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Permanent Ecological Conflict: A Conversation With Xander Dunlap
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Welcome back to The Beautiful Idea, a new project from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We’re bringing you interviews and stories from the front-lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
On today's show we have a conversation with Xander Dunlap, author of the recent book The System Is Killing Us, out with Pluto Press. In this conversation we discuss the current state of ecological resistance movements, the problems introduced by eco-Leninism, the concept of permanent ecological conflict, and the notion of home and connection to place in land struggles.
You can find Xander on the Twitter at https://x.com/DrX_ADunlap and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/drxdunlap.bsky.social. Xander is also involved in a new and exciting publishing project called Rupture Press, check it out at https://www.rupturepress.org/
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis. Follow us on Mastodon and at the beautiful idea.show. Thanks for listening.
Ecological Resistance and Land Grabbing
00:00:47
Speaker
here're Here here was Sandra Dunlop. We're going to be talking about ecological resistance, permanent conflict, ideas like this. But before we kind of dive into that, do you want to sort of give us a quick rundown of who you are and what you've been up to. So, yeah, I guess I guess we're kind of talking because my more recent book, you know, this system is killing us, land grabbing the green economy, ecological conflict. And this book in general is just a It's kind of a general overall reflection and compilation of kind of my work the last 10 years. And yeah, so I've got a PhD in social anthropology and have dedicated a lot of it to autonomous land conflicts in terms of participating in them and understanding, you know, exactly what was being fought and a lot of the problems behind all the different kinds of mega infrastructure projects, you know, from wind turbines to coal mines to copper mines to
00:01:41
Speaker
Mega transformers, lithium mines, you name it, copper mines, you know, all over the world. So yeah, I mean, a lot of my work has just really been, yeah, targeting mining and energy infrastructure and understanding trying to get through the midst of capitalism and green capitalism.
State of Autonomous Land Defense Campaigns
00:01:58
Speaker
Great. So as you're traveling around, I know like one of the things that I often deal with is the sense of doom when it comes to questions about ecology, right? ah I live in the Rust Belt, so I live in a place which is pretty ecologically destroyed to begin with. you know i I always feel like I have an impending sense of doom when those questions come up, but very obviously there are eco defense movements happening all over the place. so You've traveled all over the world. You've seen these things play out in Europe, South America, the United States, so on, so on. What would you say are sort of the current states of autonomous land defense campaigns, eco defense movements, things like that?
Challenges in Eco Defense Movements
00:02:39
Speaker
And how are those, you know, the tendencies involved in the dynamics different between kind of places that you've gone to? Oh, that's a big one. I mean,
00:02:49
Speaker
I mean, in one sense, I can say they're stronger and mightier and more combative than ever. and But at the same time, they're also the most tired, burnt out, and just dealing with more paramilitaries and and crazy government schemes and police more than ever at the same time, you know? Yeah, in a sense, like everywhere it's it's kind of hard because you know everywhere obviously has its like historical, political, and kind of cultural aspects that are going to Really kind of show up through these conflicts and struggles, but at the same time, there's still like the same structural in positions of. The companies, the states, sometimes that, you know, the state is kind of managing. Sometimes the companies are relying more on private security. Sometimes they're making contracts directly with the military. You know, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of different ways that can be done, but it's still a lot of the same stuff, you know, where there's. There's, it's big money, you know, it's.
00:03:44
Speaker
Governments are inviting this for foreign direct investment, they're encouraging this type of extractivism and they'll do anything they can to kind of go through this and so typically the companies just go and they immediately go to the local elites or municipal authorities or kind of regional governors and just try to you know shake hands, make those deals there to kind of craft legitimacy and then Yeah, when there's that type of money rolling in, it tends to fragment the kind of local communities or even the region in terms of, you know, some you got the full spectrum, you know, you've got people who are waving their flags. Hooray. We're going to have jobs and new mine and we can buy televisions and.
00:04:24
Speaker
You know, try to climb the developmental and kind of pseudo-American dream. And then you have other people who are trying to find some environmental justice, middle ground of, okay, like, how can we have this friendlier and have this distributed distribute the costs and benefits of these projects easier? And then you have the more kind of traditionalist perspectives who are, you know, really with the rivers, with the trees, or kind of with the agricultural culture itself, and which kind of represents more of this kind of autonomous and kind of anarchistic kind of approach.
00:04:52
Speaker
where they're just like, fuck this, you're not taking the water, we're going to fight this to the death. And so I don't know, you have these you have these stereotypes, you know, and and sometimes there's strong resistance in the beginning, but then after three years and a couple assassinations or just being worn down or legal cases, depending on the context, then, you know, it gets harder, things get fragmented, things turn inward and, you know, the gossip spreads and you know, patriarchy is obviously a big problem within the movements in terms of how people are treating each other and you know, it's, I don't know, maybe I'm maybe i'm maybe i'm starting to paint the the paintbrush a little too thick in terms of how I'm just seeing everything these days, but it just seems like the same, yeah, just the same imposition, the same kind of, for lack of a better word, counterinsurgency tactics for how kind of movements are being divided and moved and how people are reacting and just kind of getting exhausted or just coming into kind of shitty,
00:05:48
Speaker
kind of habitual patterns, in addition to just the repression that's kind of conditioning this stuff.
Counterinsurgency and Tactics Across Regions
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned counterinsurgency. You talk a lot about that in the book. I think it's a really, really interesting connection, especially when we're talking about not counterinsurgency, like in a vague sense, but counterinsurgency in a very specific, like your goal is to pacify the population by separating out irredeemable elements, like that US doctrine of counterinsurgency.
00:06:17
Speaker
one of the things that happens in that discourse often is there is a tendency to ignore the way that those things play out radically differently, depending on whether you're in sort of the imperial center or whether you're out on the periphery. right and so like In the United States, for example, we see that play out a lot through compromise and also police violence, but we very rarely see things like executions, military raids, like those kinds of things. right and so I guess as you've been in these situations, right? Like you were in Mahaka, you experienced really scary stuff down there. um How have you seen that difference play out, right? Like you've been in these conflicts in in you know Europe and Central and South America where counterinsurgency tends to look very different. And so how have you seen that kind of play out?
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah I mean and so to be clear like i maybe obviously counterinsurgency plays a huge role in my work so a lot of my more academic articles and work has actually been dedicated to actually yeah using the lands and military manuals at counterinsurgency to understand land conflicts. And really what I did is I you know i was influenced by the work of Christian Williams and also Nancy Peluso and really was like, all right, let's let's apply what anarchists have been learning in terms of actually understanding their own environments with community policing and these things like this. And I wanted to apply this to to land conflicts. and And that's what I did. And I have a whole huge strand of work that really went in detail about this stuff.
00:07:47
Speaker
But to answer your question, you know, so what the case studies that I really looked at, you know, kind of counter-insurgency strategies was wind energy development in Oaxaca, Mexico. ah With my friend, Andrea Brock, we looked at coal, might the way the RWE, the biggest utility energy provider and one of the biggest coal miners and.
00:08:05
Speaker
and Germany, how they were actually applying against Bock forest defense. I looked at also in copper mining in Peru. And then I also, and then while I was in France and also in Portugal, you you see these tactics coming out. But one of the big, to answer your question, is that it's really the same stuff. You're just going to see different intensities of violence. So for example, in, for example, in Mexico, in Oaxaca or Peru, you're going to see You're going to there's going to be shootings, there's going to be deaths, there's going to be more like there's more over militarization. And maybe, you know, there's talk about kind of the way that kind of rape was used as a tactic where you see the exact same stuff in Germany, except you just see more of the threats of it and the lower intensity. And for example, you know, you know, land defenders were more or less locking themselves down to bulldozers and being sprayed with water cannons. Also like what happened at Nodal Paul.
00:09:00
Speaker
And but you'll have security guards threatening to end like sexually harassing it and threatening to rape women were in Latin America. This is more of a you know It's used as a military tactic. And obviously, um Lynn Steffen did a lot of great work in actually showing how this was a big part of stuff going on in Oaxaca and Chiapas in the 90s and 2000s as well. So it's for me, it's the same it's the same kind of textbook that's kind of being applied. There's different institutions, you know and as you probably know very well, like Latin, you know, via Israel, Colombia, Brazil, you know, they're actually making their own manuals and counterinsurgency in these strategies and tactics. So there is now kind of
00:09:36
Speaker
proliferation of this this kind of thinking of Walter Rodney, the the techniques the of scientific violence, you know, the techniques of scientific violence and how they're being trained. And so, yeah, you're just seeing that kind of splinter out and you're going to see them adjusting and kind of adapting to a different institutional and and kind of social cultures in those areas and how they're being played out, failed, don't work work entirely and and how people, yeah, or break them and are kind of outsmart them.
