Refuse Dystopia

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Episode five refuse Dystopia. In the end, the state failed
in more places than it succeeded. It was a matter
of sheer logistics. After more than a century of taking
the United States for granted as a concept, the men
women in jack booted thugs at the top were reminded
of just how big this country is. In response to

(00:21):
a government crackdown, wildcats strikes sparked up all across the
big cities. Many were crushed by police and arrested. Activists
were often forced back into their old service industry jobs
as prison labor. But some of the strikes succeeded. With
interstate commerce breaking down, police in many urban areas weren't
able to maintain their supplies of riot munitions and ammunition

(00:42):
in your own area, a spirited alliance with some of
the rural communities near by allowed you to move like
water when the cops came in force while choking their
access to supplies from the central government. Eventually they broke
and left. That story more or less was repeated in
hundreds of com unities across the country. Eventually the Feds

(01:03):
gave up. There were attempts to impose demands on the government,
and some of those demands even went through, but most
of the old States power devolved into a loose association
of local communities. What's going on in some of those
communities sounds pretty scary. You've heard awful stories from other states,
but where you live things are looking up. No one
pays rent now in your neighborhood. People own the property

(01:25):
they're willing to maintain. There are more houses than people still,
as there have always been, so the biggest logistical hurdle
has been organizing training and skill sharing across the city
and nearby towns to ensure everything stays maintained. For the
most part, it does. Power is almost as reliable as
it used to be before things fell apart, and the
hybrid solar wind set up you and your community put

(01:47):
together works better than the old system did. By the end.
You all have to be more careful about your power use.
No leaving things plugged in, fewer personal appliances, and more
shared ones. During the summer, you run your ace at
the heat of the day and keep your homes properly
sealed so it stays cool at night. The food situation
got bad at a couple of points. During the worst days,

(02:10):
you learned what it feels like to be truly hungry.
But between the people who died and the people who fled,
including most of the old money types, the overall caloric
need in your area dropped substantially. You all got better
at aquaponics, building greenhouses, learning how to cultivate and survive
off plants native to your area. Now chickens and even
a few cows graze free in every neighborhood. You and

(02:32):
your next door neighbor keep goats and make cheese. You
trade for eggs every couple of weeks. You no longer
own a car, or rather, your car is no longer
just your car. It was new enough that one of
the mechanic collectives was able to modify it into a
purely electric vehicle, and now it runs off the same
solar grid as everything else. Every block has a couple
of vehicles just like this in common. They're used for

(02:55):
hauling produce, transporting small groups on occasional johnts across town,
and even the odd joy ride. There's a sign up
sheet for that. There are times when you miss the
old days, but then you think about the people who died,
and those last terrible convulsions of a broken system. You
think about the friends you had who didn't make it
through the months of hunger, or who died to gunfire

(03:15):
by the police or from vigilantes. The new world you've
helped to build isn't perfect, but you know it will
never turn into the kind of monster that brought you here.
You owe it to the dead to make sure of that.
On Thursday June at approximately one am, the twelve story

(03:36):
Champlain Tower South Complex in Miami, Florida collapsed. Dozens of
people were buried in the rubble would ultimately die crushed
to death by their own homes. It took weeks for
rescuers to search through more than fourteen thousand pounds of rubble,
and was just over a month before the final victim
was definitively identified. The story of how and why the

(03:59):
Champlain Tower collapsed and killed so many of its residents
is a perfect example of how social democracy can fail
when confronted with an existential threat. See In a condo
complex like the Champlain Towers, all the residents own part
of the building. They elect representatives a condo board to
make decisions about things like when to make repairs and

(04:19):
how much to spend on those repairs. In many ways,
this is a better situation for the residents than say,
living in an apartment complex. Your home is your own property.
You don't live at the dictates of a landlord. But
if one or a few of you recognize a major
problem with the larger building, you have to get everyone
else on board in order to fund repairs. The Champlain

(04:40):
Towers Condo Board met repeatedly in the years that led
up to the collapse. Many on the board pushed their
fellow residents to pony up the cash hints of thousands
of dollars apiece to fix the very obvious damage and
structural failures of their building. People don't like to spend
huge amounts of money to fix problems they're pretty sure
they can ignore, so the repair is kept getting put off.

