Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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linked to any environmental discussion of climate change in terms of pollution but also the simple fact that London is rapidly becoming unbreathable. What was brilliant about the BLM statement that came out was that they insisted that breathability is differentiated—that the problem with expanding London City is not that it affects the whole of London, but rather that it disproportionately affects the poor Black communities in Newham, where the airport is located.
Something I was excited about was the opening of a discussion around atmosphere and breathability, which would bring in the environment as a space where effects are differentiated. So that was an exciting moment, which I hope hasn’t stalled because no one else took it up. It seems like the environmental movement missed that, and it’s interesting that it has done very little about atmosphere and pollution in London. For me, that seems like a really axiomatic struggle that could be acted on immediately, and would massively improve the welfare and livelihood of systematically oppressed peoples.
So, I think it’s very possible to already envisage what some kind of environmental activism in the UK might look like—it might not be as simple as targeting resource extraction, campaigns around pollution would be just as valid. In terms of displacement by flooding, that’s something we are going to perhaps see more of, but pollution is something that’s happening immediately. I would say that I remain deeply hopeful because people are making these moves towards realizing that the environment is a context rather than some kind of sole cause and, as environment is contextualized, I think we begin to see something quite hopeful here.
I don’t see it as a movement, but as a series of deeply fragmented local insurgencies. That’s what movements have always been. If you read Aldon Morris, who’s a great sociologist of the Civil Rights Movement, he says it wasn’t a movement but a series of local insurgencies which came to be seen as a movement because they acquired a force great enough that it was impossible to resist them.22 I don’t think we can model what we do now on the Civil Rights Movement, but it’s important to remember that event, the archetypal movement, wasn’t a movement. So, on this basis, in thinking about anti-fracking campaigns, all of them have the capacity to become very successful local insurgencies in which the demand ceases to be just about “we’re going to stop this one thing” and becomes how how we can begin to act in solidarity with those whose lives are determined by catastrophe.
D: There’s a great article by Aufheben written in 1994, “The politics of anti-road struggle and the struggles of anti-road politics.” It outlines a lot of these issues in that movement: which sometimes was driven by NIMBYism, sometimes by environmental concerns, sometimes by moral concerns, sometimes by a more holistic Marxism.23 What happens in those past movements, the historical memory, I think, is actually pretty important: in their struggles did they bring issues together to show how they were connected? How? That’s of real use in determining how we organize against environmental destruction in the UK without the protofascist rhetoric of “Our England.”
A: Yeah, and that refusal of “Spitfire Ecology,” of Merrie England and green fields with an old fighter plane flying over them, is undoubtedly the danger. I think a refusal of the nationalist image of the land, as well as an embrace of the antinationalist possibility of a cyborg Earth—which simultaneously does not deny the possibility of an Indigenous nationhood—is the kind of contradiction we have to work through. This working through can’t be didactic; it can’t just be based in speaking, nor just in writing, nor can we just hope that if we fight hard enough it will all sort itself out in the end. I guess what I’m caught up in is some kind of social life where we practice speaking, writing, and fighting as if they had never been separate in the first place. That’s why BASE makes me hopeful; it’s a good place for some regenerative conversation, for some kind of lovingly antagonistic chatter.
1. See our introduction to Section I, “Introduction: Disaster Migration,” for a critique of our use of Myers’ numbers in this interview.
2. Oli Brown, “Migration and Climate Change,” International Organization for Migration Research Series (Geneva: International Organization of Migration, 2008), 17. Available at https://www.iom.cz/files/Migration_and_Climate_Change_-_IOM_Migration_Research_Series_No_31.pdf.
3. The National Health Service is the UK’s public health provider. Famously a “universal” health system feted for providing care on the basis of need rather than ability to pay, the UK government has in recent years developed a range of policies restricting access as part of a “hostile environment” directed at undocumented migrants—including a requirement that people pay upfront for secondary care if they cannot prove their “eligibility” for NHS treatment based on migration status. The group Docs not Cops are challenging this: see page 68 below.
4. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
5. From memory, I (D) had an essay by Rupert Read in mind here. The truth is even more unnerving, because Read had made such arguments as an “expert” to a UK Parliamentary Select Committee. See publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/consumpt/consumption.pdf.
6. See “Lies of the Land” in Section II of this volume for our response to this essay.
7. This is not entirely clear to us today, as argued by Jan Selby et al., “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War Revisited,” Political Geography 60 (2017): 232–44. The authors dispute existing evidence of both drought-induced migration and migration-induced conflict.
8. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 3.
9. On the race-erasive, white-feminist universalism of the latter text, particularly in its iteration as a Hulu TV show, see Sophie Lewis: “In Gilead, Atwood’s fictional setting, human sexuation is neatly dimorphic and cisgendered—but that is apparently not what’s meant to be dystopian about it. It’s the ‘surrogacy’.… [As such] The Handmaid’s Tale neatly reproduces a wishful scenario at least as old as feminism itself. Cisgender womanhood, united without regard to class, race or colonialism, can blame all its woes on evil religious fundamentalists with guns.” [Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019), 10.]
10. For Moylan, “critical dystopia” names a historically specific genre of science fiction arising around the birth of neoliberalism. We’re prepared to expand the concept to describe our present, however. [Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). For more on the use of “critical dystopia” as a descriptive term for the present, see David M. Bell, Rethinking Utopia: Place, Power, Affect (London: Routledge, 2017), 20–51.
11. The “Prospecting Futures” research conducted by Lisa Garforth, Amy C. Chambers, and Miranda Iossifidis at Newcastle University has been exploring this issue in relation to online science-fiction reading groups (whose texts have included works by Octavia Butler).
12. Silvia Federici, “Preoccupying,” The Occupied Times (blog), October 25, 2014, https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13482.
13. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 9–89.
14. See especially Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London and New York: Verso Books, 2019).
15. This is a bit of a rhetorical simplification—differentiated vulnerability can also mean rich white people choosing to live in more risky places, displacing those who can longer afford to live