For The Wild - GOPAL DAYANENI on the Exploitation of Soil and Story ⧸232

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00:01:39.740 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. And today I'm speaking with

00:01:47.320 Gopal Dayaneni. And when we say rights are not given and rights are not taken away,

00:01:53.400 that is because rights are only ever violated. And of course, that's what violence is,

00:01:59.760 the infringement upon rights. Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic,

00:02:05.920 environmental, and racial justice through organizing and campaigning, teaching, writing,

00:02:11.600 speaking, and direct action since the late 1980s. Gopal is a co-founder of Movement Generation,

00:02:19.380 Justice, and Ecology Project. MG is rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income

00:02:25.540 communities and communities of color committed to a just transition away from profit and pollution

00:02:31.340 and towards healthy, resilient, and life-affirming local economies.

00:02:35.720 Currently, Gopal supports movement building through his work and with his organizations,

00:02:40.420 including the Climate Justice Alliance, ETC Group, and the Center for Story-Based Strategy.

00:02:47.160 He is also a fellow with the Center for Economic Democracy.

00:02:51.260 Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy, and empire.

00:02:56.080 He lives in an intentional community of nine adults and a squabble of kids.

00:03:00.280 well Gopal thank you so much for spending this winter day with me and for

00:03:09.720 being here to jump into some complex and far-reaching topics thank you for having me

00:03:19.980 wonderful well I think many of our listeners are familiar with the critical importance of

00:03:26.580 engaging with the future and radical imagination. But something I've heard you speak about that

00:03:33.020 really piques my interest is how dominant society's obsession with techno fixes and

00:03:39.000 climate solutions should be understood as one of the strongest manifestations of our lack of

00:03:44.940 imagination. And I appreciate this framing in this way because for too long, we've brought

00:03:52.040 into the idea that technological development is synonymous with human ingenuity, when in reality,

00:03:59.180 this pursuit is about attempting to save the status quo. So in order to frame our conversation,

00:04:06.140 I wonder if you can begin by speaking to this correlation between climate-related

00:04:11.580 techno-solutions and a lack of imagination. Sure. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm,

00:04:20.000 you know, it's kind of seems counterintuitive in a way. It's when we think about the scale,

00:04:27.380 pace and implications of the climate crisis. And in fact, the urgency of the crisis,

00:04:33.860 which is very real and important for us to think about, is a double-edged sword because urgency

00:04:39.600 can motivate us to action, but urgency can also enable desperation and desperation can enable

00:04:44.840 false solutions. And the question is, what are you really desperate about? And I find it

00:04:50.760 interesting that, as you mentioned, this idea that increasing technological complexity is a

00:04:57.420 defining feature of progress. And we have this fantasy that every problem that we have can be

00:05:03.580 solved through ever-increasing technological complexity or technological innovation.

00:05:08.860 And what's interesting is that so many times we get caught up in or we get sucked into this

00:05:14.320 this idea of these incredibly sci-fi sounding, amazing kind of magical sort of ideas that will

00:05:26.100 suddenly be the quote unquote silver bullet to address these complex problems like climate

00:05:33.180 disruption. And on one hand, because it sounds sci-fi and creative, like stratospheric aerosol

00:05:39.220 injection, the idea that we're going to pump particulates into the stratosphere that are

00:05:43.680 going to block out the sun's radiation, or we'll put mirrors in space, or we'll create these

00:05:49.680 machines that will directly suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester them deep under 0.91

00:05:56.360 these geological formations. These sort of like fantastical technofix solutions, to me, while

00:06:02.320 at once seeming creative are actually a reflection of a much more profound lack of imagination,

00:06:13.020 which is the inability to imagine a world different than the world you're in.

00:06:16.640 Because they're actually, as you said about maintaining the status quo, all of the geoengineering

00:06:21.620 schemes that are put forward say, hey, we can solve the climate crisis for you. But what they're

00:06:27.200 really trying to solve for is the maintaining of the fossil fuel industry, the maintaining of

00:06:33.240 inequitable distribution of resources. And actually, what's really most fundamentally

00:06:38.440 problematic about it for me is that it not only misunderstands the climate crisis, but attempts

00:06:46.220 to frame the climate crisis as simply this, like to reduce it to this overly simplistic problem of

00:06:54.420 atmospheric concentrations of CO2. When in fact, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 isn't actually

00:07:02.200 the problem. It's the emergent consequence of the actual problem, which is the exploitation

00:07:09.920 of land and labor and living systems all over the planet everywhere at once. So it's the planetary

00:07:17.540 scale emergent manifestation of a whole different problem, which is the problem of the very nature

00:07:26.100 of extractive economy. And one thing I always point out or that we like to point out at

00:07:33.060 Movement Generation is that if you want to understand the climate crisis, you can't look

00:07:36.820 up at the atmosphere and count carbon. You have to look down at the economy, at the erosion of land

00:07:41.980 and labor and living systems and the exploitation of seed and of soil and of story. And I think

00:07:47.440 that's the the place where for me um the real imagination lives it lives in the ability to both

00:07:55.140 imagine a different way of being in the world a different set of relationships to each other

00:07:59.280 um and even what's interesting here it's like maybe even imagination isn't the right word

00:08:05.300 because it's really about remembering it's about remembering our way forward not

00:08:10.040 imagining something different we don't need to imagine something different we need to remember

00:08:15.580 our way forward. The other thing, silver bullet is an expression we use to talk about these kind

00:08:22.260 of techno fixes. But what I really like about the expression silver bullet, it is a metaphor based

00:08:28.220 in a linear narrative of conquest. It's a war metaphor or a killing metaphor or a conquering

00:08:35.280 metaphor. And whenever you hear people talk about the climate crisis or climate disruption

00:08:40.820 with a linear narrative of conquest,

00:08:44.620 you know, it's a problem to be solved.

