of which
live in the surrounding hells. As the poisoned oligarchs of Haiti [138]
could tell you, this, despite the CCTV, is not as safe as it looks.
With such divided worlds â and such divided cities â uprisings and
generalised conflicts are always on the cards. Military strategists have
for decades been predicting uprisings and guerrilla war in the swelling
cities, and to a certain extent we are already seeing them a la the
battles in Revolution/Sadr City and the like. The combination of
unparalleled income disparity, deprivation, crowding and the spread of
criminal gangs and millenarian groups is a heady mix. As a US Army think
tank report puts it:
Distinctive features of the largest or so called âworld citiesâ...
include marked economic and social polarisation and intense spatial
segregation. We also find what is probably an effect of these
conditions; the large array of anti-state actors. Anarchists, criminals,
the dispossessed, foreign meddlers, cynical opportunists, lunatics,
revolutionaries, labor leaders, ethnic nationals... and others can all
form alliances of convenience. They can also commit acts of violence and
handle ideas that provoke others... Analyses that focus on a single
strand of the fabric of violence â that isolate on ethnic rivalry,
mafias, or revolutionary cadre â can underestimate the disruptive power
that those phenomena gain when they coincide. Troubles will not come as
single soldiers; they will come in battalions. [139]
So the militaries (and militarised police forces) are both fighting and
preparing for conflict in the new, unmapped, urban jungles. Of course,
if cities were simply a negative for governments they wouldnât have
spent thousands of years ordering their construction. There are reasons
why states often like to concentrate their subjects. The âmost famous
attempt of modern militarised urbanisation was that carried out by the
US army in Vietnam. Their defeat should not mask the logic of their
attempt to âdrain the seaâ and thus leave the Vietcong exposed. Wider
examples of how the slums deter insurgency abound. As Charles
Onyango-Obbo says:
In Kenyaâs case, slums â all their risks notwithstanding â are actually
a stabilising force. The pressures created by the great land
dispossession in Kenya by the colonialists, which continued after
independence, were partly soaked up by Nairobiâs slums... Without them,
perhaps there would have been a second Mau Mau uprising. [140]
Despite being tools of domestication there are feral possibilities in
the cities as almost everywhere. Their place as the exclusive terrain of
power is a generalised delusion, even if it is backed up by violent
facts. Nowhere is fully civilised. For a start, as the US Army theorist
quoted above says,â... the urban environment offers individual
anonymity, a factor that can be of great use to the anarchist.â [141]
The last two decades have seen an emergence of a âthird waveâ of
anarchists in many of the World Towns: Manila, Jakarta, Mexico City,
Lagos, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Delhi and many others, with a
truly remarkable growth in Latin America especially. Here we seem to
have the beginning of a return to the flowering of diverse transnational
Anarchisms that characterised us a century ago. [142] That this is
happening as part of globalisation, and the growth of cities is not
surprising given that the seeds of social movement Anarchism are largely
carried around the planet on the coat tails of capitalism and often grow
best, like weeds, on disturbed ground. As Richard Mabey has put it,
civilisation divides life into:
... two conceptually different camps: those organisms contained, managed
and bred for the benefit of humans, and those which are âwildâ,
continuing to live in their own territories on, more or less. their own
terms. Weeds occur when this tidy compartmentalisation breaks down. The
wild gatecrashes our civilised domains and the domesticated escapes and
runs riot. [143]
Earlier we looked at some continuing, if besieged, anarchies which
continue to live âin their own territories on, more or less their own
terms.â Even though from birth most of us in the cities have been
âcontained, managed and bredâ for othersâ benefit, possibilities for
escape are often present. There are cracks in the pavement and our
growth can lever them wider. In most places, by doing so we are unlikely
to destroy the concrete utterly but we can open up more spaces in which
to grow together.
In some senses vagabond plants are, âon the other sideâ; they are living
in opposition to the city, yet they are simultaneously part of the
overarching urban ecosystem. To see them in isolation without implicitly
seeing their links and interactions within the wider community would be
foolish. The same can be said of those of us with feral ambitions â as
urban anarchists we are both consciously âotherâ whilst intricately
within the wider ecosystems â both human and beyond. Anarchists all over
the urban worlds are growing their own counter cultures whilst actively
fighting in wider social and ecological struggles, within and alongside
striking workers, indigenous peoples, womenâs organisations, migrants,
slum communities and countless others. However, one only needs to look
at the recent repression faced by anarchists in Chile and elsewhere to
remember that being âgrass between the cracksâ is dangerous â the weed
killer is always on the way. Practical international solidarity is
sometimes helpful, but it will be the vigour of the plants themselves
and how suitable their environment is that will primarily determine
whether they take hold. If, as many theorists of elite power fear, the
fast expanding, largely unplanned cities of the global south are fertile
ground for the growth of anarchy, the age of the mega-cities will be
interesting indeed. What rebellions await? What ideologies will be
concocted? How will humanities feel and see themselves following this
massive disconnection from the land? Will all these cities remain at the
end of the century or are they a transitory bloom?
âLong live the weeds and the wilderness yet.â [144] We have briefly
looked at the expanding urban mono-cultures, but what of their opposite,
the besieged bio-diverse wildernesses? How will climate change,
conflict, civilisational expansion and contraction affect them? What can
we, the weeds, do to defend the wilderness?
As long as class society exists, the war on the wild will continue â
they are one and the same. The ideal answer to the question posed at the
end of the previous chapter, âwhat can we, the weeds, do to defend the
wilderness?â would be: re-wild where we are (and ourselves) to the
extent that civilisationsâ false divisions are overgrown. I say ideal,
because for all the reasons outlined already and more, in most places we
are unlikely to see an ecological transcendence.
But if the millennium is a myth, apocalypses feel more and more like
unfolding realities. Many understandably fear that rainforests could
die-off in the future thanks to climate change induced drought, [145]
but the fact is that today much of them are already being cleared and
burnt to make way for agriculture â still the number one driver of
tropical deforestation. Farming has already replaced wilderness on an
estimated 40% of the earthâs land surface [146] so for the animals,
insects, peoples and plants it replaced, the apocalypse has already
come. Add the overall hijacking of ecosystem services and the continued
pillaging of wildlands for animal bodies, tree trunks, water, minerals
and anything else that can be turned into a ânatural resourceâ, and
industrial civilisation is effectively attempting a sustained, blind and
hugely damaging take-over of the Earth System. As part of this process
anthropogenic climate change is likely to be a force magnifier.
âHabitat destruction includes habitat fragmentation, a particularly
problematic factor under climate change. And the problem of alien and
invasive species, so favoured by non-natural disturbance, is only
greater when climate change is added... The impact of climate change in
this heavily fragmented world may be immense.â [147]
How immense? No one really knows, though plenty are trying to work it
out. [148] While there is a lot of uncertainty on the details, most
conservation biologists would probably agree that unless âaction [is]
rapidly taken, the sixth great extinction event on Earth will be ensured
by increasingly fragmented habitat combined with the biological dynamics
resulting from climate change.â [149] Some voices go further. As Stephen
M. Meyer points out in The End of the Wild, extinction rates â long
before significant climate change kicks in â are already in the order of
3,000 species a year and rapidly accelerating. The situation is truly
dire.
Over the next 100 years or so as many as half of the Earthâs species,
representing a quarter of the planetâs genetic stock, will functionally
if not completely disappear... Nothing â not national or international
laws, global bio-reserves, local sustainability schemes, or even
âwildlandsâ fantasies â can change the current course. The broad path
for biological evolution is now set for the next several million years.
And in this sense the extinction crisis â the race to save the
composition, structure, and organisation of biodiversity as it exists
today â is over, and we have lost. [150]
I donât know about you, but when I read that last sentence for the first
time it was a shock, and it is worth reading more than once. âThe
extinction crisis â the race to save the composition, structure, and
organisation of biodiversity as it exists today â is over, and we have
lost.â Meyerâs general position is that in the anthroposcene,
undomesticated species are effectively divided into either Weedy Species
or Relics, with many of the Relic Species rapidly becoming, at best,
Ghosts.
Weedy Species âthrive in continually disturbed, human dominated
environmentsâ, whilst Relic species live âon the margins in
ever-decreasing numbers and contracting spatial distribution... Relic
Species do not thrive in human-dominated environments â which now nearly
cover the planet.â Meyers argues that, âto survive outside of zoos,
relics will require our permanent and direct management.â Those relics
that donât get such conservation attention, and even many that do, will,
if not immediately become extinct, enter the ranks of the Ghost Species.
These species are âorganisms that will not survive on a planet with
billions of people, because of their abilities and our choices. They are
ghosts because while they seem plentiful today and may in fact persist
for decades, their extinction is certain, apart from a few specimens in
zoos or laboratory-archived DNA samples.â [151]
A great many of the plants and animals we perceive as healthy and
plentiful today are in fact relics or ghosts. This seeming contradiction
is explained by the fact that species loss is not a simple linear
process. Many decades can pass between the start of the decline and the
observable collapse of a population structure, especially where
moderate-to-long-lived life forms are involved. Conservation Biologists
use the term âextinction debtâ to describe this gap between appearance
and reality. In the past century we have accumulated a vast extinction
debt that will be paid in the century ahead. The number of plants and
animals will spiral as the extinction debt comes due. [152]
So what strategies are conservationists coming up with to protect
biodiversity, wildness and ecosystem services amidst climate change? The
main proposed answer still seems to be protected areas, [153] but with a
greater protection for their surrounding matrix and with an eye to flux
and increased interventionist management. Of course, putting a park sign
on a habitat doesnât automatically result in preservation; in an
increasingly crowded world, itâs almost a form of advertising. As Meyer
puts it, âbio reserves have become the preferred hunting grounds for
poachers and bush meat traders: it is, after all, where the animals
are.â [154] While the predation is largely humans eating the wild, itâs
got to the point where the inter-species conflict also flips the other
way. âIn Mumbai, slum dwellers have penetrated so far into the Sanjay
Gandhi National Park that some are being routinely eaten by leopards
(ten in June 2004 alone): one angry cat even attacked a city bus.â [155]
Attempts to overcome such intrinsic âcivilised human vs. wild natureâ
divisions with conservation-as-development projects, eco-tourism
community income generation schemes and the like have had some success,
but not much. Often as not, they have simply monetised existing
relationships with the land, bred resentment and instilled another layer
of bureaucracy over the heads of local people with marginal conservation
gains. [156] More successful, horrible though it is to admit, has been
the wide scale fencing off â including sometimes eviction [157] â of
peoples from landscapes, and their continued policing by park rangers.
But putting oneâs ethics aside for the moment, this âYellowstone modelâ
seems increasingly unworkable without significant injections of
resources, increased militarisation and an expansion of land coverage.
None of which seem particularly likely on much of the planet.
Both of conservationâs big ideas â parks and conservation-as-development
projects â are effectively forms of government over people which presume
a static ecology threatened by a human population in flux. On a climate
change modified earth, where ecosystems are themselves in flux (they
always were, but not so rapidly); the obvious answer from a mainstream
conservation perspective is expanding out to encompass
management/government over human systems in the landscape matrix around
reserves and management/government of the ecosystems within reserves.
Overall âmanagement strategies are likely to have to be more innovative
and more interventionist.â [158]
We already know some of what this will begin to look like â just look at
the incredibly interventionist nature of most of British conservation.
The bioregion where I live is, in the context of temperate Europe,
bio-diverse but it is heavily managed, in part by conservationists.
