Giant Piles of Salt
agriculture, genocide, and resistance from Catalunya to the eastern Mediterranean
Bages is the name of the county in Catalunya where I lived the longest. The name comes from Bacchus, a reference to the excellent and plentiful wines grown here when it was a Roman colony. There’s still good wine cultivated in Bages, and even more land is dedicated to olives that make an excellent oil. A little bit of wheat and other cereals, and a lot of non-native pine plantations for timber – the forest fires of the near future.
Want to play 3 T/Fs? I’ve got the new edition and the answers from last time below. And, really important: here’s a fundraiser a Palestinian friend shared with me. This goes to support two families in Gaza. One has a small baby; another child of theirs was murdered by the Israelis. The other family are living in tents after their home was destroyed by bombing.
Desertification and catastrophic fires, punctuated by torrential downpours that speed up erosion and rack up a growing death count, are the main danger the ecological crisis presents in this corner of the world. A sensible culture would take the hint to take care of its water supply and phase out industrial agriculture and forestry. There are plenty of ecological gardeners and silviculturists who would love the opportunity to spread their skills across the whole landscape, but the Romans are still in charge, commoning is illegal, blocked by powers hard and soft, so the plantations are here until they bring about their own ruin.
I wrote an article a couple years ago about how peri-urban, migrating shepherds offer one of the best solutions to the ecological crisis for the Mediterranean region. Read about it at Undisciplined Environments. (And Part 2! explores the overlap between shepherds and the anarchist guerrilla movements that crisscrossed the Pyrenees for most of the 20th century.)
The solutions are always already all around us, but it’s not just the State and the big investors who refuse to support them. Many of us continue to put our faith in political reform or we just don’t know how to find the knowledge and courage to get started. I get it. It’s hard to do anything as alienated individuals, but our necessary first step is to honestly recognize that as a weakness and not political pragmatism.
I got to visit Catalunya again earlier this year: borders and visa regimes plus a weird job I had out that way. The apartment I squatted back in 2015 is still there, put to good use, and the little garden I nurtured out of that farmed-to-death soil is still a green jewel in a spreading desert. All it takes is compost, a good mix of crops and trees, treating the land with respect, and patience. The cherry and the plum tree I planted died in one of the droughts while I was gone, but the olive tree and almond tree are thriving. At this point the olive tree, Walter, must have a good tap root down, meaning a safer water supply for him and everyone inside his root radius.
Walk farther up the path, past olive orchards both tended and abandoned, over the dusty rocks where rosemary, thyme, and wild asparagus thrive in the margins, and all of the sudden you’re on top of the ridge. Montserrat stands breathtaking in one direction and in the other the great expanse of rocky hills and valleys that make up Bages. There’s the Pyrenees on the horizon, and closer, just below you, the Cardener where it wraps around Manresa. Past that other hill, the Llobregat flows down from Sallent, and there’s the bend that hides the town where the two rivers meet.
Mountainous country, and yet the second tallest peak in all Bages is a product of capitalism. You can see it from here, shining out like sickly gold. It’s a pile of mine tailings placed thoughtfully next to the Llobregat. That’s the reason why, from Sallent on down, all the precious waters of the Llogregat, originating as snowmelt and natural springs in the Pyrenees, are saline, too salty for human consumption or agriculture. And that—plus the worsening droughts, another product of capitalism—is the reason Barcelona has to run the largest desalinization plant in all of Europe. That’s a tremendous cost in energy, meaning fossil fuels or industrial-scale green energy that destroys the land through mining and all the stolen and poisoned surface area that’s required. Another example of how the solutions provided by capitalism and the State just make things worse because they refuse to see the root, the nature, and the dimensions of the problem.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: all the skepticism about whether anarchists have any practical solutions to offer is bullshit because A) we do, plenty, and B) supporters of capitalism and the State do not have any practical solutions to the problems they have caused, and they are so deluded they’re not even able to engage with reality.
It gets worse. From up here, you can see another pile of mine tailings, the one that looms over the town of Súria, right next to the Cardener. So, that river, our river, is poisoned as well. These and two other potash mines are owned by the ICL group, formerly Israel Chemicals Ltd., majority controlled by the Israel Corporation, which was founded by the Israeli government. ICL is the 6th largest producer of potash in the world. (And, in another clear example of the merits of corporate/NGO environmentalism, the company has won awards for their “environmental stewardship.”)
