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Barry Commoner once suggested that if we took the trillion annual dollars squandered on world military expenditure, we could feed, clothe, and educate the world’s population, and build a postgreenhouse economy freed from dependence on fossil fuels. As a cost-benefit analysis, this is ecologically persuasive. But such an analysis assumes that these disparate areas of social and economic life are not already linked in the first place—in other words, that institutional militarism, structural poverty, undereducation, and capital-intensive, hard energy production are not fundamentally linked in the world system of power relations. It is this kind of statistical calculation that generates the illusory promise of something like the ‘peace dividend’ in the wake of de-escalation of the Cold War. And yet, all too quickly, we find that ‘scarcity’ of some sort curiously prevents the reallocation to social programs of the vast economic resources devoted to the military, while noting that, in spite of this scarcity, there is always money to fight wars. It is not, then, simply a case of moving resources from one sector to another. Institutional militarism is much more than an obscene budgetary appropriation from the federal tax base. It is a highly complex embodiment of social, political, and cultural conditions of power, each with its own complex history. Militarism can no more be reduced to the testosterone factor—it’s a male thing—than it can be reduced to the specific economic need of capitalist production for market stability. If militarism is an ecological threat, the root problem lies: (a) in the social ecology of its own institutions, more profoundly undemocratic in their entire power structure than any comparably hierarchical, or authoritarian, political body: and (b) in the long, cumulative history of militarism’s hegemonic coordination of other institutions in society. All wars after the Gulf now demand urgent ecological analysis, not just because their consequences are physically damaging, and may imperil the survival of species on the planet—but also because they are rooted in a social ecology of domination that continues to sustain the power of some humans at the cost of the majority of others.

Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (Verso, 1994), p. 169.

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The environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III … [discusses] a goat “eradication” program on San Clemente Island, off the coast of California. Around 14,000 goats were shot (and many others trapped and removed) to conserve three endangered plant species. This action was justified in Rolston’s view because the goats are not endangered and therefore are “replaceable”—as well as not being “native” to the island. I am in wholehearted agreement with Rolston that the endangered status of the plants is ethically relevant. His discussion takes place in the context of a response to Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethic, which Rolston charges with paying inadequate respect to nonanimal forms of life, as well as species. But like those of many other conservationists and environmental philosophers, Rolston’s position has the opposite problem. The surety with which he declares the “right” thing to do, his confidence in the fact that conserving endangered species “outweighs” and so justifies the suffering and deaths of individuals, is, I think, deeply problematic. What are the limits of this “trumping” capacity of endangered species? How many goats can be killed to save a species of plant, and in what ways can they be killed? How much can they be required to suffer? Ongoing practices of “invasive species management” in the United States, Australia, and a number of other countries indicate that our tolerance for mass death and suffering in the name of conservation can be very high indeed. The other side of this equation […] is the suffering of those individuals that are “made to live” in zoos and captive breeding facilities for the sake of the continuity of their own species. For how long, and in what conditions, can these beings be made to live?

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 159–60, note 16, citing Holmes Rolston III, “Respect for Life: Counting What Singer Finds of No Account,” in Singer and His Critics, edited by Dale Jamieson (Blackwell, 1999).

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[W]hole modes of life, whole ways of living and dying in company with others, are disappearing—nonhuman languages, socialities, perhaps even cultures. Part of this loss will inevitably also be ways of mourning. Perhaps in the end, what must be mourned at this time, alongside so many other things, is the diminishment of mourning itself, the loss of the rich and varied expressions of grief that have evolved on this planet over millions of years. As species disappear, or as their socialities become dislocated and fractured by violence and disturbance, their ways of being meaningfully together in death, as in life, are undermined and lost.

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 137.

