Alright, so many friends of mine irl will have heard me offhandedly remark “That’s Scavenger Politics!” in some conversations. When asked, I’ll probably have said roughly what it is and that I’ve been working on a longer essay about it. Well, that work has ballooned into a very long essay that still isn’t finished, but I wanted to get some of these ideas out there anyway, so here’s a quick breakdown and a manifesto (?) of sorts. In discussions about topics such as climate resilience, collapse, and enabling new freedoms of remaining, one of the frequent hurdles I’ve found that keeps people from engaging with these ideas in an earnest and practical way is that they run so squarely counter to the prevailing ideas of human and societal progress that many find it hard to let go of these structuring narratives. In an attempt to forge new ways of thinking about how we engage with the world as its inhabitants, I propose the figure of the scavenger as programmatic for life upon this gentle, damaged, and hurtling planet. This figure can hopefully bridge the gap between collapse oriented climate doom and new ways of coexisting with one another in the world. The scavenger puts into question many relations we see as fixed and rigid, it pops up throughout history and throughout the natural world as a mode of living that enables new life, but that also enables itself. This is a piece of the puzzle toward developing a theory of what I’ve called “The Mycelial Society” in the front of this blog. It’s just a sketch for now. There’s more to come but for now I humbly offer this salvage.
My music recommendation for today is Disposable Everything by AJJ
Everything we need is already here.
The scavenger thinks today, but it knows that it can think again tomorrow.
The scavenger dances on shifting sands.
The scavenger thrives in the ruins of the world. It picks through the rubble of industry, grows over highways and cracks open asphalt.
The scavenger accepts that it will never build anything that lasts. It picks at the cadaver of the past to take what it needs to build a life in the present, and the next present, and the next present.
The scavenger is to Capitalism what Whalefall is to Whaling.
The scavenger is unbound by species or taxonomy. It has wings, beaks, claws, roots, hyphae, hands, feelers, fins, probosci, tubes, tentacles, tendrils.
The scavenger is unconcerned with purity or complete systems, in fact, it scrutinizes any attempt at trying to anticipate and plan any future.
The scavenger is DIY. There’s no coherent program it needs to follow, it takes what is useful to the place/time it is in, and leaves the rest behind.
The scavenger recognizes that everything is a composite.
The scavenger knows that everything becomes salvage eventually.
The scavenger understands that all function and properties of things emerge from the interaction with other salvage.
The scavenger understands that everything relates to everything else.
The scavenger is concerned with the parts of the present. It looks at how these parts may be changed, decomposed, and restructured.
The scavenger rejects the state on the basis of its untenable entropy. There is no state for the scavenger. The scavenger is the great dismantler.
The scavenger lives always at the cusp of the entropocene.
The scavenger is the gatherer of failed systems.
The scavenger enables practices of remaining. That includes stewarding remains.
The scavenger appears in many places. In fact, the scavenger can appear anywhere things are discarded. The scavenger can appear anywhere.
The scavenger is immediate. It pays close attention to immediate needs and desires.
The scavenger is social. It knows that no salvage would exist without others. It cannot exist without others.
The scavenger is a life enabler and a shepherd of decay. Decay is the enabling of life.
Further Reading
- Bleibefreiheit by Eva von Redecker
- Zwischen friedlicher Sabotage und Kollaps by Tadzio Müller
- Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliviera
- Waste & Want by Susan Strasser
- The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing
- A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown
- Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway