Unrelenting heat.
That
feels like the summation of the world right now: like being in a boiling
cauldron and the temperature just keeps escalating.
I’m
talking about the climate. I’m talking about society. I’m talking about
politics. I’m talking about the economy. I’m talking about ecology. Every facet
of the world we face feels like it is on fire. This is literally the case as
record-setting wildfires overtake chunks of the map and as constant bombing
campaigns continue to devastate others. 2015 was the hottest year on record and
2016 is on track to surpass it.
This is
the future unfolding before us: the consequences of industrialized growth and
technologized expansion extrapolating the caustic downfall of a globalized
civilization. And that is the overwhelming feeling you get every day when you
wake up and open your computer or turn on your devices, opening yourself to the
flood of seething anger and impotence.
But we
do it.
We
carry on. We get lost in the sea of reactionary reiterations. We fall into the
crushing waves of the mutual assured destruction of our own empathy. We are
willing to accept the destruction so long as we are right.
Why? How
are we able to do this?
How do
we simultaneously bask in the endless cycles of perpetual call-and-response of
social media and ignore the world as it becomes only further engulfed in
catastrophic and systemic destruction?
We do
this because we shut off. The atrocities of civilization are simply too much
for our regionally based hunter-gatherer minds to comprehend. This is existence
with implications that we were never psychologically prepared for because
neither we nor any other being is physically capable of causing them. Not
without technology.
This is
beyond our realm as empathetic beings, so we stop our minds from going there.
This is our mind in survival mode: solely able to address the immediate
fight-or-flight impulse, redirected through technological intrusion. We double
down. We embody the ethos of accepting reality as it is and fragmenting our
experience of life into individual issues. We plant ourselves and we defend
that position until the next thing comes along.
We
define ourselves by our own acts of active defeatism. We immerse ourselves in
the immediacy of technology so we no longer have to keep the totality in our
minds. We are just reacting.
Meanwhile,
the predictions for the earth are dire. The potential for human extinction looms
heavily underneath a perpetual loss of ecosystems and species. The thresholds
once considered tipping points for endemic climate shifts are being surpassed.
If we
start to unplug, we can see it, but it is no less overwhelming. The New York Times recently released a site
that charts the high and low temperatures of 2015 by city against what has been
considered the baseline temperatures for each place based on 160-year-old data.[1]
It has to be seen to be believed, but, as with nearly every climate change scenario,
the worst-case scenario predictions for 2100 are being passed already. Places
like Fort Chipeyan in Canada have already had an average temperature increase
of 5.8° Celsius.
Methane
sinkholes become the new norm. Exaggerated cycles of drought and flooding
become the new norm. Increased temperatures have resulted in concentrations of nitrates,
hydrogen cyanide, and mycotoxins in cash crops.[2]
And have resulted in the thawing of long frozen reindeer carcasses in Russia unleashing
anthrax.[3]
Social
and political tension is impossible to ignore.
We see
in Donald Trump social media personified: exaggerated blasts of reactionary
conspiracy, the billionaire acting as the underdog. We see the ignition of the
xenophobic and racist underpinnings of civilization come back to the forefront.
We see in Hillary Clinton the smiling voracious face of Neoliberal surgical
strikes and expansive systemic subjugation sold as policy reform. We see a
fanning of flames on liberal blindness to the iron fist of a society built
upon violent subjugation of Others. We see people buying into the mythos of
democracy: of the notion that any State is sustainable.
We see
the blow back as the climate refugees of one nation are corralled in camps,
forced back by nations under their own economic and political duress. We see
the need for scapegoats and watch as the Westernized identity of the Sacred
Individual feels attacked and becomes militarized: as the frustrated and afraid
are given access to hyper-technological weaponry and psychological
justifications to kill en masse.
Salvation,
martyrdom, the elated subjects of a hero’s return, capturing headlines: the
suicide bomber, the religious zealot, the soldier, and the mass murderer all
share in the flaccid rage of living in a boiling world and feeling as though
the promises of civilization have let them down. We are all boiling. And given
direction, we will seek revenge on whoever is possible. Be it the ex-military
cop gunning down unarmed black people in the streets or the suicide bomber
seeking vilification beyond this world by killing as many within it as
possible.
When we open ourselves to the depth of this reality,
it becomes impossible. It is beyond comprehension, beyond our threshold for
pain and empathy. It is easy to opt back in: to get lost on social media, to
bury ourselves in our Self.
It is
easy to become lost in distraction.
As sad
as that option is, it makes sense. Against the reality that we surely face, any
bit of hope stands against the most uphill battle imaginable.
The
problem we face is that distraction remains an option.
We have
no choice here. The reality that is unfolding before us is real. It is our
home, this earth, being destroyed. It is those that we love, those we hate,
those we wish we could not love being lost in an unrepentant mirage of
distraction. It is our own fate intertwined with the fate of all life on this
planet.
We
started Black and Green Review not
because it would be the catalyst to save the world, but because we need to
start somewhere. We need to stake our ground and attack from that position. It
isn’t enough to continually react and respond while staying prepped for the
next round of continual arguments on the same subjects forever through every
cycle of the News Feed.
As John
Zerzan stated in the Opening Editorial of BAGR
3, we wanted to carry on the debates and discussions that Green Anarchy, Green Anarchist, and Species
Traitor had taken part in. Those were discussions that spilled far beyond
the microcosm of anarchist debate and circles. They had grown and found their
way to filter into society at large.
And in
their absence, that trajectory atrophied. Through sites like Anarchist News, it
became insular. The cheerleaders for insurrection-for-insurrection’s sake faded
as the attention shifted towards the comfort afforded the critics. Anarchism
has never been absent of the philosophical hollowness of eternal dissection of
lingo,
nor strayed far from the politics of negation. But these are the aspects that
the internet and social media amplified.
And
they grew.
This
trajectory has led anarchists into the cul-de-sac of nihilistic terrorism and
egoist soul searching. In that trajectory, anarcho-primitivism is a lightning
rod for having the audacity to stand for something: to have staked our claim on
seeing a world that is worth fighting for and defending. To want to build
communities of resistance, support those that are and have been resisting
civilization’s advances and to refuse the domestication process as it seeks to
tear us from the wildness that runs through all life.
We
began BAGR in part to expand and
challenge those discussions alongside others. There is merit among them, but
the problem is that there is no end point, nothing worth acting upon. The
politics of negation are discussion for the sake of discussion. They are about
carving out the perfect anti-ideological ideology. To set out the perfect
anti-moralistic moralism and to carry out the pure will of the Individual.
Dedicated
to finding and chasing out the boogey-men of impure thought, there are only two
options: to celebrate in discussion as praxis, as stated by one of its
advocates, “to laugh at the futility of it all”, or to embrace the absurdity of
unthinking acts of terror under the guise of “eco-extremism” while leaning
further and further towards eco-fascism.
If we
are to accept that there is no hope, that there isn’t even a sliver of chance
that we can divert or lessen the catastrophic conclusion of civilization’s
collapse, then we have nothing to offer but another noun to justify our
particular brand of online voraciousness.
I have
no time for those discussions.
I have
two daughters. I have two daughters that I will, above all else, do anything to
protect and to provide for. I have two daughters whose fates are intertwined
with the fate of all wildness. I have two daughters who have no future on a
dead planet.
I have
no false assumptions or heroic ambition to save the world, but if I’m not even
fucking trying to do anything about all of this, then what am I worth? What am
I worth to the world to just waste away finding new ways to demonize the
grounds that I am standing upon, the grounds I have placed my stake in: the
grounds that I will always fight for?
All of
the editors and contributors of this project have poured themselves into this.
And we have gotten untold support from others who resonate with our simple call
to action: for a wild resistance, for a passionate resistance.
We are
not,
nor have we ever been, satisfied with vilifying ourselves
for a spot within anarchist history. We are driven by a hatred of civilization.
Driven by a vile contempt for the consequences of domestication. We are
motivated by the nomadic hunter-gatherer within our bodies and minds that
yearns to embrace the wildness.
We see
that within generations of communities, that there is hope. That there is that
sliver of chance that this world will not be destroyed and that life may
continue on. We take solace in the world our grandchildren’s grandchildren may
one day inhabit where our lives and our struggles are forgotten memories.
This
resistance, like wildness, exists far beyond us. We aren’t leading the call: we
have just seen the cracks and have sought to
continue pursuing them.
It
would be easy to look at what we have done and to remain cynical: to continue
the negation of critics and to wonder what any exploration based in ecology,
anthropology, history or questions of technology could possibly have upon the
world civilization has created. In the end, it may not matter at all.
But
that is where we split.
We want
discussion, but if it serves no end, then it serves nothing. With civilization,
we have had everything taken from us. We are left with reflections and mirrors
of its history. We are left with the scars of our elder’s own subjugation to
the false future of empire building. We are left with their emptiness.
But
these are tools. They are a part of piecing together and deepening our understanding
of how domestication begins, how it functions which, paired with building
relationships beyond reification and beyond abstraction, we find the cracks. We
find the pressure points, the bottlenecks.
It is
through this search that we find what has been taken from us and we take it
back.
Without
question.
Without
hesitation.
For us,
there is no other option. There is no appeal to endless discussions that have
long ago dismissed the idea of purpose. There is nothing to be gained from
that.
This
discussion speaks to the soul of every domesticated being. And that is whom we
are speaking to. We know our enemy. We have found its weaknesses and we will
continue to search for more vulnerabilities.
We
aren’t interested in distractions and cycles: for discussions without end.
We seek
to do everything within our power to further push civilization beyond the brink.
We seek to protect and fight for the world that we love.
And we
remain absolutely unapologetic to that end.
We are
in one of the most unique moments in history: to be at the end of this dying
civilization. We face a world of uncertainty and we have the knowledge of how
our ancestors had adapted for that. When distraction no longer remains an
option, will you look back and wonder why you didn’t do everything in your
power to make the most of it?
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