Guerrilla History - Climate Breakdown, Sovereignty, & the "Anthropocene" - IB

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

In this Intelligence Briefing, Adnan and Henry discuss some of the latest regarding the ongoing climate breakdown and discussions of the "Anthropocene", weaving in discussion of sovereignty, techno-modernism, the Capitalocene, and much more.  This is the latest in our series of episodes focused on the environment and climate, be sure to check out our previous episodes on A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things (w/ Jason W. Moore & Raj Patel), World Ecology & the Capitalocene (w/ Jason W. Moore), Shut Down Red Hill! Naval Pollution Disaster (w/ Mikey from O'ahu Water Protectors), Socialist States and the Environment  (w/ Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro), COP26 Dispatch  (w/ Vijay Prashad & Chris Saltmarsh), and Eco-Despair, Revolutionary Optimism, and the Fight for the Future.   Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined, unfortunately, only by one of my usual co-hosts today. We are joined by Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? Hi, Henry. I'm doing well. It's great to be with you. Yeah, great to see you too.

Unfortunately, we're not joined by our other usual co-host. host, Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and The Red Menace podcast, as he had other commitments come up at the last minute. But we're definitely looking forward to having Brett back for our next recording. Today, we are going to be having an intelligence briefing. But before we introduce the topic, I would like to remind the listeners that you can help support the show by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. All of the contributions, are what make this show possible without those contributions.

We really wouldn't be able to continue making the show. And you can also follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod to keep up with the latest releases that we're putting out. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore Pod. As I mentioned today, we're having an intelligence briefing, which means it's just me and Adnan today. No guests that we're interviewing today, but we have a really interesting conversation coming up.

So, Adnan, this was a topic that you, suggested for this intelligence briefing, so why don't I let you introduce it for the audience? Sure. Yeah, I noticed, of course, as many of us did, that it was very hot this last month. And there were many news reports that talked about how the global temperature was the highest on record. And then the very next day, the record was broken, and we were clearly going through a period where the evidence of climate change, global warming is very clear, and its consequences are that when I speak to a student of mine who happens to be in Iran and I ask how he's doing, you know, there are a lot of technical challenges because it's 47 degrees centigrade, you know, in, you know, in Qom or in And around the Middle East, there are places that for months of the year are almost becoming uninhabitable. And there are rising temperatures, of course, in Europe. And this is already having

consequences, fatal consequences with excess deaths, particularly the elderly or those with other preexisting conditions, certainly the poor, people who can't afford, whose health is already degraded by their living conditions and then on top of it with substandard housing without access to expensive energy. So it just seemed to me that it was time for something of a climate update and discussion. And subsequent to those record-breaking days a couple of weeks ago or so, there also have been some interesting developments in environmental sort of studies and debates and the discourses and policy discussions around, particularly with the Anthropocene working group, a collection of scientists and policymakers and environmental groups that have decided that, you know, studying the human intervention into the environment and climate change needs to be dated in a kind of narrow way. And they have decided that you have to look at the 1950s as the decisive turning point

for various radioactive or radioisotopes from the nuclear age that disseminated through the environment. And they decided to have a kind of publicity stunt, you might say, to. to dramatize the marking point in time by situating it also in a place. And they chose this Lake Crawford in Ontario, a Canadian lake, as the sort of symbol of the Anthropocene age. And this is occasioned quite a lot of heated. I mean that perhaps meaningfully as a pun here. heated debate and discussion because of the narrow parameters involved and what is left

out. So it seemed to me that it was worth thinking a little bit about, you know, what's happening in environmental questions right now. And I also happened to read an article that was interesting and provocative. And it seemed also demonstrated so much of the narrow way in which we're trying to think through and respond to the devastating effects of climate change and in particular rising sea levels. So there was a article in the Guardian that's doing a series on the Rising Ocean that was profiling the legal questions of sovereignty for countries that is island nations that are facing, you know, imminent submersion. Maybe it's not so imminent, but it's already clearly starting to happen, and they're anticipating that within 20, 30, 40 years, certainly over the

next century, their nation may no longer exist as a territory and what to do about that. And so the article is called, we could lose our status as a state. What happens to a people when their land disappears? So this raised some very serious questions about sovereignty, how to think about sovereignty in the age of climate change, how international law and legal regimes that have defined states in particular ways are suddenly becoming obsolete and yet there seem to be attempts

to reconstitute some form of law to preserve legal status as a state without territory. And it also raised questions about indigenous approaches to environment that I thought, you know, would be worth discussing and thinking, thinking through because I had some critiques about, you know, the response that was taking place here to create, for example, for Tuvalu, a digital twin for them in order for them to survive as a kind of legal entity in the world of nation states. It just seems in some ways a very odd approach, you know, to the devastation that's taking place is that, well, we need to, you know, maintain our national identity in a virtual world so that we can, what, make claims still have representation in the U.N., participate in national bodies, get loans.

