I’ve just finished reading two books by Alexander Dunlap. The first, co-edited with André Brock, Enforcing Ecocide. Power, Policing & Planetary Militarization, Palgrave McMilan, 2022, brings together researchers around the growing militarization of areas of ecological extraction and protest (among other themes). The second, co-authored with Jostein Jakobsen, The Violent Technologies of Extraction. Political ecology, critical agrarian studies and the capitalist worldeater (Palgrave McMilan 2020), paints an impressive picture, not devoid of lyricism, around the figure of the WorldEater, created by anarchist writer Fredy Perlman (Against His-story, Against Leviathan, the full text of which can be found on the anarchist library, along with numerous articles by Alexander Dunlap).
The use of metaphors and monsters, inspired not only by Perlman but also by anthropologist Michael Taussig (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980)), one of my favorite authors, enables the authors to paint an extremely vivid picture of global extractivist capitalism – Alexander Dunlap often speaks of a project of “consuming everything”, following a delirious imperative of “total extractivism”. I obviously have a lot of sympathy for the anarchist content of this radical thinking – and I note in passing this radicality and “commitment” among a growing number of scholars who are mistakenly lulled by the routines of academic circles, notably in the fields of “political ecology” and “Critics Agrarians Studies”, to which the authors refer here, but also in many other fields of investigation (in anthropology, history, geography, socio-ecology, etc.. My blog tries to report regularly on the vitality of this research, of which so little, unfortunately, is translated into French).
I wouldn’t follow Dunlap and his colleagues on every point : I don’t use the same frameworks to think about the sphere of non-humans (being fairly critical of the logics of “speciesism”), or the “decolonial pluriverses” dear to Arthur Escobar (my assiduous frequentation of ethnological surveys among animist groups having led me to be wary of idealizations in the field of “indigenous societies”, and of essentialist tendencies). As for his interest in “bioregionalism”, I would tend to view it from a rather critical bias, in line with the remarks Rob Nixon makes at the end of his classic work, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). Finally, I’d approach the devious and multiple (protean) strategies of “neoliberalisms” (preferring the plural to the singular here) in a different way, no doubt.
As for the rest, I’m totally won over by his overall apprehension of the socio-ecological tragedy, the climate catastrophe, and his insistence on degrowth (in the tradition of Giorgos Kallis), and recommend these breathtaking readings. Better still, I find there, in another form, the concept of “intimate colonialism” and “intimate capitalism” on which I’m currently working and which should occupy a significant place in my next book (if I ever get round to it!), as this extract from chapter 6 testifies:
“The situation humanity faces—in all of its billions of unique multiplicities—is not all that different from what Hansel and Gretel confronted. When they were separated from their families, a creepy person in a house full of candy invited them in and took care of them, letting them eat the candy and junk food on display around the house, but also feeding them chicken and other three course meals. As the story goes, this sweet allure and kindness was really just to satisfy the desire for roasted children. In the Hansel and Gretel nursery rhyme, the kids flip the script and kick the ‘creepy person’—a story engaged in witch bashing1—into the oven, cook them and run away. This creepy person, we might consider, embodies the ethos of the Worldeater. If humans and non-humans are not being expelled, then they are being fattened up in the factory farms, or enchanted to be cooked or, more accurately, kept alive just long enough—using their rational best interests—to continue a particular type of work, managerial role, lifestyle and, overall, participation in the techno-industrial system. Maybe this is following migration routes to find work or people trying not to kill themselves in banal—or ‘bullshit’ (Graeber 2018)—office jobs and so on. The variation and possibility of lived situations are enormous. The point, however, is that humans have broken ecological balance and are systematically poisoning their habitats and this is done by betraying their traditional tree, animal and river friends—to name only a few—in exchange for modernity and economic growth or ‘second nature’ (O’Connor 1988 ; Escobar 1996). The story of Hansel and Gretel—in keeping with the playful yet (deadly) serious spirit invoked throughout this book—in our reality may not be the happy ending told to children, as in a similar story mainstream society reproduces with notions of eco-modernism and green growth. This raises the question : how will people get out of the candy house—how will they get out of the temple of techno-capitalist progress that has been constructed over the last three centuries, if not longer ? Said differently, do humans have the power to resist the allure of the Worldeater and escape its entrails—what can they do ?
In theory the answer is, ‘yes’. In practice the future is undetermined, but if the past century is any indication it is, ‘no’.”