Click on image to view online PDF.

For printer-friendly PDF, please click here. Feel free to print and distribute to your heart’s content.

By Andrew Flood (1995)

The major problem with any discussion of the ‘Green Movement’ is that it does not exist as a single body of ideas. Instead both individuals and organizations hold a range of positions from anarchism right across the political spectrum to ideas influenced by fascism. Any of the terms, environmentalist, ecologist etc are very vague definitions of a wide bodies of idea and practice, probably even wider and vaguer then socialism.

Therefore we should not create a false choice between anarchism and environmentalism but rather ask what sort of environmental theory and action should anarchists favour on the one hand and on the other explain why any environmentalist should also be a class struggle anarchist.

There is a good argument that some of the early anarchists, in particular Kropotkin were the originators of some of the core ideas common to today’s radical environmental theory. Similarly some anarchists today, like Murray Bookchin, have a widespread influence in modern environmental theory. This historical and current connection is probably why many radical environmentalists already describe themselves as anarchists.

On the other hand there are people who call themselves environmentalists with whom we have nothing in common and whom we should dislike just as much as other reactionary politicians and movements. A major problem with the green movement is that the progressive elements often fail to seriously distance themselves from the reactionary elements. This can be contrasted with the deliberate distancing implied in the slogan ‘neither left nor right but green’.

A simplified understanding of the range of green ideas can be gained if we imagine two axes of environmentalist theory and practice:

a) Organization tactics: Direct Actionist to Leader/Parliamentary
b) Motivation: Misanthropic Mysticism to Humanist Materialism

The intersection between Leader/Parliamentary tactics and Misanthropic Mysticism is currently and historically useless at best and all too often dangerous in giving cover to deeply reactionary political trends. In Germany in the 1920’s, for instance, a mass organization called Blood and Soil existed which represented just such a combination.

Their 1923 recruitment material include “In every German a forest quivers with its caverns and ravines … it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul …”. By 1939, 60% of the membership of the main ‘nature protection’ organizations had joined the Nazi party (as compared with 10% of the entire male population.)Even as late as 1942, Himmler could use ‘environmentalism’ as a justification for the annexation of Poland, writing “The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavoured to increase the natural powers of the soil … and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. … If, therefore, the new Lebensraum [living spaces] are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite”.

Sections of today’s Green Movement in Germany have resurrected some of the Blood and Soil theoreticians, more details on this can be found in the AK Press pamphlet “Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience”. This is not to claim that all environmentalists are or will become fascists - far from it -, but it should be clear that one cannot assume that the label of “environmentalist” is any sort of guarantee of progressive politics in other areas.

The wing of environmentalism that is most open to anarchism is the opposite intersection, that of Direct Action and Humanist Materialism. It is based around an understanding that the environment is important because it is where we live. So we cannot escape the consequences of environmental degradation. This understanding is coupled with action to protect the environment based on mobilizing numbers in direct action against pollution etc. rather then relying of ‘green taxes’ or other new laws to make the earth safe.

Many of these environmentalists are already using the label anarchist to distance themselves from the respectable reformism of the Green Parties. But others have come to anarchism because there is a distinct and powerful logic drawing them towards us.

Anarchism brings to environmentalism an understanding of why the environment is degraded. That is the pursuit of profit by powerful interests over which we exercise little control in current society. It matters little to an anarchist if these powerful interests are the private ruling classes of Western Europe or the state bureaucrats who previously ruled Eastern Europe and still control large sections of the economy on the global level.

To summarize, as anarchists we are aware we are dependent on the environment in order to exist, we are aware that ‘the Power’ be it industry or state based is willing to locally destroy large parts of the environment in pursuit of power and profit. Finally we are aware that the only way to stop ‘the Power’ is by direct action against its projects in the short term and a revolutionary change of society in the long term.

However there is another common element to the radical or progressive wing of the environmental movement. For many involved, the tactics used also represent a way to escape some of the day to day misery of life under capitalism. This attitude which is often referred to in anarchist circles as lifestylism is something we also need to consider.

The protest camps of the anti-road movements in Britain and Ireland represented more then a way of stopping un-necessary road projects and questioning transport priorities. To many they also represented an alternative model of how we could live - one without hierarchy and more in commune with nature.

Articles originating from within these camps often portrayed them as islands of escape from capitalism and alongside this sought to develop a theory of how people could leave self-sufficiently in and between them, in some instances even trying to escape dependency on state welfare (the dole etc). The creating of colonies to ‘escape capitalism’ is not a new phenomena, it too has historical parallels associated with anarchism. In the 1920s, for instance, this was expressed by the growth of communes in the USA.

