Building Stuff, Breaking Stuff
On creative destruction, and destructive creation
I spend a lot of my time imagining what daily life would or could or should look like in a post-capitalist, post-colonial reality. I try to imagine a way of life that is no longer dependent on extractive industries, a way of life in which we no longer live as colonial settlers, but as creatures living in reciprocity with the land and with each other. I am convinced that the future of life itself depends on us making that shift, and that in order to do so, we must give up on our efforts to rescue “civilization” with a mythical “green” capitalist future. “Green” capitalism is still capitalism. “Green” industrialization is still industrialization. The hope that a progressive “Green New Deal” will save our way of life is a myth that obscures the fact that, from the perspective of the world’s Indigenous peoples and the land, water, and air that they steward and which we all depend on, it is the same old deal.
One of the lies that green capitalism peddles is that we can save the planet by shifting our consumer behaviors from one product to another. For instance, by trading in our gasoline powered cars for electric cars, or by shifting our electric grid from fossil fuels to renewables, we can collectively lower our emissions enough to curb or slow rising global temperatures without making any changes to our way of life. In the meantime, we can keep building our public infrastructure around cars, and the auto industry can keep its profits by selling us new cars. But it still requires an unsustainable amount of carbon to produce a new car, even if electrification effects an overall reduction in emissions produced by car culture.
What gets glossed over by green mythology is the fact that industrial extraction and production in any form is destructive to life on earth. One of the hard lessons we are about to learn if we stay the course of green capitalism is that we are subject to the law of unintended consequences. There is no quick techno-fix that will allow us to keep living as settlers on stolen land. We cannot exchange one form of environmental plunder for another and expect different results.
No matter how you spin it, our consumer capitalist way of life must end. It is built on the sacrifice of communities, especially BIPOC and poor communities, who have always been considered disposable, as standing in the way of “progress,” who must be eliminated or removed for the greater good of “civilization.” We see the genocidal logic of this from the Congo to the Amazon, from Oak Flat to the Blue Ridge: all communities that are falling victim to the growth of extractive industries seeking out minerals to power a new “green” economy. Our increasing appetite for lithium, cobalt, coltan and gold, for land to build industrial solar arrays, for the raw materials to generate “renewable” energy, will keep on poisoning the water, killing habitats, cutting down forests that keep the air, water, and soil healthy, robbing us of arable farmland, and dispossessing and slaughtering Indigenous communities.
I am not a scientist. I am not an economist. I cannot rattle off reems of data to prove my point like some of my friends can. I am an activist and land defender who happens to get his paycheck from a nonprofit that provides fiscal sponsorship to several environmental justice groups who are advocating for the well-being of their local communities. I have learned much of what I know from those groups, people on the ground who are fighting existential fights against the pressures of burgeoning green capitalism, against “green” extractive industries that are circling and closing in on their communities. Rural Virginia counties like Nelson and Buckingham, who defeated the Atlantic Coast Pipeline years ago only to now face threats from corporations seeking precious minerals, or utilities seeking to clear cut forests, strip the soil, and poison rivers for the sake of industrial solar development, even as rural gentrification gobbles up arable farmland for agritourism and pushes low income and BIPOC people off the land.
What good will it do us to lower our emissions if we cut down the forests that keep our atmosphere breathable and cool and sustain millions of species? What good will it do us to cut carbon if we continue to drive species to extinction by poisoning the soil and water through mining? Is it realistic to believe that continuing to living off the land as exploitative settlers instead of living with the land, as Indigenous people have done for tens of thousands of years, is a path to a livable future? To think we can have a future without the total abolition of colonial industrial extraction and production is delusional.
We must de-develop. I think this could take many forms, and I am always curious about what ideas people have, what has been tried, what has worked, and what has failed. Broadly speaking, I believe communities need to decentralize infrastructure while re-adopting more collectivist ways of life. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A majority of the people on this planet live in collectivist cultures where people rely on each other for their well-being rather than consumer capitalism. In the West, and especially in the US, most of us are individually tied to our employers to provide for our basic needs in exchange for our labor. It is the capitalist West that has tried (and failed) to be the exception to the rule that humans must rely on each other and the land for our well-being. We are a collectivist species, never meant to live this live in self-sufficiency. For this reason, almost any move we can make politically and culturally to turn towards each other, towards mutual sufficiency, and away from the capitalist mirage of self-sufficiency, is a step in the right direction.