You know, clearly the problem here is that people are going to be made refugees by the terrible effects. And instead of thinking about this as a large-scale question that we have to, one, reverse and then adapt to by welcoming refugees, rethinking what it means to be a citizen and saying we are one world and have an internationalist perspective, there are developments taking place to kind of preserve this narrow national kind of perspective. although I do appreciate that given the problems of the global south has in trying to seek justice from the global north that is most responsible for the environmental changes that are taking place that if you have a politics of seeking some kind of reparations for in climate justice within the current system that we have. have those claims perhaps can only be forwarded if you maintain some sense of a kind of legal entity as a nation state. So there's all these contradictions that I was very interested in. I just wanted to raise this as a topic of interest in discussion. Yeah, of course. And there's so many points that I would like to jump off on here, but one of the first ones that I want to jump off on just because it's something that always

frustrates me is when you're talking about this kind of digital and entity in order to preserve the, you know, digital statehood at least of places like Tuvalu. It's the typical reaction from the eco-modernist camp that we see in terms of, okay, well, we understand that we're having ecological collapse in many cases, and we're having all of these impacts that are being disproportionately felt by the global South in particular. But instead of addressing the root cause of what's causing the ecological collapse, instead of thinking about what we can do to prevent those causes from continuing, and of course I'm speaking here of capitalism being the motive force of ecological collapse, instead of thinking about how can we ensure that we have a just transition, how can we ensure that we have climate justice, how can we ensure that what we're doing

in terms of mitigating the ecological collapse is not just a one-size-fits-all strategy to ensure that we are preventing some of the impacts, but in a way that the global north would be able to absorb some of the negative impacts of having to make such a transition, Whereas the global self has hung out to dry because they're going to impose the same policies on everybody, whether or not that country is developed and whether or not they've developed their own productive forces and et cetera, et cetera, all of these things. The ecomodernist take is, well, we are increasing our production of technological activity. We are coming up with new technologies all the time. let's just put our focus on developing new technologies in order to either mitigate or to circumvent the problems that we're seeing, rather than addressing the root cause. So instead of saying, hey, capitalism is the root cause for ecological collapse, the solution therefore is obviously breaking free of the confines of the capitalist economic and social system, instead of focusing,

on that aspect of things, they're thinking about which technologies they can make in order to within the existing system, or they say during a transition to a socialist system without actually focusing on how that becomes possible, what technologies they can do in order to preserve some sorts of societal things that we have going on. So how we can not scale back production, but use new technologies to do it in a more efficient way. or utilize alternative sources of material input or in cases like this, say, hey, we are going to lose these island nations. The ocean levels are rising. Inevitably, they're going to go under the seas and the people there are going to become climate refugees having to travel

to elsewhere because their home is now underwater. Instead of saying, what are some things that we can do to try to prevent that from happening? They say, let's look at how we can try to preserve their culture, assuming that they are going to go under the water in the first place. And yes, of course, the way that things currently are constituted within the world system, we're not going to prevent these things from happening. But we shouldn't accept that. We should plan for that eventuality, but we should focus our attention on mitigating that from happening by focusing on the root causes of this ecological collapse. And that's something that this ecomodernist camp tends to do is focus on technological fixes to things rather than actually dealing with

the root cause that's creating the necessity for trying to think about what technology could be utilized to fix it. So that's one of the things that I wanted to talk about. I don't know if you have any take on that. I mean, I completely agree that this is what seemed absent in the discussions. It was about a very technical set of legal questions and measures and mechanisms that could be made to adjust within it. But I guess they would, you know, the authors of this article would argue that, well, the overall kind of framing kind of question that motivates the whole discussion in this series about rising seas itself is, of course, this devastating, you know, consequence of global

warming and ice belt and rising sea levels. But, you know, it's interesting that it doesn't foreground, um, you know, any of the mechanisms or the moral justification or, as I say, the mechanisms within this system to recognize these dangers and try and address the problem to prevent the loss of these island nations. The only thing that is discussed is how that there are attempts to, you know, build these kind of sea barriers and other things to kind of reinforce the coastliner and, you know, outlying atolls and so on. but that because there is the anticipation that it isn't just that the sea levels themselves will rise over the course of the next century to threaten the existence of these nations, but that storm surges and, of course, with greater volatility in the weather and climate systems we're seeing, you know, large and more violent kinds of storms and weather, the storm surges can overwhelm and, flood these, you know, flood these countries multiple times, say, within a year that just make the viability of, even if the sea levels haven't completely submerged the country.

And so they're talking about, you know, this from a very technical perspective without sort of thinking or at least raising the issue of what is needed in order to, you know, what is needed in order to reverse this situation. And also, you know, they didn't really bring up the whole question in this article and in these discussions that you're referencing, actual climate justice and appropriate reparations. If these countries are not going to be saved because we reverse the problem that's causing, the root causes that are that are creating the environmental issue, then there must be an obligation within international law for the harms that are created. I mean, this is a mechanism that is

already within international law, within the state system, you know, reparations have been paid or great crimes, you know, war crimes, and so on in the middle of the 20th century. So there is certainly precedent for this. And it seems to me it would only be natural to have climate justice and climate reparations be an immediate part of the discussion. But they don't want to open that up so directly and fully because it would mean a massive reorientation of the entire global economy to actually pay. And it's only under those conditions that they might consider the mechanisms of reorienting the economy and society and politics in such a way to address the climate devastations caused by capitalism.

And that's exactly right at none. And I want to talk more about that in a little bit. And I'm going to be utilizing the work by a comrade of mine who I think nails this more than anybody else, which is of course Max Isle, who's been a guest of this show before listeners will be familiar with his book, A People's Green New Deal, which has been talked about on Rev Left. I've talked about it on David Feldman's show. It's been talked about many other platforms that are not associated with us.

