Table Of ContentInhabiting the Earth
Inhabiting the Earth
Anarchist Political Ecology
for Landscapes of Emancipation
Edited by
Martin Locret-Collet, Simon Springer,
Jennifer Mateer and Maleea Acker
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Locret-Collet, Martin, editor. | Springer, Simon, editor. | Mateer, Jennifer, editor. |
Acker, Maleea, 1975- editor.
Title: Inhabiting the Earth : anarchist political ecology for landscapes of emancipation /
edited by Martin Locret-Collet, Simon Springer, Jennifer Mateer and Maleea Acker.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021029553 (print) | LCCN 2021029554 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781538159149 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538159156 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political ecology. | Environmental sociology. | Anarchism.
Classification: LCC JA75.8 .I54 2021 (print) | LCC JA75.8 (ebook) |
DDC 320.5/7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029553
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029554
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Contents
Preface vii
John P. Clark
Introduction: The Political Ecology of Inhabiting the Earth 1
Simon Springer, Martin Locret-Collet and Jennifer Mateer
1 An Effective Approach to Circular Economy within
the Domain of Social Ecology 19
Andrej Fideršek
2 Heritage as a ‘Common’: Exploring Alternative Approaches
for De-growth 41
Elizabeth Auclair
3 Local Resistance to Mega Infrastructure Projects as a Place
of Emancipation: Land Use Conflicts, Radical Democracy
and Oppositional Public Spaces 59
Jérôme Pélenc, Anahita Grisoni, Julien Milanesi, Léa Sébastien
and Manuel Cervera-Marzal
4 Agri(Cultural) Resistance: Food Sovereignty and Anarchism in
Response to the Sociobiodiversity Crisis 79
Cassidy Thomas and Leonardo E. Figueroa-Helland
5 Our Graves above the Timberline: Urban Green Commons,
Intergenerational Justice and Diachronic Environmental Politics 99
Martin Locret-Collet
v
vi Contents
6 An Anarchist Landscape? Rethinking Landscape and
‘Other’ Geographies 115
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre
7 Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman: Poets, Writers Anarchists
and Political Ecologists 131
Gregory Knapp
8 The Prefigurative Politics of Going Off-Grid: Anarchist
Political Ecology and Socio-material Infrastructures 147
Ryan Alan Sporer and Kevin Suemnicht
9 Escape from Ecology: Necrophilia and the Left’s Internalized
Green Scare 167
Dan Fischer
10 Are the State and Public Institutions Compatible with De-growth?
An Anarchist Perspective 187
Francisco J. Toro
Index 205
About the Contributors 215
Preface
John P. Clark
REINHABITING THE LAND AND THE EARTH
This work, like the companion volume that preceded it, makes a major contribution
to the creation of an explicitly anarchist political ecology. The concept of ‘inhabit-
ing the Earth’ in the title points to the importance in anarchist social and ecological
thought of place and region as the loci of meaning, value and the flourishing of life.
Anarchist political ecology is the theoretical perspective that more than any other
seeks to draw out the radical, and, indeed, revolutionary implications of bioregional
thinking and of such key concepts as re-inhabitation and regeneration. It shows the
disastrous consequences of the imposition on the Earth of artificial borders and other
lines of demarcation based on political domination and instrumental rationality. As
the Introduction to this volume points out, the issue of the relation between the
universal and particular is a crucial one. Anarchist political ecology shows that true
universality must be grounded in the rich, complex diversity of freely flourishing
social and ecological communities. The alternative is the abstract universality and
impoverished particularity of capital and the state, with their legacy of social alien-
ation, possessive individualism and spiritual nihilism.
As this volume demonstrates, an integral part of re-inhabitation and social and
ecological regeneration is the recreation (and, where it exists, the preservation) of
the regenerative economy. Fideršek argues persuasively for such an arrangement in
chapter 1 when he defends the need for a ‘circular economy’ that ‘emulates natural
systems’ and makes use of ‘simple, durable, reusable, and recyclable design’. Such a
regenerative system is a subset of Nature’s larger economy, which consists of the self-
regulating and evolutionarily self-transcending metabolic activity of the Earth itself.
The term ‘economy’ derives from oikos, the Greek word for the home or household,
and from nomos, which is often translated as ‘law’, but in ancient Greece meant both
vii
viii John P. Clark
law and custom. The term derives from the concept of ‘allotment’ or ‘distribution’
and is thus related to early ideas of natural justice, and specifically to what Heraclitus
depicted as the common logos or discourse of nature.
According to this ancient wisdom, we must learn from the ‘Great Book of
Nature’, which, contrary to Galileo, is written as much in the language of evolution-
ary biology and geohistory as it is in that of mathematics. What we learn from this
primordial text is what the ancient Daoist sage Laozi expressed in his famous judg-
ment that the ‘Way of Nature’ (that of the free community) is to take from where
there is excess and to give to where there is deficiency, while the ‘Way of Man’ (that
of the system of domination) is to take from where there is deficiency and to give to
where there is excess. This is the truth that the regenerative economy, and indeed,
the regenerative society, follows.
