BAGR1: Opening Editorial - Kevin Tucker

Opening editorial from Black and Green Review no 1.

It’s now been 7 years since the final issue of Green Anarchy (US), roughly a decade since the final Green Anarchist (UK), 10 years since an issue of Species Traitor has come out, and 8 years since the last Black and Green Gathering. While claims that anarcho-primitivism (AP) and radical anti-civilization green anarchism (GA) are dead are wildly false, things have been awfully silent.

      Meanwhile the economy has collapsed into multiple recessions. The resource wars that started in the beginning of this millennium are just now starting to “officially” end while new ones ignite. Far worse post-Peak Energy production methods have reigned supreme. The programmers have found untold new means to weave themselves into our pockets and “communities”.  Climate instability worsens as storms grow larger and more erratic while droughts stretch longer and farther. Portions of the globe have gone aflame in social upheaval.

      The past 9 years have literally been a slew of headlines that would appear to be an AP checklist for the collapse.

      So what the happened?

     

Context always matters.

      Just a decade ago, the AP/GA milieu, alongside the wider earth and animal liberation struggles, had a tremendous fire blazing. Even when repression hit home, there were discussions, actions, and a semblance of community forming in the furnace of civilization’s dying flames. Our critiques were unfolding before us as tensions were mounting.

      But then came the silence.

      Close to 10 years of it. What was building with force was now trickling. Outside of John Zerzan’s steadfast and committed drive (always praiseworthy), the lion’s share of this milieu went quiet. Magazines and collectives folded and events lost their rhythms. Bloggers tried to co-opt and market our critiques in consumable packages. Nihilistic and individualistic strands retook anarchist discussions. Then social networking came in and flooded out the ground to stand on.

      Despite everything that had happened from the time of Reclaim the Streets in Eugene, Oregon in 1999 till the mid-2000s, all the repression, all the harassment, all the imprisonment, all the threats; it almost seems as if the Green Scare (a massive government breakdown on earth and animal liberation activists) got the best of us. Prisoner support groups had to abruptly end as our warriors turned into informants. Our friends faced multiple decades of imprisonment either for crimes without injury or tacit agreement that action is required.

      The very act of thinking about liberation was increasingly criminalized and targeted. Security culture, it seemed, had failed and we now longer knew where things would fall.

      I’m not pointing fingers.

      I am one of those who pulled back under the increasing repression. Most of my friends did the same, even those who weren’t legally required to do so. At times it almost felt like paralysis: watching all of the events that we predicted unfold. Seeing the worst of scenarios just playing out in a sea of systemized brutality, seeing children fear the empty skies and the drones they would bring, seeing the fracking and tar sands bubbles destroy places that we loved, seeing the community that we once belonged to fall into faceless squabbles and posturing, seeing eco-liberals discover socialist revolutionary text to try and skim the well-intentioned among us off as cannon fodder. Seeing the seasons wane and the tides rise. Seeing the sixth great extinction loom nearer.
      Sometimes being right is the worst feeling in the world.

      Many of us became spectators of a world, our world, turning towards the worst end possible.

      Nothing has changed.

      All of these things are unfolding with speed and the anarchist imagination to understand and challenge it shrinks into obscurity. The plague of social networking removes our ability to recognize experience as we fall into a post-modern place where time becomes an eternal now without presence and the ability of our minds to process information is lost as we offset cognitive functions to increasingly personalized machines.

      We are still targets of the state: as we were, as we are, as we will be, but the silence must end. I can’t stomach watching this song and dance and only tossing insults from the balcony any longer.

      I know I’m not alone in this, but this publication is a step. Hopefully the first of many to pull ourselves from isolation and to once again be the threat the domesticators so clearly saw us as.

     

This is not a beginning, but a continuation of old paths, picking up with where we went in the meantime and where we left off before. A lot of us spent that time embracing wildness, trying to stay plugged in within resistance movements, working on land projects, and seeing megalomaniacs try to commodify and reify our principles and beliefs. This is a call to challenge, spread and grow our critiques and praxis.

      But the times have changed. The purpose of Black and Green Review (BAGR) is very specific: it is not intended to replace or to revive any previous publications, but to expand these critiques and to bring discussion back into the fold. We intend to draw out old faces and serve as a basis for new ones. Our communities have been torn apart and replaced by facades of connectivity without grounding.

      For us to move forward, we must address the increasing disconnect while working towards resolving its consequences. News spreads quickly and fades faster now than before. Speed has become the form and function. One of the function of Green Anarchy through its empowering and steadfast reporting of resistance news and communiqués has arguably been replaced, but the discussion has not. At least not in lasting ways.

      We’ve fallen victim to the News Feeds.

      That part was intentional. The programmers, the domesticators of this late Modernity, know that regardless of content, context matters the most. Form determines function. While arguments might flare with regularity and an irritating sense of repetition, it might feel as though discussion is now a lost art, their presence into the electronic void only merits integration into the platforms.

      To have lasting and impacting discussions, we need to pull attention away from the machines. That is no simple task and the manifestations of techno-addiction inherent in unconsciously swiping screens are no easy enemy. And that is the function that we had in mind behind starting BAGR: how do we have discussions again that matter?

      It might not be a solution, but it’s definitely a start.

The format of BAGR is broken down into a five primary sections;

·      ESSAYS: Writings intended to challenge and push forward the AP and GA critiques of civilization.

·      DEBATES: Moderated discussions evaluating opposing opinions in terms of fighting civilization.

·      DISCUSSION: Often open-ended pieces intended to drive discussion of issues, particularly those with no clearly opposing stances or even some that are.

·      FIELD NOTES FROM THE PRIMAL WAR: A look at particular actions and movements directed at resistance to civilization.

·      REVIEWS: Engaging and drawing on relevant publications.

We’ve forgone the debate for the first issue and expanded the Essays section, but this will be a regular feature. We’re interested in anything pertaining to anti-civilization thought and praxis, but upcoming works will address the relevance or irrelevance of nihilism and egoism, the continued effort to update AP critiques in light of the impact and prevalence of the Digital Age, expanding historical, anthropological, ecological, and social underpinnings of the domestication process, evaluating actions, expressing the relationship of rewilding and resistance, espousing a love for the wild, and looking at current, future, and past land and resistance projects and campaigns.

      We aim to simply encourage discussion. We want to hear your voice. We want to encourage you to articulate your understandings and questions. We want to expand and strengthen this critique so that our words, actions, and efforts have more fire, so that our love and rage cannot be suppressed.

      So read, get pissed, get excited, and respond, but most importantly, learn from our nomadic hunter-gatherer past and present selves and get moving. The countdown to the end of time ticks on.