But, yeah, Max is a great scholar. And I mean, he really nails these issues better than anybody. And we're going to, I'm going to be utilizing some quotes from his work in just a little bit. But I want to highlight something else that you mentioned, which is regarding the anthropos Anthropocene working group and their designation of, you know, this lake and this layer of sediment is being indicative of the Anthropocene. I find this very problematic because, of course, there are people who utilize the Anthropocene as a concept who are socialists, but the framing of the Anthropocene leaves it wide open to usage by capitalists, by non-socialists, in any case,

because it, again, does not necessarily bring in capitalism as the motive force. Many people who utilize the Anthropocene do utilize capitalism as part of their analysis when looking at the causes of ecological collapse, but that is not inherently part of the conceptualization of the Anthropocene. And very interestingly, after this designation of this lake in Canada that you mentioned earlier, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group. Earl Ellis, he'd been a member of the group for 14 years, one of the more you could say heterodox members. He wasn't exactly in the mainstream of the Anthropocene Working Group, but he was working within that group for 14 years. He resigned and put

out a statement, which is a very interesting statement. You can find it online. I got the statement on anthroecology.org. But I'm just going to highlight two little parts here within his statement. He says, in part, it is no longer possible to avoid the reality that narrowly defining the Anthropocene and the way the Anthropocene Working Group has chosen to do so, speaking of this lake, has become more than a scholarly concern. The Anthropocene working group's choice to systematically ignore overwhelming evidence of Earth's long-term anthropogenic transformation

is not just bad science, it's bad for public understanding and action on global change. This, at a time when broader cooperation to address these grave societal challenges, is more critical than ever. To define the Anthropocene as a shallow band of sediment in a single lake,

is an esoteric academic matter, but dividing Earth's human transformation into two parts, pre and post-1950, again, just a reminder of listeners, we're talking about 1950 as the dividing line. I mean, so recent, it's absurd, as if the pivotal moment and the ecological collapse only began in 1950. But in any case, that was the decision that was made. So pre- and post-1950, does real damage? by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth's unfolding social environmental crisis? Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet? The political ramifications of such a

misleading and scientifically inaccurate portrayal are clearly profound and regressive. Perhaps Anthropocene Working Group's break in Earth history will simply be ignored outside stratigraphy, But this is undoubtedly neither Anthropocene Working Group's goal, nor is it the way Anthropocene Working Group's narrative is being interpreted across the public media. I think that that's a critical thing, is that if we're focusing on the dividing line in terms of here is where the root of our current ecological collapse began, 1950. Of course you cannot say that the root causes capitalism, because that would assume that capitalism, in at least its modern form

only began in 1950. That's not true. Capitalism goes back far before that. And that's why in terms of many other things, looking at class relations and things like that, is why I find the capital scene, which we've talked about with our comrade Jason

W. Moore and Raj Patel in various episodes of the show is much more useful because this is a longer term history. It goes back to 1492, as Jason will quickly point out that highlights capitalism as the motive force for ecological collapse. And of course, capitalism has progressed in various ways since 1492. And similarly, we have seen various components of the capitalist system drive ecological change and ecological collapse

at different rates over time. But to focus on 1950 as the root, you know, based on the sediment layer in this lake, you can no longer say that capitalism is the mode of force because what was different about capitalism pre-1950 and post-1950? Yes, there were some changes in modes of production and things like that, the amount of emissions that were coming out. But are we going to say the Industrial Revolution, which happened far before 1950, was not a contributor to ecological collapse? Was it not part of capitalism? Is the colonial legacy, the imperial legacy of these nations, the imperialist nations? exploiting the resources, completely stripping the land bare in the colonized nations, and then

utilizing those resources to ramp up production and put out those emissions to develop their own countries. Is that not something that was driving ecological collapse? Of course it was. And so to narrow down your conception of when the ecological collapse's root was to 1950 and say, yes, there were things happening before that, but the root is 1950, it's a, a it makes me very angry because I think that it's a complete misframing and it's something that as you mentioned the nun has been scooped up by way more media than most you know left wing ecological news is typically brought up and it misleads people into thinking that oh if only 1950 had been different then things since then would be different no the cause is capitalism and it goes far before 1950 well i i also saw um dr earle ellis's um

statement about why he was resigning from the AWG and found it very interesting. And I think actually it's even more pernicious than what you were saying in that choosing 1950 does a number of things. I mean, not only does it include that previous history and diminish or minimize it as analytically relevant for really thinking about what's caused environmental change and collapse. But one, it makes it very much a kind of technology question of nuclear age. It's only one small component of the way in which human interaction with the environment has been changed and disrupted it in various ways. It's also highlighting far more the question of a kind of pollution, a particular kind of pollution. Yes. And a whole kind of question of how land use about

emissions, about development, and all of that. So it very narrowly says, well, the nuclear age introduces certain kinds of outcomes of technology that are kind of devastating. And so that's what we're really, you know, kind of discussing. The second kind of point about that is in terms of making kind of modern technology rather than processes that lead to the developments of certain kind of modern technology as the key framework, is that also by dating it at 1950 and making it about this kind of modern technology, it's possible to occlude the role of capitalism entirely because, of course, this is the age, you know, in which you do have the Cold War and you have two camps, right, you know, and they're making developments and both of

them are nuclear powers by 1950 and are developing nuclear energy over the course of the 50s. And so it's possible to say that it's just a kind of human broad-based condition of modernity that's creating this rather than analytically discusses. And I think what's interesting about this is the erasure of history as a meaningful. This is a real big problem. And this is what guerrilla history overall is dedicated to opposing. So this is why we should be so angry about it, Henry. Right. Because it's absolutely an erasure of any meaningful engagement in history.

And there can be debates, and there can be discussions and differences among scholars about how to interpret and understand history. But this kind of a move really just erases history and makes it kind of irrelevant in various ways. Because a lot of people in the Anthropocene discourse who take that framing rather than, say, the capitalist scene, which we prefer, you know, following the great work of Jason Moore that's much more analytically specific, is that, You know, many people argue that the change to, you know, from hunter-gatherer sort of forms of social organization to agriculture, you know, was one of the key kind of delineators of human interaction with the rest of ecology that tips the balance. Or, you know, you can have these kind of analytical discussions, right? the long-d-ray history of how human social, technical, political, and economic development has transformed the environment and human relations within it. So, you know, some people who are part of the Anthropocene, you know, want to talk about this kind of deep history going way back, fossil remains and so on. And they can make their case.

I think what's in but you can't actually have that discussion either if you're only talking about Lake Crawford 1950 right and so on it erases like a genuine vital discussion that could be had we would prefer dating it with you know what happens with Western European kind of colonization and the development of industrial capitalism and those kinds of transformations that happen in the early modern world but of course we could discuss. with environmental historians, scientists, and so on about other periods of change. And we have to have that discussion in order to meaningfully make the case for, well, how is the rate of change? What are the consequences at different stages in history to be able to make the case that capitalism is the most destructive force? That that's the most meaningful one analytically. It's not about when did any kind of effect of change in the environment happen. I mean, I mean, that's just, you know, that's a not a robust analytical understanding of history.

I mean, of course, you could say there is change. You could make that case, you know, in the deep sort of like history. But if you're not having that kind of a discussion, then we can't actually refine and make the appropriate critiques and analysis. And that's another point of what, of why he's, why Dr. Ellis, you know, to resign is, you know, that the group itself has been so focused, as he says, on promoting a single narrow definition of the Anthropocene that there is no longer room for descent or for a broader perspective within the group. And this is going back for quite a ways. But, you know, what he's talking about is something that also we've been talking a lot and some of the critical

kind of areas of the left is that, you know, having the capacity to have open for, you know, free discussion and debate rather than having orthodoxies that ignore material realities to promote certain ideological positions and a kind of culture that is opposed to being able to really engage in meaningful discussion, debate, and so on, is never going to serve the left. You know, it's never going to serve the left because in order to make the case and make the arguments, we have to go against so many presumptions that are part of what's generated ideologically and culturally under capitalism that it really requires a lot of time, a lot of evidence, a lot of study in order to show how all the presumptions, all the media

consensacies are, you know, off track from really allowing us to understand, you know, current realities, socially, economically and politically. So the fact that there is in this scientific circle, the development of a kind of exclusionary orthodox view of taking a very narrow approach and then kind of enforcing that as the definition of the Anthropocene, rather than sustaining a kind of culture of discussion and dialogue and debate to really understand how the environment, you know, has been shaped by human engagement, you know, it's really, it's really, it's really. necessary to have that. And that also is being closed down by all this excessive media attention

and the participation by this group in a rather narrow framing of the issues. Yeah, I think that that's exactly right at none. Now, I want to kind of transition us a little bit. I mean, we're not really leaving the topic. But one of the things that we've talked about is the impacts on the global south. And you mentioned Tuvalu, which, of course, is an island nation. And interestingly, I think that these island nations get far more attention than other places in the global south that are similarly impacted. Just because it's a little bit more dramatic, like, hey, their island is disappearing under the water. Now, of course, that is an existential issue. And it, of course, deserves attention. I'm not saying that

they should get less attention than they do. My point is, is that other global South nations that also suffer. Devastating consequences get zero attention and that we need to be giving a lot more attention to the impact on these places. So one of the examples that I typically give is Mozambique. I mean, think about the last time you saw Mozambique and the climate crisis and the news together related to each other. I mean, have you ever seen it in the news related to each other? And probably not in mainstream press. I can't recall any such occasion. Right. I had to do my own research on it years ago because I was interested, I was doing some research on Mozambique specifically, and I was looking up the impacts of the climate crisis on Mozambique. So, I mean,

this was like a decade ago that I was looking at this already, or almost a decade ago, I guess, maybe eight years. And what did we find? Mozambique has an obscene number of climate refugees. Of course, you have to consider the geography of where Mozambique is and what the land. landscape is like. And I'm assuming that most listeners probably aren't all that familiar with Mozambique's geographic location and geography. It's on the east coast of Africa, relatively flat on the coastal areas. And what do we see is that with the increasing ecological breakdown and the increasing number and severity of these natural disasters that are taking place coming off of the ocean, we see huge, you know, typhoons hitting Mozambique directly that in the past,

both the number and the scale are nowhere near what we're seeing these days. We have mass flooding that's displacing hundreds of thousands of people and creating climate refugees that having to go inland in Mozambique or into other countries more generally. But, you know, this is not an example that we see. Or Madagascar. Now, Madagascar has been in the news a couple of times because of one specific reason. Madagascar is the leading producer of vanilla beans, which of course is what people in the global north like to flavor their sweets with. You know, you can't have a good creme brulee without Madagascar, bourbon vanilla beans. And because of that, Madagascar actually does get into the news sometimes with regards to the impacts of the ecological breakdown on it, but otherwise

it wouldn't. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode that we did, kind of our last environmental update, I guess you could kind of call it. But Madagascar had not had a sustained rain for like three years at that point. I mean, think about that for a second. The drought that they had been experiencing, a year's long drought. And it was making into the news because it was devastating their vanilla crop, which again, people in the global North care about, but also those people could not be food self-sufficient because their crops would not eat. Your crops don't grow if you don't get rain. And they were having years-long droughts, multiple years-long droughts. And there was a bunch of interviews that I had read of farmers in Madagascar who were

talking about the absolute inability to cultivate anything without extensive irrigation, which is also not particularly easy in Madagascar, given the geography of that island nation, it's something that we don't think about, we don't often hear about, and we have to consider that when we're talking about environmentalism, environmentalism, which sometimes is used as a almost like a slur against people and, you know, these social Democrats in the global North talk about environmentalism. And of course, what they're talking about is green capitalism that preserves their way of life and, you know, maybe mitigate some of the most extreme devastation of climate change. But of course, the most extreme devastation of climate

change is felt in the global South. And what these social Democrats care about the most is maintaining their quality of life, maintaining their, you know, social benefits that they have and things like this. So it's green capitalism is what it is. But there are, of course, you know, there is eco-socialism. There is socialist environmentalism. And we have to keep in mind that when we're talking about the global south, environmentalism is often linked to the struggle for sovereignty. as these people in the global south are often struggling to protect their land rights and resources from exploitation by multinational corporations and other entities from the global north, of course. What we have to do is we have to not let these social Democrats

have the usage of environmentalism to their own ends and have that term become synonymous with social democratic or liberal conceptions of what is the extent of what can be done under the framework of environmentalism. We have to view this through class struggle. We have to see that environmental crises are the result of economic and political systems that are prioritizing interests of the wealthy and powerful capitalist class over the working classes of various countries. We have to keep this in mind.

