This audio production was made in collaboration with Audible Anarchist. Chapter 3. The solutions are already here. We have stopped pipelines, airports, highways, and mines, the victories that add up. Whereas governmental and market responses to the ecological crisis have an almost perfect record of failure, there is, in fact, another methodology that has achieved stunning victories and concrete, real gains across the world. After the previous chapter, it should come as no surprise that this methodology is almost completely invisibilized or dismissed as a series of isolated acts of resistance that are interesting anecdotally, but that could never scale up enough to become significant. On the contrary, the network of resistance we are about to dive into has access to greater local knowledge than any government or scientific institution. Rather than being isolated, we, in fact, network and debate strategies globally, confounding the borders, the unequal access to resources, and even the internet firewalls erected to divide us. And several times, we have demonstrated the ability to scale up our actions across an entire continent far more rapidly than capitalist and state bureaucracies are capable of. Rather than using technocratic blueprints and simplified statistics as our starting point, comfortable with the idea of imposing our solutions on populations we deem as unqualified to take part in designing them because they do not hold the right degrees. Our starting point is the desire to protect our territories and our livelihoods, both of which we understand intimately, far better than any expert. And the fact of the matter is, if we win, capitalism becomes impossible and with it, ecocide, on a global scale. While these movements need to improve their global visions and their plans for a safe transition away from ecicidal society, and we are, in fact, in the process of doing so, time and again, we have demonstrated how quickly we can adapt to incorporate new techniques and changing circumstances. The struggles that follow have achieved concrete gains in stopping the infrastructures and the extractivism that is killing the planet, changing the conditions on the ground that make ecocide possible, rather than simply shuffling the problem around through carbon trading, future emissions, promises, or green industries that carry out ecocide in slightly different ways. The main obstacle to the models presented here, scaling up stopping climate change and healing the planet, our government repression, police and paramilitary violence, and the media, NGOs, and academic institutions that either naturalize repression or turn a blind eye. Diak Tomun and Diak Tamambalo, Indonesia Indonesia is home to the third largest tropical forest in the world, an important site of biodiversity and a vital carbon sink for the global climate, but it is now being deforested faster than the Amazon. One of the main drivers of the destruction responsible for 40% is the palm oil industry, which seizes and clears land for destructive plantations. Indigenous communities and small farmers are often violently evicted, and local companies clear the forests with aggressive burning. In 2019 alone, 10 million children were put at risk of air pollution from the fires, which released 360 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in just a month and a half. Palm oil fires in 2015 caused an estimated 100,000 premature deaths. Those responsible for the plantations and processing operations include Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, and U.S. companies, while the major buyers are global giants Unilever, Nestle, and PNG, corporations with deeply colonial histories based in the UK and Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States respectively. The largest importers of Indonesian palm oil by country are India and China, while the logging industry, alongside palm oil, one of the major causes of deforestation, exports primarily to China and Japan. Only about a quarter of Indonesian palm oil is consumed locally as cooking oil. Aside from its extensive use in processed foods and cosmetics, the growth in the palm oil industry is being fueled by its use as a supposedly clean biofuel. I spoke with an anarchist activist and researcher from a mixed diet family from Kalimantan, Borneo. They asked to use a pseudonym for the interview to avoid police attention. You can call me Junkyur Maruta. I was born and raised in Borneo, and since I was little, I had concerns about environmental and agrarian issues where I live. Many indigenous communities and Kalimantan are fighting against palm oil plantations. One of them that received national attention is Dayak Tomun at Le Mans Kinipan, La Mandau, central Kalimantan. They are against the expansion of a palm plantation owned by PT-SML. But now I spend more time with Dayak Tomun Baloa in Kapua's Hulu, West Kalimantan, who have also taken preventive action by blocking the clearing of land for palm oil for several years and successfully defending their forests. Although in this case, they are dealing with a national park denying their access to forest products that they have been using for hundreds of years. These two Dayak tribes have a very high level of dependence on the forest, also because their village is so far from the market. They are shifting cultivators who require a large amount of land. They can meet their basic food needs by producing their own rice. Apart from that, the need for food, housing, and making household utensils is still dependent on ratan and other forest products. They also still set traps to catch deer and pigs, and they catch fish. They grow vegetables mixed with wild food, and one of the tribes still uses traditional medicine and traditional healers. Even so, the tendency is for this knowledge and dependence to decrease as a result of the penetration of capitalism and the state. What makes them safe enough to this day is only that they are an isolated community. I don't know how long it will last. Like I mentioned, the Dayak Tomung are fighting the expansion of an oil palm plantation owned by PT-SML. The company executives are also connected to local officials, like Sujiento Sabran, governor of Central Calamonton, parenthesis, linked to the violent attack on a journalist mentioned in chapter 2, "Close Parenthesis." The local media called him the "ambassador of the oligarchy." He is the nephew of Abdul Rasid and HM Ruslan, both members of the Golongan Karia Party, Golkar, the owners of PT-SML. Rasid, the boss of the Tanjung Lingak group, and a former NPR parliamentary representative for Central Calamonton, together with his younger brother, Ruslan, started an illegal logging business during the New Order era. He was listed as one of the 50 richest Indonesian people, according to Forbes magazine for two consecutive years. Meanwhile, Ruslan's wife, Noria Daya of the Golkar Party, is the current regent of West Kota Warringen, and was appointed by her nephew Sujiento. Several other public officials in Central Calamonton also come from their families. When the forest was depleted, in 1955, Rasid established PT-Sawit-Sumbar Masarana SSMS, creating oil palm plantations on 100,000 hectares in 2016 of state-owned land, and making a profit of 787.1 billion Indonesian rupias in the first quarter of 2018. Illegal logging and persecution by this oligarchic dynasty is recorded in dozens of white papers and many environmental agency documentaries. Sujiento was suspected of being involved in the pillaging of a forest in Tanjung Pudding National Park when he was entrusted with managing his uncle's company that owned a plantation of more than 40,000 hectares and he hired thugs as company security guards. When asked about government support for the companies responsible for deforestation, I have to emphasize that entrepreneurs are the government in Calamonton and, in fact, throughout Indonesia. Despite having the entire power apparatus arrayed against them, dyac communities have put a stop to land clearing in La Mandal. They took direct action by seizing heavy equipment, evicting palm oil company employees, clashing with police and blockading roads. But I think it's only a matter of time before it resumes. Not many struggles in Calamonton have been successful and land grabbing is so common. The Indonesian state is very repressive. Visually, black-block anarchists dominate the images in the national media so the government has new enemies to blame. This is getting easier because they associate anarcho-syndicalism as a new variant of communism. In Calamonton, indigenous communities are at the forefront of the struggle with anarchists slowly setting up campaigns of solidarity. There are also some mass organizations that exhibit ethno-nationalist sentiments. I fear that if alternate discourses are not rolled out, they will turn out to be worse than what they are against. At the end of Juncker Maruta interview, Saapmi, Northern Europe The Saami are an indigenous people within the European subcontinent. Their territory, Saapmi, is largely within the Arctic Circle and occupied by the states of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Many Saami are engaged in fights against industrial wind farms and mines that poison the water and destroy lands needed for traditional reindeer herding. Much of their land has also been taken over for military training exercises and bases, as well as tourism. Blockade camps and protests have stopped iron mining in Gallup, at least for the moment, though "the Swedish government has not yet decided how to proceed." Asla Kornberg, "A salmon fisher, Saami language teacher, indigenous studies scholar and vice president of the Saami Council" spoke with Gabrielle Kuhn about resistance to new fishing regulations passed in 2017 by the Finnish and Norwegian governments for the Deat-New River, which marks the border of the two states for over 200 kilometers and is part of occupied Saapmi. Open quote, "Sami live on both sides of the river" and they've been fishing salmon in it for centuries. The new regulations affect primarily our traditional ways of fishing. The Deat-New River is one of the very few salmon rivers where you can fish with nets. That's what we do. But rod fishing has higher status. If you look at the new regulations, there is only one very specific group of fishers that gains something, the Finnish cabin owners who have bought property along the river with fishing rights attached to it. The new regulations are supposed to protect the salmon, but essentially they are just shifting fishing rights from one group, the Saami, to another, the cabin owners. The consequences go far beyond fishing. Our entire culture is based on the fishing tradition, so when our fishing rights are restricted, our entire culture is under threat. In 2017, local Saami people began establishing a camp on an island in the Deat-New River every summer to enforce their moratorium on the new regulations. They would only allow fishing in accordance with traditional practices, and tourist fishers would have to specifically ask for permission from the Saami of the Deat-New Valley, respecting the traditional areas of local families. Knee Hissombi is a veteran of the Saami's struggle going back to the 1970s after being severely injured during the Alta movement when a bomb went off prematurely during an action against a power plant in 1982. He evaded the authorities, quote, "and subsequently found refuge among First Nations in British Columbia." He has worked as a reindeer herder, sailor, mechanic, photographer, and journalist, end quote. He is also a descendant of one of the people executed by Norway in the Ghoul of Deat-Gag-New rebellion, and he fought to have the skulls of the executed, returned by the state for proper burial. He speaks about some of the dangers of success and how the victories of past movements have created channels of institutionalization that can weaken their struggles today. He says, "It was great that the Alta movement put Saami rights on the political agenda, but it also established a new class of Saami politicians who soon claimed control over how these rights were to be implemented. Saami activism was integrated into the colonial system, and people like us were told to be quiet. In some ways, things had become more complicated because of the Finnmark Act. Before it was passed, we could go to the forest and collect firewood. Now we have to pay for it. It feels like we have given away land with the stroke of a pen, rather than ensuring that it is ours. The Saami Parliament has consultation rights. That is as much as it has achieved. But what are consultation rights? It means the authorities are obliged to meet with you and listen to what you have to say before doing whatever they want to do." In 2018, a long-term land occupation at Notre Dame de Land near Nantes in Northern France successfully stopped the construction of a major airport. When the government began planning and land seizures for the mega project, they gave it the bland bureaucratic name of the "Zad" from "Zone Daminège Monteferre" or "Zone to be managed." The Motley Alliance of Farmers and Anti-Capitalists who refused to abandon the wetlands, forests, and farmland, rebaptized it the "Zone Adefondre" or "Zone to Defend." Blocking the airport and saving the wetlands was a major victory, coming at a time when the European economy was booming, carried in large part by tourism and cross-border business networks that favored a dense infrastructure of short-haul flights. But the struggle was about much more than just an airport, and painful divides grew between participants who had differing visions of what they were fighting for, what kind of world they wanted to live in, and what were acceptable methods for getting there. Going beyond the immediate victory to understand how the struggle fell short is crucial as we go from fighting specific battles to unleashing a wave of global transformation. The accounts in this piece come from three long-time "Zad" residents. I asked them not only about what they achieved, but also in what ways their struggle failed. For reasons of state repression, they preferred to remain anonymous. Beginning of the Zad accounts. When we speak from our own perspective in the struggle against the airport and its world, we speak in the past tense because for us, the struggle on the Zad is over, even if people still live there. There have been many different phases in this struggle because it lasted for such a long time, so it's hard to speak in absolutes. It was a struggle against an airport, against the world that needs such airports, against the state and the state's ability to decide how our lives and the places we live are structured, and it was a struggle for community self-determination. There were many different kinds of people who lived there and who participated in the movement against the airport. Urban squatters, environmentalists, small farmers, and street punks. The Zad occupation and the movement against the airport were not the same thing. There were times there was a divergence between the Zad, which was sometimes more concerned with daily life, solidarity with each other, and material and social collective structures, and the movement, which drew from a larger geographical area, had many different participating organizations and was more liberal. The general assemblies of the movement increasingly became the terrain of little pea politicians from both on and off the zone, while the voices of many other people and groups who lived on the Zad became increasingly pushed to the margins or ignored. The committee that tried to control the assemblies derived their power from the movement, whereas the Zad occupation was messy, diverse, and principled and got in their way. When the first plans for the airport were announced in 1963, locals organized together, some against the airport and others to collectively negotiate imminent domain and avoid getting screwed over for the value of their farms. The project was dropped in 1972 and restarted again in 2000, with the new version of the project came a new version of local resistance. ACIPA, an anti-airport association, started by local farmers and residents. In 2009, a number of local residents facing expropriation formed a group called the "Resisting Residence". They made a call out for squatters to come and occupy the empty houses on the zone that had already been seized. At the end of the 2009 climate camp, which was held on the Zad, 10 people decided to stay and occupy houses, beginning the strategy of occupation as a means to fight the project and joining a small group that had been squatting a house on the zone since 2007. The effectiveness of the Zad was not a magical accident. It was built on a history of environmental, social and agricultural struggles. A culture of resistance permeated the territory, with lots of local people participating. The small farmer and worker movement that was strong in this area in the 70s was one of the things that set the stage for this struggle. When farmers and other workers found class solidarity together during strikes. The small-scale farmer defense organization, S.O.S. Paison, had existed for decades and there had been prior victories of small farmers fighting for access to the land. On a larger scale, there were two well-known environmental and anti-state conflicts in the 70s in Larsak and Plogolf against Amenajmon de territois, which roughly translates to technocratic development planning. At the beginning of the Zad occupation, the people involved were mainly from the French urban squatting movement, influenced by feminist and anti-authoritarian politics. Many people had been radicalized in the CPE social movements of 2006. Opposing a major reform that would increase job insecurity for young workers, they were joined on the Zad a few months later by people from the network of anti-national forest occupations across Europe. The struggle succeeded in preventing the airport from being built. It created political bases for collective ownership and management of the land, particularly agricultural land. It allowed people to live together in an autonomous, self-organized way, creating social and material infrastructure to survive outside of state and monetary systems, instead relying on sharing and solidarity. It allowed many people in France and beyond to see that it's