one can never further the course of freedom by creating new forms of coercion

That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we’d all be better off as a result. To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith, since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters?

even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his endless battles with Marx over practical questions, also personally translated Marx’s Capital into Russian.

Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some Great Thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle.

It is, presumably, to preserve the possibility of winning the game that intellectuals insist, in discussing each other, on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Man theories of history they would scoff at in just about any other context: Foucault’s ideas, like Trotsky’s, are never treated as primarily the products of a certain intellectual milieu, as something that emerged from endless conversations and arguments involving hundreds of people, but always, as if they emerged from the genius of a single man (or, very occasionally, woman).

Put simply, a war of attrition in which the U.S. suffers no casualties while plenty of Russians die suits some key players in Washington. In such circles, whether it comports with the well-being of the Ukrainian people receives no more than lip service.

“The Statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

“From my vantage point in a hotel room in the center of Kyiv,” he writes, “the whole attack was no big deal — just a matter of losing a little sleep and hearing some loud thumps,”

I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow.

Ernst Mayr, the most influential evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, maintained that speciation could only occur when a given population was geographically separated, after which the two populations on either side of the divide would face different selective pressures over time and eventually become so different that interbreeding would no longer be possible even if they were reunited.152 This became, for a time, the received wisdom of evolutionary biology. That may be surprising, given its utter implausibility as a theoretical framework for understanding the speciation of large, highly mobile marine animals, between whom geographic barriers are quite literally impossible.153 Something else must act as the root cause of their reproductive isolation.

Despite sex being among the most presumably instinctive of animal behaviors, young elephants also require sex education: specifically how to act to invite sexual encounters and who to seek out as a mate. Female elephants reach sexual maturity around ten to twelve years of age.

This debate about chimpanzees often circles back to the question of homology versus analogy: in essence, do the cultural aspects of humans and the cultural aspects of other animals actually emerge from the same evolved cognitive apparatus? Or are they only evolutionarily converging and appearing to be similar without direct relationship by descent?73 I consider this debate to be a thoroughly unilluminating distraction, and a narcissistic one at that: reducing scientific import to whether it can tell us something about “where we came from.”

In particular, cumulative culture seems to rely upon imitation and teaching as key transmission mechanisms. It is not, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd write, simply “a by-product of intelligence and social life.”

Whiten would classify these each as “a culture,” given that there is a whole suite of socially transmitted behaviors that continue to be passed on. Others assert that the meanings of “culture” and “tradition” are largely interchangeable.48 Many scientists define culture in a manner that includes all mechanisms of social learning, while others assert that applying the word “culture” meaningfully only entails behaviors learned through imitation, emulation, and teaching.49 Summarizing their basic commonalities across disagreements, however, primatologist William McGrew writes that, “Consensually, all seem to agree that culture is learned (rather than instinctive), social (rather than solitary), normative (rather than plastic), and collective (rather than idiosyncratic).”50

Social learning is huge, because it means that a dolphin or an elephant, a parrot or a chimpanzee or a lion, can tap into collective skills and wisdom that accrued slowly over centuries.

Cecilia Heyes influentially defined social learning as “learning that is influenced by observation or interaction with another individual or its products.”

When early pastoralists domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats, they began consuming milk and milk products. This was a cultural practice, not a biologically evolved one. Humans, like all mammals, stop producing lactase, the enzyme capable of digesting lactose, after infancy—or at least did until the cultural innovation of animal domestication. Under these new selective pressures generated by a novel cultural practice, groups of people who were raising animals underwent evolutionary genetic changes as well.

Cultural innovations, however, are often not accidents. Even when they are entirely experimental, they are still the products of thinking minds capable of considering multiple courses of action to solve problems in a complex and dynamic environment.

Kinship relationships are important for cultural transmission patterns, but unlike genes, cultural traits are vastly more flexible and dynamic in their possible spread. They are therefore not directly tied to reproductive outcomes. 

For Bookchin, animals can hardly be called “social” at all, their clustering together in groups being ephemeral, unstructured, and purely instinctive, geared towards particular passing needs of collective predator defense or mating.