If we don't keep this in mind, we allow them to use that term to their own ends. And at the best we can hope for is green capitalism, which in trend. This neo-colonial relations between the imperial countries and the global periphery, we're not going to break free of it unless we're viewing environmentalism through the lens of class struggle, unless we're focusing on national sovereignty, self-determination for people. Of course, focusing on indigenous populations and indigenous practices is also something that often is not talked about in mainstream circles, but is something that we have to continue to talk about and is something that, you know,

our friends like Nick Estes at the Red Nation have talked about. Max Isle has talked about. So I just wanted to discuss that for a second and then turn it over to you at none before maybe I'll read a couple of quotes from Max and we'll just have a little back and forth about them. That's right. And I think you're right.

Reminding us of the Cochibamba Declaration. Absolutely. These kinds of indigenous statements on and representing Global South perspectives and indigenous perspectives in this and this is partly the reason why I found this article both curiously

interesting but also so strange because these questions of sovereignty were being talked about in this abstract a historical way as just a mere response to the contemporary and future possibility of this contradictory situation of

a nation losing its home territory and how does it constitute itself and maintain its legal and internationally recognized identity as a nation and maintain its sovereignty over maybe the water ways and water areas of what had been their land and territorial waters and so on. When what is being ignored here is the way in which national sovereignty, under colonialism and under neocolonialism and under imperialism and global capitalism as so undermined these people's ability to control their resources, you know, for decades and centuries, that this is not a sudden kind of question or problem that is a quirk and an interesting kind of, you know, thing to contemplate in light of, you know, climate change. It is part of an ongoing devastation and domination. And none of this was really discussed. instead we're having this discussion about, well, what are the historical precedents, you know, for, you know, nations in exile? And they give a few, you know, examples of like, you know, during wartime where a nation had, you know, a government had to kind of leave the territory and in exile but still kind of be recognized as making decisions on behalf of a certain people or periods where the Holy See, right, the Vatican micro state, you know, had to kind of relocate, you know, to Avignon, for example, in the medieval period, and so on, as giving precedence. And so they're representing as if they're using history to try and help us understand what may or may not be possible for these island nations in the future and noting that, well, those were temporary cases.

Wouldn't the situation of, you know, environmental collapse, submersion and loss of, you know, the physical territory on a more permanent basis? be a challenge that maybe these precedents couldn't be used. So you're having this kind of sophisticated discussion that completely misses the point. And I guess that's kind of the point that you were getting at, really, is that these have to be framed as questions of class. International class solidarity and class analysis is absolutely necessary. And that means that you have to look at history as these processes, large-scale processes of the rise of these world systems, of global colonial and imperial empires that have devastated the planet

in the rise and emergence and globalizing of capitalism. So without really framing it in those class terms, it's impossible to see the real, you know, big issues and instead you get these strange kind of legal discussions and micro questions and contradictions in liberal and even certain left discourse. that mistake, you know, where the real analysis needs to be.

Yeah, I think that you nailed that exactly at Don. And I just want to make one other quick mention that I kind of forgot in my last point before I turn to these quotes, which is that when a lot of people that are on, you know, the far left fringes, which of course we have many of that are listening to this program, when they hear the term environmentalism, they often think of, you know, liberal environmentalism or social democratic green capitalism or environmental imperialism which is like another of course uh you know direction that it's being being taken in as well yeah i think we talked about that with max aisle when he was on the show so uh yeah of course listeners you should go back and listen to that episode with max aisle

but another recommendation in terms of what to go back and listen to and read is when we're talking about environmentalism or eco-socialism these are not inherently green capitalism, social democratic, or eco-imperialist conceptions, we have to remember that when we're striving for those of us who are striving for socialism or communism, like environmentalism can be included in that. And in historical cases of trying to build socialism was, we talked with my dear friend, comrade, collaborator, Salvatore, Engel de Morrow, about his work, socialist states and the environment, when people think about socialist states, like, of course, the Soviet Union, Mao's, China, when we think about these things, we're often told that it was production and increase of the productive forces above all else,

you know, degrade the environment as long as we can increase the mode of production and then create improvements to the standards of living of the people within these countries, within a socialist economic framework. I mean, that's what you hear when you look at, you know, what was the environment like in these state socialist countries. But when you actually analyze the record of these state socialist countries on the environment, you see that they were actually better than what was before them, better than their contemporaries, the capitalist contemporaries. So, you know, comparing them to places like the U.S. or France,

or Germany at similar time periods, and they were better than what happened after the socialist projects ended. So, you know, when the Soviet Union fell or upon the 78 reforms and afterwards in China, if you compare these socialist projects against any of these different metrics, you know, their own country before and after these socialist projects, or against capitalist, contemporaries of theirs, what you see is that these places all performed significantly better and had much more robust environmental projects

than the capitalist contemporaries of them or their capitalist precursors. This is something that we have to understand. It's not something that we get told. We have to understand it, though, that environmentalism, in many times in history, has been wrapped up in the project to try to build socialism and therefore we shouldn't just discard environmentalism as like a bourgeois capitalist conception. It's not necessarily. We have to make

these socialist conceptions of environmentalism for when we would like to build a socialist project ourselves. So I just wanted to remind you that we have this episode with Salvatore that's about three hours long on his book Socialist States and the Environment. Of course, you can pick up his book Socialist States and the Environment. To read more about that, I think it's really important. But I want to turn to some of these quotes from Max Isle's book. So listeners, of course, another recommendation for you. You have to pick up a People's Green New Deal by Max Isle. I really think it's one of the most important books that's come out in recent years for those of us on the left and for those of us who do care about the ecological collapse that we're witnessing every day.