Given the fragmentation of existing habitat it would probably be
disastrous if such management stopped. [159] Effectively, in my
bioregion it is a ridiculous choice between wild (i.e. self-willed) land
and biodiversity. From a radical environmental perspective (not to
mention one with an eye to island biogeography) the solution would be
rolling back human management of habitat over a large enough area that
the ecosystems could function effectively. Realistically it now looks
more probable that much of the worldâs wildernesses will increasingly
resemble my bioregion than my bioregion resemble the worldâs
wildernesses.
There is likely to be plenty of work for those conservation managers
with a stomach for the needed endless interfering, but itâs not the kind
of conservation Aldo Leopold would recognise. Even if such massive
expansion of governance by conservationists over humanity and protected
areas is carried out (doubtful), unless there is a significant slowing
of climate change (which I suspect will not happen any time soon)
biodiversity will be affected âin ways that will eventually become
impossible to manage.â [160]
A few years back an old friend and comrade told me, with obvious sadness
in his eyes, that the earth will need active management for the next
1,000 years. In some senses heâs probably right; the trick of government
has always been that it creates problems to which only it can be the
solution. While doubting its efficacy, I for one will not condemn those
who â motivated by biocentric passion â take this path. However, for
those unwilling to step away from their core ethics around
liberty/wildness/anarchy, other options remain, narrowing though they
are.
Action, action of any kind. Let our action set the finer points of our
philosophy... Out of this planet, out of the earth has emerged a society
of warriors, women and men who are planting their spears in the ground
and are taking a stand... Our job is damage control.
â Dave Foreman [161]
There are still places and peoples that civilisation has not yet
conquered and in these places lines can be drawn and battles joined.
Ecological resistance scattered across the planet has been inspiring and
often effective.
Different people use different priority-setting systems to choose where
to plant their spears, with the commonest being the simplest â 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.
However, many wild ecosystems (and the non-civilised peoples that are
part of them) have few (if any) allies and many potential warriors live
in places with little wildness to defend, or with little chance of
victory. Given the scale of the attack on the Earth System/Gaia/Mother
Earth, some priority setting systems call for increased focus in
particular areas. [162] Additionally, strong personal desires to respond
to the call of the wild by seeking adventure, escape, struggling
communities and conflict also drive people to seek other terrains. With
the objective of aiding such choices, letâs map out some advantages that
become clear when we accept that the situation is as bad as it probably
is. Given we are in a pretty shitty situation it seems helpful to
transform disadvantages into advantages.
The first disadvantage that can be turned around is the simple fact that
not that many people are willing to commit to defending the wild, few
are libertarians and fewer still are able to travel far from home, or
put time and resources into solidarity action or fundraising. When this
is coupled with the scale of the global problem, and the number and
diversity of battles, an obvious advantage appears. The problems vastly
outnumber those of us wishing to engage them from our perspective and,
thus, we should be able to concentrate on only those battles which most
reflect our ethics. We can leave the majority of those messier
situations, which abound in conservation, to when the struggles that
donât raise significant contradictions for us are âdealt withâ. This is
likely to be never.
Some indigenous peoples, driven by deeply held land ethics, willingly
defend the bio-diverse wildland communities they are part of from
development. Others are forced to do so as, rightly or wrongly, states
often view them as impediments to progress, or simply want to destroy
their habitat to enclose human subjects, other ânatural resourcesâ and
territory. Either way, the genocidal nature of civilisation ensures that
the resistance of minority indigenous communities from the mountains of
Orissa to the forests of the Amazon is often an ecosystemâs best
defence. Solidarity and joint struggle with such peoples is often the
most successful strategy for wilderness defence and one that usually
involves few compromises and contradictions for biocentric libertarians.
Itâs not entirely atypical that in just over 25 years the purchasing
power of a forest officerâs salary (a graduate post) in the Ugandan
Forest service fell by 99.6%. [163] Such situations enable small amounts
of outside money to have a significant impact if carefully targeted. Sea
Shepherd has managed to gain influence and strengthen conservation in
the Galapagos Islands by providing funds, equipment and technical
support to the Park Service â who had previously suffered from both
inadvertent neglect and purposeful underfunding to hamstring their
chance of interfering with politician-backed mafia style industrial
fishing. [164] Rangers in some of the planetâs most important reserves
are often badly armed and suffering significant casualties with little
outside support. For instance, 158 Congolese rangers have been killed
over 10 years defending mountain gorilla habitats, and small amounts of
money â not least to support bereaved families â is making a real
difference to the sustainability of projects and communities. [165]
Many outside of the âwestâ believe all those from it â especially (but
not only) those with white skin privilege â possess political/economic
powers they do not have. This illusion (unfortunate as it is from an
anti-imperialist perspective) can be of great use. For instance, a
prison visit to forest conservationist Raul Zapatos by a handful of
eco-anarchists from the British Isles on a solidarity trip in the
Philippines, combined with a small amount of âinternational pressureâ
from similar circles, was probably a significant factor leading to his
release. [166] Numerous similar examples of successful solidarity in
ecologically important areas come to mind. Peoples who have found refuge
in wild areas â and wish to defend them â can use and construct
ethnicity and aboriginality myths [167] to both carve out protective
land rights, mobilise romantic support from outside and present a
self-protective image whether of âpeaceful sagesâ or âviolent savagesâ
depending on utility.
Much destruction and attacks are carried out by forces that, though in
no way libertarian, are nevertheless outside or adversarial to the
particular state that controls the terrain on paper. Conservationists
from the uniformly governed West often presume governments control
âtheirâ territory and are floored if they are not able or willing to
act. Rather than strengthening the state (as conservationists have often
done) in some such situations, those who wish to support local
communities in militantly defending their ecologies may be able to do so
directly, âlegallyâ and relatively openly. As the recent experience of
(Earth First! co-founder) Bruce Hayseâs abortive âgreen armyâ in the
Central African Republic attests, there can be many pitfalls and
problems, but possibilities remain. Even more directly, Sea Shepherd has
successfully branded itself as enforcing conservation in international â
i.e largely ungoverned â waters, enabling it to carry out eco-defence
which elsewhere (and with less clever branding) would be judged
sabotage, theft, harassment and obstruction.
As part of globalisation, an increasing amount of urban social movement
anarchists are cropping up in lands claimed by such states such as
Indonesia, Chile, the Philippines and Russia. Many of these are well
placed to engage in ecological resistance and solidarity with indigenous
peoples and channel those from elsewhere to support such struggles.
Itâs generally accepted that â âwith climate change, even the best
designed protected area system cannot aspire to conserve biological
diversity if it consists mostly of isolated units.â [168] Meyers states
above that wildland fantasies are unlikely to halt biological meltdown;
while this is probably true, the fact that many want to believe they
might is, in some places, opening the door to large scale rewilding
[169] somewhat resembling the wilderness regeneration advocated by
radical environmentalists for decades. Smaller ecological restoration
[170] projects seem to be also on the increase.
One canât really make the situation much worse, and oneâs actions could
help make a real difference in struggles to defend wildness and liberty.
An obvious criticism of damage control is that it could be seen as
treating the symptoms and not the root cause. Diagnosis of the malady is
clear but it would be deluded to believe one had (or more ominously was)
the cure. Whatever the prognosis, the spread of the disease is surely
still worth resisting and if anything climate change only underlines
this. Slowing the destruction of wilderness (what Lovelock describes as
âthe vanishing face of Gaiaâ [171] ) may enable the Earth System to
better deal with continuing anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide, a
significant percentage of which itâs worth remembering, arise at the
moment from deforestation. This is not to say that habitat defence can
âstop climate changeâ. Like it or not climate change is probably now the
context in which ecological struggles are fought, not a subject against
which one can struggle.
In Eastern Europe an amazing wilderness throngs with elk and wolves.
Above the woods and pastures of Wormwood Forest eagle owls fly whilst
beavers build dams in the rivers and swamps. In what has become
effectively one of Europeâs largest nature reserves creepers climb
buildings, lynx run in abandoned fields and pines have long since broken
through much of the tarmac. Welcome to the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Following the 1986 nuclear disaster over 120,000 people were evacuated
from the area â most never to return. In the heart of the zone, the
previously 50,000 strong city of Pripyat is now deserted â bar a small
number of squatters â but is by no means a ghost town. âPripyat began
returning to nature as soon as the people left, and there was no one to
trim and prune and weed.â [172]
Natureâs incredible power to re-grow and flourish following disasters is
evident both from previous mass extinctions and from its ability to heal
many lands scarred by civilisation. Its true power is rarely considered
within the sealed, anthropocentric thinking of those that would profit
from the present or attempt to plan the future. Yet the functioning of
the Earth System is destructive as well as bountiful and it is not a
conscious god with an interest in preserving us or its present
arrangement â something we may find out if the Earth is now moving to a
new much hotter state. With us or without us, âwhile the class war is
vicious â there can be only one winner, the wild.â [173] In a sense
there is solace in this, but we should not look to such âvictoryâ as
Christian Fundamentalists look to their âraptureâ, for those species
that have been pushed to oblivion will not rise from the dead and
neither shall we. Nevertheless, nature bats last.
James Lovelock says that in the âpredicted climate catastrophe... what
is at risk is civilisation.â [174] I am unfortunately less optimistic â
civilisation in some form or other will persist, at least in many
regions. It is no accident that the first civilisation to spread
globally originates in temperate Europe. Many other civilisations raised
up empires only to destroy their environments and collapse. The oceanic
temperate climate gave Western European civilisation a wider margin of
error, enabling civilisation to escape its own regional locality and
devour much of the earth. As with other civilisations, it leaves deserts
in its footprints â but being global in reach but temperate in origin
the physical deserts are largely elsewhere. Thus some of the key
countries historically responsible for global heating will be the least
dramatically affected by it â at least directly.
While those large capitalist core countries that span multiple climate
zones (Australia, USA, Russia) may see considerable direct disruption,
[175] under most models those living in temperate zones â especially
oceanic and mountainous lands â can expect a heated, yet relatively
calm, climate punctuated by extreme events. [176] To a very large degree
the forecast for social war [177] is likely to be similar to that of the
climate forecast: heated, yet relatively calm, while punctuated by
extreme events. Relative, that is, to situations elsewhere on a rapidly
heating and conflicted planet, NOT relative to social and climatic
situations today. Mediterranean lands will probably get far hotter â in
both senses â and this may favour the growth of anarchists in a
spreading version of what Europol has referred to as the âMediterranean
triangle of anarchistic violenceâ. [178] Generally speaking landlocked
temperate countries in the middle of continents are likely to see their
summers get considerably hotter, with some such as Lovelock even
predicting the functional collapse of existing agricultural forms.
In the film Children of Men countries world-wide seem to be engulfed in
famine, insurrection, civil war, epidemics and ânaturalâ disasters.
Meanwhile Britain âsoldiers onâ with a banal authoritarian system that
sees most people continuing in their assigned class roles and travelling
daily to work as much of the planet seemingly implodes around them.