For an attempt at developing a comprehensive philosophy of humanity’s relationship to nature, social ecology has surprisingly little to say about the animal question. There have been few engagements by social ecologists with animal liberationist or post-humanist ideas seeking to broaden conceptions of subjectivity, moral worth, and philosophical import to non-humans.

Mexicans — and Indians, I may add — do not need the evocative account of their stolen lands and place names in the Southwest that Foreman penned in the Nov. 1 issue of Earth First!, nor his rhetorical offer of a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition. to recognize when they are being asked to disappear in the name of “radical environmentalism.” Their oppressors do not only live in Mexico; they occupy far too many boards of directors in U.S. concerns. To hear the Arizona Junta bemoan their plight at home and then try to ship them out of the country that their ancestors once lived in is a hypocrisy that defies anything Chim Blea could impute to me.

I will not enter into the implications of deep zoology and its use by xenophobic elements in the Arizona Junta, notably Edward Abbey, who fears, as expressed in The Bloomsbury Review (April — May 1986), that the immigration of Mexicans into the United States threatens to “Latinize” our “northern European” (Aryan?) culture and force us to “accept a more rigid class system, a patron style of politics, less democracy and more oligarchy, a fear and hatred of the natural world. a densely populated land base, a less efficient and far more corrupt economy, and a greater reliance on crime and violence as normal instruments of social change.”

There is no way to go back to animal innocence.

The “beauty” of the Noah Principle, in fact, is precisely its mindless simplicity. Mere existence, you see, is the only fact that confers “value” on an organism. Equipped with this guiding maxim, we no longer have to think about the consequences an organism — or who knows? maybe an institution or a social system like Nazism — produces in the biosphere. Like Noah responding to God’s command. we simply collect two of everything, even of deadly pathogens. After all, it exists, so we rescue it.

But it is by no means a “silly quibble to ask whether AIDS and smallpox organisms have rights.” to use Professor Flowers’s condescending remarks on this issue. Indeed, the “rights” of viruses are one of the sizzling “issues” raised by “anti — humanists” and their papa, David Ehrenfeld, who earns high praise in the literature of deep zoology. I didn’t raise this issue: Ehrenfeld did, and so did the professorial establishment of “anti-humanism” that writes for the academic press. I feel obliged to ask if Ehrenfeld’s “Noah Principle” is part of deep zoology? Is every living thing, including the AIDS virus, plague bacillus, and smallpox virus to be preserved because “Existence is the only criterion of the value of parts of Nature,” as Ehrenfeld puts it in The Arrogance of Humanism (p. 208). Do Sessions and Devall. accept Ehrenfeld’s notion that “for those who reject the humanist basis of modern life, there is simply no way to tell whether one arbitrarily [?] chosen part of Nature has more ‘value’ than another, so like Noah we do not bother to make the effort”? (p. 208)

Rather, the Nazi version of deep zoology was vastly expansive. It reached into the German family itself. reducing women to breeders of men for the army and men into “warrior” cannon fodder. The Hitler Youth were thoroughly indoctrinated in a crude biologism that stressed, ironically, the virtues of wilderness, wildlife, and the rugged joys of a comradeship formed around the campfire. Teutonic paganism and “folk tribalism” were given so much emphasis that they led to protests by priests and religious parents — usually to no avail.

Although this disruption spanned the most crucial years of World War II, from 1942 to early 1945, it went on and on, even to the frustration of German army commanders who were grimly in need of troops, supplies, and ammunition.

As a people, the Jews were not so numerically significant that they interfered with Hitler’s “development” plans for Lebensraum, or “living space.”

Even American Indians had the opportunity to fight back, and an aroused public opinion often came to their rescue when cowboys and the cavalry invaded their lands.

It was not merely a propaganda stunt for focusing on Jewish scapegoats, as so many of us believed fifty years ago. Adolf Hitler had murder in his eyes when it came to the Jews. and this murder derived from a form of deep zoology that fostered the most extreme and deadly racism in history.