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French philosopher Françoise Dastur […] mov[es] away from a singular focus on the individual’s own death—what she calls a “phenomenology of mortality”—toward a more relational account centered on our memories of, and interactions with, the dead. This is a promising movement, and one that influences my thinking here. And yet, there is something profoundly traditional and humanist about the way in which Dastur takes up this idea; despite her shift in focus, death still emerges from her work as the basis of a divide between the human and the animal: “That human life is a life ‘with’ the dead is perhaps what truly distinguishes human existence from purely animal life”. Dastur’s thought seems to center on the notion that the political and cultural dimensions of human life inevitably “reference” the dead: whether directly, in the sense that the dead continue to live among us and act on us as spirits or ghosts, or “simply” in terms of the meanings, values, memories, and ideas that we individually and collectively inherit (not to mention the languages and other modes of expression that we inherit them through). […] Death does important boundary work in this kind of philosophical thought. Knowledge of death, or a relationship with the dead, here joins a long list of other “lacks,” other characteristics or attributes that are thought to ground an essential difference between humanity and animality: be it the possession of language, mirror self-recognition, rationality, moral agency, or any number of other characteristics. In this context, death has become […] an essential and unique characteristic proper to the human that does not just make us different in the way that all animal species are different from one another, but somehow sets us outside the sphere of animality. […] But, as with all these other supposed “lacks,” it is far from clear that death is up to the task of dividing up the animal kingdom so neatly or finally. If we take seriously specific nonhumans and the current scientific literature about them, examples abound of animals interacting with the dead in ways that, at the very least, must draw us to question these ideas: from foxes burying others of their kind and gorillas caught up in obvious displays of profound grief, to the long periods of interaction with the bones of the dead that so often occur in elephant communities, sometimes covering them with leaves or branches, and at other times slowly and silently touching them with their trunks and feet. Reading longer accounts of these behaviors, it is often hard to believe that these animals do not have some notion of death, some concept that the other is no longer with them in the same way and will not be again. What else might it mean to a fox or an elephant to bury or cover the body of another or to return to their bones, again and again? At the same time, in their frequent return to touch the bones of their dead, I see in elephants’ grief a quiet but profound challenge to Dastur’s notion of the human. Can we possibly think that elephants do not dwell with the dead in their own elephant ways? Can we really believe that their community, their lives, are not also structured around and lived in reference to those who are now gone? The captive Hawaiian Crows who are thought to have lost parts of their vocal repertoire in the absence of free-living adults to learn from also offer a powerful example of a nonhuman community that has traditionally drawn from and referenced those who are no longer living corporeally among them. […] As is suggested by the plight of Hawai‘i’s crows—alongside that of elephants around the world, many of whom are endangered and subject to ongoing anthropogenic violence—perhaps the ability to live in a way that references and interacts with the dead is not uniquely human as such, but rather is a way of life that we are increasingly denying to a host of other animals.

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 131–3, citing Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude (translated by John Llewelyn, Athlone , 1996).

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Recognizable petrels and albatrosses can be found in the fossil record from roughly 32 million years ago. As early as 9 million years ago, fossils from the Southern Ocean indicate that these birds were already very similar to their current forms. Millions of years before anything like the human species appeared on the scene, albatrosses were already soaring, dancing, and fishing across this great blue planet. Approached with an attentiveness to evolutionary history and a focus on the complex and difficult emergence of each new generation, it is clear that this thing we call a “species” is an incredible achievement. Each of the literally millions of generations of albatrosses that have followed one after the other has itself been ushered into the world through this narrow passage: laid, incubated, hatched, guarded and fed by parents, before taking those first steps toward flight and the world beyond. We often do not appreciate—and perhaps we cannot truly grasp—the immensity of this intergenerational work: the skill, commitment, cooperation, and hard work, alongside serendipity, that are required in each generation to carry the species through. It is with recognition of this embodied intergenerational achievement that I understand species as “flight ways.” This understanding is possible only since Darwin. Central to the mode of thought that evolutionary theory opened up is the transition from an understanding of a species as a fixed and eternal “kind” to that of something more akin to a historical lineage stretched between a beginning (speciation) and an inevitable end (extinction). In this context, a species must be understood as something like a “line of movement” though evolutionary time. But it is much more than an empty trajectory. Each species lineage embodies a particular way of life, a particular set of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are passed between generations. But this is also not a static way of life. More than the sum of those individuals currently living, species are engaged in an ongoing intergenerational process of becoming—of adaptation and transformation—in which individual organisms are not so much “members” of a class or a kind, but “participants” in an ongoing and evolving way of life.

