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ON CLIMATE/BORDERS/SURVIVAL/CARE/STRUGGLE

TWO MEMBERS OF OUT OF THE WOODS IN CONVERSATION WITH BASE MAGAZINE

First published June 2017

What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place via Skype. We have smoothed over some of the infelicities that result from spontaneous speech to make it easier to read while preserving some of the clunkiness of phrasing to convey the texture of spoken dialogue. Footnotes attend to some of the mistakes made in our arguments here.

It feels particularly fitting that this interview should be the opening piece in this book. Among the digressions and mistakes, this conversation is also full of new ideas, some of which have subsequently become fundamental to our thinking. This is the first time we talk about the false image of a spectacular, singular apocalypse; the first time we define (after Gilmore) ecological crisis as the group-differentiated destruction of the means of survival; the first time we use the term “catastrophic present.” Indeed, a strong theme in this interview is differentiation: that the disasters people experience, the struggles they organize and the futures they struggle for are all differentiated by race, class, gender, and sexuality. Black feminist critiques of universalism and humanism exert a strong influence on the entirety of this interview, but particularly on the sections pertaining to migration and borders. It is fitting that this book begins with a generative conversation, because that is where all our work begins. Conversations amongst ourselves, amidst the work of others, is the ulimate origin of all our thought. That now, on reflection, we can see mistakes and mishaps here, only serves to demonstrate the nature of collective study; that we know differently now to how we knew then. In particular, our ongoing theorizing of ‘ecological crisis’ as something connecting environmental concerns with the violences of borders, prisons and racialization, grows out of some of what we discuss here.

BASE Magazine: In much of your writing, you talk about the relationship between mass migration and climate change. How can climate change be more consciously linked to existing opposition to borders and everyday struggle against the border regime?

Out of the Woods, A: One place to start would be the estimate of 200 million climate migrants by 2050, which Norman Myers put out over a decade ago. This is seen by many as a conservative projection, yet even so, it would mean that by 2050 one in every forty-five people in the world would have been displaced by climate change.¹ A report for the International Organization for Migration notes that, “on current trends, the capacity of large parts of the world to provide food, water and shelter for human populations will be compromised by climate change.”² The framing of this “capacity” as a series of absolute, “natural” limits is of course problematic. “Carrying capacity” is a product of racial heteropatriarchal capital as it works through nature and of nature as it works through racial heteropatriarchal capital. However, climate change will certainly erode people’s capacity to reproduce themselves and in a manner that forces their movement. The majority of climate migrants will be racialized people, and it seems highly unlikely that those states least affected by climate change and/or most able to adapt to it (the white powers of Europe and America), will approach climate migrants any differently to those racialized people already being murdered by their borders or imprisoned in their camps. Climate change is another reason people have to move, but it is not a reason for states to treat moving, racialized people any differently.

Out of the Woods, D: When Black Lives Matter UK shut down London City Airport they were very clear in stating that climate crisis is racist. It disproportionately affects people of color, both because they can’t cross borders with the ease that white people do—for a whole host of reasons—and they’re more likely to live in areas that are worst affected by climate change. Connecting up struggles that might be seen as “single issue” in this sense is really important because, in a sense, they are single issue: climate change and racism reproduce each other.

BASE Magazine: Since it features heavily already, and will likely appear again, could you speak a little more to the nature of the border—its composition and politics?

D: The violence of the border isn’t just at “the border”—schools become borders, hospitals become borders. I broke my knee recently, and I—a white person who speaks English as their first language—was very well looked after at the hospital [in Nottingham, England]. However, a South Asian woman who came in a few minutes after me didn’t fare so well. Her English wasn’t great, she wasn’t able to think clearly because of the pain she was in, and staff were insisting she gave an address—and she didn’t understand what they were saying. Although she did eventually receive care, we know that the NHS will withhold treatment: this is a form of border violence.³ So, struggles that might seem quite distant from ecological issues—hospital workers resisting the imperative to behave in this sort of way, for example—are really important for a transformative ecological politics.

A: I think when it comes to climate change what we’re seeing is the way the border can be used to trap someone within an increasingly catastrophic present. Achille Mbembe has written extensively about necropolitics, of holding people within a situation where their life is defined by their proximity to death.⁴ The border keeps people in places where they cannot find food or [are] at the mercy of floods. This is coercive, conscious violence orchestrated by states that will persist, both in countries outside Europe and within it. I think we must also emphasize that there’s a globalized institution of antiblackness, and the forms of violence which reproduce it are very much in common. The necropolitical obviously operates against Black people in the United States and the UK, as well as in Libya and the Mediterranean. In terms of the way climate change and natural disasters might interact with this existing necropolitics, it is perhaps important to think of police operations in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. On Danziger Bridge, seven police officers opened fire on a group of Black people attempting to flee the flooded city, killing two of them and seriously injuring four more. That event—Black people being murdered by the state—encapsulates the necropolitical violence of attempting to hold people, and particularly Black people, in a place where life is untenable, and then extinguishing that life as soon as anyone tries to move out of that place. That’s the murderous double bind of anti-Black violence in the policing of crisis.