(05:01):
People would demand more inspections, which took more time and
put off further votes on the millions and desperately needed repairs.
With every year that went by, the damage deepened and
the price of repair increased from nine million dollars to
fifteen million dollars. For the people who accepted the severity
of the problem, this delay was intolerable. In two thousand nineteen,

(05:21):
the President of the condo board, and at Goldstein resigned
in protest. In a letter to the condo Association, she wrote,
we work for months to go in one direction, and
at the very last minute objections are raised that should
have been discussed and resolved right in the beginning. This
pattern has repeated itself over and over, ego battles, undermining
the roles of fellow board members, circulation of gossip and mistruths.

(05:43):
I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the
functioning of our board and many before us, but describes
a board that works very hard but cannot, for the
reasons above, accomplish the goals we set out to accomplish.
Residents signed a petition against an assessment that pegged the
price of repair between eighty thousand and two hundred thousand
dollars per condo. People balked that the cost was akin

(06:06):
to taking out a second mortgage. Dozens of them then
died in their homes, lives over but bank accounts fuller.
They died alongside residents who saw the problem and supported
taking action, but failed to force the issue. Like the
residents of the Champlain Towers, we are stuck in a
problem of collective action. We cannot fix anything without getting

(06:26):
a hell of a lot of our fellow humans on
board a solution. And if we fail, opting out of
the system, moving to the woods or whatever won't stop
us from burning from the same wildfires that scorched the
homes of climate deniers. I tend to think that among
the people who see the true scope of the problems
facing us, you have two broad categories of response. They

(06:47):
are the optimists, always at work trying to mitigate harm
and wake people up, and there are the nihilists. The
nihilists also break into two broad chunks. One chunk of
us want to go hide in the woods or drop
out in other ways. These are the dark mountain types.
They accept the situation as fucked beyond unfucking and try
to enjoy what time they have left. On the other

(07:07):
side are people who decide the best thing they can
do is light fires and break things. Over a billion
sea creatures died on the Northwest coast when the Pacific
heat dome hit in early summer one. New research indicates
that in recent years, global insect populations have declined by
as much as seventy five one point five degrees celsius

(07:28):
of warming, which we absolutely will hit in the very
near future, will kill an additional hundred and fifty million
people per year from air pollution alone. When you put
the facts together and really force yourself to look at them,
it is hard not to at least consider terrorism as
a legitimate response to climate change. I would go so
far as to say that on a moral level, violence

(07:48):
against the individuals, institutions, and governments most responsible for our
shared catastrophe is very much justified. Again, we're looking at
roughly fourteen holocausts per year of additional dead people, and
just from the air pollution caused by one and a
half degree celsius of warming. There are people, individual human beings,
who were warned about this decades ago and made the

(08:09):
decision to devote great wealth and power towards ensuring nothing
was done. There are people who recognize the reality of
the situation and chose to deny it for the sake
of their own political and media careers. In the wake
of the Second World War, with tens of millions dead,
the victorious Allies held a great trial at Nuremberg to
punish those most responsible. You could probably get quite a

(08:29):
few people on board the idea of holding a climate Nuremberg,
and if that's justified, why isn't some sort of insurgency.
Today we celebrate the French Resistance, the brave partisans from Czechoslovakia,
Ukraine and Russia who struck hopeless blows against the Nazis
despite the certainty of their own doom. It is probable
that the people of the future will feel similarly about

(08:51):
our modern day eco terrorists, many of whom are currently
rotting away in federal penitentiaries. Most people outside of activist
circles have not heard of the Green scare. It's a
term that refers to a concerted campaign by federal law
enforcement and the federal government, both Republicans and Democrats, to
crack down severely on the activist wing of the environmental movement.

