This Bonfire

Since they made this bonfire, can we please throw them on it??

Sorry to start off so aggro, but I am seething with rage today. That’s not uncommon for me, but the silver lining is, it’s a reminder I’m still alive. I’m not convinced the same is true of anyone who is not seeing red, indulging fantasies of Armageddon, plotting bloody murder, or—in the case of our more mature or at least more collected siblings—dedicating their lives to deep healing work.

So, be forewarned, but pull up a chair if you like and kick back as I rage out on this violin, because we both know this fucking ship is sinking.

The other day, the WWF and Zoological Society of London came out with their Living Planet Report, announcing that animal populations across the world had plunged by 70%, just in the last 50 years. They claim this is primarily because of human activity. If we make the good faith assumption that they actually want to get to the truth of the situation, which is a pretty big assumption to make on behalf of the scientists, journalists, and policy advocates spreading the news of this 70% die off, then what they mean to say is that animals are dying off because of capitalism. After all, anyone with access to decent resources related to information and education can discover pretty easily that humans have been a vital part of the ecosystems that are still in the best shape, so it’s unfair and inaccurate to blame the entire species.

The mass die-off is not news to me, and it probably isn’t news to you either. Though we could not have come up with a precise statistic on our own, anyone who opens their eyes and their ears and pays attention to the world around them knows that mass infrastructure, mass construction, cars, mining, deforestation, other kinds of extractivism, and increasingly catastrophic weather are all wreaking death and destruction on animals across the planet, human and non-human. Those who care also know that there is no true, exact distinction between animals and other forms of life, and all forms of life are being devastated.

So why am I this upset, even though the news is hardly new? Because the cynical motherfuckers who produce it, the whole fucking assembly line, from the high school teachers encouraging the more idealistic students to follow their dreams into the appropriate careers, to the professors distributing degrees, to the scientists taking the census for different animal populations (when they could be making the big bucks in battery design or genetic engineering or autonomous navigation systems or evolutionary psychology), to the NGO canvassers throwing self-congratulatory fundraiser galas, to the lobbyists and spokespeople, to the journalists who somehow know exactly what questions never to ask: all of them together are conspiring to make sure we keep wringing our hands and ask, how did it come to this, as we keep throwing logs on the fire.

What culprits do the WWF and Zoological Society name in their report? Carbon emissions, of course, which isn’t untrue, but it’s such a small slice of the truth and one the carbon traders, investors, mining companies, and vehicle manufacturers who sit at the heart of the disaster are happy to hear. The report authors have the basic decency to lay some of the blame on infrastructure megaprojects, which the aforementioned profiteers are happy to ignore. And then they call for conservation. More conservation.

What are the questions the journalists knew not to ask when they relayed the NGOs’ admonitions?

There are so many things we could tear apart here, but I want to focus on the topic of conservation, which experts are always telling us we need more of. The going rate, depending on how moderate or realistic an expert is in comprehending the scope of the problem, is between one-third and one-half of the planet’s surface that needs to be “set aside” for conservation.

Here’s a question: will New York City be set aside? Will London? Will Hong Kong? Will Brasilia?

Of course not. What an impractical query. Naturally, places where lots of humans live don’t make sense as conservation areas. One question journalists rarely ask, and their chosen, self-constructed medium cannot find the column inches for, is why you have a bunch of humans living in some places, like Brasilia, and very few humans living in other places, like rural Kansas. And the truth is, there is nothing natural about these results: they are the fruit of blueprints, of wars, of genocide, of policies of starvation and governance, of industrial agriculture.

And on the other hand, there is something perfectly natural about cities, in the sense that they are habitats and they have the potential to be much healthier habitats than they are currently. Even if we think of nature in terms of non-urban space, there are extremely few habitats on this planet of which humans are not a natural member; there are few habitats that did not evolve with us as a part of the whole. And in fact, many human groups—by far most human groups, across the breadth of natural history—have been healthy members and stewards of their habitats. So the very idea of conservation as exclusive to human activity has nothing to do with an engaged observation of the nature of nature and everything to do with capitalism and the State. To put it plainly, capitalism (which cannot exist independently of the State and, nowadays, vice versa) has always brought a genocidal pressure to bear, on any and every continent, to make sure that it was impossible to be biologically human without also being ecocidal, without participating in the destruction of the natural world. And what the apologists for capitalism are realizing too late is that the destruction of the natural world means the destruction of the human world, going back 230 years, going back 530 years, going back 1000 years, going back 6000 years. Anywhere on the planet you choose to look, this lesson has been there to be learned for many generations, nowhere is this a new revelation like these wretched fucking scientists and charity-mongers and journalists want us to believe.