D: I also think it’s really important that we challenge environmentalism’s history and ongoing complicity with racism (and outright white supremacy)—[in which it argues] for closed borders, population control, and sterilization, for example. We’ve recently had prominent members of the Green Party of England and Wales arguing for reductions in migration in the name of the environment and a “sustainable economy.”⁵ There was a Paul Kingsnorth essay in The Guardian a couple of months ago that’s abhorrent; it repeats so many of these tropes.⁶

BASE Magazine: Most of us know very little about climate science, and whilst a great many people work very hard to translate an overwhelming amount of data and fieldwork into accessible writing, the point where trends and patterns meet the daily effects of climate change can feel elusive. Is there more that could be done to orientate the energies of existing struggles and how far into the future should we be looking? To what extent, to take just a single example, should a housing movement engaged in a project to defend access to housing across London take into consideration that it could soon find itself underwater?

D: We often understand climate change as leading to a spectacular future event and this is often understood visually: imaginaries of ruined, flooded, and depopulated cities are really common. But I think this is flawed: it suggests climate change is heading towards a singular “event” that is going to happen rather than something that is already happening, often in less visually perceptible forms. It becomes harder to grow certain crops, for example, and food becomes more expensive. That drives both migration and conflict. Climate change has undoubtedly played a role in the Syrian Civil War.⁷

So, it’s wrong on an empirical level to figure climate change as this thing that will happen in the future, but I think it’s also unhelpful politically, because that kind of future threat I don’t think works as a sufficiently motivating force to affect things in the present. I think, like you say, it can be disempowering. That parsing of climate change as a spectacular future event affects how we behave politically as well, leading to a kind of fatalism whereby people just accept these things. I actually think they empower a certain white, male, heterosexual subject too: they can project themselves into that catastrophe thinking they can start anew—the sort of “cozy catastrophism” that the novelist John Wyndham was (perhaps a little unfairly) accused of. You know—“Oh well, all the poor people have died, but we can have a jolly nice time with our new community on the Isle of Wight.”

Public mistrust of experts is also a huge problem because the people we usually hear talking about climate change in the media fall into this category. I think a lot of that hostility is entirely understandable, but rather than get rid of “expertise” in favor of a broad cynical fatalism, we need to think how we can expand the category of expertise and popularize it. We need to amplify the voices of those who live and struggle where climate change meets everyday life: migrants who’ve moved because they can’t afford to buy food; people who’ve worked the land and seen how changes in climate affect crop growth. They, too, are experts.

BASE Magazine: If these kind of analyses of disasters rooted in a distant future can instead give rise to a paralysis and fatalism, whereby with a long enough timescale, all activities become regarded as irrelevant and inconsequential, how then can these feelings be combatted or even harnessed?

D: It’s not necessarily the timescale that’s the problem here, or that talking about the future is inherently wrong, but the function of thinking about the future. There is a difference between prediction and extrapolation. Beyond identifying broad trends that are highly likely and factoring them into our thinking as appropriate, I think prediction is really damaging: firstly because we know not to trust it, and secondly because it doesn’t leave room for agency. We all know that past futurologies, optimistic and pessimistic, religious, apocalyptic have all been terrible. They’re lots of fun, with the capacity to fascinate—we’ve all enjoyed images from the sixties of the year 2000 full of flying cars—and people have long clung to predictions about the imminent collapse of the global population. But they’re just wrong and I think damaging to any attempt to challenge climate change.

I think extrapolation is different; it’s the mode of a lot of science fiction. Here, I’m reminded of the claim made by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha in their introduction to Octavia’s Brood—a collection of short stories from people of color involved in social justice movements in North America/Turtle Island—that all organizing is science fiction.⁸ Perhaps we could think about dystopian fiction here. It’s had quite a bit of press recently, but the way much of this is framed is unhelpful, I think. Dystopian fiction is positioned as something that can help us “understand” the present in a narrowly empirical way (which denies agency), and the novels celebrated—Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale—are limited even in that sense because they disavow the role that race, in particular, plays in structuring our present. And, in the first three of these, the “victim” is understood to be the abstract individual rather than collective subjects co-constituted by race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability.⁹

So, instead, I think we need to engage with dystopian fiction that extrapolates from the white supremacist, able-bodied, colonial, heteropatriarchy that structures our world—here I’m thinking of writers like Octavia Butler, Stephen Graham Jones, and Marge Piercy. This isn’t just a descriptive process—extrapolation doesn’t simply describe our world or even where it’s going, but at its best gives us the opportunity to intervene in that through collective struggle. It tells readers that acting in the present can make a difference to the future. The science fiction scholar Tom Moylan talks about what he calls “critical dystopias,” and I think they’re particularly useful here, because they present collective organization and struggle within the dystopian society being depicted as well. Even if things continue to get worse, this won’t be the end; there is always room for collective struggle.¹⁰

Having said that, I am a little skeptical about the power of literature, partly because we don’t generally read it together anymore—unless you’re part of a reading group or reading at a university, you probably read fiction as an isolated individual. I think the popularity of Octavia’s Brood is interesting: it’s got a large social media following, has been used by reading groups, and seems to have opened up a space for collective discussion about the future and how acting now can alter it.¹¹ It doesn’t necessarily have to be literary fiction that plays this role: “design fiction” is a potentially powerful tool too, for example.