(09:13):
The culprits were people who had burnt down construction sites
for housing developments, destroyed SUVs and car dealership lots, spiked
logging or mining equipment, and in one case, set fire
to a McDonald's. Despite the fact that these activists did
not kill human beings, they were treated by law enforcement
as terrorists, a tactic that has become increasingly common in

(09:33):
the years since. Earlier this year, Jessica Resinesek, a Catholic
environmentalist activist, was sentenced to eight years in prison for
damaging heavy construction equipment meant for use on the Dakota
Access pipeline. Resinesek was prosecuted as a terrorist. The judge
who sentenced her said that domestic terrorism charges were warranted
because Jessica sought not only to stop the flow of

(09:54):
oil through a pipeline, but to prevent government approval of
pipelines like Dapple in the future. Now, it is possible
that the damage Jessica helped do to that construction equipment
de layed the construction of the pipeline that has certainly
acclaimed the government made. The Dakota Access pipeline was completed, though,
and has gone on to leak several times. In July
of this year, a Department of Transportation regulator issued a

(10:17):
notice against the company that runs the pipeline, alleging multiple
serious safety violations. If Jessica really did delay construction, it's
possible she reduced the harm caused by the pipeline, but
if so, the overall impact was sadly minimal. Hundreds of
thousands of gallons of oil still flow through the Dakota
Access pipeline every day. The company behind it suffered a

(10:39):
few million in damages, but Jessica rezinesex suffered much more.
She will spend almost a decade behind bars, an other
three years under probation, and she owes more than three
million dollars in restitution, ensuring she will never be able
to lead more than an economically marginal life in the future.
That is, of course, the government's strategy here. When you

(11:00):
come at people like the hammer of God, whenever they
consider environmental direct action, you reduce the chances of something
like that going viral. Think of the way direct action
got briefly picked up by liberals nationwide during the George
Floyd protests. For the first time, maybe ever, you had
large numbers of normal people, the kind of folks the
cops can't brutalize without creating an outcry either doing or

(11:22):
physically supporting people doing damage to police infrastructure. This terrified
the people in power, both liberal and conservative, and as
a result, they've spent the last half year or so
pushing a raft of new laws to criminalize protest. More
than that, we've seen cities like New York, Los Angeles,
and Minneapolis deploy a wildly excessive police and sometimes military

(11:42):
forces at the start of new protest movements. The goal
is to scare away all but the most committed activists,
to avoid letting any protest reach the critical mass of
numbers that makes crackdowns dangerous. When considering this topic, I
found a lot of wisdom in something J. R. R.
Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher in the dark day
days of nineteen forty three concerning the global plague of industrialization.

(12:05):
There is only one bright spot, and that is the
growing habit of disgruntled men dynamiting factories and power stations.
I hope that encouraged now as patriotism, may remain a habit,
but it won't do any good if it is not universal.
And that is more or less the truth. Ecological direct
action as an occasional fringe burst of fury does little
besides make a statement. It may be many things, but

(12:28):
it is not a path forward for us if we
care about more than just fenting our rage against industrial society.
I know that it can be extremely tempting to take
the attitude that the situation is already fucked, we might
as well just burn it all down, But that attitude
isolates you, and while you are offering people nothing but
a sense of doom, the fascist is promising them that

(12:48):
with enough state violence, they and their families can at
least be protected. Leviathan is coming to them and saying,
hand over power to the state, and we can bring
back some version of the good times. Every bad actor
route there is coming with promises that they can improve
people's material conditions. If you want a better future and
not just revenge, we're going to have to be able
to offer that too. There is a line from the

(13:22):
book Climate Leviathan. I find it quite stirring. It's written
in response to Roy Scranton, a climate change philosopher and
author of the book We're Doomed Now What, commenting on
his claim that nobody has real answers and the problem
is us. Wainwright and Man say, quote, at a time
when the left everywhere must reinvent means to live together,

(13:42):
we cannot make acceptance of death our aspiration. They go
on to note that the coming crisis is not unmanageable.
It is already here, already being managed by liberal capitalism,
if rather badly. Indeed, the very manageability of the crisis
is part of the problem we face. To address it,
we do not need to learn to die, but to live,

(14:05):
think and rebel. I tend to agree with this assessment,
and I think that face with the ultimate failure of
older attempts at rebellion, we need to be open minded
in our search for a new rebellion. We may find
that in a society built to facilitate mass death, learning
how to survive and keep others alive is the most
effective method of revolt. Do I have suggestions for that