So I'm going to read a couple quotes of not and maybe we'll discuss them. So this is from, these are all from chapter 7, green anti-imperialism and the national question. In this part, we're talking about the national question. He says, for those reasons, the national question arises in South and North alike. It is the foundation of a people's dream new deal. This might seem like an odd foundation stone for a people's agenda in a settler colonial empire. And I think just as an aside that we always have to remember that countries like the United States, like Canada, like Australia, these are a settler colony. The United States rides a rough shot over the sovereignty of other states, but that is precisely

the point. Other people's national questions, especially those of indigenous peoples, must form the basis of a people's Green New Deal within the territory of the United States and in other settler colonies, since building ecological societies requires popular control by the most excluded over their national productive resources. I think that that's a really important point at none. I don't know if you have anything that you want to add on that before. turn to the next quote. I think that that is a very important principle here that he's begun the chapter with, you know, is that, and also citing the indigenous core content within, linking, you know,

indigenous struggles and solidarity with indigenous struggles in the imperial core is absolutely crucial. So, you know, the fact that the U.S. rise roughshot over the sovereignty of other states is, as he says, really the point. I mean, you have to have national liberation at all levels both globally and within the imperial core. And that's how we can link those who want to, you know, be productively related to causes of liberation and climate justice can do so in the imperial core is, you know, by. taking an anti-settler colonial perspective, you know, on their own, on their own nation and aligning themselves in solidarity with the politics of decolonization. That's what it might mean. Yeah. Yeah. And then jumping forward a little bit to the climate and ecological debt section. He says the concept of ecological debt, and I bring this up because we talked about it a little bit earlier. Yeah. Is based on the diagnosis that capitalist production and consumption have vastly overrun the world's space for waste, including the atmospheric space, space for that all

important byproduct of fossil capitalism carbon dioxide. The concept of climate debt concerns the appropriation or enclosure of the world's capacity to absorb greenhouse gases with staggering implications for the development prospects and pathways of the world's poor. Some also refer to what is often termed adaptation debt. The resources needed for poor countries to control or otherwise respond to rising sea levels, increased typhoons, and other outgrowths of ecologically destructive capitalism. settling climate debt is a material implementation of the international legal principle of

common but differentiated responsibilities, which stipulates that all states are responsible for addressing the destruction of the global environment. But they are not all equally responsible. Economic and other disparities between countries must be considered when designing legal obligations or responsibilities appropriate to their economic resources and institutional capabilities. And then he goes and talks about how many social Democrats often are kind of overlooking this key point. But in a little bit later, he talks about the Cochabamba People's Process, which you mentioned Adnan. Over a decade ago, the Cochabamba People's Process took place settling the framework for climate debt discussions. That meeting devoted a working group to tackling the issue of climate debt, building upon two of the core principles of the United Nations framework,

invention on climate change, the principle of common and differentiated responsibilities and the principle of equity. These are very important things, Adnan, that we have to keep in mind that when we're talking about dealing with the ecological collapse that we're experiencing globally, all countries have a role to play in mitigating this, but not all countries have an equal role in having caused it, not all countries have had an equal benefit from the destruction of it, you know, in terms of the equal benefit of increasing their production, which causing in many ways the destruction of the environment, not all have had that benefit relative to each other. And therefore, we must understand that not all countries should have an equal

responsibility in trying to deal with this. It's not just for a country like the United States or like Britain, which benefited greatly from causing environmental destruction. It's not fair for us to think that the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is one of the most exploited countries in terms of the harvesting of natural resources from them by the imperialist countries, for them to have a similar role, at least in terms of scale down to their size, it's not fair to think that they should have similar responsibilities to the United States who developed itself on the backs of the exploited peoples and the exploited resources from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo when they haven't reaped those similar benefits. It's not just. So I think that that's a

really important point. Absolutely. I mean, this is elaborating on the point that I alluded to early on that if you actually look at legitimate claims for reparations and do the kind of accounting, the sums are staggering. And actually in this chapter, Max Isle does do some estimations about it. Obviously, more should be done to document and establish these kinds of claims in their foundation. But, you know, estimating 111, 100,000, 12 trillion at the low end to 450 essentially trillion at the high end. If you really account for the devastation, the economic cost in the kind of terms that capitalism operates under that is monetizing all of these and calculating their economic

value in monetary terms, it is staggering. And in fact, actually, the value of doing so is saying that if you take those so-called externalities that are the fiction of how capitalism has legally exempted, you know, profit taking from actual consequences and actual costs, it is the most inefficient system in the history of the world. and if you actually had to pay for the benefits that were, you know, pay for the devastation and the harm for the benefits that you have received, the whole system collapses. So, in fact, what's valuable about this is that if we push the climate debt, if we make the case for reparations, in fact, the best settlement, like any set of debtor nations,

which the Global North really is, would be to make a settlement that is to change their system and have international, you know, communism so that they could escape what would be the utter impoverishment of the global North, that they actually had to pay for what they've caused. You know, a better solution is that we all, you know, have a system of genuine justice and equality and fairness by getting rid of this ridiculously inefficient and horribly destructive system of capitalism. You know, so this, I think this is such an important point here and is never part of the framing and we need to keep introducing these ideas, not because that's the way we actually

think, I mean, you know, but because it puts pressure on absolutely dissolving capitalism is the only solution for humanity and, you know, for the global North. I mean, if you want to avoid, you know, I think legitimate claims of reparation, your best bet is make those transfers into investing in a different kind of system of social economy and politics globally. This is the only way out for humanity. And I think if we can, you know, increase the pressure and saying it's the only way out for the global north because otherwise, really. you're going to have to pay devastatingly to make up for the benefits you've taken and the harm that you've caused. Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of things that are typically not talked about, although I'm hoping that that'll change in the near future is one of his next sections, demilitarization in a peacetime economy. It's not talked about how monumentally destructive to the environment militaries are, and particularly places that have gigantic military.