Note well that this reproach is directed not so much against Hitler as against the Jews who doubtless got what they deserve inasmuch as they have an “anthropocentric” and “humanistic” religion. More than one person I’ve met in the “ecology movement” has said this in barely veiled attacks upon Judaism as the very source of “anthropocentrism” and “humanism” in history.

what is accepted as a matter of course when humans are doing it to animals becomes ‘unparalleled evil’ when humans do the same to other humans.

Professor R. Wills Flowers is palpable evidence that one doesn’t have to be very bright or knowledgeable to make it as a professor these days.

Anarchism, I may add, knows no “Popes.”

I even corrected an erroneous citation in the Utne Reader that had me saying that “most” Earth Firsters! are “ecofascists,” pointing out again in my response that a distinction must be drawn between the movement and the Junta.

And what do those good gentlemen think about Foreman’s demand that we close our borders to Latin Americans (of which more later) because they put “more pressure on the resources we have in the USA”? Shall we kick “them” out to spare “our” forests and water including Indians, whose ancestors came to this continent thousands of years ago? If so, how many little Hitlers will “we” need to round “them” up? What detention camps, police, military forces, and coercive institutions established by the State will “we” need to expedite “their” removal — that is, until “we” need “their” labor to harvest “our” crops and feed “our” faces? They will keep coming, you know, because “our” corporations, banks, and oil magnates destroyed their revolution in Mexico three generations ago and inflicted a terrifying hell upon them. Although they did this with the aid of their own bourgeois thugs, it was “ours” who guided them. Much of the land “we” occupy was stolen from “them” by “our” own thugs in the last century, particularly land in the Southwest and in California. where the Arizona Junta and its “warriors” have their stamping grounds.

As with most questions surrounding power and its redistribution, there remains much uncertainty as to what could fill this void. A danger inherent in self-organized approaches is the unintentional reinforcing of the very same power mechanisms they attempt to counter. With the flattening of hierarchies and circumvention of regulating bodies, economies of free time, social and cultural capital, and unpaid labor all become alternative currencies which can take unaccountable and unsustainable forms. Self-organized forms of education can reaffirm the very same neoliberal tendencies in education they intend to critique by relieving the institution of its responsibility to provide for its students and faculty. For this reason it’s important for these initiatives to be speculative and world-building in nature, but also to be rooted in and cognizant of the conditions that structure their range of possibilities.

By thinking of the “living forest” not only as an ecosystem but also as a laboratory, full of sensors collecting data for future testimonials and stories, the implications of ecological personhood expand into social relations.

Because of these priorities engrained in the software, terra0 sidelines critical ecological factors and risks simply reproducing capitalist-colonial dynamics.

The smart contract offers digital and economic forms of ecological sovereignty, expanding the agency of the NHA and serving as a critical infrastructure for environmental personhood. As articulated by the artists, “Blockchain technology and smart contracts enable nonhuman actors to administer capital and therefore to claim the right to property for the first time.”

Through a reworking of traditional contractual relations, proponents of blockchain technologies argue that they constitute a reorienting of the historical trajectories of ownership and property.

As a case study that explicitly mobilizes the “Rights of Nature” clause, the speculative art project terra0 proposes a protocol that enables a forest to own itself. Formulated in 2016 by Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling, and Max Hampshire as both a white paper and a series of ongoing exhibitions, terra0 lays a possible groundwork for digital forestry practices through nonhuman forms of ownership.

“A profound change occurred in the late Middle Ages: it was not forest clearance, but the forest itself that became the foundation of political power... Territorial lords manifested their claim to dominion in the forest no longer by clearing the forest, but by protecting it.”

the ‘netherworld of fantasy’, in which progress came to seem a lie and many people rejected Enlightenment ideals, favouring the false sanctuaries of occultism, astrology and divination

It is the knowledge that society, by virtually excluding the possibility of spontaneous change, is gravitating toward total catastrophe

conferred upon Jewry a metaphysical evil

time

The world we want is one where many worlds fit.

hypertext.

A thought comes as it wills, not when I will it.

What translator Ann Goldstein describes so evocatively as “dissolving margins” or “dissolving boundaries” is smarginare (verb) or la smarginatura (noun), a peculiarly untranslatable and double-edged typographical term.

My work is anti-nature

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.