00:08:46.100 It's a battle to be overcome.

00:08:47.660 It's a mission to be won.

00:08:50.360 Chances are they're walking you down a path of false solutions.

00:08:55.820 And the way to think about the climate crisis

00:08:58.280 is through a spiral narrative of interdependence.

00:09:02.260 The climate crisis is a message to us

00:09:04.500 that our relationships are out of balance

00:09:06.320 with each other and the rest of the living world,

00:09:08.200 And that we must be part of as we always have been and as we cannot escape in a grand conspiracy with all the rest of life and the living world.

00:09:21.700 And every time we breathe in and out, we are conspiring with the soil and we are conspiring with each other and we're conspiring with our ancestors.

00:09:29.180 and when things are out of balance those are offerings those are gifts those are messages to

00:09:37.620 us to change the nature of our relationships our dynamics our feedbacks our processes and our

00:09:43.600 economy that was such i don't know if that answered your question at all no it was such a

00:09:51.980 beautiful introduction and i was like you know there's so much of it on mute through the zoom

00:09:58.260 link. So I was feeling it. And yeah, thank you for that. And now similarly, I'm thinking about

00:10:06.020 how we need to continue to reckon with the reality that we aren't going to undo climate change.

00:10:13.400 Disasters will continue to happen and our ecological systems are going to change.

00:10:18.700 But that doesn't mean we can't create a livable world. In fact, we can create an even more just

00:10:25.660 world than the one we've been living in. But this work is intergenerational and there are no

00:10:32.500 finite solutions. And I think this reality is hard to come to terms with when every day it feels

00:10:40.500 like the possibility of a soft transition is eroding from under us. So can you speak to the

00:10:47.360 importance of a framework that isn't solution-oriented but is instead deeply committed

00:10:53.320 to acceptance, accountability, and adaptation? Yeah, I think the framework that we speak to

00:11:02.200 at Movement Generation a lot is the notion of resilience. And by resilience, we don't just mean

00:11:08.520 like the more we get beat up, we bounce back kind of thing. But the capacity to navigate the

00:11:15.060 transition in ways that are both mitigating the causes of it, but also creating the capacity to

00:11:22.920 stretch and transform and change and integrate the changes that are coming that you know that

00:11:29.840 we are in we you know we say transition is inevitable and justice is not but actually

00:11:34.280 I think ultimately the only transition that leads to our collective well-being is one in which

00:11:39.540 we are actually engaged with justice and and and here I'm going to use the definition of justice

00:11:45.200 from from Dr. Cornell West justice is what love looks like in public as as kind of her guiding

00:11:51.080 path. But I also don't want to suggest that there are no solutions. It is that the scale at which

00:11:57.400 we understand the problem is manipulating how we understand the solution. So how do I say this?

00:12:04.780 The scale of the problem does not dictate the scale of the solutions. And this goes back to

00:12:08.920 the thing that I was saying about like, please do not think of climate disruption as this

00:12:14.220 planetary scale problem. You have to understand it in terms of actually what's happening on the

00:12:20.920 ground in communities every day, all the time, at once, and the liberation of our communities from

00:12:26.520 those unjust relationships of white supremacy, of settler colonialism, of heteropatriarchy,

00:12:34.060 of ecocide, of, you know, that disconnection from each other, that way of seeing the world

00:12:41.160 as made up of objects and parts and things as opposed to a complex of relationships.

00:12:46.240 Like the economy that is, you know, destroying our communities is the strategic point of intervention. And it is in that process of transforming those relationships that the thing that's freaking some people out on the planetary scale, this idea of climate disruption is transformed.

00:13:08.800 So it's like the strategic point of intervention and the nature of the changes that we need are at a very, very different scale than the way we have or the way that the issue of climate disruption or the collapse of biological and cultural diversity or the erosion of biological and cultural diversity have been framed for us or imposed upon us, which is at the planetary scale.

00:13:34.300 you know you will only ever experience the world through the economy all economies are nested in

00:13:43.840 living systems and you will only ever experience the world to the economy you are in which is why

00:13:50.820 there's no such thing as a natural disaster right you know a 5.0 earthquake in california

00:13:57.020 might rattle our dishes and knock some things off the shelf and a 5.0 earthquake in bangladesh

00:14:03.000 could collapse a sweatshop and kill a thousand people. And that's because you will only ever

00:14:09.400 experience the earthquake as it navigates the economy. Inequitable unjust economy will 0.79

00:14:14.680 inequitably and unjustly distribute the consequences. And it doesn't matter if it's

00:14:18.920 an earthquake or climate disruption or a super storm or a pandemic. You will only ever experience

00:14:26.360 the living world and your relationships as it is mediated by the economy which you are nested

00:14:32.660 within, which is why your relationship to the soil outside of your house is based on whether

00:14:37.140 the economy paved over the soil or not. And the reason this matters is because reimagining our

00:14:44.940 relationship to each other through rethinking and redesigning the economy is the only strategic

00:14:51.940 point of intervention if you want to navigate the climate crisis over the long haul. And so it's not

00:14:57.640 that there are not solutions. It's that the nature of the solutions are at a scale different than the

00:15:03.220 way the issue has been presented to most people, presented to us. And by that, I mean, the way we

00:15:10.980 imagine energy, if we just think about it as like shifting the entire world over to solar, we

00:15:16.140 misunderstand what the real problem is. It's not just about where we get our energy. It's actually

00:15:21.800 about how we govern it what it what we use it for how we relate to it so it's like so energy

00:15:27.740 democracy is really the the answer to that the question of how do we address the energy transition

00:15:33.560 it's democratized decentralized distributed and that we reduce our you know we damper down our

00:15:42.240 consumption and equitably redistribute the resource and we can do that because of the

00:15:49.920 incredible fact that our own planetary system is nested in a solar system, we can do that in a

00:15:57.860 decentralized and distributed fashion all over at once. Like we can deeply decentralize energy.

