Out of the Woods Collective - Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis

The global ecological crisis is not going to happen in some distant future, in 2050 or 2100 or when computer projections tell us the glaciers may have melted. It is happening now, all around us. And it builds on and intensifies long histories of extraction, exploitation, extinction, and genocide. How do we fight despair, nihilism, and an eco-fascist politics of the armed lifeboat in the face of this gathering but unequally experienced storm? In this collection of urgent essays, the Out of the Woods collective argues that hope emerges from the acts of solidarity in the face of crisis that they term disaster communism. Surveying four key terrain of social struggle around the ecological crisisborders, nature, futures, and strategiesOut of the Woods plot an environmental politics grounded in antiracist, decolonial, and anticapitalist movements and solidarities. There is no better guide to building a future of collective possibility out of the ruins of the present than Hope against Hope.

Ashley Dawson, author of Peoples Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons and Extreme Cities and Extinction: A Radical History

This collection from Out of the Woods represents some of the most refreshing thinking on the politics of climate change and ecology. It is also the record of a collaborative project that arose from the dynamic conjunctures of radical theory and social movements, written for understanding and worldmaking rather than clicks or commerce. As climate change emerges as an undeniable fact demanding of solutions, Hope Against Hope is an important contribution to an honest examination of the interests, desires and futures which might be served by the range of answers offered across the political spectrum.

Angela Mitropoulos, author of Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia

Hope Against Hope is an experimental book that shares important initiatives and dreams to work against the hell of current capitalist climate catastrophe and the worlds beyond that this hell will create. In doing so, it brings hope back from the future. It encourages and nourishes, through friendship and courage, a revolutionary present badly needed today. Oh, yes, Out of the Woods claims, a new world already exists and is set to abolish the present state of things!

Gustavo Esteva, author of Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures and The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca

Work, energy, and the planets ecology are all in crisisapocalyptically, so. Survival seems impossible, hopeless, in fact. And, and, and. In the struggles against enclosures and borders, wasted natures and foreclosed futures, there are possibilities for going beyond capitalism, the state, and ecological crisis. To the array of competing strategies circulating throughout contemporary climate movements, Out of the Woods offers Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis toward the most revolutionary, interminable prospects of a hopeful future born of struggle.

Kevin Van Meter, author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible and coeditor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States

Out of the Woods collective frontally attacks three major limitations in the strategies and tactics of dominant strands in todays climate change movement: national paths to salvation that ultimately rely on and perpetuate oppressive border regimes and global inequalities; the widespread perception of the need to shrink rather than increase the forces of production; and, last but not least, undue optimism about so-called stranded assets. Hope Against Hope is also a twenty-first century affirmation of Marxs highly enigmatic conviction that Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. Importantly, its approach is a non-sectarian, original, and thought-provoking attempt at grappling with, anticipating, and preparing for struggles to come.

Kolya Abramsky, editor of Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-petrol World

WRITINGS ON ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

OUT OF THE WOODS COLLECTIVE

Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis

Out of the Woods (editors)

2020 Common Notions

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

ISBN: 978-1-942173-20-5

LCCN: 2020930522

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Out of the Woods Collective,

www.commonnotions.org

Copyediting by Erika Biddle

Cover design by Josh MacPhee / Antumbra Design

Layout design and typesetting by Morgan Buck / Antumbra Design

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Out of the Woods Collective (OOTW) gratefully acknowledges the following publishers for granting permission to reprint edited versions of OOTW articles in this publication. All other essays in this volume were previously published on OOTWs blog at http://libcom.org/outofthewoods.

On Climate/Borders/Survival/Care/Struggle, originally published in BASE Magazine, June 23, 2017, http://www.basepublication.org/?p=474.

A Hostile Environment, originally published in Society & Space, November 22, 2017, https://societyandspace.org/2017/11/22/a-hostile-environment/.

Organizing Nature in the Midst of Crisis, published as Human Nature in The New Inquiry, January 27, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/human-nature/.

Cthulhu Plays No Role for Me, originally published in Viewpoint Magazine, May 8, 2017, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me/.

Postcapitalist Ecology: A Comment on Inventing the Future, originally published at The Disorder of Things, November 4, 2015, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/11/04/postcapitalist-ecology-a-comment-on-inventing-the-future/.

Blockadia and Capitalism: Naomi Klein vs. Naomi Klein, published as Klein vs Klein in The New Inquiry, January 7, 2015, https://thenewinquiry.com/klein-vs-klein/.

Disaster Communism: The Uses of Disaster, published as The Uses of Disaster in Commune Magazine, October 22, 2018, https://communemag.com/the-uses-of-disaster/.

In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report. It is a work defined by exhaustive detail and three exact and exacting conclusions. The first is that the global target set in the Paris Agreement of 1.5C of warming would have far greater impacts than were previously anticipated.

The authors of the IPCC report intended it as a clarion bellan intervention which would mobilize people and dent the mood of complacency. In an essay published just a few days after the report, she describes how she came to comprehend the scale of climate change and how it drove her to despair: