Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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that feed on and were fed by the Earth. “Climate change” is the dominant description of ecological destruction, but this is not simply a climate crisis, it is an ecological crisis. The catastrophe is not just emission counts but rather countless extractions, exhaustions, and extinctions.
When Out of the Woods started writing, it quickly became apparent to us that merely comprehending the breadth and depth of the ecological crisis could be a destructive thing in and of itself. Distress and despair arise from beginning to grasp the cascading scales through which the ruining of so many living and nonliving things is underway. Such responses are not misplaced, for the ruination of these things negatively impacts the possibilities for collective life they may have once held. The spectacular apocalyptic images of climate change in the received narratives, moreover, figure this equivalence as an inevitability: the breakdown of the climate is the breakdown of society. As the waves roll in on the cities, it is assumed, societies will break down and survivors will fight each other over whatever remains, while looking to the state and the military for salvation. In the classic “eco-catastrophe” film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), for example, survivors seeking shelter on the rooftops of skyscrapers experience hope only upon the redemptive return to the city of the US Army and its helicopters. In The Road (2009), only the repro-normative filial bond between a father and his son is made to matter amid a nightmare world of cannibalism and despair. Out of the Woods came together, in 2014, in order to reject such privatizing responses to the conjuncture and to collectively formulate alternatives without, however, disavowing despair.
“When people feel something is really urgent, or crisis-oriented,” Kyle Powys Whyte argues, “they tend to forget about their relationships with others. In fact, most phases of colonialism are ones where the colonizing society is freaked out about a crisis.”6 The fear of social breakdown amidst calamity is a colonial terror. This can only be a fear founded on a forgetting of existing relations and a figuring of crisis as something that has not yet happened. As Heglar notes, “when I hear folks say—and I have heard it—that the environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to get off the train.… For four hundred years and counting, the United States itself has been an existential threat for Black people.”7 No disaster is experienced by a unified “We.” Likewise, no disaster is defined by a sudden disappearance of kindness. These are myths of liberal political theory and its ideological extension through pop culture. It is ridiculous to imagine that solidarity and generosity emerge only through the conditional guarantee of a state-enforced social order.
The historical evidence seems to confirm our political suspicions. Rebecca Solnit shows that the differentiated destruction of disaster is frequently defined by “an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive” that creates “disaster communities” founded on mutual aid and collective care. These communities are not run by the state nor are they defined by the sudden evaporation of race, class, and gender. Instead, existing collectives of those most affected by disaster are expanded and elaborated to build new socialities of solidarity—whether in Mexico City after the 1968 earthquake or in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In these cases, when the state appears, it is not to help but to restore its own definition of order. It clamps down on ‘looters’ repurposing vital supplies to share, and ‘squatters’ seeking shelter in abandoned homes. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the US Army was sent in: they murdered between 50 and 500 survivors and disrupted the self-organized search, rescue, and firefighting efforts that had spread throughout the city. “The disaster provoked, as most do, a mixed reaction: generosity and solidarity among most of the citizens, and hostility from those who feared that public and sought to control it, in the belief that an unsubjugated citizenry was—in the words of [Brigadier General] Funston—‘an unlicked mob.’”8
Out of the Woods faces such calamity by insisting that we must not forget our existing relations with others. Amongst the working class, the racialized, the gendered, the colonized, disaster is met with self-organization, solidarity, and care. These collectives share in common their struggle and survival despite and because of the ongoing disaster of capital, race, gender, and colonialism. Whatever happens, their circulation of kindness is undoubtable. There will, of course, be no such kindness forthcoming from the brutal nexus of raciality, capital, and coloniality, forces which Denise Ferriera da Silva argues are “deeply implicated in/as/with each other.”9 But what else should be expected from operations which presuppose violence? The ecological crisis is a product of centuries of this system, of innumerable extractions and exploitations, indescribable enslavements and extirpations.
No true salvation can come in the form of a US Army helicopter. It is as a result of these striations that we insist on the importance of understanding ecological crisis as incorporating and being reproduced by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.” In fighting against this premature death, racialized, poor, queer, disabled and feminized subjects ensure that the response to ecological crisis is also group-differentiated. This response is one of deepened kindness from kin (or ‘kith’—to revive an old word referring to affinities grounded in place and action, rather than genealogy) and redoubled oppression from oppressors. It is in this deeper “kithness” that we find a solidarity which may yet change everything. If connections can be built across spatial and social differences, beyond their current fragmented form, they might yet begin to construct the provisional infrastructures of a new world amidst the ruins of the old. Out of the Woods chooses to recognize such disaster communities as a space of possibility for communism in the midst of disaster.10
To talk of disaster communism in these terms is to take the ecological crisis as a disaster. In the Oxford English Dictionary, these are the first two listed definitions of “disaster, n.”:
1. An event or occurrence of a ruinous or very distressing nature; a calamity; esp. a sudden accident or natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life.
2. The state or condition that results from a ruinous event; the occurrence of a sudden accident or catastrophe, or a series of such events; misfortune, calamity.11
The concept of “disaster” is useful because it can collapse the distinction between event and effect—between ruination and the resulting ruins. Part of what makes the planetary ecological crisis so difficult to comprehend is its complex temporality; the disaster is simultaneously happening, has happened, and will happen. This is also part of what makes recognizing the scale of catastrophe so psychologically devastating. It is hard enough to accept some cataclysm that is yet to come. It is even harder to reflect on the rapid ruining of the past, present, and future all at once. Talking of ecological disaster offers a way to enfold these different times of ruination.
This enfolding capacity is evident in Neil Smith’s understanding of disaster as a composite of risk, result, and response. His writing also offers another shaping element in what it means to think of ecological crisis as disaster:
It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—(physical) causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom.12
In line with our claim that ecological crisis is group-differentiated, Smith notes that “disasters don’t simply flatten landscapes, washing them smooth,” but instead “deepen and erode the ruts of social difference they encounter.”13 Clyde Woods, importantly, extends this rut further into the history of “plantation capitalism,” noting that “activists in New Orleans were very insistent that there was not just a disaster and people were taking advantage of it, there was a disaster before Katrina.”14 While disaster collapses the distinction between the process of ruining and the ruins it creates, it simultaneously deepens the differentiation between who and what bears the brunt of disaster and who and what does not.
What we call “disaster communism” is an immediately ethical and eminently