00:16:06.220 And in fact, the scale at which we produce it now is part of the scale of the problem.

00:16:11.320 The same is true for food sovereignty and thinking about food systems, right? Peasant agriculture

00:16:16.820 on less than 25% of the arable land

00:16:19.800 feeds over 80% of the world's population,

00:16:23.340 peasant subsistence and indigenous food waste.

00:16:26.860 Industrial agriculture,

00:16:28.300 which is not actually growing food at all,

00:16:31.280 it's mining for calories,

00:16:33.400 controls 75% of the arable land

00:16:35.440 and feeds less than 25% of the world's population.

00:16:39.020 The solution is in decentralized,

00:16:43.460 centralized distributed democratically controlled land processes it's not about you know precision

00:16:51.400 agriculture digital agriculture or you know or any of those things it's actually in relationships

00:16:57.800 it's an agroecology and so i say this because i you know complex problems don't have simple

00:17:03.900 solutions but that does not mean there are not interventions that we can make and those

00:17:08.040 interventions which make meaningful improvements in the quality of our daily lives changes our

00:17:13.260 relationships to each other that help us be in right, reflective, responsive relationship with

00:17:21.440 the living systems upon which we depend, including each other, will have consequences at the bioregional

00:17:31.200 and planetary scales. It's true for climate destruction. It's also true for a lot of other

00:17:38.260 things. It's about re-understanding what we think of when we think of solutions. And the other thing

00:17:45.680 is like every time we engage with these kinds of transformative processes that change our

00:17:54.400 relationships with a problem and that intervene, we actually change also the nature of the time

00:18:00.300 horizon. So this static story of like we have 12 years or we have 10 years or now we have eight

00:18:05.940 years to peak emissions. There's something important about that. But what's really important

00:18:12.100 for us to think about is when we make transformations towards greater equity, justice,

00:18:17.300 and liberatory self-governance, these kinds of processes, we change our very relationship to

00:18:24.800 the crisis, which changes every aspect of it in every dimension, including time horizons.

00:18:31.500 A way to think about this is like, I often say, I used to say like the best thing we can hope for is the equitable distribution of the suffering. And people are like, well, that's just depressing. Why would you say something like that?

00:18:44.400 And the reason is because when you equitably distribute the suffering, you change the very nature of suffering. It's not suffering anymore. If we are all navigating it together, it becomes the way we live, who we are, right?

00:19:03.460 It's like what makes it suffering is its deeply inequitable navigation of the consequences of climate disruption.

00:19:13.600 And as we change our very relationship to it, and as we navigate it together, it changes what it feels like, right?

00:19:23.680 It's like, that to me, it's like, it sounds depressing to say equitable distribution of suffering, but if you think about it, if we're all going through it together, it's a different quality of experience than suffering.

00:19:42.420 It's hard, but hard and bad are not the same thing, as I'm very fond of pointing out to my kids.

00:19:53.680 I'll tell you a little story

00:20:14.740 I'll tell you about how it changes

00:20:20.560 The man got all the glory

00:20:23.200 The rhythm is a place of freedom

00:20:27.300 But if they don't know

00:20:31.940 Then they won't grow

00:20:35.860 The seeds we sow

00:20:40.400 Are far from now

00:20:44.800 Hard time, yeah

00:20:47.900 Though we see it in Hollywood

00:20:49.960 Hard time, yeah

00:20:53.200 Well, something I've really been feeling these past couple of months is just the incredible surplus of knowledge, stories, and imagery that we're being flooded with.

00:21:07.680 And so much of it is vital for us to know and grow from, but I do also have an aversion to the idea of content and content for content's sake.

00:21:19.060 and my mind does wander a bit to think about the ways in which we think about growth or

00:21:25.080 endless growth from the ecological standpoint which is inhospitable to diversity and the sort

00:21:32.080 of content that is being generated currently. Now I know the Center for Story-Based Strategy

00:21:38.540 really recognizes the importance of creating visions and telling stories and so from your

00:21:44.820 perspective, why is it still vital to create stories, but how to also navigate this overwhelm?