I’m going to be critical of this tendency, but let me start off by moderating this criticism by saying as anarchists we should defend people right to choose whatever lifestyle they desire under today’s society. And in a future anarchist society we should be clear that people will choose to live in a wide variety of ways. I like cities and the cultural diversity that comes with them, so I certainly believe cities will exist in the future, but we should also be clear that some people will choose to live in much smaller communes, in ways they consider to be more in contact with nature.

Providing people are free to choose in what manner they live, we not only should have no problem with this, but look forward to such a society. One in which people could move between different ways of living and different communities as it suited them, without the attendant economic disadvantages and political repression that accompany such choices in today’s society.

What I do want to criticize however is the idea that this sort of choice can change society - or more fundamentally, that if everyone conformed to such a lifestyle change a revolution would come about because capitalism could no longer function.

Fundamentally, this underestimates the willingness of capitalism to force people to work.

Capitalism when faced with shortages of workers has little hesitation in driving people off the land and facing them with the choice of working in the factory or starving. Historically this was, at least some extent, what the Enclosure acts in 17th century Britain were all about. The division of the land into clearly marked units drove tens of thousands with no formal claim to land into the cities. Conditions in the city at this time were horrific with the death rate exceeding the birth rate.

Today a similar phenomenon is witnessed in many ‘third world’ countries, where huge areas of land are allowed to lie fallow while landless peasants are forced to move to the city slums and eke out a living in next to impossible circumstances. In short, we should not forget that capitalism has teeth, and that both in the historic past and outside of the ‘first world’ it is not at all shy about using them if it needs to force people into work.

More fundamentally though, many workers will not wish to choose the lifestyle associated with dropping out. We enjoy the consumerist comforts of capitalism. I’m a great fan of the Sony Playstation, for instance, and such luxury items can only be produced in advanced industrial societies. I’m willing to fight for a society where as a class we decide what to produce and whether the benefits of production outweigh the environmental damage caused by production. I’m even willing to recognize that for a time at least we may decide that producing charcoal burning stoves is more important then producing Playstations. I’m willing to fight for a society where people can choose their own lifestyles. But I’m not going to fight for a society that limits itself to small communes and low tech industry.

At the end of the day, this is the core plank of an anarchist analysis of the environment. In a society where we democratically control production we will decide not to pollute, or to limit pollution to a level that can be absorbed. We also recognize the need to fight against harmful activity in the ‘here and now’ and to link up such fights with other issues in a fight to change society. We defend people’s right to be different in the here and now, to choose their own lifestyle, sexuality, musical preferences, whatever. This position automatically makes us allies of the radical end of the green movement, for whom it provides a way of moving from the politics of permanent protest to the politics of permanent change.

Andrew Flood is an Irish Platformist and member of the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM). He has written many articles on the subject of anarchism, including Civilisation, Primitivism and Anarchism and The Trouble with Islam.

The first feature-length documentary by radical filmmaker Frank Lopez, EndCiv is an urgent and withering attack on the moral foundations of industrial civilization. Based on the book EndGame by radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen, the film brings the author’s words to life with visual footage that lays bare the depravity of western capitalism and the shallow hypocrisy of the mainstream environmental movement.

Perhaps one of the film’s greatest contributions is its dissection of North American pacifism. Through interviews with figures such as Ward Churchill, Peter Gelderloos, John Zerzan, Gord Hill and Lierre Keith, EndCiv effectively challenges the primary myths surrounding Gandhian non-violence. While much has been written about the role that widespread acceptance of pacifism has played in the marginalization of popular struggle in the years since WWII, EndCiv makes these arguments much more accessible to a larger audience - something that desperately needed to be done.

Plans are currently in the works for a North American tour sometime in the coming year. Until then, those interested can watch clips of the film online at http://EndCiv.com

Over the course of the G20 weekend, over 1000 people were arrested and sent to an abandoned film studio that had been turned into a makeshift prison. The vast majority of those detained were completely peaceful protesters. Some of those arrested were not protesters at all, but merely pedestrians detained and brutalized for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not unsurprisingly, many of these people are now protesters.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” So what lessons, then, did G20 detainees learn about the “degree of civilization” of Canadian society?

Throughout the time that I was detained I was told many statements that I find repulsive and completely inappropriate and what I view as threats. I was told I was going to be raped. I was told that I was going to be gang banged. I was told that they were going to make sure that I was never going to want to act as a journalist again by making sure that I would be repeatedly raped while I was in jail. While I was in the detention center, I saw numerous young women who were completely strip searched, who were strip-searched by male officers. And one young woman who was coming out, who was completely traumatized, said she had had a finger put up her.
- Amy Miller, Independent Journalist and Filmmaker

There were 40 people in one cage — it was brutal, and it was cold.
-Matthew Beatty

We were given a two day old stale cheese and butter sandwich, and given a small cup of water every five hours. The police guards had an unlimited supply of apples, bottled water, roast beef sandwiches and chocolate covered strawberries that they were eating in front of our cells. Some cell mates where so desperate for food they’d eat the thrown away apple cores left on the cell floor.
-Anonymous

For the first time in my life, I had to beg for water. There was a water riot; you could hear all the cages screaming for water; all the people losing it. I had never been in a situation like that, and never had to for being a Canadian.
- Tommy Taylor

That detention centre was tantamount to torture.
-Cameron Fenton, Journalist

I will not forget what they have done to me and others.
- Guillaume Lemarron

Click on image to view online PDF.

For printer-friendly PDF, please click here. Feel free to print and distribute to your heart’s content.

By Darius Mirshahi

As young people, we already know we’re fucked. We’ve been robbed of a future by our elders who consumed it. The last few generations have taken every resource imaginable and extracted it at an ever-increasing rate. Blind to the world around them they planned our obsolescance like the products they designed for the dump. Now everything is unbalanced and we’re coming to a tipping point. We already see the consequences everywhere. Depression economics, ecological catastrophes, violent and oppressive social relations. Their poisons have logically spread beyond our rivers and land into our bodies and minds. It’s in the air we breathe, its broadcasted on the airwaves, it’s all pervasive, and always present. They dug us into a coffin and we must escape it. This will be no small task. It demands the radical re-organization of humanity and a total re-evaluation of our relationship with our ecological support systems.

What we know is this: There’s no future on this path and we’re speeding to the finish line. These are desparate times, the very survival of life on this planet, including our own, lies in the balance of the decisions we make now. Everything will flow from here.

The damage is done, the climate is not only changing, it has changed. We already live in an ecological catastrophe. But this only means that we must fight harder to save the small pockets of vibrant ecosystems that still exist. There are fools among us that still wish to pillage what little remains and it’s up to us to stop them. We cannot count on governments to do this work for us either. They have never worked for us, and have always paved the way for corporate exploitation of the earth’s resources. Politicians are bought and paid for by those who fund their campaigns. Clear-cutters, mining companies, and developers own the Canadian economy and by extension our politicians, who gladly rubber-stamp their ecocidal projects. The most important thing we can do now is directly confront the forces of industrial expansion by intervening as individuals and communities of resistance. We must create conflict with these forces every time they attempt to replace a forest with new suburban sprawl, every time they attempt to rob our mother and turn her into commodities, and every time they attempt to expand the roads and highways to facilitate larger distribution of their products.

But even this is not enough, we must dismantle the system of industrial capitalism not merely contain it. We need to reverse the process not just stall its expansion.

We need to develop sustainable alternatives to everything  we have come to take for granted in our culture. We need to realize our way of life is incompatible with life itself. We need to decontaminate our soil water and air, because even if we drastically decreased emissions we would still be breathing in toxins and living on a toxic planet. We need to dismantle the power grid, stop all mass production of energy and transition into more resilient community-controlled autonomous energy production. We need to abolish patent-laws that protect intellectual property and liberate the knowledge of sustainable alternatives. Corporations have been keeping us dependent on their inefficient and dirty technologies for decades through copyright laws.

We need to challenge the forces of social control that exist to keep us passively marching towards the nightmare they are steadily building for us on this planet. We need to reject their products, and make their entire industrial system collapse before there is a total ecological collapse and mass extinction. Species extinction is currently accelerating on this planet due to our culture of consumerism and the economic domination of this planet. The oceans have massive dead zones, most rivers have become undrinkable from dams and industrial runoff, and we live in concrete jungles, saturated in smog, where we slave away to meet our basic needs.

Another way of life is possible and necessary. We can radically change this world for the better, all we need to do is start acting on our desires and putting our ideas into practice. We can start liberating our lives, communities, and bioregions from the tyranny of the market. We can challenge the authority of governments and reclaim local autonomy. We can defend the ecosystems that are still intact while re-wilding areas that have been devastated. We can tear up parking lots, detoxify soil, and create community gardens. We can occupy and take over the existing infrastructure and run it collectively while reconnecting it to our environment by collecting rainwater, building rooftop gardens, and ripping out lawns to allow diverse plant and animal life to flourish.

We can start in the here and now. We do not need to wait for action from the powers that be. We must take action and be the power for change ourselves. The fate of the world is in our hands. We can either create resilient communities capable of surviving the collapse and defending and regenerating our ecosystems, or we can continue down the suicidal path of industrial expansion and consumer culture. It’s time to get off the fence and stand up against those who have sold out the future.

