Only by starting with decolonialism can we address ecocide – the aff and permutations are doomed to fail.

The alternative to ecocide is not a simplistic plan for carbon reduction on a schedule that will not be met, and even if it were could not avert a catastrophe that is already upon us. The alternative is the networking of thousands of empowered territo- ries, each one approaching the horizon of a complex imagined future that prioritizes the health and happiness of that territory and its inhabitants. To achieve that, we do not have to await the timetables of economists and engineers advising us how to incentivize powerful, murderous institutions to make the needed changes at their own pace, without rocking the boat too much.

What we need to do instead is to find the seeds of those empowered territories all around us, nurture them, cultivate them, and link them in a rhizomatic web that will become stronger than any institution of the ecocidal system that is already falling to ruin, strong enough so that as many of our living communities as possible—human and non-human, all enmeshed—will survive the upheavals and disturbances as our planet tries to heal from centuries of abuse.

Finding those seeds, cultivating them, will look different in every ter- ritory. But after talking with friends across the world, I think we can trace an outline for action that will be useful in different contexts by asking ourselves four simple questions. These questions, in conversation with those around us, can be an important step in creating empowered communities.

• Who is already fighting?

• What seedlings do we have?

• What risks do we face?

• Who can we help?

When we look around us to see who is already fighting, we are looking for accomplices and also breaking with the mentality of passively awaiting solutions. And by fighting I mean struggling for survival, in the broadest sense of the term. Survival is never individual, it is communal, it is physical, emotional, and intergenerational. It includes people trying to stop a pipeline that would poison their water supply, to stop an airport that would bring in floods of tourists and destroy their traditional relation with their territory; people trying to preserve their language or their heirloom crops against pressures to modernize; people fighting against evictions or trash incinerators, trying to create a more livable city; people crossing borders in search of a better life. Fighting for survival does not include people launching careers off their activism. It does not include people developing and patenting technologies that, taken out of context, might seem to make a small part of the problem better but in the current context will just concentrate more wealth into fewer hands.

Taking inventory of our seedlings means identifying sources of strength that have shown to be viable right now, and that with more support might grow exponentially, serving as inspirations or starting points for a new way of living, like the weed that breaks the pavement or the first-generation tree that makes way for a thriving forest. Maybe we take part in a labor organization that might be able to launch infra- structures of international solidarity in a moment of deepening crisis. Maybe we live in a territory that has remained relatively fertile, with a good number of projects that point the way to local food sovereignty; or maybe we live in a desertifying area but take part in projects that help the local ecosystem and human communities to adapt and mitigate the damage. Maybe we run a hacking collective or open technology initiative capable of sharing useful tools and designs on a global scale. Maybe our region has a combative street movement capable of wrecking capitalist infrastructure projects or blocking government policies that threaten us. What links can we establish between projects and what conversations can we have within these projects in order to let more people know they serve as a model for a better world, and to be ready when they need to grow rapidly and pull more weight?

We also need to be aware of what specific risks we face in our territory. Do we live in a food desert? How far away are food and fuel supplies, should the gas stations and supermarkets go empty? What infrastructures do we lack for growing and processing our own food? What repressive strategies and capabilities is the local government likely to use against us, and what kind of organized paramilitary forces exist in our territory? Are we at acute risk of desertification, wildfires, sea level rise, or tropical a truly different future . 201 diseases? Do we have access to the seeds that we will need for next year’s planting, or are they all warehoused by agribusiness? How do the people around us react to crisis? When the pandemic hit, did they rush to empty out the stores, or did they think of ways to protect one another? Finally, who can we help? What living communities—human and non-human—in our territory are most at risk, most in need of additional resources in order to adapt and protect themselves? What infrastruc- tures and resources do we have—especially considering those given to us by global capitalism—that people in other territories lack? How can we build bonds of communication and solidarity with those other territories so we can help them get what they need to survive? Where we live and who we are will result in very different answers to these questions. No institution on the planet is capable of assimilating all those knowledges in an intelligent way. It is up to us to answer these questions and create our own plans.