Polyglot refugees in vast numbers are imprisoned in a seaside ghetto
town. Such a picture could be an image from the future climate for not
just the Britain Isles but many temperate countries, especially those
states with oceanic borders (which both moderate climatic extremes and
enable easier border control) such as New Zealand, Tasmania etc. While
conformity and social copying will, I suspect, remain the norm,
increasingly authoritarian conditions and the economic effect of global
dislocations, will occasionally ferment spectacular episodes of class
anger and the wider formation of dissident cultures â however
âmarginal.â Gord Hill of the Kwakwakaâwakw nation may have it about
right:
The convergence of war, economic decline and ecological crisis will lead
to greater overall social conflict within the imperialist nations in the
years to come. It is this growing conflict that will create changes in
the present social conditions [with] greater opportunities for organised
resistance. The rulers are well aware of this, and it is for this reason
that state repression is now being established as a primary means of
social control (i.e greatly expanded police-military forces, new terror
laws etc)... We are now in a period that can be described as the âcalm
before the stormâ. [179]
Mirroring Gord Hill, but from a statist perspective, the UK chief
scientist has warned of a âperfect stormâ in 2030 due to potential
shortages of water, food and energy that could result in âmajor
destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant
problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food
and water shortages.â [180] Though this storm may initially break
elsewhere, those states (and their captives) that rely heavily on
international trade will be hit.
Such a picture of social conflict should not give the false impression
that the coming âtroublesâ will result in some kind of libertarian
social transcendence. To suspect that the future will see an increase in
trouble and that some of those troubles will be âusâ, does not presume
any form of overall âvictoryâ. Rather, social crises are inevitable in
societies based on class warfare, and will only be exaggerated by the
emerging conditions. Additionally, it would be unwise to ignore the
pacifying effect of everywhere else being perceived as âworseâ. In
Chapter 3 (Desert Storms) we looked at how lands such as America and the
British Isles etc. may âfall back on a combination of policies that add
up to quarantineâ and it would be naive to think this would be a policy
favoured by states only; indeed we can expect stronger calls for More
Borders to come from across classes. [181] In contrast Lovelock has,
some may be surprised to find, an optimistic view:
Scandinavia and the oceanic parts of northern Europe such as the British
Isles may be spared the worst of heat and drought that global heating
brings. This puts a special responsibility upon us to ... give refuge to
the unimaginably large influx of climate refugees. [182]
Legal immigration today is class (and to a certain extent race)
selective and this is likely to become only more the case. Overall
struggles are extremely unlikely to change this, though when focused on
individuals will no doubt continue to have some great successes.
While those of us living âbehind the wallsâ may be shielded from some of
the more overt and large scale conflicts â and opportunities â that are
likely to characterise this century, the social war is all around us.
The lack of overt civil war is merely a sign of the depth of our
domestication, as in most places, the policing needs only be sporadic.
Pecking orders are almost everywhere, and from the boredom, pain and
indignity of wage labour to our exclusion from the land community, we
live in (and are) occupied territory. If we disregard the illogic of
private property and take food or shelter when needed we risk facing
security guards, bailiffs, police and prisons. Though largely absent
from the spectacle the class casualties mount up â in my country the
richest live on average 10 years longer than the poorest [183] and one
of the greatest single predictors of fatal heart disease â thanks to
social stress â is how low one is in a hierarchy. [184] Just as
worldwide more people kill themselves than get killed in wars and
through interpersonal violence, [185] in Britain suicide remains the
highest single cause of death for both males and females aged 15â34.
[186] Assimilation is painful and trauma, self-harm, abuse and addiction
are rife. As Raoul Vaneigem said, for many, âthe greatest kept state
secret is the misery of everyday life.â [187]
Our lives can be better, freer, and wilder than this and as anarchists
we do our utmost to make them so, not in the ever-after of
post-revolutionary heaven, but now. Nevertheless despite being
anarchists many of us find ourselves in relatively temperate social
climates far from overt conflict on the scale likely to be seen beyond
the walls. This brings both advantages and disadvantages.
The Fortress faces inwards as well as out. Increasingly new technologies
of control are brought in under the justification of fear of the
barbarians â whether of terrorists or migrants. Somewhat evocative of
sci-fi dystopias (not to mention the Gaza Strip) covert surveillance
drones are already flying British skies introduced initially for
maritime border control, a public justification which the police
themselves admit is largely a ruse. [188] In many countries, cameras,
some now with microphones, proliferate to the point of being practically
invisible â not because they are covert but because they have been
normalised. Pervasive technologies of control, many even paid for by
ourselves and adopted voluntarily, such as mobiles, computers, bank
cards and road cameras (with number plate recognition) map social
networks, changing affiliations and physical movements.
New communication technologies = New ways of making us talk.
When these new technologies are combined with old fashioned âhuman
intelligenceâ gathered by informers and infiltrators operating within
resistant communities, states and corporations can gain a level of
oversight that would have been unthought-of even a few decades ago.
Whether or not control technologies converge to create an intelligence
state that understands everyone rather than merely gathers data on them
is yet to be seen; but against those pre-existing cultures of opposition
the lenses are very much already focused. Sadly, much of the focusing is
done by us.
The fact that our tyrannical enemy no longer draws its power from its
ability to shut people up, but from its aptitude to make them talk â
i.e, from the fact that it has moved its centre of gravity from its
mastery of the world itself to its seizure of the worldâs mode of
disclosure requires that a few tactical adjustments be made.
â âSilence and Beyondâ, Tiqqun 1
A limited response would be (along with abandoning any dialogue with
power and spectacle) relinquishing the use of new near universal
communication technologies. Though this may have wider lifestyle
benefits, it may also increasingly make oneself stand out. According to
a UK military mid-term future projection: âBy the end of the period
[2036] it is likely that the majority of the global population will find
it difficult to âturn the outside world off.â ICT [information and
communication technology] is likely to be so pervasive that people are
permanently connected to a network or two-way data stream with inherent
challenges to civil liberties; being disconnected could be considered
suspicious.â [189] We are moving to such a future fast. When the French
anti-terrorist police invaded the land community in Tarnac in 2008 one
of the public justifications they gave for suspecting that a terrorist
cell was forming was that few on the land had mobiles! [190]
The agreed convention is that the first step for those who, having
planned the future, now wish to bring it about is to make oneself known,
make oneâs voice heard â speak truth to power. Yet âthe listener imposes
the terms, not the talker.â [191] Much of the low-level contestation
that characterises activism, and the limited social spaces that make up
counter-cultures, actively mark out areas, and people, in need of
potential policing. Thatâs not to say that all resistance is futile (if
meaningful, achievable objectives are kept in mind, and tactics not
transformed into aims), nor that we should desist from growing
communities in which to live and love; rather that we would be wise to
understand that many âsubversiveâ actions â and social relations â
increasingly serve the needs of power as well as liberty. The balance of
advantage should always be taken into consideration. We need to always
ask ourselves the question: To what extent is the planned action or
method of social relationship likely to haemorrhage data on potentially
resistive identities? With increasingly powerful surveillance states and
storms approaching, our responsibility to each other, especially to
those as yet unimplicated, grows.
Yet, despite this contradiction, if we donât believe in a global
revolutionary future, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the
present. Shelves overflow with histories of past struggles and
hallucinations of the post-revolutionary future whilst surprisingly
little has been written about anarchist life under, not after,
capitalism. [192] Yet that is where most of us in temperate regions are,
and where most of us are likely to remain.
The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but
is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of
human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by
behaving differently.
â Gustav Landauer [193]
In many places we are âbehaving differentlyâ by spreading love and
co-operation AND resisting and/or avoiding those who would be our
masters. One of the strengths of anarchist currents has always been the
desire, and attempt, to live our ethics now. One does not need to
believe, as many have, that counter-cultures are pre-figurative to see
their value. After all, whilst in most temperate places anarchist
subcultures are not ânew worlds for the futureâ they still remain
âbarracks and sanctuaries for today.â [194]
This is nothing new, even if it does seem (in its own small way) to once
again be becoming more widespread. The classical anarchist period was
propelled forward primarily by peasant insurgencies (think Zapata and
the Machnovicha) and essentially bohemian, mostly urban, anarchist
âcounter-societiesâ (to use Murray Bookchinâs term for the worlds
created by Spanish anarchists before the fascist counter-revolution).
[195] From Spain pre-1936, to the Jewish anarchists in North America,
the illegalists of France and the Italian anarcho-syndicalists of
Argentina; the inhabitants of anarchist counter-societies were always,
by definition, active minorities. The minorities may have got larger in
insurrectionary moments, but they remained minorities always. The same
can be said for libertarian subcultures ever since. For the foreseeable
future libertarians in temperate regions will remain minorities, even as
possibilities for widespread anarchy arise beyond the walls. There are
many things we can do, but we cannot change the fact that we will not be
joined voluntarily and actively by most citizens. We will always be
within and against, and this may become increasingly dangerous for all
involved.
I live in an area with a sizeable anarchist subculture. I like living
amongst people who make my life lovelier in a society not of my
choosing, and with whom I can continue to engage in resistance. Such
clustering is unfortunately almost designed to attract unwanted
attention. We should hold no illusions about our ability to be
simultaneously open to the world yet closed to the state, but âsecurity
cultureâ measures can minimise the damage. In the end though, our
security rests primarily on the wider society, not simply the practices
of the subcultures we create. Governments would no doubt lock far more
of us away than they do, but for now, in many countries at least, there
is some protection in the stateâs fear that increased repression risks
widening resistance and more generally breaking the spell of illusory
social peace.
Counter-cultures need embedded security to survive, but our main
security lies hidden in the wider culture.
When we choose which interventions/campaigns/struggles to fight, and
which locations to live in, we should select them, where we can, partly
on their potential for social contagion. For the presence of factors
that link us, and our desires, ethics and needs, to those of the
surrounding society. Doing so is self-protective. Beyond our own
security, choosing battles based on where people already are, and
linking the anarchies we are growing with existing ecologies, social
relations and gains from previous struggles, has the significant
advantage of making anarchy more translatable. As Colin Ward said:
Many years of attempting to be an anarchist propagandist have convinced
me that we win over our fellow citizens to anarchist ideas, precisely
through drawing upon the common experience of the informal, transient,
self-organising networks of relationships that in fact make the human
community possible, rather than through the rejecting of existing
society as a whole in favour of some future society where some different
kind of humanity will live in perfect harmony. [196]
Seeking out other elements, other allies, wider compatible .social
relations, enables us to learn from them, aid them â and be aided in
return. Thatâs not to say we should dilute ourselves. We are anarchists.
What strengths we have arise from our desires, and active decisions, to
live freer and wilder, as communities, as individuals; false unity with
authoritarian social forces only weakens us. In our own small ways,
where we exist, libertarian communities of resistance are gathering
resources and growing connections of mutual aid in the cities,
re-inhabiting and defending the land, and trying to grow a fighting
spirit. We can do far better, but we have started.
Subcultures are part of the encompassing society and thus one of their
characters is that their practises can seep out into the surrounding
culture, often in a deformed way but not always entirely washed clean of
their ethics and healthiness (or otherwise, as the case may be).
Horrific as the situation today is, it would be worse still if it was
not for resistance and the unforeseen effects of people trying to live
well. Just as we cannot âsave the worldâ, we will not âreclaim the
futureâ; nevertheless we will be part of it.
We are not âthe seed of the future society in the shell of the oldâ but
one of many elements from which the future is forming.
When resistance and desertion significantly threaten those in power,
repression/counter-revolution is inevitable. One answer to how to make
counter-cultures less of a threat to those within them would be to drain
them of antagonism; make them obviously unthreatening to power. This
counsel of evasion and non-resistance has long been articulated in the
lived experience of anarchies both outside civilisation, and within.
Today though, putting aside the ethical issues involved, [197] the fact
is that while you can try and ignore the state, if youâre within its
controlled territory the chances are that the state wonât ignore you.