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 26–7.

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[C]onventional understandings [of extinction] center on the death of the last individual of a kind. We may not very often be sure if any given individual really is the last, but we are usually confident that if we did (or could) know for certain, then we would be able to pinpoint the precise moment of an extinction. The death of Martha the Passenger Pigeon at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, or that of an unnamed Po’ouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma [a Hawaiian honeycreeper]) in conservationists’ hands in 2003, were in all likelihood simultaneously deaths of individuals and “extinctions” in this sense. There is, of course, something entirely accurate about this understanding. Something important and profound took place with the deaths of these last individuals. And yet, the immensity and significance of extinction cannot be captured within these singular events, as though a species might be deemed to be extinct or not solely on the basis of the presence in the world of at least one individual of that kind/lineage. This understanding reduces species to specimens—reified representatives of a “type” in a museum of life—in a way that fails to acknowledge their entangled complexity. The nomadic form of life of Passenger Pigeons, moving through the sky in flocks of hundreds of millions of birds that blocked out the sun, had long since come to an end when Martha passed away in 1914. As Passenger Pigeon numbers dwindled, the social and behavioral diversity of this unique way of life—of what it was to be a Passenger Pigeon in some fundamental sense—would also have broken down. Similarly, over the decades before Martha’s death, the interspecies relationships that the Passenger Pigeon evolved and lived within would also have become increasingly fractured as these birds stopped playing any significant role in the lives and nourishment of diverse humans and nonhumans. A singular focus on Martha’s death covers over all of this; it presents a species as somehow “ongoing” because one individual continues to draw breath in a zoo, while the entangled relations that in a nontrivial sense are this particular life form and its form of life, have long ago become frayed and disconnected. The point here is not that a bird in a zoo is not a bird at all. Clearly, many birds are capable of living in a range of environments, of adapting to changed conditions: a species is not a single, narrow, and unchanging way of life—as is indicated so well by the numerous birds and other animals who have taken up residence within, sometimes as an integral part of the emergence of, “human” cities. Rather, the point is that the loss, the change and disruption—often accompanied by violence and suffering—that occurs in extinction must not be reduced to this one event. Instead, the deaths of these last individuals must be understood as singular losses in the midst of the tangled and ongoing patterns of loss that an extinction is.

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 10–12.

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Not only do affluent Western consumers with vast carbon footprints bear a disproportionally larger responsibility for environmental deterioration than destitute peasants in the Global South, the fallout of those changes also affects different constituencies in vastly dissimilar ways: the impact of Hurricane Katrina on black and white neighborhoods in New Orleans or the threat of rising sea levels in a rich country like the Netherlands and an impoverished one like Bangladesh illustrate the differentiated vulnerability of distinct groups. This gives the lie to the facile claim that in a climate changed world, there are no lifeboats. As Malm and Hornborg (2014) write, “[f]or the foreseeable future … there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged”. Today, such lifeboats often take the shape of a luxury doomsday bunker or even of a rocket, as in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s much-hyped ambition to colonize Mars in order to, in Musk’s own words, “safeguard the existence of humanity”. The vaguely humanitarian rhetoric obscures that at best, planetary relocation can accommodate an infinitesimally small segment of the human population while it will abandon billions to a heating and drowning earth. In such scenarios, the pious invocation of the species transparently serves as an alibi not to address the degradation of the lifeworld.

Pieter Vermeulen, Literature and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2020), pp. 13–14.

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Care is not only ontologically but politically ambivalent. We learn from feminist approaches that it is not a notion to embrace innocently. Thought and work on care still has to confront the tricky grounds of essentializing women’s experiences and the persistent idea that care refers, or should refer, to a somehow wholesome or unpolluted pleasant ethical realm. Delving into feminist work on the topic invites us to become substantially involved with care as a living terrain that seems to need to be constantly reclaimed from idealized meanings, from the constructed evidence that, for instance, associates care with a form of unmediated work of love accomplished by idealized carers.

María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 7–8.

