Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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at that point when you’re willing to start comprehending the abolition of yourself, that you might become a useful traitor rather than a very dangerous ally who just seeks to incorporate a more critical edge into the reproduction of violence.
So, there is something about treachery and a willingness to be dangerous to the thing that reproduces you—simplistically speaking, to bite the hand that feeds you. I think if those rogue accounts do become dangerous, it will be if they leak things, if they cause a problem and then are willing to go beyond that. What would be interesting is if those people doing the rogue stuff started quietly talking to and helping Indigenous people reoccupy parts of the National Park Service that have been stolen from them. Maybe that would be a good form of treachery.
BASE Magazine: When it comes to activities to support and build on, people often point to the numerous struggles, many on Indigenous/First Nations land, aimed at preventing the extraction of resources which directly lead to climate change—but much of this seems far beyond the reach of this island. Meanwhile, similar UK-based activity around antifracking seems also to have been rooted in a reactionary nationalism—somewhere between NIMBYism and a defense of the English countryside. How might we better confront and resist the causes and effects of climate change or, if the determining moments are to be far from these shores, how might we better offer solidarity?
A: Once when OOTW were doing a talk, someone from the audience raised this point about Indigenous struggles and was like “we’ve seen these Indigenous struggles elsewhere and they are really good, important, and fundamental to any kind of environmental practice in the twenty-first century.” Which was cool, but then he went “so, what do we need to do in the UK? We need to do something around our local places, our local environments, do we need to become Indigenous?” And that’s the moment when you are like “Noooo!” It’s ridiculous, but you can see this kind of thing comes up often in the Kingsnorth stuff. It is obviously a real problem and it’s interesting because it seems to spread across the political continuum.
Kingsnorth is actually a properly dangerous ideologue who has all of these ideas which have been coalescing around a very fervent nationalism-fascism complex. What’s dangerous is that it has been taken up by a lot of people on a liberal Left, who nevertheless seem to find something in it. So, I think part of the problem is that people start making easy equations with the land and start thinking about things in terms of “Nature.” What we have always been trying to insist on in OOTW is that there is not some kind of pure nature to go back to, and that any implication of some kind of perfect wilderness is colonial dreaming, and a dreaming which will only vivify an incredibly dangerous form of enclosure of the wild as a means of preserving the world. And, what we’ve been talking about more in OOTW is the cyborg ecology or the cyborg Earth, in which there is no perfect nature to go back to; and in which we have to face up to the complexities of the interrelation between human and nonhuman life—which ironically enough, is exactly what Kingsnorth says he is trying to resolve! Kingsnorth says he is doing it through the nation, but he can’t talk about human and nonhuman life without pitching nonhuman life as some kind of perfect and pure thing. As soon as human life is removed from that, for Kingsnorth, it becomes dirty, polluted, and corrupted because, for Kingsnorth, nature is what rejuvenates the nation.
The thing that we have to resist here is Western colonial romanticism—this absolutely has to be destroyed, and this isn’t some kind of abstract literary problem, it totally vivifies a vast proportion of the UK environmental movement at the moment. There is still a popular imaginary of some kind of pure nature which you find as much in RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) members as you do in hardcore environmentalist activists, and it really must be refused. At the same time, we need to be certain that we don’t become technofuturists who’ll happily embrace a technological invasion of everything existing, with no regard for the colonial paradigm and the advent of European technology as both weapon and arbiter of colonial “progress.” To a certain extent, we are between a rock and a hard place here—between a romance of wilderness and a romance of technology, and both are worse.
D: I think that binary is really important and you get it from both sides. So, if you try and criticize the fetishization of the slow, the local, the authentic and the romanticization of nature, then you are accused of being in love with the global, the fast or of being a technological fetishist. It’s this kind of binary thinking that structures both the accelerationist-oriented, technofuturist Left, and “back to nature” leftism. I think unpicking that binary, in fact rejecting it as a structure, is really important. There is a case, sometimes, for organic food, there is also a case, sometimes, for using drones in farming. And sometimes there is a good case not to grow organic food—we talk about this in our piece on cyborg agroecology.20 Indigenous ways of organizing life in specific locations across the globe are important here—not so that we can apply them to a wholly different context, but because they often completely undercut those binaries—they are “local,” but have dynamic, relational understandings of “local” or “place” that eschew cozy romanticism.
On the appropriation of the term Indigenous outside of the Indigenous context, it’s important to be clear that there is no substantive Indigenous population in Britain. I know some Crofters in the Scottish Islands and Highlands argue that crofting is an Indigenous way of life. I don’t know enough to comment on that, but generally the way “Indigenous” is used in the political discourse of the UK is to suggest that white British people are the Indigenous population of this island and so have a unique claim to live here. This is sometimes extended “greenwards,” so they are held to have a unique ability or right to cultivate its environment, or protect it from “overpopulation.”
Against that, I would (cautiously) take Indigeneity as a way of naming a particular co-constitution of identity with land and place: a way of life that cannot be separated from the dynamic, relational ecologies in which it developed, and that includes nonhuman life: animals, minerals, and the land itself (and as I understand it, many, though not all, Indigenous people make use of this relational understanding in organizing their struggles). Now if you colonize that land, that way of life is marginalized or made impossible, and that simply does not happen in the UK—left-leaning localists might point to Tesco coming into your high street and closing your local shop. That might be bad, but it’s not remotely comparable: your way of life is still fundamentally the same. So the term “Indigenous” just doesn’t translate.
I also think there is still a danger of white-settler activists; or white activists in Europe or Britain—and it’s a tendency I recognize in myself—fetishizing Indigenous struggles and placing too much hope in them, or just abstracting bits of knowledge without attending to the need for decolonization as a political project. We saw it with the Zapatistas a lot: because things are so shit over here, something that looks brilliant, exciting, and a little bit different (perhaps there was a degree of exoticism in it as well), people overly invest in it and overly identify with it but of course it can’t be transplanted wholesale to a different context.
So it’s important to look at what’s happening more locally too—rather than depoliticizing hope by displacing it onto an other—and thinking about where the connections might be. We’ve got anti-fracking campaigns, migrant solidarity campaigns, and certainly with the anti-fracking campaigns I think the political content of them is yet to be determined. A lot of it is NIMBYism, a lot (though not all) of it is middle class [and white], but that’s what we’ve got. People don’t come into struggle with perfect positions. People get involved in struggle because something is affecting them [or something they care about] and through contact with a whole host of people—activists, other people struggling, people reading texts—their political positions can change. Green and Black Cross are doing some really important work in anti-fracking struggles, sending observers to villages in Sussex that perhaps haven’t seen a lot of political struggles or protest previously.21 Of course, not all struggle will take the direction we want it to, but I think it’s really important that we don’t give up on it as inherently flawed from the beginning because then it will be captured by the Kingsnorths. The [fascist] British National Party made great play of localist environmental policy and you could easily see the far right jumping on anti-fracking campaigns.
A: To