Re-Attachments

“It is said that eco-anxiety will be the affliction of our generation.”

“We become obsessed with anything that is within our control: zero waste, veganism, public transit for the poor, electric cars for the rich, greenways for good citizens, climate marches, and always the same refrain “we must pull together, as a society…””

“Through these acts we assist in a terrible transfiguration. Our genuine concern for the world is remade into a pathology, and our desire to change it is channeled into inert policies.”

“we know we are bound to the rest of the living world.”

“The hypothesis that we wish to elaborate, and bring to its full political conclusion, is situated at the level of inventing ways of living in and against this catastrophic era.”

“We must recognize that the paving over of the world, the destruction of all living things, and our growing inability to feed ourselves are not incidental; they are political projects of dispossession in the service of wealth creation.”

“Facing this crisis, we are typically offered two proposals: on the one hand, a demands-based activist environmentalism in which we urge our governments to intervene; and on the other, an individualist environmentalism in which we modify our daily choices as consumers.”

“We believe that ecological struggle must be fought on two fronts, which are, in fact, inseparable. It must first disrupt the course of economic normalcy — the economy of the exploitation and the destruction of living beings. Disrupt, and through forms of attack — blockades and reoccupations, strikes, and sabotage — it must also elaborate other ways of living.”

“Forming attachments to places, and inventing other ways of being, new sensitivities, and new relationships with ourselves and with others, which we hold dear and which hold us.”

“We need to learn to organize ourselves on the basis of our needs and then gradually respond to collective questions that arise through the confluence of life and struggle, little by little, moving away from the functional separation specific to classical activism.”

“isn’t the task of ecological struggle ultimately about restoring our presence in the world, our capacity to act in, and on, the situation?”

“We understand action as a vector: ethics is its orientation, while power is its magnitude.”

“An orientation without magnitude, an ethics without power, remains purely moral.”

“It is only interested in designating what it does and what surrounds it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”

“a moralist logic does not result in experimentation or in seeking new ways of living in struggle, but instead results in affects and judgments that either comfort (I’m doing my part!) or induce guilt (we are the monsters…).”

“It’s the difference between the judgment that owning a pick-up truck is the choice of a barbaric polluter, and knowing that a truck is a tool to build infrastructure that will allow us to live differently. A tool that allows us to access the roads used for resource extraction, and to block the economy on the stolen lands we inhabit.”

“Is the end of the industrial world the end of the world (as collapsology claims), or is the modern/colonial Empire itself the realization of many ends of worlds through its creation of a ‘non-world’ barren to the senses and without definition?”

“we frame this apocalypse as an ongoing process that began with the colonization of the Americas, and we want to be done with this end of the world.”

“Ecology must be extracted from the economic realm and become not only a part of politics, but of life itself, understood as a political phenomenon.”

“We find potentialities in our shared sensitivity: that sense of urgency that pushes us to seek new ways of living — to want to change this world; that feeling of belonging that pushes us to act, and likewise to risk everything. How can we unleash these potentials?”

“responsibility is intrinsic to the relationships that bind us to other humans and to the rest of the world, and interdependence is at the heart of its conception of all life.”

“it is distinct from blame, guilt, and shame, as it is not imposed by any legal or moral authority, but rather emerges from the imperative interweaving of our lives with others, with the world we belong to, and with the rest of the universe.”

“To exist in the throes of action, to live a life that regenerates other life, that generates more — a life that sustains us — we can no longer allow our sensitivities and the possibilities they contain to be captured by the apparatuses of power.”

“Our modes of action must take the place of institutions and our strength must be measured by our capacity to care of each other, to take care of our world and grow in our knowing of it.”

“To make ecology truly political, we must ask the following question: what makes it possible for this or that community to live a fulfilling life, to increase its happiness? And, to the contrary, what threatens it, what makes life difficult?”

“Ecology is not a party but a paradigm. It allows us to situate realms of life in their interdependence, in their reciprocal relationships.”

“Their “change” comes down to the deepening of a technological logic, one which locates the only possibility for salvation in its progressive innovations. Their diagnosis is statistical, and their tactics consist in the introduction of new modalities of management.”

“It is an ‘ecological transition’ that no one would notice. In short: as it always was, but in a green way — crushing fragments, flattening the worlds inhabited by all manners of beings, and making a smooth totality (society) capable of governing and exploiting itself, all while turning a profit. The economic ecology they support is fundamentally an ecology of absence.”

Commentator’s Note: Compare this to what I think to be the vital work of the folks at outlets like Heatmap and Volts. Certainly, these voices are proponents of a green transition that might be characterized in the way this passage does, but I think their voices must be considered part of this transformation of our modes of action.