Predicting and Advising on Land Conflicts
00:10:06
Speaker
but Yeah, I mean, I think personally, one of the things that's really hard right now is that because I've specialized in these kind of technologies of terror, especially land conflicts, is that it's really predictable ah in terms of what's going to happen. And I've actually go in as kind of an advisor to people. And it's always weird as being an outsider, especially in a country where I don't speak the language probably. And I'm just like, hey, like this is what you're going to expect and the kind of main things that you should be preparing for. And it's.
00:10:33
Speaker
It's really hard when there's just kind of some rural farmer who loves their land and their lifestyle and then you kind of have to have these serious kind of political conversations with them and they're just... Someone like me can come in and tell you, they can map it all out, they can even start seeing it and I get calls all the time like, oh my God, you're right. It's like until you actually experience those things and have that experience and actually can... kind of internalize it or feel it, then it's actually still it's still in your head. It's kind of hard to understand and to make kind of those choices and those really difficult life choices when meanwhile, as you know very well, and and you're someone who's written and talked greatly about kind of the way NGOs, meanwhile, you've got, you know, different political parties, NGOs making land defenders feel really special and celebrating them on their covers. And so then there's that becomes these valves and these outs where you don't necessarily have to listen to like the autonomous militants.
00:11:24
Speaker
And people you know so it's yeah does it sound familiar to some of the urban context for you. Oh yeah yeah i mean i i was as you were speaking i was thinking about i do a lot of operational security training right for other people obviously. um It's one of the things I've kind of developed some skills in over the last 25 years or so. And one of the things I always run across every single time that I have these conversations with people that are new to things is I run into this like overly intellectualized understanding of what repression looks like.
00:12:01
Speaker
which often either is someone's imaginary about how some dude in a trench coat can be parked outside their house, um or it's this idea that someone's always reading your emails, or it's this idea that, well, everything is compromised anyway, so why do I have to care about privacy? Or the one I love is, I'm not doing anything wrong, so why do I have to care? um yeah Those are all my, these are, I love these conversations because what I have to do often So I have to sit people down and I have to say, all right. Well, really, the core part of repression that makes it something that we ourselves cannot just deal with is that we do not get to decide whether we are a threat to the state or not. Right. That they get to make that decision. They get to act based on that decision. And our job is to make it very difficult for them to identify us in the process of making that decision.
00:12:58
Speaker
Right. um And that doesn't always look like going dark. And in fact, often doesn't look like going dark. Right. But it really requires people to see it. Like I can talk to them about it all day, but it really requires them to see it.
Impact of Social Media on Protest Culture
00:13:13
Speaker
Right.
00:13:13
Speaker
So what what do you think about how I mean, this is something I'm actually having a hard time with right now that hey yeah ultimate and look so I, you know, I'm ah i'm a good liberal academic and I'm got my life all tied up in these computers and my name on things and whatever, you know, but I'm having a really hard time because I kind of need the younger people to step up for me, you know, help me out, show me what's going on in the street. But everyone thinks it's really cool to like,
00:13:37
Speaker
I feel like this kind of idea of actually being anonymous and actually protecting your identity and stuff like this is actually kind of been lost in protest culture. like Everyone wants to be on social media. everyone and see i i don't Correct me if I'm wrong, but i just I feel like ever since Greta came out and made it really hip to talk about climate justice, that everyone also just wanted to Yeah, just to kind of wear this badge and actually forgot the purpose of protest and struggle and actually what to do like how does what I'm saying sit right or am I just yeah, I think there's a couple of things going on there. I think first and we've seen this in the US around the protests around Gaza.
00:14:15
Speaker
We've really watched the revival of kind of the early 2000s liberal anti-war movement happen in the form of groups like the PSL and stuff like that. And they show up with budgets and they've got logos and they sit there and they go, hi, kids who don't know anything about how to get involved in politics. We will solve all of those questions for you. Here's a manual. Here's a group you can join. Here's a bunch of campaigns we're doing. Right now, that's also play acting politics.
00:14:42
Speaker
that the reality is is that those groups would get obliterated almost instantaneously if they ever became anything that even approximated the threat, right? That anarchist communities in the US have survived, and I use that term very intentionally, survived many rounds of extreme repression. And we've been able to do that because we've maintained a culture of trust and anonymity internally, right? and sort of a tendency to have a really good sense of who needs to know what and who doesn't and how not to talk about stuff, right? So I think there's the first shift that's happened is we've sort of gone back, unfortunately, to play acting politics, right? Where everything becomes about expression and discourse and activism and ceases to be about conflict with the state. That that entire mode of activity involves putting yourself forward to the state.
00:15:40
Speaker
Right. If one actually had an understanding of what that meant, you would never make that choice. Right. And so that's the first problem. I think the second problem, this exacerbates the first is I talked to a lot of younger people about this. So I'm, I'm old, right? Like I'm over 40. And as a result of that, I got to grow up and watch the internet develop as a thing.
00:16:05
Speaker
I got to be really freaked out about people knowing who I am. I got to play around with having 50 online identities that no one could ever trace because there's no information out there about anybody. I got to do all of that. And I got to understand that it was in those spaces with those varieties of different identities that I could sort of play around with ideas or have different conversations or sort of push past things like at the time I was young, push past things like adults arrogance about youth.
00:16:35
Speaker
right? And be an equal part of a conversation, right? I could do all of that to the degree that I couldn't be identified as far as who I was. And so when Facebook came about, when I was a freshman in college, I looked at that and went, that's really shady. Why would I give you my name? And at the time, student ID number, to a private company. And so I just never did it. And so I think there's there's a sense in which those of us that have been around, have watched the national security state grow since the early 2000s, have lived through repression,
00:17:04
Speaker
have always existed in a mode where we've kind of been either rejecting social media or sort of on the edge of rejecting social media, we come at things from a fundamentally different perspective.
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, but do you think it's this I kind of feel like people like lost ah i at least the younger generations and I for some reason want to blame everything on digital technologies. But I, I feel like the goal has been lost. You know, I mean, like, yeah in terms of the objective in terms of like, so everyone right now is obviously saying like, you know, ceasefire stop the war, but it's like, no, like,
00:17:39
Speaker
This the system has to stop. like is There has to be an economic damage. It has to learn that there's a cost for doing these things. and it seems like It seems like actual struggle and incurring economic damage is actually just kind of flitted away into Instagram in terms of like having nice, pithy signs that's going to get you some type of social capital or yeah attention in a certain way.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think part of that is, I mean, I've watched discourse around here in the States shift back to one about policy and that's happened concurrent to the rise of the electoral far right.
Political Landscape in the U.S. and Europe
00:18:14
Speaker
And so this is something Peter Gelderloos talks a lot about, right? I think this is a really important thing to kind of recognize in these struggles, which is especially in the U S and I know that this is happening in Europe, but I don't understand the context in the same way, but especially in the U S.
00:18:29
Speaker
When we saw the rise of a very overtly kind of unapologetic electoral far right, what we also saw was the rise of a kind of popular frontism in the United States. right It went under the term left unity and it was one of the biggest mistakes we have ever made. um I was not a proponent of this. right Anyone that's ever been listening to me, I've been a pretty extreme critic of this idea for a very long time, but essentially the concept was the same idea that we had sort of in the global justice movement, right? Which is all these people vaguely have politics that loosely agree about this one thing. So therefore we all have to work together.
00:19:07
Speaker
And what that often ends up in is... Hey, just to clarify really quick, sorry to interrupt. When you say global justice movement, is this kind of a reference to the anti-alter globalization movement? Yeah, from the late 90s, early 2000s, where there were anarchists, obviously, active in Seattle and things like that.
00:19:25
Speaker
were very spectacularized in a lot of ways, but to give you all a bit of a reality check, there were very few of us, right? There were not that many of us. I don't know. There's a pretty big handful, man. Well, there was there was a handful, but of the 30,000 people that were in Seattle, 300 of them were in the Black Block, right? Just to give you an idea of what that scale looks like. By the time we got to 2009 in Pittsburgh, the block was most of the march.
00:19:51
Speaker
Right. And so like that, that shift was really profound. And what we've seen is we've seen kind of in the Trump years, a retreat back. right, that we've sort of accepted the presence of, you know, state socialists, we've accepted the presence of liberals again, we've accepted the idea of coalition politics. And as a result, we've fallen into a politics of lowest common denominator, as you do every time you do coalition politics. But I feel like it's always been like that, to be honest, like, at least in the US, like my experience is that there's always been in this, I think it comes to this idea of this word radical, or even just this word activism, it's like,
00:20:29
Speaker
it This word radical, like, are you into radical politics or whatever people would say, kind of like that a long time ago, I still do, where was just kind of like anything that was like, I don't know, like anti-war, some type of, or like, you just, everyone was radical and got lumped into this. And I feel like it's always been like this, you know, know for some reason, I'm thinking like the Laughing Horse books in Portland and I think i think the the tone of action changed though. So one of the things I've been talking a lot to younger people about is at the end of the anti-war movement, 2004 or five, when the liberals left the streets, we were still there, right? And so we had 2005, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, all the way up to Occupy.
