by: Lazy & EntitledPosted on:

Friday Links: Anarchism For The Environment Edition

“Billions of people around the world are already responsible for conserving biodiversity, building on the efforts of their ancestors to live harmoniously with the environments they inhabited.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’

As always, I am determined not to have a bad summer. My wife did spring for that pool membership, and the city summer camp we’re sending the kid to is good. I’ve been performing. I really like teaching. But dudes, is the weather not atrocious this year? All of June was severe, severe thunderstorms. July immediately hit Chicago with 90+ degree weather, no 75-degree-but-sunny buffers. Wildfires made last weekend hell. The show Brendan and I were gonna play with Ester and Routine Fuss got cancelled, so last Thursday was a depressive hell. Climate change doesn’t just mean a bunch of Pacific islands and parts of India and Miami sinking into the sea. It also means otherwise mundane weather events have been turbo-charged and are that much worse. It’s harder to get people to make that connection, though. It sucks.

Anyway, time to use Claude to write an email and ChatGPT to write a loved one’s obituary and Anthropic to generate a flyer for an event and Grok to make some non-consensual pornography of strangers.

Or—

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

A good text that I am glad I read, but have to say—this tested my resolve for reading an environmentalist nonfiction book every year. I liked this book, and will be returning to it for poetry reasons. But goddamn was this depressing. I felt the same way about Dan Egan’s Death and Life of the Great Lakes, for sure. Still, both books are so loaded with information about climate disasters that no one is going to do anything about. Even if the people in power are doing nothing, though, it feels important to know what’s going on. Well, people in power aren’t just doing nothing. In fact, they are actively making the problem worse, thanks to forcing genAI on everyone with an entry-level corporate job. I might need to protect my mental health a bit, is what I’m saying. Like 80% of my other media consumption, from podcasts to news sites to whatever, is learning about upsetting current events. I know how bad it is out there. Books are supposed to be a little reprieve from that—and it’s not like I’m reading cotton candy novels and Instagram poetry. I’m not afraid to shy away from real shit, but, like, can we add a Mapingauri? Or a kraken? At least some werewolves? Anyway, let’s get into Environmentalism From Below by Ashley Dawson.

a book, Environmentalism From Below by Ashley Dawson, on a shelf
Environmentalism From Below by Ashley Dawson

Environmentalism From Below by Ashley Dawson: helpfully, this book is a few lengthy but focused chapters. We’ve got “A Global People’s Movement, “Decolonizing Food,” “Urban Climate Insurgency,” “Reclaiming the Energy Commons,” “Against Fortress Conservation, and “Climate Debt and Border Abolition.” There are two helpful appendices, as well: “Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth” and “People’s Agreement of Cochabamba.” The biggest takeaway, for me, is that the Earth is alive in far more ways than we think. We have to stop thinking of cities as unnatural human creations separate from pristine nature and start thinking of the two as part of the same ecosystem. We have to start thinking more locally about food, we have to start thinking about ways we can reduce our dependency on cars. Dawson outlines various policy failures and corporate evils—if you’ve been paying attention, there is nothing new under the sun, yet things are also worse than you think. Also, this book came out in 2024, meaning it was written before AI came along to make things 500x worse.

Fortress conservation is something I want to touch on a little, since it was relatively new to me. I’m generally a National Parks fan, but have heard rumblings of how they are imperfect. It boils down to thinking about land as separate zones, rather than thinking of the Earth holistically. The first National Park created was Yosemite, and it was created after a massacre. Not only were the people who lived on that land killed, but so was their way of living in harmony with the land. Are our 21st century brains even capable of comprehending what the ecology of the Americas was 500 years ago? 250 years ago? What has our building done to wildlife habitats, plant and animal alike? Do we even remember what we’ve lost?

That’s a good way to get into the title of this book, which is instructive. Environmentalism from below means an environmentalism that is led by people’s movements. The end game of capitalism—and this is Bridget Gordon and me talking, not Ashley Dawson, but I think he’d agree—is for the wealthy few to turn the world into a resort. Whomever survives is The Help. The book suggests: what about not that. What about people’s movements leading the way to a new kind of thinking, one that isn’t eco-fascist but does argue for a more harmonious approach to living. This would necessarily mean embracing Indigenous knowledge—Dawson looks like India’s Forest Rights Act and the way Ecuador and Bolivia rewrote their constitutions to give the planet rights as good first steps that other nations should follow. Speaking of nations—Dawson makes a compelling climate argument for the abolition of borders, but I’m going long already.  

LINKS!

Something to listen to while you browse? Hey, that Helado Tropical album came out.

What’re you still doing here? Hey I had to learn this Wolfmother song for work. My left forearm is huge now because of playing this riff. Want an excuse to watch the Jackass guys while listening to a fun and strange song?

If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Look, if there’s something I want everyone to take away from the climate crisis, it’s that you’ve been lied to about what sorts of consumption habits you should expect to be normal. Yes, most of the climate problem is billionaires. I do want everyone to remember the reduce part of “reduce reuse recycle,” though. Maybe this isn’t the best place to put this bit of my brain, since all your customers this weekend are unlikely to understand moderation. It’s just worth thinking about.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris

  1. a personal hangup: now that I am a teacher to students ranging from age 11-40, I will always find Daniel Biss a touch repulsive because of the sleeping with a student thing. It is bizarre to me that you could be in a teaching position and even see your students that way. His politics are mostly okay and he seems willing to move left, but that behavior is repulsive and a stain. ↩︎
  2. I have my jaunts over to Mongabay, I’ll watch nature documentaries, I’ll read stuff that gets posted on my Bluesky timeline. I read a decent amount of science writing for someone who isn’t a sciencist or SFF author, but still. I know how much I don’t know. ↩︎

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