are many proposals for what is to be done in the face of disaster. STRATEGIES outlines our analysis of contemporary leftist approaches to the ecological crisis, especially those which under the name of climate justice somehow seek to obviate or even exclude struggles against capital, coloniality, and racism. But we refuse to remain only negative. In our most recent and comprehensive essay, we outline the ways disaster communism might be understood to be already emergent amidst such environmental crisis.
Much more could be said about these essays and their possible strengths and weaknesses. We remain self-critical, but this book presents an opportunity to expand the scope of critique. As disaster engulfs spaces and times around us, let us put to you a simple question: what will it take to get out of the woods, together?
1. Stephen Leahy, “Climate Change Impacts Worse than Expected, Global Report Warns,” National Geographic, October 7, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ipcc-report-climate-change-impacts-forests-emissions/.
2. Kelly Levin, “8 Things You Need to Know About the IPCC 1.5˚C Report,” World Resources Institute, October 7, 2018, https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/8-things-you-need-know-about-ipcc-15-c-report.
3. Quoted in Andrew Freedman, “Climate Scientists Refute 12-Year Deadline to Curb Global Warming,” Axios, January 22, 2019, https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocasio-cortez-12-year-deadline-c4ba1f99-bc76-42ac-8b93-e4eaa926938d.html.
4. Stabroek News, “Fighting Complacency towards Climate Change,” Stabroek News (blog), October 20, 2018, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2018/opinion/editorial/10/20/fighting-complacency-towards-climate-change/.
5. Mary Annaïse Heglar, “When Climate Change Broke My Heart and Forced Me to Grow Up,” Medium (blog), October 10, 2018, https://medium.com/@maryheglar/when-climate-change-broke-my-heart-and-forced-me-to-grow-up-dcffc8d763b8.
6. Quoted in Emilee Gilpin, “Urgency in Climate Change Advocacy is Backfiring, Says Citizen Potawatomi Nation Scientist,” National Observer, February 15, 2019, https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/15/features/urgency-climate-change-advocacy-backfiring-says-citizen-potawatomi-nation.
7. Mary Annaïse Heglar, “Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat,” Medium (blog), February 18, 2019, https://medium.com/s/story/sorry-yall-but-climate-change-ain-t-the-first-existential-threat-b3c999267aa0. We would add Indigenous people here too. See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
8. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2010), 35.
9. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The Documenta 14 Reader, eds. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (München, London, New York: Prestel, 2017), 92.
10. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 246.
11. “Disaster, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53561. [Accessed June 2, 2019.]
12. Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, June 11, 2006, https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster/.
13. Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.”
14. Clyde Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans, eds. Laura Pulido and Jordan T. Camp (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), xxiv.
15. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), 563.
16. George Caffentzis, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse,” Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992, eds. Midnight Notes Collective (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992), 215–72.
17. On the relation between the “organic composition of capital” and the production of “surplus populations,” see the extraordinary analysis by Marx in Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Marx was not particularly hopeful about the political potential of surplus populations. By contrast, following Frantz Fanon and others, we see those populations rendered surplus by capital to be indispensable to any revolutionary movement today.
18. Cissy Zhou, “Man vs Machine: China’s Workforce, Starting to Feel the Strain from Threat of Robotic Automation,” South China Morning Post, February 14, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2185993/man-vs-machine-chinas-workforce-starting-feel-strain-threat.
19. Paul Mozur, “China Scrutinizes 2 Apple Suppliers in Pollution Probe,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2013, sec. Business, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323420604578648002283373528.
20. Mozur, “China Scrutinizes 2 Apple Suppliers.”
21. Georgina Gustin, “Florida’s Migrant Farm Workers Struggle After Hurricane Damaged Homes, Crops,” InsideClimate News, October 17, 2017, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16102017/hurricanes-florida-agriculture-migrant-farm-workers-jobs-crop-loss.
22. Che Gossett, “Blackness, Animality, and the Unsovereign,” Verso Books (blog), September 8, 2015, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign.
23. Ben Doherty, “A Short History of Nauru, Australia’s Dumping Ground for Refugees,” The Guardian, August 9, 2016, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/10/a-short-history-of-nauru-australias-dumping-ground-for-refugees.
24. Anja Kanngieser, “Climate Change:
