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In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report. It is a work defined by exhaustive detail and three exact and exacting conclusions. The first is that the global target set in the Paris Agreement of 1.5°C of warming would have far greater impacts than were previously anticipated.¹ The second is that these impacts would still be vastly preferable to those incurred by 2°C of warming: a sea-level rise of nearly half a meter by 2100; a massive increase in the proportion of the population exposed to severe heat; a decrease in marine fisheries by three million tons; a sixteen-percent loss of plant species; and a ninety-nine percent decline in coral reefs.² Perhaps most striking, however, was the report’s third and final conclusion: the window for containing these clearly catastrophic consequences is rapidly closing. If warming is to be limited to 1.5°C, just twelve years remain in which to undertake what the authors call an “unprecedented” transformation of society. As NASA scientist Kate Marvel notes, 2030 is not a deadline. Climate change is not “a cliff we fall off—it’s a slope we slide down. We don’t have twelve years to prevent climate change, we have no time. It’s already here. And even under a business-as-usual scenario, the world isn’t going to end in exactly twelve years.”³

The authors of the IPCC report intended it as a “clarion bell”—an intervention which would “mobilize people and dent the mood of complacency.”⁴ Yet the reception of the report was, for many, defined not by decisive determination but desperate dejection. As climate activist Mary Annaïse Heglar notes, “Lots of folks who had never thought about climate change, or who thought it lived on some distant horizon, are now coming to terms with its reality, here and now. They’re terrified. And sad.”⁵ In an essay published just a few days after the report, she describes how she came to comprehend the scale of climate change and how it drove her to despair:

I knew climate change was real. I knew it was dire. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I didn’t know just how bad it was. I didn’t know how many innocent — and I mean innocent — people were already suffering hideously. I didn’t know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances.… Where other people saw bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. Even as I walked on dry land, I saw floods.… I worried about how we would treat each other in the face of such calamity. I doubted it would be kind. (I still doubt that, actually.)

Heglar suggests that for many, the initial shock of destruction is not met with resolve but with grief. The realization that people, creatures, and entire ecosystems have died, are dying, and will continue to die does not immediately lead to determination but melancholia. As Heglar puts it, “We’re mourning our futures … some of us are mourning our todays, even our yesterdays.” The quantification of destruction does not instantly inaugurate action to prevent it, especially when what is being destroyed is so all-encompassing. Indeed, the devestation is so total that its most spectacular forms—floods, storms, fires—are poor metaphors for the true depth of the damage. To really grapple with the scale of the destruction involves attending to the slower, less eye-catching processes: the pollution and erosion of the soil; the felling of forests that bind the ground together; the extinction of creatures that feed on and were fed by the Earth. “Climate change” is the dominant description of ecological destruction, but this is not simply a climate crisis, it is an ecological crisis. The catastrophe is not just emission counts but rather countless extractions, exhaustions, and extinctions.

When Out of the Woods started writing, it quickly became apparent to us that merely comprehending the breadth and depth of the ecological crisis could be a destructive thing in and of itself. Distress and despair arise from beginning to grasp the cascading scales through which the ruining of so many living and nonliving things is underway. Such responses are not misplaced, for the ruination of these things negatively impacts the possibilities for collective life they may have once held. The spectacular apocalyptic images of climate change in the received narratives, moreover, figure this equivalence as an inevitability: the breakdown of the climate is the breakdown of society. As the waves roll in on the cities, it is assumed, societies will break down and survivors will fight each other over whatever remains, while looking to the state and the military for salvation. In the classic “eco-catastrophe” film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), for example, survivors seeking shelter on the rooftops of skyscrapers experience hope only upon the redemptive return to the city of the US Army and its helicopters. In The Road (2009), only the repro-normative filial bond between a father and his son is made to matter amid a nightmare world of cannibalism and despair. Out of the Woods came together, in 2014, in order to reject such privatizing responses to the conjuncture and to collectively formulate alternatives without, however, disavowing despair.

“When people feel something is really urgent, or crisis-oriented,” Kyle Powys Whyte argues, “they tend to forget about their relationships with others. In fact, most phases of colonialism are ones where the colonizing society is freaked out about a crisis.”⁶ The fear of social breakdown amidst calamity is a colonial terror. This can only be a fear founded on a forgetting of existing relations and a figuring of crisis as something that has not yet happened. As Heglar notes, “when I hear folks say—and I have heard it—that the environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to get off the train.… For four hundred years and counting, the United States itself has been an existential threat for Black people.”⁷ No disaster is experienced by a unified “We.” Likewise, no disaster is defined by a sudden disappearance of kindness. These are myths of liberal political theory and its ideological extension through pop culture. It is ridiculous to imagine that solidarity and generosity emerge only through the conditional guarantee of a state-enforced social order.