What is potash? It’s a potassium salt, vital as a chemical fertilizer for industrial capitalism and also important for weapons production. ICL sells a bunch of explosives grade potassium compounds to the US military, the greatest murderer on the planet, and it supplies the Israeli military with white phosphorous. Often compared to napalm, white phosphorous burns the skin off people’s bodies while they’re still alive. It can’t be used as a precision munition, though that doesn’t matter much since the Israeli military regularly targets civilians and has burned countless families to death in Gaza over the last several years, using the white phosphorous produced by ICL.
ICL is one of the most important Israeli corporations, and it has locations in Spain, the UK, five other European countries, the US (Missouri), Brazil, China, Australia, and Ethiopia. All of these are places where its operations can be stopped. In Catalunya a couple weeks ago, people decided to do exactly that.
I’m translating here from a newsletter from my friend Ricard de Vargas. He’s an older anarchist, a participant in the guerrilla struggle under the Franco regime, and these days, pushing well past 70, he’s active in ecological and anticolonial movements and in the fight to protect our historical memory. (I interviewed him about that in my last book.)
“On the 17th, 18th, and 19th of April, 4000 people gathered in Callús (Bages), convened by Revoltes de la Terra, a coalition of various ecological collectives, social movements, local platforms, and farmers, in protest of the ecocidal activity of the multinational company ICL, which operates the potash mines in the territories of Sallent, Balsareny, Súria, and Cardona.
“The participants, divided into columns, carried out four simultaneous actions: while 1000 people wound their way up the Cogulló mountain of mine tailings at Sallent (the second tallest mountain of Bages) in order to, once at the top, create a human mosaic spelling out the message, NO MORE SALT, a second column dismantled part of the train line that carries potash from Súria to the port of Barcelona. At the same time, the third column took to the highway and, marching slowly, blocked the C-16 and C-25 for a couple hours, until they arrived at the neighborhood of the old station in Sallent to pay homage to the 800 neighbors who were evicted in 2009 to make room for a mine expansion. Meanwhile, the fourth column, formed for and by the kids, carried out activities to help understand the perverse consequences of salinization.
“In Bages, the land is sickened by the chloride coming from the progressive salinization of all the rivers, wells, aquifers, waterfalls, streams, and springs, impoverishing the farmers and shepherds and leaving the population without potable water, all due to the bad mining practices of the ICL, a militarist Israeli company that is complicit in Netanyahu’s policies of extermination and genocide.”
In the days of Rome, salt was used as money, specifically, as payment to the soldiers who spread the Empire through murder, rape, occupation, and despoliation, pledging their loyalty to atrocity in exchange for a poisoned piece of the pie. Proponents of slavery, the Romans forced debtors and war captives to work in their salt mines in Tarraconensis and other corners of the Empire. In those days, they were after sodium chloride, table salt, which was useful for preserving food at a massive scale, a necessity within an imposed plantation economy where food production was no longer local and permanent armies needed portable food as a resource they could warehouse.
Nowadays, the upper layers of sodium chloride are mostly gone, but the potassium salts are used to inject artificial fertility back into the land that has been so abused, and to bomb and burn the hungry masses who have been dispossessed from their lands time and time again.
In the Bible, which would eventually be adopted as the Holy Book by the Empire, there is also a pile of salt, and in some ways it’s as big as a city. The God in this Book is capricious, moralistic, and vengeful. He has decided that certain sexualities are evil. In the story of Lot, the people of Sodom want to have sex with two men/angels-in-disguise who are guests of Lot. The righteous Lot knows that it is evil for men to have sex with men so he instead offers his daughters to the crowd, without their consent, but the evil crowd refuses. The angels warn Lot of an impending punishment and instruct him to flee with his family. As they run away, God viciously murders every man, woman, and child in Sodom, and it’s not because of their bad practices around consent. Lot’s wife, though—the Christian version of the Bible erases her name, which is preserved elsewhere as Ado or Edith—looks back on the city and in a further act of punishment God transforms her into salt.
This is a story, ultimately, about obedience and empathy. The righteous people, according to the God of the monotheists, show their goodness by obeying every order that comes from Authority, no matter how cruel or senseless. They do so without question. And if they show any empathy with those the Authority has labelled as the Enemy, if they so much as raise their eyes to look at the suffering happening around them, they deserve punishment. The Authority can torture and murder entire cities if he has decided that they are, or even just some of them are, disobedient. The greatest crime, in His eyes, is to refuse to look away.
Capitalism and the State comprise a system based on senseless, harmful rules, on absurd moral hierarchies, on obedience and apathy. Those who keep it running are not the handful of presidents, generals, and billionaires on top. It’s all the minions below them who insist on believing in obvious lies, those who refuse to see the World, to speak with it, to learn from it, those who avert their eyes from the suffering of others, who make up their own lies to justify that suffering, who invent a God or a racial science or a market theory or a nationalist history so that they can kill and profit off death and blame their victims.