Those communities with a land base capable of some level of
self-sufficiency will still face intervention, whilst those immersed in
capitalism will often have little option but to labour, and lacking
resistance, for worsening hours and wages.
Another answer, and noticeably itâs the one many of us have taken,
explicitly or not â is to resist (preferably in winnable campaigns), but
barring wider social crisis usually at a somewhat muted level â all the
time attempting some level of invisibility.
Given where we find ourselves, a lot of what we already do makes sense,
even when the overt justifications for such action remain mired in
visions of salvation (as outlined in Chapter 1). Ironically, these
practical actions are sometimes abandoned when it is realised
(correctly) that they will not lead to the transformation of the world.
Just as counter-cultures/communes/communities of resistance may not be
embryos of a future mass anarchist society, direct action may not lead
to the destruction of capitalism; but it does protect some threatened
ecosystems, helps many of us and stops the further erosion of some
liberties. Strikes and syndicalism may not be steps towards a future
anarcho-communism but they may aid survival in the here and now and open
up time in which to live better. Riots may not lead to revolution but
they can break the social spell for many. I wouldnât pretend for a
moment that we are significantly slowing the death march that
civilisation is taking life on earth, but the âweapons of the weakâ
[198] are the ones they have, not the ones they dream of.
The most fertile ground for resistance over the last 30 years has been
neither âundergroundâ or âabovegroundâ but in the networked space
between the two. As noted earlier in discussion of increased
surveillance, this ground may be disappearing from under our feet,
irrelevant of arguments of its utility. For resistance cultures that are
often skewed generationally towards the young itâs often easy to forget
how fast options narrow. There was a time, not many decades ago, when
police had no riot uniforms and had to use metal rubbish bin lids as
improvised round shields amidst an inner-city insurgency. Not so long
ago animal liberationists could break into laboratories where no motion
sensor would pick them up â because they hadnât been invented. Charities
could openly run fundraising pushes for medical support for armed
liberation movements abroad (SWAPO) â through the National Union of
Students! This is no call for 1980s nostalgia â by othersâ reports, in
many ways things are far better now; but some avenues have closed, and
more will follow them.
To an extent, a lot of the type of actions that will become increasingly
difficult, especially the spectacular stuff, could be dumped with little
loss anyway. Often their only purpose is to make people feel they are
Doing Politics. [199] However, some victories and successful campaigns
have achieved real gains, defended real people and places, and often
with tactics which may be decreasing in viability. What, then, are the
âother sideâ thinking is the future of resistance?
For a start we should be clear that we are by no means viewed as the
only, or even the main, resistive social force. Unhappiness, poverty,
social division, irrationality and the desire to fight abound, and many
in elites understand that the potential for chaos is often barely under
wraps. As pointed to earlier in the discussion of the rise of
mega-cities, state theorists often do not make the mistake of seeing
economic crime as divorced from the wider class war. In terms of the
strictly âpoliticalâ, many activists seemed rather miffed when September
11^(th) and the growth of Islamic terrorism upstaged the âmovement of
movementsâ which a decade ago was meant to be the only game in town. The
growth (limited as it is) of non-state authoritarian actors, whether
Al-Qaeda wannabes or far right ârace soldiersâ, shows that there are
many potentially insurgent subcultures behind the walls, many of which
are our enemies as much as the states are.
Colonel Thomas X Hammes (US Marine Corps) in his influential book, The
Sling and the Stone, popularised the idea of fourth and fifth generation
war. Some military theories have long divided different forms of modern
conflict into generations. In the most common schema First Generation
War (1GW) is characterised by the emergence of conflict involving
massive armies culminating in the Napoleonic Wars, 2GW by industrialised
WWI style conflicts, and 3GW by World War II style Blitzkrieg. 4GW was
developed in theory and practice by Mao and includes, amongst others,
the wars in China, Vietnam, Somalia, Gaza, Iraq (following the
successful 3GW blitzkrieg invasion), as well as the so-called âwar on
terror.â This is a vastly simplified version of the scheme, but you get
the idea.
Hammes spends most of the book explaining 4GW, pointing out that this is
a form of war the US and co are, and will, be fighting for some time,
and that â at least in the 20^(th) century â it is the only type of war
that it has lost. The Western states have mostly been pretty successful
in stopping 4GW âterror incidentsâ happening within their borders for a
whole host of reasons, not least of which has been their increasing
capacity for effective surveillance of networks. Hammes states that
âFourth generation war is more than seventy years old and is reaching
maturity.â âWhile we are only beginning to understand it clearly,
history tells us the fifth generation has already begun to evolve.â Heâs
open about saying itâs too early to tell but his best guess is that 5GW
may be carried out by âsuper-empowered individuals or small groupsâ who,
unlike 4GW, are not embedded within wider networks, and therefore far
less visible. This is pretty much a description of how much of the ELF
and ALF have portrayed themselves, though rarely a description of
reality â as the successful repression of networks from â80s animal
liberation to the â90s green scare show. It also resonates somewhat with
the increasing appearance of âlone wolf attacks across the oppositional
spectrum. Itâs worth pointing out that âsuper-empoweredâ in Hammesâ
sense doesnât just mean an overabundance of Nietzchean self belief, but
the force-magnifying effect of high technology. [200]
Earlier we looked at military thinking about insurgency in the new
mega-cities of the majority world, but those who would maintain the
submissive peace also remember the LA Uprising and are rapidly
militarising as they await its return. The extent of apocalyptic
thinking amongst elites (and the failure of oppressed classes to often
live up to them) was most evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Yet even in the day-to-day absence of such uprisings there are, and will
be, opportunities to intervene and participate in moments of wider
social and ecological struggle; to show leadership from below, help
instill a fighting spirit and provide important infrastructure. Success
often comes when upsurges seem to appear out of nowhere, but benefit
from the will and experience residing in established communities of
resistance. Politicos often want to push these moments beyond their
natural lifespan, but momentum lasts only so long, and it doesnât take
much time for the state to organise. Such situations will not be the
foundation for a total libertarian transformation of the world, yet they
do have a chance of occasionally achieving real class gains, defending
communities and ecologies, making people safer, showing people their own
capacity, and breaking social spells. [201] They can, obviously, be
costly, both in terms of repression and the calming power of having let
off steam. We should also be under no illusion that authoritarian social
forces â on both sides of the barricades â will not try and control such
moments for their own uses.
It seems then, at least in the minds of some of our enemies, that the
main offensive forms that resistance will take in more surveyed and
grating future temperate worlds, will be those of un-networked
super-empowered small groups (and individuals) and largely unmanaged
episodes of mass social opposition. For now, a middle ground also exists
â mostly occupied by activism and crime â but maybe for not much longer.
As I said earlier, subversive actions serve the needs of power as well
as liberty, so toleration may last longer than strictly technologically
necessary if it plays the role of inhibiting emerging forms of action.
It should also be obvious that the oppositional forms so far mentioned â
existent or yet to appear â are methods of opposition, not enablers of
transcendence or ending. This will not stop them being claimed as such.
In our circles some communists will no doubt see social struggles and
outbreaks of disorder as leading to transcendence, while some
primitivists will see 5GW as a way of ending civilisation in its
heartlands.
Situations in far off lands also call, and those behind the walls can
get out â at least at the moment. It is often dangerous to go where
battle-storms are brewing, potentiality for anarchies opening up and
ecologies needing defence, but some always âprefer liberty with danger
over peace with slavery.â [202] Even some of those who donât, may feel
an obligation to fight, either to a level that may be unsustainable
under surveillance states, or with wild places and peoples, which in
much, but by no means all, of the temperate world, are increasingly few
and far between. Despite the denials, civilisations still have many
outsides, and as I have argued in earlier chapters global heating will
probably expand many of them.
It is my opinion that the situation is hopeless, that the human race has
produced an ecological tip over point... but assuming there is a
possibility of changing the societies âcourse in the darkness deathward
setâ, it can only be done by infection, infiltration, diffusion and
imperceptibility, microscopically throughout the social organism, like
the invisible pellets of a disease called Health.
â Kenneth Rexroth, Anarchist and Poet, July 1969 [203]
We have chosen to be anarchists, presumably at least in part, because we
feel it is more healthy and ethical to be so. It is better not to be
bosses and servants in our intimate and social relationships. Turning
the pain we feel into resistance is better than turning it on each
other, our own class and our own bodies. It is environmentally healthier
(to use a degraded term) to defend wild freedoms than let all of earth
become civilisationâs territory.
If Rexroth were alive today he would not be surprised that itâs now
probably too late to change the âcourse in the darkness deathward setâ.
Yet those of us who have chosen to be anarchist, in some of the most
domesticated places on earth, still need to find each other â both to be
effective and to be socially rounded. We have to maintain some
invisibility from power whilst still being socially present enough to be
contagious.
Too often some peopleâs activism resembles the manic phase of bi-polar
disorder. This is followed inevitably by a depressive phase, which once
having disillusioned folks of feelings of omnipotence only reinforces
illusions of powerlessness. To become stronger and healthier, and
encourage and support others to do so, it is sensible to set ourselves
realisable short term goals, rather than adopting an all or nothing
perspective. This is the case whether it is in what we want our
resistance to achieve, what we want to actively create, what we want to
learn or simply what we want to become. In this way our conscious action
can take on the function of collective therapy, making our lives
measurably improved for being anarchists, whilst achieving wider social
and ecological gains. There are many answers on how we can do this.
We are anarcho-syndicalists on the shop floor, green anarchists in the
woods, social anarchists in our communities, individualists when you
catch us alone, anarcho-communists when thereâs something to share,
insurrectionists when we strike a blow. [204]
An Anarchism with plenty of adjectives, but one that also sets and
achieves objectives, can have a wonderful present and still have a
future; even when fundamentally out of the step with the world around
it. There is so much we can do, achieve, defend and be; even here, where
unfortunately civilisation probably still has a future.
Here I have tried to map present and plausible futures whilst calling
for a desertion from old illusions and unwinnable battles in favour of
the possible. I would hope that the implicit call throughout, for us to
individually and collectively desert the cause of class
society/civilisation, was clear. Yet I can already hear the accusations
from my own camp; accusations of deserting the cause of Revolution,
deserting the struggle for Another World. Such accusations are correct.
I would rejoin that such millenarian and progressive myths are at the
very core of the expansion of power. We can be more anarchic than that.
Much of this piece has been âbig pictureâ, but that should not detract
from the true value of the hands on, the local, our emotional
relationships and day to day projects. The future should not be allowed
to foreclose on today, even if today is foreclosing some possibilities
in the future. No future is worth living or fighting for that is not
existent in the present.
None of what I have outlined in this piece is amazingly revelatory; in
the anarchist community I live in some mix of these ideas are often felt
to be common sense. In others I think this is the case too. One would
however not know that from our overt stated positions either in text or
often in the way we talk to each other. Itâs almost as though we feel we
have these views, despite being anarchists. Yet, as I have outlined, I
feel discarding progressive and revolutionary articles of faith can make
us stronger, freer and mentally healthier.
To be disillusioned â with âGlobal Revolutionâ and with our capacity to
âSave the Earthâ â should not alter our anarchist nature, or the love of
nature we feel as anarchists. There are many possibilities for liberty
and wildness still. What are some of these possibilities and how can we
live them? What objectives, what plans, what lives, what adventures are
there when the illusions are set aside and we walk into the world not
disabled by disillusionment but unburdened by it?