BASE Magazine: In an older issue of The Occupied Times, we asked Silvia Federici about surviving apocalypse(s). She told us:

The prospect of annihilation is a relative one. For many communities in the US—Black communities whose children are murdered by the police in the street, Indigenous communities like the Navajo that have to coexist with uranium mining, communities where unemployment is skyrocketing and the list goes on—apocalypse is now. In this context, we struggle for justice by refusing to separate the struggle against the destruction of the environment from the struggle against prisons, war, exploitation. You cannot worry about climate change if your life’s in danger every day, as is the case for so many people in this country.¹²

What do you recognize in these descriptions as possible points of engagement to building our capabilities to survive?

A: I think it’s very interesting how Federici responds to that, and I think part it is in the way that you worded the question: “The consequences of climate change are forcing humanity to contemplate its own destruction in ways it hasn’t since the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War.” I think what that comes back to is what we were saying earlier about these images of universal catastrophe. Because that question very much sums up the way climate change is depicted in terms of this global, universal threat to the species and a particular framing of the human, but I think it’s very important to then pose the questions that Black studies has insisted on: Who is the human? Who gets to be human? Sylvia Wynter’s work here is incredibly important.¹³

I think what climate change actually requires us to do is to recognize that it’s not one apocalypse. What’s more terrifying to think about, but is perhaps more useful, is to realize that catastrophe and normality can coexist quite happily; that it’s not about some apocalyptic future but a catastrophic present. This seems especially pertinent in the situation where we had 5,000 migrants drowning in the Mediterranean last year, yet the current discussion is around the fiscal effects of Brexit. There is no squaring of that circle. In reality, Europe is experiencing a form of normality at the moment which is in complete contradiction to these catastrophes. I think what that question requires us to do, and what Federici starts to approach in her answer, is a differentiated vulnerability and the fact that catastrophe has always existed for some people.

However, I don’t think I can agree with her saying you cannot worry about climate change if your life’s in danger every day, because I think the people who’ve been historically struggling against that vulnerability were the first people to experience climate change. The people who’ve been displaced in Bangladesh, the Navajo Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux (who’re fighting the development of the Keystone Pipeline), I think those people have historical experiences, perhaps not always of climate change, but certainly of environmental destruction. When we think about the systematic and organized destruction of the ecosystems of the American Plains and the effect that had on the Indigenous peoples living there, you could say the Standing Rock Sioux have a historical experience of the destruction of the means to survive, not unconsciously as is happening with climate change but very deliberately and consciously.¹⁴ I think what’s important to say is that climate change is not unique in its destruction of one’s means for survival. To frame it in terms Federici might do herself, it’s all about the means by which we reproduce our daily lives. Climate change is the group-differentiated destruction of the means of our survival. Sometimes, for some people, that’s going to be catastrophic—meaning the complete obliteration of the means to reproduce yourself—but for others it will be minimal.

That’s exactly what we speak to when we talk of these false images of London underwater. One of the things that’s so cloying and disgusting about those images is the idea that climate change is a universal problem. What is perhaps more nightmarish about climate change is that it’s not; it’s a very particularized series of problems that will very differently affect a rich white man who owns a house in Primrose Hill and a Black working-class mother who lives on the floodplains of the Thames.¹⁵ I think there is an important distinction to embrace there. I think that’s almost the moment when we must begin to talk of building our capabilities to survive against group-differentiated vulnerabilities. What that forces us to comprehend is the capacity to organize ways to survive.

What I think Federici mentions is the fact that people have always been surviving catastrophes. Here, Out of the Woods would probably talk about disaster communism. Historically, after earthquakes, volcanoes or other moments of instability and damage, people will often exhibit mutual aid, social care, an elaboration of reproductive labor towards liberation. These actions are not contained in, or constrained by, the boundaries of colonial capital or heteropatriarchal individualism. I guess what I’m trying to say is, what Federici gestures towards when she talks of those things like the struggle of Black communities against the police, the struggle of the Navajo against uranium mining, is what Fanon would describe as a program of “total disorder.”¹⁶ I guess what we have to think about in terms of resisting climate change, is resistance not just to that but also to the systems of order that differentiate violences.