A commitment to such social and ecological regeneration looks to place-based,
land-based and Earth-based cultures and value systems for examples and inspiration.
This leads us to a rediscovery of the relevance today of historical practices of com-
moning, as is recognized here in both the Introduction and in a number of chapters.
The commons cannot be dismissed as a merely abstract utopia, in view of its rich
and expansive history, and the fact that it lives on today in many contemporary
social practices, as noted by Auclair in chapter 2. It thus poses a materially and
socially grounded challenge to the system of domination and inspires hope for the
emergence of a broad sphere of mutual aid and social cooperation. Similarly, anar-
chist political ecology looks to living indigenous traditions as an embodied critique
of domination and as a material basis for hope and regenerative praxis. Thomas
and Figueroa-Helland present in chapter 4 an astute account of the significance of
indigenous knowledge, practices and values. They note, for example, the presence of
a ‘care and response orientation’ towards all beings, a recognition of the ‘dynamic
co-evolution’ of all life forms, and the ethical and spiritual ideal of ‘an integrated
community of life’. One finds in this analysis and others in the collection an acute
awareness of indigenous values as a powerful challenge to the ideological and exis-
tential roots of the system of domination.
OVERCOMING DUALISM
Underlying many of the diverse issues discussed in this work are deep ontological
questions. These include what is perhaps the most fundamental one for any eco-
political ontology, that of how we conceive of nature and of our place in nature.
This encompasses not only how we conceptualize and experience natural naturata
(natured natured), that is, the field of realized nature as we look upon and observe
it but also natura naturans (nature naturing), that is, the activity of nature as an on-
going dynamic process of emergence and giving birth.
There are several references in this work to the ancient Ciceronian ideas of ‘first’
and ‘second’ natures. These concepts can be useful for challenging certain extreme
dualisms between society and nature. However, it is important to realize that these
Preface ix
ideas also have the potential to reinforce dualistic thinking if not developed into a
more complex, dialectical view of emergence, continuity and difference in nature,
and in the multiplicity of natures within nature. As is acknowledged in the Intro-
duction, a key project for anarchist political ecology must be the overcoming of any
dualistic conception of the relationship between social, and so-called ‘environmental’
problems.
We can begin by recognizing that in the most radical and strict sense, there are no
‘environmental’ problems. The socius and the oikos are not two separate spheres, and
all social problems are, immediately, ecological problems. Furthermore, as part of
its project of ‘undoing human supremacy’, a deeply non-anthropocentric anarchist
political ecology will recognize that both the human and non-human exist at every
level of being. This includes the levels of ontological nature, physical nature, chemi-
cal nature, biological nature, psychological nature and social nature. The present
work is a notable advance in this direction, through its attention to the implications
of animality and the ways in which other species share with humans diverse aspects
of biological, psychological and social nature and through its recognition of our ethi-
cal and intellectual responsibility to acknowledge and act on these commonalities.
THE ECO-ANARCHIST CRITIQUE OF DOMINATION
Like the previous volume of the series, this one treats extensively the pre-eminently
anarchist question of the nature of domination, which is identical to the question of
the nature of liberation or emancipation. Authentic anarchism is always at the same
time an authentic libertarianism in the most radical sense of that term. Anarchism
is a quest not for abstract freedom, but, as is discussed in this work, for freedom as
the full flourishing of interdependent and co-creative beings, in all their particularity
and singularity. The title captures very well this geohistorical situatedness of freedom
through the concept of ‘landscapes of emancipation’.
A particularly strong point of this collection is the attention that it devotes to the
problem of technological domination, as it interacts with other forms of domination.
Pélenc, Grisoni, Milanesi, Sébastien and Marzal point out in chapter 3 the fateful
arrival of a ‘post-political’ era in which ‘technocratic mechanisms and consensual
procedures’ predominate, within an official but largely illusory ‘framework of rep-
resentative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism’. The
concept of ‘consensual’, as they employ it, should be interpreted in the sense of the
‘neoliberal consensus’ that has, according to conventional wisdom, prevailed since
the collapse of the previous ‘Keynesian consensus’. As we are now seeing through-
out the world, the erstwhile triumph of this consensus and the pseudo-politics that
accompanies it generates an authoritarian populist and even neo-fascist reaction.
This reaction brings back the ‘contestation and agonistic engagement’ of the more
authentically ‘political’, but now in its most twisted and demonic form.
Perhaps the most pertinent lesson that we can learn from the concept of ‘post-
politics’ is that the political has been increasingly reduced to a superstructure in
