BAGR2: Opening Editorial - Kevin Tucker

From Black and Green Review no 2.

Sometimes green isn’t always good.

         The weather around me has been unpredictable at best throughout the spring and summer of this year. That is unquestionably a part of the larger destabilization of weather patterns that we’ve seen mounting since agriculture and industrialism arose. But we are now in overdrive.

         The spring rains barely came. Foliage was both stunted and delayed or, in some cases, seemingly non-existent. Drought like conditions in the Northeastern United States might have missed the headlines, but it was only because they were eclipsed by raging wildfires along the West Coast, a burning boreal forest, and prolonged, epic drought, not surprisingly, preceding the fires. Not making headlines, however, doesn’t change the reality on the ground.

         Decreasing winter snow pack, irregular precipitation, storms that are more abrupt and forceful simply run off of parched, denuded lands; bodies of water become isolated and their flows disrupted. Deprived of rain, ponds, creeks, and lakes wane. This spring I witnessed many of them vanish.

         Riparian ecology is relatively delicate. The symbiotic relationships surrounding them are tightly wound around what is essentially an ecosystem in fragments: a balance based on movement, on flowing water, on the slow and continual nourishment of constant replenishment at times seeming to go on forever. Stagnancy brings demise.

         When you look across the late summer fields, it has become a sea of green and often overheated amber. Cattails are gone. The songs of green frogs are muted. The sight of elder snapping turtles becomes increasingly rare. The water has largely vanished, overgrown with grasses. The landscape where water had spent decades crossing the soil just looks like divots without causation.

         The majority of the human body is comprised of water. It is our lifeblood. It allows us to live. But it is more than that. Water, in its existence and movement, is a reflection of ourselves: it thrives in flowing movement. It is the embodiment of resilience: water will always strive to find a way to get where it needs to be. Hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding, and even mold are all evidence of this. Water is a force to be reckoned with.

         Like water, our resilience comes from movement. Our patterns leave room for change and degrees of deviation, but there are certainties as well; without rain, the waters stagnate. Patterns can shift, but patterns must remain.

         Things are heating up, both literally and figuratively. Water is a resource that we largely take for granted. Yet much of the world wars over water rights without delusion. Drought adds kindling to areas already torn by oil wars. Food scarcity and rising food costs echo into political and social uprisings. Segments of the Earth are torn by increasing political instability and the unilateral response of military force has not nor will not resolve those tensions. This couldn’t be any clearer than the current flood of Syrian refugees as they move through Europe.

         These are refugees of an instable and unsustainable climate. As goes the ecological climate, so goes the political and social ones. Tensions will continue to mount. Socio-political infrastructures will tighten their grip to attempt to divert the uncontrollable. The wildness of our body and spirit flows. Like water, it will find a way. Dams will burst. Barriers will fall and paths will divert.

         What we have learned from the story of the human being is that our being lies in and was carved by our resiliency. The lifeway of the nomadic hunter-gatherer is etched into our biology, into our minds. Like all wild beings, we are able to adapt, sometimes to a fault. But there are limits. We need movement, we need flow, and we need ecological sanity.

         If we can say anything of certainty about the crises that we now face it is that we live in uncertain times. But there’s a catch to that. We still have something. We have knowledge about how humans have thrived, about conditions under which humans have suffered, about the systems that have stilled our movements and built barriers. The wildness that has always guided our paths remains. Even if buried and misdirected, our resiliency still struggles.

        

The landscape of Modernity leaves little room for optimism. In light of the universality of the crises that we face, hope seems like the last vestige of naivety. And it certainly can be. But the history of civilization has its counter-narratives in struggles against it. As John Zerzan points out in the title essay of his new book, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization (out now from Feral House), hope can stand against all reason: “it is possible. Our overcoming the disease of civilization is in no way guaranteed, obviously, but clearly it is possible.” (Pg 134)

         In uncertain times, the only certainty is that stagnancy assures death. We need movement. The hyper-domesticated technological vortex that we are continually drawn into bolsters our barrier. It allows us to feel removed from consequence, to feel as though we can have our critiques and that is enough. As society turns further towards technology, using social networks for our interactions, our stagnancy turns into rot. Our continued usage of these predatory platforms confirms our complacency.

         Black and Green Review, to me, represents an attempt to reground the green anarchist, anarcho-primitivist, and anti-civilization milieu in movement. We don’t just need the discussions, we need to have them in ways that matter. The reason we focused so heavily on technology in the first issue is that it is the elephant in the room. Until we begin addressing the neurological and social effects of the Interface Revolution, then no discussion can cut through those levels of entrenched domestication. It simply became impossible to address what has happened to this milieu and to further these critiques without drawing that out first.

         The response has been good, but the response has been slow. These aren’t the times to get a physical publication up and running as even long-standing publications like Earth First! Journal are finding themselves raising printing costs with every issue. The medium that predominates offers immediate gratification, the ability to just click, like, share and comment on the most radical article of the minute without consequence. And, as we discussed repeatedly in issue one of BAGR, those things are all happening without absorption.

         It is the thoughtless integration of technology into our lives that shows its power. We live in the era of overwhelming distraction. It is easy to go along with it. In many ways, to exit the social networks is to cut yourself off from friends and family. But we need to understand that having a critique of technology, of civilization, does not make any of us exempt from its implications.

         And so we are trying to rebuild and expand on where things were. Hark back to recent memory when the discussion on pages was followed with campfires and burning infrastructure. We have a hurdle before us, but we have to find our way back to that place.

         I have heard that BAGR has helped some of those conversations again. I’ve been part of some great ones myself. I’ve heard from old friends and taken part in long standing arguments. I hear rumblings. Things might be moving slow, but good things often do. It takes a lot of work, it might not lead us to where we need to go, but I know nothing different than to continue that struggle and to push in this direction.

         In dismal times like these, it is projects like this, and, more importantly, the conversations and connections that result from them that give me a reason for hope. Given time, civilization will collapse under its own weight. That process has already begun. But every bit of resistance brings that time closer.

         And I welcome it with loaded arms.

This issue deals with numerous topics, but what you see in these pages is the result of many of those conversations that I mentioned. The editorial processes behind Black and Green Review are arduous. In order to have these discussions, to push this critique and to develop praxis, we need to continually challenge each other and ourselves. Behind these essays are in depth and often contentious discussion about things like the nature of symbolic thought, the consequences of delayed return in minutiae during the Upper Paleolithic, the depths of interspecies communication, and the biological implications of being a wild being stuck in Modernity.

         As an editor, I take pride in the level of energy that the other editors have brought on board. It has taken a lot of work pulling this together, but I hope that you will find something in it that resonates or causes a response. These aren’t easy discussions, but they are necessary ones.

         I’d like to formally welcome John Zerzan and Evan Cestari on as editors. Both have been vital since the inception of this project and, in many ways, I see BAGR as the response to discussions that John and I had been having since the last issue of Green Anarchy came out.

         In addition, Four Legged Human’s ‘Written in Stone’ is in part a response to Cliff Hayes’ ‘Stone Tools and Symbolic Thought’, but unquestionably belongs in the essays section.

         We hope that what we’ve put together for you will inspire and incite. And we thoroughly welcome response.

For wildness and anarchy,

Kevin Tucker