possible to struggle, to resist, to organize, concretely in practice. In this way, it changed the perception of what was possible for the generation that was growing up at the time. There are adults on the Zad who talk about arriving in 2012 during the first round of evictions as preteens with their parents and how that affected them. The Zad also managed to create an incredibly powerful political rapport de force out of basically stubbornness and conviction. In some cases, the Zad was able to make workers involved in the development and state apparatuses, realize what their jobs entailed and encourage them to quit, especially in the case of environmental consultants, but even cops too. The occupation created an internal conflict resolution structure that lasted for several years to manage interpersonal disputes in the absence of police and courts. There was also the creation of a horizontal and diversified healthcare system that ensured people had access to the care they needed, regardless of citizenship, papers or wealth. It also proved to be skilled and effective at dealing with the consequences of police violence on the ground. The Zad also fostered the presence of radical, politicized thought, connecting different ways of engaging in daily life struggle through participation in a diverse political community. It's important to mention the contributions made by those who are normally marginalized in society, such as people living with addictions, street punks, homeless people, and migrants. It was both an asset and a liability for the Zad, that it was a zone open to anybody. All kinds of people from different walks of life came to visit or to live there. Anyone could come, anyone could stay. Furthermore, the Zad became a political model for fighting infrastructural mega projects imposed on the population, and that idea spread across France. More than 20 land occupations that called themselves Zads have existed between 2014 and the present. While the land was squatted until 2018, we often heard the Zad described as an open-air laboratory of alternatives. Hundreds of people organized without the state on a large area, eight square miles, of countryside, and experimented with all kinds of different forms of autonomous organization on a mid-sized scale, confronting theory with reality. A key player in the movement against the airport was Copan, created to advocate for small-scale farming over industrial agriculture. The group was made up of farmers who were fighting to have their own relationship to the land in their farming practices, and not be directed by engineers and machines. There was also the creation of Semtazad, Sew Your Zad, or STZ in 2013, a collective structure for organizing between everyone who wanted to use agricultural land on the Zad, including members of Copan, squatters, and other farmers or people with agricultural projects. Together, STZ decided crop rotations, organized collective money for seeds, tools, and maintenance, and organized regular upkeep and repair of tractors and other collective machines. The movement defended respectful agricultural models on a basis of a shared commons rather than private acquisition. There were deep divisions about the relationship to the land on the Zad. From early on, there were people who wanted to let nature do its thing, who advocated doing everything by hand, and who were angry about pesticide use by local farmers. For example, a neighborhood in the east of the zone closed its paths to motor vehicles using barricades from 2013 to 2018. On these 66 acres, there was no electricity or running water. This neighborhood championed a non-management of land, with the goal of letting part of the occupied land return to a more wild state, with some cabins and small permaculture gardens that blended in with the landscape, including walls made from local clay and living trees. People there often foraged for food and health care. This relationship to the world was central to discussions in this neighborhood, in what they created and imagined together in collective activities and in personal reflections. A deep ideological conflict regarding humans' relationship to nature situated the squatters of this neighborhood in opposition to local farmers in the anti-airport movement and to other groups of squatters. The state clearly took advantage of this dissension, targeting the groups of squatters it saw as most resistant to assimilation. All living structures and gardens in this neighborhood were entirely destroyed in the 2018 evictions. The relationship with the state was conflictual from the start. We were fighting against capitalism in the form of private property, monetary exchange, systems that put monetary value on living things and ecosystems, thus profiting from their destruction, and the logic of environmental compensation. We were fighting against all the companies that collaborated with the state to promote the project, the contractor Vinci, subsidiaries like Uropia, as well as subcontractors like Biotope, who performed environmental impact assessments, quantifying the wetland's ecosystem so its destruction could be offset by digging ponds somewhere else. As the prefect of Vroir Adlantique said in October 2012, "If the republic can't take control of the zone, then we need to be worried about the state of the republic." The state tried to crush us with eviction and military force in October 2012. There was fierce resistance and a lot of media coverage that led to the zod becoming a household name and gaining massive support. Not only did the state not manage to destroy all the houses and take back control of the territory, the attempt made them look both overly repressive and ineffective. It was very embarrassing for them, and they effectively lost control of the zone for several years afterwards. Leading up to the evictions in 2018, they were much more strategic. They wanted to be sure they'd win, no matter what. The state abandoned the airport project because it became too difficult for them, and also to neutralize the zad's political power. With the relative loss and mainstream support once the cause was won, it was much easier for them to proceed with evictions. The state tried to break the mutual support that gave us strength to divide the local population and the wider movement in many ways, continuing with land expropriations to threaten and physically remove local resistance, having the regional population vote in referendum and setting up a series of negotiations with representatives from different groups in the movement. The negotiations took place with representatives from several groups, ACIPA, a local farmers organization, naturalists in struggle, the farmers organization COPPA, a coalition of organizations against the airport and squatters from the zad. These negotiations ended up being one of the most successful parts of the state strategy for sewing divisions. Many counterinsurgency tactics were used to create fractures in the movement and turn the local population against the zad. The media fully participated in this. Our interactions with the police changed a lot over the years. At the beginning of the occupation, the police were very present but pretty ineffective. They harassed us but didn't do much else, and as we generally refused to identify ourselves, there wasn't much they could do. It's hard to issue a summons for X, and it was annoying for them to waste their time in paperwork, knowing we just refused to identify ourselves. Several times, they even suggested we just give a fake name to be able to get rid of us. This made us all a lot more daring and confident. The police presence and other forms of state violence started to really ramp up after a while in demonstrations and especially in the 2012 evictions. The 2018 evictions were incredibly violent, even compared to normal French police repression of urban riots. It is truly incredible that no one was killed at that time, as happened in the eviction of another zad in Testet in 2014. After the 2012 evictions, there were six months of military occupation. All the roads leading into the zad had police roadblocks 24/7 with large spotlights. There was a big confrontation in April 2013 with one cop set on fire, and the police left afterwards. They were not allowed to come onto the zone for the next five years because it was "too dangerous." In our efforts to prove the viability of living free of police in the judicial system, we organized horizontal structures such as the cecular deduce, the cycle of 12, to deal with interpersonal conflicts. During the years without the police on the ground, there was still regular surveillance by helicopter. The vast resources deployed by the state demonstrated their fear of another failed operation. In advance of the 2018 evictions, they enlisted a general to lead preparations, using drones, tanks, and intelligence gathering and listening them, and visible assault weapons. We have since learned that the military police had integrated a Notre Dame de Land exercise into their training programs for both cadets and officers, and that the prefect, who oversaw the 2018 evictions, now teaches classes about this period in famous schools of political science. Furthermore, the French state now sells to other countries the counter-insurgency tactics they trialed on us. We protected ourselves from the police by creating a culture of resistance, using pseudonyms, not revealing our identities when arrested, refusing photos, fingerprints, and DNA testing, communicating about actions with little printed paper invitations that have a time, place, and a risk level so that information was never spoken out loud to foil surveillance via phones and microphones. There were incredibly strong bonds of trust between us, with collective physical resistance in case of arrest and collective defense in trials. The legal team did direct support for arrestees and prisoners, coupled with political work against repression. After the police left in 2013, there was suddenly no more daily confrontation with a common enemy, and we fought more among ourselves. While the legal team continued their work, we lost a collective transmission of those practices of refusal to new arrivals, as daily encounters with police became rare. Up until the movement became more consolidated or centralized around 2016, it was an excellent argument for the effectiveness of using a diversity of tactics. It was impossible for the state to counter a mix of nonviolent, liberal demonstrations, court challenges, university-educated squatters of multiple persuasions, and completely unpredictable wild-card street punks at the same time. The more the movement pushed for unity around an unconsensual strategy and enforced adherence to this top-down unity by dissuading actions deemed to threaten it, the weaker the whole struggle became. Some groups' motivation to negotiate with the state on their own terms required them to flatten and shape the resistance into something that the state could understand. Eventually, even sabotage was violently discouraged because it might hurt the negotiations. Unity was a strategy that failed, as enforcing this idea of unity around a common project involved the exclusion of dissenters, the links that had previously held us together were broken. Up until that point, a wide variety of tactics and strategies had been used. This included everything from festively-costumed mass bike rides through one of the nearby cities, while carrying out direct actions or attacks against businesses and other targets related to airport construction. Marches with agricultural implements that ended in collective land occupation, squatting land for farms and orchards, Otto Aduxion, the mass refusal to pay at the supermarket, mass demonstrations, rating offices for inside information, barricades, catapults, infotours, writing songs for the movement, squatting theatre pieces, eating together and providing food for conferences and protests, ambushing the police, taking care of local people's cows while they were on hunger strike, sharing activities and daily responsibilities that let us create and strengthen relationships within the occupation and the movement. There were acts of sabotage, blockades, media actions, legal appeals, collective decision-making, general assemblies and organizing spread throughout France with local support committees. The mainstream media only repeated the discourse of the state at first, partly because we refused to talk to them. They gave a loudspeaker to all kinds of politicians who saw in us the great danger, an outlaw zone that needed to be flattened to save the republic, a dangerous domestic enemy. Le Géronol Giudimanche wrote an article in 2018 based on secret photos, which were just everyday photos of the Zad, described in fear-mongering ways, for example, a hand dug well, was labeled a weapons cache. We can also cite the former president of the region, Bruno Ritayor, in 2017. "No Tordam de Land has become a symbol, a political symbol, and Emmanuel Macron should be on his guard because what is at stake is nothing more and nothing less than to know if an ultra-violent minority will manage to push back the rule of law. If Macron backs down, he will send to all French people the terrible signal of the collapse of the state." The more well-known the struggle became, the more the media had a role to play in stigmatizing and dividing the participants, trying to sort and label the squatters and create a difference between the good, young, educated, productive, middle-class, white farmers, and the bad, violent, black, block, drug addicts, windowbreakers. At some point, a group of people arrived on the zone who played right into the media game of good versus bad squatters. Some people couldn't help but project a good image and be loved for their adherence to social and class norms. For a long time, we had collectively chosen anonymity and had a distant relationship to the media. We considered that they needed us more than we needed them. Around 2016, when the press group was reinstated, there was an established norm where the journalists would only film hands and feet instead of faces unless people were masked. This prevented us from having an identifiable spokesperson and also made it possible for anyone to talk to the media, even if they were wanted by the police. Some people in the new version of the press group disliked this approach, saying it made them uncomfortable and looked weird and started giving interviews unmasked, making it much harder to get the press to accept masked interviewees and so reducing the diversity of those speaking to the media. As for autonomous media, there was a pirate radio, website, newspaper with position essays and news, communiques and actions to spread ideas and perspectives. While the relationship between the Zad and journalists was mostly antagonistic to begin with, media opinion changed as the Zad's struggle continued and grew. Some journalists shifted their perspective and tried to understand the phenomenon. Prior to the 2018 evictions, the cops said journalists weren't allowed in because, quote, "they", the police, would provide adequate footage, close quote. The journalists came anyways and got shot at with grenades like everybody else, even though they were wearing high-vis jackets that said press. Some of them were treated by Zad medics, a medic team and some journalists later filed a joint formal complaint together to the human rights ombudsman. The horizontality of the general assemblies took several large hits over the years, with a few different groups and personalities monopolizing most of the space. There was a lot written about this elsewhere, notably reflections on the Zad and the movement is dead, long live reform. One group in particular took increasingly more power through increasingly less subtle means. This committee, whose existence as an organized political group with a common strategy was unknown to most of those living on the occupation, seized power in numerous ways. One of the ways they consolidated their position was to court and emphasize links with the leaders of important groups in the movement. In order to be taken seriously by those moderate groups, they needed to prove themselves capable of reinforcing control of the rest of the occupation, who were much less willing to sacrifice radical political goals and tactics in exchange for increased mainstream support. They thus distanced themselves from the existing internal political structures of the Zad, delegitimized them and created others that were both easier to control and more acceptable to other components of the anti-airport movement. They took control of the communication and press groups. When their machinations came to light and they were challenged by others on the Zad, they refused to change their practices. The general assemblies became a tool to channel power and legitimize decisions that had already been made elsewhere, killing possibilities for horizontal organizing in the name of speed and efficiency. In the lead up to and during the 2018 evictions, it was this same group who were outspoken critics of direct action against the police presence and who pushed the idea that negotiations with the state were inevitable. In the end, they got what they wanted, and today are a large part of those who live legally on the land that used to be the Zad. When evictions were announced, several leaders of the off-zone components of the movement, who we had worked with for almost a decade, publicly separated themselves from the eastern part of the zone, a geographic area where a large part of the occupants were radically opposed to any form of negotiation with the state. These movement leaders stated they would only defend a zone up to a certain geographical boundary despite their claims of unity. Others met privately with the Chief of Police and then gave interviews to the media on the eve of evictions, calling for the eviction of certain areas and demonizing squatters. These actions weakened public support, putting the lives of those resisting at risk by legitimizing the state narrative of "by any means necessary." The currents that made effective resistance more difficult were all those who used the struggle to advance their personal or collective interests at the expense of the struggle, the wannabe politicians among us, and the organizations that were