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Ex-Vöid, "Swansea" (2024)

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[I]n the village, and not only there, classes travel under strange and deceptive banners. They are not apprehended as ghostly, abstract concepts but in the all-too-human form of specific individuals and groups, specific conflicts and struggles. […] [T]he Malay peasant experiences increasing land rents, stingy landlords, ruinous interest rates from moneylenders, combine-harvesters that replace him, and petty bureaucrats who treat him shabbily. He does not experience the cash nexus or the capitalist pyramid of finance that makes of those landlords, combine-harvester owners, moneylenders, and bureaucrats only the penultimate link in a complex process. Small wonder, then, that the language of class in the village should bear the birthmarks of its distinctive origin. Villagers do not call Pak Haji Kadir an agent of finance capital; they call him Kadir Ceti because it was through the Chettiar moneylending caste, which dominated rural credit from about 1910 until World War II, that the Malay peasant most forcibly experienced finance capital. The fact that the word Chettiar has similar connotations fur millions of peasants in Vietnam and Burma as well is a tribute to the homogenization of experience which the capitalist penetration of Southeast Asia brought in its wake. Nor is it simply a question of recognizing a disguise and uncovering the real relationship that lies behind it. For the disguise, the metaphor, is part of the real relationship. The Malays historically experienced the moneylender as a moneylender and as a Chettiar—that is, as a foreigner and a non-Muslim. Similarly, the Malay typically experiences the shopkeeper and the rice buyer not only as a creditor and wholesaler but as a person of another race and another religion. Thus the concept of class as it is lived is nearly always an alloy containing base metals; its concrete properties, its uses, are those of the alloy and not of the pure metals it may contain.

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 43–44.

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Those with power [...] may write the basic script for the play but, within its confines, truculent or disaffected actors find sufficient room for maneuver to suggest subtly their disdain for the proceedings. The necessary lines may be spoken, the gesture made, but it is clear that many of the actors are just going through the motions and do not have their hearts in the performance. A banal example, familiar to any motorist or pedestrian, will illustrate the kind of behavior involved. The traffic light changes when a pedestrian is halfway across the intersection. As long as the pedestrian is not in imminent danger from the oncoming traffic, a small dramatization is likely to ensue. He lifts his knees a bit higher for a step or two, simulating haste, thereby implicitly recognizing the motorist's right-of-way. In fact, in nearly all cases, if my impression is correct, the actual progress of the pedestrian across the intersection is no faster than it would have been if he had simply proceeded at his original pace. What is conveyed is the impression of compliance without its substance. But the symbolic order, the right of the motorist to the road, is not directly challenged; indeed, it is confirmed by the appearance of haste. It is almost as if symbolic compliance is maximized precisely in order to minimize compliance at the level of actual behavior.

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985), p. 26.

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Nana Grizol, "Not the Night Wind" (2020)

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I think especially for Natives in the US, the NoDAPL campaign was very important, and I’m sure thousands of Native youth were radicalized in some way by participating in it. Ultimately, however, the NoDAPL campaign failed. I would suggest this occurred for a number of reasons, the primary one being that the opposition, despite some militant actions that occurred, was primarily based on “non-violent civil disobedience” and pacifist methods. Any attempts at creating a diversity of tactics were largely squashed by the NGO-type organizers that dominated the debates on tactics, combined with the lack of experience among members of the Standing Rock reservation. In contrast, I like to point out the resistance carried out by the Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick in 2013 against exploratory work for fracking operations. They didn’t have thousands of people gather, didn’t have big name celebrities join in, and didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars at their disposal. They mobilized their community and after a brief attempt at non-violent civil disobedience, they carried out more militant actions including sabotage and road blockades. Their main blockade was cleared out by police in October 2013, which resulted in six police cars being torched; afterwards, they used more mobile tire fire blockades to disrupt the exploratory work. Eventually, the company, SWN Resources, pulled out before completing all their work, and the next year a provincial election was held that saw the pro-fracking government thrown out of power in what was seen as a plebiscite on fracking. The new government enacted a moratorium on fracking. The Mi’kmaq, even though they were much smaller in numbers than what we saw at Standing Rock, and with far less resources, were victorious.