Here’s something else about conservation that I haven’t seen covered in any of the media attention around the Living Planet Report. In the last 50 years, as we’ve seen the destruction of animal deaths skyrocket, do you want to know what other statistic has shot up astronomically? The amount of land set aside for conservation. As near as I can tell, it has increased by more than 500% in the same time period. Fifteen percent of the land and ten percent of territorial waters are now “protected,” at least according to our governments.

More conservationism, more animal deaths. They go hand in hand.

Now I’m not saying that a nature park directly kills animals, although sometimes that is certainly the case, as with all the driving and flying middle class families engage in to go spend their vacations in conservation areas. However, the ongoing ecocide destroying life on this planet, and conservationism—mainstream environmentalism—are without a doubt part of the same monster. That monster is colonialism, racial capitalism, the State. Conservationism originated as a direct application of aristocratic supremacy in Europe and in their colonies across the globe, and anyone not blinded by a paycheck can see how the practice today is still fully wrapped up in ongoing forms of colonialism.

People trained in media sophistry (and that’s all of us) will be conditioned to ask, well, surely, more animals would have died if not for all these nature reserves and other features of mainstream environmentalism, right? But this is not the correct question to ask. There is no alternative world in which there was zero environmentalism or zero organizing in response to ecocide and the other harmful impacts of racial capitalism. People are always going to react in some way to the poisoning and leveling of our habitat. Saying it’s better than nothing is a false comparison, because there was always going to be something: either a false solution, or a real solution. And we have been sold the false solution and we are drowning in the consequences.

In the 1970s, a pretty relevant decade for the global reaction, as anti-racist and anti-colonial movements around the world were being thwarted, crushed, or discovering that their chosen strategies were self-defeating, we got sold a form of environmentalism that centered consumer choice and individualism, that centered conservationism and nature reserves, that centered the middle class as the protagonists who would save the planet. 100 Things You Can Do to Save the Earth and all that noxious bullshit.

The alternative to that wasn’t nothing, because people were scared, and people were pissed off, and people were getting sick or going hungry. The alternative was people evolving from the mistakes and lessons of the past decades, expanding their critique to reject all of the State, to challenge colonialism not just by changing who was at the levers but by wrecking the whole damn machine. I hear they still export sugar from Cuba, but at least the locals are in charge!

The alternative was crushing the capitalist wet dream in which movements for racial justice and movements for environmental justice are at loggerheads. The alternative was cultivating revolutionary struggles for the living world in all its many aspects.

The leading paragraph in the Guardian and most other coverage blames “humans” for all the devastation. We can leave that as the final question for today, the crucial question they avoided. Who is the real culprit?

Blaming humans for this disaster is one of the primordial lies, racial capitalism’s great alibi, but in the end they’ve forced us all to participate, at gunpoint if need be, or maybe with a magically heated home and a nice vacation package, but in the end here we all are, lined up, participating in our last great enterprise, one big relay race, taking each log from the one behind us, passing it forward to the next in line, and onto the bonfire. Onwards, into our glorious future.

If only we could break ranks and grab the ones who design it, the ones who justify it, and throw them on the fires instead.

Can we?

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

Today’s article is a brief, angry version of critiques I make at greater length, and with more examples, research, citations, and all that stuff, in my latest book, The Solutions Are Already Here. The first chapters of the book especially deal with all the shortcomings of the mainstream responses to the ecological crisis.

Here’s one of the standard articles covering (and covering up) the news around the ongoing global population collapse.

Here’s a report on conservation totals around the planet.

Also, @Unpop_Science put up a good thread on Twitter yesterday, WHAT KILLED THE CRABS?, that explores some of the intersections of industrial food production, warming, and government regulations, as well as how inept media coverage serves as a cover-up for the ongoing catastrophe.

Texts of the Week

Childhood, Imagination, the Forest from Black Seed, has critiques of the concept of the pristine, and challenges how many anarchists conflate imagination with blueprints, but ultimately it’s about spending time in the woods as a kid.

I rage at the Guardian a lot, and their ecology coverage is so bad (as is their style guide!!!), but they ran a nice interview with Alan Moore about comics and superhero movies.