What can this look like concretely? One immediate, very attainable interim (but perhaps a bit symbolic) reform would be to eliminate detached single-family zoning and incentivize density in urban planning. We can advocate for policies that redistribute stolen land into the hands of BIPOC communities as a program of reparations and Land Back (this can turn problematic if redistribution schemes leave capitalist structures of wealth and ownership intact). We can further reduce our dependency on extractive industries by relearning Indigenous technologies of land stewardship, farming, medicine, and foraging (and this means settler descendants respectfully following Indigenous leadership as guests on the land, and not appropriating Indigenous knowledge or technologies for themselves). We can abolish centralized alternating current (AC) electric grids and adopt solar-powered direct current (DC) microgrids to locally power neighborhoods and agricultural communes, like Living Energy Farm in Louisa, VA already does along with partners in Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
All of these measures are just examples. Working together they can drive a systemic cultural and economic shift, but they will require sacrifice. Few of them are profitable, which is why the Green New Deal pushes for renewables on an industrial scale instead of local DC micro-grids. They will require scaling down our lives: smaller houses made of sustainable materials (straw bales and stucco are cozier than you think!), less travel, the elimination of many (perhaps most) mass-produced manufactured goods, and less instant-gratification and convenience. They will mean scaling-up our connectivity to community and land for the sake of a richer, more interconnected quality of life. For those of us used to living independently, we will have to relearn interdependence and communal ways of life. For those of us who have lost our connection to culture, we will have recover and/or reinvent it. For those who have lost connection to land, we will have to relearn how to live with reciprocity and respect.
That is the creative side of the shift. But I won’t gloss over the dark side: this revolution necessitates destruction, as well. It means a disruptive process that liberates us from the shackles of capitalism and settler colonialism in all of its manifestations. The process won’t be pretty, because the forces of capital and white supremacy will not go quietly. They will not collapse on their own without taking us all down with them. We will have to facilitate their collapse in a controlled way that protects and defends the lives of the vulnerable. Not only do we have to change our way of life, we have to force the intransigent wealthy and powerful to change theirs (shout-out to the orcas).
We see this violent shock unfolding in the decolonization of Palestine and its ripple effects worldwide. The stated goals of the resistance include the wholesale destruction of the Zionist project that is perpetuating genocide and ecocide on the Palestinian people and the land. Those in the global community who support the resistance are learning what it means to exert force on the system in order to halt the harm. Simply begging those in power to change their ways has proven fruitless. We are waking up to the fact that the powerful must be brought down and rendered powerless, but we are too often hindered by collective amnesia of the revolutionary methods that have been used for centuries to accomplish that objective. We all know that “by any means necessary” is a euphemism for armed struggle, an avenue that is simply unavailable to most of us living in the belly of the empire. But it also refers to other available means that we have disallowed to our detriment since the end of the Civil Rights era: blockades, sabotage, vandalism, disruptive pranks, general strikes, occupations, all working in concert.
Cultural and economic change cannot come from the top down through state power. It has to be enacted from below, both through the way we live together, but also by attacking the structures that imprison us and prevent us from living our lives humanely and sustainably. This is our responsibility. No one else can or will do it for us. We must be willing to build our own structures, exert force, and hold space. Many of these humanizing structures already exist in our lives and in our communities – we just have to look for them, value them, and nurture them. But we must also take our cues from the resistance. Corporations and businesses that collude with colonial enterprises like Cop City and the occupation of Palestine are cancelling contracts and leases after equipment catches fire, windows shatter, and walls turn blood red. We can make it too expensive to do business. We can make life miserable for the rich and powerful. We can stymie the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure, and we can shut down existing operations.
But that means reallocating our energies away from fruitless reforms and empty appeals to the nonexistent morality of the powerful, and pouring them into revolutionary action that opens up new, heretofore unimaginable possibilities.