Author Archives: slepow

Systems thinking and the university

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I found myself struggling to write our final paper, because there were so many points I wanted to touch on and it seemed daunting to unite these points under a coherent argument. This blog post then is almost doubly difficult, because I’ll need to cut so many points out to keep the word count. Nonetheless, in this post I’d like to focus on systems thinking as it pertains to our action group project and the university system as a whole.

As we have learned it in class, systems thinking is an understanding that people, organizations, institutions, environments, non-human animals, and more are all in relation to one another. In our group, we worked as individual people within a group system. This group system worked within our class system, and the ICA system, and the university system, all of which also work within different systems (and of course our bodies are systems and relate to the ecological systems around us). 

In thinking about our group and ICA in relation to the university system, I found myself wondering about the purpose and feasibility of progressive struggle and action from within an institution so totally invested (literally) in fossil fuels, ecological destruction, and war. What are ways we could be using our energy more productively, while still pushing for climate justice? What will be the actual, material result of UW divesting from fossil fuels when so many other universities still will be? What are the contradictions of pushing for climate justice as students within an objectively colonial and imperialist institution? 

With all these questions, I don’t have specific conclusions. In my personal time, I engage in both institutional and subversive action, with varying results. I believe that there is value in organizing for institutional reform (particularly when keeping in mind the greater impact that success in this area can have), but I also recognize that American universities are inherently colonial and exploitative—in their histories, and in their present-day actions as well—and their interests are at odds with the interests of the masses. What I do hold is the importance of understanding the contradictions within any type of struggle. While there may not be one perfect way to “do the work,” building with each other and recognizing the limitations and strengths of different tactics will produce a more cohesive and powerful movement.

Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene: human issues and their specific roots

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While I resonate with many of the arguments posited in The Worm at the Core, I also find myself questioning the universality posed by authors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. Their experiments, which largely have been performed on Americans, Canadians, and Israelis, have results which are then applied to humans as a whole, and without significant regard to class, race, and other differentiators. This is not to dismiss their conclusions, but rather to question whether every person has the same understandings and fears of death.

The movie Anthropocene as well, while helpful in showing the extent of climate crisis, at many points lacked an internationalist analysis and instead pointed to all humans as the cause of climate change. While somewhat different from universalizing fears of death, this is another example, in my opinion, of painting too broad a stroke with regards to climate and death. Specificity with regards to who/what has caused climate destruction allows for more accurate conclusions with regards to alleviating future destruction.

Large, heavy machinery works in the middle of a vast, barren field. Humans look on in the foreground.

Creating the capitalocene: endless accumulation – CounterPunch.org

This specificity is exemplified in a shift from calling our current era the “anthropocene” toward names such as “capitalocene” and “plantationocene” (plantation including chattel slavery as well as other forms of agro-industrialization). I was first introduced to these terms by a friend last week, and truthfully I’ve done only the barest readings of either. Nonetheless, in this interview, Donna Haraway says that “the Anthropocene is […] an historical, situated set of conjunctures that are absolutely not a species act.” In the same series of articles, Sophie Sap Moore et. al. posit that the plantation was “produced through processes of land alienation, labor extraction, and racialized violence.”

This terminology correction seems valuable to me as a way to shift focus from “mankind” as the cause of climate crisis (which might lead to eugenicist and fascist solutions such as reducing births) and instead towards an understanding that global systems of imperialism and colonialism have exploited masses of people for the benefit of a few, moving everyone closer to climate catastrophe. This in itself does not pose a solution, and in all honesty I don’t have one. Just that a more thorough analysis of our circumstances will lead to a sharper understanding of our duties. 

Something less heavy—I’m slowly starting to curate a (limited and not at all cohesive) death/climate crisis playlist. Please add and listen! Or don’t! 

Climate nihilism and community care

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I worked through two responses before deciding on this one, which I chose for its attempted honesty in the face of real, violent, and discriminative political/ecological threats. This short response argues for an understanding of community care as a means to mitigate the effects of climate change on the most marginalized. I assume several things which are not necessarily true and are framed imperfectly, listed below. 

  1. There is nothing the masses can do to “stop” climate change
  2. There is nothing the capitalists and imperialists can/will do to “stop” climate change
  3. Climate change is resulting in mass extinction
  4. Climate change will not kill all humans, and will discriminate along geopolitical, racial, and class lines 

These assumptions are at best incomplete and at worst false. That said, I adopt them in my life to move toward an acceptance of “our” collective fate, and move forward in my own actions. I’ve come to terms with this as “climate nihilism,” which strikes me as similar to Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander’s This Civilization is Finished, and builds off the anonymously-authored Desert (which is kind of worth the read, but not at all working toward an Indigenous analysis of climate change and its effects).

Indigenous struggle as climate struggle and struggle against the colonial state—a blockade in so-called Toronto in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in so-called British Columbia displays a banner reading “NO PIPELINES: Stop RCMP Invasion on Indigenous Lands.”

With this acceptance, I try and often fail to do actions that have the greatest immediate impact on those that are most affected by climate change. This can be described as community care, which I define in line with bell hooks’s All About Love, where she attempts to redirect her readers toward a constant and true practice of love in their lives. Mutual aid, whether true to its theory or not, comes to mind—in Seattle this seems to be one common way for community care to manifest. It especially stems from the knowledge that our disproportionately Black and brown unhoused neighbors are also disproportionately affected by climate change. Long, hot, smoky summers, and long, cold, rainy winters lead to preventable deaths from exposure. A meal or a cigarette for a neighbor can be a radical act of love.

Climate change is here—orange smoke in Seattle 2020 shrouds the buildings and trees.

This line of thinking, admittedly, is dangerous. It ignores opportunities to mobilize mass lines, work on long-term campaigns, and otherwise organize in politically powerful groups. I describe it, though, in an attempt at an honest answer to the question of “first thoughts”—an acceptance of collective semi-destruction must not mean apathy, but instead move us toward care for each other. 

After this wordy response—more words! Here are so many books (should be linked to free online versions) that inform these thoughts. In no order:

  1. All About Love
  2. Accomplices not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex
  3. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (will have to make an account then download)
  4. Desert
  5. Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla
  6. The Progressive Plantation: racism inside white radical social change groups
  7. The Land of Open Graves 
  8. National Union of the Homeless: a brief history
  9. Primer: Transnational Weapons Corporations (click through to w-tnc.pdf)
  10. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next!)
  11. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Liberalism

Citations:

Abbas, Freya. “What Canadians should Know about the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s Struggle.” InkSpire, https://inkspire.org/post/what-canadians-should-know-about-the-wetsuweten-nations-struggle/-M2R80RtqjuC-63LBrof. 

Alexander, Samuel. “This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire—and What Lies Beyond.” The Simplicity Collective, June 14, 2019. 

Anonymous. Desert. E-book, The Anarchist Library, 2011. 

hooks, bell. All About Love. HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. 

Live Storms Media. “09-12-2020 Seattle, WA – Wildfire Smoke – Major City With Worst Air Quality in the World.” Youtube, September 12, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH6Spfsntjc.