Permanent Ecological Conflict: An Ecology Of Tactics Against The World Eater / Xander Dunlap
Author and activist Xander Dunlap joins me in this wide-ranging interview to discuss permanent ecological conflict, as theorized and documented via numerous case studies in his new book, This System is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy and Ecological Conflict, published through Pluto Press.
The living earth is under assault. High modernist capitalists logics, rooted in colonial legacies of domination and extraction, frame much of the environmental discussions and activism of how to address the global ecological crisis reaching its inevitable outcome: a death by a thousand and one cuts. Will carbon accounting and capture do the trick? Will electric cars save us from the internal combustion engine? Will the construction of solar and wind farms assuage our collective guilt of living in the global north?
One could argue these technological innovations and infrastructures move us in the right direction. Unless you're on the ground, living close to the lands and waters affected by these innovations. Then, you may, in fact, be attempting to halt these projects: the proposed lithium mine; the solar energy or wind energy farm. On the ground, the burgeoning green economy looks a hell of a lot like the one that brought us to this world-rending polycrisis we find ourselves in today.
“The common thread through this thing is the idea of permanent ecological conflict, and what that really means is people who have really decided and dedicated themselves to be in conflict with their lives and with everything they got against—you can call it capitalism, you can call it the state, you can call it colonialism, you can call it a lot of different things. You can call the mega machine, the world eater. There are a lot of different ways we can talk about it, but it all roughly means essentially the same thing in terms of this kind of urban apparatus of resource extraction—human, timber, water—people really doing everything they can to be in permanent conflict with that.
“And a lot of this idea of permanent conflict, whether it comes from the ’70s in Italy, which probably has a much older genealogy—I think a lot of the things we're talking about are kind of ancient, but are kind of continuing or manifesting or being theorized in certain ways. But it’s people moving from this kind of symbolic protest. It is moving away from this weekend warrior, whether it's the day antiwar protests, the climate camp, or whether it's the anti-globalization crash the meeting, and actually really moving into a situation where people are like, no, this isn't just a weekend thing. This isn't a feel good identity. This isn't this kind of “activism.” This is, how do I actually engage in permanent conflict and use everything I have in my life to change?”
Bio:
Xander Dunlap is a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston University, USA, and a visiting research fellow in the Global Development Studies Department, University of Helsinki, Finland. Their work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in Latin America, Europe and the United States. They have written numerous books, most recently Enforcing Ecocide: Power, Policing and Planetary Militarization. They are a long-time participant in anti-police, squatting and environmental movements.
Episode Notes:
Purchase a copy of The System is Killing Us from Pluto Books
Follow Xander on X @DrX_ADunlap
The music featured is by Nick Vander, used with permission by the artist.