anchored in social norms, respect for the state, and desire for a return to the status quo. Some of the other Zads that have been formed here have succeeded in blocking infrastructure projects in other parts of France, and many have put their collective experience to use to overcome the authoritarian dynamics that prevented the occupation at Notre Dame de Lond from expressing its full potential. Protest camps have been an important method for stopping extractive industries throughout Europe. This phenomenon, as differentiated from rural communities defending their territory against extractivism, is likely a result of the countryside being largely depopulated in wealthy countries, with remaining populations already largely integrated in extractive industries. As such, protest camps and similar experiences are a vital way for alienated populations to reconnect with the land and to break with a technocratic view of nature. The anti-roods movement in the UK saved several remaining forests from a massive expansion of motorways, the Thatcher government said in motion in 1989. Saved forests include Oxley's Wood in Greenwich and Billston Glen in Scotland. Even the protest camps that were unsuccessful often doubled the costs of road construction and generated public opposition. Such that in the latter half of the 90s, the government canceled over 400 projected road constructions, though some of these projects were put back on the table a decade later. The movement was also an element in the creation of Reclaim the Streets, an urban event focused on opposing car culture and reclaiming cities for their inhabitants through unpermitted roving dance parties and temporary autonomous zones. The practice, which spread to over a dozen countries on at least four continents, intuitively overcomes the separation between urban and rural, human and environmental issues, and mixes questions of culture, quality of life, survival, ecology and confrontation in a way that still eludes NGO oriented environmental movements. Long-term tree-sets taking place in a context of environmental protest and sabotage against the logging industry saved numerous forests on the west coast of the US in the 1990s and 2000s, and it is a tactic that is being used today in many other places. Over the last 10 years, forest camps and related resistance movements have proliferated across Germany. The threats to the forests have been manifold, all related to industrial capitalist practices, open pit coal mining, gravel mining, line pits, factory expansions, waste disposal and road construction. Responses to the forest camps have been fairly uniform, a combination of state repression, mercenary violence and political co-optation through dialogue and false promises. At least one person has died in the course of forest defense and evictions. Thousands have been injured by militarized police forces and in some cases by corporate mercenaries. And many thousands have been arrested and saddled with drawn-out court cases, debilitating fines and jail sentences. While media and politicians demonize those who physically stop the devastation, preparing the field for harsher repression and even lethal force, they celebrate activists who enter into dialogue and claim to share the same priorities of protecting the earth. We already know where that road leads. In several German states where they are part of the ruling coalition, the Green Party are the managers of the devastation, supporting profitable highway development schemes and the attendant destruction of significant forest land. The forest defense movement has protected the Steinhouser forest from the planned expansion of a factory. And after over a decade of struggle, won the protection of a small part of Humbach Forest against a monstrous Lignite coal mine owned by the Major Energy Corporation RWE and vociferously supported at the highest levels of the German government, marking a strategic priority for state power. Though most of Humbach Forest has been destroyed, the movement to save it has inspired a proliferation of similar struggles and raised public awareness about a previously invisible problem, put pressure on the German government to begin phasing out coal and set the stage for future victories on a greater scale. The resistance also constituted a learning process about the futility of legal protests, as well as a laboratory for effective methods of resistance. The forest defense movement utilizes a diversity of tactics. Included in the blend are the student strikers of Fridays for the future, the wave of mass civil disobedience called Ende-Golenda, which explicitly avoided use of the term "non-violence" to sidestep any self-defeating tactical handicaps. There are long-term tree villages and forest occupations, barricades, urban protests, and numerous actions of sabotage, including the burning of vehicles, blocking of train tracks, and arsons of power lines to shut down a major coal mine and coal-fired power plants. These actions also cause significant economic losses to the companies responsible. A culture of rich internal debate accompanies this heterogeneity, for example, on the question of whether to dialogue with politicians or reject them, how to combine different tactics, and how to communicate with a broader section of society and challenge the distortions spread by the media. The movement also exhibits a close relationship between rural forest camps that are anti-industrial in character and inner-city tree-sets related to the concept of a right to the city, opposition to car culture, and horizontal direct action to improve urban health. This reciprocity across and against the dichotomy of urban and rural will be a key feature as these movements become stronger and more intelligent over the next decade. An in-depth analysis of the strategy and history of the German forest defense movement, published anonymously by the anarchist group Crime Think, points out the importance of local initiatives, which have been passed over because of their small scale in launching major movements. "Local initiatives from those who are directly impacted by the things they are protesting are a crucial element in the success of large movements. Local expertise and continuous work over years and decades can neither be provided by activist groups, nor by NGOs focused on nationwide work." Indeed, the movement has expanded considerably with forest defense movements in over a dozen locations across Germany, networked with forest occupations in Poland, Switzerland, France, and other countries. In one example, anarchist squatters and tenants groups, using tree-sets and blockades, protected the city's green belt from a development company in post-non-Poland. The green belt provides working-class neighbors with allotment gardens and a healthier environment, whereas gentrification threatens the trees, the gardens, and the neighbors. An even more powerful example of networked resistance, spreading in this case across an entire continent, can be found in the blockades, camps, and protests against fossil fuel infrastructure in territories occupied by Canada and the United States. The resistance is centered in indigenous struggles to assert their autonomy and win their land back. These struggles have increased in strength since the OCA standoff in 1990, in which Mohawk warriors from the communities of OCA, Konasatake, Kanawake, and Aquisasne defeated an attempt, backed by the armed force of the Canadian state, to expand a golf course on their lands. Other struggles that built up this resistance and increased solidarity among indigenous peoples include the 1995 attempt to recover a Sundance camp and set what met territory occupied by British Columbia. Defense of traditional hunting and fishing rights by nations such as the Mikmak, Ojibwe, Haudenosaunee, and Yakama, resistance by the six nations of the Grand River to suburban development on unceded territory near the Toronto metropolitan area. The long-running opposition to coal mining at Black Mesa near the Grand Canyon, and resistance by the Yakui and Tohono Odham to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, which runs through their territories. The fossil fuel industry has been a frequent target of resistance. In 2013, people of the El Sepagtog First Nation blockaded highways and seismic equipment and lit a sacred fire to stop an energy company from fracking the region. When police moved to evict the blockades, intense fighting broke out, and six police cars were seized and set on fire. The resistance led the company to suspend their activities for two years, during which time the government of New Brunswick imposed a moratorium on fracking throughout the entire province to avoid more conflict. Wet-so-wetten opposition to the construction of pipelines on their land led to a new level of resistance. A boom in oil and gas exploitation, including the extremely eco-cidal Athabasca tar sands mining, supported by the Canadian government and various multinational corporations, has required an expansion in transport infrastructure, including the coastal gas link CGL pipeline, which is intended to bring gas from the interior to a port on the Pacific coast for shipping to Asian markets. In 2010, Wet-so-wetten hereditary chiefs and communities blocked an earlier pipeline project by setting up encampments on their lands, blocking the pipeline's path. In 2018, they continued this tactic against the CGL, leading to multiple attempts at repression by Canadian police and military. According to Tawinake, a Mitchif Cree Two-Spirit person active in a struggle against colonialism, resistance only spread. "It began when the Metriarchs at Unistoten burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation dead. Like wildfire, it swept through the hearts of youth across the territories. Out of their mouths, with teeth beared, they echoed back. Reconciliation is dead. Reconciliation is dead." Parallel to the camp at Unistoten, the tiny house warriors erected a series of small houses at strategic points in Sekhwepmik territory to block the trans-mountain pipeline, "to assert Sekhwepmik law and jurisdiction and block access to this pipeline." Their actions simultaneously halt the expansion of the dying world of colonialism and fossil fuel capitalism and plant the seeds for a healthier world by "reestablishing village sites and asserting our authority over our unceded territories." Each tiny house will provide housing to Sekhwepmik families, facing a housing crisis due to deliberate colonial impoverishment." And be equipped with "off the grid solar power." Racist settlers have attacked and robbed a tiny house warriors camp and several members of the group face charges for land defense actions. After police raids in February 2020, Indigenous people and supporters shut down Canada with rail and highway blockades across the continent, bringing the Canadian economy to a halt. Through March, there were blockades and heavy protests in territories occupied by the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. Gord Hill has emphasized the Indigenous practice of setting up solidarity blockades across the continent, a major occurrence in 2006, as well as during resistance at OCA in 1990. It is a particularly effective model for resistance, showing how anti-colonial warriors can challenge both the legitimacy and the logistical viability of a settler state that is fundamentally based on extractivism and how struggles that are intensely local and frequently dismissed by the mainstream as small backwards or irrelevant can in fact very quickly scale up and take on continental dimensions. Similarly, we have the case of the airport blockades that shut down hundreds of airports large and small across the US and immediately forced the government to rescind the Trump administration's racist Muslim ban. This tactic shows how effective decentralized networks can be, bringing the country to a halt and threatening an infrastructure that is crucial to the fossil fuel economy and to the inherently racist border regime that punishes people who are fleeing the effects of US economic and military actions. While we are still waiting for the tactic of airport blockades, to make a reappearance, the resistance of the Wet's Wetten, as well as that of the Lakota and Dakota at Standing Rock, has led to a proliferation of similar struggles targeting the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, the Trans Mountain Pipeline going from Alberta to British Columbia, Enbridge Line 3, running from Alberta to Wisconsin, and the Mountain Valley Pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia. Meanwhile, other pipeline projects were canceled due to investor fears of how resistance could affect profitability. There are fewer pipelines in the world today, thanks to these movements. Aside from blocking destructive projects and policies, direct action can also achieve the protections that government regulations promise and fail to provide. The UK's marine sanctuaries are an infamously bad joke, providing almost none of the promised protections to marine life. In response, Greenpeace took out a boat and dumped several large boulders into the sanctuary, ensuring that any dragnet fishing trawlers that came through would wreck their own equipment. They effectively used the threat of property destruction to prevent the ecocidal stripping of the seafloor. This practice is significantly more widespread than most people know. Visiting friends on an island on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia were much of the older generation participated in the partisan resistance against the Nazis. I chanced upon the interesting story of how a neighbor dumped an old junker, engine removed, into the middle of the small bay where they lived, sabotaging any larger fishing trawler that came in to drag the waters. It is unknown how many bays are similarly protected throughout the Mediterranean and its adjoining seas. Neighbors acting autonomously and sometimes illegally rarely announce their actions to the media or to experts. The bottom line is that nature sanctuaries declared by governments are illusory. The only thing that makes a place safe from the institution's public and private that would despoil it is a certain correlation of force that favors local people. Food sovereignty and ecological healing finding our place in a damaged ecology. Industrial agriculture has failed. The so-called "green revolution" pushed by institutions like the World Bank and agrochemical corporations has not succeeded in ending hunger, which is largely a product of colonial and neo-colonial systems for food production and distribution. It has succeeded at its real objective, transferring a huge quantity of wealth to private companies and investors, while making rural areas more legible to state intervention. It has constituted a major land grab with 1% of farms controlling 70% of farmland worldwide. Its disrespectful practices are destroying the soil with one-third of the soil of the entire planet acutely degraded, and it is driving global warming. Depending on heavy machinery, poisonous chemicals, and gratuitous global supply chains, industrial agriculture is directly responsible for 14% of greenhouse gas emissions and is also a major driver of deforestation responsible for another 18%. But attempts to heal and recover the land, to gain local control over food, are serving as a springboard for some of the most exciting resistance and the most intelligent alternatives in this terrain. One such experience has had a direct impact on this book. The neighborhood where I currently live is surrounded on three sides of agricultural lands that has been left fallow for years. In fact, the fields are a great example of the uselessness of state environmental regulations. To carry out the more profitable industrial animal farming, in which animals are imprisoned in wretched warehouses for their entire lives and fed on a diet of grains that makes up a large part of overall agricultural production, the complete opposite of traditional pastoralism. The state requires farmers to have a certain amount of land, supposedly to offset the impact of the animals. Without planting anything, the tractors come through every year or two and plow the fields, wasting fuel, killing the soil, and preventing the fields from becoming a carbon sink and a habitat for grassland species. All to fulfill a bureaucratic environmental regulation. Several neighbors, myself included, squat part of these fields in order to garden. In my garden, I combine fruit and nut trees with some food crops and medicinal herbs, use rainwater collection and don't use any chemicals or motorized tilling. It's a small garden, and though I don't rely on it for the majority of my diet, it does provide me with healthy food, a way to learn from the earth, to listen to what's happening, and to learn methods for gardening in a desertifying climate, which will be a major issue here over the next decades and one that mainstream producers are completely unprepared to deal with. I have been able to see in just six years how the soil health has improved dramatically, increasing water and carbon retention and providing a home for so many other species. And I share the medicinal herbs I grow in a network that brings together anarchist infrastructure projects throughout Catalonia, fomenting everything from farms to print shops, pirate radios and free schools, while fostering a gift economy among them. Beyond the neighborhood, there are extensive fields of olive trees, most of which have been abandoned by their owners. Many of these orchards are now taken care of from pruning to harvest by neighbors who organize themselves and win access to healthy, high-quality olive oil that the capitalist system would normally reserve for wealthy consumers. All of this is only possible because of our radical disrespect for property laws. In some cases, people ask for permission. A few of the absentee owners are simply small holders who are too old to do the harvests themselves. But in the last analysis, no one would respect the property rights of an owner who insisted on letting the bounty go to waste. Te yidos polos bajia brazil. To help out with this book, anarchist comrades in Brazil spoke with Erestu Felicio of the Articula San tépe, the communication section of the Te yidos polos network. They write, Te yidos polos is