If I cross the river will you cross the river
Or drown in this desert, this empty cup weâre drinking from
If we are beasts, we are not beasts of burden
So ride alone, or ride with many others
Just ride away as fast as you can.
â Blackbird Raum, Valkyrie Horsewhip Reel [205]
[1] No, not Derrick Jensen but John Cleese! â Clockwise. Film.
Christopher Morahan. 1986; London, Thorn EMI Screen Entertain-ment.
[2] John Gray, Al Queda and What It Means to Be Modern (London: The New
Press, 2003), p. 7.
[3] While I know no-one personally who professes this today, Anarchism
as the telos of human history is still present in our propaganda. As
late as 2006 in what I would say is the most accessible and by far the
most visually beautiful introductory book to Anarchy it is stated: âthat
the general direction of human history was continually towards liberty,
in spite of anything that authority imposed, and that further progress
was inevitable... Society is naturally developing to secure a life of
well being for all, in which collective productivity will be put to
collective use â Anarchism.â â Clifford Harper referring approvingly to
Peter Kropotkinâs âScientific basis for Anarchismâ, in, Clifford Harper,
Anarchy: A Graphic Guide (London: Camden Press, 1987), p. 59.
[4] The idea of the millennium implicit in the âend of historyâ affects
the rulers as well as the ruled.
[5] Though the âglobalâ day of action that arguably kicked off this
period, J18 1999, was named by Reclaim the Streets (London) as the
âCarnival against Capitalâ, there is little evidence that most who
participated elsewhere (especially outside the West) saw themselves as
anti-capitalist, either then or in the subsequent period. Peoples Global
Action â the main network that then linked anarchists/activist groups in
the West to organisations in the Majority World â was never really that
global and its scale was often exaggerated.
[6] As the absence of any global movement against capitalism is so
obvious, those with a desire to believe in one have to go to impressive
mental lengths. Ignoring the grand-standing of the authoritarian left,
the main technique in our circles is to think of all the diffuse
struggles and moments of personal and collective resistance implicit in
class struggle, and then join them together by naming them: communism,
the movement of movements, the multitude â take your pick. Fundamentally
this is an example of magical thinking, by categorising and naming the
diffuse and invisible it becomes real. The thing can then be given
attributes and desires can be projected on to it â unsurprisingly often
exactly the same desires the imaginer would like to see in a movement
which expressed their politics. That these incidents of struggle might
be being carried out by people with fundamentally different beliefs,
desires and needs is unimportant, for it is the imaginary construct that
matters, not its actual content.
[7] Andrew Flood, âS26 in Ireland and the Origins of the Anti-capitalist
movementâ, Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland), 13^(th) September
2000.
[8] UK Anarchist Federation, Resistance, May 2009, p. 4. These quotes
are just illustrations â you could find many similar ones yourself.
Donât take it as a dig if you are allied to these
organisations/tendencies. Many of you I know are doing great stuff and
are lovely people who I have shared laughs and struggles with.
[9] I use the phrase, âsocial movement anarchistsâ, to mean those of us
who self-label as anarchists, and feel allied somewhat, to largely
western originated, anarchist traditions. Many peoples and individuals
have, and do, live anarchist/acephalous lives, without any link to our
relatively modern social movements. I write about these other anarchists
in Chapter 4 â African Roads to Anarchy
[10] Statements that refer to building or growing the new society in the
shell of the old are relatively common in libertarian writing. Though
the concept predates it, the origin of these phrases is thought to be
the century old preamble of the constitution of the Industrial Workers
of the World: âBy organising industrially we are forming the structure
of the new society within the shell of the old.â
[11] Sure the web connects the globe, but most of us end up hearing
mainly people just like ourselves: âWe end up within these filter
bubbles... where we see the people we already know and the people who
are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see the
wider picture.â Ethan Zucker-man, Listening to Global Voices, TED,
(www.ted.com).
[12] Down with Empire, Up with Spring! (Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington:
Rebel Press, 2006), p. 74.
[13] Seaweed, Land and Liberty: Toward an organically self-organized
subsistence movement, ( âOccupied Isles of British Columbiaâ: Self
Published, 2002). Available online: (www.anti-politics.net/distro).
[14] We started to be defeated on the streets by the police, bored by
the routine, infiltrated by the left, intimidated by lengthy prison
sentences, overshadowed by Islamist insurgence and Western wars of
invasion, watered down by immersion in the anti-war movement and then
weakened by its failure. Some key struggles were on some levels won (GM
Terminator technology stalled and WTO negotiations imploded), many
migrated to more advantageous (or dramatic) terrains of straggle, some
battles moved beyond what was generally acceptable. Many consolidated
locally and/or abandoned illusions about the mass and the spectacular.
Myriad ânon-politicalâ issues of everyday life â kids, generational
shift, depression, death and employment â should also not be
underestimated.
[15] Apart from being hopelessly USA-centric this was surely another
example of fundamentally magical thinking. One wonders if an equation
that concluded Copenhagen = Seattle would have been as popular if COP 15
had occurred near the sixth anniversary of Seattle rather than the
numerically elegant ten year anniversary.
[16] The 10.10.10 day organised by 350.org saw 1600+ events in 135
countries, mostly of the ritualistic tree planting/light bulb changing
variety though also appropriately with the option of âfaith workâ.
[17] John Sauven â Executive Director of Greenpeace UK, âGlobal
collective action is the key to solving climate changeâ, Guardian, 16
February 2010, p. 33.
[18] See the sadly now evicted Mainshill Solidarity Camp or the
successful Climate Camp linked campaign against the expansion of
Heathrow Airport.
[19] Some of the groups allied to Transition Towns would be the most
obvious example, at least in the British Isles.
[20] See Tadzio Muller and Ben Trott, How to Institutionalise a Swarm?
(www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/?p=412).
[21] You are Now Fucked, Natterjack Press, (www.
natterjackpress.co.uk/menu/downloads.php). The title refers to a Climate
Camp leaflet the front cover of which was simply the text âYou are Not
Fuckedâ.
[22] Unless of course climate change reaches one of the truly End Times
possibilities outlined well by Mark Lynas in his description of the
end-Permian wipeout. This is a possibility... Mark Lynas, Six Degrees:
Our Future on a Hotter Planet (London: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 243.
[23] The 2010 World Peopleâs Conference on Climate Change and the Rights
of Mother Earth was called for and hosted by the Bolivian Government.
For a good anarchist critique see: Dariush Sokolov, âCochabamba: Beyond
the Complex â Anarchist Prideâ, Shift Magazine No. 9, 2010. A far more
pro â if still somewhat questioning â approach to the conference can be
found in: Building Bridges Collective, Space for Movement? Reflections
from Bolivia on climate justice, social movements and the state
(Bristol: Self-published, 2010).
[24] Quoted in, Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism
and the Unmaking of Civilisation (Boston: Little Brown and Company,
1990), p. 25.
[25] Edward Goldsmith et al, 5000 Days to Save the Planet (London:
Hamlyn, 1990).
[26] James Lovelock, Climate Change on the Living Earth, Lecture at The
Royal Society, 29 October 2007.
[27] His pro-nuclear stance is practical if you are pro-civilisation
like he is. He does not say that nuclear power is the solution to global
heating which he sees as now inevitable. He thinks nuclear fission and
eventually nuclear fusion are the only technologies capable of âkeeping
the lights onâ as civilisation retreats. As someone who wants the lights
to go out, I can see the logic of his arguments but wanting the opposite
have no need to agree with his stance or reject his wider arguments
because of it.
[28] Arguably the book that launched the environmental (rather than
conservation) movement.
[29] Here it is less the science itself which is at question but its
presentation in the policy-makers summary, the editing and wording of
which does come under some level of governmental pressure. Others in the
field have also called for increased independence from governments:
âIPCC: cherish it, tweak it or scrap it?â, in, Nature, 11 February 2010.
[30] Industrial pollution has increased aerosol particles in the
atmosphere which are thought to reflect sunlight back into space and
seed clouds. If one could somehow turn off global industry tomorrow,
this dimming effect would disappear and surface temperatures could rise
significantly, almost immediately. This could push feedback mechanisms
into place, with massive increases in greenhouse gases being emitted by
non-human managed systems. Lovelock says for this reason he thinks we
are living in a âfoolâs climateâ â damned if we do and damned if we
donât. Here I have outlined a very simple (and therefore flawed) picture
of a very complex process. For a better stating of the theory, see
Meinrat Andreae et al. âStrong present-day aerosol cooling implies a hot
futureâ, in, Nature, 30 June 2005. For a more approachable (if
simplistic and partially out of date) intro to global dimming watch
BBCâs 2005 âGlobal Dimmingâ documentary,
(www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtml). The
masking affect is now widely accepted but its extent is still unknown.
For instance in a 2008 study by the Met Office Hadley Centre models
showed either a modest or severe increase in heating following a sudden
removal of haze. Either way âIt is very likely that present-day aerosol
cooling is suppressing a major portion of current greenhouse warming.â â
Peter Stott et al., âObserved climate change constrains the likelihood
of extreme future global warmingâ, in, Tellus B, 60: pp. 76â81, 2008.
Among the advocates of purposeful geo-engineering the idea of increasing
global dimming by dumping sulphates into the stratosphere seems to be
gaining support, oh joy.. Itâs worth underlining that by the time you
read this much of the science will have been superseded/advanced.
[31] Proceedings of the September 2009 conference â â4 Degrees and
Beyond: Implications of a global change of 4 plus degrees for people,
ecosystems and the earth-systemâ, jointly sponsored by the University of
Oxford, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and the Met
Office Hadley Centre, www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees
[32] Bob Watson, quoted in, âHow to Survive the Coming Centuryâ, New
Scientist, 25 February 2009.
[33] Quoted in, âHow to Survive the Coming Centuryâ, New Scientist, 25
February 2009.
[34] James Hansen, quoted by Bill McKibben, in, âCivilizations Last
Chanceâ, Los Angeles Times, May 11 2008.
[35] In contrast, the pre-historic planetary gatherer-hunter population
is estimated to have stayed under 10 million for nearly all of homo
sapiens 60,000 generations. Gerald Marten, Human Ecology (London:
Earthscan Publications, 2001), pp. 26â38.
[36] âBe fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it:
and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.â â King James
Bible, Genesis 1:28
[37] World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision, Population Division
of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations
Secretariat. June 1009.
[38] The work of ânew social movementâ anarchists and feminists from the
â60s onwards is relatively well known but anarchist involvement in birth
control struggles reaches further back. Emma Goldman, among many things
a nurse and midwife, was one of its most well known advocates and for
lots of the movementâs nameless it was a significant part of their daily
organising. This is as much an issue of class struggle as of womenâs
liberation. As Emma Goldman proclaimed, âLarge families are a millstone
around the necks of working people!â The following quote refers to
French anarchists of the early 20^(th) century but could apply to many
in other countries: ââAnarchism can be considered their crowning
synthesis,â and âneo-malthusianismâ (family planning), education and
anti-militarism were valid and necessary fields of activity for
anarchists working for a total social revolution.â â David Berry, A
History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917â1945 (Oakland: AK Press,
2009), p. 26.
[39] See George Bradford, âWomanâs Freedomâ, in, How Deep is Deep
Ecology? (Detroit: Fifth Estate, 1989).
[40] For a decent intro to issues around the green revolution see,
Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity
and Biotechnology. (London: Zed Books 1998).
[41] William R. Catton Jr., Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p.
38.
[42] World Hunger Hits One Billion, BBC (www.
news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/world/europe/8109698. stm), 19 June 2009.