(14:27):
beyond start cooperative kitchens with your neighbors and hand out
supplies after disasters. Yes, But before we get into that,
I want to make the case for why I think
mutual aid is a viable path towards revolt. Earlier in
the series, I laid out what I see is the
most likely route towards radical change, a general strike with
a list of demands supported by a massive national and

(14:47):
ideally international mutual aid campaign. There is a tendency among
some radicals on the left to right mutual aid off
as charity dressed up to look like revolution, but the
evidence suggests that the state and the far right consistently
see effective mutual aid programs as what they are a
serious threat. In January of nineteen sixty nine, the Black

(15:09):
Panther Party held their first free for children breakfast program
at Saint Augustine Episcopal Church. They fed eleven children. They
kept going though every day, and by the end of
the week they had fed a hundred and thirty five kids.
Billy X. Jennings was one of the Panthers there. At
the very beginning, he recalled to the Guardian every office
was required to send two people to learn how it ran,

(15:31):
so you can open one in your area. In a
matter of weeks, the breakfast program had expanded to twenty
three locations around Oakland. By the end of nineteen sixty nine,
the program had been incorporated into one of the Black
Panther Party's survival programs and regularly fed twenty thousand people
in nineteen cities. On the surface, this was just cooking
breakfast for poor kids. It certainly looked less radical than, say,

(15:53):
the armed patrols the Black Panthers carried out to monitor
police officers in black neighborhoods. But j Edgar Hoover, director
of the FBI, considered the breakfast program an existential threat.
The program represents the best and most influential activity going
for the BBP, and as such is potentially the greatest
threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the b PP

(16:14):
and destroy what it stands for. Hoover recognized that the
Panthers were engaged in the most crucial task for any
insurgent movement, winning hearts and minds. The Maoist Marxist beliefs
of many Panthers were a lot easier to spread to
folks who saw them as the people feeding their damned children,
because at the end of the day, for almost everyone,
the basic needs of your loved ones trump specific ideology

(16:37):
every day of the week. That's why the FBI targeted
the free breakfast program specifically. At one rate in Chicago,
agents smashed and urinated on all the food that had
been collected for the next day's meal. In some cities,
agents were sent door to door, visiting parents in their
homes and claiming the Panthers were using breakfast clubs to
teach children to be racist against white people and to

(16:58):
urge them to riot in school. Historian Franzisca Meister says
that in San Francisco, quote FBI agents actually brought one
of the breakfast programs to a halt by talking the
parents of the participating children into believing that the food
the panthers were serving had been infected with funereal disease.

(17:25):
Mutual aid is just as frightening to our enemies to
day as it was to j Edgar Hoover. The Center
for Security Policy is a far right, anti Muslim, anti
communist think tank founded by former Reagan administration official Frank
Gaffney JUNR. Earlier this year, they were leased a report
analyzing the mutual aid efforts of a number of Texas
based leftist organizations, including the Elm Fork, John Brown Gun Club,

(17:49):
and the d f W chapter of the Socialist Rifle
Association from the Center for Security Policy. But mutual aid
must not be understood as simply volunteerism, as its proponents
explicitly note, its true purpose is to build up capability
for dual power, a kind of shadow governance. As much
as avowed anarchists might hate the term to be exercised

(18:10):
by a network of a narco communist and autonomous groups.
As a result, the likelihood that mutual aid will also
involve the presence of community armed self defense groups like
the John Brown gun Club and other ANTIFA groups is high.
Such groups do not make a distinction between providing basic
aids such as providing water, emergency meal and motel rentals,
and direct clashes with law enforcement and others who they

(18:33):
perceive is threatening their agenda. Local and state officials dealing
with natural disasters should urge citizens to avoid contributing to
unknown or suspect mutual aid organizations and encourage support instead
to traditional, registered charities. They should likewise respond to an
increase in protest and activism activity generated by autonomous groups
seeking to use the disaster for propaganda purposes. Finally, they

(18:56):
should develop a comprehensive understanding of the extremist groups reading
in their areas of responsibility. The think tank is of
course wrong with they attempt to cast the DFW, s
r A, and John Brown Gun Club, neither of which
have been tied to terrorism, as violent extremists, but they
are broadly right about the purpose of mutual aid. One
thing that sets it apart from simple charity is that