00:21:53.640 Yeah. First, I just want to say, Ayaan, I really appreciate the way you related endless growth,

00:22:01.520 which is antagonistic towards diversity. Diversity is our best defense. Diversity is

00:22:08.880 resilience. And I actually think it's also true that the endless growth of content and the

00:22:17.200 propagation of that content through the new kind of platform supremacy that is represented by

00:22:22.180 the internet is also actually averse to diversity. And that can be seen in the ever deepening

00:22:30.340 fragmentation of our consciousness, the feedback dynamics of outrage without accountability that

00:22:38.660 are enabled through the internet and the way those kinds of emotional responses you get from

00:22:43.480 being vitriolic end up being privileged through the platforms, because those are the things that

00:22:50.240 make the most money. I think there's something really important about that. It's actually,

00:22:55.800 it's, again, it seems a little bit counterintuitive, but the overwhelming flooding

00:23:03.780 of noise is actually corrosive to diversity of thought and ideas because it's actually

00:23:11.240 hyper-bubbling us and making us less and less capable of seeing, hearing, and engaging with

00:23:18.320 others and engaging in the edge, you know, the ecotone, the tensions of home where new diversity

00:23:24.740 can arise. And so I just, I find that a really useful framework that you just offered us. So

00:23:32.080 I hope you don't mind. I'm going to start using that. Stories matter. It doesn't actually just

00:23:40.020 have to be news stories. We are narrative creatures. We make meaning of the world through

00:23:46.740 metaphor. The metaphors we use to make meaning of ourselves and the world really matter because

00:23:53.080 that that is how we make meaning. It used to be that life was the metaphor for everything.

00:24:03.140 And now machines are the metaphor for life. We talk about DNA as code. We talk about our minds

00:24:09.520 as being wired. We talk about our bodies as engine, our food as fuel. The idea that our DNA

00:24:16.680 can be edited and deleted and cut and pasted.

00:24:20.260 That idea that we simply understand ourselves as parts,

00:24:25.220 that we don't talk about our phones

00:24:28.060 as running out of batteries, but as dying.

00:24:31.540 And when we get tired,

00:24:32.840 we say we're running out of batteries

00:24:34.140 or I don't have the bandwidth for something.

00:24:39.140 We are making meaning of ourselves through machines.

00:24:43.900 And that matters.

00:24:45.500 The metaphors we use to understand the world matter because now we understand the earth as a machine made up of parts that can be taken apart, put back together, that can be engineered, right?

00:24:59.240 We have synthetic biology, the production of novel life forms through engineering.

00:25:06.100 That is because of a worldview made up of stories and metaphors.

00:25:13.020 And it matters.

00:25:14.500 it matters again the linear narratives of conquest weren't the the predominant stories

00:25:21.980 that were told on planet earth it was stories of interdependence that defined who we are in

00:25:27.580 our relationships to each other stories of sacredness and caring

00:25:31.620 the metaphors we used were trees of life web of life you know coyote is trickster there's so many

00:25:40.700 stories all of us have stories in which the metaphors are living metaphors versus machine

00:25:46.460 metaphors that's just one example so it really matters stories are how we make meaning and we

00:25:53.580 don't tell stories we live stories they are how we navigate the world and so to me that is still

00:26:05.420 vitally important and and we do need transformative narratives

00:26:10.300 many of them are based on our old stories

00:26:12.860 but some of them are based on on new stories or new ways of thinking i have this children's book um

00:26:18.860 that i keep on my shelf well i have two children's books i keep on my shelf

00:26:22.540 um one that i um assigned to all my um all my students um even at the graduate level and all

00:26:29.500 all the programs that I teach in is the Lorax and I always I always tell people I'm like giving

00:26:35.060 talks and people and people are like what should I read and I was like well I've got a really good

00:26:38.740 book for you everybody takes out their pencil and paper and they're getting ready to write it down

00:26:42.320 it's like it's the Lorax and the point of the Lorax of course is that you cannot extract from

00:26:47.420 a finite system faster than its capacity to regenerate and get away with it because if you

00:26:53.980 do your economy will collapse you cannot chop down the Truffula trees faster than they grow back

00:26:58.340 and expect to get away with it. Your economy will collapse and there will be consequences along the

00:27:04.600 way. And the other children's book I keep on my shelf is an amazing story retelling the birth of

00:27:14.600 the universe from the Big Bang. Instead of telling the story as the Big Bang, it's told as the

00:27:21.380 everything seed. This book is called The Everything Seed. And it's the idea that the Big Bang is just

00:27:27.980 a metaphor. And we could just as easily use the metaphor of the infinitesimally small, highly dense

00:27:37.360 everything seed from which all of the material of the universe was born.

00:27:46.180 It's not the only story we can tell to make meaning of our origins, but it's an origin story

00:27:54.560 that allows us to engage with a living metaphor

00:27:57.560 to talk about the universe than the Big Bang,

00:28:02.860 which is obviously an explosive war metaphor.

00:28:05.840 So for me, stories matter not just because,

00:28:09.580 it's not just about inspiring or convincing,

00:28:12.140 it's about changing the way we actually understand the world.

00:28:17.960 The language we use can be relational,

00:28:21.340 can be less objectifying can be more liberating if we choose to embrace and

00:28:30.640 live into a different way of making making meaning of our experiences

00:28:35.680 through the metaphors we use I just I don't I think there's too much of we

00:28:42.580 over privilege this idea of new like new ideas new thinking new this new that new

00:28:48.460 technologies, new whatever. I think this is mostly about remembering. It hasn't been an

00:28:53.940 original thought in thousands of years. This is really about remembering.

00:28:58.740 Yeah. I think about the level of defensiveness and rigidity that is becoming somewhat common

00:29:08.160 in movement spaces, but also in society at large, really. And I know your work with movement

00:29:15.100 generation has changed. But as I understand it, movement generations formation really focused on

00:29:22.180 how to integrate ecological consciousness into organizing. And so I'm wondering if you could

00:29:27.840 speak to how it is that when we are in alignment with ecological behaviors and patterns, this

00:29:34.760 climate of defensiveness becomes incompatible. And that's not to say that defensiveness is

00:29:40.540 inherently bad. But could you share a bit about finding regenerative and healthy movement

00:29:46.700 between defensiveness, resistance, and disturbance as well?

