Saying that “humans” are responsible for ecological devastation is a continuation of colonial racism, and it is an insult to the peoples who have fought against obliteration to preserve their way of life and their relationship with their territory. It is also an insult to the many people who, despite growing up in a culture totally infused with the values of capitalism, have risked their lives and freedom to defend the land and halt destructive development projects. And it is an insult to the hundreds of millions who are subjected to extreme poverty or absolute precarity by the very same economic order that profits from ecocide, who have to worry about their personal survival and that of their family and community, and do not have the luxury of choosing between different job opportunities and consumer products based on how “ecological” they might be.
As Kathryn Yusoff argues in A Billion Black Anthropocenes, the framework of the Anthropocene is racist, and it also serves to obscure our view, to hide the actual system at the heart of the problem.95 People in the Global South—people dehumanized by Western slavery, colonialism, and racism—finally get included in the category “human,” just in time to share the blame for the devastation caused by a social system that has ravaged them far more than they have profited from it.
– Peter Gelderloos
Enough of this. This is one of the dumbest takes Gelderloos has had and there are a lot of dumb takes he has put forth. He can join Chomsky in the pile of anarchist authors doing more harm than good. He had one good essay on non-violence and it mostly served as a way to help cancel Ward Churchill, whose Pacifism as Pathology is just much better. Use your critical thinking skills on this one. Global warming is anthropogenic and your consumerist behaviors have always driven these things. At any time we could have been like, what I have is enough for me, but we didn’t we bought the new iphones and the new jordans and every other dumb thing the billionaires sold us, when all we really needed was reliable food, shelter and clothing. Now we are buying their AI while having the audacity to be mad they are building the datacenters. Stop. We are the problem and we could have changed our behavior, but we didn’t. Now the earth is being ravaged for the lithium for your e-bike when a regular bike worked just fine (if you are disabled and need an e-bike you are excluded from this critique, because you aren’t forming the destructive trend I am talking about by using a mobility device), rare earths for your phones and computers and trees to build mansions nobody needs to live in, but everybody wants anyway. Our insatiable hunger for bullshit is why we are here in this climate catastrophe that will never get better, only worse. If we all keep clinging to shit like this to pass the buck onto just one or two humans we are actually just outsourcing our own power to said people. Take personal responsibility and collective responsibility and organize together and do better, or stop whining when somebody identifies humans as the parasites. It has nothing to do with colonialism or eugenics, because I will go further and say white people are the parasites… Whiteness is the disease and if you want to fix this shit, don’t whitewash yourself to fit into their disease of a culture. Gelderloos is simply giving cover for the whitewashing of the world, whether that’s his intention or not. Enough is enough.