an articulation of many based nuclei territories spread throughout bajia and other states. Most of the territories were taken back, which means they do not have a long history of organized occupation. In the state of baja, most of them have been occupied in the last 30 years. Those with a historical occupation, such as some kilumbus and indigenous territories, have gone through an organization process and sometimes self-demarcation in the last few decades. Kilumbus are maroon communities of escaped Africans and other refugees from colonization. Self-demarcation is an indigenous community's declaration of its own territories. Currently, most of these territories live from what they grow. They are, therefore, producers and generally agro-ecological or in transition to agro-ecology. The territories are located in different biomes, such as the Atlantic forest, where Te yidos polos originated. The ka tinga, a dry forest eco-region in the northeast, and the hystringas, sandpit or coastal broadly forests on sandy soil, and mangroves. There are some traditional territories in which life is still associated with collecting, fishing, and small farming, yet there are others that even have a fine chocolate industry. We pursue food sovereignty whenever possible, as well as other economies. Our main conflicts are with mega enterprises. On the coast, these are linked to shrimp farming and tourism, especially hotels. Inland, it ranges from agro-business estates to mining companies. In the urban territories, peripheries, and homeless settlements, the major conflict is with the state and its police, whose records show that 97% of those killed by the police in Bahia, just in 2020, were black people. That is, there is a black genocide underway in our lands. The nature of the attacks on the territories varies from region to region. In the west, we have seen agro-business dry up entire rivers for their production for the foreign market. Now we are seeing this same operation taking place in Chapata di Amantina, where landowners obtain water grants to the point of making the water supply of many peoples unfeasible. There is also the harassment and persecution perpetrated by local politicians. Violence is frequently linked to the power of large landed estates or to the destructive exploitation of the land, mining, and the use of river water for large-scale irrigation. Mining companies usually have foreign capital, while agro-business estates still belong to national capitalists, but they have been counting more and more on external financial support. Resistance has been established according to the principles of food sovereignty and the massification of the struggle. Our elders have been teaching us that the land is the foundation, the principle. It's where the great struggle is born. And we saw that many people could not resist harassment by corporations as they turned up distributing food parcels, jobs, and some other charities in order to dismantle the movements. How do we face this situation? For us, it's through the land by creating food sovereignty, real abundance, a small paradise of abundance. As a result, coercion would have much less impact. The other matter is the making of alliances. Nobody can win alone because of the immense power of capital. Thus, a quilombo under attack needs support from indigenous people or from MST settlements, the Landless Workers Movement, in the region. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, for example, there was a lot of hunger in the suburbs and within the prison system. And our comrades from the Politico reja useramort reactor get killed. Organization campaigned to get food and hygiene products for prisoners who were banned from receiving visits from family members and, therefore, lost access to much of the food they received. Then an MST brigade connected to Taya Dos Polos went to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, and sent a ton and a half of organic food so they could reach the prisoners' relatives and the prisoners themselves. So we learned that it is essential to establish the Black, Indigenous, and Popular Alliance in practice. Without it, it is impossible to resist, and mainly that the resistance comes from the land that we are reclaiming. We usually say that we are heirs to a tradition of long-standing struggle in the history of Brazil. If we look closely, the struggle in Cuilomo Dos Palmatis lasted longer than the Soviet Union's socialist experience. Palmatis faced the main economic powers of its time, Portugal and Holland. It managed to establish itself as a federation of peoples under the leadership of the Bontu peoples, but which had Indigenous peoples and even Jews and Muslims persecuted by the Inquisition among them. This is just one example. We could talk about Cabanajam, Balayada, and the city of Kanugos, located in the Interland of Bahia, which faced the Brazilian army with important victories against the newborn Republic of Brazil. We identify a rebellious tradition of peoples and communities, not individuals, who joined forces in a fight against the La Defundium, our longest running enemy in these lands. So the Brazilian rebellions were built by an alliance of entire communities and peoples, who rose up against larger states and even the power of the state. We see this throughout colonization through the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. It was in the 20th century that political theories started giving more focus to the organization of individuals through political organizations and parties, abandoning the perspective that it was fundamental to territorialize the struggle through the adherence of communities to the rebel march. We are not doing anything new, just learning from our elders and those older than our elders, the enchanted ones, and history. Taking back the land is the main task at the beginning of the rebel journey. The whole political theory of the Brazilian peasantry is all about breaking the fence and getting inside. We are wondering what to do beyond the fence, how to build the territory. When we return to a land degraded by cattle raising or by the exhaustion of the soil by crops grown without considering the health of the land, it is necessary to begin a process of regeneration. But we know that the people will only say on that land if we have food, so the work starts first. Before we even break through the fence to retake the land, we plant in other areas to have enough food for three to six months for the people who will retake the land. Accumulating food is essential to the process of taking back the land. Without food, there is a risk of taking back a degraded land and people going hungry and giving up on the dream of the land quickly. But if we have food for these first moments and break the fence, then we need to make the first garden to produce an amount sufficient for our existence. Beans, sweet potatoes and corn, three months, cassava, six months, and banana, one year, are species that we always plant because of their ability to generate a healthy and rich diet. While we are making this garden, we need to work hard to raise our agroforestry. For this we have a seedling nursery with native and fruit trees, asai, kupua, soup, cocoa, etc. Growing the forest is the beginning of the land regeneration process. We developed a four-hecter project that is our best-reported experience to be able to share with our companions in land reclamation. All of this respecting the principles of agroecology that we learned from the native peoples and intellectuals like Anna primavesi. Tejia appeared in 2012, the year of the end of the world in the Mayan calendar, the year of the Zapatista Silent March, in the Tejia Vista settlement, municipality of Arataca, southern Bahia, on the first agroecology day in Bahia in articulation with native nations, like Patashio, Patashio ha ha ha, Tupinumba, Krillongos and peasant movements like the MST. There a struggle was launched for the spread of agroecology and the spread of Creole seeds, local traditional varieties free of intellectual property regimes in the territories. It started as it should with the seeds. It was from the spread of Creole seeds of corn and beans that the network was woven as an articulation in contrast to a centralized formed organization. We have no role in directing the territories. On the contrary, we want to learn from the differences in direction, work and struggle in each territory. We are about to build bridges between different territories and to build the necessary alliance to face racism, capitalism and patriarchy. Although there is no board of directors, there is a council of older people willing to guide struggles, but the decision is made by each base group. We are spread among these basic nuclei, territories, peoples and organizations that are territorialized, and the links in the web, supporters, diffuse urban groups, political or research collectives. So the links need to support the struggle of the nuclei, but only these can lead the fight. Only the nuclei can guide the direction of Teia de Spogos, because we assume that only those who hold a community, only those who broke the fence, occupied the land, can explain how they do it. Those who have not yet territorialized and organized their community cannot lead a fight for land and territory. On our last journey in 2019, in the heart of the Payaya people's lands in Utingla in Chapada di Amantina in Bahia, a comrade from Radio Zapatista was with us to discuss the life and struggle of the indigenous Zapatistas from Chiapas. There is no doubt that there is a deep inspiration in the struggles of native peoples in search of autonomy, such as this Mexican comrade, or even the Colombian guards or the Mapuche people in Chile. They are stories and struggles that feed back into what we do. Almost all of these struggles we mentioned are fundamental because they combined the reclaiming of the land with the awareness that it was necessary to help nature to recover. They have a deep love for humanity, but also for Madre Teira, as they say. Now, we also hear that there is an echo of these struggles in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan, and we are very happy. We hope one day to get to know them deeply. For us, the path is the defense of territories and peoples, above all recovering every inch of land that belongs to the native peoples. There is a debt to be remedied on this issue. It is no longer possible to tolerate entire indigenous nations being deterritorialized. There is a climate threat now, and we all know that indigenous peoples are the greatest guardians of the forests. There is an urgent need to return the land to the native brothers and sisters. The left needs to rethink with some urgency the materialist and individualist horizon that they got themselves into. It is essential to understand that a true alliance with black and indigenous peoples also involves recognizing their world views. Defending a river is not just preserving a natural resource or a good deed for the environment. For the Nargol people who came from the region of Nigeria, the river is the representation of Oshum, a deity. When we desecrate the river as a divinity and make it a natural resource, we convert it into merchandise that can be bought, sold, destroyed. In the same way, indigenous peoples understand that their enchanted people, spirits, and guides who care for and sustain the world live in the forest. They do not only see minerals, wood, and animals there. These world views are fundamental to safeguard the world and collapse today, so without abandoning stupid materialism, it is very difficult to move forward in a true alliance. On the other hand, it is necessary to reject this individualism that no longer speaks to peoples and communities. It is necessary to go beyond the congregation of individuals under ideological banners. We want to know if X people, or neighborhood Y, can get together to discuss reclaiming land, planting trees, building organized territories where we take care of each other. And that means building another time for politics, a time that is aware that it will take 50 years for a baobah to give it seeds for the next generation to be able to plant. Our problems in sorrows are urgent, but the haste with which we are acting in politics has simply not helped us to build up politically and overcome our enemies. It is necessary to cultivate a good individuality so that we have more solid collectives, and that good individuality is the self-care, the self-preservation of your people. It is to cultivate values that connect you to your people, to your ancestry, to your spirituality in the territory you live in, or that was taken from your people generations ago. Finally, the oppressed peoples of the world recognize each other in the first gesture of struggle and are willing to make alliances. We just have to examine our differences and work on what brings us together. There are two words of wisdom that we echo at the end of our writings, and that we wanted to share here. What unites us is greater than what separates us, peace among us, war on tyrants. Guarani Brazil. Another inspiring struggle taking place in Brazil has brought together Guarani communities recovering their lands and a rural anarchist collective called Cultive Resistencia. Comrades, helping out with this book, passed my questions on to Catarina, Nimbo Purua, and Aldeja Taperema in the Pia Segueira indigenous land, Peruibe Sao Paulo. She writes, "The lands where I always lived were in the Atlantic forest, Mata Blantica. I was born close to the hills. There was a very beautiful waterfall, a very beautiful forest, and if we planted there, it would give a lot. But today I am on the coast, on the beach, where the land was also very good until the mining company and other forces came here and finished off the forest. But we are still trying to plant again. For me the forest is very precious, even more so being the Atlantic forest. Our lands were devastated by the mining company, but today we are very happy here because we returned to the land that once belonged to our ancestors. So for us it is very important because here is the spiritual strength, the spirituality of the elders, the ancestors, they are here. And that is why for me this land is very valuable. And also because it is the Atlantic forest, there are many birds that stay here. There are several different fish, there are turtles around here in the sea. So here for me it is very special. This land here for me is very, very special. The resistance of the Tupi Guarani people goes back to 1500, five centuries ago. Our people have been resisting to preserve and maintain the culture, our customs, songs, dance, and especially our mother tongue. The advancement of technology is leaving many young people distant from their culture, and today we are focused on strengthening the culture and the mother language. We do classes in Tupi Guarani and gather around the campfire with Charamoy Charadari to strengthen our knowledge through lived and everyday stories. We build pow a pique houses, we harvest herbs to make medicinal tea, translators note Charamoy and Charadari masculine and feminine are the wise elders who concern themselves with spirituality and healing among the Guarani's pow a pique is a bamboo and cob construction technique in translators note. There are several examples of struggle and inspiration, such as the struggle of our elders to retake old lands and the struggle for their demarcation as indigenous territory to have autonomy within the community itself, such as differentiated education and traditional health care. Our land was very devastated by the mining company, the land was very, very harmed, but even so today we are taking care of it so that we can plant what we need for our daily food, like sweet potatoes, cassava, and fruit trees. We are taking care of the land, and I imagine our mother earth is very happy at the moment because we are taking care of it, we are taking care of our children's future. It is very difficult to recover our land today due to government laws. When we go to recover a piece of land, we unite Charamoy, Charadari children and women, and we set up camp in that place and fight against the government that insists on not demarcating our lands. To heal the degraded areas, we do a study on the place, like what kind of animals live in that environment, and we plant trees that the animals feed on. We have gotten support from Cultivé Rezistencia, our relationship with Cultivé Rezistencia started a long time ago. We started a friendship and work relationship in the Prasagwera village. This is a partnership that has been generating great efforts to strengthen the Tupiqui Guarani culture, and this relationship was and is fundamental for our community to resume practices and customs that were only in the memory of the elders. With the work developed, our children began to feel proud and appreciate their own culture. Since then, this relationship has been a source of great pride for our community. Plon Pueblo a Pueblo, Venezuela. Quote, "If food is a human right, our goal is abundance and diversity. If food is a commodity, it is claimed by the logic of scarcity." End quote. Ana Felician works in a research institute in Venezuela and collaborates with the Latin American Working Group, developing the concept of political agroecology. Quote, "One theme we want to center is how the nucleus of agroecological thought in Latin America is not the academy, but all the histories and the construction of indigenous, afro, and peasant peoples." End quote. "She has participated in various agroecological initiatives in urban and rural spaces, including La Universidad Indifena del Tauca, the indigenous University of Tauca, and El Plon Pueblo a Pueblo, planned people to people." One of the plan's triumphant moments was when they were able to secure funding from the government program to provide meals in schools in rural zones and some cities, and were able to dramatically improve the quality and abundance of the meals for children. Quote, "With the budget that had been spent on feeding 400 children, a diet of just four crops," Ana explains, "the plan managed to feed 8,000 to 9,000 children, a diet of 27 different crops." So basically, we were showing how obscene the conventional system of production was, and so they canceled the program, close quote. These