00:29:53.240 Yeah. It's interesting, defensiveness. This relates to the storytelling thing or how we

00:30:00.060 make meaning of the world and objects. We tend to think of defensiveness as the quality of a person.

00:30:05.140 or the you know it's like a person's being defensive and it's like every time somebody

00:30:10.560 doesn't take you know feedback it was like oh they're being defensive and it's like defensiveness

00:30:16.720 isn't the quality of a person the defensive defensiveness is a reaction to an unhealthy

00:30:23.000 relationship all living things when their integrity that that is that which makes them whole

00:30:30.680 living things when that which makes them whole is threatened will become defensive. If you threaten

00:30:37.420 the young or you threaten the life or you, you know, threaten the safety of living things,

00:30:44.640 they become defensive. And it is a totally, as you said, a totally appropriate reaction.

00:30:50.360 And for human beings, when you feel that your humanity, your value, your worth,

00:30:54.660 your integrity, that which holds you together is being questioned, then the appropriate response

00:31:00.660 to the to the feedback is defensiveness so then the question we have to ask ourselves is how do

00:31:07.120 we cultivate the kind of relationships with each other that allow us to view feedback as an

00:31:14.160 investment in a relationship rather than an assault on our integrity i think the problem is

00:31:21.820 the you know the profound lack of accountability that's facilitated by the internet

00:31:26.260 is a big part of the problem but it's also just this ironically even in the left this

00:31:32.980 this assimilation of the atomization of us as individuals rather than seeing ourselves as

00:31:38.700 interdependent whole communities in which our well-being is dependent on the well-being of

00:31:43.920 others right we've learned in this period of the pandemic that health is actually health and

00:31:51.980 well-being, are a common pool resource. It turns out that I am deeply interdependent on the health

00:31:59.080 of everyone around me and the well-being of others around me, and that we all are.

00:32:03.300 And that the way we have always understood health in the United States in this settler,

00:32:09.620 colonial, individualist mind frame as being about your personal body, or even maybe just

00:32:18.560 your family, turns out to be a total fiction. Because my health is deeply dependent on the

00:32:25.460 health of those around me, and even those quite distant from me, as health and unhealth propagate

00:32:30.560 through a population. So it's the unhealthy relationships that lead to the defensiveness.

00:32:37.080 And so the question that we have to ask ourselves is, how do we get into right relationship?

00:32:40.140 and it's not enough to be in right relationship only with each other we have to see those

00:32:49.020 relationships as interdependent on the living systems that we are interdependent with and

00:32:54.440 one interesting thing about the living world is and particularly say the microbial life in the

00:33:00.800 soil is your engagement with it gives you quite rapid feedback and with consequence without

00:33:08.480 judgment. That is to say, you know, you try and plant some seeds, and you're going to get some

00:33:14.060 feedback pretty, pretty quickly. And you learn, you learn to care and cultivate in a different

00:33:19.140 kind of way. I hope I hope we do. And we learn lessons along the way. And there's a way in which

00:33:24.780 that feedback comes without judgment. I think maybe that could be wrong. I'm just riffing right

00:33:33.280 now. But that that I think is a useful lesson for us and how we can engage with each other.

00:33:38.480 You know, during my time at Movement Generation, one of the great gifts of the collective is the ability to give each other feedback and help each other grow.

00:33:50.740 And there was a period where I got really, really intense and super helpful feedback around gender, gendered patterns, patriarchy, and even fraternity.

00:34:05.440 I would argue that we don't simply live in a patriarchal society, we live in a fraternal society, in which all of the brothers have all the privileges and all of the power of the patriarch, but with none of the accountability.

00:34:17.220 It's almost more dangerous.

00:34:19.200 But at any rate, there were some periods of intense feedback around patterns of practice in the collective and patriarchy, and for me, a lot of really, really great and helpful feedback.

00:34:31.180 And I was reflecting on it over the very challenging year that it was to struggle together through that on how much it was a gift because I never, ever, ever felt that I was not valued or loved or cared for by the other members of the community.

00:34:54.100 that it was in fact a gift to have people care about you enough to support you to be a better

00:35:02.020 person because you know if being a better person was as simple as an act of will i'd be a way

00:35:06.180 better human being by now it's not as simple as an act of will it takes a community of practice

00:35:13.380 and you know the collective offered that and again it's that it gets all the way right back

00:35:18.660 down to defensiveness which is like you don't have to be defensive if um if you know that

00:35:26.260 the feedback is about the process of you know collective liberation nina simone says it best

00:35:33.440 ain't nobody perfect because ain't nobody free it's important for us to have some grace for each

00:35:38.720 other that is not to say that we should not have serious judgment about systems and structures of

00:35:46.060 oppression, and that we do not point to and recognize that very particular people benefit

00:35:51.760 from those systems and structures and manipulate and exercise power, coercive power, narrative

00:35:58.500 power, and all kinds of power to subordinate us.

00:36:03.740 I'm not suggesting it's like, we shouldn't exercise judgment.

00:36:07.620 We should.

00:36:08.740 Jeff Bezos is incredibly dangerous, you know, as is Bill Gates and so many others.

00:36:16.060 But as a movement, I think having a little latitude for us to learn and grow together and to be able to admit to each other that none of us have the right, quote unquote, the right answer.