like the United States. I'm hoping that this changes in the near future. As we know, Abby Martin and Mike Prysner are putting together a documentary about how devastating the U.S. military specifically. But of course, this could be more generalized to militaries more generally across the globe. But of course, the United States being the largest and most destructive military in the world has a relatively larger role to play in the environmental destruction.

I'm hoping that their documentary, Abby and Mike's documentary, goes a long way, and we're hoping to talk with them very soon about the documentary. But yeah, it's something that's not talked about other than by people like Abby and Mike. And so we do have to focus on that. But the last two points that I want to look at in this in terms of quoting, and then we'll have maybe final discussion. I know you have a meeting that you have to go to relatively soon. are the sections on sovereignty and on settler colonialism. And these are things that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. This was kind of the impetus for the conversation.

We've had all of this news coming out, you know, the AWG news coming out. We've had the record breaking heats coming out in the news. But when we're talking about, you can always have new discussions about the latest climate news, but that doesn't inherently make it, you know, of this. very useful conversation for the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist left. You know, otherwise you just end up saying the same things over and over again, but something that we need to focus a lot more on. I mean, we have to focus more on it personally, but also just everybody needs to think

about it more is how the role of sovereignty and settler colonialism within the conceptions of environmentalism as well as what we need to do in order to mitigate the destruction to the climate that we're experiencing. Max in his section on sovereignty says Latin America, the Arab region, and Africa suffer under foreign intervention from the imperialist corps, which plainly retains the right to determine who should rule other peoples, as it has done for centuries. Under colonialism, peoples were denied their right to history, their right to control their historical process, and their social and economic life, including what to do with the land,

mines and trade of their territories. The consequence of this denial of history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Again, we're not starting at 1950 here. Adnan, we're going back a little bit farther than that. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, was often late Victorian holocausts, borrowing, of course, from Mike Davis's excellent work, and massive wealth drain and colonial famine. People were super exploited.

They were paid wages below those needed for their day-to-day survival and prospering. The anti-colonial struggle in the words of the outstanding anti-colonial theorist and leader Amalcar Cabral was the national liberation of a people, the regaining of the historical personality of that people. It is their return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which they were subjected. And such domination did not end with the extirpation of formal colonial rule. Of course, we still see this with neo-colonial relations all the time and talking about the destruction of the environment and the looting of land's resources without the sovereignty of the people being able to determine what is done with those resources.

I mean, you live in Canada. Think about the mining companies that are Canadian mining companies and the damage and destruction that they do not only to the environment, but to the people in the areas that they're exploiting the resources from. I know that a lot of people, probably not that many listeners to our show, but many people in the broader consciousness think of Canada as like the nice United States or like the more just United States. Canada is a settler colony. It's a capitalist, imperialist settler colony in the same way that the United States is. They're not as loud about their imperialism.

They're not as loud about their settler colonial history and the relations within the country. But just look at what Canadian mining companies as an exemplar of the Canadian project internationally do abroad. They are the biggest exploiters of mining rights and resources that are mined in the world. people don't know that Canada has the biggest mining, the largest number of mines that are under their control outside of Canada compared to any other country. There's no country that's even close to Canada in terms of how many mines globally they control under the auspices of national corporations within their borders. So at non, you know, sovereignty is a big issue and one that even people in Canada, the United States have to grapple with in order to deal with conceptions of environmentalism. If they don't, it's just the same colonial mentality, the same imperial mentality that people

in the global north everywhere tend to have. Absolutely. I mean, you know, green imperialism and green capitalism are really at the heart. That's a discourse that's so important and significant or being able to, you know, bamboozle people into, you know, thinking that there's, you know, any change really afoot. I mean, that's exemplified so well by the example of mining companies and also the way in which decolonial practice land back and indigenous rights are absolutely vital to the solution and the way forward to safeguard the future is, you know, these mining companies violate all the treaty obligations that have been made, all the sovereignty of indigenous peoples inside

Canada and then, of course, you know, nations around the world. And the mining of these kinds of minerals, whether it's lithium and other kinds of metals and so on, are. absolutely crucial to the green capitalist future that is being envisioned. So we really need to ring fence that kind of liberal and even kind of socialist, social democratic environmentalism and provide the real analysis and the critique here. And I guess I would say by way of kind of concluding thoughts from me is how important a real sense and understanding of history, of dialectical materialism, of historical consciousness that's informed by being able to see analytically what's significant and what's just a kind of

small, minor kind of contradiction of other processes is to the contemporary political discussions around climate, around environment, you know, without having this kind of longer sense, long-dure sense of the growth of capitalism, its relationship to imperialism, you know, I think our politics is completely confused and unmoored. And it's by having that kind of historical understanding that you can really substantiate and clarify what are the real issues and what are the real movements