[43] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the
Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p. 9.
[44] âThis girl here, for instance, is in a feeding centre in Ethiopia.
The entire centre was filled with girls like her. Whatâs remarkable is
that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. In India, in
the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically
survive at the same rate because they depend on the breast, and the
breast shows no son preference. From one to five, girls die at a 50
percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India.â â Sheryl
WuDunn, Our centuryâs greatest injustice (July 2010: www. ted.com).
[45] CNA Corporation. National Security and the Threat of Climate Change
(Alexandria: CNA Corporation, 2007), Finding 1.
[46] Ibid, Finding 2.
[47] For example: ââWith the effects of climate change compounding
existing pressures, future operations will be more frequent and more
intense than those currently underway in East Timor and the Solomon
Islands.â [Air Chief Marshall Angus] Houstan said that rising sea levels
caused by climate change would worsen social problems on the islands,
many of which are poor and underdeveloped, with the potential for
sustained economic growth low in all but a few countries. This meant
that island nations would struggle to adapt to climate change, he said,
while changing rainfall patterns, extreme weather and rising sea levels
would threaten agriculture and fisheries on which they depended. âFrom
there, it is a small step to political instability and social disorder,â
Houstan said.â â âAustralia military head warns of Pacific climate
instabilityâ, France 24, 3.11.2010 (www.france24.com).
[48] James R. Lee, Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars
(London: Routledge, 2009), p. 7.
[49] National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (Alexandria: CNA
Corporation, 2007), p. 6.
[50] Kurt M Campbell et al, The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy
and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change (Centre for
Strategic and International Studies, 2007), quoted in, Gwynne Dyer,
Climate Wars (Toronto: Random House, 2009), p. 19.
[51] Down with Empire, Up with Spring! (Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington:
Rebel Press, 2006), p. 118.
[52] R Nordas and N.P. Gleditsch, âClimate change and conflictâ,
Political Geography (26) 627â638 (2007), quoted in, James R. Lee,
Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars (London: Roudedge,
2009), p. 15.
[53] Maria Nikiforova âwas the only woman commander of a large
revolutionary force in Ukraine â an atamansha. The Free Combat Druzhina
was equipped with two large guns and an armoured flat car. The wagons
were loaded with armoured cars, tachankas, and horses as well as troops
which meant that the detachment was in no means restricted to railway
lines. The trains were festooned with banners reading âThe Liberation of
the Workers is the Affair of the Workers Themselvesâ, Uong Live
Anarchyâ, âPower Breeds Parasitesâ, and âAnarchy is the Mother of
Order.â... With their black flags and cannons, Murusyaâs echelons
resembled pirate ships sailing across the Ukrainian Steppe.â â Malcolm
Archibold, Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan
of Arc (Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2007), pp. 21â22.
[54] James R. Lee, Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars
(London: Routledge, 2009), p. 93.
[55] Mattijs Van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild:
Civilisation and its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 1998), pp. 15â17.
[56] Randolph Bourne, âWar is the Health of the Stateâ. Bureau of Public
Secrets (www.bopsecrets.org).
[57] Pierre Clastres, Archaeology of Violence (New York: Semiotext(e),
1994), pp. 164â165.
[58] Either wiped out during periods of (counter) revolutionary tumult
or picked off as the chosen prey of authoritarians during relative
social peace â anarchists do have a tendency to get it in the neck. Our
ranks have been further thinned by the many who of have felt forced to
escape civilisation through suicide and drugs.
[59] Joseph Khan, âAnarchism, the Creed that Wonât Stay Deadâ, New York
Times, 5 August 2000.
[60] The fundamental ânatureâ of all civilisations is an illusory
estrangement from wilderness, deepening as we become estranged from each
other, from the land, from the product of our labor and even from our
own desires. Wild animals (humans included) are tamed â domesticated â
by being fenced off, separated, from their natural environments and free
members of their own species. Dominance is burnt into brains through
violence and rationing of resources. Wilderness is tamed, both without
and within. The birth of âdomestication involved the initiation of
production, vastly increased divisions of labor, and the completed
foundations of social stratification. This amounted to an epochal
mutation both in the character of human existence and its development,
clouding the latter with ever more violence and work.â â John Zerzan,
Elements of Refusal (C.A.L Press: Columbia, 2006), p. 77. While it is
important to try and understand their origins, it would be a mistake to
see estrangement and domestication as past events, rather they are a
process that can be, and is, resisted. For starters, see also: Ian
Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Basil Blackwells: Oxford, 1990),
Leopold Roc, Industrial Domestication: Industry as the Origins of Modern
Domination. Anarchist library (www.theanarchistlibrary.org), Derrick
Jensen et al., Strangely Like war: The Global Assault on Forests (Green
Books: Dartington, 2003), Jacques Camatte, Against Domestication (Leeds:
Re-Pressed Distro, 2006), Beasts of Burden: Capitalism, Animals,
Communism (Antagonism Press: London, 1999).
[61] James Lovelock, Climate Change on the Living Earth, (The Royal
Society: London, 29 October 2007).
[62] Speech by the dishonourable Minister for Foreign Trade (Nigeria)
Mr. G Yhema, Crown Plaza Hotel, The Hague, 27 April 2000.
[63] See: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008).
[64] Contrary to the idea that a decrease in resources is likely to
result in increased conflict many surveys have shown that increased
resources result in increased conflict. Conflict can be caused by a
combination of greed and grievance and often greed is the motor while
grievance is the justification. âThis suggests that the resource curse,
by exposing those in power to the temptations of great wealth, is the
most powerful driver of violence and conflict.â â Camilla Toulmin,
Climate Change in Africa (London: International African Institute and
Zed Books, 1999), p. 118.
[65] Sam Mbah and IG Igariewy, African Anarchism: The History of a
Movement (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 1997), pp. 27â33.
[66] The following is worth noting also: âSuch limited links were in the
interest of the... [bosses], who purposely created a semi-working class.
Thomson states, âMine owners and farm managers rely on the fact that
peasants [who come to work temporarily] are also producing for
themselves back on their smallholdings (farmed in their absence by their
families). As workers have this additional source of subsistence, wages
can be kept low.ââ â Jim Feast, âThe African Road to Anarchism?â, in,
Fifth Estate Vol. 43 No. 2 2008.
[67] For a good overview of some lived, rather than imagined, anarchies
both in Africa and elsewhere see: Harold Barclay, People Without
Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy (London: Kahn SrAverill, 1990).
[68] P Skalnik, Outwitting the State, (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1989), p. 13.
[69] A personally abhorrent and definitely authoritarian exercise which
some anarchists still seem to enjoy...
[70] Though obviously not at the expense of looking at the class
relations, balances of power, struggles and joys where we live. Too many
activists know the intricacies of struggles, abroad yet little of the
social war all around them.
[71] While I agree with the author here, I would say âthe client issueâ
is a factor behind the spread of multi-party systems but by no means the
only one. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc, social democratic
mobilization within Africa and the demands â both financially and
ideological â of the West, are some factors amongst others. It will be
interesting to see how the expansion of Chinese power in Africa affects
this.
[72] Jim Feast, âThe African Road to Anarchism?â, in, Fifth Estate Vol.
43, No. 2, 2008.
[73] A cheap joke at the expense of Murray Bookchinâs ridiculous,
âSocial Anarchism vs Lifestyle Anarchismâ, dichotomy.
[74] Sam Mbah and IG Igariewy, African Anarchism: The History of a
Movement (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 1997), p. 108.
[75] âImprovement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without
improvement are roads of genius.â â William Blake, quoted in, Lawrence
Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North (London: Sphere Books,
1992).
[76] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History
of Upland South-East Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[77] If you doubt this why not try a pleasurable experiment and get a
taste of freedom by eating food not bought with sold time but grown with
oneâs own hands. I suspect the experience will convince you that land is
liberty and make you desire more of both. For those who like book
references as well as soil under their fingernails see: The Ecologist,
Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (London: Earthscan, 1993)
[78] Graeme Barker, âA Tale of Two Deserts: Contrasting Desertification
Histories on Romeâs Desert Frontierâ, in, World Archaeology, vol 33,
No.3, 2002, pp. 488â507.
[79] Helmut Geist, The Causes and Progression of Desertification
(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), pp. 4â7.
[80] Those who doubt this could do with reading. Clive Ponting, A Green
History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great
Civilisations. (London: Penguin Books, 1991). On a side note, before
becoming an academic Ponting narrowly avoided jail (thanks to an
unexpected jury acquittal) for leaking the truth behind the Belgrano
Affair (the British sinking of a Argentine navy warship as it sped away
from the Falklands conflict) whilst he was a senior MoD civil servant.
[81] Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization (Oklahoma:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1974).
[82] Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1971), pp. 303â305.
[83] Wilfred Theiseger, Arabian Sands (London: Penguin, 1959). I took
the cheeky, though I think worthwhile, step of gender neutralising this
quote i.e âOneâ was originally âManâ and âtheyâ was originally âheâ.
[84] See for example: Christobel Mattingley ed, Survival In Our Own
Land: Aboriginal experiences in âSouth Australia â since 1936 (Sydney:
Hodder &r Stoughton, 1988).
[85] For a good background on the situation of die Tuareg see: Helene
Claudot-Hawad, A Nomadic Fight Against Immobility: the Tuareg in the
Modern Stateâ, in, Chatty, Dawn ed. Nomadic Societies in the Middle East
and North Africa: Entering the 21^(st) century. (Leiden: Brill Academic
Publishers, 2006).
[86] âGiven the likely rise in temperatures and shifts in rainfall many
farmers will face yet more challenging growing conditions. Livestock
production may do somewhat better than crops, especially as herders move
away from cattle, which are less heat tolerant and towards goats, sheep
and camels, which are better able to cope in drier, hotter conditions.â
(p. 12.) âOverall, however, the livestock sector is likely to be more
resilient than corporate agriculture, since the mixed herds kept by
smallholders are better able to cope with erratic rainfall. Transhumant
systems in which animals are moved according to seasons, are also better
placed than those where animals are kept in large commercial beef and
dairy farms. In those areas likely to get hotter and drier, herd
composition will change from cattle towards a greater number of small
stock or camels. If this means ewer oxen can be kept, this will have
knock-on effect on capacity to farm land. (p. 60.; CamillaToulmin,
Climate Change in Africa (London: International African Institute and
Zed Books, 2009).
[87] Richard B Lee & Richard Daly, eds The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of
Hunters and Gatherers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
[88] Though to the British military this just made it ideal for nuclear
weapons testing.
[89] Nisa a woman of the !Kung San: âI remember another time when I had
been walking with my friends in the bush. Our families were moving from
one camp to another and my friends and I were walking ahead of the
adults, riding on top of each other, making believe we were donkeys.
Thatâs when my friend Besa saw a wildebeest lying dead on the ground;
then we saw another and then another; they had all been recently killed
by lions. We ran back on our tracks, crying out, âWe saw three dead
wildebeest killed by lions!â The adults said âHo, ho, our children...
our wonderful children... our wonderful, wonderful children!ââ â
Marjorie Shostak, Nis a: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (London:
Earthscan,1990), p. 101.
[90] Steve Conner, âWorlds Most Ancient Race traced in DNA Studyâ, The
Independent (London), 1 May 2009.
[91] Rachel Sussman, The Worldâs Oldest Living Things, TED 2010,
(www.ted.com).
[92] Survival International,
(www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen).
[93] And yes, that includes people.
[94] James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin Books, 2006),
p. 159.
