An interview with Out of the Woods

We wanted to speak with Out of the Woods because of their close engagement with debates around the particular dangers of ecofascism, as well as the potential of locally-oriented networks of care and anti-fascist resistance. Our conversation occurred right as their new book Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (New York: Common Notions, 2020) was being published, and therefore draws heavily on ideas explored within the book.

Out of the Woods is a transnational political research and theory collective, a loose grouping of decolonial, small-c communist, antiracist queer-feminist thinkers working together to think through the problem of ecological crisis.

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Editors: Can you start by sharing a bit about the Out of the Woods collective? When did you start writing together, and what are your central concerns?

Out of the Woods: Thanks so much for having us! Out of the Woods began around 2014 through an online conversation concerning the relationship between capitalism and climate change. We wanted to think more precisely about the specific and myriad ways in which exploitation, domination, privatization, and exhaustion are at the core of the climate crisis, and what that meant for a libertarian-communist or an otherwise transformative, organized response emerging from the global proletariat. This involved historical political economic explorations, delving into and summarizing the writings of key thinkers for each other and for others, and reading a lot of scientific reports. Through our conversations surrounding historic and theoretical texts, we also began developing our own concepts to better apprehend ecological crisis. Putting these concepts to work allows us to analyze political responses to intergovernmental negotiations, political events, and climate disasters, an important question being how seemingly disconnected events and groups might come together and mutually reinforce revolutionary struggle. Since that time a lot of new folks have joined, others have moved on to other things. Our thought has also shifted quite a lot over time – we stumbled around a bit searching for a conversation that didn’t exist yet. Some of our members are anonymous, for good and obvious reasons. So our orientations and concepts aren’t built through a shared identity or set of experiences, or meeting and working in person, but thinking through the problematic of ecological crisis. That said, putting together this book (Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis) has meant a few of us will be partial representatives of the text.

We are especially interested in amplifying the ways in which Black, Indigenous, queer, and migrant thinkers and movements around the world have been at the forefront of that transformative struggle within, against, and beyond the ecological crisis precipitated by the nexus of capitalism, raciality, and coloniality.

 

Editors: JOAAP is particularly interested in the way in which you address the risks and manifestations of fascism and ecofascism in your work. How do you as a collective define these two terms, within our contemporary context? Do you feel that the components and contours of fascism and ecofascism are changing?

Out of the Woods: I suppose I think of fascism as the consolidation of authoritarian power through popular ethno-nationalism, the latter (as numerous thinkers from Aimé Césaire to Cedric Robinson to Denise Ferreira da Silva have argued) are formed through the mutual imbrication of racial capitalism and global colonial and settler colonial empires. It's really important to be precise about the sorts of reactionary, ecologically tinged movements that are currently being fomented around the world – from the U.S. where I live, to Brazil, Australia, India, the Philippines, etc. But for us, it's most important not so much to get caught up in thinking there’s some precise threshold one crosses at which the designation of “fascism” becomes super meaningful – hence our use of terms like “reactionary,” “protofascist,” or “völkisch”. To that end, we try to think about some of the different tendencies that already exist in that world structure of capitalist/colonial crisis that precipitate, encourage, and reward the formation of reactionary individuals and movements – many of them interior to the moral economies of everyday racial capitalism.

I think that contrary to some, I might not necessarily draw much of a boundary between fascism and ecofascism. There are many ways in which certain attachments to place, feelings of nostalgia for a nature that is pure and has since been despoiled, etc., are parts of fascist ideology. Some on the Left really think we shouldn't even use the word “ecofascism” because doing so might give the impression that actual ecological systems could be protected through a fascist form of politics. Of course we would all agree this is impossible! Much like “green capitalism,” ecofascism can only ever be an ideology that fails to resolve the contradictions of ecological crisis, because it will forever be unable to understand that the crisis stems in part from the racial and national systems it takes to be “natural”! However, that failure makes an ecologically aware fascism all the more insidious, because crisis continues to be blamed on the exterior threat (Jews, migrants, queers, Muslims, etc.). For me, then, “ecofascism” helps us understand what is currently a rather marginal – but could be a potentially meaningful – reactionary right which uses ecological crisis to justify actions of extreme violence, necropolitics, racial cleansing, etc.