Direct Action vs Policy-Focused Protests
00:21:14
Speaker
And there wasn't really a liberal presence in the streets.
00:21:17
Speaker
After that, we had the George Floyd uprising. but Well, we had Mike Brown, then we had George Floyd, right? Also not a place where liberals really had much of a voice. This is Baltimore, but yeah. Yeah, Baltimore. I mean, these were like militant direct action sort of events. These are not things that liberals had a voice in. Something like Gaza, they've reduced to a policy question because it's something which is happening somewhere else. It can be easily abstracted and turned into policy.
00:21:45
Speaker
Right. But something like a riot on the street in your downtown camp. And so I think what's happened is we've kind of come into a moment in which that sort of politics of reducing things down to policy goals, to being able to achieve things you can see on paper. And that being the only goal of politics has really kind of had a bit of a renaissance. Unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, i I think it's because obviously like the military is daunting. Yeah.
00:22:13
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I think people, I mean, i I feel like there are a lot of people in struggle who are, you know, imagining going up against tanks or how to protest and throat or to break into different military facilities and disabled jets and tanks and logistical transport trucks or supply trucks. And I think that that's kind of, I see that being kind of marginalized a bit.
00:22:36
Speaker
in general, but maybe I'm transposing a lot of my experience now in a and Nordic countries because obviously this isn't the case in Germany where there are people still hopping fences and and kind of mingling with NATO infrastructure and things like this. but i I think one of the things that I notice in the States very specifically is the idea of what revolt looks like is really skewed. right And it's skewed often heavily in this i in this direction of imagining frontal conflict. right We see this in the militia movement in the US, where the militia movement is prepping for a frontal war with US military.
00:23:15
Speaker
they're getting the same gear, they're doing the same training, and they think somehow that's gonna mean that them who are weekend warriors are going to be able to stand up to the special forces, which is not true, right? But that entire understanding of conflict is rooted in the notion that there are organizations which fight struggles against the state.
00:23:35
Speaker
And that is an idea which is based in our historicization of the concept of revolution. That's not actually whatever occurs. What really occurs is that revolt happens when people, quote, normal people, so people outside of those stated organizations, start to get active directly. Start to challenge the state directly. Revolts have never been the result of organizational form.
00:24:01
Speaker
They've always been the result of that breaking down completely. right And so when you look at something like a militia or you look at something like the IRA, they end up in frontal conflicts with the state because they are organizationally isolated and easily identified and then therefore targeted. right If you look at something like a popular uprising though, say Argentina in the early 2000s, you couldn't do the same thing. There was no ability to identify quote, leadership.
00:24:29
Speaker
or anything like that, that you had to deal more with ah a broader sort of political shift that was happening actively in the streets much faster than the state could respond to it. And so I'm always talking to people about how revolt is not about destroying the state militarily.
Rise of Eco-Authoritarianism
00:24:48
Speaker
It's about disorganizing the ability of the state to function logistically, and that's different.
00:24:55
Speaker
Right. That's a fundamentally different thing. Of course. But I think in the end, like, I think when there are uprisings and upheavals and things like this, I think in the end, once there is a certain level of success in that disorganization, there becomes, and as it happened with George Floyd uprisings, you know, then there becomes a threat, the National Guard being sent in, you know, so there is.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah. And what happens after that? The loop and vaulter swoop in and they pick up everyone that leaves the streets. like that's That's exactly you know what happened during George Floyd. it's It's what's happening now with Gaza. I think you know one of the things I wanted to talk about in this this very clean leak sort of you know, flows into this is, you know, I know when we talk often, you know, one on one, um we often talk a lot about the rise of kind of eco-authoritarianism. right And, you know, a lot of figures kind of all over the kind of political spectrum have kind of made this argument from a variety of different, you know, directions that under the current conditions,
00:25:58
Speaker
ecological control or the attempt to, quote, save the planet um is only effective in a completely totalitarian sort of context, right? That ah a lot of these thinkers are talking about this in a cautionary sense, right? I mean, Takoon talks about this. I mean, you've got thinkers from the 1980s talking about this stuff, right? And sort of the risk.
00:26:18
Speaker
of sort of biopolitical control by the state in relation to ecological preservation, right? And now what we started to see is we've started to see people not take that as a cautionary tip.
00:26:30
Speaker
You start to see people talk about this as a good thing. the Climate change is here. There's a climate emergency. We have to do anything by any means and ignore whatever our political protocols to stop this by any means necessary. so the line And it it mirrors a lot of the class reductionism you see in Marxism, right? Where all of a sudden this one thing is the only political question, right? That it is just a question of ecology and not only a question of ecology, it's a question of preserving the planet.
00:26:59
Speaker
right not understanding ecology differently. And so those are two very large assumptions, I think. right And ones that don't really hold up to any kind of of intellectual rigor at all. um But that doesn't mean that they're not popular. right And specifically with people like Malm and stuff like this, there's this sense in which there are certain people who find that vision of authoritarianism very compelling.
00:27:27
Speaker
And what I'm trying to understand, you know, I've got a lot of thoughts about why things like that happen here, but what I'm trying to understand is why are we seeing that drift, right? That ecology movements, kind of like the anti-nuke movement used to be these hubs of decentralized organizing and anti-authoritarianism and things like this. Why are we watching that shift happen? Like what is it about these visions that is really pulling people in that direction?
00:27:58
Speaker
Well, for me, I think it's two things and I don't know where to kind of begin. I guess I'll begin where some, I just think this is a horrible patriarchal kind of hangover, you know, where it is like patriarchal conditioning and everyone's looking for a daddy to come fix the big issue and looking to some big grand leader, blah, blah, blah. And it really is just this kind of patriarchal hangover that kind of is leading to this and people, which obviously the what the whole Marxist canon, which, you know,
00:28:26
Speaker
on the European side is a bit stronger in terms of, you know, yeah, I mean, there's still Stalinists in Germany and things like this, you know, so there's stuff like that. So in one sense, there's this patriarchy and this kind of big man's gonna, you know, daddy's gonna fix things, you know, the used car salesman is gonna come and save the day. But then this is reinforced and I guess reinvigorated through this just even this kind of idea climate of climate change itself.
Local Interventions vs Global Climate Narratives
00:28:51
Speaker
And the climate science and world system, world system, not world system theory, but But the Earth System Science, where it's this, now we're thinking on, and and it's really just the kind of this sick hangover, you know, that a lot of the feminists, you know, Vin Dineshiva, Caroline Merchant, and so many others talked about this idea of modern mechanical science and this this need to actually constantly put everything in a petri dish, control it. And this, which is ultimately the foundations of like the these kind of sick ecological relationships that is kind of Euro-American, Western modernity. But it's now taken this and and expanded it to a planetary scale.
00:29:25
Speaker
To say, oh, we have to like control the whole planet. You know, climate change is this big issue. And as I've been saying a lot with my talks related to this book is, you know, it's this problem of yeah's I mean, and peter you i mean this problem ah this idea of climate change is is a crazy sleight of hand. you know not Again, it's not talking about production in terms of like the the these systems. And again, it's very interesting how it's a lot of Marxists promoting like ecological Leninism or and things like this. And these people that are talking about means of production constantly, but somehow have no real grasp of logistics and supply chain.
00:30:03
Speaker
but you know so But there's this idea that, oh, it's climate change. Oh, it's such a big issue. we need you know oh It's bringing it to this level where it's it's ah it's forgetting that climate change and ecological disaster comes like from 100 million thousand different local interventions. yeah that It's the factories, it's the cars, it's the fucking data centers and the the computers and the way that we're kind of living these things. you know Never mind this. But we watched this kind of this discursive kind of political strategy to kind of shift it to make it this big, grand issue that only big figures like international governance panels, states, corporations, and some large NGOs, only they are the ones that can actually address climate change.
00:30:46
Speaker
And so it's become this really big, scary thing. And then the natural progression is like, yes, we need big leaders. We we need ah we need a revival of Leninism so we can save the day. it just like It's like, man, you what you guys smoking, you know? not Not to mention, and which is more maybe significant for people in the US, is to remember that this was a project that actually already happened. And it came actually rather organically through the eco-anarchist milieu with Derek Jensen and Deep Green Resistance, where we're look man I think there's a certain level of respect for Derek Jensen where he was going around. Endgame was good. He came out of the milieu. He would go into these liberal art colleges and actually talk about the importance of attacking industrial infrastructure and changing our relationships with the environment and was radicalizing so many people.
00:31:35
Speaker
and And then he was but making all this buildup about deep green resistance. And then if anyone paid any attention to armed groups or these politics and saw what they did there, then it was like, holy shit, this was a disaster. sir not Not to mention the transphobia, not to mention all the other kind of things that came with it.
00:31:52
Speaker
But, I mean, and and at the time with Deep Green Resistance, I was actually just shocked. I'm like, hey, what about all the, at like, what about all the Earth Liberation Front, informal anarchist federations? What about all these other actions claimed, unclaimed by eco-anarchists, not to mention different kinds of indigenous struggles that's going on around the world against these things already? Like, I was like, how come are they, how come they're ignoring this? Now, here we are 10 or 12 or whatever years later, we have someone saying, anarchist ideas are useless. They must be combative, eco-Leninism, hooray.