[95]
W. H. Auden, âThe Fall of Romeâ, in, Collected Poems (London: Faber &
Faber, 2004).
[96] Tim Folger, âViking Weather: The Changing Face of Greenlandâ,
National Geographic Vol 217 No 6, June 2010, p. 49.
[97] James Melic, James and Duncan Bartlett, Melting Ice Opens Up
Potential for Arctic Exploitation. BBC World Service â Business Daily:
22 September 2010, (www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11381971).
[98] Camilla Toulmin, Climate Change in Africa (London: International
African Institute and Zed Books, 1999), pp. 15â16.
[99] Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping
Civilizationâs Northern Future (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 6.
[100] âGlobal Warming Poses Threats and Opportunities to Arctic Regionâ,
Manila Bulletin, 6 December 2009.
[101] James R. Lee, Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars
(London: Routledge, 2009), p. 167 and p. 17.
[102] For example the Russian National Security Strategy, adopted in
spring 2009, referred to the possibility of using armed force in
conflict over Hydrocarbon reserves. âClimate Change, the Arctic and
Russiaâs National Securityâ, Pravda, 25 March 2010 (www
english.pravda.ru).
[103] Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that he thinks there is an
urgent need for Russia to secure its âstrategic, economic, scientific
and defence interestsâ in the Arctic. Russia Plants Flag Under N Pole,
BBC News website, 2 August 2007
(www.news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/world/europe/6927395.stm).
[104] James R Lee, Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars
(London: Routledge, 2009), p. 102.
[105] Barry Lopez, Arctic-Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern
Landscape (New York: The Harvill Press, 1999), p. xxiii â xxvii.
[106] The divisive existence of nation states is already a problem for
the inherently trans-boundary Sami and could prove fatal in their
attempts to adapt to climate change, even without considering
civilisational expansion. See: Erik Reinert et al, âAdapting to climate
change in Sami reindeer herding: the nation-state as problem and
solutionâ, in, W Neil Adger et al, Adapting to Climate Change:
Thresholds, Values, Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 417â431. For a good background also see: Hugh Beach, The
Saami of Lapland (London: Minority Rights Group. 1988).
[107] When an indigenous people ceases to exist and becomes instead part
of the wider culture is a question I will leave to the peoples
themselves. That such assimilation is deeply painful can be seen both in
the staggeringly high suicide rates amongst many newly settled
communities and in the self harm and suicide rates more generally as
children worldwide are formed into adult cogs and microprocessors.
[108] Survival International. Siberian Peoples Protest Against Oil and
Gas Pipelines, 26 August 2005, (www.survivalinternational.org/news/985).
[109] Geoffrey York, âIndigenous People Describe Real Perils of Global
Warmingâ, in, The Globe and Mail, 14 December 2007.
[110] Luke Harding, âClimate Change in Russiaâs Arctic Tundraâ,
Guardian, 20 September 2010.
[111] For civilisation, the great thawing of the Far North will probably
form obstacles as well as bridges. Lawrence C Smith argues that in many
places thanks to decreased winter road access and ground disruptions
from thawing permafrost there will be âdiminishing access by land, but
rising access by sea. For many remote interior landscapes, the perhaps
surprising prospects I see is reduced human presence and their return to
a wilder state.â â Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces
Shaping Civilizationâs Northern Future (New York: Penguin, 2010), p.
170.
[112] Parag Khanna Maps the Future of Countries, TED, July 2009,
(www.ted.com).
[113] Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping
Civilizationâs Northern Future (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 258.
[114] The tendency emerging, to see cities as natureâs salvation, is
cargoist nonsense, backed up by carbon counting techniques that ignore
the inter-related nature of industrialism. A good recent example of such
flawed thinking is: Shanta Barley, âEscape to the Cityâ, in, New
Scientist 6.11.2010, pp. 32â34. I note the editors flagged it up on the
cover as the lead article with the title âUrban Utopiaâ, which says it
all really!
[115] Lagos in Nigeria shelters an estimated 20 million people and is
one of the worldâs fastest growing megacities. Once a small fishing
village, Makoko has grown into a slum housing around 100,000 people
largely in stilt houses on Lagosâs lagoon. Like many slums the area is
largely governed by local gangs rather than state ones.
[116] Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: The New Press,
2002), p. 363.
[117] United Nations Human Settlements Programme, State of the Worldâs
Cities 2008/2009 (London: Earthscan, 2008), quoted in Laurence C. Smith,
The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilizationâs Northern Future
(New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 32.
[118] Population figures taken from state censuses. Bristol: 433,100 (UK
2001). Bratislava: 429,000 (Slovakia 2006). Oakland: 446,901 (USA 2010).
[119] Hans Rosling, Hans Rosling shows the best stats youâve ever seen.
TED, February 2006, (www.ted.com).
[120] See: Christine McMurray and Roy Smith, Diseases of Globalization:
Socioeconomic Transitions and Health (London: Earthscan, 2001).
[121] 1.20 million and 1.27 million respectively in 2002. Tim Halliday
and Basiro Davey, Water and Health in an Overcrowded World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 39.
[122] As though âweâ areâ finishedâ...
[123] Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping
Civilizationâs Northern Future (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 35.
[124] â...the bottom billion will have to wait a long time until
development in Asia creates a wage gap with the bottom billion similar
to the massive gap that prevailed between Asia and the rich world around
1980. This does not mean that development in the bottom billion is
impossible, but it does make it much harder. The same automatic
processes that drove Asian development will impede the development of
the bottom billion.â â Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest
Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 86. Whether one sees the process above as
âautomaticâ as Collier describes or sees it as an expression of class
interests (or both), the basic tone of his conclusion is persuasive.
[125] See Chapters 3, Desert Storms, and 4, African Roads to Anarchy.
[126] Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are
Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), p. 3.
[127] Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington: US National
Intelligence Council, 2008), p.99, quoted in, Laurence C. Smith, The
World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilizationâs Northern Future (New
York: Penguin, 2010), p. 43.
[128] Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban
World. (London: Routledge, 2004).
[129] United Nations statistics quoted in: Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
(London: Verso, 2007), p. 23.
[130] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007), p. 42.
[131] Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban
World (London: Routledge, 2004).
[132] Leopold Roc, Industrial Domestication: Industry as the Origins of
Modern Domination. Anarchist Library (www.theanarchistlibrary.org).
[133] Murray Bookchin, quoted during a description of historical and
present transitional classes in: Down with Empire, Up with Spring! (Te
Whanganui a Tara/Wellington: Rebel Press, 2006), p. 150.
[134] Patrick Chamoiseau, quoted in Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London:
Verso, 2007), p. 174.
[135] Camilla Toulmin, Climate Change in Africa. (London: International
African Institute and Zed Books, 2009), pp. 70â118.
[136] âThe idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and
justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and
necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory and
practise... if god really existed, it would be necessary to abolish
him.â â Mikhail Bukunin, God and the State (New York: Dover
Publications, 2003). See also: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
(London: Black Swan, 2007).
[137] It would be too simplistic to blame this all on industrialism but
clear relationships can be seen â for example, that demonstrated by
Vandana Shiva between the spread of the green revolution and the growth
of fundamentalist communalist movements in India. If anything, the
coltan fuelled war in Congo and the subsequent spread of charismatic
native/Pentecostal cults bent on solving their problems through
expelling tens of thousands of âchild witchesâ is an even more spooky
sign of the marriage of the modem and the magical.
[138] Writhing in agony, his arm lost to a sugar mill, slave Francois
Makandal had a millenarian vision of glorious free black Haitian cities.
âImmediately after his maiming, Makandal affected the role of a prophet
and built a considerable following in Northern Limbe. By 1740, Makandal
had fled to the Maroons and used their secret networks to build a force
of thousands across Haiti, infiltrating every home and plantation and
bringing poison to each, adapted from West African lore to local
circumstances. Dependent on their servants, the plantocracy was helpless
as one day their livestock died, the next their domestic animals,
finally themselves and their families. 6,000 were killed before Makandal
was through.â â John Connor, Children of Guinea: Voodoo, The 1793
Haitian Revolution and After (London: Green Anarchist Books, 2003), p.
11.
[139] Geoffrey Demarest (US Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort
Leavenworth), âGeopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin Americaâ,
in, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol.6, No.l (London: Routledge, 1995).
This article is a bit outdated (fax machines as network threat!) but is
definitely worth reading not least as a good illustration of the
circularity of thought on insurrectionary possibility. I read it as Mike
Davis (who is a revolutionary socialist) references this study in his
2006 book Planet of Slums, but itâs noticeable that a large part of its
thesis is from Davisâs earlier book (which it quotes) City of Quartz...
[140] Charles Onyango-Obbo, âKibera. Itâs rich city folks who need slums
mostâ, Daily Nation, op/ed 8 July 2009.
[141] Geoffrey Demarest (US Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort
Leavenworth), âGeopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin Americaâ,
in, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol.6, No.l (London: Routledge Spring
1995).
[142] Jason Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global Context
(Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2003).
[143] Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation
and Changed the Way We Think About Nature (London: Profile Books, 2010),
p. 21.
[144] Gerard Manley Hopkins, âInversnaidâ, in, Poems and Prose (London.
Penguin Classic, 2008), p. 50.
[145] As with so much in climate change, narratives about what affects
future global heating may have on tropical forests, range from the
positive to the apocalyptic. For a good overview see the excellent:
Simon L. Lewis, âTropical forests and the changing earth systemâ, in,
Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B (2006) 361, 195â210.
[146] Garry Peterson, âEcological limits of adaptation to climate
changeâ, in, W Neil Adger et al Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds,
Values, Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 31.
[147]
T. E. Lovejoy, âConservation with a Changing Climateâ, in, Climate
Change and Biodiversity (New Haven: Yale University Press:
2006), pp. 325â326.
[148] We can look at tropical forests â those great reservoirs of
diversity â in particular. âProjections to 2050 estimate 10% extinction
(i.e. species committed to extinction) of all tropical rain forest
species based on habitat loss alone, but a far greater extinction of 24%
under projected mid-range climate change scenarios.â â âBiodiversity in
a changing worldâ, in, Jaboury Ghazoul and Douglas Sheil eds., Tropical
Rain Forest Ecology, Diversity, and Conservation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), p. 356. Worse emission scenarios push that
horrendous figure to 37% in one model. â Laurence C. Smith, The World in
2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilizationâs Northern Future (New York:
Penguin, 2010), p. 138.
[149] âGreenhouse Gas Levels and Biodiversityâ, in, Thomas E. Lovejoy
and Lee Hannah, eds., Climate Change and Biodiversity (New Haven: Yale
University Press: 2006), p. 395.
[150] Stephen M. Meyer, The End of the Wild (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 2006), p. 4.
[151] Stephen M. Meyer, The End of the Wild (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 2006), pp. 9â14.
[152] Stephen M. Meyer, The End of the Wild (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 2006), p. 16.
[153] âProtected areas are the most important and most effective
component of current conservation strategies... There is strong reason
to believe that they will continue to be central in conservation
strategies designed for climate change... Area under protection is
expanding, while remaining undisturbed habitat is declining, so that by
the time climate change impacts are pronounced, protected areas may
represent most of the remaining natural areas of the planet. Protected
areas provide the least disturbed natural habitat, and therefore the
best hope for natural response (e.g., range shifts) to changing climate.
