TOTW: Resiliency and growing stronger

As I’m sitting down to write this Topic of the Week, I’m confronted with an array of ideas and thoughts of where to go with the topic after years of writing them. I’m writing from the season of winter or four months of cold, snow, wind, and grey overcast skies which can certainly present challenges of finding the bright spots.

Disaster Anarchy

From Void Network by Rhiannon Firth

The growth of autonomous disaster relief efforts, grassroots anarchist initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and collective responses to climate change, both in the UK and in the US. Written by Rhiannon Firth, author of Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action, the article was published in two parts, in issues 21 (Spring) and 22 (Summer) 2023 of the anarchist street newspaper Dope Magazine.

This Is America #142

from It's Going Down

This Is America #142: Resisting the Curfew in NYC; A Discussion on ‘Desert’

On today’s show, first we feature an interview with Black House News, about the ongoing resistance to curfews happening in New York and attempts by the State to hold onto control of the streets in a post-pandemic and post-rebellion world. We also discuss how the terrain in DC has changed following the attempted far-Right coup. We then play a recorded text from Perilous Chronicle, about surveillance of teenage activists in so-called Tucson by local police. We then switch to our discussion, where we cover the horrific realities of climate change and the implications raised in the book Desert for the anarchist movement in an epoch of global warming.

A Conversation About Desert w/ Alfredo of Occupied Southwest Distro

From Solecast

This is a good conversation to have at the end of a strange year. For this episode I am joined by Alfredo of Occupied Southwest Distro to have a wide ranging conversation picking up on the themes in the book Desert. Desert is an anonymously written book which offers a sober assessment of our current material conditions and urges us to toss out-dated thinking aside.

A Critique of Desert

From The Wild Will Project by John Jacobi

Desert, an anarchist pamphlet put out in 2011, has become something of a defining text for green anarchists and primitivists. It has the style of pop lit historical narrative texts like “Clash of Civilizations or “The Coming Anarchy,” but from a uniquely anarchist and uniquely ecological perspective. It influenced me profoundly when I was first delving into green ideas, but I didn’t realize quite how much until my recent re-read of it, prompted by its renewed popularity. Still, while the broad narrative of technological ivory towers and slums and rebels on the outskirts rings true, it suffers from a few problems worth critiquing. The most important of these are the author’s disregard for organized political responses and his position on wildlands conservation; but there are also a number of smaller historical and analytical inaccuracies, like his ideas on population.

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