(19:17):
the goal of mutual aid is to build power. Not
hierarchical power, not a shadow governance put in the hands
of a leader or a pollit bureau, but the power
of a community to meet its own needs and thus
resist domination. This is why mutual aid frightens those in power.
It's why in a two thousand and six lecture at
the Universities of Texas School of Law, the FBI Supervisory

(19:39):
Senior Resident listed Food Not Bombs as an organization on
the local terrorist watch list in Austin. In writing for
Belling Cat, I analyzed the chat logs of Patriot Coalition,
a group of several hundred armed far right extremists in
the Pacific Northwest. They looked forward to the potential of
fights with Antifa, but they were terrorified when during the wildfires,

(20:02):
Portland's anti fascists put together and distributed thousands of pounds
of aid supplies to people who'd been displaced. If we
judge the efficacy of resistance tactics by who they scare,
mutual aid ranks highly. Indeed, this is, of course not
the whole answer to the question, how do we pull
ourselves up out of the tail spin? I would be
an arrogant man. Indeed, if I pretended to know that,

(20:23):
or try to put myself forward as someone with the
ultimate solution to our problems. How would a national network
of mutual aid collectives organized to handle the manufacture and
distribution of more complex necessities like insulin. How would a
general strike movement reach some kind of agreement on an
actual list of demands without becoming bogged down in debate
and negotiations like a doomed condo board. How would we

(20:45):
protect such a movement from the kind of threats that food, medicine,
and good intentions can't defeat. Over the coming days and months,
we're going to try and find the answers to all
of those questions. Together. I'm going to bring on people
much smarter than me, and we're going to hear their answers.
I'm going to bring on activists and organizers from around
the world who have answered versions of those questions themselves,

(21:07):
and we'll see what we can learn from their struggles.
Together with a lot of help from our friends, I'm
hoping we can come to some conclusions. But before we
conclude this first week of episodes, I want to take
a look at the future we could have, or at
least new elements of it. Because when you tell people
the world needs to change very quickly or where fucked

(21:27):
it kind of behooves you to provide them with a
vision of the future you'd like to make instead. The
people of the Navajo Nation have been enduring the consequences
of capitalism for a very long time. Decades of US
government neglect has led to a situation in which thirty
to forty percent of their people lack access to clean water.
Climate change, drought, and reduced rainfall have further strained their

(21:48):
access to water, making farming and simple survival much more difficult.
Cameron sou who lives in the Navajo Nation, told an
interviewer some of them have to drive an hour and
a half one way to town to get drink water.
People say, well, water is not expensive. Sure, if you
have access to the store it's around the corner. Yes,
But for us, the reality is that just going to
the town of Flagstaff, you're spending maybe fifty dollars on

(22:11):
gas and other things. When you go by water in town,
a case of bottled water is actually costing you around
sixty eighty dollars. But while climate change has strained the
Navajos access to water, it has provided them with additional
reserves of another resource, sunlight. This has led many in
the nation to embrace solar businesses. Especially after in two
thousand nineteen they voted against continuing to operate a coal

(22:34):
power plant that employed some eight hundred people. At this moment,
some Navajo entrepreneurs are working with a company called Source
Water to install hundreds of hydro panels on isolated homes.
The hydro panel is a solar powered water generator. It
condenses clean water out of the atmosphere. A standard tupanel
array can make four to ten liters of water per day,

(22:56):
even in fairly dry conditions. This is a small solution
in the grand scheme of things, but it is a solution.
At the moment. Fifteen Navajo families have access to regular,
clean water because of these panels. Five hundred more homes
should receive panels in the near future. The technology is
still very new and as a result, not particularly cheap.