The historical evidence seems to confirm our political suspicions. Rebecca Solnit shows that the differentiated destruction of disaster is frequently defined by “an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive” that creates “disaster communities” founded on mutual aid and collective care. These communities are not run by the state nor are they defined by the sudden evaporation of race, class, and gender. Instead, existing collectives of those most affected by disaster are expanded and elaborated to build new socialities of solidarity—whether in Mexico City after the 1968 earthquake or in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In these cases, when the state appears, it is not to help but to restore its own definition of order. It clamps down on ‘looters’ repurposing vital supplies to share, and ‘squatters’ seeking shelter in abandoned homes. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the US Army was sent in: they murdered between 50 and 500 survivors and disrupted the self-organized search, rescue, and firefighting efforts that had spread throughout the city. “The disaster provoked, as most do, a mixed reaction: generosity and solidarity among most of the citizens, and hostility from those who feared that public and sought to control it, in the belief that an unsubjugated citizenry was—in the words of [Brigadier General] Funston—‘an unlicked mob.’”⁸

Out of the Woods faces such calamity by insisting that we must not forget our existing relations with others. Amongst the working class, the racialized, the gendered, the colonized, disaster is met with self-organization, solidarity, and care. These collectives share in common their struggle and survival despite and because of the ongoing disaster of capital, race, gender, and colonialism. Whatever happens, their circulation of kindness is undoubtable. There will, of course, be no such kindness forthcoming from the brutal nexus of raciality, capital, and coloniality, forces which Denise Ferriera da Silva argues are “deeply implicated in/as/with each other.”⁹ But what else should be expected from operations which presuppose violence? The ecological crisis is a product of centuries of this system, of innumerable extractions and exploitations, indescribable enslavements and extirpations.

No true salvation can come in the form of a US Army helicopter. It is as a result of these striations that we insist on the importance of understanding ecological crisis as incorporating and being reproduced by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.” In fighting against this premature death, racialized, poor, queer, disabled and feminized subjects ensure that the response to ecological crisis is also group-differentiated. This response is one of deepened kindness from kin (or ‘kith’—to revive an old word referring to affinities grounded in place and action, rather than genealogy) and redoubled oppression from oppressors. It is in this deeper “kithness” that we find a solidarity which may yet change everything. If connections can be built across spatial and social differences, beyond their current fragmented form, they might yet begin to construct the provisional infrastructures of a new world amidst the ruins of the old. Out of the Woods chooses to recognize such disaster communities as a space of possibility for communism in the midst of disaster.¹⁰

To talk of disaster communism in these terms is to take the ecological crisis as a disaster. In the Oxford English Dictionary, these are the first two listed definitions of “disaster, n.”:

1. An event or occurrence of a ruinous or very distressing nature; a calamity; esp. a sudden accident or natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life.

2. The state or condition that results from a ruinous event; the occurrence of a sudden accident or catastrophe, or a series of such events; misfortune, calamity.¹¹

The concept of “disaster” is useful because it can collapse the distinction between event and effect—between ruination and the resulting ruins. Part of what makes the planetary ecological crisis so difficult to comprehend is its complex temporality; the disaster is simultaneously happening, has happened, and will happen. This is also part of what makes recognizing the scale of catastrophe so psychologically devastating. It is hard enough to accept some cataclysm that is yet to come. It is even harder to reflect on the rapid ruining of the past, present, and future all at once. Talking of ecological disaster offers a way to enfold these different times of ruination.

This enfolding capacity is evident in Neil Smith’s understanding of disaster as a composite of risk, result, and response. His writing also offers another shaping element in what it means to think of ecological crisis as disaster:

It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—(physical) causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom.¹²

In line with our claim that ecological crisis is group-differentiated, Smith notes that “disasters don’t simply flatten landscapes, washing them smooth,” but instead “deepen and erode the ruts of social difference they encounter.”¹³ Clyde Woods, importantly, extends this rut further into the history of “plantation capitalism,” noting that “activists in New Orleans were very insistent that there was not just a disaster and people were taking advantage of it, there was a disaster before Katrina.”¹⁴ While disaster collapses the distinction between the process of ruining and the ruins it creates, it simultaneously deepens the differentiation between who and what bears the brunt of disaster and who and what does not.