and areas for opportunity for our political action and what are the various responsibilities and duties to the future and for liberation that we have in our different positions and places around the world? We are in the imperial core do have a role to play. It's not the one that it seems so many people want to adopt, but, you know, working to decolonize, demilitarize, these are the crucial questions. And if our politics is not joined to an anti-imperialist analysis, it's really, you know, missing the boat, it seems to me. It's just another variation of, you know, global north hegemony that helps perpetuate capitalism on the backs of the vast majority of the world. Yeah, I agree entirely. And in closing, I'm just going to read one last quote from Max. It's from, you mentioned land back, which is what brought me to the,

the section on settler colonialism within his book, and this will be my closing thought as well. He says, skipping down just a little bit. In Zimbabwe, for example, the most radical post-Cold War agrarian reform occurred, eliciting a Cold War campaign of demonization, isolation, and possibly rollback. In South Africa, agrarian reform is on the table and is a vibrant political demand in cities, slums, and countryside alike. In the North American settler states, indigenous struggles at standing rock and through idle no more have been catalyst for far broader consciousness amongst non-indigenous radicals

of the simmering and bubbling national question. More broadly, it has been amongst the indigenous that rights to access and use of the environment are intertwined with rights to land and land back. The Anchorage Declaration, which assembled indigenous representatives from North America, the Arctic Asia, Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean called for its states to, quote, recognize and implement the fundamental human rights and status of indigenous peoples, including the collective rights to traditional ownership, use, access, occupancy, and title to traditional land, air, forests, water, ocean, sea ice, and sacred sites. We have to keep in mind that, of course, we can't fetishize indigenous knowledge in the way that

some have kind of a knee-jerk reaction to, but we do have to understand that indigenous knowledge and indigenous practices were things that were developed over hundreds or thousands of years in order to coexist in nature as part of nature. There are a lot of things to learn. We have to have sovereignty for the indigenous populations within these settler colonies at the forefront of our mind. And we have to keep in mind that until we deal with the settler colonial nature of the capitalist societies that are here, And until we dismantle capitalism, we're probably not going to be foregrounding indigenous rights, indigenous knowledge. And sovereignty for the indigenous people of these countries or the sovereignty of people in the neo-colonial nations abroad, we have to deal with the root cause.

And that's what my closing thought is, is that if we're just thinking about, you know, the main problems. with the environment have really been occurring since technological advances from 1950 onwards, we're missing the point. We have to go back and understand that colonialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, these are the motive forces for environmental and ecological degradation and destruction. We have to grapple with that. We have to think about how to deal with that, how to overcome those relations, and therefore we can put forth conceptions of how to have a just transition. We can have conceptions of how to move to a socialist system that does also focus on protecting the environment in a way that will also be

just for people in the global south who have been suffering the brunt of ecological collapse without having any of the benefits. Historically, that the global North countries have had by exploiting and destroying the environment. So that's my closing thought, Adnan. How can the listeners find you in your other podcast? I guess we'll just wrap up here. Yes, well, listeners can follow me on Twitter at Abnan A. Hussein.

You can also check out my website, adnanhussein.org, later in the summer and fall. I hope to be putting more content on there. Maybe doing some individual videos and developing some courses like I've done in the past, the formation of a crusading society. So if you're interested in perhaps kind of guerrilla history basic training, today I talked a little bit about how important historical formation and consciousness is. I'd like to do a series of workshops on training in history, theory and practice for liberation, for social justice. And so if you're interested in those, check out. Stay in touch. Connect with me on my website or through Twitter so you can find out about those opportunities. I also hope to relaunch since there's been a bit of a hiatus. The M-A-L-L-I-S. You can go listen to back episodes, but I hope starting in the fall to begin putting out some new episodes if you're interested in the Middle East Islamic world, Muslim diaspora culture and issues. Yeah, absolutely recommend all of that.

before I give some more suggestions that tell you how to find me, I'll just mention that our co-host Brett O'Shea was not able to make it today, but you can find him and all of his work at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. And before I introduce myself, you know, read myself out, I guess.

I just want to reiterate those suggestions for those of you who are truly interested in how to deal with the environment and are socialists. You know, you are socialists and you want to deal with the environment in a constructive and productive way. The people who I've mentioned in this episode are people who you should look into their work, people like Jason W. Moore, people like Raj Patel, like Max Ayo, like Salvatore Angl de Morrow. These are people. We've talked to all of them on the show before, so you can, of course, listen to the episodes that we did with them, but also read their work. They have huge volumes of work at this point, focusing on eco-socialism, focusing on socialist environmentalism.

You know, Jason W. Moore is the leader of the and kind of the founder of thinking of things as the Capitolo scene. If you find that to be a useful conception, there's nobody better to look at than his work. History of the World and Seven Cheap Things. What a wonderful book by Jason and Raj. We talked about that book on the show relatively recently. That's looking at the history of the world through this lens. Salvatore Angle de Mauro not only did he write

social estates in the environment but he's got a whole journal that he edits that's focused on socialism capitalism, capitalism, and nature and of course Max Isle everybody knows and loves Max. You definitely need to check out his work so if you are

interested in these topics and if you're listening at this point you're either hate listening or you are interested in these topics do check out all four of them because you will certainly find very very useful and essential work that will help you with thinking about these conceptions and thinking about ways forward. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-H-U-C-K-1995. The book that we're putting out, the Losorto translation that Salvatore and I put together of Stalin history

and critique of a black legend, the prints are now being printed. Pre-orders will be available probably at the time that this episode comes out. So check out the Iskra Books website for that. And to remind you, you can help support guerrilla history. Keep us up and running by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Or check us out on Twitter. And you can, of course, help us by sharing our episodes, letting people know what you found

interesting in them by tagging us at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A. a underscore pod. If you say nice things about us on Twitter, we will retweet you. So there's your incentive. I know it's not much, but it's something. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.