initiatives are developing in a situation of extreme economic and political violence between the financial blockade orchestrated by the US and its allies, and paramilitary attacks that correspond with elite economic interests. Begin a long citation by Ana Felician. Plan Pueblo a Pueblo is the articulation of a plan between the countryside and the city. It is not an organization. We are experiencing in which food has become a central topic of our lives. That's to say, because of inflation and the high prices of food, people have to plan and struggle every day to get what they are going to eat. And in this situation, we were able to build this proposal to connect rural communities in the city in order to carry out the planning of production and consumption. And from there, to think of how to go about decolonizing our forms of consumption. In the city, our consumption is very much governed by a few principal crops, very globalized, with imported seeds, mostly from the United States, with lots of agrochemicals. And that agricultural models have to be cultivated by peasant families in the places with the better resources for production, most water, better lands, etc. And in the midst of the crisis, we managed to deploy a proposal for the agroecological transition toward food sovereignty, which gets talked about a lot, but which is very difficult to build in a particular terrain with people. Meanwhile, some of us were also a part of the process that we called the popular constituent debate for the seeds law from 2012 to 2015, something we did on a national scale to try to create a law that would recognize all of this peasant knowledge, the importance of our diversity, custody of the land and the real ways of practicing an agroecological agriculture. Because despite all the resources that have been spent throughout agricultural modernization, in the end, most agriculture is cared for by people of peasant origins, indigenous origins, African origin, and these are the most widely grown and most available crops. The hunger crisis in Venezuela, which is publicized so widely in the media, is that there aren't any more imported foods, but every time we're in the countryside, people are saying, there are too many root crops, but we don't know how to eat them. There, the problem is abundance, so it's really schizophrenic that you have the image of a Venezuela in famine, and then a Venezuela where food is being wasted because it's not food, because it's the food of black people, food for Indians. Pueblo, a pueblo arose in 2015, which was a very hard year because our diets are very monopolized and homogenized, basically we get fed on very few crops, above all processed food. The most consumed food is processed corn flour, and this has repercussions throughout the entire agricultural system. It's controlled by a single company, in Presas Polar, only one type of flour is produced from processed white corn, and nearly 80% of arable lands are planted with corn and rice. And this corn, basically 90% of it is seeds that are hybrid varieties oriented towards industrial agriculture, so we have an enormous diversity that is completely invisible, and all the resources for production and the structure of the agro-industrial system is centered on these few hybrids, which aside from being imported, give lower yields under our field conditions to name just a few of their characteristics. So the average yield of the corn is 3,500 to 5,000 kilos per hectare, which is very low. In the United States, it's two or three times as high, but the yield of cassava or other root crops, yams, sweet potatoes, et cetera, can reach 20,000 kilos per hectare. But the majority of the land is planted using imported corn seeds, which monopolizes agricultural policy, resources, and so on. 90% of the people live in the city as the result of a migratory process that we can trace throughout history of going to the city because I can achieve a higher standard of living in the middle of what was called the oil boom. Some Campagneros, who came from the historic struggles for the land in the 70s and 80s in the student movement, who were no longer in the state institutions because of differences of vision, took on the construction of Plan Pueblo or Pueblo on the premise that food was a right and not a commodity. So they went to Karachi. This is a city in the Venezuelan Andes, which is the region with the highest crop production in the country. And they went to rebuild what they call the struggle of Argymiro Gabardón, who was one of the leaders of the Guerilla in Venezuela and who carried out an interesting labor for peasant organization, for self-organization. They began to recognize different axes of production, different routes, because in the Andes, in the middle of the mountains, production is mostly done at the family scale. So what you have is a very intense production, which is oriented toward supplying national markets, but on the basis of family production, with a long history of cooperative organizations. In other words, all those highways were built by the people. There's a long history of work exchanges, Cajapas, Mano Huertas, in brackets, respectively, a form of collective work in which a group carries out a task one person alone could not, and a form of reciprocity in which one day you and I work in your garden or on your construction or other project, and the next day we work in mine, in bracket. Family relationships, which are like Medieneres, a juridical and architectural situation in which multiple houses or families share an overall structure that is subdivided by internal walls between the different units, but which are really relations of sharing and complementarity among families, which are also bisected by other power relations. For example, the majority of women are day laborers, and the men are the ones who own the land because they are the ones who can get investments. So considering this to be a strategic location, because also in terms of geography, it's quite strategic, an analysis was carried out with these cultivators to create plan pueblo a pueblo. The goal was to generate a response from below to this assault, this idea that food was a commodity, and if we didn't behave, we couldn't have any. Ours was a response that said food is not a commodity, it is a right, and it must be in our hands in the fields and in the city. The essence of the plan is what we call the latter method for double participation. People organize themselves in the fields to produce and to establish a calculation for prices on the basis of costs and the needs of people in the city. And in the city, people identify their dietary needs. There has to be a connection between every wrong on the latter, between the countryside and the city, so that people in the countryside can plan on the basis of a diagnostic of the needs of the city. These needs are enunciated by their consumption patterns. Another objective is to fit what is produced with what is consumed. We have a diversity there that does not enter into the distribution circuits, but they produce so much and people don't need it because they don't recognize it, or because they are very domesticated by this culture of supermarkets. The plan has managed to distribute more than 2 million kilos of crops, I've already lost count. We have established different points for communal distribution, where people plan out their orders on the basis of the community's needs. The neighbors of Karachi pick up the produce that has been ordered, and they do do distribution days in the urban zones, and they pay the farmers the same week. We organized the cultivation of 27 different crops, many of them traditional, some more conventional. The greens, the leafy crops, are grown primarily by women. An interesting thing about the plan was that these territories have a long history of cooperativism, but who participates in the cooperatives? Above all, men with a medium or high production, but then you had all these people who were much farther from these official productive axes with poorer roads and smaller fields. The plan gathered together the very smallest, quote, "You just have a little cilantro in your front garden? We'll take it. Anything you have, we'll take it," end quote. This generated a very interesting dynamic. You had women who began to fight for the land, to ask their husbands for more land. Their daughters began to get involved. If you had a family that wouldn't pay the student housing for the daughters in the city, once the mother and the daughters were working the land and had their own money, all of a sudden it was a priority for the daughters to go to the university, and they could pay. All this was possible because the productive geography was changed. Our distribution truck passed through the most isolated places. All this went into crisis once there was no more fuel for driving our routes. 2020, above all, was a very hard year. The shortage of fuel affected how we calculated our prices and everything. But if food is a right, then everything you need to produce the food is also a right. This also means seeds. If a good seed is one that maximizes production, even if it costs $400 a pound, that's not sustainable when the minimum wage is $1 a month. That's 400 minimum wages. So our task now is to intervene in all the elements of the forms of production and move toward an agro ecological model. In many territories, the rains are changing. We're already facing climate chaos. The agro industrial system is in crisis. They don't have gasoline to fumigate the cornfields, which is usually done by airplane. So there has been this great wager on decentralization. People are beginning to sow the fields, reconnecting with the tradition that synthesizes what has survived from the African, the indigenous, and the peasant traditions. The difference between the earlier crisis and 2020 is that now people realize there is the possibility to supply themselves with their own efforts. Everyone is cultivating. And the other half are processing and exploring a complimentary transformation of their consumption. On the old seeds that people have been saving have reappeared. Now there are nuclei for the production of seeds all across the country, fairs in the villages for sharing seeds, varieties, experiences, opposed to the logic of dependence. The only possibility to eat with dignity is by forming a part of this network that already exists. End of Anna Felician's words. Food sovereignty is an important practice for ending white supremacy in the global north as well as the global south. Leah Pineman, who participates in a soulfire farm outside Albany, New York, and is the author of Farming While Black identifies dispossession of black farmers and food apartheid, a racially distributed lack of access to healthy foods that results in a huge number of deaths due to diabetes, kidney failure, and heart disease as ongoing features of systemic racism. Whereas quote, farming is inherently about the future, close quote, because of the planning, the long term perspective involved in planting a tree that won't bear fruit for several years. Many young black people have a sense that there is no future, because quote, incarceration and untimely death are so ubiquitous, close quote. Dressing these overlapping concerns, soulfire farm trains farmers of color practices silvo pasture, grazing birds and sheep among fruit trees as a way to maximize carbon sequestration, and donates lots of fresh food to neighborhoods in Albany that are victims of food apartheid. Pineman's words, quote, we use Afro indigenous and regenerative practices, fancy words that essentially mean we're trying to farm using the best advice of our ancestors, and we're trying to farm in a way that actually makes the environment better and not worse, close quote. Inside and outside of the cities indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the struggle for food sovereignty or food autonomy. In rural areas of North America, this has often centered on struggles for traditional hunting and fishing practices. Opposition to native hunting and fishing often comes from commercial fishers under the pressure of producing for the capitalist market, a practice that has destroyed marine ecosystems around the world, and from reactionary whites threatened by the implication that they live on stolen land. Native hunting and fishing practices are very much about caring for the ecosystem as an integral part of the territory, rather than as an outside agent. Angela James, a hunter from the big stone Cree nation, explains how, quote, the moose, the bear, the elk, the muskrat, the fish, all these animals, these beings, there are relatives, you've got to honor that protocol, honor that connection, that we are part of something bigger than all of us. We aren't almighty human beings at the top of the food chain because we're not, close quote. Pastoralism from Barcelona to the Pyrenees Catalunya. Edu Balsell's practices traditional pastoralism in Catalunya, a participant in the autonomous movements, he began to get involved with the world of activist agriculture in 2004, and has since become a principal reference for the use of goats and sheep in forest maintenance and the prevention of catastrophic wildfires. He also participates in the transhumans, a semi-nomadic practice going back to the beginnings of pastoralism, in which the shepherds stay with their flock in the lowlands during the winter, and then migrate to mountain pastures during the summer, allowing for a healthy regeneration of vegetation in both places. The Pyrenees and their various lowlands are one of the few places in the global north where the transhumans is still practiced. The shepherds who carry it out have long fought for the commoning of land, whereas its opponents are generally those who profit off the enclosure of lands and the industrialization of food production, or those who in terms of public order oppose public spaces being used jointly by humans and other animals. Edu currently has a small flock of 150 sheep, a sheep dog to guide the flock and a mastiff to protect it, all of traditional Pyrenees breeds. We met on the small terrain where Edu has his cabin and the open staple where the flock spend the night when they're not out in the field. It is on the slopes of Saint Ramon, a small mountain on the outskirts of Saint-Boy de Yobregat, itself a small city within the Barcelona metropolitan area. He has been there for ten years. Edu's income derives from selling lamb and selling manure. The latter is actually illegal without a permit that is too expensive for small producers, though he defiantly told me to mention his transgression in the interview. Another source of income is a government fund to maintain the forests and reduce fire hazards, technically a subsidy, though the government would have to pay for the service either way, and forest maintenance with machines cost 50% more. Unfortunately, Edu cannot sell the wool from his sheep because the price for wool that is off white or spotted does not even cover the cost of bringing it to market. Edu began by explaining to me the importance of the traditional animal breeds in the kind of pastoralism he practices. The first two years we were here with goats. Of course, every animal has adapted to a certain behavior for its survival. Cows eat as though their tongue were a scythe. Goats raise their heads and look for the tender shoots on the trees. Sheep tend to eat the herbs and grasses. Horses have teeth on top and on bottom and they can rip out the vegetation that a sheep or cow couldn't, so every animal has adapted. The goat is par excellence, the animal best suited to forest pastures. Without any doubt, it is a self-sufficient animal that can get 100% of its diet from the forest. The problem is, when we came here to Saint-Boy, even though the land here is forested, Mediterranean forest, we realized that "lacabra tera palmonte", an adage that every being will follow its own nature, but that literally means the goat heads for the hills. The goat is a very selective animal, it walks a lot, and here the space is limited. This isn't a mountain of 600 hectares, the forest we take care of is only 60 hectares, and that comes with a lot of people, trails. It is a space that is very fragmented by suburbs, electrical towers, people doing outdoor activities, so here the goats were not working out as well as they could have. And the space that was supposed to manage is a margin of 25 meters around the outlying residential areas. The city pays us to protect the suburbs from the forest, but as far as I'm concerned, we're protecting the forest from the suburbs, but we have to keep the space clean with a holly oak here, a bush there, very few grasses. But goats are very aggressive in these spaces, they would go after the trees, and they wouldn't touch the grasses. So they were always in the forest, which is fine, but were paid to carry out a very technical labor to keep the brush down and prevent fires. The effect of the goats on the forest was huge. Already after one year, people were telling us where the goats had passed, now there was more space, trails were opening up, there was wild asparagus, mushrooms. Of course, it also depends on not saturating a space with too many animals. If we don't take care of the forests, we might lose it all here in Catalonia. There have even been forest fires in the Pyrenees in the winter, that's unheard of. Between heat waves and fires, we might not be able to practice pastoralism or agriculture anymore. But if we support grazing in the forests, that would open them up and allow more light to come in, better water retention. We could also use the energy resources of the forests like biomass, with local communities collecting fuels, not industrially, which would destroy the forests, but done with practices that emphasize balance and sustainability. You have to make sure the trees and bushes can grow, the birds can nest, the boars can forage. There are small activities that would make a huge difference, but in the current system, it is not economically feasible. So, we were with goats for two years and we had to change. If the type of pasture that you have is more suited to sheep than goats, then you change. With all the heartbreak in the world because they're your animals and they're used to you, but in the end, you have to make a living. They live