“For us, to the contrary, change implies re-anchoring ourselves in practices that bind our lives to the living world, influencing the environments we inhabit and that inhabit us. In order to do this, we must relearn ways of taking action that resist the detachment that modernity imposes upon communities and their habitats, and between bodies and communities.” *Note: While we indeed must change our modes of action, the fact remains that we cannot, in fact, recover some prior relational scheme, and that indeed no such scheme exists in the past that would be suited to our present. To all become small hold farmers, for instance, would be to doom the world to starvation (so the research I’ve read contends). *

“passing from an ontology that places nature to one side and culture to the other, to a relational ontology which centers relations of dependence, cooperation, predation, etc. between the constituents of a milieu is also, in recent history, largely tied to a systems science in which ecology was developed as a tool for the governmental management of territories.”

“Defending territories necessarily means learning how to inhabit them and, inversely, to truly inhabit them necessitates their defense.”

“Living well means living a life more expansive than the self — ‘life’ — a life multiplied. Living well implicates each and every one of us in a life in common.”

“What we mean by a political ecology of inhabiting is a struggle that is inseparable from life itself. Inseparable because its force, the momentum that propels it, emerges from a life that defends itself, that blooms and scatters its seeds. Inseparable because this political ecology cannot survive without the whole of the world it inhabits.”

“The commune as a line of flight makes it possible to elaborate ecological, sensitive forms-of-life. The commune is a force of gravity, a mass that attracts and welcomes those who seek it, and allows them to hold on.”

“The commune materializes in openings, in spaces to invite and to be invited”

“The possibility of unraveling this world lies in our capacity to make these spaces habitable, to foster the circulation of bodies, affects, and ideas between these nodes into autonomous material power.”

“What lies at the center of our idea of revolution is that people can live and be joyful: that we can subtract ourselves from the economy and government, weave alliances of presence with existing forms-of-life, and develop ecosystems that bloom and multiply, far from the logic of progress and of governmental normalcy.”

Commentator’s Note: This is a lovely vision, but a fantasy. To “subtract ourselves from the economy,” in this sense, is to cede the greatest power for human flourishing the world has known. The economy must be remade. They forget that oikonomia, housekeeping, is necessary for the commune. And we must now consider the world our house, our dwelling, that must be kept in new ways—including “economic” ones.

“What needs to be restored is not the climate, but our attachment to the world.”

“What makes the catastrophe possible, as much as what leaves us so indifferent to it, is our inattention — our detachment from the whole that we constitute and that constitutes us.”

“Suspending this suspension from the world lies in an attention to the ‘how’. It lies in the means and not in the end, in daily practice, in our intimate presence in the intricate ways that worlds are created (and the earnest joy of learning to play in them).”

“An ecology of presence unfolds in a double movement, that of a material and existential re-attachment to the world we inhabit. Positions and dispositions. To become present is a practice which consists of breaking with our absence from the world through an elaboration of new sensitivities, but also new positions from which to act on them, from new consistencies.”

“To make oneself both perceptible and open to perceiving. Affect and power, orientation and magnitude. It is not a question of fighting on ‘two fronts’, but of the practical elaboration of the double meaning of “presence” and “sensible””

“Across the island of Montreal, the most basic human act is forbidden to us: lighting a fire and contemplating it.”

“It is not by accident that fire is so central to our adventures outside of the metropolis, or against it. Agamben writes that telling a story (literature) and making history are one and the same act, that of telling the progressive loss of fire. Through history, the mysteries of the world are simultaneously commemorated and distanced, secularized in narrative (distancing the ritual origin of literature) and in a scientific enterprise (distancing the divine origin of the world).”

“Whether we’re camping with friends, in a riot, or on a blockade, contemplating a fire signals our awakening, on this second-to-last day of Earth’s existence, before the evidence that history has not completely succeeded at severing us from tradition.”

“Our meetings over the last few months have pushed us to develop a new conception, a horizon for understanding a possible alliance between various relationships to the territory. We call it “redneck ecology,” half-jokingly, ourselves surprised by the vision of a use of the territory that is so profound and sincere, which by definition can be neither pure nor impure.”

“Environmentalism primes us to see a rigid ‘sacredness’ in nature, something distant from us. But instead we found its profanation, in a sacredness that allowed for life, since it supported life so concretely.”

“We found backhoes for destroying the road and uprooting trees, in order to erect barricades and stop enemies from using the territory”

“it is more important to be able to raise your children in the forest, to be able to teach them about trees, plants, Bigfoot, and animal spirits, than to preserve a version of nature that is absent of human traces.”

“The Book of Changes (I Jing) has this to say on the subject: ‘‘Fire has no predetermined form, but attaches to bodies that burn, and in this way, gives off light.””