What we call “disaster communism” is an immediately ethical and eminently practical response to this differentiated disaster. Such a statement is anathema to the liberal devotees of establishment responses to catastrophe. To them, disaster communism could only be a perverse and antipragmatic faith in things that don’t yet exist, or a dangerous romanticization of practices that have already failed. Such critiques indicate not only an obvious detachment from the lived reality of disaster communities, but also a determined ignorance of the inefficacy of supposed liberal “solutions.” While liberal critics will claim disaster communism is based on promises not practices, they will also maintain a strange silence about the fact the IPCC’s own solutions depend on as-yet-uninvented technofixes. This can only be the fantasy of that which claims to be nonideological, and therein sits the most pernicious ideology. Disaster communism already exists—indeed, some components have existed for hundreds of years—but is criticized as a radical fantasy, while the as-yet-uninvented technologies of carbon sequestration and geo-engineering are taken as matters of scientific fact.

Not content with things that don’t yet exist, leftist critics of disaster communism might supplement these technofixes with spatial fixes or displacements of the climate disaster. In this vision of the future, nature is not to be mourned but managed. In our view, the imaginations of assorted Keynesians, Green New Dealers, and accelerationists tend to be constrained by a romanticization of labor-saving technologies and automation. We do not want to be mistaken for defending work, yet what these architects of the future cannot admit is that automation does not save labor-time as much as displace it. The automation of production only changes the form and composition of labor and the places in which labor is performed. In terms of form and composition, automation merely reorganizes labor-time so that a greater proportion is devoted to the intellectual labor of innovation. Such knowledge is eventually embodied in machines, which of course have to be built as well. As Marx convincingly showed in the longest chapter of Capital, “It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt.”¹⁵ This shift is undertaken, whether consciously or unconsciously, in pursuit of crushing the power of workers. By reducing the portion of “living labor” enrolled in capital (thus reducing the number of laborers who can go on strike, blockade the factory or abduct their boss), the “dead labor” of machines (who can be relied upon not to blockade or sabotage anything) compose the value of a product or energy system.

Just as it changes the form and composition of labor, automation also changes the places of labor. All technology requires energy but energy itself is harnessed through work.¹⁶ Even renewable energy systems require new or recycled raw materials such as rare-earth metals, lithium, and copper to be extracted. The cheapest way of doing this is through the appropriation of raw materials and exploitation of labor, most likely in the Global South. Under capitalism, mining is an inescapably violent and toxic practice. Separating raw materials from waste increasingly requires chemical and biological “work” (in addition to human and nonhuman labor) to recover harder-to-extract reserves. Costs can be driven down if environmental protections are circumvented outright through bribery or, more commonly, structural adjustment policies. Mined materials are circulated along hypersecuritized global supply chains. International maritime shipping is said to compose up to three percent of global carbon emissions. Yet such maritime transport is specifically excluded from the transnational Paris Agreement, demonstrating the absurdity of contemporary international climate politics (albeit the International Maritime Organization has recently tried to mandate for cleaner fuels). Globally transported raw materials must, of course, be coordinated with one another in order to be transformed and assembled in factories. The latter, more conventional, sites of exploitation ultimately rely upon directly productive labor as well as social infrastructures of cheap food, clean water and care, all of which maintain workers’ bodies. Finally, products shipped to their points of consumption are used for increasingly short periods of time before being discarded into landfills or recirculated as e-waste for one last gasp of value extraction.

Automation has already failed the vast majority of the population of the planet. While it has undoubtedly benefitted white colonial capital, the effects of automation on racialized, colonized proletarians have always been disastrous. The form, composition, and places of human and nonhuman exploitation, capitalization, and appropriation continue to produce what Marx called “surplus populations” or the “industrial reserve army”—massive groups of unemployed laborers whose existence serves to keep the cost of labor down.¹⁷