Editors: In your essay, “The Future is Kids’ Stuff,” you problematize the way in which a better future is often prioritized over a better present. This also makes me think of the longstanding issue of children being used as justification for fascist, racist, and at times environmentally unjust policies and actions. These actions are often intended to ensure a future world for some children, but arguably not a just one. How can we challenge this pattern, as well as what you call “reproductive futurisms” to foreground the importance of not simply a future, but a just one? Furthermore, how can we challenge the “fascism of the baby’s face,”(1) to collectively build “utopia now”? 
 
Out of the Woods: We should be really explicit that what is at stake in this oikonomic situation is the reproduction of the heteronormative white family structure. So the problem isn't just whether one prioritizes the future or the present (and whose future or present), but rather that securing the present is done in and through the name or image of the child – a future. There’s a kind of temporal torsion going on here: in situations of perceived crisis as I described above, the image of the white child becomes a way for reactionary thought to create a nostalgia for the future! I wonder how we would write that essay differently in the world after the Greta Thunberg moment, in which a young political activist’s refusal to allow things to go on as “normal” has quickly and predictably become the symbol of choice for “doing something” about climate change. What absolutely cannot be admitted about Greta, or any other child refusal, is actually hearing young people speak when they indict contemporary dithering and demand a livable future – especially if the implication is the end of planetary racial capitalism! Instead, the child is only allowed to function as a symbol that authorizes states and capital to go about their business, as if to say, “oh, isn’t this precious, the children are right, this is So Important, we really should do something.” There’s no contradiction having Greta speak at Davos, for example, because the content of her speech can only be heard to be authorizing already existing power. This patronizing discourse results in a severe cognitive dissonance for a lot of us (here speaking a bit personally as someone involved in youth organizing in the past). In the book we write that part of the problem is that such a move “denies agency to children, rendering them mere vehicles for our political desires.”(2)

Where things get really tough is that certain segments of the Left, especially the “Green Left,” are comfortable working with such a “reproductive futurism,” in which “the child” is the metonym for the world that must be saved. A classic example we discuss in the book is Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, in which the author is torn between an expansive, regenerative “kinship of the infertile” on the one hand, and a question she leaves somewhat hanging: question “Is it even possible to be a real environmentalist if you didn’t have kids?” The latter is meant to be posed against the Malthusian anti-natalist tradition in western environmentalism, which erroneously argued that the principle problem of resource exhaustion is tied to population growth and thus that ecological solutions must limit that number (often through coercive means). The inverse counterpoint of anti-natalism, however, shares a certain premise: that reproduction and children are the primary symbolic means through which crisis and redemption must be posed. This a use of “the child” as a framing symbol, where its meaning is derived from a classically familial set, secures the propriety of a kind of bourgeois scientifically-informed environmentalism to speak of and for the future.

We think that this isn’t just an abstract question – it’s a real problem for movements! Hinging everything on “the child” is a severely limiting framework. It precludes building queer forms of kinship beyond the heteronormative family, marginalizes Indigenous youth leaders like the Lakota runners who really sparked the blockade of DAPL, and unnecessarily steers us away from the capacious forms of relationality and care we will need to survive and flourish amidst increasing and cascading crises. These include the practices of mutual aid, care, and survival pending revolution that we call “disaster communism,” which could include cyborg agroecology, communist energy distribution administration, communal kitchens and food provisioning, and non-family-based social centers, creches, and abortion clinics.(3) Our goal isn’t necessarily to define precisely what utopia will be built or how, as of course it’ll work differently in different places; it’s instead to suggest that holding on to the nuclear heteronormative structure serves as a blockage to constructing “utopia now!”

Editors: In Hope Against Hope, you discuss a Glasgow Council initiative that matched Glaswegians with asylum seekers. You write about how when the UK government attempted to remove some of them, Glaswegians adamantly resisted the deportation of their new neighbors.(4) What other examples of successful mobilizations based on kinship and community might we look toward as models? 

Out of the Woods: In our book we really try to at least speak to a few of these situations where the power of the carceral and border imperialist state is actually actively precluded by the desires of people to be in solidarity. Personally, I've been really interested in trying to learn more about, for example, the ways in which Mutual Aid centers in Puerto Rico that grew exponentially after Hurricane Maria fostered not only a kind of “community” but transformative social relations centered around queer and transfeminist utopias. From what I understand, the organizing work that No More Deaths has been doing really seeks to hold together and transform our understanding of commonality. The pipeline blockade at Standing Rock was something similar, at least for a lot of us, insofar as a cohesive “community” was something that was not entirely possible or perhaps even desirable, at least not without some intensely painful transformations of settler subjects. So, we always want to note that power relations don't disappear in any of these situations.

Editors: One of the most egregious examples of the ways in which fascism, or at least far right populism, is appropriating narratives of ecological sustainability is in the recent Future Energy, Water, Industry and Education Park (FEWIEP) proposal. This document proposes a border wall that consists of a combination of solar panels, natural gas pipelines, wind turbines, surveillance drones, and educational facilities.(5) It seems to me that one of the dangers of this proposal is the way in which it seeks to ostensibly unite environmental and border concerns in a way that distracts from issues of consent – not to mention its questionable environmental impact. What do you think of this proposed project?

Out of the Woods: On the one hand, the FEWIEP proposal is just so totally perverse – It almost has the air of something that an evil villain in a low-budget 70’s thriller would imagine, or the content of a “this is the future liberals want” meme. Placed in the contextual history of U.S. environmentalism, it’s not so exceptional. Some environmentalist ideologies have long considered what we’d recognize (after Harsha Walia) as border imperialism to be a central pillar of their politics. What’s maybe a bit different is that the FEWIEP is an infrastructure plan, not just a xenophobic rhetorical move. Much as a more avowed “eco”-fascism inevitably fails, so too would this project. Extensive border developments like this are ecological disasters – they exacerbate flash flooding, prevent animal migrations, and destroy desert landscapes. They do this not because their walls and roads are just “poorly designed” material infrastructure, which one could then just design in a more “sustainable” way. Rather, we’d suggest that borders are social relations incapable of sustaining caretaking relations among people. I can’t help but think that for the Tohono O'odham and other Native nations, a border imperialism in the form of imposed solar panels and wind farms isn’t much different than the current wall, which actively and consciously produces ecological destruction.

Editors: Can you say more about your idea of anti-fascist infrastructures? Could these anti-fascist infrastructures be extended into the explicitly ecological realm?(6) In other words, are there also anti-ecofascist infrastructures? If so, what might these infrastructures look like?

Out of the Woods: To follow on from the last question, what we’re trying to get at in thinking about infrastructures is that actual material spaces, flows, and technologies are at stake in confronting ecological crisis and fascism alike. So, something like anti-fascist infrastructures can and do form through communications and media networks, though obviously the “platforms” that facilitate those communications are not innocent. But caretaking infrastructures (following Kim TallBear), or infrastructures of solidarity, require both new forms of relating to each other, but also new forms of relating to other species and the earth itself. So, yes! I think what is at stake in these kinds of infrastructures must be not a simplistic negation of fascism on their terrain (e.g., Twitter), but instead the co-creation of platform spaces that can pry and hold open generous and careful forms of relations across difference. In North America where I live, this means not simply acknowledging, but developing shared capacity to rematriate or ex-appropriate land to Indigenous nations – in short, “land back”! Land, in its expansive sense, serves as a necessary infrastructure of social relationships.(7) But again, this will look differently in different places.

Editors: You cite a quote by Deleuze and Guattari, that excellently sums up one of the most concerning elements of fascism: “ ‘what makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.’ “(8) It is relatively easy to identify the ways in which fascism becomes diffuse – or enacted by many instead of one. However, it is more difficult to identify these patterns in ecofascism. Would you say ecofascism exists in places where it cannot immediately be seen? If so, where?