By Alric Malgraith

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes described pre-civilized life, what he called “the natural condition of man” as “nasty, brutish and short” and thus Man needs an all powerful government to suppress his natural savagery. (Hobbes 1651) This description of hunter-gatherer cultures was widely accepted in Enlightenment thinking. Only Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed and argued in favour of an uncivilized life, philosophically. (Rousseau 1754) Rousseau’s thinking was dismissed as romantic and “noble savage” mythology. Perhaps Rousseau was romanticizing, but through modern ethnographic and archaeological studies it can be determined that hunter-gatherers have better lives than so-called civilized people. Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time, a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and a stronger sense of community than those living in industrialized societies.

Philosopher Derrick Jensen gives an appropriate definition of Civilization in a practical sense. Civilization is “a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities.” He proceeds to define a city as “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” (Jensen 2006) These definitions will be considered when the term “civilization” is used throughout this essay and the term “uncivilized” or “primitive” should not be taken as a term of offense or denigration.

The Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reported in his book on Stone Age economics that hunter-gatherers on average spend three to five hours per day dedicated to food production. In this small amount of labour time per day, plus the occasional time spent building and maintaining tools and shelter they are able to provide all the things that subsistence requires. This is far less labour time than is required by industrialized people who often work eight hours per day or 35-40 hours per week. (Sahlins 1972) This leaves hunter-gatherers ample time for social, familial, artistic and other playful pursuits. One need only read the accounts of civilized people who have lived among uncivilized people to understand how leisurely their lifestyle was. Caribbean expert Carl Sauer gave the follow description of the lifestyle of the Arawak people, a pre-Columbian Caribbean culture; “The tropical idyll accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true. The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dexterous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances and music.” (quoted in Jensen 2004) Similar descriptions of primitive cultures can be found from Africa to the Americas to the South Pacific.

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” In his paper of the same name he claims that social and sexual inequality, despotism and most diseases have their origins in the advent of agriculture. He further reports that Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert spend only twelve to nineteen hours per week obtaining food. Hadza nomads from Tanzania spend fourteen hours or less every week foraging for food. Diamond quotes a Bushman who, when asked why he hadn’t adopted agriculture like some neighbouring tribes, responded, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Diamond 1987)

Central to their success from pre-historic times to the present is primitive cultures’ dedication to sharing. Hunter-gatherers have a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth than agricultural societies. This is important in that it ensures fairness and that everyone receives equal compensation for their contributions to the band or tribe. In uncivilized cultures “the importance of giving gifts and sharing is reinforced throughout life until it becomes deeply embedded within a person’s personality. Because the failure to share among many hunter-gatherers results in ill feeling because one party fails to obtain food or gifts, but also because the failure to share sends a strong symbolic message to those left out of the division.” (Kelly 1995) It was this concentration on solidarity, cooperation and sharing that led to the communitarian and close-knit tribes that developed out of small Paleolithic bands. This mutual respect in hunter-gatherer tribes explains their strong sense of community and lack of alienation.

Anarcho-primitivist philosopher and re-interpreter of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory”, John Zerzan defines alienation as being “estranged from our own experiences, dislodged from a natural mode of being.” (Zerzan 2002) Nothing such as this is experienced among primitive cultures. Zerzan argues that this is because hunter-gatherers do not have their personal relationships mediated by technology. He believes that the full range of communication and understanding developed among hunter-gatherers through directly experiencing each others’ opinions, personalities and ideas is why tribal peoples rarely have feelings of isolation, hopelessness or exclusion. (Zerzan 2002) It is through an excess of cultural images and technological mediation that we dehumanize each other, neglect each others’ emotional needs and suffer a general breakdown in societies. In adopting civilization we lose the generally friendly communal bonds based on mutual aid that hunter-gatherers have, at least within their own tribe.

Detractors of these viewpoints will claim that these ideas are a type of positivist or reverse racism and are no more than noble savage mythology. This is a fallacy. The historical revision of how we view hunter-gatherers in not groundless ideology, but a worldview backed up by almost 40 years of new ethnographic and archaeological data which throws into question old progressivist ideas. Others will point to violence among some tribal peoples as well as the ritualized violence of the Aztecs and headhunting groups as evidence against pre-civilized peacefulness and equality. This is also easily refutable considering that the Aztecs were clearly civilized. None of the headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers either. The ritualized domestic violence among the Yanomano of South America, as reported (and exaggerated) by Napoleon Chagnon (1968) can be explained by the authoritarian power relations and sexual divisions that developed due to their use of “slash and burn” horticulture. Domestication and control breeds domestication and control.

The vast amount of archaeological data that has been collected and vast amount of ethnographic research conducted on hunter-gatherer cultures seems more and more to support the “romantic” idea that primitive people live with a close bond to nature and each other, that they are not destitute and backward. In fact we should instead be reconsidering the merits of civilization and questioning the civilized way of life. Perhaps the question is not “Why did humans take so long to invent agriculture?”, but “Why did humans invent agriculture at all?”