Sketching the Scavenger
Posted: | Categories: essays | Tags: anarchism, collapse, ecology, english, politics, post-civ, scavenger politics, technology
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.
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