Out of the Woods: I think forms of reactionary thinking are imbued in all kinds of assumptions about nature and ecology, to the point that they are almost banal! I mean, let’s take “the tragedy of the commons,” for example. We and numerous others have written on the only-thinly-veiled reactionary assumptions and eugenic ends Garrett Hardin intended with that essay. Obviously, it has been proven to be empirically incorrect as well. Yet the tragedy of the commons remains something of an “ecological common sense” – it is taught uncritically in intro-level science and economics courses alike.

I think this is what D&G are getting at by saying there’s a “diffuse” element here; state-centric theories of fascism seem to downplay the role of the desires that state fascism actualizes, desires that are ambient in liberal capitalist social relations. Today, we might ask a different question of the tragedy of the commons than we ask in Hope Against Hope: why does the tragedy continue to hold such purchase for self-described environmentalists (along with those scientists and economists)? Institutional explanations can only get you so far; I think that behind the popularity of the tragedy of the commons is a racial, capitalist desire to actually see the tragedy of the commons play out – this is a different argument about neo-Malthusian theories like Hardin’s that Angela Mitropoulos makes in her piece “Lifeboat Capitalism.” The catastrophism of the tragedy is welcomed, in an almost eschatological manner. This should sit uncomfortably next to the popularity of certain kinds of apocalyptic fantasies today. And I think that certain parts of the Left participate in what Jodi Dean calls “anthropocenic enjoyment” as well, not just accelerationists, but also those who would sit by as the world burns with a sort of smug “I told you so.”(9)

Let me give an example of the diffuse desires of ecofascism. In 2017, I attended a public lecture by science writer Elizabeth Kolbert just after the publication of her essay collection The Sixth Extinction, in which several hundred were in the audience. And the Q&A, of course, immediately jumps to the question of “what should be done” because the book essentially refuses to grapple with that. Of course, there are some of your standard liberal responses that you’d expect. Then someone stands up, and perhaps a little bit sheepishly says something like “well, we’re not talking about the elephant in the room. It’s clear from your book that overpopulation is a huge problem! We have to address this!” At the mention of the word overpopulation, there was an audible murmur throughout the room; I distinctly remember someone behind me actually going “yes!” as the word was mentioned. As they finished asking, the crowd actually applauded! It doesn’t matter so much that Kolbert had a judicious if not satisfying response, but rather that it was clear (she may have even stated this) that she gets this question a lot. These were mostly liberal Midwesterners, many but not all of them white, and aren’t a bunch of out-and-out fascists. But you can see how the diffuseness of the neo-Malthusian assumption has already primed them for authorizing certain kinds of punitive state actions.

I’ll just say one other thing quickly, to circle back to the question of anti-fascist infrastructure: this anecdote, and the broader theory of fascism here, demonstrates that it is not enough to simply disprove Malthus; instead, the racial structures of desire actually have to be transformed at a different level of the social psyche.

 

Editors: In Hope Against Hope, you discuss the videos taken by New Yorkers who could not afford to leave during Hurricane Sandy. These videos feature white people leaving the city in droves prior to the storm.(10) This visual culture of white privilege and differential access to safety could be contrasted with images of the work of Occupy Sandy, during the storm’s aftermath. In these images, one can see a visual culture of mutual aid, rather than of privilege and desertion. What role do you think making these more hopeful responses visible might have in figuring more just nows and futures?(11) In other words, could visibility/representation of mutual aid be a tool of building solidarity? (I ask this specifically because of the central role visual culture has in bolstering harmful structures of racialized violence – environmental and otherwise)

Out of the Woods: This is a great question, and I’m not sure I’m necessarily the best to answer it since I am personally terrible at aesthetics – I’d rather wash dishes than paint a sign. But I will say this: I think that solidarity and healing doesn’t just happen automatically, it also has to be given meaning through the collective concepts and phrases that make the most sense. Obviously one of the ways we make solidarity meaningful is through telling ourselves stories – art, media, history – about when and how it actually worked. I don’t think we should oversell the importance of visual culture, but at the same time it is indispensable. The theory of the world we must rebuild is in those phrases and images – solidarity not charity; we the people must help each other; no ban on stolen land; Mni Wiconi; que es el pueblo que va salvar el pueblo. The more we can keep working on these names and slogans, the better. I dream of a demo or march where we no longer have to chant “this is what democracy looks like!”