00:32:23
Speaker
And I'm just kind of like, oh, okay, academically, I wonder how they're going to confront deep green resistance. And if sure enough, they they don't deal with it because it's all, it's like spectacle, you know, like they're not taking this seriously. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no totally. So it's, ah there's a lot of really harsh things we can say about deep green resistance. And for some reason, they never wanted to listen to it, which I actually don't understand either.
00:32:46
Speaker
But at least they actually really tried from where they're starting from and it came from within the movement, like it came within like the Eco-Anarchist movement and trying to come up through Occupy and things like this. But now we've got this even more like academic guys coming out of the university, intellectualized, and really like not even academic, but also not under any level of scrutiny or feedback from Verso and these different publishers of this kind of idea of eco-Leninism that It's just like, what? And and not to mention, you you know, you mentioned Peter Galaluz earlier. It's just like, how have these academics completely ignored someone who has taken very seriously this conversation around nonviolence?
00:33:27
Speaker
debunked it, did a whole overview from like the 1990s to like till Occupy or whatever about all the different uprisings. like How can this be ignored? Not to mention Ward Churchill and so many other people later, or or the different action groups from the George Jackson Brigades or Action Director, not to mention all the Latin American ones, Tupomaros. How has this conversation around struggle been so watered down? ignore it like why I guess the long story short is I'm perplexed.
00:33:55
Speaker
That one andres mama somehow become the figure had to talk about these things and do how people tolerate this to a degree and that. For example political ecologist i mean either weather in academia or outside of it's been relatively tolerated in. And maybe it's just it's and it comes down to this kind of this climate again it just comes back to climate change is a framework in this idea of climate justice.
00:34:19
Speaker
and how it kind of created this mass and manufactured this kind of mass interest that really didn't take any qualitative interest of what was there before. You know, in your most recent book, you kind of walk through a lot of experiences and studies related to conflicts around extraction of the green economy.
Importance of Rootedness in Ecological Struggles
00:34:36
Speaker
And one of the themes that kind of comes up repeatedly is one of locality and autonomy. right So like namely in the struggles which were effective and resilient, um there often occurs a sort of discourse of rootedness or place in which you're sort of in a place and you're fighting for that place as opposed to showing up at a protest camp and leaving in a week.
00:35:01
Speaker
or something like that. right That there's actually this attempt to make place. And you know before Aragorn passed, ah you know one of the things he talked a lot about was this idea of home and rootedness and place and that these were the spaces that we found our grounding to fight. right That we were there, we could carve out different kinds of life that we had stake in the people around us. That we weren't just these kind of abstract political agents sort of floating through generic space. We were sort of very directly rooted in the location of the conflict that we were fighting, right?
00:35:36
Speaker
And so I'd love to hear you speak a little bit to what you think the role of rootedness is in these kinds of struggles. Like what is that dynamic, right? And why is that dynamic so much more powerful in a lot of ways than this kind of pretty superficial kind of form of activism that we usually see in the US and Europe where people kind of like show up, do a thing, and then just kind of go home back to their lives.
00:36:02
Speaker
Yeah, you know, what's actually really interesting is that, so while it's true, while I advocate kind of territorial defense struggles and kind of being rooted in the forest and and engaging in a process of permanent ecological conflict by by engaging, at the same time, rootedness in place is a double-edged sword, especially in terms of matter of anonymity and being legible and being able to be found. So it's it's hard. It's actually a delicate balance in terms of actually Yeah, you want to protect the forest and the forest has always been an important place for freedom in providing sanctuary for people, specifically people on the margins or people kind of resisting empire. But as the thing is, you know, there there are in one sense, there is like how to develop that connection, how to have a sense of place, how not to end up some academic running around the world 10 ways from Sunday and kind of losing yourself a bit.
00:36:57
Speaker
And avoiding that and then at the same time main so having that sense of place but then also maintaining a certain level of anonymity and where you are in and movement and I guess kind of an aspect of kind of no madness where you were. You are moving around in this this allows you a greater capacity to kind of struggle and to fight but this in the end.
00:37:18
Speaker
To be able to maintain a level of fluidity between conflicts and struggles to to be flexible to be and to also remain unknown also depends on actually. Having those people those friends those people that you're close to whether they ah they are humans or whether they're trees that are kind of there and kind of stable for you which is distress.
00:37:39
Speaker
maybe the importance in terms of militant struggle of I guess logistics in terms of the support of people in certain places to make sure that people can flow in and out of struggles so they can So yeah, so because sometimes it's hard to actually escalate and to defend things in ah in an area where everyone knows everyone. There's old village ties and rifts and blood feuds that go back either 10, 15, 20, maybe a hundred years if we're talking about different indigenous villages in Mexico or somewhere else, but it could be anywhere really, you know? so it's
00:38:11
Speaker
I guess to answer your question though, I think it's important to to maintain this connection with with land, with water, with trees and with these but different kind of territories, but at the same time, if you're kind of what stagnant will rot maybe, you know where you might get kind of stuck and dragged into kind of some type of political circus or just even the kind of the the drama that kind of unfolds in these areas and sometimes is around the church and whatever weird social pecking order gets that gets kind of that comes about in like kind of the village tyranny, where it's a lot of these rural areas are heavily affected. It depends where we're talking about, but a lot of rural areas are heavily affected by the church, and everyone is kind of struggling with different levels of certain type of morality and kind of oppression, and and most certainly patriarchy. so it's ah yeah it's It's a tough one, but I think being rooted in having that connection, but then learning how to
00:39:06
Speaker
to still maintain flexibility and movement as important. Both of us in work that we've done have talked a lot about our critiques of ideas like movementism, right? Like the idea that there are social movements which are these privileged spaces of political resistance where everything is going to happen. And I've talked a lot about broadening trains of conflict, right?
00:39:30
Speaker
um in your most recent text, you're talking about ah the idea of permanent ecological conflict, right? In relation to the Zod, in relation to resistance in Chile, in Germany, in Portugal. But maybe, you know, this is ah this is an idea that in a lot of ways flies in the face of the way that movements tend to function, right? Where movements tend to be these kind of spaces of temporary action where we sort of show up at a place, we do a thing, and then some issue wanes and people go home and then they come back for the next thing. And so this idea of permanent conflict, right or in this case, very specifically permanent permanent ecological conflict, is something which tends in a direction that's different than activism, I think, in a lot of ways.
00:40:17
Speaker
oh yeah um And so maybe like get into that idea a little bit, like what does it mean to talk about permanent conflicts, right? and And what does it mean to, you know, contrast this sort of against what we usually see in movement spaces today? Yeah. I mean, I mean, so you're hitting the nail on the head and kind of where this came from. And it really, I mean, I guess the more recent articulation of it, it's a reaction to the anti-globalization movement. And then I, which I guess you kind of,
00:40:45
Speaker
which kind of transformed itself into the climate movement a little bit. Like in 2010, it became more ecological climactic with like the but the copin Copenhagen. But the idea is, you know is it was great, crashed the meeting, but you know as i mean I guess this tendency still exists and there's maybe a place for it. Crashed the meeting, but you know it's a year it's a year of organizing preparation.
00:41:08
Speaker
There's a nice big spectacular event of two or three days. There's an endless a lot of damage. People coming together, you know finding each other, making a lot of damage. And then there's another year or more of you know legal cases and problems and a lot of resources going towards kind of making that work. And so obviously, there's a conversation like, hey, like we can't just do this kind of weekend warrior thing is as fun as it is, as as great as it kind of breaks isolation.
00:41:36
Speaker
And so like, at least the way the book kind of, the the book kind of takes it more and uses the kind of the German on the Humbot Forest struggle is kind of a way to kind of take up that conversation and that kind of, I guess that genealogy. And it really is just, it's, it's very simple and it's obviously, it's obviously inspired by all the different and autonomous indigenous projects across the world, where it's the idea of, you know, you've got to live in place, you've got to develop, you've got to know the, well and one way to say is you've got to know the know the terrain.
00:42:05
Speaker
you got to know the place, you got to have a connection to it, you got to develop and build a relationship to it, and therefore you want ah you want to protect your friends, you want to protect things that you love, you want to protect that space. So it is this idea of, at least in this kind of ecological context, of really inhabiting territory and learning to fight from there in a and a way that isn't just symbolic, it's in a way that's actually It breaks that kind of the symbolicness in the sense of that you are having a positive project of developing anti-capitalist relations, strengthening your relationship with the the environment around you. And then from there moving in a way that will hopefully cause real economic damage to these different earth destroyers or companies or things like this. But yeah, so the book is, I guess, is like I mentioned before, is supposed to be titled permanent ecological conflict. And it it really is this idea of just.
