Weaving Paths from Colonial Apocalypse to Ecological Revolution
https://www.firefund.net/pathstoecorevolution
People who are paying attention know that wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods are becoming more frequent, more extreme, more dangerous. We know it’s harder to grow food. We know that greenhouse gas emissions are rising every year, unless there’s an economic recession. We know that within a capitalist economy, an increase in industrial-scale green energy production causes an increase in fossil fuel production, by lowering the price of energy and forcing owners of the extensive fixed capital involved in fossil fuel production to produce more, in order to make up for a lower profit margin.
We know that every attempt to claim that economic growth is being decoupled from carbon emissions is just carbon accounting, shuffling the numbers to hide the true costs of capitalism. The highly paid researchers and journalists telling us that we can make capitalism green are pointing to multiple examples of emissions decoupling. But if we scratch under the surface we find Scandinavian countries that are actually producing huge quantities of oil and gas, but that doesn’t count because they’re selling it to be burned in other countries. We find the UK, which is also increasing gas production and weapons manufacture, has an economy based largely on banking and financial services for fossil fuel companies and other destructive industries. Curiously, none of that counts. We’re told that forests count as a carbon sink. And yet, if we look at a “green” country like Chile, much of these forests are on land stolen from Indigenous communities. And from Chile to the US and Canada, they’re not actually forests: they’re monocrop tree plantations. They destroy the soil, they don’t provide a good habitat for other species, they’re reliant on petrochemicals and fuels used in clearcutting and processing, and they don’t absorb nearly as much carbon as healthy, real, forest ecosystems.
Capitalist agriculture is a major cause of soil depletion, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Many of these emissions aren’t counted. Capitalist forestry and development practices cause bigger wildfires. Those emissions aren’t counted either. Militaries and wars are a major source of emissions. They also get excluded from most official counts.
Keep digging, and we see that electric vehicles as well as industrial-scale wind, solar, and hydro projects cause immense damage to the land through deforestation and mining, and in some cases they also devastate human communities. It also becomes clear how much money green energy, electric vehicle, and carbon capture companies are making, even though they are obstructing the goal of a negative-emissions economy.
The COP climate conference is happening this November in the Amazonian city of Belém, keeping alive the promises of the Paris Agreement, which at its root claims that green capitalism and government regulation will save us from catastrophic climate change. This framework has a track record of 30 years of failure. They set themselves the mission of preventing us from passing the dangerous threshold of 1.5C average warming, but we’ve just blown through that threshold more than a decade before scientific models predicted. And yet they continue to advocate for more of the same. We cannot continue to validate any part of their approach.
People who are really paying attention know that the ecological crisis didn’t start with fossil fuels. It started with colonialism, it started with the forceful imposition of capitalism on every part of the planet. It starts with the State, which always organizes the most extractive, exploitative economies its technologies will allow.
This shows us how questions of poverty, dependence on back-breaking and soul-crushing jobs, unhealthy overprocessed food, housing precarity, poisons in our air and water, low quality or privatized healthcare, wars and genocides are all wrapped into the ecological crisis. We know that as real scarcity caused by desertification, food shortages, and infrastructure collapse increase, those in power are fully willing to create scapegoats and murder revolutionaries and marginalized groups to stay in power a little longer.
If we pay attention, we can see all this. But few of us feel like we know what to do.
“Weaving Paths to Ecological Revolution” is an attempt to shift the focus on a global scale, turning despair into a battle cry against all the institutions of power responsible for this crisis, turning hopelessness into enthusiastic support for the kinds of projects and struggles that actually make a difference.
Many of the members of this initiative live in territories occupied by the Brazilian state. Over the next months, we will weave our paths closer together to help the world see, what are the patterns and characteristics a realistic response to the ecological crisis, a response that addresses the full dimensions of the problem, that helps us restore a healthy relationship with our ecosystem, and that enables us all to survive as the crisis gets worse. From there, we will see what proposals emerge that can aid people in completely different parts of the world to develop responses that make the most sense in their own specific situations. In the course of this work we will be publishing:
- Articles
- Interviews
- Videos
- Teaching materials
With your help we can translate these materials into a dozen different languages and spread them globally. They’ll be produced to communicate well with a diversity of audiences, with the goal of:
- examining effective strategies for struggle
- understanding why the present framework for dealing with climate change and other ecological and social issues can’t work, isn’t working, and is in fact making things worse
- discussing the histories and characteristics of projects that transform our social relationships and our relationship with the earth, spreading practices of mutual aid and collective survival, generating a non-extractive abundance, and helping our ecosystems heal and adapt
We need your support to have as great an impact as possible. This is our fundraiser: https://www.firefund.net/pathstoecorevolution
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Below, we present the accounts of several people participating in this initiative, speaking about some of the inspiring projects and struggles we are working to bring attention to.
Teia Dos Povos is active now in a dozen of Brazilian states, “taking back traditional Indigenous lands, practicing ecological agroforestry, producing food, energy, water, and giving autonomy for thousands of people. Even making premium chocolate and other goods. They are a network or web, organizing with settlements, quilombos (communities of peoples descended from African slaves), and Indigenous territories active for decades or hundreds of years. The forms of mutual aid practiced in Teia Dos Povos are more closely linked to collective work (mutirão), and here it’s been more common for building and managing agroforestry systems. But there is also collective work for building infrastructure, creating vegetable gardens, and organizing meetings. It’s also common to organize collective work for rainwater harvesting, school renovations, and even building collective spaces.”
Members of Teia Dos Povos speak about the beliefs that guide them: “Our elders explained that Land and Territory are the beginning, the end, and the means […]. In this sense? We speak of the beginning because those who are landless and marginalized in society need to understand once and for all that Land is power. The best part is that rights are means of production, because we can all generate wealth and build our lives with greater independence. Those who live on the land need to strengthen their awareness of how important life and the generation of wealth are to everything. That this wealth comes not from capital, but from the generation of life, from the conservation of biomes, from the production of water and oxygen, because our vision of the present includes the future of our children, their future children, and their children’s children. Land is the means because it is the condition through which we carry out our struggle. Who will finance our struggle? Foreign capitalists who have philanthropists for the struggles but have a long history of sabotaging radicalism, who have geopolitical interests in destabilizing governments and expanding their profit margins with our struggles? We do not consider this path. We must self-manage (autogerir) our struggle through our own efforts and with the solidarity of our comrades who, far from the land, can support us. But the fundamental thing comes from the wealth generated on the earth. Therefore, having access to land means being able to finance the struggle to confront plantations, capitalism, and racism. It is in this sense that the earth is the means to achieve our goal.”
The second interview examines the housing movement in Belo Horizonte, where 100,000 unhoused people created homes for themselves through direct action, land and building occupations. Here, it’s vital to emphasize we’re not just talking about housing, and not talking about movements attempting to reconcile with the State and simply climb the class ladder. What is happening is heterogeneous, multifaceted, and transformative.
“When the Covid-19 pandemic reached Brazil in 2020, it’s impact made the woes affecting the poorest people even more glaring… Such contrasts became even sharper when the commandment “stay at home” was not applicable to those without a home. Nor for those who live crowded together with family members in shacks and precarious housing, at risk of collapse or without basic sanitation. Occupying empty properties becomes, in moments like these, an even more urgent issue for survival.
Unlike established and more structured land and housing struggle movements, which outline organisation and planning prior to the emergence of a new occupation, newer movements such as MLP (Popular Liberation Movement) have emerged from the demand to organise and build solidarity with occupations that arise spontaneously from the self-organisation of homeless people. After an occupation, which is not necessarily planned by the movement, MLP militants and supporting collectives, such as Kasa Invisível, come together to create material, social, and legal support to ensure the occupation survives.
One example is “the Luiz Estrela Common Space, named after an emblematic street artist who mysteriously died in June 2013. The space was occupied in 2013, in the heat of the uprisings that swept the country that year against transportation costs, turning an old military hospital and children’s sanatorium into a centre of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial culture and politics. It hosts a theater, a communal kitchen, a permacultural initiative, music, and much more. The Anita Santos occupation started in 2018, when about 20 families occupied land owned by the state railway company. It was also organised by the MLP (Popular Liberation Movement), which runs actions with the Community Kitchen and distributes hundreds of free meals weekly in partnership with the Homeless Movement and the Street Pastoral. The MLP organises a dozen house and land occupations in Belo Horizonte and the surrounding region, including the 8-story squat called João e Maria in the municipality of Contagem.
“It is important to emphasise, however, that the largest occupations in terms of territory and inhabitants are not the vertical occupations of buildings in the central region, but the horizontal occupations of idle land that are occupied and become true neighbourhoods of the city, where movements and residents are responsible for urbanisation, opening roads, and building structures for sewage and electrical networks.
“At the turn of the decade from 2000 to 2010, there was a trend to decrease the occupation of buildings in central areas and focus instead on occupying peripheral lands to avoid repression, relying on self-construction of properties by occupants, and creating new popular territories. Examples include the Camilo Torres Occupation, in 2008, in the Barreiro neighbourhood, housing 140 families. The Dandara occupation emerged in the Céu Azul neighbourhood in 2009, with 150 families taking direct action in the same year that the PT government created the “Minha Casa Minha Vida” popular housing program. Today, approximately 2,500 families reside in the area. The Eliana Silva occupation, which emerged in 2012, remains active with 350 families organised by the MLB as well. When the occupation began, it was besieged by Military Police vehicles that prevented people, supplies, and medical aid from entering. After an attempted eviction the families resumed occupation on other land nearby. The authorities’ attitude was evident when they refused to authorise a water connection to the area, only relenting when residents organised and hijacked a COPASA water company truck.”
“We cannot fail to mention the urban Quilombos, which constitute an important area in the struggle for territory to live, practise their culture, and their way of life. Belo Horizonte officially has five urban Quilombos: Manzo Ngunzo, Souza, Luízes, Mangueiras, Kaiango, and the Irmandade Os Carolinos.”
Help us spread more stories like this, along with the analysis that will help us all build liberating, ecosystem-healing, life-saving projects all around the world, no matter what specific types of scarcity, oppression, and disaster we face.
https://www.firefund.net/pathstoecorevolution
