Читать книгу Hope Against Hope - Out of the Woods - Страница 8

Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis is organized into four sections: BORDERS, NATURES, FUTURES, and STRATEGIES. Each section is preceded by an introduction that contextualizes the essays in our thought and in the world. We highly recommend reading these introductory pieces, all written in 2019, before the essays contained within. We have updated these essays for internal consistency across the book, albeit admittedly some essays are very much products of the moment in which they emerged. We have, through further citations and introductory remarks, revised the shortcomings of our earlier thoughts. We hope the contradictions that remain can be fruitful for readers. In particular, we continue to work through the contradiction between an understanding of ecological crisis as something that reproduces and is reproduced by other social crises and a more expanded notion of ecological crisis as something that incorporates these crises (though does not eradicate their specificities). Although we have discussed this tension amongst ourselves, no clear consensus has yet to emerge (and this is as true for some of us as individuals as much as for the collective as a whole).

We begin with BORDERS, the struggles against nationalism, enclosure, and immobility as imperial projects of nation-states. We suggest that these features of our world play a key role in reproducing ecological crisis; and that the latter must not be understood as separate from those punitive regimes seeking to manage human mobility. The interview and four essays in this section forcefully argue for a politics beyond and against the border imperialism of nation-states.

The essays in NATURES unpack how understandings of what and where “nature” is affect: the ability of capital to appropriate and extract value. Nature is never as self-evident as it is made to seem; in fact, there is nothing less “natural” than nature. We demonstrate this claim through an evaluation of the role the defense of nature has played for reactionary and fascist individuals and political movements. We further show how the understanding that nature is always produced can liberate us to collectively construct better worlds.

Perhaps nothing is made more visible by climate disaster than the manner in which the future is very much at stake in the choices we make today. FUTURES contains three essays concerning what this means for climate and left politics. In mainstream environmentalism the future is too often a safe, knowable realm for heterosexual white children to inherit. By thinking through a range of struggles, we reposition the future as an unknowable site of possibility for a variety of subjects in constant formation.

There are many proposals for what is to be done in the face of disaster. STRATEGIES outlines our analysis of contemporary leftist approaches to the ecological crisis, especially those which under the name of climate justice somehow seek to obviate or even exclude struggles against capital, coloniality, and racism. But we refuse to remain only negative. In our most recent and comprehensive essay, we outline the ways disaster communism might be understood to be already emergent amidst such environmental crisis.

Much more could be said about these essays and their possible strengths and weaknesses. We remain self-critical, but this book presents an opportunity to expand the scope of critique. As disaster engulfs spaces and times around us, let us put to you a simple question: what will it take to get out of the woods, together?

1. Stephen Leahy, “Climate Change Impacts Worse than Expected, Global Report Warns,” National Geographic, October 7, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ipcc-report-climate-change-impacts-forests-emissions/.

2. Kelly Levin, “8 Things You Need to Know About the IPCC 1.5˚C Report,” World Resources Institute, October 7, 2018, https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/8-things-you-need-know-about-ipcc-15-c-report.

3. Quoted in Andrew Freedman, “Climate Scientists Refute 12-Year Deadline to Curb Global Warming,” Axios, January 22, 2019, https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocasio-cortez-12-year-deadline-c4ba1f99-bc76-42ac-8b93-e4eaa926938d.html.

4. Stabroek News, “Fighting Complacency towards Climate Change,” Stabroek News (blog), October 20, 2018, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2018/opinion/editorial/10/20/fighting-complacency-towards-climate-change/.

5. Mary Annaïse Heglar, “When Climate Change Broke My Heart and Forced Me to Grow Up,” Medium (blog), October 10, 2018, https://medium.com/@maryheglar/when-climate-change-broke-my-heart-and-forced-me-to-grow-up-dcffc8d763b8.

6. Quoted in Emilee Gilpin, “Urgency in Climate Change Advocacy is Backfiring, Says Citizen Potawatomi Nation Scientist,” National Observer, February 15, 2019, https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/15/features/urgency-climate-change-advocacy-backfiring-says-citizen-potawatomi-nation.

7. Mary Annaïse Heglar, “Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat,” Medium (blog), February 18, 2019, https://medium.com/s/story/sorry-yall-but-climate-change-ain-t-the-first-existential-threat-b3c999267aa0. We would add Indigenous people here too. See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).

8. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2010), 35.

9. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The Documenta 14 Reader, eds. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (München, London, New York: Prestel, 2017), 92.

10. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 246.

11. “Disaster, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53561. [Accessed June 2, 2019.]

12. Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, June 11, 2006, https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster/.

13. Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.”

14. Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, eds. Laura Pulido and Jordan T. Camp (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), xxiv.

15. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), 563.

16. George Caffentzis, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse,” Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992, eds. Midnight Notes Collective (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992), 215–72.

17. On the relation between the “organic composition of capital” and the production of “surplus populations,” see the extraordinary analysis by Marx in Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Marx was not particularly hopeful about the political potential of surplus populations. By contrast, following Frantz Fanon and others, we see those populations rendered surplus by capital to be indispensable to any revolutionary movement today.

18. Cissy Zhou, “Man vs Machine: China’s Workforce, Starting to Feel the Strain from Threat of Robotic Automation,” South China Morning Post, February 14, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2185993/man-vs-machine-chinas-workforce-starting-feel-strain-threat.

19. Paul Mozur, “China Scrutinizes 2 Apple Suppliers in Pollution Probe,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2013, sec. Business, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323420604578648002283373528.

20. Mozur, “China Scrutinizes 2 Apple Suppliers.”

21. Georgina Gustin, “Florida’s Migrant Farm Workers Struggle After Hurricane Damaged Homes, Crops,” InsideClimate News, October 17, 2017, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16102017/hurricanes-florida-agriculture-migrant-farm-workers-jobs-crop-loss.

22. Che Gossett, “Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign,” Verso Books (blog), September 8, 2015, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign.

23. Ben Doherty, “A Short History of Nauru, Australia’s Dumping Ground for Refugees,” The Guardian, August 9, 2016, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/10/a-short-history-of-nauru-australias-dumping-ground-for-refugees.

24. Anja Kanngieser, “Climate Change: Nauru’s Life on the Frontlines,” The Conversation, October 21, 2018, http://theconversation.com/climate-change-naurus-life-on-the-frontlines-105219.

25. EJOLT, “Phosphate Mining on Nauru,” Environmental Justice Atlas, accessed April 25, 2019, https://ejatlas.org/conflict/phosphate-mining-on-nauru.

26. Doherty, “A Short History of Nauru, Australia’s Dumping Ground for Refugees.”

27. “Protests Escalate on Nauru,” Refugee Action Coalition (blog), April 6, 2016, http://www.refugeeaction.org.au/?p=4859.

28. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

29. Josie Michelle, “Against the New Vitalism,” New Socialist (blog), March 10, 2019, https://newsocialist.org.uk/against-the-new-vitalism/.

30. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

31. See William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018); Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press, 2013).