It is worth considering a visceral example of the consequences of this system. Foxconn, the electronics giant infamous for its exploitation of workers in China, cut more than 400,000 jobs between 2012 and 2016 through the introduction of tens of thousands of robots.¹⁸ By 2020, the company plans to fully automate thirty percent of its production. While Foxconn’s jobs are rapidly disappearing, its ecological destructiveness persists. In 2013, Foxconn was accused of releasing vast quantities of heavy metals into tributaries that feed the Yangtze and Huangpu—the two rivers that supply most of Shanghai’s water. Locals told reporters of high incidences of cancer. They had stopped eating cuttlefish from the rivers or vegetables from the fields for fear of the health consequences. The central government had already relocated one entire community away from the area, apparently because of its unnaturally high incidence of cancer.¹⁹

This is part of a much greater problem in China. In 2013, researchers estimated that “between 8 percent and 20 percent of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals.”²⁰ China’s surplus populations thus face a double disaster: there are no jobs in the newly automated factories and they cannot return to live on the land because pollution has made agricultural subsistence nearly impossible. Automation is not a solution to the ecological crisis. It merely intensifies the vulnerability of the surplus populations it creates, making them ever more dependent on resources that capital has already ruined.

Faced with the impossibility of surviving on land where nothing can grow, amidst factories where no one can work, in housing where no one is safe, it is not surprising that surplus populations are forced into migration. Under global capitalism, it is impossible to escape the processes that produce local ruins. Racialized proletarians who move from one country to another may find work and thus survival but they will still be exposed to the differentiated disasters of the ecological crisis. After Hurricane Irma in 2017, for example, most reports focused on the damage to Florida’s agriculture. The sugarcane harvest was destroyed as was much of the avocado crop. The fate of the 300,000 migrant workers who tended the farms was almost entirely ignored.²¹ Many Latinx migrants chose not to go to the hurricane shelters, fearful that operators would report them to immigration enforcement. Some could afford the expense of a motel room in a safer area but others had no choice but to try to weather the storm. The hurricane completely destroyed many of the mobile homes these migrants were living in, worsening a housing crisis that was already dire. In the aftermath of the hurricane, migrant workers desperately needed new cheap accommodation, yet the destruction of the farms made it impossible to find work and thus to pay rent. Their experience is typical of the differentiated disasters the ecological crisis wreaks on surplus populations. In search of work and survival, migrants are forced to endure new vulnerabilities and more limitations on their mobility.

The global ecological crisis is a catastrophe of extraction, exhaustion, and extinction which exploits human and nonhuman things. As Che Gossett has argued, “The caging and mass killing of animal life, the caging and mass killing of Black life, and the racial capitalism that propels premature death are connected in a deadlock.”²² The extermination or carcerality of Black people and nonhumans are in a coterminous relationship structurally necessary for political domination. Race and coloniality operate as an endless destructiveness that constantly feeds on and into itself.

A potent example of this can be found in the colonial history of the island Nauru, where the violence of colonial resource extraction is reproduced in the present brutality against racialized migrants. Nauru was initially colonized by Germany in the late-nineteenth century before being transferred to joint administration by Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain after World War I. Nauru’s value was in its extraordinarily abundant deposits of phosphate—a crucial ingredient of agricultural fertilizers. From the early twentieth century on, the British Phosphate Company strip-mined the island during a frenzied resource boom. For a brief period, Nauru had the second-highest GDP of any nation in the world—only Saudi Arabia was richer.²³

When the phosphate was finally exhausted in the late nineties, the country fell into a deep crisis: the central bank went broke, unemployment hit ninety percent, and the school system collapsed. After decades of strip-mining, the very foundations of the island were in ruins. Geographer Anja Kanngieser writes, “the mine area, called ‘topside’ by Nauruans, is like a moonscape. Huge limestone pinnacles reach skywards, punctuated by steep gullies into which, I was warned, people have fallen to their deaths. It is unbearably hot, humid, and inhospitable.”²⁴ Eighty percent of Nauru’s surface was now not only infertile but utterly uninhabitable.²⁵

Faced with catastrophe, Nauru’s government made a series of increasingly desperate attempts at self-preservation—alternating between laundering money for the Russian mafia and recognizing breakaway states in return for cash. Eventually, in 2001, Nauru’s options ran out and it agreed to become part of Australia’s “Pacific Solution.” The consequence of this was a stream of aid but its price was hosting a massive migrant-detention facility. By using Nauru as an offshore prison, Australia avoids its responsibilities under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Since 2013, Australia has used its offshore prisons on Nauru and Manus Island to prevent anyone who seeks asylum in Australia by boat from landing on its sovereign shores. Nauru, not a signatory to the convention, provides the perfect alibi for the detention, deprivation, abuse, and torture of thousands of racialized migrants.²⁶

Nauru is an object lesson between the extractive colonialism and the violence of the border. The island was stripped of its resources because of colonial contempt for the Indigenous islanders. The poverty of those same islanders could then be weaponized to use the island as a site of racialized violence. The population of Nauru, rendered surplus, is forced to deputize the oppression of migrants from other surplus populations. The island sustains itself on the destruction of the lives of others, because all other means of sustenance have been ruined. Nauru’s experience encapsulates the breadth and depth of the disaster’s destructiveness: an example of what is happening, what has happened, and what is going to happen.

Reading of this breadth and depth, you, like us, might feel the pull of despair. But to despair over Nauru is to return to the same problem we found above—where an understandable despair at the reality of destruction becomes confused with an unacceptable hopelessness at the inevitability of cruelty. In the face of such calamity, do not doubt the capacity for kindness. Even amid the horror of the camps on Nauru, the prisoners gather together and organize for their collective survival. Despite years of police repression, 2016 saw protracted protests by those detained on Nauru and with solidarity from Nauruans.²⁷

In these protests we glimpse the beginnings of disaster communism. We are aware that the word “communist” risks conjuring up images of authoritarian statism. Yet there is no name other than “communism,” that Out of the Woods knows of, adequate to describe collective world-building beyond the state and capital. For us, communism is precisely the process which simultaneously undoes “business-as-usual” and builds a new world. Communism, in short, is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Like ecological crisis, communism cannot be understood as yet-to-come. Communism, too, has existed, still exists, and will continue to exist. This is what provides hope against grief and replaces acceptance with struggle.

Like disaster, communist struggle is differentiated. Those undertaking it are more often than not already feeling the sharp end of ecological crisis: Indigenous peoples, migrants, racialized people, women, prisoners, “queers,” workers, the poor, and the disabled. Isolated, their struggles can appear reactive, as if they provide only temporary local reliefs. Capital is all too eager to offset the costs of its ecological crisis onto those who suffer from it, attempting to turn coterminous struggles into self-ingesting infighting. When viewed together, the acts of these groups appear the prime motor of social change. We know not yet what we might do, and this unknowable togetherness, we call communism.

It is this which makes us hopeful, which wards off that damaging and self-fulfilling despair. Hope is our word for the grave but positive emotion which collectively emerges within the disastrous present, pushes against it, and expands beyond it. With Ernst Bloch, we insist that this hope is not expectation, nor even optimism.²⁸ Rather, it is always against itself; warding off its tendency to become a fetish, sundered from solidarity and struggle. This is hope against hope.

The importance of being together and becoming together is one we feel strongly about as a collective. Through the simple repetition of talking and writing online, Out of the Woods has become an important part of all our lives, with shared study evolving into real care and solidarity. It has been a wonderful thing to write together: typing over each other in sprawling online documents, not remembering or caring which parts any individual wrote, piecing together our knowledges on things we already knew, teasing out from each other things we didn’t know we knew, and collectively addressing those things we did not and do not yet know. As a collection of essays-thus-far written, this book is by no means the culmination of our thought but a series of snapshots of thought-in-gestation. Any kind of conclusive finality is impossible for us. As in the struggles we advocate, this process of becoming together can have no destination at which it settles once and for all. We frequently disagree with each other about what we wrote yesterday, about what we are writing today. This too prevents any sense of finality, as does the fact that, come tomorrow, we want to be writing with each other again. Our thinking together is not complete because it can’t be completed, and even if it could, we wouldn’t want it to end anyway.

Writing as a collective under a shared name solidifies this becoming together. Yet we recognize that it can also play an obfuscatory role, allowing us to escape accountability for our histories and positions, and eliding our relationships to those power structures which reproduce the ecological crisis. Out of the Woods started from a call circulated online in English, predominantly shared in a communist milieu concentrated in the UK. The founding members were all loose acquaintances and largely affiliated with UK universities, whether as staff or students. At this point, we were all white and all men. This probably reflected the nature of the call—a (perhaps uninviting) invitation to do unpaid theoretical work, with all the imbrications of privilege that inherently involves. The original composition of the collective was reflected in the readership we appealed to: a certain left-theory audience was implicit in our writing. In the years since, new people have joined Out of the Woods—primarily through Twitter. Others have stepped back. The collective is now spread across the United Kingdom and the United States, and while it is no longer all men and certainly not heterosexual, we are still all white—and several of us settlers in North America. We are undoubtedly beneficiaries of the nexus of raciality, capital, and colonialism. We take responsibility for and fight against being determined by that inheritance. Several of us still work on the margins of universities, as tenuous students, temporary lecturers, and administrators. It is important to keep in mind these situated perspectives as you read this book—not to invalidate our thought but to better specify it. What has (not) been written undoubtedly reflects those who have (not) written it. With this book complete, Out of the Woods will transform yet again, with the intention of further multiplying our positions against homogeneity. We invite you to contact us, and to think, write, and struggle with us.

