There Are Also Good Fires
readings and recommendations
With wildfires becoming more and more catastrophic, it’s important to remember that there are also good fires. This was a photo I found in mainstream media, The Boston Globe, in an article about how Tesla sales are falling as outrage and horror at that company’s egomaniacal/idiot/nazi owner spreads.
Tesla superchargers on fire in Littleton, MA. Photo attributed to “Fire Chief Steele McCurdy.” So, props for that.
I just finished an exciting interview with a long-time fisherman, crabber, and oysterer from the Northern Neck, on the Rappahannock River, which is a place near and dear to me and in some ways the only stable home I’ve had – where I’d go to visit my grandparents and where my mammaw lives still. But, it’s all being lost to rising storm surges, silt from erosion, pollution in the water, and rich retirees driving up housing prices.
The interview touched questions of pollution, erosion, and gentrification, and how these are connected to Black autonomy and the death of crabbing and oystering in the Chesapeake Bay. I’ll be talking to some more people and organizations. I can’t wait to get the article published, maybe this summer.
I released a whole bunch of newsletters last week, maybe more than you had time to read. Here are a couple you might want to revisit:
Some memories of a longtime anarchist revolutionary from Spain, on the anniversary of her death. My path crossed with hers once, directly, and plenty of times through friends who learned about struggle from her and her comrades. The revolutionary movement she participated in is still giving off sparks, and the people carrying those embers are all across the world, in Paris, in Toulouse, in Barcelona, in Amsterdam, in Glasgow, in Montevideo, in Santiago (Galicia and Chile), Detroit…
Joaquina Dorado Pita
Eight years ago today, on 15 March 2017, we learned of the death Joaquina Dorado, a lifelong anarchist and fighter. She had passed the day before, after an accident at home. She was two months and ten days shy of 100 years old.
And here’s an interview that gives us an inside look into the NGOs that are heading up what is supposed to be the cutting edge of the Climate Movement, the ones who are supposed to be saving us from this slow apocalypse that’s already begun, that’s already killing millions of humans and causing countless extinctions every year.
These Are the People Who Are Going to Save Us?
Recently, I had the chance to interview someone who had a job once helping a confluence of NGOs and “professional organizers” to set up a countersummit in protest of one of the COP events – the yearly conferences established by the Paris Agreement supposedly to deal with the climate crisis
It’s meant to be something of a supplement to this recent article from In These Times, “Betrayed by Green Capitalism, Here’s How We Can Build a Livable Future.” For our own survival, and because we owe it to our ghosts and we owe it to future generations, we have to say the hard truth no one wants to hear: the official climate framework (green capitalism and the Paris Agreement) has no chance of saving us. The way it’s designed actually makes it the slowest feasible way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, when we’re already passing points-of-no-return and triggering dangerous tipping points. We need to fight for realistic responses, social transformations actually capable of reversing all the damage done to all of us, to all the living systems on this planet, and we need to do this as much as possible. I think we can only help ourselves if we regain the ability to imagine the future, and imagine what those solutions might look like.
In the next week or two, I hope to have the next companion piece ready, about the superiority of decentralized methods and about how quickly these methods might slow or stop global warming.
In the meantime, the suffering is only going to increase, especially in areas that are hardest hit by extreme heat waves, desertification, and colonial violence, like Palestine and Sudan. That means we need to improve our international solidarity!
A friend of mine is helping support a family in northern Gaza. Israel is breaking the ceasefire for the millionth time, massacring more Palestinians, and reinvading Gaza, so please check out these links – if you don’t have any money to spare, at least pass them on:
https://kolektiva.social/@franklinlopez/114192086634560110
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1161559405126258
And here’s a text and a link about Sudanese anarchist comrades who are doing their best to stay alive and fight for survival in rapidly shifting circumstances. I’m looking into two fundraisers that I might recommend in the next newsletter.
Anarchists in Sudan played an active role in one of the most inspiring revolutions of the 21st century. Many were heavily involved in organizing through the Resistance Committees that helped topple the dictator Omar al-Bashir. For this, they are now paying a heavy price. Many comrades have been forced underground, or into exile, as they are being actively pursued and hunted down by both the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces, and the mercenary warlords of the Rapid Support Forces. Sadly, the international community failed to do enough to support the Sudanese Revolution. But we can still support its surviving revolutionaries, and help them to weather the brutal civil war and famine that has consumed the country and led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. This support is urgently required, and is very literally a matter of life or death.
For more information: “Sudan Anarchists against the Military Dictatorship”
And here’s some recommended reading:
“I saw a Black shackled person on the way to the gym” by Marcela Onyango
Here’s an interview with Sophie Lewis talking about Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation.
John McWhorter’s “How a Plane to Australia Took Me to ‘90s Oakland” is a good intro level piece on how languages evolve in colonial circumstances, and how the (racialized and classed) differentiations between the “proper” language and supposedly inferior dialects or slangs is linguistically and scientifically ignorant.
Need some pop-culture reading? I loved this blast from the past, a feminist dissection of Earth Girls Are Easy. Also, damn! Young Jeff Goldbloom? Damn! “You’re an Alien, and I’m from the Valley” by Celia Mattison.
Need more reasons not to trust cops? Here’s an in-depth piece about how one detective systematically used anonymous informants—real or invented—to conduct searches, steal property, run a major drug selling business, and harm people he had a vendetta against. Fortunately, the Globe doesn’t pass the story off as a lone bad apple. They conducted research into thousands of search warrants and hundreds of police departments, from major cities to small towns, to show that the problem isn’t exceptional: this is just how policing works.
Almost 90% of drug-related police searches are conducted on the word of a single anonymous informant
These searches can involve cops busting down your door in the early morning and hauling you and your children out of bed at gunpoint while they destroy the interior of your house, empowered to go through all your things, dump everything on the floor, take apart the walls, with no accountability or liability for damages
Judges usually don’t know the identity of sources and usually don’t ask police and prosecutors for any verifying information
Around 80% of police departments refused to give any information on informant programs to the media, including basic facts like how many informants they run and how much public money they get paid
Investigators found numerous examples of police inventing informants (basically giving them the power to carry out searches wherever and however they wanted, since the cops could say that non-existent informants claimed there were drugs at anyone’s house, or that the person who lives there has an unregistered firearm and is dangerous)
Additionally, they found that cops got informants to give false testimony, to plant drugs on police targets, or to assault personal enemies, cops took advantage of informants in dangerous situations, and cops raped informants.
There are no examples provided in the study of cops going to prison for any of these activities. That’s always been the nature of the law: there’s one law for those who write it and enforce it, and another law for the rest of us.
Got a decent job? I don’t! Consider making a donation to support me, by getting a paid subscription. It won’t get you any more access: I want all these writings to be equally available to everyone.
This is a free newsletter. But it is a lot of work. The few publications that still pay writers don’t pay much (or they won’t publish an author who is against the genocide in Palestine, says the police can’t be reformed, and neither can the State). It’s normal to write six pitches for every one that gets accepted, and to write full articles that never see the light of day.
For a while I worked as a translator, but computer translators took that job. Nowadays, unless someone is looking for a quality translation, a robot does the first draft and then a human fixes it up — and correctors get paid much less than translators.
NGOs and greenwashing cooperatives can be even worse, claiming to be the good guys when they’re hypocritical and exploitative to the core. For my next job, I’m hoping to drive an elder cab or do tree work. In the meantime, spare a dime?