00:36:28.420 like one of our our members of movement generation um one of the planning committee members dave

00:36:34.220 henson offered us this this slogan that we use to talk about ourselves which is movement generation

00:36:40.040 doesn't have a political line it has a political line of inquiry because we're not interested in

00:36:44.300 just insisting on a right answer we're interested in constantly engaging in the question how do we

00:36:51.560 realign movement strategy with the healing power of living systems and what is demanded of us

00:36:58.760 as a movement in this moment on what grace lee boggs calls the clock of the world

00:37:21.560 I tell you I have so many rules

00:37:43.400 If you're not strong

00:37:56.820 yeah the lens of the pandemic has revealed how cruel our unfettered quest for efficiency has

00:38:19.480 become as it relates to our labor and i know for many this statement is nothing new

00:38:25.740 but I do think about it in context to the pandemic and this moment where so many are without work

00:38:32.780 and many outside of the echo chamber are beginning to question how we've been living and working

00:38:39.080 and in Movement Generation's resilience-based organizing the following is written quote

00:38:45.480 the first rule of ecological restoration is the restoration of our own labor human labor is the

00:38:52.820 precious natural resource, concentrated, controlled, and exploited, that has been wielded

00:38:58.600 like a chainsaw against the rest of the natural world. Because of this, we must take it back from

00:39:04.800 the chains of the market and restore it to the web of life. This should be the basis of our

00:39:10.160 organizing at every scale, from the school to the workplace, from grassroots organizing to

00:39:16.360 trans-local movement building, end quote. And this point about the connection between

00:39:23.480 ecological restoration and the restoration of our own labor is often so overlooked and

00:39:29.660 strikes incredibly close to home. So what does this look like for communities when labor is

00:39:35.940 restored? And what are the rights-based organizing strategies we can use to work towards this future?

00:39:42.560 Oh, thank you for reading that. It's been a while. So first, I want to just say a little

00:39:51.300 something about what we mean when we say labor and work, because we have a tendency to just

00:39:59.240 think of it in the very narrow way that has been imposed upon us by, you know, racialized monopoly

00:40:05.020 capitalism and settler colonialism and industrialism and efficiency and, you know,

00:40:10.180 in the factory. And I would like to take a moment to say that all living things, we take energy

00:40:18.140 from the sun, we convert it into power to do work. And that work is what matters. And when we

00:40:29.380 define it that way, we are not distinguishing between the beating of a heart or the singing

00:40:37.040 of a song or the hugging of a child or the telling of a story or the building of a building

00:40:42.160 or the planting of a seed or the blinking of an eye, it's all work. It's all work. And it allows

00:40:49.580 us to stop thinking about labor in terms of jobs. And it allows us to stop thinking about labor in

00:40:57.000 terms of these very narrow notions of what a productive body looks like. And it allows us to

00:41:05.260 accept in much greater diversity all the different ways we can be and collectively contribute to

00:41:12.800 to our well-being like the thinking of the thought is work just as much as the beating of a heart or

00:41:21.460 you know the building of something so i want to i want to you know kind of reclaim work a little

00:41:28.040 bit and michelle mascarina swan from movement generation writes a lot about you know thinking

00:41:33.060 about roles versus jobs thinking about all the ways in which we exercise our labor our bodies

00:41:39.960 our work and all the different diverse forms that that can take and to value all of them and to not

00:41:46.020 simply reduce ourselves to the job um it's funny because i heard a meeting recently a call recently

00:41:54.440 where folks were talking about how they were excited to take a break from work and i kept

00:41:58.320 reminding them that they were going to take a break from their jobs but they weren't taking

00:42:00.980 any kind of break from work because you take a break from work your heart stops beating

00:42:04.800 and your lungs stop filling so don't stop working what you are looking forward to is

00:42:11.640 laboring in your own interests and you know if you cannot withhold your labor at any time for

00:42:19.740 any reason then you are not free or that is to say your freedom is infringed upon because freedom

00:42:27.400 is not given or taken away um it is it is only ever violated and that's the origin of violence

00:42:35.180 um which gets to rights-based organizing which is that that you know what i just said about

00:42:41.440 freedom you can save our rights you know um we often think of rights as right rights is one of

00:42:46.700 those funny words that like you know if you ever had the experience of saying like um you know

00:42:51.880 Somebody asks you if you can get together at 12 noon and you say, oh, yeah, I'm free.

00:42:58.980 And you don't actually mean you're free, free.

00:43:02.020 You just mean the time is available.

00:43:04.800 Or if you have a coupon for ice cream and it says buy one, get one free, it doesn't

00:43:08.740 mean that the ice cream is actually free in any grander existential sense.

00:43:14.020 Or even in the fact of it, the term free simply means you don't have to pay for it.

00:43:18.660 That doesn't mean there isn't a cost.

00:43:20.360 Rights is another one of those words where sometimes it means entitlement, like property right.

00:43:25.800 Sometimes it means declaration, like universal declaration of human rights, but may only be as paper thin as that.

00:43:34.180 It's a word that has lots and lots of different meanings.

00:43:37.600 It can be an assertion, it can be a declaration, it can be an entitlement.

00:43:42.420 But when we say rights-based organizing, we're using it in a very fundamental way.

00:43:47.160 this idea that rights are not given and rights are not taken away rights are inherent and they

00:43:53.860 are exercised by people to meet their needs and in so far and when we say rights are not given

00:44:02.120 and rights are not taken away that is because rights are only ever violated and of course

00:44:08.000 that's what violence is the infringement upon rights and the only way rights are ever asserted

00:44:14.660 is when they are exercised.

00:44:17.520 And in fact, the only reason you need rights

00:44:20.480 is because something which was understood

00:44:23.880 to be customary

00:44:25.260 is threatened with infringement

00:44:27.980 or is infringed upon.