So, we have to think about organizing against climate change as mediated through a world dominated by colonial, heteropatriarchal capital. The violence is organized and differentiated by these structures and it is in the struggle to destroy those structures that we might also survive. It seems quite evident to me that we can realize a particular imagination that has always been practiced in struggles against catastrophe—struggles founded on care, reproduction, and warmth.¹⁷ Those have always been the things which have made it possible to survive every catastrophe of the past 2,000 years. People will still be fighting those battles even if white environmentalism does nothing about it—that’s another thing to insist on. This resistance will happen anyway, no matter what transpires in the corridors of power. It’s to what extent we can help each other to go beyond the survival of a few people and emerge from the current series of catastrophes into a world in which we would hope no one experiences them. A world beyond catastrophe is possible.

BASE Magazine: Disaster communism is a concept we’ve featured in older publications and we’ve been talking about here again, but it seems that the manner in which it is evoked often relies on the kind of grand “event” which was warned against earlier—for instance, the organizing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is often brought up as an example of disaster communism in action. The description of care and survival just mentioned now seems to be a far neater deployment of the idea—and that feels a very comfortable fit to the organizing many of us who produce this publication are familiar with (for example, the struggles against the housing crisis and abusive components of our own social movements). Could we talk more about how if the catastrophe is now, how we may survive it?

A: I’ve been thinking about disaster communism in terms of what Fred Moten writes about as “fugitive planning”: this operation that’s always going on beneath the surface of social life because it’s the precondition of social life; it’s the means of a certain form of collective living.¹⁸ This is familiar for anyone who has had any experience with childcare—there are certain points when someone else looks after your kid whilst you go to the shops or something, and it’s a moment which has to happen to make it possible for you to carry out any basic tasks. I guess what’s confusing about the way we’ve been thinking about disaster communism is that there’s an uncertainty or vagueness about whether we are calling for something to come into being, or whether we are observing something that’s already happening and merely recognizing a certain way of extrapolating it. I think the complexity is that we do kind of use it both ways.

D: There’s a distinction between the two modes. There’s the “communizing” stuff that’s already happening that we can observe, like the kinds of communities that form around disasters, collective relations of care, mutual aid, etc. Then, there’s the idea that the term “communism” also names the linking of those struggles on a much larger scale. So communism-as-movement connects these otherwise isolated communizing practices that can actually help reinforce capitalism because capitalism will coopt the common: thanks for self-organizing all this, now we don’t have to pay anyone to do it! Also, you’ve helped increase property values in the area!

A: I guess that’s why I was thinking about Moten and planning because, as Moten is saying, against planning there is always policy—the attempt to extract value from planning, to strip-mine the social commons. So all those forms of reproductive labor can easily be exploited by an increasingly desperate state or state-capital formation. This is really notable in frontline care in terms of people being discharged from the NHS early on the expectation that their family will look after them. The policy formation of the state has turned towards care in the NHS being home-based rather than hospital-based, which is in no small part a cloak for the incorporation of planning into policy, and the subsumption of a certain form of social life into the antithesis of that—state and capital. So, I guess this is the ambiguity; what already exists wouldn’t necessarily destroy the thing that we want to destroy, that’s the problem. And this is always the ambiguity of survival as well, you know, survival in a world that depends on your reproduction and your destruction or in holding you in some kind of ground between the two, and that’s massively differentiated by race, gender, class, and sexuality. I suppose what we have to do is survive in a way that’s antithetical to the survival of the forms of power that oppress us. I guess this is the ambiguity at the heart of disaster communism: how do we survive the disaster whilst also destroying the things that make it a disaster in the first place? How do we become potent whilst rendering the threats to our lives impotent? This kind of constant contradiction or ambiguity is very hard to resolve in theory, but I think can often play itself out in practice.

To bring all of this back to climate change, I think this is what I disagree with fundamentally about Federici saying “you can’t worry about climate change if you are already struggling with the everyday,” is that it doesn’t actually take someone very long to realize that the destruction of their everyday life is based on something bigger than that. People tend to start looking for a pattern, and I think that’s the point at which disaster communism has to intervene and say that we can operate on the basis of a destruction of the things that are destroying us.

D: Yes. To say “yes” to what we want—and what is already created in cramped spaces—necessitates saying “no” to the world that dominates save for those cracks or openings. I actually have a slight concern about the phrase “disaster communism” though, which is partly to do with it being such a snappy phrase. I worry that it can travel without the meaning we’re trying to outline here, because when you hear “disaster communism” it can bring to mind a communist take on Wyndham’s “cozy catastrophism.” Like, “hey, if the world ends, we can build a kind of communism.”

A: I would agree. I’d probably also go as far as to say that we should try to develop something else because I’m not even sure “disaster” is quite the right kind of word for encapsulating what we are really trying to resist and survive given that it’s not one disaster or even a series of disasters, it’s a particularly potent mix of catastrophe and normality in which both are murderous. Perhaps the problem of coupling “disaster” and “communism” is that it implies a unified response to a unified crisis, when in fact we have different resistances, necessitated by a group-differentiated schism of normality and catastrophes.