It won’t be easy, and so many of us have died or been imprisoned in this struggle already, but the Temples of Power are trembling. They have spent thousands of years running from their own mistakes, their own willful ignorance. We have the power to murder God and to cast His sycophantic servants to the four winds, to doom them to an unpredictable fortune: the kindness of strangers and the mercy of those they’ve wronged.
Below I’ve got some recommended readings related to this article. And I can’t recommend it yet, but I’m really looking forward to reading this article by Jesse Roth about Yiddish anarchism and the anti-nationalist Jews that the broader Left can learn from amidst the ongoing genocide that we all feel pretty powerless to stop. And don’t forget to support that fundraiser!
But first, 3T/Fs!
That’s right, it’s the second edition of your new favorite game, 3T/Fs! Below are three statements. They might all be true, they might all be false, they might be a mix. To play, place your answer in the comments (in the format TFF, FFF, FTF, etc.) and when I publish the next round of the game, I’ll share the answers for this round. It’s not too late to take a crack at the first edition, in the April 26 newsletter.
For a time, the capital of the Roman Empire was at Tarraco, now the city of Tarragona, in Catalunya.
The word “salary” shares its root with the word for salt because it was once prized as much as the metals that were used for minting coins.
Many subjects of the Roman Empire probably never heard of Rome nor encountered anyone speaking Latin.
Okay, here are the answers from the first edition:
TTF! As of this writing, 3 people got it right. Congratulations Louis, samsteacup, and Raechel Anne Jolie! And Sue C shared some great challenges to the true/false format and that entire approach to knowledge. I appreciate it, and I also think plenty of questions can be accurately evaluated as true or false even if that binary is too simplistic for most forms of knowledge. As an anarchist, I encourage y’all to do your own research or argue if you think I got any of these wrong or if any is too complex for the binary!
Why TTF?
The eastern coast of North America is the western shore of the Atlantic. “Coast” refers to the edge of a land mass whereas “shore” refers to the edge of a body of water, so when we have to name them with a cardinal direction, they end up being opposites, or antonyms!
The mechanism that has spread English ivy and the plane tree across large parts of the world, especially in settler states, is not a biological mechanism (the way these two species physically reproduce is quite different). It’s a sociocultural mechanism, namely, the aesthetic values of British aristocrats and others who want to mimic them, whether it’s upper middle class North Americans or the aristocrats and bourgeoisie of southern European cultural capitals from Barcelona to Torino. They’ve both spread across the globe due to a cultural feature of European colonialism.
False? But genes do produce more genes! Yes, they do, but that’s the observation of a function. Function is not the same as purpose. Is your purpose to metabolize oxygen and carbohydrates? No, your purpose is whatever you define your purpose to be, or what someone else defines your purpose to be if you accept their authority. Assigning a purpose to functions and beings we are not in conversation with is usually an instance of teleology, or believing that things have an intrinsic purpose or destination. Many Christians and also many Marxists are teleological. MLK’s famous quote about “the moral arc of the universe” – teleological. It’s essentially a spiritual approach to understanding the universe that either requires a Supreme Authority or hides its own spirituality by naturalizing purpose through rationalizations and dense academic lingo or alibis that hide those rationalizations. Incidentally, I’ve met a couple biologists who believe that genes have a purpose, or even that “the purpose of life is to produce DNA.” That particular scientist scoffed at philosophy. He might actually need to read up on some philosophy to understand how he is imposing a specific spiritual worldview on chemical functions in the world around him. Genes might actually have a purpose, but we would have to be able to talk with them to find out, and if that were possible, we’d probably find that they don’t all agree.
Recommended reading and listening from this issue:
“The Witch’s Child,” a bedtime tale of colonialism, here as a zine and audiobook
Whigs and Hunters, the seminal work by EP Thompson about commoning and how it was illegalized
El Comú Català by David Algarra Bascón, a rich history of the war against the commons in Catalunya. In some ways this book is even better than Whigs (though of course DAB might not have been able to conceive of his work if EPT hadn’t laid that groundwork two generations earlier). It’s in Spanish now as well as Catalan, and dear gods someone’s really got to translate it to English!
“Dams, Forest Fires, and the Hidden Commons” and “These Mountains Fight Back: Between Anarchist Commons and Fascist Environmentalism” by me.
Wonderful. FTT?
Great essay Peter!
I was too dumb to attempt the first round but learnt from your answers, thank you.
Not sure the first one, but I'll go TTT