off of you and you live off of them. It's a balance. The forests are as bad as they are because of a lack of interaction and maintenance by humans, because we think we're a very rich country, and so we don't value the energy and the potential that the forests have. On the other hand, if Reptsoul, a major energy company, came and said, "These pines are worth 100 euros," there wouldn't be any pines left in all Catalina. It always goes from one extreme to the other. In the 60s, they got rid of the goats, and then around 2000, they said, "Well, maybe we can integrate goats in forest maintenance." But they never speak with shepherds to find out what our proposals are. We tell them, but nobody listens. And then somebody comes from the government or the NGOs, all of them living off of public money, and they bring their proposals. It's like, "You just don't get it." We don't have any remedy to the global market we live in, so we have had to live with getting subsidized and to accept that they pay us. And we're obliged to do certain things to get that money. I did calculations earlier, and if I just made two euros more off-lam, per kilo, I wouldn't have to receive subsidies. But it's the global market that regulates prices. Sure, there's a market here. Black boy has 80,000 inhabitants, but the market is organized in such a way that meat comes all the way here from Mexico or Chile. And then all the lamb from here gets loaded up on boats in Taraguna and shipped to Syria, because they eat a lot of lamb in Muslim countries. And there's a war over there, so they can't produce it themselves. They ship it from here. So what? We're supposed to be thankful that there's a war in Syria so that lamb producers here can make a living? Well, what a shitty system then, and that's how it is. If together, in an organized way, there were more unity in our sector, if we were capable of making ourselves known, proposing and offering and valuing our function in this world in terms of the environment, culture, maintaining traditional breeds and practices, encouraging biodiversity so that we could actually make a living from what we do. Then we could give a good kick in the ass to the Department of Agriculture, the European Commission, the Spanish Ministry, and then send them on their way, but we have been unable. It's very easy for governments to talk. They only know how to lie. It's one lie after another, and I've seen quite a few official projects to integrate shepherds into forest management. But if you can't guarantee that the shepherd can make a living, nothing will work. Everyone has to eat. There should be an exchange. I don't mean a monetary one. I have sheep. We could do an exchange for cooking oil, gasoline, vegetables, whatever you want, something to guarantee our survival. It's very easy for governments and all these satellite organizations from environmentalists to unions to the hunting lobby, a whole conglomerate of organizations who make a living off talking about the benefits of pastoralism for the environment, for rural development, and it's all true, but for all they talk about it, they don't accomplish anything. All of these bureaucrats and public servants, they're always talking about the numbers. Well, let's look at the numbers. agrarian incomes are in free fall. The prices of what we produce are in free fall, but the cost of living is rising. The cost of rent in rural areas is going up like it's Barcelona. In a village with 12 inhabitants that doesn't even have a bakery, a pharmacy, or a bar, rent as 400 euros for an apartment. I'm not paying for the bougie lifestyle of living in the countryside so I can telecommute. There's a huge pot of money that is earmarked for projects like mine, but coincidentally the shepherds barely see any of it. First, they have to pay for a study, then a pilot project, then a diagnostic, then an analysis. And there are all these people who really care about environmentalism and food sovereignty, and they're on your side, but in the end everything they've done hasn't helped me out at all. Things are just getting worse. There are more and more people talking about these things, but they're not getting any better. Now, I just don't speak with academics when they call me for interviews because they exploit us. They sell knowledge and don't give us anything in return. But I don't want the shepherds to disappear. Our world has a lot of history. The pastoral world has these connections that surpass borders. End of Edu Balsal's interview. As I finish up this manuscript, the 10th anniversary of a great victory at Cheran Kerry has come around. On April 15, 2011, the people of this small town in the Mexican state of Nichuwakan rose up to defend their forests, their waters, and their lives. Cheran Kerry, with a population of 14,000, is one of the principal towns in the territory of the Purek Bicha people. Thanks to the last hundred years and more of struggles by indigenous peoples from Baja, California to Chiapas, large swaths of territory throughout Mexico are officially recognized as communal lands, including 15,000 hectares around Cheran Kerry. However, nothing is safe under capitalism, and much of a communal lands were being despoiled by the drug cartels, which are largely integrated into the state in which have diversified into other industries like lumber. Several men in the town had spoken up against the out of control logging, and they usually ended up dead. As the killings continued unpunished, and as the logging approached the source of the town's water, the women rose up and took several cartel truck drivers and loggers hostage. There were several days of intense fighting against the cartels mercenaries and the local police, but the people of Cheran Kerry put up barricades, set fire to trucks, and held their own with stories, Molotov cocktails, and whatever firearms they could get their hands on. On April 17, they created a popular assembly that would be the first step towards their self-government. From the assembly arose a dialogue commission, consisting of rotating representatives from each neighborhood. This structure served the egalitarian aspirations of the people of the town, and it was also far more effective than having leaders who could be co-opted, kidnapped, or assassinated. Around the barricades and the Parjuankua, the communal cooking fires, a sense of community was rekindled, overcoming divisions, antagonisms, and scarcities implanted through hundreds of years of colonialism. Puretica traditions and language were revitalized and became a cornerstone of their practice of autonomy. One such tradition was kuaj pekurikua, a word that translates as taking care of the territory, and that refers in distinguishably to the social and ecological territory, therefore including everything from education and improving the situation of women in the community. To repairing relations between neighbors, to massive efforts at before station. By 2015, the nursery they established for growing trees, starting out the seeds they had gathered in the forest just four years earlier, surpassed the figure of 1 million trees and shrubs germinated a year, with an 80% survival rate, making it the largest greenhouse in the state, and possibly in all of Mexico. The people of Chironkari also developed a communal justice system, focusing on mediation rather than punishment. By winning their autonomy from the state and the forces of extractive capitalism, they have gained the ability to begin undoing colonization and all its dimensions. We can find examples of forestation all over the world. The distinction between a true forest and a tree plantation that looks good on paper, but in actual fact, destroys the local territory, is qualitative. The key factor in determining whether a reforestation effort belongs in the first category or the second is whether it is under local control and designed by localized knowledge. As opposed to being under control of the state. Ethiopia made the headlines in 2019 by breaking world records and planting 353 million trees in a single day. The effort was a government initiative designed to capture media attention and promote ecotourism, though there are many doubts as to its effectiveness. No independent studies are available, but in one typical village, a third of the seedlings were washed away in a flood shortly after planting. Local experts criticized the government for "not considering how the community can be owners of the process" and "not thinking about how a reforestation cannot be a one day event, but needs to be integrated with the economic and ecological needs of the local people who will be taking care of and coexisting with those trees every day. Others pointed out earlier government schemes going back to the 80s that also took a quantitative approach, but that ended in failure because their top-down model was impervious to local knowledge. Another danger with entrusting the environment to governments can be seen in the ongoing civil war in Tigray where the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments are systematically destroying the orchards of local people and committing other acts of genocide. Destroying a people's food sovereignty, their capacity for self-sufficiency is a standard part of counter-insurgency operations, as well as a tendency of capitalism in states in general. When people are fully self-sufficient, the state cannot exist. In July 2020, in western Kenya, the sanguine people of the emblebut forest and the ogeic of the malforest were evicted and had their houses burned down, the culprits, the Kenyan Forest Service, nor was it the first time they had been evicted, not even that year. The Kenyan government employs a particularly colonial form of conservation known as "fortress conservation," imported directly by, in this case, the British colonizers. Fortress Conservation is an artifact of the European aristocracy's wars to enclose the commons and deproletarianize the rural poor. It sees humans and nature as antithetical, and the purpose of conservation as the expulsion of poor humans to enable the creation of nature parks, primarily for the entertainment, use, and aesthetic preferences of the wealthy. What this practice refuses to see is that humans are a part of our ecosystems, and that in the case of the western Kenyan forests, they exist in large part, thanks to how the sanguine and ogeic peoples interact with them. It also refuses to acknowledge that states are not instruments for protecting the environment. They are the machines of exploitation, accumulation, and surveillance. To anyone who understands this, it comes as no surprise that the Kenyan Forest Service is in fact one of the main bodies linked to illegal logging. Critics insist that "governments and conservation organizations continue to fail in applying a human rights-based approach to conservation, despite numerous international commitments to do so." In India, a constellation of small farmers and indigenous peoples have been crucial in protecting the subcontinence remaining forests. Similar to Ethiopia, the Indian government has tried to capture headlines with major tree planting events. Under capitalism, after all, it makes more sense to cut down existing forests and to replant new forests, but ecologically this does not work. In India, as in Ethiopia, successful plantations have been "mainly the result of community-led efforts." Government-sponsored tree planting has often resulted in land theft from indigenous adivasi communities sparking major protests. Many adivasi speak out as their traditional rights are "violated for the sake of artificial forests that pay little heed to the local ecology." For example, the government plants native teak trees, but in vast monocrop plantations rather than as one tree interspersed with many others in a diverse ecosystem that also supports local human populations. Of course, teak plantations make for a valuable export crop, though it's not the local communities who see the profit. The government also favors eucalyptus trees that grow quickly and sequester large amounts of carbon, but the eucalyptus drain the water table and hurt native species. Another example of how climate reductionism is actually bad for the planet. To meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement, the Indian government is trying to double its forest cover, but since the technocrats ignore the difference between a forest and a tree plantation, this means fencing off communal indigenous lands and planting monocrops that further harm the earth. Millions of indigenous people in India are currently threatened with eviction from their lands by the state. Small farmers have been adapting to the ongoing disaster, employing important innovations even as the government threatens to run them out of existence. While industrial agriculture is the second greatest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet, many small farmers in India are turning to agroforestry or forest gardens, mixing trees with annual crops to provide a more diversified diet, draw carbon out of the atmosphere rather than emitting more of it, and heal the soil, 50% of which in India is degraded thanks to the green revolution. Agroforestry also gives small farmers an advantage because it is a method that favors quality over quantity, allowing more people to sustain themselves with agricultural work, and to do so in a way that is actually good for the earth rather than eco-cidal. At a time when the state is trying to dispossess India's remaining peasantry in line with capitalist development models. They have recently changed agricultural laws in a clear move to favor large industrial producers and to drive small farmers off the land. In response, hundreds of thousands of small farmers, many of them from indigenous communities went on strike at the end of 2020, fighting with police and blockading roads around the capital. According to Pranath Jeevan P, the farmers movement in India is largely organized according to practices of mutual aid and self-organization, typified by leaderless solidarity and logistical organization around Langars, free community kitchens that feed the farmers while they maintain their blockades. The blockades quickly encompassed a revolution of daily life, taking on questions of childcare, education, and culture, microcosms of a new world being built, rather than a merely political protest for different government policies. Fighting where we live from cities to habitats. The urban rural divide is a central dynamic of capitalist accumulation and the ecological crisis. There is a differentiated regime of extraction, accumulation, and social control between rural and urban space. Just as rural struggles are rediscovering their potential for blockades and sabotage, urban struggles are learning that they are not limited to protesting and destroying. They can also transform. In order to reclaim cities as habitats, ecological struggles in cities merit special attention. As a first step, that means keeping cities from killing us. For poor people, urban life is often a death sentence, even as medical infrastructure under capitalism is concentrated in cities. In the 1970s, New York City officials and business interests began planning to build a trash incinerator at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The incinerator would have plagued local neighborhoods like Williamsburg with dioxin and other lethal forms of pollution. But Puerto Rican and Hasidic neighbors fought back using a "by any means necessary" approach. Taking on the city government, the utility company, and major media that all supported the plan, they definitively blocked the incinerator in 1995. What should not be elided is that subsequent to this neighborhood victory, Williamsburg and much of the rest of Brooklyn have been aggressively gentrified with property values going through the roof, and many working class residents and people of color pushed out in favor of disproportionately white young professionals. In other words, many of those who fought for a cleaner neighborhood were not allowed to stay around to reap the benefits. This kind of story is systematically typical and a reminder of why the supposedly pragmatic position of partial reform is hopelessly naive. As long as capitalism remains intact, whatever gains we happen to win by pressuring existing institutions will be enjoyed by economically privileged strata and those who are best able to assimilate to the racist codes and culture of a colonial society. Another struggle that links environmental concerns with the economic needs of poor urban residents is the defense of public transportation. These can include critical mass bicycle protests from San Francisco to Sao Paulo that oppose car culture, and in many cities have led to the creation of bicycle lanes and increased access for poor residents to bicycles and bicycle repair. More than a lifestyle question, cities designed for cars are lethal, especially for residents in denser neighborhoods. Cities that are organized in such a way that workers have to rely on automobiles are simply increasing indebtedness and funneling wages to corporations in two of the wealthiest sectors in the global north, the automobile and petroleum industries. The defense of public transportation has also sparked full blown revolts in Barcelona and the San Francisco Bay area, mass refusal to pay, or public actions to neutralize ticket checkers and open up metro stations for free, whether organized by neighborhood assemblies or anarchist organizations and sometimes in tandem with labor strikes by transport workers, have temporarily reduced financial strains faced by working class commuters and also generated tremendous pressure on municipal governments against further fair hikes. In both Brazil and Chile, major insurrections grew out of movements that initially formed in response to fair hikes. Both the 2013 movement in Brazil and the 2019 to 2021 uprising in Chile counted on a decisive anarchist participation, defeated the proposed fair hikes and were able to identify a much broader social horizon expanding to address deeper issues of injustice, including police repression, inequality and austerity, and the right to the city. Urban movements often feel doomed to failure. Those who live in a city rarely have any chance to resist changes to their own neighborhoods that are imposed from above. In