I think the undercurrent to this conversation is the specter of what is now quite openly and explicitly called fascism. We have talked about the potentialities of such fascism in the works of Paul Kingsnorth, and early on in relation to Garrett Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics,”¹⁹ and how it would be quite easy to imagine a response to climate change in which those at the top of systems of oppressive power, those empowered by capital, the state, gender, class, race, sexuality, basically live out a sort of super-privileged version of what Rebecca Solnit is talking about. The core vision of dystopian films recently has been that either the rich people go and live in the sky or a magic island, etc., but that doesn’t seem realistic. Actually, what’s more likely to happen is that the city breaks up into increasingly small fragments in which extreme privilege and protected privilege are surrounded by a mass of those who don’t have the power to defend themselves, and that plays out around moments of disasters as well. There’s several accounts I remember reading after Hurricane Sandy of people watching the streets of New York, just as the hurricane was about to hit, filled with carloads of rich white New Yorkers going to the countryside or to stay in hotels—they were being filmed by Black and Latinx workers who had to stay at work. There’s something strong there about the nature of the disaster—some people literally in the absurd, nightmarish situation of not being able to escape the disaster because their boss wouldn’t let them.

BASE Magazine: As well as signing a raft of Presidential Memoranda and Executive Orders which reduce the scope of environmental protection oversight for “high-priority” infrastructure and energy projects, the Trump administration also imposed a gag order on offices within the US Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop them from releasing public-facing documents. In response to the order, and freezes on resources, we’ve seen dissenting voices from authorities previously in alignment with the state—the National Park Service (@NotAltWorld), the EPA (@UngaggedEPA), and NASA (@RogueNASA) calling for people to #resist. In terms of media dissemination, do these alt formulations present any hint towards a valuable affordance or is the gesture, at best, a populist gimmick? Is there some unrealized application for the alternative channel from the authoritative (peer-reviewed) voice when it comes to information around climate change?

A: I think the reaction to these accounts, and the supposedly “dissenting” elements of the US state they represent, is dangerous to be honest. Celebrating these accounts overlooks a lot of the fundamental problematics we have to engage with, and creates a fictional division between some form of rational, proper, scientific state and an irrational, improper, populist perversion of the state.

I think that’s dangerous because it occludes a lot of the actual features of the American state which make it so lethal and which are responsible for the current series of differentiated catastrophes which people are experiencing. For example, it’s weird to see the National Park Service (NPS) become this embodiment of American liberalism given that the NPS is literally a protracted celebration of a form of wilderness made possible by genocide against Indigenous people. Then again, perhaps it’s a good icon for the liberal resistance, because the NPS sets out to preserve a certain kind of pristine purity from the devastation of modernity embodied by urban life (and its associations with blackness). It’s actually a colonial myth very similar to American liberalism itself.

I think you can also say related things about the Rogue NASA (@RogueNASA) Twitter account. As part of the military-industrial complex, NASA’s history and its self-mythologizing as a colonial “explorer” makes it a depressing, if unsurprising, hero for the liberal #resistance. I guess that’s what I felt was dangerous about that particular moment in which people started fetishizing a certain form of civil-service resistance. It occludes the nature of the American state and I think we should be careful not to allow populism, or Trump’s form of populism, to distract us from the nature of the American state as an organization of forces of heteropatriarchal, settler colonial, capitalist domination—that whole murderous configuration shouldn’t be overlooked just because some civil service people don’t like Trump.

D: The one thing I would say is that it remains to be seen what kind of forms these movements will take, and certainly in the March for Science there was a lot of very unhelpful exceptionalism—“we are scientists, we produce truth”—which kind of suggests that as scientists they should be protected. In this sense, they failed to join up with already existing struggles and with other movements because they even exceptionalize themselves in relation to other movements. That’s worrying, but I’m sure there are elements that do want to connect and do want to join up and are doing so. The NPS, of course, is massively colonial: it has literally forced people off their land and continues to do so. But there may be people who work for the NPS who would like to address this, are aware of this, and would like to remedy it in some way. Just because they are struggling at the moment as rogue employees of the NPS doesn’t necessarily mean that they are struggling for a return to what was—you can struggle against your own history as well. Whether that is happening or not, I don’t know. We certainly saw it in the student movement around tuition fees and privatization of higher education in the UK—that wasn’t just a struggle for the return of the university as a space where relatively privileged people could have a free education or even be paid to have an education, at its best it was a struggle for a fundamentally different kind of education. So perhaps those struggles will take that kind of direction. I’m sure elements of those struggles will and they are the ones I guess that will potentially have the most interest for radical politics, against and beyond the world as it is.

A: And I guess this is the point where it might be important to talk about a certain form of “treachery” against the manifestation of power that one is willingly and/or unwillingly incorporated into. I have been thinking a lot about treachery in the context of recent discussions around the term “ally.” I mean, I think a lot of people have come to realize that the term ally is problematic, but there seems to have been an easy shift towards “accomplice” instead and I don’t think that has actually resolved the fundamental problem: both imply that there is some form of easy movement that one can make towards someone in quite a different structural position, which means that you can then unilaterally declare “okay, I am an accomplice now.”