00:42:54
Speaker
how to how to actually maybe be a bit more serious. So it's as individual it it as it is communal in the sense of its it's really up to people to decide who they are, what their relationships are and how they wanna carry themselves and what type of skills they wanna have and what they wanna do and how pissed are they and how are they gonna kind of organize and do things. And this obviously isn't in separation to anything, but it is a way to Yeah, to kind of move away from ultimately these kind of planned and kind of managed, i sometimes I like to call it kind of these kind of colonial methods of organizing that are very bureaucratic based on certain divisions of labor, very public, and that tend to just evolve into kind of a lot of talking meetings, discussions, and is really people, I feel like in many ways is setting people up to be like the next politician if they're successful in any meaningful way.
00:43:47
Speaker
kind of set them up to be like the politicians of tomorrow, where but because you're kind of already approaching issues like not living it, not being it. You're you're figuring out how to organize it, organize people, organize things, how you become ah ultimately a social movement bureaucrat in some ways. And this isn't... And I mean, I i obviously am speaking in kind of harsh terms because I think there's really important stuff and work that people are doing, but I think I say it like this so we can maybe try to have a bit of a... We can try to have a bit of a kind of attention against this to kind of move beyond that or to figure out how we can organize in more creative and more subversive and more effective ways and effective, not just in, you know, making trouble, but in actually having more fun and feeling freer and being kind of having a better use of your time and and enjoying life in the end. But yeah, I'm kind of going on further. So maybe we can get a little more specific in this, but it's really how to yeah how to live in conflict, how to live yeah and how to live joyfully in the process. I think, you know, there's a lot of questions that
00:44:47
Speaker
ah arise in this conversation. I mean, i'm there's sort of two directions i'm I'm going in my head, but I think maybe something that's a question that's arisen a lot in conversations I've had about ecological resistance are goals, right? What are we doing? What are we trying to do? Because traditionally, ecology movements are based in kind of naive ideas about saving the earth, right? That somehow we're going to like,
00:45:15
Speaker
roll things back and live on a planet that isn't collapsing and that there's like easy ways to do that or like that can be done through policy or something like that. I think what we're seeing is not only is that not true, but that you know probably the notion that we're going to quote, save the earth is potentially not the right framing. Kind of like how I think a lot of us decided years ago that saving the world wasn't the right framing, right? That there were aragances to that or there were naivetés to that that really shaped the way that we acted and in ways that were deeply problematic. And so
00:45:51
Speaker
How do we move like, what is the role of, for lack of a better term, almost like a conservationist almost mentality that really forms the foundation of a lot of traditional kind of like more liberal ecological discourse. How does that sort of mentality start to interact with the realities that we're living today? And what does that mean as far as how we need to be organizing and how we need to be sort of preparing or talking about those things in the context of the work we're doing?
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head, you know, and I think where I'm trying to work, kind of trying to push with this is that, you know, this idea of saving the earth or mother earth, it's kind of this moral structure. It's this thing outside you, this thing that you're trying to kind of go for. And obviously what permanent ecological conflict is trying to do is it's trying to root conflict within yourself.
00:46:41
Speaker
It's not trying to put in the revolution. It's not trying to put in Mother Earth. It's not trying to put it in the poor people. It's not trying to put in the working class. It's locating the responsibility within you and where you stand in your relationships to do these things. And so it's and this is obviously not just an individual thing, but it begins there. And it's it's the idea, and I guess you could say this is very basic kind of anarchist principles, is that that you're actually moving in a way that you know is the right thing for you, but it's it's going to have wider implications if you you if you know that you want to have clean water, clean food, if you want to have happier birds and cats or whatever you have around you or soil.
00:47:20
Speaker
then then you're going to be struggling because those things are you. They are your friends. You are connected to them and you have a relationship with them. and But you struggle and that place comes from within you. And that that's where it becomes permanent. It becomes permanent in this relationship that you try to uphold. And I guess you can say, you know, it's not about rights. It's about responsibilities that you kind of you hold for yourself or you hold amongst your friends. And I think one of the things I guess in practice that's concerning is how some of this stuff can become It can become very stringent, maybe hyper discipline. It can also become very undisciplined and become a new commodity in a lot of ways, which is maybe yeah where things have kind of gone. But it's, you know, there is, yeah, I mean, it's been a hard time people burning themselves out by trying to be the best, most militant anarchist there is and holding these standards and not really having that care or sensitivity or understanding sometimes within
00:48:16
Speaker
kind of different and kind of hard struggles. but But yeah, it's really about, it begins with really putting it in yourself and not putting it outside you and recognizing that you are the environment.
00:48:27
Speaker
and that you are the ecosystem, that you are dropping it and to to make what you want to create. I mean, what's interesting to me about that is is the way that it presents a very different kind of epistemic model from the way that politics in the modern era is traditionally understood, right? So what I mean by that, for those listening, is We tend to understand the political through lenses of things like ideology, right? That we construct a conceptual framing that we've decided explains the truth of the world and we then apply that framing to everything. We see this with Marxists who are constantly trying to like shoehorn a Marxist economics analysis into like baseball trades. I mean like it really gets kind of absurd and we do we do see that
00:49:11
Speaker
pretty consistently and in in the space. The other place that it can come from is morality, right? and We see that a lot with things like the religious right. But in both of those contexts, what's happening is that, you know, sort of using the language you've been using, politics becomes grounded by something that's outside of life, right? Literally, it becomes grounded in this kind of dead, abstract, conceptual space.
00:49:33
Speaker
which has this advantage of allowing us to sit there and say that we think we've understood something true about life and so therefore we're acting quote the right way but ultimately has these really fascistic overtones to it right and has these really kind of epistemically authoritarian overtones to it as well as being sort of and absurdity, right? The idea that me as a person in the Rust Belt in the middle of 2024 could understand the totality of all possible things in all possible ways is kind of a really absurd thing to think. And so, you know, what you're talking about a lot, you know, in a really core way is kind of this
00:50:15
Speaker
difference between politics is understood in modernity and politics is understood from the point of departure of autonomy, right? Like I'm living in this world, I'm doing these things, right? What does that look like in this context? I mean, I think a lot of the ecology movement does have kind of universalist overtones in a lot of ways, right? yeah But I'm seeing that shift a lot. And so what does that mean as far as, you know, how organizing happens, right? It it feels a lot like a lot of what we're both talking about in our work is are things like, hey, really, maybe the protest or the meeting is not where politics happens. Maybe politics happens somewhere else. But that really changes everything about how we do work. So what is that looking like in this space right now?
00:51:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I just realized I didn't answer the first part of your question, which we're kind of getting at
Critique of Environmentalism and Climate Justice
00:51:05
Speaker
here. I mean, that's, that's kind of the thing. That's kind of the problem. And it really is this kind of perspective and worldview. And I guess thinking of ah Joseph Gardena is, you know, social war is trying to teach you to see things from the perspective of kind of the powerful. And so when we, when we relate to nature or the environment or our ecosystems or our habitats as something separate, we're constantly putting ourselves into this planner or managerial gaze.
00:51:30
Speaker
And we're constantly separating our schools from it. And then so this in the 80s and 90s, this had something called fortress conservation. I guess you have it even much earlier and it was ultimately quite of but part of a genocidal campaign to clear the forests of the Northwest of the United States and elsewhere that got exported to Africa and other places. But it's the idea that, you know, nature's pristine, humans aren't in it, they're destroying, therefore let's clear the natives out of there and not really pay attention to really what was going on with these ecologies.
00:51:56
Speaker
And the big thing from like environmental anthropology and sociology was ultimately like, hey, guess what? You're pristine Amazon or you're different forests or wherever in the world or jungles, as they'd sometimes like to be called. These were actually created by humans in our giant forest gardens. and And so when we have this kind of modern environmentalism, obviously it has really great intentions. It had good things. It at least began with direct action.
00:52:23
Speaker
And it was, yeah, Earth First was doing amazing despite some of the weird shit from Dave Foreman and all the kind of racist, weird things going on there. But, uh, but in terms of introducing monkey wrenching and really trying to take direct action and put people's kind of mouth where their, where their cash, put the mouth, walk the talk, I guess.
00:52:41
Speaker
but it's But ultimately what happens, it was still kind of rooted in that discourse that that naturally leads you, and especially when there becomes repression, especially when there becomes infighting, will naturally lead you towards kind of policy circles, which I think Dave Forman went, and trying to kind of manage conservation areas, keep humans out of it, and just really this kind of defunct environmentalism that that made no sense. And then you have this kind of the, then as, since what we're talking might know, then there was kind of the primitivist articulation of it, which I think had a lot of great critiques on modernity. There's a lot of good things I think we can say about primitivism. However, it does oddly brand, ah you know, Christian theology very well onto things and upheld this idea of kind of pristine nature that in a way that's very concerning, which isn't to say that we don't want to develop quality. We don't want to develop better relationships and and kind of our habitats and where we live. Of course we do. And we're watching these things being degraded, which I think there's in a lot of other people were good at popularizing.