Consequently, protected areas will play a dominant role in efforts to
conserve biodiversity in the future, as they do now.â â Lee Hannah and
Rod Salm, âProtected Areas Management in a Changing Climateâ, in, Thomas
E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, eds., Climate Change and Biodiversity (New
Haven: Yale University Press: 2006), p. 363.
[154] Stephen M. Meyer, The End of the Wild (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 2006), p. 49.
[155] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007), p. 136.
[156] For an insightful anthropological critique of a
conservation-as-development project see: Paige West, Conservation is Our
Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (Durham:
Duke University Press 2006).
[157] For a good (if anthropocentric) look at state engagement by
conservation organisations and the resultant clashes with indigenous
people, especially through the creation of National Parks, see: Marcus
Colchester, Salvaging Nature: Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and
Biodiversity Conservation (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for
Social Development with World Rainforest Movement, 1994).
[158] Lee Hannah and Rod Salm, âProtected Areas Management in a Changing
Climateâ, in, Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, eds., Climate Change and
Biodiversity (New Haven: Yale University Press: 2006), p. 370.
[159] Thatâs not to say it all makes sense. Much of UK conservation is
simply baggage from previous management regimes or is skewed towards
particular favourites (woodland flowers as an example) rather than
orientated to a whole system approach. For an old but unfortunately
still relevant critique see: Clive Hambler and Martin R Speight,
âBiodiversity Conservation in Britain: Science Replacing Traditionâ, in,
British Wildlife, 6 (3) pp. 137â148.
[160] âGlobal Greenhouse Gas Levels and the Future of Biodiversityâ, in,
Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, eds., Climate Change and Biodiversity
(New Haven: Yale University Press: 2006), p. 390.
[161] Dave Foremen, speaking on the film, Earth First: The Politics of
Radical Environmentalism, produced by Christopher Manes, 1987.
[162] As has been argued widely there is a need for increased ecological
defence in both the âbiodiversity hotspotsâ (34 regions with high
biological diversity under imminent threat) and the last great tropical
wildernesses (Amazon, New Guinea, Congo) as well as at Sea. The scale of
the present crisis and the likelihood of future massive climate change
may now add weight to the argument calling for a âlong warâ focus on the
last big wildernesses, but itâs probably not yet time to give up on the
hotspots all together. Itâs also perfectly conceivable that if the Earth
System is moving to a hot state then even the âlong warâ strategy is
rather out the window.
Ho hum. For an up-to-date summation of Hotspots â
www.biodiversityhotspots .org. For a critique see: Peter Kereiva and
Michelle Marvier, âConserving Biodiversity Coldspotsâ, in, American
Scientist, Volume 91 (2003), pp. 344â351. In the end, number crunching
only gets one so far; irrelevant of an ecosystems relative global
âimportanceâ, it is our desire to be part of it and become its defence
that pushes us to action, whether itâs a rainforest on the other side of
the planet or a rewilding vacant lot down the road.
[163] âRequiem or revivalâ, in, Jaboury Ghazoul and Douglas Sheil eds.,
Tropical Rain Forest Ecology, Diversity, and Conservation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 400.
[164] Sea Shepherd Conservation Society â www.seashepherd.org/galapagos/
[165] The Thin Green Line Foundation â www.thingreenline.info
[166] For more info on the Zapatos case see Solidarity South Pacific â
www.eco-action.org/ssp/prisoners.html For an excellent, informative and
refreshingly honest overview of the solidarity trip in question and
overview of the ecological/indigenous struggles in the Philippines see:
From Mactan to the MiningAct: Everyday stories of devastation and
resistance among the indigenous people of the Philippines (Leeds:
Repressed Distro, 2003).
[167] This is not to say that there are not aboriginal groups, merely to
point to the probability that many of those so labelled or who claim
such âstatusâ are instead maroon communities who have fled to remote
areas to avoid incorporation into civilisation. See: James C. Scott, The
Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East
Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[168] Thomas E. Lovejoy, âConservation with a Changing Climateâ, in,
Thomas H. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, eds., Climate Change and Biodiversity
(New Haven: Yale University Press: 2006), p. 326.
[169] For a good intro to the ideas of conservation rewilding â Dave
Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the
21^(st) Century (Washington: Island Press, 2004). Already rewilding is a
bit of a buzz word which is not only framing new style conservation
projects but also being used to sex up projects with less âlegitimate
claimâ. Either way for an easily accessible â if propagandist overview
of current projects worldwide Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World:
Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (New York: Henry Holt,
2010).
[170] For some thoughts on ecological restoration from a British radical
environmental perspective see: âTake a Sad Song and Make it Better?:
Ecological Restoration in the UIC, in, Do or Die, No. 8, 1998, pp.
159â173.
[171] James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
(London: Penguin, 2009).
[172] Mary Mycio, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl
(Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2005), p. 6. Elements in the Ukranian
state are presently (2010) pushing to re-domesticate much of the
deserted land for agricultural production.
[173] Down with Empire, Up with Spring! (Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington:
Rebel Press, 2006), p. 159.
[174] James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin, 2006), p.
10. Some have questioned if he genuinely thinks this, implying he is
exaggerating for effect or to encourage action. I asked him this
personally and he said he does genuinely think this is probably the
case.
[175] For example some models predict that âthe drought conditions
associated with the brief American Dustbowl could conceivably become the
[American Southwest] regions new climate.â â Laurence C. Smith, The
World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilizationâs Northern Future (New
York: Penguin, 2010), p. 108.
[176] âThe climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few
survivors living a stone age existence. But in several places in the
world, including the UK, we have a chance of surviving and even of
living well.â â James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final
Warning (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 22. For an interesting perspective
on a future Britain Isles see: Marek Kohn, Turned Out Nice: How the
British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up (London: Faber & Faber,
2010).
[177] âSocial War: The narrative of âclass struggleâ developed beyond
class to include the complexities and multiplicities of ... conflict
within all hierarchical social relations.â â Liam Sionnach, âEarth First
Means Social War: Becoming an Anti-Capitalist Ecological Social Forceâ,
in, Earth First! Journal, Lughnasadh 2008, Vol. 28, No. 5.
[178] Europol, Terrorist Activity in the European Union: Situations and
Trends Report (Europol: The Hague, 2003).
[179] Zig-Zag, Colonization and Decolonization: A Manual for Indigenous
Liberation in the 21^(st) Century (Victoria: Warrior Publications,
2006), p. 28.
[180] John Beddington, quoted in, World faces âPerfect stormâ of
problems by 2030, chief scientist to warnâ, The Guardian, 18.3.2009.
[181] UK immigration control was actually a âvictoryâ (sic) first
brought in following a huge mobilisation by the Left against Jewish
migrants. Noticeably pretty much the only section of the Left that
agitated against it was the only groups that did not accept borders at
all â the anarchists. See: Steve Cohen, Thatâs Funny, You Donât Look
Anti-Semitic: Anti-racist Analysis of Left Anti-Semitism (London: Beyond
the Pale Press, 1984).
[182] James Lovelock, Climate Change on the Living Earth, The Royal
Society, 29 October 2007.
[183] âPoor in UK dying 10 years earlier than the rich, despite years of
government actionâ, Guardian, 2.7.2010.
[184] Richard Wilkinson, Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health and Human
Evolution (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000).
[185] James Phillips, Trauma, Repair and Recovery (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 5.
[186] This statistic involves an ordering of data which splits both
cancers and accidents. See: Clare Griffiths et al., Leading causes of
death in England and Wales â How should we group causes? (London:
National Office of Statistics, 2005), p. 11.
[187] Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel
Press, 1983).
[188] âPolice in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones,
controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the âroutineâ monitoring of
antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and
fly-tippers... Previously, Kent police has said the drone scheme was
intended for use over the English channel to monitor shipping and detect
immigrants crossing from France. However, the documents suggest the
maritime focus was, at least in part, a public relations strategy
designed to minimise civil liberty concerns. âThere is potential for
these [maritime] uses to be projected as a âgood newsâ story to the
public rather than more âbig brotherâ a minute from one of the earliest
meetings, in July 2007, states.â â âCCTV in the Sky: police plan to use
military-style spy dronesâ, Guardian, 23.1.2010. More recently ACPO
confirmed that three forces are already using drones and a national
scheme is out for tender, âUnmanned drones may be used in police
surveillanceâ, Guardian, 24.9.2010.
[189] Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, Global Strategic Trends
Programme 2007â2036 (London: Ministry of Defence, 2006). âA source
document for the development of UK defence policyâ quoted in, Gwynne
Dyer, Climate Wars (Toronto: Random House, 2009), p. 5.
[190] âRural idyll or terrorist hub?â, Guardian, 3.1.2009.
[191] âSilence and Beyondâ, in, Tiqqun 1, (Paris: Tiqqun,1999).
[192] See: Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), The
Call (London: Short Fuse Press, 2010), Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
(London: Freedom Press, 1988), âGrowing Counter Culturesâ, in, Down with
Empire, Up with Spring! (Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington: Rebel Press,
2006), pp. 61â79, Crimethinc, Dropping out: A Revolutionary Vindication
of Refusal, Margitiality, and Subculture (London: Active Distribution,
2010).
[193] Gustav Landauer, Revolution and other Writings (Oakland: PM Press,
2010).
[194] Down with Empire, Up with Spring! (Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellingtcn:
Rebel Press, 2006), p. 77.
[195] Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years
1868â1936. Edinburgh: AK Press, 1988).
[196] Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1992), p. 5.
[197] Ward Churchill, Pacifism as Pathology (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring,
1998) pp. 70â74.
[198] To use James Scottâs term, in a different context. James Scott,
Weapon is of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987).
[199] In contrast, as French anarchist Pierre Chardon put it: âAnarchist
action) â patient, hidden, tenacious, involving individuals, eating away
at institutions like a worm eats away at fruit, as termites undermine
majestic trees â such action does not lend itself to the theatrical
effects of those who wish to draw attention to themselves.â â Quoted in,
David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917â1945
(Oakland: AK Press, 2009), p. 42.
[200] Incidentally the theory/practise of 4GW is highly evolved and
while incorporating guerrilla and network war has a wider meaning on
paper and on the ground. For this alone the book is worth reading.
Colonel Thomas X. Hammes (USMC), The Sling & The Stone: On War in the
21^(st) Century (St.Paul: Zenith Press, 2004). Quotes, p. xiv and p. 290
respectively. The ALF do hilariously make an appearance as a possible
screen for a Chinese military 4GW false flag attack on the American
âlivestock industry.â p. 259.
[201] âTo be a feminist, one has first to become one... Feminists are
not aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the
same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured,
turns a âfactâ into a âcontradiction.ââ â Sandra Lee Bartky, quoted in:
Carol J Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 184. Whilst many
articulate their Anarchism thanks to the written word itâs rare, in my
experience at least, that many decide to become anarchist through it.
Rather the most powerful âpropagandaâ is that âby the deedâ â lived
experience, either through involvements in resistance or through meeting
the love and lived ethics of anarchist communities.
[202] A Polish aristocrat, quoted in, Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social
Contract (Cosimo Inc: New York, 2008), p. 70.
[203] Kenneth Rexroth, âRadical Movements on the Defensiveâ, San
Francisco Magazine, July 1969. Bureau of Public Secrets â Rexroth
Archive, (www.cddc.vt.edu/bps/rexroth).
[204] Crimethinc., âSay you want an Insurrection: Putting the âSocialâ
in Social Warâ, in, Rolling Thunder, No. 8, Fall 2009.
[205] Blackbird Raum, âValkyrie Horsewhip Reelâ, Swidden (Santa Cruz:
Black Powder Records).