I think what this often means, especially for people like myself who are in a particularly privileged position, is that I have to actually think about what it means to be traitorous or treacherous. I think the interesting thing about the figure of the traitor is that you never fully escape the thing that you are betraying. The traitor is always an ambiguous figure who can never be fully trusted because they can always be drawn back into the form they are betraying. So, I guess there is something interesting to think about in terms of these state workers. You know, whenever the police commit another atrocity, they usually pull out some policeman who has a critique of the police, but it never goes into a full betrayal of the police. It’s never treacherous, it’s always restrained in some way, and I guess it’s at that point when you’re willing to start comprehending the abolition of yourself, that you might become a useful traitor rather than a very dangerous ally who just seeks to incorporate a more critical edge into the reproduction of violence.

So, there is something about treachery and a willingness to be dangerous to the thing that reproduces you—simplistically speaking, to bite the hand that feeds you. I think if those rogue accounts do become dangerous, it will be if they leak things, if they cause a problem and then are willing to go beyond that. What would be interesting is if those people doing the rogue stuff started quietly talking to and helping Indigenous people reoccupy parts of the National Park Service that have been stolen from them. Maybe that would be a good form of treachery.

BASE Magazine: When it comes to activities to support and build on, people often point to the numerous struggles, many on Indigenous/First Nations land, aimed at preventing the extraction of resources which directly lead to climate change—but much of this seems far beyond the reach of this island. Meanwhile, similar UK-based activity around antifracking seems also to have been rooted in a reactionary nationalism—somewhere between NIMBYism and a defense of the English countryside. How might we better confront and resist the causes and effects of climate change or, if the determining moments are to be far from these shores, how might we better offer solidarity?

A: Once when OOTW were doing a talk, someone from the audience raised this point about Indigenous struggles and was like “we’ve seen these Indigenous struggles elsewhere and they are really good, important, and fundamental to any kind of environmental practice in the twenty-first century.” Which was cool, but then he went “so, what do we need to do in the UK? We need to do something around our local places, our local environments, do we need to become Indigenous?” And that’s the moment when you are like “Noooo!” It’s ridiculous, but you can see this kind of thing comes up often in the Kingsnorth stuff. It is obviously a real problem and it’s interesting because it seems to spread across the political continuum.

Kingsnorth is actually a properly dangerous ideologue who has all of these ideas which have been coalescing around a very fervent nationalism-fascism complex. What’s dangerous is that it has been taken up by a lot of people on a liberal Left, who nevertheless seem to find something in it. So, I think part of the problem is that people start making easy equations with the land and start thinking about things in terms of “Nature.” What we have always been trying to insist on in OOTW is that there is not some kind of pure nature to go back to, and that any implication of some kind of perfect wilderness is colonial dreaming, and a dreaming which will only vivify an incredibly dangerous form of enclosure of the wild as a means of preserving the world. And, what we’ve been talking about more in OOTW is the cyborg ecology or the cyborg Earth, in which there is no perfect nature to go back to; and in which we have to face up to the complexities of the interrelation between human and nonhuman life—which ironically enough, is exactly what Kingsnorth says he is trying to resolve! Kingsnorth says he is doing it through the nation, but he can’t talk about human and nonhuman life without pitching nonhuman life as some kind of perfect and pure thing. As soon as human life is removed from that, for Kingsnorth, it becomes dirty, polluted, and corrupted because, for Kingsnorth, nature is what rejuvenates the nation.

The thing that we have to resist here is Western colonial romanticism—this absolutely has to be destroyed, and this isn’t some kind of abstract literary problem, it totally vivifies a vast proportion of the UK environmental movement at the moment. There is still a popular imaginary of some kind of pure nature which you find as much in RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) members as you do in hardcore environmentalist activists, and it really must be refused. At the same time, we need to be certain that we don’t become technofuturists who’ll happily embrace a technological invasion of everything existing, with no regard for the colonial paradigm and the advent of European technology as both weapon and arbiter of colonial “progress.” To a certain extent, we are between a rock and a hard place here—between a romance of wilderness and a romance of technology, and both are worse.

D: I think that binary is really important and you get it from both sides. So, if you try and criticize the fetishization of the slow, the local, the authentic and the romanticization of nature, then you are accused of being in love with the global, the fast or of being a technological fetishist. It’s this kind of binary thinking that structures both the accelerationist-oriented, technofuturist Left, and “back to nature” leftism. I think unpicking that binary, in fact rejecting it as a structure, is really important. There is a case, sometimes, for organic food, there is also a case, sometimes, for using drones in farming. And sometimes there is a good case not to grow organic food—we talk about this in our piece on cyborg agroecology.²⁰ Indigenous ways of organizing life in specific locations across the globe are important here—not so that we can apply them to a wholly different context, but because they often completely undercut those binaries—they are “local,” but have dynamic, relational understandings of “local” or “place” that eschew cozy romanticism.