Editors: You also discuss the notion of abolitionist care, in relation to the work of immigrant advocacy organization No More Deaths. How does the culture of mutual aid link with the notion of abolitionist care?(12)

Out of the Woods: China Medel’s articulation of an abolitionist care is truly beautiful, and I highly encourage everyone to read their essay along with Scott Warren’s – both in SAQ – for better situated understandings of this concept in the work of No More Deaths. What I strongly identified with in that essay is this: Medel says that care in the borderlands isn’t just care work for the migrants who have faced weaponized environments, which entail horrendous physical and psychological violence. Care here is also for each other – It exists in “excess practices of care that emerge between aid workers and the camp itself.”(13) This includes all forms of quotidian relations built in and through these camps – staying hydrated, cooking together, sharing a quiet moment under the stars or around a campfire. I think there’s a lot of healing and repair that isn’t always centralized when we think about revolutionary struggle as The End Goal. Abolitionist care centralizes that which must be dismantled, changed, and built; we really have to reckon with how to dismantle certain forms of white subjectivity, which is a painful process. Blockades and occupations around the world are one common site where such abolitionist care can be fostered, and readers might identify with their own experiences in some ways.

Editors: I see some potentially generative connections between your work and Kyle Whyte’s article, “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises.”(14) In the piece, Whyte highlights several often-overlooked issues in apocalyptic discourse. For instance, he notes that ostensible allies of Indigenous peoples sometimes “deny that they are actually living in what their ancestors would have seen as fantasy times.”(15) This issue can be linked to the way in which ecofascists often blame racialized peoples for contributing to environmental crises, rather than accepting that their (the ecofascists’) ancestors contributed significantly to creating this ecologically unstable world. In other words, in both cases there is a lack of acceptance of responsibility, first by ostensible allies to Indigenous peoples, then by ecofascists seeking to avoid apocalypse. Perhaps these two issues can be considered alongside each other. What do you think?

Out of the Woods: Exactly. Kyle Whyte’s work has been indispensable for thinking through what we call in the book “disaster as condition” – specifically, as tied to the afterlives of slavery and settler colonialism as a structure. Kyle helpfully summarizes the argument like this: “When people feel something is really urgent, or crisis-oriented, they tend to forget about their relationships with others. In fact, most phases of colonialism are ones where the colonizing society is freaked out about a crisis.”(16) He and numerous other Indigenous and Black thinkers seek to displace the sense of “disaster as event”: those who would diagnose ecological crisis as a relatively recent occurrence, an assumption tied to a settler subject position whose specific way of life and understanding of futurity is felt to be threatened. Now, I’ve heard a couple different reactions to this. On the one hand, if we understand “disaster as condition” tied to irreversible events like slavery and settler colonialism, it’s easy to fall into deeper despair and burnout. But I don’t think this is a very common response, actually. When we understand “disaster as condition”, it means we have to be in it for the long haul. There is no single technology, no revolutionary moment (and certainly no election) that is going to fix it for us. Instead, we have to do it carefully and do it right: that’s the responsibility to relations with others that we’re hoping to remember, rather than forget. 

Editors: In your forthcoming book, you explain the phrase “hope against hope”: “Hope is our word for the grave but positive emotion which collectively emerges within the disastrous present, pushes against it, and expands beyond it. With Ernst Bloch, we insist that this hope is not expectation, nor even optimism. Rather, it is always against itself; warding off its tendency to become a fetish, sundered from solidarity and struggle.”(17) Can you say a bit more about the political potential of this notion of “hope against hope,” specifically in relation to the risk of ecofascism?

Out of the Woods: It’s so easy to fall into platitudes about hope: it designates a better world, a utopia, the kind of Obama-esque rhetoric that papers over the maintenance of the status quo. Hope against hope is about that long haul I just mentioned – the constant churning and regeneration of active and responsible relationships in the present. Bloch helps us understand how the everyday anticipatory hopes can become active and creative in order to actually bring about that more just world. Something like hope against hope might work against the detached and ambient politics of crisis, fear, and apocalypse endemic to fascism, and towards instead fostering ever-increasing moments of abolitionist care.

 

Endnotes