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I think you might be misreading their work, which is tied to insurrectionary practices. Its about claiming territory, not retreating into a simple lifestyle. If you define an area as your habitat, which supplies you (and your kin/friends) with everything they need, then you want to defend that habitat and the set of lifeways you have built around it. They aren’t talking about intentional communities or just hunting and fishing and living a quiet life, although actually I think that those are some of the things they have done/do.

But the people inspired by or who were part of the development of those ideas are either involved in solidarity efforts with indigenous reoccupation sites, doing land defence, etc., or quietly working with others wherever they live to try to reconnect with the idea of belonging to a habitat and trying to build something from there. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t also writing to prisoners, doing a pirate radio station, organizing anti police brutality actions, or bringing coffee to wildcat strikers . It just means recognizing that those things fall short of something fundamental - that ultimately access to land is necessary to experiment socially or to build anything from.

Self-managing the city form or taking control of production seems un-anarchic to me. So what’s left? Individual rejection and forms of destruction by any number of people aiming toward .... horizontal networks of autonomous groups. In Land and Freedom and other writing, they make it clear that the big picture idea is forms of secession in the here and now because it is possible to some extent, and these secessions are aimed at creating autonomous cultures/groups of friends/islands etc. - which ultimately link up with others. The quote they used was “ ponds become oceans” or something like that.

The author of desert quotes seaweed in the opening pages : “ To give up hope for global anarchist revolution is not to resign oneself to anarchy remaining an eternal protest. Seaweed puts it well:

Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it, mostly as the grip of civilisation in that area weakens through its own volition or through the efforts of its inhabitants... Civilisation didn’t succeed everywhere at once, and so it’s undoing might only occur to varying degrees in different places at different times. [13]
Even if an area is seemingly fully under the control of authority there are always places to go, to live in, to love in and to resist from. And we can extend those spaces. The global situation may seem beyond us, but the local never is. As anarchists we are neither entirely powerless nor potentially omnipotent, thankfully.”