part, that is because throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, cities have represented the concentration of capital accumulated on a global scale. Legally, houses and other buildings are not places for people to live or carry out their professional activities. They are essentially bank accounts where major interests can safely park the trillions of dollars they have made through currency speculation. Private equity marauding, the underpaying of workers, the overcharging of tenants and the stripping of complex ecosystems to sell for parts. It does not matter who lives there and what they need or even if these buildings are left empty for decades. So when we fight for our right to the city, we are going up against capitalism at the point where it is strongest. Furthermore, police departments in major cities today tend to be larger, better financed and more heavily armed than national armies were a century or two ago. The fact that decentralized urban movements can rise up and force the state to back down. So we know 1986, Hamburg, 1987, Kochabamba, 2000, El Alto, 2003, Paris, 2005 and 2006, Oaxaca City, 2006, Athens, 2008, Oakland, 2009, Tunis and Cairo, 2011, Istanbul, 2013, Sao Paulo, 2013, Barcelona, 2014, Santiago, 2019, Minneapolis, 2020, Lagos, 2020 and on is extremely significant and should be a central consideration in any strategy for social change today. However, urban rebellions are frequently excluded from the official conversation. Sadly, cynically, this is a reflection of the disorder and sacrifice they entail, inimical to the culture and class interests of the experts who control the conversation and a reflection of the difficulties around controlling these movements. Urban rebellions tend to move from single flashpoint issues to ever broader and more revolutionary horizons would be politicians cannot control these movements while they remain active. On the contrary, their main form of influence is a partial ability to demobilize in exchange for short term reformist gains or failing that to encourage internal conflicts in the movements. By focusing on technological or administrative solutions rather than the decentralized and often combative responses, social movements themselves keep offering up. Most academics and writers from the global north fail to tailor their technocratic proposals to the immediate need for survival, dignity and direct control by people and communities over our own lives. Social justice and decolonization have become buzzwords, but most of the people today who are getting paid to make proposals or write about the problem, events or practice that is deeply colonial. Fortunately, we don't need them. Proposals for dignity, survival and self-organization are popping up like mushrooms after the rain, originating in affected communities themselves. Secosesola is a network of cooperatives in Venezuela that took questions of survival and dignity as their point of departure. Secosesola is currently made up of 50 communitarian organizations located in seven states in the center and west of the country. It began in 1967 as an initiative for cooperative funeral homes at a moment of familial tragedy that also often implied financial hardship. Working class families were being fleeced by private for profit funeral homes. The new cooperatives were intended to fulfill this need with dignity and respect, while also lowering costs, so as to be affordable. Following this desire to meet popular needs through cooperative structures, Secosesola branched out in the mid-70s to provide public transportation. It was a period of massive mobilizations against transport fare hikes, so the network pooled its resources and they acquired a fleet of buses soon providing the majority of the transportation in the city of Barque Simeto. The experience continued until 1980 when the government seized and destroyed their buses. Secosesola also confronted a slow but steady drift into bureaucratization, the same tendency that turned most other cooperative ventures into little more than alternative businesses. I corresponded with a few members of Secosesola and they told me how they completely changed their organizational practices to prevent bureaucratization, to remove the positions of supervisors and boards of directors from their legal statutes, and to continue meeting lower class needs in a worsening economic situation, while also expanding their scope to take on ecological considerations. Secosesola is an important survival mechanism for hundreds of thousands of people amidst Venezuela's major economic crisis. Their cooperative markets are the principal source of food and supplies for some 100,000 families. They link farmers with urban residents, build up communitarian production of pasta, coffee, cleaning supplies, and other goods, help finance harvests or the purchase of vehicles, and provide healthcare to 230,000 people a year. Throughout our conversation, the members I spoke with gave the most attention to questions of process and relationship building, a clear difference from the dominant institutions focus on quantitative results. Food insecurity is also a problem in the global north, especially in racialized neighborhoods. Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi arose in 2014 from the experiences of a black liberation movement and mutual aid efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The organization establishes cooperatives to build a circular economy with an emphasis on gaining access to land within the impoverished majority black city, growing healthy food that can be prepared and distributed by other cooperatives, and collecting waste and producing a post and fertilizer by yet other cooperatives in a "reinforcing value chain" that expands to cover a growing body of vital needs. They also set up a manufacturing cooperative to "promote the arts and science of digital fabrication" and "fulfill the goal of "owning and controlling the means of production" This project, in turn, is part of the plan for building the Ewing Street Eco Village, a permaculture-based communal housing project for cooperative participants, and a springboard for yet more cooperative enterprises. Cooperative Jackson follows a strategic plan that seeks to "build autonomous power outside the state structure" while also "engaging in electoral politics on a limited scale" Largely, as a means to protect themselves from the power of the state, which "as we learned through our own struggles" can present a grave peril to movements. Their solidarity economy of worker cooperatives "informal affinity-based neighborhood bartering networks" is "grounded on the principles of social solidarity, mutual aid, reciprocity, and generosity" Following an ideal of eco-socialism, cooperation Jackson prioritizes survival in its many dimensions from gaining employment and economic self-sufficiency for members, increasing access to healthy food, reducing dependence on hydrocarbons and transforming their neighborhoods to improve the quality of the air and water In these efforts, they have received support from local trade unions and progressive churches Cooperative Jackson has achieved considerable successes in a politically and economically hostile environment The member Kali Akuno identifies two prime challenges or setbacks their model has faced, which parallel the experiences of related initiatives from the Mondragon cooperative complex of a Basque country to plan Pueblo a Pueblo, which we looked at in an earlier section The first is the tendency of cooperatives to focus on profit margins and reintegrate with capitalist economies Following this trend, which in a matter of decades has made the Mondragon complex indistinguishable from the rest of the capitalist landscape The original cooperation Jackson cooperatives broke away from the group as they were not "prepared to make the required sacrifices necessary to promote eco-socialism through the development of a non-exploitative and regenerative system at the community level" The second is all the work that remains to be done "getting people to understand the severity of the crisis and our collective ability to do something about it" This in turn relates to the difficulty of convincing the government to "implement the policy proposals" that are needed that will only materialize Akuno argues if "consciously driven by the people" An ally and veteran of the movement for racial justice, Chopra Lumumba won the mayoral elections for the city of Jackson in 2013 And it seemed the grassroots would receive official support for their projects and urban transformation plans But Lumumba died prematurely after just a couple months in office and subsequent politicians have not been supportive The first turn of events underscores the importance of cooperation Jackson's emphasis on building autonomous power and not waiting on electoral cycles Given the latest differentiation between city and countryside, control over food and artificial scarcity have been frequent methods for controlling urban populations At this point, urban gardening is often a way for people to assert neighborhood control in the face of real estate developers and racist urban planning experts to improve quality of life and increase community bonds In North Lawndale Chicago, there are some 20 garden spaces, many like the MLK Garden on 16th Street, have a long history of significance in local anti-racist movements These gardens, which often start with neighbors directly taking over plots, organize skill shares, hold community events, improve air quality, and distribute food throughout a neighborhood that experiences real food scarcity Several gardens donate medicinal herbs to a historic black pharmacy and support formerly incarcerated people Ondale, Little Village, and other neighborhoods, the urban gardens are connected to a network of associations arising from black, Puerto Rican, indigenous, and migrant communities One such organization, reclaiming our roots, quote, "is an initiative of Southwest Chicago that reclaims public spaces for healing and gathering using indigenous knowledge Reclaiming our roots creates opportunities for youth to engage with a community garden while connecting and caring for the land," end quote The special period in which Cuba faced sudden food shortages when they lost access to petroleum due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. embargo Shows how quickly urban populations can transition in order to feed themselves, in this case, through the explosion of urban and suburban gardens that ordinary people planted and tended to using hand tools and small-scale techniques Although the Cuban state encouraged the phenomenon, it was decentralized in nature, and some who lived through that moment tell me the main thing the government did was to get out of the way and allow communities to self-organize Indeed, there is little evidence to suggest a government would even be capable of organizing such a profound transformation in such a short time frame Urban reforestation is also an important line of action to consider, whereas government-led programs tend to focus on ornamental species and to actively avoid creating a free commons of edibles Neighborhood-initiated efforts can carry out planting in a way that simultaneously removes carbon, decreases pollution and urban warming, autonomously provides food security, and turns cities into habitats that can be healthy for humans and other species Small city forest gardens, somewhere in the U.S. I spoke with one person involved in anti-capitalist initiatives in the United States, including an informal effort that has resulted in the planting of over 10,000 fruit-bearing native trees and shrubs in a couple of neighboring small cities Because their circles have been targeted multiple times by police and FBI for their anti-capitalist and ecological politics, they have wished to use a pseudonym and keep their location anonymous Victor explained how they take advantage of a government-subsidized program meant to help commercial farmers using it to buy native fruit-bearing trees in bulk and distribute them in different communities As Victor says, it's worth noting that the entire agricultural industry is structured around state subsidies USDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, funds or guarantees, thrives, most else withers, the state decides among growers which farms are made to live and which are left to die And this apparatus and resource monopoly is something that we have to slowly break while also extracting resources from it This is why it is so decisive that black farmers have been historically excluded from USDA loan programs In bad crop years they have to pay the real cost of their wages while white farmers stay insulated and thus black farmers have lost a huge portion of the land they held 100 years ago So it's important that the USDA recognizes "five agroforestry practices" These are magic words and mean that these practices open the slu skates for cash and subsidies In the same way that other recognized farming practices do, so farmers get paid to plant in wind breaks and they get the trees cheap too They mostly go for big hardwoods that they plant as investments for logging, but it creates a leverage point for us to pull resources out of the system and create our own reservoirs for cooperative growing and future plant breeding and distribution Our species list includes paw paw, American plum, hazelnut, American persimmon, elderberry, eronia and chuk cherry These are all made available via subsidies but are rarely intended to be planted with enough density for human food or medicinal production And are instead commonly planted to meet one of the other five recognized agroforestry practices such as riparian plantings We also order hardy berries like currants and gooseberries in bulk from commercial suppliers and select trees like service berry from friendly nurseries We solicit donations from these friendly nurseries as well, which is a way that people who have already made the move back to the land can express an organized complicity And this year we've received mulberry, blueberry, blackberry, hardy fig and chestnut as donations We have slowly spread out and included more neighborhoods in town as they requested participation But we organize it each year within core neighborhoods that we do other autonomous organizing in I think that the project has been successful in producing collective spirit in certain neighborhoods and not others We give people the choice to take trees to plant on their own or to receive help or to use trees to plant neighborhood plantings All of the neighborhoods have held at least one of these collective plantings Two of the neighborhoods did seem to really draw inspiration from planting in trees together One is a neighborhood with housing projects and the other is a neighborhood of mostly Latin American immigrants who are used to growing their own food and mixing residential and agricultural spaces As we've spread the plantings to more neighborhoods, we've also been confronted with class differences and even relatively minor differences in income between areas These have posed problems in terms of resource distribution that can't always be easily solved from an autonomous perspective Especially regarding trees which are in short supply or most apt for particular places So far, mostly only the berry bushes have reduced fruit But once the fruit trees mature, it will be a game changer in terms of creating a commons And many working class people will have free access to a huge amount of fresh fruit and nuts One of the challenges we face is redeveloping familiarity with some of the native plants that were never appropriated by the colonizers for commercial food production Some of these non-commercial fruit are delicious raw like papa but cannot be sold because they are too fragile to ship to stores And thus perfect for neighborhood consumption Others, however, are best enjoyed with processing like the so-called Choke Cherry First Nations peoples have many ways to process fruits like these and so we have researched and discussed the appropriate ways to draw on these methods This ends the quote from Victor Such an initiative can scale up by filling out with just a few active people in any region or small city adopting the model Spread throughout an entire country, this practice can plant an atmospherically significant number of trees Unlike with state-led initiatives, there is a solid guarantee that the trees will be taken care of and will actually survive to maturity Accelerating processes of community building and commoning that will be necessary for lower class people to confront the ecological crisis with resilience It improves quality of life for lower class people and creates stronger relationships to place that can serve as an effective poll for resistance Against the notion of private property wielded by real estate developers and speculators Enabling a huge part of the map, small cities or less dense large cities, to play a significant role in carbon removal This is a preemptive mutiny against the imminent plans of the technocrats to turn a huge chunk of rural space into sacrifice zones For carbon removals so that life in the cities can continue with minimal transformation Grassroots autonomous efforts to vitalize the urban habitat can also be a source of powerful resistance against municipal attempts to restructure a neighborhood in the interests of capitalist profit and top down urban planning Volkarka is a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona formerly an independent village that has become the site of a particularly complex resistance Bringing together assemblies, neighborhood entities and self-organized communal spaces In 2002 city planners stated Volkarka as a sacrifice zone for a motorway expansion that was to destroy the entire Old Town Center Speculators bought up emptied out and demolished properties throughout the center of the neighborhood Anarchists and others began squatting many of these properties to prevent their demolition While neighborhood associations protested the devastation More recently, neighbors of all kinds have come together to occupy the vacant lots left behind by the demolitions and plant urban gardens filled with vegetable plots, activity spaces for important traditions like pittanka, uncalsutatis and hundreds of fruit and