Until the Floods and the Fires Sweep Us All Away
It’s an unsettling feeling when you’re fully aware that the apocalypse is ongoing and has been for centuries, when you know it’s accelerating, and when you spend plenty of time researching the Disaster’s many facets – but then you’re caught off guard by a new outcropping of disaster, when someone you thought was safe (even though rationally you know none of us are safe) suddenly finds themself in harm’s way.
One of my cousins I’m closest with lives in a small town in Appalachia, western North Carolina. She and her family live on a little drive, basically a switchback off the main road, sitting high above the town. I remember when I visited them a few years ago, walking barefoot down the drive to the narrow road, the infrequent cars heading into town, the main street, a few shops along a creek, the whole valley peaceful.
On Saturday, three days ago, I finally got word that they were alright, physically, but… it was a brief email from my aunt, forwarded by my mom. Just the news, a picture, a video. The video showed the waters coming up to my cousin’s drive. Where I expected to see at least rooftops, it was just a raging flood filling the whole valley.
The devastation is barely in the news, and it looks like this in a huge swathe from the Gulf coast all the way through central Appalachia. The storm system even made it to the banks of Lake Erie, arriving as a deluge and a few tornadoes.
From the pattern in past disasters, from snippets on Signal threads, from organizing I’m on the periphery of, I know what’s happening all across the continent: the media are sweeping it under the rug, the government is neglecting it or using it as an excuse to flex the military muscle of their emergency management apparatus, NGOs are cashing in but generally failing to deliver aid effectively.
Meanwhile, anarchists and others who don’t put their trust in the State or the NGOs are organizing the real relief, moving tons of resources, helping tens of thousands of people get food, first aid, dry places to rest and charge their phones, figuring out what prisons people are trapped in and making sure they’re not left to die.
But in NGO convention after academic conference, people on the payroll who have won stability and wealth by selling out the movements they come from are on the offensive, peddling the lie one more time that NGO directors and experts know best, that the State is the only thing that can save us.
We’ve proven that the more the State intervenes in the so-called climate crisis1, the ecological disaster only intensifies, and I’ve shown that every state in history has been ecocidal2. They can’t rebut it, so they just ignore us, or they misrepresent us and use their huge platforms to demolish straw men. Then they cash their fat paychecks.
Lately, they’ve been betraying the struggle for abolition and claiming that the State is the only institution that can deliver liberation. And since they haven’t been able to shut us up, they’re trying to isolate us, pretending like anarchists haven’t always been right there on the frontline, keeping our heads up when we’re inside the walls and on the outside supporting prisoners and their families day in and day out. They’re claiming we’re naïve or ignorant, and meanwhile they’re taking their paychecks from the same hand that feeds the cops and the prison guards. Their job isn’t to beat and kill people, it’s to erase the history that the modern state, the prisons, and the police were born in the same moment, that they are inseparable, that no reform has succeeded in getting rid of prisons or police, and that every revolution that trusted the State has only expanded or enhanced imprisonment and policing.
We are trapped in these cycles of suffering until we learn these lessons permanently:
Don’t trust the State ever again!
Don’t trust political parties and other hierarchical organizations, ever again!
Don’t trust NGOs and other highly paid experts who break up the Disaster into different silos, different single issues they can control, they can make money off of, without ever putting themselves at risk!
Don’t ever trust a system based on profit and growth ever again!
The only reasonable organizing logic for a society is mutual aid and solidarity!
Either we strive for collective survival or it all burns down in an inferno of wars, genocide, police shootings, forest fires, floods, and lies. We have to remember this and keep striving for it, until we can create real transformation or the floods and the fires sweep us all away.
Vicky Osterweil wrote something valuable about the effect the hurricane has had across the South, and how storms—intensified by climate change, caused by capitalism—are exacerbated by other effects of capitalism like real estate development and gentrification.
I also find a lot of value in the calm tone that Métis and Little Shell Chippewa writer Chris La Tray finds to speak about storms, loss, and how disasters change the places and people we love.
Before I heard about the devastation my cousin, her dear partner, and their two little kids are staring in the face—and this morning finding out about a death very close to us, but one that’s not for me to write about—I had set aside time today to write a newsletter, “Kill AI Before AI Kills You.”
That won’t be happening. Fortunately, scrolling to distract myself, I discovered that Osterweil did it a week ago, writing a better version than the piece I was planning on, and hitting on all the points that people really need to understand:
AI is racist
Tesla is evil
"AI Datacenters Are More Than 600 Percent Worse for Environment Than Tech Companies Claimed"
And contrary to Marxist misrepresentations that have been reproduced by the Left ever since, the Luddites actually understood capitalism better than their erudite contemporaries, and a Luddite approach to technology still proves itself to be of strategic value today (a topic I hope to develop more in a future newsletter)
I do want to gently push back on an optimistic note Osterweil shared at the beginning of her piece, a news article claiming that solar energy and China’s EV production would cause emissions to decrease. “The rise of solar power and China's staggering EV growth may have pushed global emissions into decline”
For anyone with questions, I go into detail in this In These Times article about how selective carbon accounting and other tricks are used to back up false claims of emissions reductions but basically, no, we can’t even count on a little bit of good news about emissions: they’re still going up.
This would be a good place to share an article by Dunlap, Sovacool, and Novaković: “A Dead Sea of Solar Panels: solar enclosure, extractivism and the progressive degradation of the California desert,” which illustrates how “environmental policy, expressed through market-imperatives and bureaucratically-centered modeling science, severely threatens ecosystems, meanwhile failing to accomplish climate change mitigation.”
To be clear, Vicky also explicitly names how extractive and industrial processes related to green energy are toxic and destructive.
Finally, some recommended reading that I would love for everyone to share widely, because it involves a capacity that is so rare today, and yet essential to any possibility for revolution and change: imagining what it might look like.
Vicky Osterweil (third plug today! Seriously, subscribe to her newsletter if you’re not following it already) looks at the strike spreading across the East Coast today, and imagines how solidarity from people other than port workers could turn the strike into an insurrection of solidarity, delivering much needed supplies to those hurt by Hurricane Helene and also blocking further shipments of murder supplies to Israel. And from there, a revolution!
Share it with your friends, talk about it, and do something if you can, or at the least, plan what you might do the next time shit hits the fan. Seriously, we’ve seen it time and again these last two decades: what happens in the first 24 hours after a major, destabilizing event (from a police murder to a bombing to a disaster to a spontaneous protest) can do so much to help the event to spread and radicalize, to keep the police and the NGOs and the movement politicians from getting it under control.
Until next time, take care of one another.
For a critique of climate reductionism—understanding the Disaster as exclusively or primarily a problem of carbon emissions and global warming—see the second section in Chapter 1 of The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, “In the Biosphere, Everything Is Connected: The Ecological Crisis Beyond Carbon.”
I document the ecocidal nature of the State in The Solutions Are Already Here and Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation.
All hierarchies are authoritarian. All governments are hierarchies. Therefore, no matter what you call it, all states are AUTHORITARIAN. Democracy is a myth.
The first paragraph really summed up how I’ve been feeling lately.