00:53:40
Speaker
But at the same time it's still upholding this kind of separation even and ironically while it was about rewilding and going back to it. but But here, but like, so here's the thing is that we have, there is this kind of crazy separation going on with general environmentalism and it towards heads towards policy. And then I just, even when I think some of this was starting to change with a lot of the earth, like the, a lot of the kind of eco-anarchist stuff going on and a lot of the kind of more militant environmental movement stuff, even though, as I think we all know that the infighting, the divisions are just like depressing in terms of like the different
00:54:15
Speaker
Sierra Club and not only not to mention all these different Greenpeace Sierra Club ultimately working is like bodyguards for extractive companies. I think some media had a good little expose on that some time ago. And then ultimately we're pacifying resistance, but then more. So while all this was happening and you had the kind of the really good militant earth, first up eco-anarchist things, then all of a sudden sometime around 2014, at least in my experience, everyone starts talking about climate justice, which then takes this like degree of separation.
00:54:46
Speaker
even further and so all right so now we're talking about the climate and i guess one of the big critiques of this i think peter said it good i think we talked about last time climate reductionism you know like also a means of reduction or carbon tunnel vision but this idea that I mean, again, and I've been saying this a lot. It's just like, all right, great. Cool. We have the alarmist thing like, oh, the planet's dying. you know It's as big as the planet. Climate change is changing the world. Ah, we got to do something. We got to take action, right? So there's a benefit to that, to try to raise that awareness.
00:55:20
Speaker
However, this has just really been a disabling and narrative that really just put this into the hands of companies, governments, international committees, setting up new green markets, whether from crazy conservation schemes to geoengineering, to i mean take green hydrogen now, and and justifying all these kind of heavy industrial projects that have nothing to do with actually saving the environment, but really just saving the economy.
00:55:45
Speaker
and creating some new, dope, kind of crazy shit. And it's just, it's really boring and tiring. So it's, so yeah, this is what happened. and but And again, I think this is the point of the book with like, with really trying to talk about permanent ecological conflict and how it's manifesting in different places. It's just, it's like really, and and it's it's really a reaction to the climate movement where there were there was all this kind of public relations, excitement, climate, UN, n you name it, all the different talks.
00:56:13
Speaker
I mean, and that's the sad thing. I think we mentioned this last time, you know, it went from crash the meeting and shut down the COP conferences to like, and then they did the state of emergency in 2015, where that was still kind of a little bit of the vibe. And now it's like, let's go in and talk with the leaders and it's just like again there's been this kind of this breakdown but the whole point of the book is to be like hey if people are serious about this there have been and still are people fighting and pretty for real about this and you got to kind of look at yourself where this is and again but when we talk politics or anything like this we have to really know like we got to look to know who we are where we stand what we really think and how we're actually going to react under severe stress and pressure and this is
00:57:00
Speaker
This is no easy task and it's a force in in maturity that maybe no one really wants to have. but So yeah, I guess it's just, yeah, it's just kind of a, from an ecological conflict really trying to kind of meet this and it's by no means a hopeful thing, but at the same time, at least in a transcendent sense, it's not hopeful, you know? But in the immediate, yeah I think it's the only place where one can find sustenance and joy and and to actually begin living and creating the way they want.
00:57:29
Speaker
you know one of the questions that kind of comes up for me when we're talking about this is we're we're talking about kind of localizing fighting where fighting happens, right? But the discourse on climate tends to be one that frames everything around the concept of the globe.
00:57:48
Speaker
right? Everything's a global problem, a global solution that requires these huge things. And so there's this kind of scale that often gets baked in to the narrative, right? And that scale tends to facilitate certain kinds of politics, right? Like eco-Leninism, which is really the taking of that managerial mentality to its kind of logical extent, right? How do we break from that? I mean, it's it's so latent in everything that we talk about when it comes to ecology that we're talking about global ecology, global systems, global carbon levels, global, you know, emissions. Everything has this kind of
00:58:29
Speaker
feel of you are a small part of this really huge global problem that only really big institutions can solve. How do we break from that? It seems so baked into so much of that narrative. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a paper called the green economy is counterinsurgency, really trying to look at actually how if we look at the idea of the green economy in the way that environmentalism has been shifted into these and ultimately into green capitalism.
00:58:56
Speaker
which is really just capitalism and there's nothing really that green about it other than a marketing ploy or the way that it's, the way it's marketing extractivism. But I mean, ultimately one can look at this and kind of what we're talking about is a strategy to like overwhelm and to paralyze people, you know, and this way to just make it so big, to scale it out, to just overwhelming us.
Addressing Climate Anxiety
00:59:16
Speaker
And I guess it's a hot thing. I keep hearing about like climate anxiety and how there's a generation of people who are depressed and have earth grief and these things like this and not to disparage it.
00:59:27
Speaker
But it seems like a direct result of this. i And it's very strange. I don't even know if I should be even talking about or feeding into this kind of these kind of stories or narratives. But it's kind of like, okay, this framework of climate change is kind of being designed to kind of overwhelm.
00:59:41
Speaker
and to paralyze people and then is generating this type of grief and then and guilt or whatever. And then it's it's just very strange where it's just kind of like, I feel like the people who get guilt, I guess I'm having a lack of empathy or sympathy for understanding how there is this, again, it's this like, poor me, I feel bad about this where there, there hasn't been this kind of like, Hey, like,
01:00:03
Speaker
What are we going to do? If things are so bad, then i guess is I guess it's a little bit of the nihilist line you know of like, you know what type of monster are you going to be? like If it's really so bad, then how are you going to actually enjoy the shit out of this? How are you going to actually do what's right for you? if you and i and you know I guess it's something I come back to and I came, a friend of mine in England a long time ago,
01:00:26
Speaker
I was just, you know, you get sad about stuff. I get, and I'm a pretty whiny person in general, you know? And and they're just like, they're like, Xander, if you're really like, if you really don't like what's going on and you really can't stand all these cameras and this authoritarian control and all blah, blah, blah, things like, you're gonna have a great time messing with it, tearing it down, pulling it here, peeing on it there, doing it like this. And I was just kind of like, I was like, yeah, you're right. You know, like if it's really, if it's really a problem and it really upsets you, then like,
01:00:55
Speaker
Awesome. like How are we going to have fun with this? like what like let's enjoy let's Let's enjoy this as much as we can and keep it as real as we can given the things that we have to do and be in this life. I'm not necessarily speaking about being self-destructive or destructive or whatever, but you know how can we actually think expansively to yeah make our lives and the world a better place along with it? you know and And when I say that, it's again, I'm tapping into this make the world a better place thing, but when I say this, it's Maybe it's the plural, versatile worlds, the many worlds that fit in worlds, but like, how are you going to make these kinds of spaces of autonomy and how are you going to make, how are you going to, how are you going to improve the soil? How are you going to make happy cats? How are you going to make the trees happy? How are you going to live your life? You know, like how do you immediately do this? So I guess.
01:01:41
Speaker
You asked a pretty big question and I'm giving you a pretty simple and kind of humble answer and that's just you have to make fun as the world burns and we have to do the best we can and we don't do this for results or let me let me temper that. we don't But we don't do this to have some to be the revolutionary hero of tomorrow, to go put something new on our CV, how this police station or this thing or this company was overthrown. We do this because it's an obligation for ourselves to kind of be right with ourselves before we die, you know, like how to kind of just be able to sit right. I'm gonna be honest with you and maybe this is, you know, I'm having a hard time doing that given how much I play academia right now. Even as much as intellectual masturbation is really fun, it's just ah
01:02:24
Speaker
But i think those are the stakes you know i think that's i think we have to begin there we have to i think that's i mean to sound cliche you know the secret is to really begin we were once told in the nineties and i and i think that's the thing is like we are dealing with governmental and entities that are saying hey.
01:02:42
Speaker
It's far away. Don't begin. We'll do it for you. It will be okay. Buy the right product, vote for the right person, pray to the right God, you know or something like this. And it's it's to say like, hey, think and it's as cliche as it can get. you know Think global, act local. Again, make it. you know and We're still there. We're still on this point, but I just think we're dealing with different waves and stages of demoralization, naivete, political ambitions of people trying to want to struggle and fight and and having kind of disconnections from earlier generations and people. And I think it really is just kind of working through our collective cycles and waves of depression and kind of bringing each other up and making sure we're eating right, doing healthy stuff and gaining different capabilities and skills to do that, you know, and and really
01:03:30
Speaker
and There's a great book, the loss of happiness and market democracies, some sociologists, you know, like the things that lead to subjective well being, you know, the technical term for happiness is first and foremost, the quality of our relationships.
01:03:43
Speaker
Second, our education, learning things, no matter what it is. And third, our ability to make a choice, whether right or wrong. And so by doing these things and building this like these and making more friends, improving our relationships, gaining new skills, being more troublemaking, being more caring, you know, these are these are ways to actually alleviate these things. And I think the idea is how much we can sync up not only with each other, but also with our with different plants and spirits and creatures to actually to do this and to gain that strength, courage and capability.