00:44:29.900 You don't have to say you have the right to breathe

00:44:33.080 until someone tries to take it away.

00:44:35.760 Before that, and for the vast majority of time

00:44:38.020 we've been on the planet,

00:44:39.780 breathing was customary.

00:44:41.420 You could just do it.

00:44:42.560 But the infringement upon the right to do it requires that we articulate it. The infringement upon it requires that we articulate it, and that we then figure out a way to assert it, to defend it.

00:44:59.960 And rights-based organizing is this idea of recognizing that when a people are organized enough to assert through exercising it rights, that they test the legitimacy of existing authority.

00:45:17.380 and see when you think about rights if you think about rights in the very fundamental sense

00:45:22.620 then you realize if something is a right like so for example if we say housing is a human right

00:45:32.200 then all economic activity has to be subordinate to that right

00:45:40.340 otherwise it is an infringement upon the right

00:45:43.140 so if you ask people how many people believe housing is a human right the vast majority of

00:45:48.160 people think housing is a human right it's a basic need everybody has it we should ensure

00:45:54.340 that everybody gets it then the question is what economic activity is currently infringing upon

00:46:01.580 that right and that's the ability to speculate on land profit off of rent all of those kinds of

00:46:06.660 things. So if you actually assert that housing is a human right, then you are subordinating all

00:46:17.080 economic activity to those rights. And that's a different way of thinking about organizing

00:46:23.760 than how we have historically thought about organizing. We've historically thought about

00:46:28.480 organizing as what is the need that isn't being met and how do we make demands on existing

00:46:32.580 authority to meet those needs. Instead, we would argue through resilience-based organizing that

00:46:38.540 we as a community should meet those needs directly. And the way that we do it should

00:46:46.500 broadcast into the world the vision of what that looks like. And by doing it and doing it in a

00:46:57.540 self-governed deeply democratic way and as a right we are contesting the legitimacy of existing

00:47:06.340 authority because the basis of revolution isn't really actually the struggle for power

00:47:12.580 the basis of revolution is rights

00:47:16.500 it's when the people assert rights that the existing authority says you can't do that

00:47:23.060 And we as a people get to say you misunderstand the meaning of the term right you and someone who's going to have to stop us

00:47:28.740 And that's where the struggle for power comes. So what are the rights upon which we are going to organize?

00:47:34.500 That's the question and for us at movement generation. We advocate for

00:47:39.940 Some very fundamental kinds of rights. The first of course of rights of living systems rights of mother earth rights of nature

00:47:46.820 And there are ways to do that at all these different scales and the other is the right to the resources required

00:47:53.060 for people. These are collective rights, mind you. These are not individual rights.

00:47:58.800 Rights of Mother Earth and the right of peoples to the resources required to create productive,

00:48:05.620 dignified, and ecologically sustainable livelihoods. And that's different than

00:48:12.200 the right to housing or the right to a minimum wage or the right to healthcare.

00:48:16.340 it's the right to the resources to meet those needs as a people and if you believe

00:48:25.880 that people have a right to those resources that peoples have a right to those resources

00:48:31.260 then they must be governed in such a way that sustains them over time

00:48:35.180 which is the definition of commons and so land is one of those resources

00:48:42.940 control of our own labor energy even i would argue in this period of transition

00:48:50.400 financial capital that we should be organizing capital as a commons as opposed to in an enclosure

00:48:58.640 because everybody needs access to those resources to create those productive dignified and ecologically

00:49:04.580 sustainable livelihoods in this period of transition so what does that look like pragmatically

00:49:09.360 Like I said, it looks like energy democracy, community-owned cooperative energy systems. It looks like non-extractive revolving loan funds in communities where lending is a tool of the people, that capital is a tool of the people, and people are a tool of capital.

00:49:27.920 where people control the resources they utilize them they return them they add value to the shared

00:49:37.180 common pool resource so that others in the community can access it further as opposed to

00:49:42.460 feeding an enclosure it looks like community control of land and housing and so those are

00:49:50.120 the kinds of sort of pragmatic interventions that we're trying to make from the perspective of

00:49:57.020 how do we build permanently organized communities that are resilient in the face of the disturbances

00:50:04.840 that are coming from what has been set in motion already, that also doesn't add fuel to the fire

00:50:12.840 of those disturbances and disruptions, that preserves biological and cultural diversity,

00:50:17.740 that cultivates it, in fact. And that increases our capacity to democratically, compassionately,

00:50:27.320 equitably self-govern. And there's a bunch of ways we do that. So I'm part of the People's

00:50:31.980 Solar Energy Fund, which is a non-extractive lending cooperative that supports community-owned

00:50:39.500 clean energy solar projects that are cooperatively governed. And so it's an intervention not just in

00:50:45.320 energy and energy democracy, but it's also an intervention in finance. We've helped support

00:50:50.860 and participate in something called the Seed Commons, which is a federation of non-extractive

00:50:57.400 revolving loan funds across Turtle Island that are supporting community-owned and worker-owned

00:51:03.400 cooperatives from Richmond, California, to New York, to the Gulf South, to northern parts of

00:51:11.760 the states. So these are the sort of pragmatic kinds of implementations of this idea of what

00:51:18.700 resilience-based organizing can look like. I actually wanted to go a bit deeper into some of

00:51:24.940 the topics you just brought up in your last response. And in preparing for our conversation,

00:51:31.120 I came across a really beautiful interview you had with Naomi Klein on Intercepted about your

00:51:37.260 intentional living situation and what this looks like amidst a pandemic. And within this

00:51:43.480 conversation, you talk about taking soil out of the speculative market. And I've spoken with

00:51:49.380 previous guests about this in terms of agrarian land reform, land back, and rural cooperatives,

00:51:56.560 but I've yet to really venture into this in terms of what it looks like in an urban area,

00:52:02.820 in places like the Bay Area. So can you share with us why it's so important to bring in

00:52:09.160 decommodification of land and land rights and the liberation of land from the speculative market

00:52:15.400 alongside conversations that have previously focused on the right to housing?