On the appropriation of the term Indigenous outside of the Indigenous context, it’s important to be clear that there is no substantive Indigenous population in Britain. I know some Crofters in the Scottish Islands and Highlands argue that crofting is an Indigenous way of life. I don’t know enough to comment on that, but generally the way “Indigenous” is used in the political discourse of the UK is to suggest that white British people are the Indigenous population of this island and so have a unique claim to live here. This is sometimes extended “greenwards,” so they are held to have a unique ability or right to cultivate its environment, or protect it from “overpopulation.”

Against that, I would (cautiously) take Indigeneity as a way of naming a particular co-constitution of identity with land and place: a way of life that cannot be separated from the dynamic, relational ecologies in which it developed, and that includes nonhuman life: animals, minerals, and the land itself (and as I understand it, many, though not all, Indigenous people make use of this relational understanding in organizing their struggles). Now if you colonize that land, that way of life is marginalized or made impossible, and that simply does not happen in the UK—left-leaning localists might point to Tesco coming into your high street and closing your local shop. That might be bad, but it’s not remotely comparable: your way of life is still fundamentally the same. So the term “Indigenous” just doesn’t translate.

I also think there is still a danger of white-settler activists; or white activists in Europe or Britain—and it’s a tendency I recognize in myself—fetishizing Indigenous struggles and placing too much hope in them, or just abstracting bits of knowledge without attending to the need for decolonization as a political project. We saw it with the Zapatistas a lot: because things are so shit over here, something that looks brilliant, exciting, and a little bit different (perhaps there was a degree of exoticism in it as well), people overly invest in it and overly identify with it but of course it can’t be transplanted wholesale to a different context.

So it’s important to look at what’s happening more locally too—rather than depoliticizing hope by displacing it onto an other—and thinking about where the connections might be. We’ve got anti-fracking campaigns, migrant solidarity campaigns, and certainly with the anti-fracking campaigns I think the political content of them is yet to be determined. A lot of it is NIMBYism, a lot (though not all) of it is middle class [and white], but that’s what we’ve got. People don’t come into struggle with perfect positions. People get involved in struggle because something is affecting them [or something they care about] and through contact with a whole host of people—activists, other people struggling, people reading texts—their political positions can change. Green and Black Cross are doing some really important work in anti-fracking struggles, sending observers to villages in Sussex that perhaps haven’t seen a lot of political struggles or protest previously.²¹ Of course, not all struggle will take the direction we want it to, but I think it’s really important that we don’t give up on it as inherently flawed from the beginning because then it will be captured by the Kingsnorths. The [fascist] British National Party made great play of localist environmental policy and you could easily see the far right jumping on anti-fracking campaigns.

A: To add to this, it was very inspiring to see Black Lives Matter UK shutting down London City Airport, and talking about breathability and atmosphere. That’s hugely linked to any environmental discussion of climate change in terms of pollution but also the simple fact that London is rapidly becoming unbreathable. What was brilliant about the BLM statement that came out was that they insisted that breathability is differentiated—that the problem with expanding London City is not that it affects the whole of London, but rather that it disproportionately affects the poor Black communities in Newham, where the airport is located.

Something I was excited about was the opening of a discussion around atmosphere and breathability, which would bring in the environment as a space where effects are differentiated. So that was an exciting moment, which I hope hasn’t stalled because no one else took it up. It seems like the environmental movement missed that, and it’s interesting that it has done very little about atmosphere and pollution in London. For me, that seems like a really axiomatic struggle that could be acted on immediately, and would massively improve the welfare and livelihood of systematically oppressed peoples.

So, I think it’s very possible to already envisage what some kind of environmental activism in the UK might look like—it might not be as simple as targeting resource extraction, campaigns around pollution would be just as valid. In terms of displacement by flooding, that’s something we are going to perhaps see more of, but pollution is something that’s happening immediately. I would say that I remain deeply hopeful because people are making these moves towards realizing that the environment is a context rather than some kind of sole cause and, as environment is contextualized, I think we begin to see something quite hopeful here.

I don’t see it as a movement, but as a series of deeply fragmented local insurgencies. That’s what movements have always been. If you read Aldon Morris, who’s a great sociologist of the Civil Rights Movement, he says it wasn’t a movement but a series of local insurgencies which came to be seen as a movement because they acquired a force great enough that it was impossible to resist them.²² I don’t think we can model what we do now on the Civil Rights Movement, but it’s important to remember that event, the archetypal movement, wasn’t a movement. So, on this basis, in thinking about anti-fracking campaigns, all of them have the capacity to become very successful local insurgencies in which the demand ceases to be just about “we’re going to stop this one thing” and becomes how how we can begin to act in solidarity with those whose lives are determined by catastrophe.