01:04:12
Speaker
two to go to the town hall and to petition them or go to the the meeting and two to be a more active participant in your community, if you know what I mean. As you said, for as cliche as it is, that's kind of what I think a lot of us did was just sort of start doing things, right?
Evolution of Anarchist Movements and Resistance
01:04:31
Speaker
like um you know For those of you that weren't around 20-something years ago, none of us knew what the hell we were doing.
01:04:39
Speaker
just to make that really, really clear. All of these structures that exist in anarchist movements in the United States today were derived from heavy trial and error. There wasn't a sense that we were sitting there going, this is what we're going to do next, and then it just worked. Most things that people tried failed.
01:05:03
Speaker
right and the vast vast vast majority of them failed but it was strangely the aggregate of those failures that added up to something really amazing and right along with some successes here and there and i think it makes the next question i'm going to ask really hard to answer of course which is you know i always resist this question heavily but it's one that i think is important to at least be in dialogue with but You know, maybe in the last 10 to 15 minutes that we're here, what does this mean for us? Like, what comes next? You know, I think there's really always this question of, you know, we've pushed things really far.
01:05:47
Speaker
What's the next thing that's going to happen? Where's that going to get pushed? What are you seeing in that direction? I mean, I see a lot of different kind of trajectories heading off in a lot of different, a lot of different directions right now. Just to give you all ah an example, like just around cop city, there's been more sabotage done around cop city than the entirety of the earth liberation front in 10 years.
01:06:11
Speaker
Right. And that's just one trajectory that has really picked up on this kind of a very insurrectionist inspired sort of way of doing action. But there's many more. And so where do we see these things going? I mean, like we're pushing into territory that we're not familiar with. And I think we've been doing this for a couple of decades already at this point. But what does this look like now? Like where are we going in the next few years in these movements?
01:06:38
Speaker
I mean, I don't really know if I'm being honest, I can't see so clearly because i just i there's just so much stuff going on. i When I think about these things, I'm thinking mostly about you know the US, Europe, and Mesoamerica, and there's just so much crazy stuff and fluctuations going on between different movements, like super sad things, some wins here and there. I'm not entirely sure, but it's ah yeah but like for for sure, the Stop Cop City movement, you know so much respect, so much love, so much appreciation for what his but has grown and built in the United and the united Snakes. you know like it's
01:07:16
Speaker
In these occupied lands, there hasn't been resistance like this in such an amazing way. and since I can remember, you know, you have to go to a hit before my yeah before my time before I was born. Yeah, and so it's so beautiful. And it's it's great. And it's obviously coming at such a high cost. So much work, so much repression, so much surveillance, so much stupid comments on the internet, so much weird dumb politicians saying things. And it's, I guess I just want to say this, ah just yeah, just to give love to that movement in the way that people have been developing thought and action and carrying it forward. And and just hopefully that
01:07:49
Speaker
Yeah, even if from what I hear that things being built, I think there's been a really an amazing precedent and example and and something to really learn from to how to improve and to and to make these kind of struggles better and and and think that's a great example of thinking local but acting global and and remembering. And I guess it's this kind of thing I work a lot with.
01:08:07
Speaker
you know, wind turbines and energy infrastructure and things like this. And, you know, everyone's like, oh, it's not in my backyard. But it's like nothing is just in someone's backyard. You know, if you're talking about farmland that's being taken, it's connected to it's connected to water. It's connected to the food that people are eating. It's connected like nothing's not connected. And and so. Yeah, I mean, so what mean so what does this mean for us?
01:08:34
Speaker
For me, I'm just doing what I'm doing. You know, i I always have, you know, and I think this goes back to what I was saying before, is I think everyone has to look at themselves in the mirror and where they stand on this and how they feel and the how wrong they know the system is and what it's doing and and do what they can and to and to just to do what they can by what they can and where they are and the friends they're around, you know, it's really.
01:09:01
Speaker
contextual for people, skills, environments, friendships, own and really what they wanna make and what they wanna be. And it really comes down to that. And so for me, what that means is I'm just doing, I just saw a space, I guess over 10 years ago now, I saw a space where no one understood why everyone was burning things, why they were flipping a ah downtown completely upside down frequently. no one like I was in a situation where I would see, I would frequently see it. I mean, this was a span of a year where I was in, I saw some situations that were so crazy and it made perfect sense to me. I was like, yeah, but they're doing it. They're going for it. And then there'd just be all these journalists and people being like, why are they burning the finance? Or they knew why they're burning the finance. But there's a lot of people, why are they doing this? Why are they fighting like this? And I just was already having so many stupid conversations. I just i just saw that there needed to be a desperate bridge for people to understand.
01:10:01
Speaker
like to just I just saw there was such a need for people to understand why people were setting were setting things ablaze and going for it and rioting and things like that. And because i think there and there is that problem of like the kind of the insular militant milieu that's kind of in its own world, mad, has its own different dramas and and things like this that's really rather separated from like the general public. It becomes pretty, I guess you can say, the anarchist ghetto, well say it which I think is a nice way to say it.
01:10:29
Speaker
And I just think it's really important for people to understand like why that's happening and to have that communication and also come up with a ah way for me to kind of survive. And I guess maybe but hedging my bets a little bit. And a lot of it was because you know the conversations I was having in squats were fucking disappointing. they were not having the fucking they know excuse me They were not having the tactical, theoretical and strategic kind of conversations, whether philosophically or practically.
01:10:56
Speaker
that I wanted to have. and And so this kind of led me towards academia. And i thought that I thought the demographic of people that needed the most help in the world were also university and college kids.
01:11:07
Speaker
and and so obviously being a product of it is ah as well. But like that's kind of what led me into the the space that I'm in. It's just you know not only wanting not only for my own pleasure and trying to understand and sharpen my own my own daggers and make my own intellectual tools to start poking holes through things metaphorically. or or And we'll say in it we'll say it another way, you know to bring truth where it's constantly obstructed It was also to, yeah, it was for me to learn and to also to have that communication and also to hopefully create more space so people could actually think and learn in ways and maybe take that further in whatever way they see fit, whether that's making farms or doing whatever to, again, in so many words, make the world a better place. And that could be in your neighborhood.
Role of Academia in Ecological Resistance
01:11:58
Speaker
That could be in larger ways. And I think the sad, the sad bit about what I'm saying is that
01:12:04
Speaker
It really is just about taking up taking up some type of position. is you I mean, there's man there's so many ways anyone can live and do their life, you know? And it's just, I guess for me, and and I guess kind of what I'm tied up in is, you know, how to create space for people and to be able to have deeper conversations and to and to have fun doing that and really to make use of the liberal credo.
01:12:25
Speaker
to the best that I can and and to be the best liberal that I can be in terms of an educator and making space for everyone to actually learn and to know all the different options and choices and ideas and things that are on the menu of like what's going on. And it's sad. yeah Obviously what i I'm saying is kind of sad in some ways, but at the same time, it's afforded me a lot of, a lot of yeah.
01:12:50
Speaker
I and get to be close with a lot of great people. i'm doing I'm involved in and close to a lot of different movements. And some of it's a bit exhausting and workaholic-y, but a lot of it is really to try to create this space so we can yeah have more fun, create more possibilities. And it' it's so much more humble than my imaginations 15 or 18 years ago.
01:13:15
Speaker
and were but i I think that's the product of repression and and losing life. this And yeah, I'll leave it there. When we talk a lot, kind of when we're not recording, we we talk a lot about academia. you know I think I've mentioned this on this show a whole bunch of times, but I'm i'm sure a lot of people are aware. I also i like i am a former academic myself, a reformed academic.
01:13:42
Speaker
someone re-entering the real world, well, did 10 years ago. But I think one of the side effects of our critiques of intellectualism, sometimes unfortunately, is that there's a tendency away from doing things like reading or learning new things. It becomes an almost anti-intellectualism.
01:14:04
Speaker
Right. So um the way that you were framing it. Yeah. The way that you're framing it earlier, I think makes a lot of sense. You were talking about is sharpening your knives. Right. And that's a lot of how I approach going to graduate school was sharpening my knives. Right. Getting ready for the next thing. I think along with that.
01:14:21
Speaker
what is your next thing? like What are you learning about right now? What are you researching? What books are you reading? like What would you recommend other people start to engage with as they're trying to sort of you know kind of rethink some of these questions?
01:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm a big fan of Tom Nomad's work. Also Peter Gelderloos, I think they're doing really good stuff. I just finished a book by Jean-Baptiste Vindaloo, We Are Forest, highly recommended. Probably one of the best critiques that came out. it came I've had the book in French since 2017, but it's now in English. It's probably one of the best critiques looking at the green economy, low carbon infrastructures and cybernetics in terms of um a method and mode of governance, which was, yeah.
