work, with all the imbrications of privilege that inherently involves. The original composition of the collective was reflected in the readership we appealed to: a certain left-theory audience was implicit in our writing. In the years since, new people have joined Out of the Woods—primarily through Twitter. Others have stepped back. The collective is now spread across the United Kingdom and the United States, and while it is no longer all men and certainly not heterosexual, we are still all white—and several of us settlers in North America. We are undoubtedly beneficiaries of the nexus of raciality, capital, and colonialism. We take responsibility for and fight against being determined by that inheritance. Several of us still work on the margins of universities, as tenuous students, temporary lecturers, and administrators. It is important to keep in mind these situated perspectives as you read this book—not to invalidate our thought but to better specify it. What has (not) been written undoubtedly reflects those who have (not) written it. With this book complete, Out of the Woods will transform yet again, with the intention of further multiplying our positions against homogeneity. We invite you to contact us, and to think, write, and struggle with us.
When we formed Out of the Woods, we wanted to intervene against the consistent inadequacy of many existing narratives around the ecological crisis. We profoundly disagreed with mainstream environmentalism’s call for a unified humanity that might stand against a yet-to-come cataclysmic event. Simultaneously, we were appalled by the ways this homogenous conception of humanity coexists with moralizing critiques blaming cataclysm on an excess of humanity. Through such a process, cataclysm becomes too easily pinned on “dirty” developing countries, with their “rapidly” reproducing populations, and their “floods” of migrants.
Oppositions between the polluted and the pure, the populating and the controlled, and the migrating and the placebound all ultimately depend on another organizational divide: between white “civilization” and racialized “disorder.” The concept of “nature” serves as an avatar for white anxiety, making manifest fears around the loss of purity and control. Such fears can supposedly be overcome only through the imperial orchestration of intergovernmental organizations—or, a descent into war. The ecological crisis, while supposedly undifferentiated in its effects on humanity, is overdetermined in its causes.
As antiauthoritarian communists and anarchists, we oppose these articulations of environmentalism. However, we also find similar reasons to oppose many of the conventional leftist responses to the ecological crisis. Green anarchism, for example, has too often been focused on defending localized purity of autonomous zones, which in our view constitutes a dangerously introverted response to a globally differentiated disaster. In its romantic attempts to find a pure nature to defend or return to, green anarchism has orchestrated another set of violences.29 At times, an essentialist conception of nature has been expanded into gender, with some (most infamously Deep Green Resistance) articulating transphobic views. Other anarchists—especially in North America—have used primitivism as an excuse to imitate and appropriate Indigeneity. Shockingly, criticisms of such projects have been labelled as sectarian slurs and intra-anarchist scuffles, rather than substantive disagreements. Unlike the well-circulated 2009 anonymous anarchist text Desert or the reactionary Dark Mountain Project, we are uninterested in a project of “nature-loving anarchism,” nor do we countenance such works’ trendy poetic nihilism disguised as sober realism. “Nature” today emphasizes only a separate and fallen world. It is no real shock that nostalgia for a now-spoilt nature is a frequent theme in reactionary thought, the “romantic anticapitalism” that Iyko Day properly names.30 Such a racial project, she argues, is premised on both the appropriation of Indigenous lands and practices by settlers and the exclusion of those deemed corrupted by capital—Asians, Jews, and migrants more generally. Against romantic anticapitalism, then, we draw inspiration from Black, Indigenous, and anti-border anarchists and communists, for whom romantic anticapitalism can only reek of white supremacy.31
This book reflects our desire to write something useful, to create something that makes it easier to understand the total interdependence of the extractions, exploitations, enslavements, and extirpations that colonial capital has brought upon this world. The brutal techniques of these myriad forms of ruination are too often reproduced in green aesthetics, politics, and practices. The logics of reactionary ecology, border imperialism, and racialized state violence are perpetuated and proliferated in environmentalism. Such a situation demands a different and differentiated response. We see such a response in inchoate tendencies all around us. This book is about the countless ways people survive amidst and against the ruins. We believe these shared strategies to survive ecological crises make a collective thriving within and beyond ruination possible. Thus, in the service of something that truly changes everything—which is to say planetary revolutions—we offer new concepts to hold together, and hold close, amidst the continuation of the crisis. Against gleeful doomsaying, romantic anticapitalism, and hopeful technofixes:
We hope-against-hope
for a careful, yet fierce, queer cyborg ecology
built through a bricolage of tools, techniques, and knowledges already around us
to move within, against, and beyond the ecological crisis
for survival pending revolution
to make, altogether, disaster communism.
GUIDE TO THE BOOK
Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis is organized into four sections: BORDERS, NATURES, FUTURES, and STRATEGIES. Each section is preceded by an introduction that contextualizes the essays in our thought and in the world. We highly recommend reading these introductory pieces, all written in 2019, before the essays contained within. We have updated these essays for internal consistency across the book, albeit admittedly some essays are very much products of the moment in which they emerged. We have, through further citations and introductory remarks, revised the shortcomings of our earlier thoughts. We hope the contradictions that remain can be fruitful for readers. In particular, we continue to work through the contradiction between an understanding of ecological crisis as something that reproduces and is reproduced by other social crises and a more expanded notion of ecological crisis as something that incorporates these crises (though does not eradicate their specificities). Although we have discussed this tension amongst ourselves, no clear consensus has yet to emerge (and this is as true for some of us as individuals as much as for the collective as a whole).
We begin with BORDERS, the struggles against nationalism, enclosure, and immobility as imperial projects of nation-states. We suggest that these features of our world play a key role in reproducing ecological crisis; and that the latter must not be understood as separate from those punitive regimes seeking to manage human mobility. The interview and four essays in this section forcefully argue for a politics beyond and against the border imperialism of nation-states.
The essays in NATURES unpack how understandings of what and where “nature” is affect: the ability of capital to appropriate and extract value. Nature is never as self-evident as it is made to seem; in fact, there is nothing less “natural” than nature. We demonstrate this claim through an evaluation of the role the defense of nature has played for reactionary and fascist individuals and political movements. We further show how the understanding that nature is always produced can liberate us to collectively construct better worlds.
Perhaps nothing is made more visible by climate disaster than the manner in which the future is very much at stake in the choices we make today. FUTURES contains three essays concerning what this means for climate and left politics. In mainstream environmentalism the future is too often a safe, knowable realm for heterosexual white children to inherit. By thinking through a range of struggles, we reposition the future as an unknowable site of possibility for a variety