It might help to suggest a few lines of inquiry relating to the most basic, broad differences. People from colonized territories have differ- ent historical and present examples to look to for deciding how to take charge of their calls for solidarity, the way they build support, and the way they understand reparations. The Zapatistas and the Kurdish liberation movement both put out calls for international solidarity and received important material and moral support. Key elements of their campaigns included inviting supporters to their territories to learn firsthand about their struggles; defining how people from outside could support them and thus eliminating one of the most central and oppressive characteristics of charity; asking those supporters to bring their experiences back to a significantly larger group of people in their home territories and to build support there; and challenging and influencing the ideologies of liberation movements in colonizing countries. Especially in the case of the Zapatistas, there was also an important element of asking people in wealthier countries to raise money and help the local communities achieve the material basis for autonomy in contradiction to the forced dependence of global capitalism. Other examples include the solidarity campaign that targeted compa-nies doing business with the South African apartheid regime with boycott or sabotage (including an extensive firebombing campaign in Germany and the Netherlands that forced multiple companies to divest), or inter- national solidarity with Palestine focusing on boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. On a smaller scale, but very recently, there was the call put out by First Nations fighting against land grabs in territories occupied by the Canadian state to help blockade transportation infrastructure in the midst of a powerful wave of protests that shut down highways, ports, and rail lines across the country.

To simplify, salient questions include how to communicate the needs of the colonized territory, how to build international relationships strong enough to provide a framework for real solidarity, and how to self-define the struggle and break the habits of paternalism and charity that people from colonizing societies are trained in.

A series of articles by John Severino, all available on theanarchistli- brary.org, detail one model for creating international solidarity based on creating and collectivizing personal relationships between communities in struggle, in this case between anarchists and Indigenous communities within the United States, Bolivia, and Chile.

For our part, people from colonizing countries might want to consider recent critiques of allyship, such as “Accomplices Not Allies” by Indig- enous Action Media or “Critique of Ally Politics.”20 Breaking with paternalistic charity models is fundamental; if we are not learning from the people we are supporting, it isn’t solidarity. But there are other pitfalls as well. Tawinikay speaks to one of them:

Saying you support Indigenous sovereignty doesn’t mean backing every Indigenous person on every project. There are plenty of Indig- enous misogynists and ladder-climbing politicians out there, and you don’t do me any favours by helping them gain power. Fight for libera- tory ideas, not for nations or bloodlines.

We do this all the time. There are Indigenous people out there who oppose pipelines and those who support them, but we align ourselves with the resistance, so we are making choices already. Own it. It’s okay. It’s good to fight for the land and for freedom.

… Understand what struggles are about and know who is partici- pating in them. Get to know those people. Build relationships. Build meaningful relationships outside of the occupation, as friends. It can’t start from a place of white guilt. Don’t get swept up in your own settler redemption story.21

As for the imperative of rooting ourselves in a territory, this can be extremely difficult if we have no such roots to start with, if we come from a culture that has been completely modernized, and especially if we are settlers in a settler state. Unless they are well thought out in historical perspective and with great sensitivity to all the other living communi- ties around us, attempts to “reconnect with our roots” will only end up reproducing alienation.

Knowing the Land is Resistance (https://knowingtheland.com) pro- vides an interesting model for an initiative by settlers living “between Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment” to learn from and connect with local woodlands; to spread ecological skills and awareness with plant walks, seed harvesting, zines, and workshops; to develop an “anar- chist ecology” that critiques “the ecology of management from a distance, and of remote expertise, that sees itself as fundamentally separate from the land, inhabiting a present without a past or future” and instead offers “starting points for an anti-colonial, anti-authoritarian way of connect- ing with the land [that is] rooted in relationships, deep listening, urban ecology, re-enchanting, and unexpertness”; and to build active solidar- ity with ongoing Indigenous struggles to defend and recover their land and their ways of life.

Because of a history we did not create but must nonetheless situate ourselves within, settlers need to make clear that it is more important for us to defend the land than to own it. This means sabotaging destruc- tive infrastructure and helping block ecocidal megaprojects without the expectation that doing so will win us ownership or some other claim to the land. Plenty of past projects that arose from European socialism and focused on reclaiming a connection with the land became complicit with colonialism when carried out in a settler context, including Zionist kibbutzim such as Degania or Sointula, a commune set up by Finnish socialists on the territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation, usurped within the confines of British Columbia.22 As for specific considerations for Indigenous and racialized people moving forward, of course I’m not qualified to offer any, but I hope that the revolutionaries, communities, organizations, and initiatives that have also spoken in these pages can provide inspiration relevant to many different contexts.

One thing that I think is true wherever we are is that we can get to know the earth beneath our feet, the history that towers behind us, the overlapping communities that surround us. Wherever we live, there we can find life, and with life, struggle. Let us connect on that basis, andfight for a world fit for living things, not for the ossified institutions begging us to save them, to rejuvenate them again with one more round of life-sapping reforms.

Capitalism is dying. It has been dying for a very long time, and still it keeps growing. Colonialism has already changed its masks. The state has stood on the precipice of collapse before. Why keep pretending? Why bite our tongues? Let us put them out of their misery, before it is too late for all of us. We don’t need them. There is another world right here. It has been with us the whole time.

Link – Nature/AT: Perm