nut trees The network of gardens brings neighbors together and encourages many more people to participate in the defense of the neighborhood As well as providing a space for cultural events, socialization and play taking a first step towards food autonomy And improving the quality of the neighborhood in terms of health, carbon footprint, beauty and enjoyment For the benefit of the lower class people who live there rather than for the higher income demographics the real estate speculators will attempt to bring in With weekly blockades shutting down traffic, occupations evicted and demolished spaces The unmediated creation of plazas and gardens and other forms of protest and direct action The neighbors forced a change to the official urban planning document for the neighborhood in 2018 And far more importantly, they created real changes on the ground and took important steps towards recovering the power to make decisions and organize their own lives In the nearby neighborhood of Las Salute, a group of neighbors have taken over a vacant lot to create a garden with a global focus The garden itself is organized in large part by people who have had to traverse continents and cross borders Fleeing the effects of a mercenary capitalism Giving birth to one initiative within the garden space La Indore Dadera, a semi-year or diasporico or nursery garden for people of the diaspora In the words of one participant, "Many of the people who have migrated to Barcelona have been displaced by climatic and agricultural pressures direct and indirect Although only loosely categorized Under a wider ecosystem lens, our migration can be considered as an adaptive climate strategy of survival and resistance With benefits for our territories of origin as well as our territories of arrival The climate migrant leaves behind profound relations to their territory and generally passes through a painful morning while struggling to start again from scratch But they also hold on to valuable knowledge about modes of life in transition, resilience and adaptability" end quote In some La Indore Dadera responds to the question, "How do we root the concept of global climate justice at the local scale?" Using "the tools of documentary films, cultural geography and agroecological design" end quote In collaboration with the rest of the garden project Though from the beginning, the gardeners took a more conciliatory approach towards the city government emphasizing dialogue In the end, the progressive administration evicted them from their original plot without availing a second location they had promised In order to acquire a second home and continue their project, the group had to occupy a high value developing property to force the government to honor their promises It might be noted that this was a left-wing administration happy to take photo ops to file away in their resume under the headings of multiculturalism or "green urbanism" La Indore Dadera makes clear the connections between migration, colonialism, the ecological crisis and urban resistance and occupation As migration and ecological crisis become increasingly enmeshed, initiatives focusing on winning housing for and by undocumented people also deserve a central focus Once again, this is a field in which anti-capitalist movements using direct action lead the way Throughout Kataluna, there are numerous initiatives by undocumented people in their accomplices to squat abandoned warehouses to provide housing for large groups Numerous squatted social centers linked to the anarchist movement also house migrants There are several initiatives for self-employment by undocumented people from making and selling handicraft bags to cooking for events that form a part of anti-capitalist networks and movements Such initiatives take on a greater scale in Gran Canaria, an island in the West African archipelago occupied by Spain and with the highest rates of poverty in the whole Spanish state The Canary Islands are also one of the main points of entry into the European Union for African migrants The anarchist federation of Gran Canaria, FAGC, has occupied several housing blocks and set up entire autonomous neighborhoods organizing for basic survival among lower-class people, both documented and undocumented Working with the offshoot organization, the Sindicato de Enchilinos, tenants union of Gran Canaria They stop hundreds of evictions every year and they have occupied numerous properties to provide socialized housing, meaning free and self-organized Liberated from both exploitation by landlords and humiliation by government bureaucrats At the time of this writing, a thousand people live in housing socialized by these two organizations and thousands more retain access to capitalist housing thanks to the blocked evictions Some of these socialized housing units are collective or communal from a squatted hotel to La Esperanza, a self-organized community with 76 families, more than 200 people Two other projects, Las Macias and Refugio too, provide housing to around 100 and 150 migrants respectively, who face legal persecution, while El Nido, a squatted school, serves as a shelter for women fleeing domestic violence The FAGC has also squatted four large agricultural plots for autonomous food production on the island, and they provide a consultation service for workers facing labor conflicts Most of those who use this service are informal workers, including sex workers, who have experienced sexist and transphobic violence Their methods have been so effective that government social workers on the island have often advised unemployed and low-income people looking for housing, food assistance or other resources to "go to the anarchists" Already these activities surpass the scale and certainly the quality of government alleviation measures The main limitation to spreading even further is not any internal defect of this kind of organization, on the contrary, we can identify two external factors, the first is state repression One of the most active organizers with the FAGC was arrested and tortured by police, and then in a typical move, in such cases, falsely accused by police of assaulting them, he is currently facing trial The other limitation is that such a practice requires organizing from below, which means a loss of control for professional activists Similar initiatives organized by and for those in need of housing, using protest, blockades and occupations with migrant women frequently taking a leading role, are active throughout the Spanish state, including the Plata Forma de Efictados por la y Poteca, P-A-H, which has been featured in numerous articles in English language media However, at key moments, middle-class activists have proven their ability to flex within the housing movement and prevent an evolution toward stronger, more generalized tactics like rent strikes that would put into question the property relations at the foundation of capitalism and achieve the ideal that houses belong to those who live in them The tendency of reformist activism toward a single issue focus also keeps such movements from spreading out of control, which they need to do to actually and effectively challenge globally interlinked systems of exploitation and oppression In Greece, the other main entry point for migrants into fortress Europe, there have also been inspiring initiatives providing housing in the means of survival Tens of thousands of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and dozens of other countries, working closely with the anarchist and autonomous movements, squatted entire hotels and other abandoned buildings in Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities in order to attain dignified housing The squats are self-organized by their inhabitants and many of them reject NGO workers as well as direct representatives of the state They also run cafeterias, language classes, clinics, childcare services and other activities Some of the squats have waiting lists with thousands of people hoping for a place In contrast, the camps run by the government and managed by NGOs are literal concentration camps with people living in unhygienic conditions, intense or barracks, with no services, eating disgusting food sometimes infested with maggots, freezing to death in the winter and suffering countless abuses The progressive cities that government had little sympathy for radical movements that put the party's complicity with business as usual in sharp relief They evicted several migrant squats and tried to repress the movement more generally In the face of the 2017 wave of repression, the movements rose to the challenge, demonstrating that principles like solidarity, mutual aid and self-organization are not just feel good ideas And that in movements of crisis, they scale up effectively in contrast to the NGOs and the progressive political parties who very literally became the problem And in contrast to the chorus of global North academics who enjoy the old game of infantilizing anarchist political action, but in fact a little to show when it comes to the housing and border crises Anarchists and others occupied ruling party headquarters, worker-run factory VOME opened "A warehouse for the collection, storage and transportation of basic items like clothes, sanitary items and baby food that had been gathered by solidarity collectives from all over Greece and Europe Prior to shipment to the Edomene border to be handed out to refugees" Thousands of people invited the most vulnerable among the refugees into their homes, and side by side, migrants and Greek radicals opened to the next generation of squats When the new democracy government came back into power in 2019, they declared an open war on self-organizing migrants and the anarchist movement more broadly, evicting numerous squats with heavily armed police, and kicking undocumented people out to sleep on the streets, or sending them into the system of state-run gulabs In a sense, poor people are not allowed to be at home anywhere, papers or not, and across the world, and across the world, they have the only way to live in the world In a sense, poor people are not allowed to be at home anywhere, papers or not, and across the world, the struggle for a right to the city is raging In poorer countries in the global south, the outcome of that fight can often determine whether people have to migrate in the first place, or whether they can build the collective power to make a home Abaflali Basim Jondolo, whose name in Zulu means "people who stay in shacks" is "a radically democratic, grassroots and entirely non-professionalized movement of shacked dwellers" The movement began in 2005, a rising out of a practice of roadblockades and land occupations carried out by poor shacked dwellers in Durban They reject participation "in party politics" or "in any NGO-style professionalization" or "individualization of struggle" In their guide for NGOs, academics, activists and churches seeking a relationship with the movement, they write Since the 2005 roadblockade, the movement's membership has grown from the entire population of the 6,000 strong Kennedy Road settlement To the point where 13 entire settlements have voted to collectively affiliate to Abaflali and govern themselves autonomously from state politics There are also a further 23 branches and other settlements that are not collectively affiliated to Abaflali, but which do allow independent political activity This means that around 30,000 people have a direct and formal affiliation with the movement, but many more have been inspired by it The movement now also works with street traders and has a further three branches of street traders, all of which are in the city of Pintown It also has members in two areas in Pintown, in which people live in poor quality houses rather than shacks, and who joined because they became familiar with the movement As their communities are adjacent to Abaflali shacks settlements, the movement is multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multinational and operates on the principle that everyone living in a settlement is from that settlement and has full rights to participate in the political life of that settlement irrespective of their origins Abaflali has fought for access to housing and land, education and childcare, water and sanitation, electrification They have "held quarterly all-night music, poetry and drama evenings, run a 16-team football league, provided HIV/AIDS care, and they have also built relationships of international solidarity In support of shack dwellers in Zimbabwe and Haiti, one of their main goals is "to win popular control over decision-making that affects poor communities" Doing so has directly pitted them against "authoritarianism from governments, business and some left NGOs with vanguardist delusions" Due to their activities and also their independence from the dominant institutions, their members and activities have been repeatedly attacked by police, sometimes with tacit support from poverty focused NGOs Urban gardens are common in the settlements of South Africa as they are in informal cities throughout the global South in which 1 billion people live Due to the framework of development, such gardens face a particular set of problems linked to ongoing colonial dynamics Many residents of these impoverished, self-constructed and largely self-regulating urban areas are recent evictees or transplants from the countryside Where a combination of capitalist and governmental pressures make life ever less tenable and desirable However, urban agriculture is not exactly a continuation of rural agriculture given the huge differences in the necessary techniques as well as the world crushing pressure that identifies small-scale agriculture with rural places and therefore as something backwards that needs to be left behind In the global north, as in the global south, urban agriculture is practiced as a survival strategy when food insecurity grows and one that often persists and spreads when people realize its many social and environmental benefits From Jane Batterby's writing, "Many national and local governments in sub-Saharan Africa have resisted urban agriculture and urban farmers often face harassment by officials and the police" People trying to feed themselves, improve their quality of life and adapt traditional food cultures to their new surroundings are confronted with militarized discourses of hygiene that signal what forms of life should be emulated and what forms of life are an obstacle or a threat "urban agriculture presents an impression to local elites and to international observers that the city remains un-modern, uncivilized, uncontrolled and underdeveloped within this rhetoric it is possible to detect a form of anti-Africanism" The need to transform cities into environments where food is abundant, ending their existence as barren sites of accumulation that despoil the countryside and where the poorer classes are especially vulnerable to malnutrition and where there are a few niches for other species runs into a wall Yet the limitations are not material, one of the primary obstacles is the very notion of progress, which is inextricably colonial and Eurocentric Drawing inspiration from Franz Fanon, Theronoc Miraftob draws attention to the colonial imagination of urban planners and challenges She says, "The assumption that every plan and policy must insist on modernization" This mental decolonization requires recognizing how the ideal of the western city has been deployed historically in the colonial era and is now being deployed in the neo-liberal era to advance a certain paradigm of development and capital accumulation A collective of developers, planners, architects and politicians, and a powerful industry of marketing and image making have promoted the western city as an object of desire" Given more space or a two-volume book, I would showcase autonomous technologies developed directly by urban residents like the rainwater filtration and greywater bioremediation developed in the anarchist social center Casa de la Gartisha Pretta in Santo Andre, Brazil, or B habitats and rooftop gardens cultivated from Dainhag to Detroit Instead, I have chosen to focus not on the particular technologies that will accompany the transformation of our cities, but on contests over who controls the space I have no doubt we can deploy all the amazing innovations that have been developed across the world the moment our neighborhoods belong to us The point is, the technologies to transform cities into healthy habitats already exist We are not lacking inventors, we are lacking control over our own lives and vital spaces Until we can directly organize and transform our neighborhoods to meet our own needs and break the monopolies that control the world's resources, including intellectual property New technologies will be of two varieties, boot-legged, autonomous and genuities developed in situ that make the most out of scarce materials or engineered technologies developed by professionals well-meaning or otherwise that will only increase global inequities End of chapter 3 This has been a production of Audible Anarchist, you can find more Audible Anarchist on YouTube [Music]
The book can be read at https://archive.org/details/TheSolutionsareAlreadyHere/page/n9/mode/2upAnd purchased at https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345116/the-solutions-are-already-here/
Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliverenvironmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that internationalgovernmental responses to the climate emergency are structurallyincapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope. Across the world,grassroots networks of local communities are working to realize theirvisions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetarydestruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted bygreenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and theneocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of theGreen New Deal. Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists inVenezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Braziland anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking atthe battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, andhelped the most marginalized to fight borders and environmentalracism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.