Gord Hill, “Gord Hill, Indigenous Artist and Anarchist: An Interview,” CrimethInc., 1 August 2017.

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There is a certain archaic grandeur about the setting of Orwell's experiences in Homage to Catalonia, and even about the actors. For, by the accident of history, he has entered a small, simplified society dominated by a few broad ethical concepts which gain value because of the material primitiveness of existence. These badly armed militiamen, guarding their mountaintops with very little but their ideals, seem a great deal nearer to the men who fought at Thermopylae and Marathon than to the great mechanized armies of modern times. It was doubtless this sense of living in a world snatched out of history that made Orwell recollect it immediately afterwards as something which had ‘the magic quality’ of ‘memories that are years old.’

George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 174–5.

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Gaelynn Lea, "Moment of Bliss" (2018)

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Goodbye to Berlin is not […] about the failure of liberal leadership, but about the failure of feeling in an impoverished, demoralized, bankrupt city. There are no public figures in the book, and no great events: Hitler never appears, and the political struggles of the time are virtually ignored. There are only the Lost—the poor, the weak, the neurotic, the lonely and unloved, living their sad private lives. Together they compose the city in which fascism was possible. It is the reality of that city that is Isherwood’s essential subject. Like Eliot in The Waste Land, he made an image of his city out of fragments of the lives of its inhabitants—a cabaret singer, a whore, a working-class hustler, a bartender, a Jewish merchant. The Berlin that their lives express is, like Eliot’s London, a waste land of human isolation, of soiled love, of urban deadness and despair, and of inaction. It is a city in which no one acts, and no one feels, a frozen and lifeless place, like the the bottom of Dante’s hell. But it is also a city in history: it belongs to the ’thirties, as Eliot’s city belong to the ’twenties. And what makes it ’thirty-ish is that it can define its hell in political terms. […] Isherwood’s essential Berlin [is] a city of lonely people closed off from one another, of squalor, poverty, and despair, a city that is like the whistles of the young men—lascivious and private and sad. […] Isherwood’s subject is a city that is dying of social sickness—of poverty, isolation, and despair—and is, at the end of the book, “cold and cruel and dead”. That dying city had engaged his imagination deeply—he never wrote so well about any other subject—and his book is a kind of elegy, a pained backward look at a city that had been a home of sorts for a shy, inverted young man, and to which he could not return, because it was dead. […] Goodbye to Berlin is not a didactic book, but nevertheless it does contain a lesson in history. It tells us that poverty kills feelings, and isolates one man from another like freezing weather; that love and hate are political terms, and that hate feeds on human separateness; that violence is the energy of frozen hearts; that passivity and detachment are cold virtues. It is not a lesson that is taught abstractly; nobody makes political speeches in the book, and author and narrator are scrupulously reticent. Rather it is a lesson that is felt in the emotions, like a bad dream. “Youth always demands its nightmares ...” Isherwood wrote in 1939. “Germany supplied them.”

Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (Bodley Head, 1976), pp. 354–9.

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In the early ’thirties, war was a folly to be opposed through pacifist action: the option of not fighting was still an open one, and most liberals chose it. Then in the middle years of the decade, an actual military action began in Abyssinia and then in Spain, war become a heroic resistance to fascism, in which the brave man would choose to join “the army of the other side”. But it was still a choice, and the war that literary heroes like Auden and Isherwood’s Alan went off to [in The Dog Beneath the Skin] was still being fought somewhere else. But as the end of the ’thirties approached, war came to seem neither an elected action nor a foreign one, but a catastrophe that could happen right here, in England, and soon: it was the Apocalypse that would destroy culture. This was the line taken by the government in defence of its policies of appeasement; but even those on the Left who urged resistance and the Popular Front agreed that if war came it would mean the end of western civilization. The only thing that could be worse, they thought, was a fascist world. […] [T]he ’thirties was surely the first time in history when the belief was generally held that a war would have such dire and wholesale effects on all human values; certainly nobody thought such thoughts before the First World War.

Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (Bodley Head, 1976), pp. 292–3.