climate change

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First Call for the Mesoamerican Caravan for the Climate and Life

Originally published on It’s Going Down.

A call to participate in a caravan traveling from Mexico to Brazil organized by Indigenous and campesino social movements to take place later this year. Published in Spanish on the Centro de Medios Libres and translated by Scott Campbell.

To all the struggles, peoples, and movements of Mesoamerica, Abya Yala, and the Global South:

The climate crisis advances unstoppably, and with it, the devastation of our territories, our cultures, and our very lives. Dispossession, extractive megaprojects, and structural violence stalk us with greater intensity every day. In the face of this planetary emergency, we respond with unity, resistance, and hope.

This caravan will be a space of encounter and mobilization for the peoples and communities that fight in defense of Mother Earth and of territories. We will unite our voices and forces to resist violence, make visible the biodiversity and cultural plurality of our peoples, and denounce the financial system that perpetuates destruction and dispossession.

The caravan will leave from the Mexican southeast, passing through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and will arrive in Belém, Brazil, where we will raise our voice in the framework of the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP30) and in the midst of this Civilizational Crisis that threatens our future with global collapse.

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Heat

The phone warns that the air is toxic and the sun too sunny. Smog to the left of me, forest fires to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle of modernity. Drink water. But the tiny omnipresent poison pellets are giving the kids cancer. I know this and drink it anyway. The A/C daily fights a losing battle. Utility bill as climate tax. Breaking records is banal. In the Caribbean, islands are eviscerated. In Saudi Arabia, hundreds drop dead. It’s a Tuesday. Meanwhile, the argument continues over who gets to captain the Titanic. One is committing genocide, the other wants to commit genocide. Get out the vote. Get out of my vote. Our dreams don’t fit in your ballot boxes. I sit between my parents and my son and think about how the aperture of perspective shifts as the wheel of time spins. Or how we navigate future pasts, tending to generational wounds. There was no cook at Denny’s, so we went to another one. How strange to be in two different locations but the same place. Quantum level capitalism. The left tried to sell me a paper. I tried to give it a zine. Turns out no one reads anymore, unless it’s on Instagram. X (née Twitter) is having a fire sale on fascism. The soul is broken when the path to freedom is premised on the suffering of the Other. God is dead, their corpse caresses our conscience. Alas, it’s muted by anhedonia. There’s no dopamine left for the divine. We are walking tragedies not of our own choosing. I try not to feel guilt and shame, and fail more often than not. It all just seems too big. I know it’s by design, but sometimes the design works. The ingenuity of an unwalled prison is that wherever you go, there you are. Seems the only choice left is to rebel. It’s already so damn hot.

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In times of climate crisis, the future is a territory to defend

Originally posted on It’s Going Down.

The following is the manifesto of the recently launched #FuturosIndígenas initiative being organized in so-called Mexico and beyond. Translated by Scott Campbell.

In the midst of this electoral drought, a network of narratives of resistance is born. Facing a climate crisis that threatens our future on the planet, that puts our lives and territories at risk, representatives from more than 20 Indigenous peoples are organizing to confront this emergency. To reforest minds, to indigenize hearts.

We are defending territory, our way of being and existing; we are uniting efforts and hearts through communicative actions and the creation of narratives in defense of life. We name ourselves Kiliwa, Cucapá, Nahua, Acolhua, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Ñu Savi, Hñatho, Amuzga, Purépecha, Ayuuk, Afro-descendant, Zapoteca, Popoluca, Maya, K’iche’, Wayuu, Zoque and germinate as #FuturosIndígenas [#IndigenousFutures].

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Glimmers Against the Horizon

For a little more than a year I lived in Palestine. This text is not about that time but rather a phenomenon I first encountered there. That would be, in an overarching sense, the experience of the normalization of the expectation of the abnormal event. In this context, an abnormal event refers to an incident or circumstance that is outside the range of normative human experience and often beyond the capacity of the human psyche to make sense of or healthily integrate. During my time in Palestine, abnormal events were occurrences such as the nighttime raids of villages or homes, killings, woundings, beatings, kidnappings, tortures, and home demolitions carried out by Israeli military forces or settlers. (This is limited to the West Bank and would be much more devastating if expanded to include Gaza. Also left out are scenarios such as protests, which one enters into knowing that Israel will utilize varying levels of violence.)

Israeli forces carried out these actions with a consistency accompanied by an intentional unpredictability. In practice, this meant holding in one’s awareness the knowledge that something bad was going to happen, and soon. There was no if. When, where, and how bad? were the ever-lingering questions. And, given the limited territory on which these events occurred, would it involve those one knows or perhaps even oneself? To daily hold the apprehension, dread, or anxiety of the knowledge of an impending but unknown calamitous event is psychologically and physically exhausting. Its presence festers in the background, tingeing even the most positive or enjoyable of activities with an ambiguous darkness, an ill-at-ease that can not be put aside. For at any moment, the phone may ring or text may arrive with the news that something has happened.[1]

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Mexico: Idealized Nature: On Absolutism and Misanthropy

Originally posted on It’s Going Down
From Propagación Anárquica
Translated by Scott Campbell

There is an ever-spreading idealistic, romantic, and superfluous tendency regarding the existence of a pristine, virgin, and idyllic nature that has never been touched by human beings and that must be preserved without having any contact with our species. There are many, many problems and shallow reflections regarding this stance about a pristine and virgin nature.

First of all, we must be aware of the context in which we are currently living: in the Anthropocene, an era in which the industrial human being has caused the greatest changes of the past 300 years. “Climate change has disrupted all ecosystems in the world.” That is to say, the industrial human being, by contaminating the water, earth, and air, has negatively disrupted all the planet’s biomes, that is, there is no pristine, untouched nature left in the entire world. All ecosystems have been touched by climate change.

Now, another issue originating from this Christian idealization and myopic romanticization of virgin nature is the belief that the human being in general, our species in its essence, is inherently ecocidal and destructive of nature, which is entirely false and erroneous.

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