Today, in light of the coming catastrophes, the question posed by African-American author James Baldwin once again presents itself: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Also, the structural integrity of the house is questionable.
We, the voices of peoples who for thousands of years have defended life on earth, have a message of hope to share: alternatives to the climate crisis already exist, they are alive.
We are in such a dire situation. We’ve tried with peaceful, polite, civil means, with no property destruction involved, just maximum restraint and peaceful civil disobedience. With very few exceptions, that’s as far as the climate movement has dared to go. We haven’t reached far enough by employing only these methods.
A roving caravan strategy for crushing snakes and other capitalist parasites. Stop Line 3!
If homo sapiens were really selfish individualists, we wouldn’t have survived a few decades. We’re not fast and strong and smooth enough to survive as loners. It’s really communication and collaboration that has allowed us to create worlds and live in them.
Violence to the territory is similar to violence to the body. Intervening in the territory and violence through extractivism is also a way of genocide. Culture cannot exist in the same way when the territory is under threat.
With the increasing concentration of corporate power in the food sector, it’s very difficult to see how it can really shift unless we decide to put pressure on it by abandoning it.
Politicians have articulated the absolute expendibility of most humans beings on the planet. That’s creating new forms of solidarity in the streets right now, and all over the world, as people struggle.
Climate change and pandemics are not just functionally integrated in the sense that the planet warms and it changes the geography of pathogens. They are integrated through the ideological totalitarianism of neoliberal capitalism that has been imposed on the planet. Not only are we as humans alienated from our work, but from nature itself.
History does not demonstrate that we have left anything in our past. We are only accumulating.
Now is the time to pull the emergency brake.