01:15:05
Speaker
which is something that I was kind of getting at in the conclusion of my my doctoral thesis in 2017 also, but they do it great. And it's with this kind of French style that I think Paul Verillio would tip his hat off and and maybe find inspiration a bit in it. so it's And that's like that's a big compliment to Jean, you know? but ah yeah yeah But yeah, for me, what was the question again? That's some of the stuff that I'm reading, so that's part of it.
01:15:30
Speaker
yeah what are you What are you working on? What are you researching? like What are your next moves? right like Where are you going next? yeah i mean Right now, I'm um involved in looking at solar panel life cycles and supply chains. so i mean i have you know so That's the thing. I'm in academia because I i i have i do real research. you know i'm not like I don't try to So I've been looking at solar panel lifecycle. I've been in a project looking at the solar panel lifecycle. So I looked at, in this order, the operation and taking over of the California desert with solar panels. I've looked at the mining operations related to solar panels. I recently saw you not too long ago and was looking, and as you weren't far from this, I was looking at the manufacturing
01:16:14
Speaker
facilities related to solar panel development. And I will soon be looking at the decommissioning recycling, which happens to be related to ah using prison labor in some places. And I'll just leave it at that. but but it's Interesting. so Yeah, I mean, a lot of my work, and and that's the thing. And and the for a lot of my students or anyone, I mean, going to the university in the United States is such an insane racket that should maybe never even be considered. But If you are, I should actually watch what I'm saying, but if you think the thing is, it really is. like I think the way to conceptualize academia is like, okay, there's what three reasons why you go to university. One, to get a better job or to become gain some technical skill to get a better job, join the workforce, get a higher bracket, marry, reproduce, and
01:17:03
Speaker
and have a BMW or something like this, which is popular where I'm living right now. The other thing is is like if you care and you're really trying to learn, like that's a place. It's it's a you know it's a workshop. it's ah it's a it's a out. Yeah, it's a weapon shaping facility, you know, and you know, there's a lot of different things and struggles and monsters, you're gonna have to fight in this world. And that's a place to really get your armory in order. And obviously, I'm speaking metaphorically in terms of making all sorts of different types of special blow darts, swords, daggers, types of, you know, you name it, you know, you get creative with how you want to think about it. And, and I guess what happened to me a long time ago was just,
01:17:43
Speaker
I knew that the green economy and I knew that green capitalism was going to be the next way that this system tried to reproduce itself and the most like degrading. and fucking ridiculous way possible. And so I really just dug my heels in and went all the way and still and focused on that, you know, COVID happened, everyone's trying to fill out and get research grants and jump on that bag wagon. I was like, nope, energy infrastructure, you know, transmission lines, what are these doing in that moment? And so I've continued that trajectory. But yeah, it's I just can't stress enough, you know, for the most part, with the exception of some kind of a
01:18:19
Speaker
with the exception of some eco-anarchists, a lot of anarchists were extremely, extremely slow to calling out green capitalism and buying into this stuff. and it was yeah it's it's actually And it's so depressing that things that were so blatantly stupid, government program, marketing scheme, whatever, how people have bought into this stuff, specifically people that identify as quote, radicals or anarchists or autonomous or things like this. and it's It's really time. I'm super worried about people's lack of experience in this world and the way that this has been kind of taken from people through a different kind of iPads technology. and And that really it's this experience of dealing with.
High Technology and Environmental Impact
01:19:00
Speaker
Reality of the police on the streets or the weird factory leaking shit or just even having this experience about what is like intense kind of infrastructure how this is kind of being lost and the the fact that someone can come out and just start saying that power lines high tension wind turbines high voltage power lines transformers solar panels and You name whatever crazy industrial monstrosity green hydrogen, you know, data center smart technologies that someone could. Oh yeah, we need to monitor everyone's energy and put pretty much put sensors any and everywhere. Except their bodies for today. So tomorrow that's to come.
01:19:37
Speaker
so we can monitor their stuff. Like how is spreading digital, inf like making high technology, ubiquitous in societies? Like how is spreading this stuff everywhere going to be environmentally friendly in any way, shape or form? Like this is psychosis, man.
Identity Politics and Academic Critique
01:19:53
Speaker
but So yeah, I'm really, I'm really heard about that. And since I'm really taking up this time to kind of rant a little bit, the other thing is the academics,
01:20:02
Speaker
that are using identity politics to advance their career and to suppress deeper conversations about colonization, violence, the internalization and reproduction of colonial thought and projects because of ultimately based in international law as a way to kind of ignore these things and not having a critique of the state and what it actually has done historically, even though it has protected some people. But these think these technologies and the way that There is so much posturing, especially from US academics, men who are on completely different pay scale, tenured US academics who are on different pay scales on this insane way. They're part of it in a crazy exploitative factory. I guess I'm a part of one of these. I just forgot I'm at a, I'm at a US university.
01:20:47
Speaker
even though I'm never there. But it's, but it's, it's insane. They're on these completely different pay scales. And they're posturing this stuff to be the I guess, for lack of a better term, like the most woke and this and that but are extremely conservative and are really rooted in these authoritarian kind of but politics that are been nuanced through identity. And it's it's just so sad to see the poverty of the anti colonial and decolonial conversation and how this is pretty much falling prey to middle and upper class subjectivities that aren't really looking deep and looking for a greater transformation in terms of larger infrastructures, state systems and things like this. And so I just i just hope that everyone out there listening, you know there's more pressure on this to actually have deeper conversations about what is you know colonizing and destroying environments and and how this kind of the larger global system, political and state system works.
01:21:43
Speaker
and if some of if some of you are interested in diving into some of the you know very interesting kind of anti-colonial, post-colonial thought happening now. Klieb and Ali's book, ah No Spiritual Surrender is really awesome. Oh my god, yeah. William C. Anderson is writing some good stuff. Zoe Samuzzi is writing some good stuff. A Nation on No Map is amazing. Black is Resistance is amazing. If you really want to go back, you know, Sudiyada Okoli, right, from Black Liberation Army wrote some really amazing stuff about, like, anarchists. Have you seen the Black Declaration? With Lorenzo Camumba-Irvin.
01:22:17
Speaker
so it' yeahbb since a recent black autonomy reader four hundred pages anarchism is not white oh my god what an amazing resource put together by the i believe sed edition press in the u k Yes, yeah it's is really good and there's so there's this whole school of like anti and postcolonial thought that's that's kind of emerging right now that is you know Answering a lot of the questions that schools have thought like Afro-pessimism are raising, right? And really talking about these in these incredibly nuanced ways. And I think especially in an American context, it's incredibly important for us to be engaging with those discourses, considering that we live in the middle of a settler colony. It's incredibly important for us to recognize and center those things in in how we're, you know, sort of acting politically. But
01:23:02
Speaker
um yeah sanders like i speak to that really quick though it's yeah absolutely please i can't stress enough the sources and the books that you just mentioned please book is phenomenal and it's needed so bad all of that all of that in the black autonomy reader such an amazing resource and that's what's so heartbreaking about the academy is it has been so comfortable so comfortable just neglecting and whitewashing all of this black anarchism, all of the indigenous indigenous anarchy, all of this stuff. and just Even if it wasn't called those things, it was so comfortable with ignoring these things. And that's exactly what I'm talking about, is that because people were trained in some type of Marxism or these different things like this, is that there's been such an insane poverty
01:23:47
Speaker
of the political thought and diversity and really the answers to some of the failures in the 70s and the 80s and the way that a lot of these movements and groups developed with such important insights that for some reason just it seems to get cut, hidden and washed and then the cycle
Evolving Political Thought and Activism
01:24:02
Speaker
repeats itself. So I just, I can't give enough love to Cleveland Alley, indigenous action media, the all the different amazing people who, ex-Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, all the different people, George Jackson Brigade, oh my God,
01:24:15
Speaker
all these people, all these cats who are riding from the front lines, riding from prison, who have so much to say and really go beyond what's being kind of talked about. And I guess this makes me think about kind of, shimmish I heard so like a year ago, Sean Swain talking about like abolition and where that came from and how that became this hot, hot topic and, and really what it means. But yeah, I just, it's just to say I can't, yeah, sedition is press. Black autonomy reader looks great and such a needed resource and Yeah, I'll leave it there. Awesome. Well, thank you, Xander. I really appreciate you coming and talking to me again. I'm sure we'll we'll have another one of these conversations at some point soon. Have anything you want to plug? Anything you want to tell people about?
01:24:57
Speaker
Oh, I wasn't ready for this. um Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of this has just been inspired by the new book, The System is Killing Us, Land-grabbing the Green Economy and Ecological Conflict at Pluto Press. All proceeds go to all of my proceeds. I think the great 6% or 9%, I think if it sells over a thousand copies to the to the Stop Cop City movement.
01:25:20
Speaker
and And yeah, just yeah keep it kitty out there and thanks for having me. Thanks for all the projects and things you're a part of. And and really everyone else out there who's doing the best they can to to ultimately in the to be honest about things and have a deeper conversation about where we are and how we're going to struggle through it. Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you for joining us and we'll be back soon with another episode.
01:25:50
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchists and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.