(23:17):
This is not a Norman boer Log style mass solution
to our problems, but it is a good development, and
it provides us with some texture to how our futures
might look once we've adapted to the inevitable new normal.
Solar stills and atmospheric condensers glittering atop roofs and alongside
gardens in all the places where useless lawns once sucked
up water, and speaking of the Navajo, our hopeful future

(23:40):
will have to involve a hell of a lot more
input from indigenous peoples. This isn't woke politics. It's our
best hope for reversing some of the damage already done
to our ecosystems. In two thousand seven, the swin Amish tribe,
located in Washington's northwest coast, published a climate proclamation that
declared climate adaptation a top priority in securing their long

(24:02):
term future. In two thousand ten, while every government on
Earth dithered, they published an action plan that ensured their
people's food security under climate change. They began to build
rock walls to expand the intertitle zone that clams call
home and boost shellfish numbers to compensate for die offs
and over fishing. I want to quote from a rite
up by Yale School of the Environment, quote to protect

(24:24):
salmon runs. The tribe is working on the Skagit River
to create better spawning beds and as planting trees to
provide shade and reduced river temperatures. In addition, the tribe
is fighting to block mining operations and the headwaters of
the Skagit in British Columbia, which could impact waters downstream
Across North America, other indigenous communities are stepping up to
formulate and enact climate action plans to protect their way

(24:45):
of life. In twenty nineteen, the Carrick Tribe of Northern
California released its climate adaptation plan with a recommendation to
return to prescribed burning, an old idea that might help
to ease California's wildfire problems. The Tulalip Tribes Washington State
are relocating nuisance beavers from urban areas back to traditional
watersheds to help lower river temperatures and aid salmon populations.

(25:08):
They are also redirecting agricultural runoff for electricity generation. The
Jamestown Squalum Tribe and Washington is removing invasive butterfly bushes
from the banks of the Dungeness River to help protect
its salmon. The Confederated Salish and Kutanaie tribes of Montana
are gathering and planting seedlings of the white bark pine
that are more resistant to warming related diseases such as

(25:29):
blister rust. Alaskan tribes are using microscopy to identify harmful
algae blooms spurred by warming waters. The list goes on. Now,
these are all examples of direct action, most of which
not all of which won't land anyone in prison, and
all of which will help mitigate the on Rushian catastrophe
in real ways. Alone, indigenous peoples cannot pull us out

(25:52):
of the mess we've gotten ourselves into. But if we
can develop a political situation which gives them back control
of their land, we can institute measures like this on
a much wider scale, and it will benefit every single
person on the planet. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Changes recent reports have noted that they have high confidence

(26:13):
that global adaptation efforts will benefit from including indigenous knowledge.
Mead Crosby, a conservation biologist with a University of Washington, notes,
one of the things that comes across really clearly is
that indigenous people are by far the most effective stewards
of biodiversity. They do the best job. One recent study

(26:34):
showed that deforestation rates in the Amazon, the world's largest
carbon sinc were two to three times lower in indigenous
held lands. At present, indigenous people's hold or manage about
twenty eight percent of the planet's land, but more than
forty percent of its protected wildlife areas. Some eighty percent
of the world's biodiversity exists under their stewardship. It is

(26:56):
so very easy to lose hope when all you consume
is a day the drumbeat of bad news, ocean die
offs and wildfires, and crooked corporate deals to piss more
poison into the atmosphere. Those stories are important, and you
should be angry. But bad news is not the only news.
Indigenous peoples have been fighting for generations in the face

(27:17):
of genocide and relentless oppression to reverse the damage unchecked
greed has done to our climate. What excuse do the
rest of us have to give into doom when they
could really fucking use our help. This may sound silly
to you, there is a good chance you just had
a visceral gut reaction to the idea of a hopeful,
solar powered future driven by hard earned knowledge of indigenous custodians.

(27:39):
This is because all of us, left and right, have
spent most of the last twenty years ingesting a steady
diet of apocalyptic fantasies. Even Star Trek, meant to be
a utopian vision of possibility, tends to focus more on
war and violence these days we're one to compare the
science fiction of fifty years ago with today, they might
think we'd lost our ability to hope. And so at

(28:01):
the end of all this, I'd like to provide you,
the ongoing listeners of it could happen here with a
promise this is a show about hope as much as
it is a show about collapse. I believe firmly that
the ability to build a better world starts with being
able to imagine one. So as we dive into the
muck and grime of a system on the brink, let's

(28:22):
accept that with hard work and above all else, love,
it's still possible to turn this ship around.