When we formed Out of the Woods, we wanted to intervene against the consistent inadequacy of many existing narratives around the ecological crisis. We profoundly disagreed with mainstream environmentalism’s call for a unified humanity that might stand against a yet-to-come cataclysmic event. Simultaneously, we were appalled by the ways this homogenous conception of humanity coexists with moralizing critiques blaming cataclysm on an excess of humanity. Through such a process, cataclysm becomes too easily pinned on “dirty” developing countries, with their “rapidly” reproducing populations, and their “floods” of migrants.

Oppositions between the polluted and the pure, the populating and the controlled, and the migrating and the placebound all ultimately depend on another organizational divide: between white “civilization” and racialized “disorder.” The concept of “nature” serves as an avatar for white anxiety, making manifest fears around the loss of purity and control. Such fears can supposedly be overcome only through the imperial orchestration of intergovernmental organizations—or, a descent into war. The ecological crisis, while supposedly undifferentiated in its effects on humanity, is overdetermined in its causes.

As antiauthoritarian communists and anarchists, we oppose these articulations of environmentalism. However, we also find similar reasons to oppose many of the conventional leftist responses to the ecological crisis. Green anarchism, for example, has too often been focused on defending localized purity of autonomous zones, which in our view constitutes a dangerously introverted response to a globally differentiated disaster. In its romantic attempts to find a pure nature to defend or return to, green anarchism has orchestrated another set of violences.²⁹ At times, an essentialist conception of nature has been expanded into gender, with some (most infamously Deep Green Resistance) articulating transphobic views. Other anarchists—especially in North America—have used primitivism as an excuse to imitate and appropriate Indigeneity. Shockingly, criticisms of such projects have been labelled as sectarian slurs and intra-anarchist scuffles, rather than substantive disagreements. Unlike the well-circulated 2009 anonymous anarchist text Desert or the reactionary Dark Mountain Project, we are uninterested in a project of “nature-loving anarchism,” nor do we countenance such works’ trendy poetic nihilism disguised as sober realism. “Nature” today emphasizes only a separate and fallen world. It is no real shock that nostalgia for a now-spoilt nature is a frequent theme in reactionary thought, the “romantic anticapitalism” that Iyko Day properly names.³⁰ Such a racial project, she argues, is premised on both the appropriation of Indigenous lands and practices by settlers and the exclusion of those deemed corrupted by capital—Asians, Jews, and migrants more generally. Against romantic anticapitalism, then, we draw inspiration from Black, Indigenous, and anti-border anarchists and communists, for whom romantic anticapitalism can only reek of white supremacy.³¹

This book reflects our desire to write something useful, to create something that makes it easier to understand the total interdependence of the extractions, exploitations, enslavements, and extirpations that colonial capital has brought upon this world. The brutal techniques of these myriad forms of ruination are too often reproduced in green aesthetics, politics, and practices. The logics of reactionary ecology, border imperialism, and racialized state violence are perpetuated and proliferated in environmentalism. Such a situation demands a different and differentiated response. We see such a response in inchoate tendencies all around us. This book is about the countless ways people survive amidst and against the ruins. We believe these shared strategies to survive ecological crises make a collective thriving within and beyond ruination possible. Thus, in the service of something that truly changes everything—which is to say planetary revolutions—we offer new concepts to hold together, and hold close, amidst the continuation of the crisis. Against gleeful doomsaying, romantic anticapitalism, and hopeful technofixes:

We hope-against-hope

for a careful, yet fierce, queer cyborg ecology

built through a bricolage of tools, techniques, and knowledges already around us

to move within, against, and beyond the ecological crisis

for survival pending revolution

to make, altogether, disaster communism.