D: There’s a great article by Aufheben written in 1994, “The politics of anti-road struggle and the struggles of anti-road politics.” It outlines a lot of these issues in that movement: which sometimes was driven by NIMBYism, sometimes by environmental concerns, sometimes by moral concerns, sometimes by a more holistic Marxism.²³ What happens in those past movements, the historical memory, I think, is actually pretty important: in their struggles did they bring issues together to show how they were connected? How? That’s of real use in determining how we organize against environmental destruction in the UK without the protofascist rhetoric of “Our England.”

A: Yeah, and that refusal of “Spitfire Ecology,” of Merrie England and green fields with an old fighter plane flying over them, is undoubtedly the danger. I think a refusal of the nationalist image of the land, as well as an embrace of the antinationalist possibility of a cyborg Earth—which simultaneously does not deny the possibility of an Indigenous nationhood—is the kind of contradiction we have to work through. This working through can’t be didactic; it can’t just be based in speaking, nor just in writing, nor can we just hope that if we fight hard enough it will all sort itself out in the end. I guess what I’m caught up in is some kind of social life where we practice speaking, writing, and fighting as if they had never been separate in the first place. That’s why BASE makes me hopeful; it’s a good place for some regenerative conversation, for some kind of lovingly antagonistic chatter.

1. See our introduction to Section I, “Introduction: Disaster Migration,” for a critique of our use of Myers’ numbers in this interview.

2. Oli Brown, “Migration and Climate Change,” International Organization for Migration Research Series (Geneva: International Organization of Migration, 2008), 17. Available at https://www.iom.cz/files/Migration_and_Climate_Change_-_IOM_Migration_Research_Series_No_31.pdf.

3. The National Health Service is the UK’s public health provider. Famously a “universal” health system feted for providing care on the basis of need rather than ability to pay, the UK government has in recent years developed a range of policies restricting access as part of a “hostile environment” directed at undocumented migrants—including a requirement that people pay upfront for secondary care if they cannot prove their “eligibility” for NHS treatment based on migration status. The group Docs not Cops are challenging this: see page 68 below.

4. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

5. From memory, I (D) had an essay by Rupert Read in mind here. The truth is even more unnerving, because Read had made such arguments as an “expert” to a UK Parliamentary Select Committee. See publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/consumpt/consumption.pdf.

6. See “Lies of the Land” in Section II of this volume for our response to this essay.

7. This is not entirely clear to us today, as argued by Jan Selby et al., “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited,” Political Geography 60 (2017): 232–44. The authors dispute existing evidence of both drought-induced migration and migration-induced conflict.

8. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 3.

9. On the race-erasive, white-feminist universalism of the latter text, particularly in its iteration as a Hulu TV show, see Sophie Lewis: “In Gilead, Atwood’s fictional setting, human sexuation is neatly dimorphic and cisgendered—but that is apparently not what’s meant to be dystopian about it. It’s the ‘surrogacy’.… [As such] The Handmaid’s Tale neatly reproduces a wishful scenario at least as old as feminism itself. Cisgender womanhood, united without regard to class, race or colonialism, can blame all its woes on evil religious fundamentalists with guns.” [Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019), 10.]

10. For Moylan, “critical dystopia” names a historically specific genre of science fiction arising around the birth of neoliberalism. We’re prepared to expand the concept to describe our present, however. [Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). For more on the use of “critical dystopia” as a descriptive term for the present, see David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (London: Routledge, 2017), 20–51.

11. The “Prospecting Futures” research conducted by Lisa Garforth, Amy C. Chambers, and Miranda Iossifidis at Newcastle University has been exploring this issue in relation to online science-fiction reading groups (whose texts have included works by Octavia Butler).

12. Silvia Federici, “Preoccupying,” The Occupied Times (blog), October 25, 2014, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13482.

13. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 9–89.

14. See especially Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019).

15. This is a bit of a rhetorical simplification—differentiated vulnerability can also mean rich white people choosing to live in more risky places, displacing those who can longer afford to live there. In many places, urban waterfronts are caught between two trends—the increasing desirability of waterfront properties and the exploding costs of living in evermore floodprone areas. Red Hook, a neighborhood built on a peninsula in the floodplains of Brooklyn, has seen accelerating gentrification in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, despite reports that normal high tides will be flooding its streets by 2080. [See Anna-Sofia Berner, “Red Hook: The Hip New York Enclave Caught Between Gentrification and Climate Change,” The Guardian, September 25, 2018, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/25/red-hook-climate-change-floodplain-hurricane-sandy-gentrification.]

16. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2.

17. Automnia, “Ecstasy & Warmth,” The Occupied Times (blog), August 20, 2015, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14010.

18. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013).

19. See “The Dangers of Reactionary Ecology” in Section II of this book.

20. See Section II (NATURES) in this book.

21. Green and Black Cross are a mutual-aid organization providing legal support for environmental and social protest in the UK.

22. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1986).

23. This is a slight misremembering of the article, which can be found at libcom.org/library/m11-anti-road-aufheben.