00:52:21.300 I think, well, for one thing, some of the most overly commoditized land is going to be urban

00:52:28.520 land so um as a strategic point of intervention in disrupting the legitimacy of commoditizing land

00:52:37.100 and which is the basis of enclosure right um i jokingly say that like or not jokingly but like

00:52:44.460 when i teach about enclosure i talk about um everything being under lock and keynes

00:52:48.260 you know referring to lock um whose notion of the rational man and the um and the individual

00:52:57.420 as the basis of rights and freedom and ownership in Keynes

00:53:02.740 in terms of the economics of enclosure.

00:53:07.080 You know, like the place where enclosures are most powerful

00:53:12.640 and least contested are in urban spaces often.

00:53:15.740 It is where you have high concentrations of federally unrecognized

00:53:20.540 indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples who are working

00:53:24.560 to rebuild land-based and reclaim territory.

00:53:27.420 And it's not an accident that the places where there's high property values, the idea of recognizing indigenous peoples is not happening in terms of federal recognition.

00:53:38.800 And, of course, folks are not in responsibility for the long-term care of their territories and the territories they co-occupy.

00:53:50.140 So that's one important thing.

00:53:52.480 But I actually think there's a huge movement.

00:53:53.960 And there's actually an incredible movement around despeculation of soil in the urban context, both through land trusts, including indigenous land trusts, but also community land trusts.

00:54:07.460 There's various forms of what Sustainable Economist Law Center has been working on, permanent real estate cooperatives, various creative and smart interventions in land and land tenure, ways of intervening in the ability to develop and speculate on land, thereby curtailing its capacity to, quote unquote, grow in financial value.

00:54:32.000 Again, land is one of those resources upon which everyone depends. We depend on it for livelihood, for food, for identity, for how we make meaning of ourselves, for housing.

00:54:46.400 And if we're just demanding more housing, we are missing what is really at the heart of the issue, which is who controls land, to what end, and in what way.

00:54:59.940 and so when we think of land reform historically particularly around third world land reform

00:55:08.740 movements land reform was about redistributing land from the few to the many and so one aspect

00:55:14.980 of land reform is the distribution of land another way we can think about land reform is through land

00:55:19.480 use which is is land going to be used for for private benefit or public benefit is are we going

00:55:26.680 to build parks or freeways? Are we going to pave over it? Are we going to liberate the

00:55:31.340 soil? So there's land use questions that are part of land reform. And the third part of

00:55:36.940 land reform is how land is governed. Will it be held as private property? Will it be

00:55:41.840 held as public land through existing structures of governance? Or will it be held by the people

00:55:49.980 through various forms of commoning and for our perspective land reform has to be about all three

00:55:57.740 of those things it has to be about how we deconcentrate control of land how we change

00:56:05.340 our relationship to land and how we utilize it to serve the interests of our communities including 0.77

00:56:13.220 our community in the largest sense of that the biotic including the biotic communities upon

00:56:19.520 which we depend or interdepend and how we govern that land and so those are the kinds of experiments

00:56:26.920 that are really exciting that are happening in urban context and some of us are engaging in

00:56:31.760 different aspects of different pieces and you know a part of transition is going to be collapsed

00:56:39.060 like there's it's not like it's not like there's going to be some smooth kind of easy little like

00:56:46.240 glide into a better way of being it's going to be challenging and there's and existing some

00:56:53.660 existing structures will collapse and in their collapse new opportunities will emerge but that

00:56:59.440 does not also mean that within their collapse there will be challenges but um some people

00:57:04.800 think that navigating some of that collapse it's going to be all about like how to grow food and

00:57:10.660 and these like what people call these hard skills such a strange expression but i you know i i like

00:57:18.360 to point out that the that when push comes to shove we'll figure out how to grow food that's

00:57:22.740 not the issue and in fact we already know how to grow food the harder thing to figure out

00:57:30.080 the more challenging skills are how do we navigate harm and hurting in our communities how do we

00:57:36.360 without policing in prisons. And that's where the transformative justice movement

00:57:40.680 is essential to a just transition. It's about how are we going to organize together in ways that

00:57:50.060 are radically inclusive, meaning that they prioritize those who are most excluded.

00:57:56.620 And that's where worker and community-owned cooperatives and the daily practice of

00:58:02.920 self-governance matter. That's, to me, an important part of what I value about living

00:58:08.400 in community is learning how to self-govern. That, and of course, it's just so much happier

00:58:15.060 and healthier for living in community. I think both the relationship to land and

00:58:21.840 despeculation of land, but also collective and community governance of these shared common pool

00:58:29.460 resources is really an important learning for us and navigating, you know, to living into

00:58:35.280 making real the world that we know we need.

00:58:42.160 Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast.

00:58:45.980 The music you heard today was by Skepit, Shingai, and Ye Sol.

00:58:51.040 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekram, and Francesca Glaspell.

00:58:59.460 Thank you.

For The Wild - May 07, 2021

GOPAL DAYANENI on the Exploitation of Soil and Story ⧸232

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