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We are told we are living in the middle of a climate crisis of unprecedented proportions. As doomsday scenarios mount, hope collapses. Even as more and more people around the planet experience climate disaster as immediate and urgent, our imagination and programs for transformation lag. The disasters are already here, and the crises, longstanding, are ongoing.
In Hope Against Hope, the Out of the Woods collective investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism and calls for the expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize within and against ecological crisis characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and—relatedly—more frequent and devastating disasters. While much of environmentalist and leftist discourse in this political moment remain oriented toward horizons that repeat and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions, Out of the Woods charts a revolutionary course adequate to our times.
At the center of the renewed political orientation Hope Against Hope expounds is an abolitionist approach to border imperialism, reactionary ecology, and state violence that underpins many green solutions and modes of understanding nature. It reminds us of the frequent moments and movements of solidarity emerging in the ruins all around us. Their stunning conclusion to the disarray of politics in our seemingly end times is the urgency of creating what Out of the Woods calls “disaster communism”—the collective power to transform our future political horizons from the ruins and establish a climate future based in common life.
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.
Out of the Woods began in 2014 as a collective investigation into the various historical, contemporary, and future relationships between capitalism and climate change. We are exhausted by the way in which hegemonic ecological politics in the so-called Global North oscillates between a return to a romantic naturalism with reactionary tendencies and a pragmatic green capitalism. We are also inspired by and seek to amplify real movements abolishing the present state of things: survivors of Hurricane Katrina, Indigenous water protectors opposing transnational pipelines, migrants fighting border imperialism, struggles for Black lives in Ferguson and safe water in Flint.
We recognize the need for a much wider lens on both the breadth of ecological crisis and the historical forms through which it perpetuates exploitation, dispossession, exhaustion, and maybe insurrection. Out of the Woods is evolving with the intention of further multiplying our positions against homogeneity. We invite you to contact us, and to think, write, and struggle with us. As disaster engulfs spaces and times around us, what will it take to get out of the woods, together?
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I. BORDERS
Introduction: Disaster Migration
On Climate/Borders/Survival/Care/Struggle: Two Members of Out of the Woods in Conversation with BASE Magazine
Refuges and Death-Worlds
Infrastructure Against Borders
A Hostile Environment
II. NATURES
Introduction: Cyborg Ecology
The Dangers of Reactionary Ecology
Lies of the Land: Against and Beyond Völkisch Environmentalism
The Political Economy of Hunger
Contemporary Agriculture: Climate, Capital, and Cyborg Agroecology
James O’Connor’s Second Contradiction of Capitalism
Murray Bookchin’s Liberatory Technics
Organizing Nature in the Midst of Crisis: Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life
III. FUTURES
Introduction: Toward a Regenerative Utopianism
The Future is Kids’ Stuff
Cthulhu Plays No Role for Me
Postcapitalist Ecology: A Comment on Inventing the Future
IV. STRATEGIES
Introduction: Organizing Amidst Crisis
Blockadia and Capitalism: Naomi Klein vs. Naomi Klein
Climate Populism and the People’s Climate March
Après moi le déluge! Fossil Fuel Abolitionism and the Carbon Bubble
Disaster Communism: The Uses of Disaster
Bibliography
Index