movement at the moment. There is still a popular imaginary of some kind of pure nature which you find as much in RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) members as you do in hardcore environmentalist activists, and it really must be refused. At the same time, we need to be certain that we don’t become technofuturists who’ll happily embrace a technological invasion of everything existing, with no regard for the colonial paradigm and the advent of European technology as both weapon and arbiter of colonial “progress.” To a certain extent, we are between a rock and a hard place here—between a romance of wilderness and a romance of technology, and both are worse.
D: I think that binary is really important and you get it from both sides. So, if you try and criticize the fetishization of the slow, the local, the authentic and the romanticization of nature, then you are accused of being in love with the global, the fast or of being a technological fetishist. It’s this kind of binary thinking that structures both the accelerationist-oriented, technofuturist Left, and “back to nature” leftism. I think unpicking that binary, in fact rejecting it as a structure, is really important. There is a case, sometimes, for organic food, there is also a case, sometimes, for using drones in farming. And sometimes there is a good case not to grow organic food—we talk about this in our piece on cyborg agroecology.20 Indigenous ways of organizing life in specific locations across the globe are important here—not so that we can apply them to a wholly different context, but because they often completely undercut those binaries—they are “local,” but have dynamic, relational understandings of “local” or “place” that eschew cozy romanticism.
On the appropriation of the term Indigenous outside of the Indigenous context, it’s important to be clear that there is no substantive Indigenous population in Britain. I know some Crofters in the Scottish Islands and Highlands argue that crofting is an Indigenous way of life. I don’t know enough to comment on that, but generally the way “Indigenous” is used in the political discourse of the UK is to suggest that white British people are the Indigenous population of this island and so have a unique claim to live here. This is sometimes extended “greenwards,” so they are held to have a unique ability or right to cultivate its environment, or protect it from “overpopulation.”
Against that, I would (cautiously) take Indigeneity as a way of naming a particular co-constitution of identity with land and place: a way of life that cannot be separated from the dynamic, relational ecologies in which it developed, and that includes nonhuman life: animals, minerals, and the land itself (and as I understand it, many, though not all, Indigenous people make use of this relational understanding in organizing their struggles). Now if you colonize that land, that way of life is marginalized or made impossible, and that simply does not happen in the UK—left-leaning localists might point to Tesco coming into your high street and closing your local shop. That might be bad, but it’s not remotely comparable: your way of life is still fundamentally the same. So the term “Indigenous” just doesn’t translate.
I also think there is still a danger of white-settler activists; or white activists in Europe or Britain—and it’s a tendency I recognize in myself—fetishizing Indigenous struggles and placing too much hope in them, or just abstracting bits of knowledge without attending to the need for decolonization as a political project. We saw it with the Zapatistas a lot: because things are so shit over here, something that looks brilliant, exciting, and a little bit different (perhaps there was a degree of exoticism in it as well), people overly invest in it and overly identify with it but of course it can’t be transplanted wholesale to a different context.
So it’s important to look at what’s happening more locally too—rather than depoliticizing hope by displacing it onto an other—and thinking about where the connections might be. We’ve got anti-fracking campaigns, migrant solidarity campaigns, and certainly with the anti-fracking campaigns I think the political content of them is yet to be determined. A lot of it is NIMBYism, a lot (though not all) of it is middle class [and white], but that’s what we’ve got. People don’t come into struggle with perfect positions. People get involved in struggle because something is affecting them [or something they care about] and through contact with a whole host of people—activists, other people struggling, people reading texts—their political positions can change. Green and Black Cross are doing some really important work in anti-fracking struggles, sending observers to villages in Sussex that perhaps haven’t seen a lot of political struggles or protest previously.21 Of course, not all struggle will take the direction we want it to, but I think it’s really important that we don’t give up on it as inherently flawed from the beginning because then it will be captured by the Kingsnorths. The [fascist] British National Party made great play of localist environmental policy and you could easily see the far right jumping on anti-fracking campaigns.
A: To add to this, it was very inspiring to see Black Lives Matter UK shutting down London City Airport, and talking about breathability and atmosphere. That’s hugely linked to any environmental discussion of climate change in terms of pollution but also the simple fact that London is rapidly becoming unbreathable. What was brilliant about the BLM statement that came out was that they insisted that breathability is differentiated—that the problem with expanding London City is not that it affects the whole of London, but rather that it disproportionately affects the poor Black communities in Newham, where the airport is located.
Something I was excited about was the opening of a discussion around atmosphere and breathability, which would bring in the environment as a space where effects are differentiated. So that was an exciting moment, which I hope hasn’t stalled because no one else took it up. It seems like the environmental movement missed that, and it’s interesting that it has done very little about atmosphere and pollution in London. For me, that seems like a really axiomatic struggle that could be acted on immediately, and would massively improve the welfare and livelihood of systematically oppressed peoples.
So, I think it’s very possible to already envisage what some kind of environmental activism in the UK might look like—it might not be as simple as targeting resource extraction, campaigns around pollution would be just as valid. In terms of displacement by flooding, that’s something we are going to perhaps see more of, but pollution is something that’s happening immediately. I would say that I remain deeply hopeful because people are making these moves towards realizing that the environment is a context rather than some kind of sole cause and, as environment is contextualized, I think we begin to see something quite hopeful here.
I don’t see it as a movement, but as a series of deeply fragmented local insurgencies. That’s what movements have always been. If you read Aldon Morris, who’s a great sociologist of the Civil Rights Movement, he says it wasn’t a movement but a series of local insurgencies which came to be seen as a movement because they acquired a force great enough that it was impossible to resist them.22 I don’t think we can model what we do now on the Civil Rights Movement, but it’s important to remember that event, the archetypal movement, wasn’t a movement. So, on this basis, in thinking about anti-fracking campaigns, all of them have the capacity to become very successful local insurgencies in which the demand ceases to be just about “we’re going to stop this one thing” and becomes how how we can begin to act in solidarity with those whose lives are determined by catastrophe.
D: There’s a great article by Aufheben written in 1994, “The politics of anti-road struggle and the struggles of anti-road politics.” It outlines a lot of these issues in that movement: which sometimes was driven by NIMBYism, sometimes by environmental concerns, sometimes by moral concerns, sometimes by a more holistic Marxism.23 What happens in those past movements, the historical memory, I think, is actually pretty important: in their struggles did they bring issues together to show how they were connected? How? That’s of real use in determining how we organize against environmental destruction in the UK without the protofascist rhetoric of “Our England.”
A: Yeah, and that refusal of “Spitfire Ecology,” of Merrie England and green fields with an old fighter plane flying
