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Three years later, Minneapolis participants in the George Floyd uprising are consistently lied to from multiple directions about the reality of those inspiring, earth-shaking days in 2020 and their aftermath.
We hear the reactionary law-and-order narrative that the uprising was nothing but senseless destruction, leaving Minneapolis a barren wasteland and the police defunded (if only!). We hear the liberal fantasy that everything good that happened, including the storming of the 3rd precinct, was actually done by white supremacists. And also we hear the story advanced by many police abolitionists, such as in Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie’s fall 2022 book “No More Police”, that it was organizers and nonprofits responsible for pushing abolition into mainstream conversation thanks to their petitioning, peaceful marching and meeting with city council members.
I picked up an early copy of “No More Police” before it came out in the fall of 2022, intending to determine which chapters might be best suited for study groups or political education of various sorts (I’ll get to that later in this essay), and what new materials or lessons had been incorporated since Kaba’s previous book “We Do This Til We Free Us.” But, as I sat in a park not far from George Floyd Square writing the first draft of this overview after several false starts, I had a hard time getting past my rage at the revisionist history that frames and permeates “No More Police.”
Flipping again through Kaba and Ritchie’s introduction and the foreword by Miski Noor and Kandace Montgomery, leaders of Black Visions—the both celebrated and side-eyed Minneapolis nonprofit whose leadership was, as I wrote my first draft, busy failing to recognize a staff unionization effort[1]—I become paralyzed at the disconnect between the reality my friends and I lived, versus their telling of the uprising.
In their story, massive protests were augmented by a petition demanding defunding of the police. Then, “The movement in defense of Black lives achieved one of its first abolitionist wins: a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council supported an amendment to disband the MPD.”
(This is, of course, false: The council members present at that now widely-derided rally in Powderhorn Park did not support such a measure; as their immediate backtracking in the days to follow made clear, their pledge was calculated to quell the ungovernability of the streets. Every single council member present later voted for at least one measure that either modestly or significantly increased police funding.)
Reading this, I think of the long hours of toxic gas and “less lethals” endured by people posted up behind blockades made of shopping carts from May 26–28, 2020. I think of the courageous looting and arsons that enabled the 3rd precinct siege, by spreading “public safety” resources thin throughout the metro area. I think of Calvin Horton, murdered by a vigilante pawn shop owner, and Montez Lee, Dylan Robinson, and others still behind bars for their actions in those days.
I think of friends who held the George Floyd Square barricades during subzero nights the following winter, heeding the call “No Justice No Streets” only to be betrayed, pooh-poohed and even assaulted and exiled by organizers who gave up the occupation of the square the next spring. Then I think of how we took the streets after the murders of Dolal Idd, Winston Smith, and others — when many organizers so quick to claim credit for the Uprising were either nowhere to be found, or actively peace-policed us. At those demonstrations, the Police 2.0 groups (We Push for Peace, Agape, A Mother’s Love, and others) funded by the “abolitionist” nonprofits’ Big Victory (a few million dollars given to the city’s “Office of Violence Prevention”) assaulted comrades while screaming misogynist, homophobic and transphobic slurs.
And I also think of those (usually anonymous) militants who, despite repeated trauma and setbacks, are keeping up the drumbeat of resistance today — with graffiti and street art, through covert actions like attacks on police precincts and arsons against those responsible for camp evictions, and through political education groups that tell the stories mainstream leftist publishers won’t ever. They — not the nonprofits or the celebrity organizers — are the reason that despite an increase in MPD funding since 2020, MPD has lost over 300 officers, a 33% reduction.
If this litany sounds like I am bitter, it is because I cannot help feeling so. Seeing the rewriting of history here in Minneapolis has made so many of us feel that way. “No More Police” frames itself from the beginning around a false story of 2020 uprising. If you thought that this much-hyped book hitting stores in fall 2022 would center itself on something other than the analyzed-ad-nauseum events of the Uprising, or at least substantially address some of the most brutal lessons learned since then, sadly, you’d be wrong.
Author: Otto Gross
Title: Ludwig Rubiner's "Psychoanalysis"
Notes: Trans. Christian Neie
Source: Collection titled "Insurrection within the Psyche: Three Texts By Otto Gross" - originally published in German in Die Aktion, May 1913.
Translator's note: Ludwig Rubiner was an Expressionist writer who had polemically written against Gross in Die Aktion. The following is Gross' response.
Many years ago at the Salzburg Psychoanalysts' Congress I spoke about the perspective on the fundamental problems of culture as a whole and on the imperative of the future gained through the discovery of the "psychoanalytical principle", i.e. the exploration of the unconscious. S. Freud's response at the time was: "We are doctors and want to remain doctors".
We know now how much greater the gift was than the giver permitted himself to hope. Today, the psychology of the unconscious is the first and only certain guarantee for finding real answers to real questions and the right ways to reach the right goals - there already exists a periodical that tries to take first, though faltering, steps on this basis. Men of literature, of course, may still be able to believe -naively and simply: "Only its brute practical use, the healing effect, is of any import".
But we hold: That man is able to know himself now, that people are allowed to hope and obliged to strive now to understand one another, that in this way the infinite and ultimate solitude surrounding the individual becomes surmountable, that an ethic with truly alive roots announces itself, this is its practical effect and worth.
Of course, so far art has been the sole guiding light pointing the way to an understanding of unconscious psychological meanings, and the power of the artist will again be called upon to lead the way on new paths of knowledge. Any art shying away from exposing itself tothe ultimate questions implied by the psychology of the unconscious will not be art at all, anymore.
We, aspiring to pass beyond solitude, do not believe any longer that the lawmaking spirit will be the creative spirit - it's true: the idea by and in itself adulterates, it forces - but we believe that only an idea having passed beyond solitude, i.e. and idea existing within love, will be creative and free, will be free spirit. A free spirit not existing within love will be conservative or disintegrative, God or Devil, but never free spirit.
Ludwig Rubiner betrays a fateful error by juxtaposing woman and free spirit. We believe, the revolution that will join woman and freedom and spirit together into one will be the first and only true revolution.
via https://ift.tt/lAPIErT
Because of the centrality of energy commodities in the age of extreme energy, sabotage occupies a place of particularly great possibility. Saboteurs could make great demands and achieve great things. If there is a strategically ripe time for sabotage it is definitely now. The pipelines are not yet built. There is a great urgency for states and capital to get the bitumen (tar sands substance) to market. Indeed, in the Canadian context, capital and states are pushing pipeline construction as nothing short of a national imperative.
This reflects what political economist Harold Innes referred to as the staples trap. Huge capital investment means they have to sell the commodity fast. They need transport networks quickly. Sabotage will have less potential after the network is more redundant. And, of course, capital is already pushing for multiple new routes, which have already been planned, as well as increased capacity on existing routes.
Thus the real emphasis is on the industry more broadly. Sabotage as industrial practice.
References
Innis, Harold. 1956. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1921. “On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage.” In Engineers and the Price System. Kitchener: Batoche Press
So, who could stop the movements of materials? For too many activists the focus is on the state. Forms they expect this to take include regulation, licensing, environmental review, and assessments. National Energy Policies and OPEC policies in the 1970s provide examples.
From a green syndicalist perspective, organized rank-and-file workers, in alliance with indigenous communities, pose the most immediately effective impediment to material flows and the most promising source of future alternatives. Workers wield both the labor power necessary for energy developments and the technical expertise to sabotage the works in a way that can ensure limited harms. Both labor and technical expertise can be withdrawn and withheld (and directed toward alternatives such as cleanup or reconstruction. This is far more effective than a local blockade which is purely oppositional and easily constrained within jobs versus environment frameworks.
There are numerous examples of organized workers’ actions against oil flows. On October 22, 2010, refinery workers at the Grandpuits refinery in the Port of Marseilles in France struck for a couple of weeks against Sarkozy’s austerity policies. Their actions contributed to the defeat of Sarkozy and the repeal of some policies. While their goal was defense of pensions and retirement benefits and opposition to austerity policies rather than the product of their labor, the impact of the strike showed the vulnerability of oil flows to sabotage and the pressure to keep the oil moving, and the leverage of workers’ actions to sabotage the flows.
The pressing question remains for many whether workers in North America are ready to strike against the industry itself (rather than against the employment of foreign workers or for job protections or against threats to benefits, for example). Of course, the real answer is that some are and some are not. Many recognize that more stable longterm employment would result from tarsands clean up, habitat restoration, materials treatments, etc. At present there is no meaningfully organized counterforce within their workplaces that might pose such alternatives in a material way, as a real, imminent, prospect. But such is in many ways an outcome of specific struggles (and alliances, or not, along the way).
The value of any commodity is, of course, tied inextricably to its real, or potential, movement. And this is a material embodiment of value. It is linked to a physicality of, a geography of, value. It is in this movement, or circulation, that the location of production is linked to the location of consumption or use. Control over flows is gained by interrupting or capturing them.
Pipelines are fundamentally mechanisms to circumvent labor and other restrictions on transportation. In relation to coal transport in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, workers used sabotage to win concessions. Workers in coal were particularly well positioned to disrupt the flows of coal through slow downs, tampering, etc., as the contemporary tar sands workers are well positioned to disrupt the flows of bitumen.
Their power came from the carbon energy they could slow, cut off, and/or disrupt, rather than from their organizing capacity. A lesson is that smaller, active numbers of workers can have a profound impact on value flows (carbon, energy, etc.) and wield a tremendous amount of power by their impact on those flows. Indeed, many of the gains made by the working class derived from the impact, and threatened impact, on these flows. And the industries developed as capital responded to, and anticipated, working class power in these areas and the potentialities for sabotage. The first pipelines in the United States, around 1865, were developed to circumvent the Teamsters and their power. Oil development in the Middle East was driven by a need to undermine working class strength in North America and Europe. Pipelines themselves emerge as a voluminous running administration of sabotage. This is a point that too few green activists recognize. Even fewer strategize around this fact.
In the early shipping of oil there was more than one possible path, the flow could switch. Today oil movement mirrors distributed networks of the internet. They create multiple, redundant paths, to circumvent sabotage. The extensiveness and redundancy of the transportation network limits the effectiveness of sabotage. There are, of course, many routes developing beyond Keystone XL, for example.
This involves not only pipelines but railroads as well. This is why there is a substantial push for greater rail capacity by capital recently, even though this has flown under the radar including for activists fixated on pipelines and anti-pipeline campaigns. Indeed, in the present period, crude shipments are the fastest growing aspect of rail transport. These are the beginning stages of multiply routed distribution networks in the age of extreme energy. A real impact requires a level of disruption that the networks cannot go around. Sabotage on multiple levels and multiple fronts.
Pipelines are developed to reduce the role of human labor in moving and transporting energy (as over rail for example). Pipelines are labor intensive at the outset, in the building of them, but the labor input is vastly diminished after the pipeline is built. This is a point that opponents of pipelines need to bring more attention to in countering jobs blackmail by pipeline companies, extreme energy developers, and petro state politicians alike. In British Columbia, for example, jobs are trumpeted by companies and government alike as justifications for the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipeline developments. Yet the actual job numbers are much more limited (often involving only a few dozen permanent jobs.
The term sabotage has several meanings. It signifies variously to mess, to botch, to ruin, to foul. Sabotage in a political sense is not reducible to isolated acts of property damage. Rather it is an expression of organized interruption. Sabotage is the organized disruption of the movement of a commodity.
Notably this is the same way capitalists wield power. This is something that capital does every day. And it results in direct, and extreme harm, to people, communities, and the environment. Critical sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in a too little read article “On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage” (1919), notes that sabotage is the ordinary condition of affairs in market economies. Notably, for Veblen, sabotage is undertaken regularly, as part of everyday economics, by workers and by capital. Veblen argues that business requires a properly running administration of sabotage. This can be used to manage prices or to circumvent labor actions. Thus the arguments against sabotage, but only when wielded by workers, is entirely ideological, that is based on adherence to the status quo.
Sabotage represents a direct disruption of extreme energy practices. It does not appeal to seemingly outside (but allied) actors to halt harmful practices. It does so directly and as determined by the needs of those engaged in the sabotage (and their communities). From a green syndicalist perspective sabotage by workers directly in the industry is a potent force against ecologically destructive practices.
Most pipelines struggles, despite the overheated rhetoric and postures, are predominantly constrained within a rather straightforward liberal democratic framework. The emphasis is on debate, discussion, and the contesting of propositions. Even the forms of “direct action” undertaken by pipeline opponents, reform and radical greens alike, are of the primarily symbolic non-violent direct action (NVDAtm) variety geared at drawing media attention and facilitating a venue for dialogue with an external (neither corporate nor protest) audience. This fits entirely unproblematically within a discursive liberal democratic framework. It proposes that pipeline developments occur because people are not informed (either of problems or of alternatives to fossil fuels) or because they cannot see that there is opposition.
At the same time they also play a rather perverse role in bringing police into the center of this democratic practice (as more than discourse). This is so because typically the presence of the police and their actions against protesters are an essential part of media mobilization (the media do not show up or report the event if police do not intervene against protesters) and play a part for protesters as the impetus to initiate the desired discussion.
What is crucial at present on the other hand is a material rather than a discursive politics. Such a material politics will exceed the question of democracy to move to address the issue of mobility (of fossil fuels, of capital, etc.). One might argue that there is something unique about the materiality of pipelines that makes their struggles unique from some other contemporary issues. And it partly involves the nature of this mobility.
Energy commodities are not only a staple—they are the staple. Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy (2011), notes that “it is the movement of concentrated stores of carbon energy that provides means for assembling effective democratic claims” in the first place.
We are currently in what might be called an era or period of pipelines. New ones are developing frequently and already built ones are undergoing expansion or twinning. There is no continent that is not traversed by pipelines, which spread like arteries/varicose veins across their terrain. And these pipeline networks are all slated to be expanded. Most pipelines on the planet are currently situated in North America and Central Asia and not coincidently these are the subject of much conflict and contestation. Highly contested pipelines in the North American context have not even been constructed yet, from the Northern Gateway development and Kinder Morgan twinning in British Columbia to the Keystone XL from Alberta to Houston to the Line 9 development across eastern Canada. Politics are waged on the basis of concern (about what a pipeline might result in) as much as, or more than, a basis of currently existing reality.
Much of the green movements, even some deeper green ones, pursue a politics of publicity, a politics of PR, which is largely the terrain of capital. The pursuit in such politics is positive public opinion. This differs greatly from a politics of sabotage (though sabotage must be properly contextualized and explained publicly). A politics of sabotage creates an intolerable situation that requires a positive resolution.
The flows of energy economies are subject to interruptions. This is done by business for the manipulation of prices, for example. But these flows can be interrupted for other uses by workers and/or their communities. For syndicalists, sabotage has typically referred to withdrawal of efficiency by workers. This brief commentary provides initial thoughts for a discussion of a politics of sabotage against pipelines and oil flows. Sabotage, from a green syndicalist perspective, poses direct challenges to capital flows and an impetus for rethinking green politics in the age of extreme energy.
In 1917, H.P. Lovecraft wrote the following lines in his short story “Dagon”: “I dream of a day when [the nameless things] may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.” Now, in the 21st century, it appears as though his unnamed narrator’s horrific vision has escaped Lovecraft’s fiction and entered into the real world. As outlined by GlobalChange.gov, sea level is expected to rise anywhere from one to four feet by the year 2100 and only continue at the current rate or an even higher one in the following centuries. Even small rises in sea level can have disastrous effects and, as Marine Insights reports, this poses an extreme threat to coastal areas—where almost 40% of the population in the United States resides—with flooding frequency projected to rise from 300% to 900% in comparison to what was recorded fifty years ago.
Other than the outer reaches of space there is possibly no place quite as mysterious and terrifyingly unknown as the ocean. The National Ocean Service writes that more than 80% of this realm that covers about three fourths of our planet “remains unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored.” The ocean has also historically presented a seemingly unfathomable dimension to reality—spawning legends of enormous beasts like Charybdis from Homer’s Odyssey, the biblical Leviathan, and the infamous kraken. This is certainly a central reason for Lovecraft’s interest in—along with those furthest regions of space—the watery deep, which helped inspire such things as the octopus-like Cthulhu who resides in the sunken nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh.
To be openly dramatic, when we cause sea levels to rise, we are messing with forces we do not fully comprehend. But saying we, as many on the left have pointed out, is a misleading generalization. Although most individuals do have substantial impacts on the environment, many major environmental issues can be traced directly to a minority of capitalists. As the often quoted point goes: Only about 100 companies are responsible for around 70% of greenhouse gas emissions—gases which are causing the heating of the earth and consequently sea level rise. These capitalists are akin to Obed Marsh from Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth who, in order to obtain wealth in the form of gold and a strange “foreign kind of jewellery,” is said to have helped the undersea monstrosities known as the Deep Ones infiltrate and genetically infect the town. The drive of global capitalism to squeeze every last cent out of the natural world is bringing the ocean to our doorsteps, just as if we were the partially complicit yet also victimized residents of cursed Innsmouth.
The aforementioned link between the heating of the earth and rising sea levels is specifically the expansion of water when it warms and the deterioration of ice sheets, but certainly the most famous such process is the melting of glaciers. This is all well and widely known, but consider that the oldest glacial ice in Antarctica is possibly 1,000,000 years old and the oldest in Greenland is more than 100,000 years old. This whole affair is not just about the stirring of deep and mysterious forces but also ancient ones, and perhaps no one mulled over the consequences of awakening ancient hibernating entities more than H.P. Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness, one of Lovecraft’s novellas, is written as an account by the geologist William Dyer of his encounter with the strange Elder Things and shoggoths—existing in a formerly-passive state beneath the arctic—in the hope it will deter further exploration. These creatures, like the annual 260 gigatons of water released from glaciers between 2003 and 2009, are being brought back into play, and humanity is now under existential threat because of it.
Many authors have discussed how climate change poses certain cosmic and anti-humanist threats to our anthropocentric understanding of the world. Eugene Thacker, in In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1), considers how it is difficult to think “of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups.” But this “Cosmic Pessimism” is represented by media images of, for example, “the cataclysmic effects of climate change.” In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton discusses the titular hyperobjects—objects massively distributed spatially and temporarily—in particular global warming along with several other items of ecological concern such as Styrofoam cups, plastic bags, and nuclear radiation. According to Morton, “By understanding hyperobjects, human thinking has summoned Cthulhu-like entities into social, psychic, and philosophical space. The contemporary philosophical obsession with the monstrous provides a refreshing exit from humanscale thoughts.” Glaciers and oceans are certainly hyperobjects, and the images of their respective melting and rising can serve as some of Thacker’s representations, but sea level rise is Lovecraftian in a particularly vivid aesthetic dimension. The ocean is an alien and largely unknown portion of the earth and glacial water is a primordial force finally being released after a slumber that has lasted eons.
In a video released a few months ago, academic internet personality ContraPoints makes the observation that one problem facing environmental activists is that climate change fundamentally lacks an antagonist. Furthermore, an important point of Morton’s book as well as James Bridle’s New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future is that climate change is so vast and vague that it cannot be pinned down, quantified, or fully thought. Bridle even derives the title of his work from a passage in The Call of Cthulhu—which he also quotes wholly within the book—that contains the line: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” In the context of this piece, this apt metaphor seems to verge on the literal. With all this in mind, perhaps a strategy of environmental thought could be to identify an antagonism within this gargantuan, undefinable, and unthinkable thing called climate change. If we are capable of revealing a more horrifying, Lovecraftian nature to at least sea level rise, is it possible we might induce a response closer to that which would ensue if Cthulhu truly rose from the depths?
Budget cuts liquidate social security programs, retirement and education, and therefore the future, while stuffing humans into overcrowded prisons and juvenile detention facilities. There’s no jobs, no money, but crime is captured by capital too. The black market is still the market, and beyond that there is an economy of incarceration complete with banks building private prisons and corporations leasing the labor of their captives. Forced into the drug trade and sex work, criminalized, incarcerated, then forced into both sex (rape) and work (slavery) in the penitentiary. This is what we mean when we say “the prison industrial complex.” It extends outside the wretched walls of San Quentin and the others into every part of life in a racist and patriarchal commodity society. All prisoners are political prisoners. And as feminists have long pointed out, the personal is political.
The spheres of our oppression grow indistinct.
Home is prison, prison is the Third World factory. Boyfriends are bosses, wardens are pimps. Capitalist and patriarchal social relations flow effortlessly across the boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside.” Our solidarity and struggle must also flow easily past barbed wire, to destroy capitalism and patriarchy we must destroy all prisons and the police. Free all prisoners! Destroy capital! Smash patriarchy!
oo//***//oo
It is impossible to quantify a unified experience of how trans people, genderqueers, queers, and women live in relation to the prison industrial complex. However, we found these statistics gravely moving and feel that these facts illuminate the connections between capital’s grotesque maintenance of oppression grounded in gender, race and class and the prison industrial complex:
Nearly two-thirds of women in prison are mothers.
In federal women’s prisons 70% of guards are male.
Sexual assault within the confines of prison walls is often perpetrated by prison guards.
In many states guards have access to and are encouraged to review the inmates’ personal history files. Guards threaten the prisoner’s children and rights as a means of silencing the women.
Over a five-year period, the incarceration rate of African American women increased by 828%. Black women make up nearly half of the nation’s female prison population.
The female prison population grew by 832% from 1977 to 2007. The male prison population grew 416% during the same time period.
Latina women experience nearly four times the rates of incarceration of white women.
Average prostitution arrests include 70% females, 20% percent male prostitutes and 10% customers.
In San Francisco, it has been estimated that 25% of the female prostitutes are transgender.
60% of abuse against street prostitutes is perpetrated by clients, 20% by police and 20% in domestic relationships.
A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California.
Jurors in the US were polled as to what factors would make them most biased against a defendant, and perceived sexual orientation was chosen as the most likely personal characteristic to bias a juror against a defendant.
The prison and the temple chat secretly, like two cronies who are tied together more by the nooses of crime that those of friendship. From the citadel escapes the stench of rotting cattle. From the temple emerges a fume laden with dismay, saturated with swooning, like the mouth of a cave in whose darkness all the debilitated grovel and all the impotent wring their arms. “I abhor the people,” says the citadel, yawning. “However, I bestow my consideration and respect to the worthy, distinguished people whose interests I shield. Each time the honorable guardian of order brings me a new guest, I shiver with emotion. My satisfaction climaxes when I feel more and more criminals stirring within my stone belly.” There is a pause. Through the bars can be heard jangles of shackles, murmurs of protests, cracks of horsewhips, bullying voices of authority amid the wheezing of harassed beasts, all of the horrible noises that form the horrible music of the prison. “Great is your mission, my friend the prison,” says the temple. “I reverently bow my towers before you. I also feel satisfied to be the shield of distinguished people. Whereas you enchain the body of the criminal, I break the will of the people. I castrate their energy. Whereas you lift up a wall of stone between the hand of the poor and the treasures of the rich, I invent the fires of hell, putting them between the cupidity of the miserably poor and gold of the bourgeoisie.” There is a pause. Through the windows and the doors enter the aromas of incense and the fetid perspiration of the clustered cattle. From the blue space emerges sounds of sobbing, of supplications, a vile racket created by all the debilitated people and all the penitents, the abject music of the submissive and the defeated. “As long as I remain standing, the master sleeps tranquilly,” the prison says. “While there are knees that touch my tiles, the master’s power will remain standing,” says the temple. There is a pause. The prison and the temple appear to meditate: the first, satisfied for enchaining the body; the second, content for enchaining consciousness; both of them, proud of their merits. In the corner of a small cave, some dynamite overhears their conversation, powerfully restraining its forces so that it does not explode from indignation. “Wait!” it says to itself, “wait, monuments of barbarism, for the bold hand that will unleash the blast from my bosom will arrive sooner than you think. In the belly of Misery convulses the fetus of Rebellion. Wait! Wait for the fruit of centuries of exploitation and tyranny; the black phalanxes of men consume the last swallows of bitterness and sadness; the glass of patience overflows; some more drops, and all the indignations will overflow, all the angers will leap out of their jail cells, all the audacities will transgress their limits. Wait, somber edifices, cellars of agony, for in the great calendar of human suffering flares, with colors of fire and blood, a red date, a new July 14 for all the Bastilles, those of the body and those of consciousness. The cattle are standing up, converting themselves into men. Soon the sun will stop toasting the backs of the herd to illuminate the fronts of free men.... Wait! You will remain standing only as long as I stay in this corner.”
War is a fight for domination. One state is trying to violently seize power and control over another.
Backing up the military apparatus necessary to carry this out is the intense alienation between people. People need to see one another as just roles, labels, “enemies”, and interchangeable cogs in massive institutional machines, in other words, complete dehumanization. This alienation is reinforced by capitalist consumer culture and authority itself, both of which need to dehumanize people in order to function.
Alienation also leads to us not being able to help one another out, support one another, or accomplish great new things together. Alienation leads us to think that it is not possible for us to work together to meet ALL of our needs.
Dehumanization makes it possible to kill, maim and torture fellow human beings. One does not concern one’s self with the destruction of mere foreign objects.
Authority makes it possible to deny the inherent self-directing and self-realizing nature of human beings. Authority is the delegation of all self-responsibility. “I was just following orders”, “I’m just doing my job” and “I had to do it” are the true rallying cries for authority.
The State is the organized institutional apparatus that makes it possible to commit the genocide that we call “war” and to put people in the soul-killing cages that we call “prisons” and “jails”, all the while denying our own complicity and responsibility in making it happen.
And war, war is the culmination of all of this. War is the final herd-mentality push that keeps the industrial factories running and that keeps the violent gangs of thugs that we call “the police” from being overwhelmed by the passions of everyday people. War is what keeps up the mass violence, death, carnage and destruction needed to crush our hopes for a world and life of voluntary cooperation, harmonious mutual aid, and creative beauty.
As anarchists, we understand this; we respect our inherent human dignity; we respect our vast potential and possibility for joyous living; we respect that freely helping one another out is our most natural and healthy state of affairs as human beings.
With this being the case, we recognize that our resistance must be complete and total. We recognize that not only must war and militarism be opposed, but the State and capitalism must be opposed as well. We recognize that not only must nationalism and jingoism be opposed, but all authority and domination must be opposed as well.
This is not just radical fanaticism and utopian dreaming, this is an understanding of what it means to be human. Our resistance is not just dreaming of overcoming the impossible, it is a reaffirmation of our own inherent power as individuals and the unstoppable force of mutual aid and cooperation.
There is a war going on, but Iraq is just one battlefield of it. This is indeed a fight of life and death proportions, but the “life” that I am talking about entails the fullest sense of the term. The kind of life that I am talking about can only thrive in TOTAL ANARCHY!!
“Every second that I spend working is a denial of the kind of life I really want to live.” – from “Temp Slave”
Here is a leaflet from the anarchist aperiodical publication “Non Fides”, translated from the french. It was distributed in french cities and in front of the Vincennes retention center which was burnt down after the revolt of its prisoners.
A retention center (Centre de Rétention Administrative or CRA in french) is a prison for illegal immigrants, people imprisoned for up to 80 days before their expulsion from the country. There have been many revolts over the past years both inside and outside these prisons. But there has also been a lot of repression for some anarchist comrades who are still in prison, some of them accused of terrorism. More information about these cases in english here: www.non-fides.fr
* * *
Why we want the destruction of retention centers?
Because we are not struggling for the improvement of detention conditions.
Because even if air-conditioned, made of gold, velvet or silk, a prison cell remains a prison cell.
Because the imprisonment follows an arbitrary raid and leads to a equally arbitrary deportation.
Because arresting a lot of undocumented migrants and expelling a certain number of them is all about terrorizing everyone.
Because neither scum nor “honest” migrants deserve imprisonment.
Because we stand for the abolition of all borders and all prisons.
Because seeing that for economic reasons the State can decide to deport 25,000 people per year, in the same way a boss can decide to fire 9,000 people because they aren’t profitable anymore.
Because we do not recognize laws, even though they recognize us.
Because the criminalization of the immigrants leads to the criminalization of anyone who wants to roam around.
Because ID checks contribute towards Kontrol over all of us.
Because when the freedom of one person is violated, everyone’s liberty is in doubt.
Because the measures and actions used to arrest people without a legal status are part of the police occupation of our neighbourhoods.
Because the fear of confinement allows the re-launch of exploitation.
Because in the acme of this cynical world, it is sometimes the illegal immigrant workers who actually build the prisons which are intended to confine them.
Because apart from the retention centers, it is the State which we want to smash.
Because the closure of the retention centers is asked for and we don’t want to ask for anything from the State.
Because the humanitarian approach could never solve the real problem and only brings a cosmetic treatment to the visible surface of the iceberg.
Because we, who have IDs, dream about the possibility of burning our documents with great happiness.
Kevin Van Meter (2017) writes that everyday resistance comprises a “factor of revolution,” directly challenging capital accumulation and creating conditions for more overt revolutionary struggle. Everyday resistance is already very common. John Holloway (2010) looks at such everyday rebels as an urban gardener, a group of friends who start a choir, a daydreaming employee, and a group of homeless squatters. Finding meaning outside of the work-and-spend cycle, at least for these moments, they “stop making capitalism.” Holloway speculates, “There is nothing special about being an anti-capitalist revolutionary. This is the story of many, many people, of millions, perhaps billions.”
Additionally, understanding nature and animals as fighting on our side, and us on theirs, can help us humans understand revolution as more feasible. As pattrice jones (2006) writes, “I do know that we are not alone in the struggle to save the earth. The sooner we see that and act accordingly, the sooner we can begin to end our own awful estrangement and help to heal those we have hurt.” In 2003 in Zuzuland, a group of 11 elephants, led by a matriarch named Nana, rescued a group of antelope that had been captured for breeding. Nana undid the metal latches closing the gate, and stepped back to watch the antelope escape. A local ecologist told reporters, “Elephant are naturally inquisitive, but this behaviour is certainly most unusual and cannot be explained in scientific terms” (Sapa, 2003). In 2016, Ponyboy the pig and Johnny the sheep escaped in California and were found wandering together in the street. In 2017, Fred the goat escaped a New Jersey auction house, and he returned the next year to release dozens of goats and sheep. In 2018, a Polish runaway cow found protection among a herd of wild bison. Such instances of animal resistance, and even of animals resisting together across species lines, are fairly commonplace and indicate that nonhuman nature will not accept compulsory work without a struggle (Colling, 2020).
Furthermore, if we understand rewilding landscapes to be a revolutionary act, then we can also understand the Earth and its self-rewilding ecosystems as revolutionary agents in their own right. A well-known illustration of this resilience involves the Chernobyl ecosystem’s recovery since industry and agriculture abandoned the region after a 1986 nuclear meltdown (Barras, 2016). Abandoned farmlands across Europe are recovering with shrublands and forests returning (Rey Benayas, 2019) and sequestering carbon.
Whether or not the Total Liberation Pathway will be achieved, striving for it could raise the chances of human and planetary survival. If the aspired 288 ppm and >80% protection targets are not achieved, the more moderate proposed targets of 300 ppm and 75% protection targets might be. If that fails too, the more mainstream demands of 350 ppm and Half Earth might be met. And if colonial and authoritarian structures are not fully dismantled, then perhaps colonized and oppressed populations can seize more autonomy and land than they can currently access. Tight-knit and diverse communities might survive collapse, as envisioned by Octavia Butler (2019). At worst, we can at least go down fighting, playfully and joyfully, for a livable future.
Mainstream solutions to climate change often involve ongoing economic growth, through promises of full-time “green jobs” and high-tech geoengineering, and are unlikely to stop the present apocalypses of alienation and annihilation. By contrast, the Total Liberation Pathway proposes letting nature play, ourselves included. We need to step off the fast-paced “treadmill of production” and instead take a leisurely walk. We need to seize the “social factory” and turn it into a playground. We need to see and treat the world as fundamentally playful and our everyday lives as sacred and wild.
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For achieving the Total Liberation Pathway, I propose a resist-and-reconstruct strategy for systemic social change. The first component, drawn from Autonomist Marxist traditions, is the “refusal of work,” important as a means of achieving the degrowth necessary for global energy and resource usage. The second component, taken from the IWW (2021), involves “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” Organizing prefigurative productive structures—such as MakerSpaces, community farms, and horizontally-run cooperatives—will enable communities to meet their needs outside of paid employment. Following Kevin van Meter (2017), I view the main (human) agents of change as the broadly defined working class, including “slaves and peasants as well as students, homemakers, immigrants and factory and office workers.” However, especially important roles must be given to Indigenous peoples’ movements, which have been at the forefront of protecting and restoring the world’s land, and to energy and agricultural workers, who control important bottlenecks in the global economy.
Indigenous communities have long been at the forefront of resisting ecological destruction (Hill & Antliff, 2021), and their reclamation of ancestral land will be essential for restoring the Earth’s health. Even despite facing ongoing settler-colonial erasure, these communities have often managed to maintain relatively anti-authoritarian cultures and sustainable lifestyles. Areas controlled by Indigenous peoples, despite taking up only a quarter of the world’s land, contain about 40% of “ecologically intact land” and a disproportionately high percentage of the planet’s biodiversity (Garnett et al., 2018). A joint letter by Indigenous groups, while demanding the protection “of more than half the planet in a natural state,” aptly insists that this proposal should “not mean the creation of more government protected areas, but rather fully and formally recogniz[ing] the rights and forms of governance of indigenous peoples over their territories” (Joint Declaration, n.d.).
Energy and farm workers also have a critical role to play. As Tadzio Müller (2013) argues, the energy sector is an especially important “point of leverage” on the global economy and is also a central factor in the climate and ecological crises. The agricultural sector represents another strategic focal point for the same reasons. Just 128 slaughterhouses are responsible for about than 90% of the cattle slaughter and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, comprising a “a bottleneck in the livestock breeding chain” (Pegurier, 2017) in the meat industry in the country that slaughters the most cows. In the United States, the world’s largest slaughterer of chickens (Sanders, 2020), slaughterhouses and meat processing plants also comprise a “critical bottleneck” (Corkery & Yaffe-Bellany, 2020). Regardless of whether populations choose to reduce their consumption, energy and agricultural workers’ strikes can unilaterally reduce the availability of destructive energy and animal products. Moreover, the hazards of their jobs provide an incentive for refusal of work. Fossil fuel and biomass industry employees have far higher death rates per unit of energy production than workers in wind and solar industries. The death rate of coal workers is over a thousand times higher than that of solar energy workers (Ritchie, 2020). Slaughterhouse workers suffer “a variety of disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder and the lesser-known perpetration-induced traumatic stress” (Newkey-Burden, 2018). Fossil fuel and slaughterhouse workers who walk off their hazardous and traumatic work can cause powerful declines in energy and animal product usage. Solidarity funds and other forms of outside support would assist such workplace actions, especially since many of the North’s farm workers are undocumented immigrants facing extreme precarity.
There exist many promising examples of resistance-and-reconstruction that have taken on deeply ecological themes, such as the Transition Towns, Right to the City, Global Ecovillage Network, Mississipi’s Cooperation Jackson, Mexico’s neo-Zapatistas, Syria’s Democratic Confederalists, and Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement. As communities shift their productive powers to alternative venues like Makerspaces, and as employees gain more control over the means of production, they can simultaneously decrease production (and production time) and implement more ecological ends of production. Some precedents include LUCAS Aerospace workers in the United Kingdom striking to produce renewable energy equipment instead of nuclear weapons, IWW and Earth First! -affiliated loggers in the United States demanding sustainable logging and opposing clear-cutting. More recently, the 2019 School Strike for Climate, children around the world skipped school and indicated that a livable future was more important to them (Klein, 2019). Since schooling can be understood as an apprenticeship for future employment, and as training to be productive members of a capitalist society, the school strike can be seen as a powerful and replicable form of class struggle.
Radical organizing has begun among global energy workers, many of whom do not want to work in dangerous fossil-fuel jobs, and some of whom do not want to work at all. Graeber (2011) describes French fossil fuel workers militantly struggling for an on-time retirement, or, in other words, “the right to stop being oil workers.” In 2016, affiliates of Latin America’s Trade Union Confederation of the Americas unanimously adopted an opposition to fracking. The following year, South Korea’s Korean Power Plant Industry Union announced they “welcome the shutdown of worn out coal power plants because we are clear about what kind of country we want to leave for our descendants” (Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, 2018). When Spain committed to closing most of its coal mines in 2018, unions secured and celebrated an early retirement for miners over 48, and new livelihoods in ecological restoration and renewable energy for other employees (Nelsen, 2018). In 2021, the U.S. United Mine Workers announced they would accept a just transition from coal mining to renewable energy production (Scheiber, 2021). Iran’s striking oil workers have demanded more paid leave time (Debre, 2021), and winning this demand would likely result in less oil production per full-time worker.
La Via Campesina, a network of an estimated 200 million small farmers in 81 countries, can play a major role in a sustainable transformation of global agriculture. Their practice of agroecology and advocacy of local food production fit easily into the Total Liberation Pathway. Although they do not share the Pathway’s commitment to abolish animal agriculture, there is still significant overlap; La Via Campesina (2018) opposes factory farming and insists that “we urgently need to reduce meat consumption” globally.
There would be backlash from not only from the capitalist establishment but also from far-Right forces including extreme speciesists and ecofascists alike. We can hope to win over some of their support bases by explaining the benefits of the Total Liberation Pathway: a drastically shortened and non-alienating workweek, a stable access to necessities, and a decent change for human and planetary survival. If the anti-Total Liberation factions are drastically outnumbered, then their opposition might not amount to much of a threat. They might crave and even demand more meat and energy usage, but they will lack coercive power to make people work in the slaughterhouses or in coal mines. Insofar as they insist on being violent toward living beings, militant responses might be appropriate and necessary: Blockades, lockdowns, house visits, de-platforming, tire slashing, arsons, and so on. If the Left can rightfully condone such tactics against far-Rightists, then it can also condone such tactics against propagators of omnicide.
In this section, I first argue for the necessity of aiming for Cochabamba targets of 300 ppm, 1°C, and a 75% wild Earth, and then I employ two climate models to demonstrate their achievability in the context of a revolutionary social transformation. Providing a significant buffer zone, I aim in these models for even more ambitious targets: bringing atmospheric CO2 to the pre-industrial level of 288 ppm, corresponding with stabilizing global temperatures below today’s, and freeing up more than 80% of the Earth for grassroots protection.
The Cochabamba targets have vast support in scientific literature literature; 1 ºC of warming is not just dangerous but could potentially trigger cataclysmic climate tipping points. Timothy Lenton and co-authors (2019) warn that “tipping points could be exceeded even between 1 and 2 ºC of warming,” and several of these same authors note that the tipping points can lead to a “Hothouse Earth” scenario eventually reaching the 5 ºC level (Steffen et al., 2018). The Hothouse Earth temperatures would cause “global diversity collapse” and are within the range of temperatures that can “annihilate planetary life” in the virtual Earth models of Strona and Bradshaw (2018). Leading climatologist James Hansen (2017) has stated, “Effective action must be undertaken not only to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C but, in my view, to return it to below 1° C to preserve island nations and global shorelines.” The 300 ppm target also finds ample support in the literature. Over the past 400,000 years, the Earth self-regulated its atmospheric CO2 levels between 180 ppm and 300 ppm, and only surpassed the 300 ppm level after the Industrial Revolution. A stabilization of atmospheric carbon at 300 ppm or lower has been advocated by many scientists including Stephen Harding (2009), Hans Joachim Schellnhuber Barry Brook, Thomas Goreau, Barrie Pittock, Andrew Glikson, and Gideon Polya (Polya, n.d.).
Of the Cochabamba targets, 300 ppm is the more demanding. Hansen writes that 1°C could be achieved with atmospheric CO2 as high as 350 ppm (2017), and David Spratt and Philip Sutton (2008) posit that “320 parts per million” could achieve a “cap of 0.5°C.” Stephan Harding (2009) estimates “300-350 ppm” would make sure that global temperature does “not exceed 0.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels.” So, achieving 300 ppm most likely means achieving lower than 1°C.
Finally, although the goal of “Half Earth” has been prominently advocated by scientists including E. O. Wilson (Dooley et al., 2018a), a more precautionary goal would be preserving and restoring 75% of the planet. Representing each plant species in a protected area would require protecting “74.3% of the global land area” (Rodrigues & Gaston, 2001). Protecting ocean biodiversity and minimizing ocean population collapse may require conserving up to 76% (O’Leary et al, 2016). Shifting from biodiversity conservation to the more demanding ethic of “bioproportionality” (Mathews, 2016) gives further reason for protecting as much of the Earth as possible from intensive economic activity.
My use of C-Roads Pro climate model (Climate Interactive, n.d.), when combined with recent studies of reforestation and rewilding, demonstrates the viability of 300 ppm stabilization even if the Total Liberation Pathway is substantially delayed. I input that the world does not get started until 2025 and misses certain social movements’ deadlines by a full decade. Whereas The Climate Mobilization (Silk, 2019) calls for decarbonizing the Global North by 2025 and the Global South by 2030, I enter that these goals are not achieved until 2035 and 2040. And whereas the New York Declaration on Forests calls for a global end to deforestation by 2030 (Dooley et al., 2018a), I enter that this goal is not achieved until 2040. My point is not to abandon the more stringent deadlines for decarbonizing, but rather I am saying that we should not give up on achieving 300 ppm even in the event that we miss them. Conservatively, I set the “climate sensitivity,” the rate at which the planet warms, at 4.5º C, the upper-most estimate given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Hansen et al., 2017). In Figure 1, the green line represents the TLP without the impacts of sequestering carbon dioxide through massive rewilding and reforestation. The result is that the atmospheric CO2 concentration peaks below 450 ppm and declines to 393 ppm CO2 by 2100. These results imply that we need to draw down more than 1 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere to get to the 300 ppm target. This factors in the issue that, as Hansen and co-authors (2017) summarize, “ocean outgassing increases and vegetation productivity and ocean CO2 uptake decrease with decreasing atmospheric CO2.” Due to these effects, Hansen estimates that drawing down an initial 197 ppm requires sequestering 328 ppm in total. Using this ratio, I calculate that drawing down 93 ppm would require a total sequestration of 155 ppm, which is roughly 1.2 trillion tons of CO2. This would involve reversing much of the estimated 1.8 trillion tons (Erb et al., 2017) of carbon dioxide emissions from historic land-use change, including pre-industrial.
The scientific literature suggests the required carbon-dioxide drawdown could be achieved through rewilding and restoration, especially in a mostly vegan world. According to Mathew Hayek and co-authors (2020), restoring the land freed by a global vegan diet to wild forest and grasslands would remove some 0.8 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. We can further add the 0.6 trillion tons that Kate Dooley and co-authors (2018a, 2018b) estimate could be sequestered by additional reforestation and agroforestry, since they mainly rely on reduced wood harvest and explicitly “do not assume that reduced land demand from agriculture could be used towards climate mitigation.” Already, this totals at 1.4 trillion tons of CO2 of restoration potential from terrestrial restoration methods alone, enough to bring atmospheric CO2 down from 393 to 287 ppm. There are indications that rewilding marine ecosystems offer significant sequestration potential. Marine Conservation Society and Rewilding Britain (2021) report that restoring an area of saltmarsh, seagrass, or mangrove sequesters more CO2 than restoring the same amount of tropical forest. Restoring marine mammal populations would also bring significant CO2 sequestration, with each whale absorbing as much CO2 as “thousands of trees” and bringing it safely to the ocean floor upon death (Chami et al., 2019).
Next, using an open-source climate model called the Global Calculator (2021a), I find that the TLP would “cause emissions to fall so much that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is below pre-industrial levels (288 parts per million).” Since the calculator gives several sliders and asks users to put them on Level 1 (minimal abatement), Level 2 (ambitious), Level 3 (very ambitious), or Level 4 (extremely ambitious), I placed the sliders in order to best approximate the TLP. I placed several sliders at the lowest, “minimal” level, signifying no nuclear power and no geoengineering technologies such as carbon capture and storage technology. I allowed a 99% reduction in animal agriculture. Imagining a decentralized economy where self-reliant communities consume mainly what’s produced locally, I input the minimum possible increase, 56%, in the distance that things are transported by freight worldwide. Envisioning an end to planned obsolescence and a move toward multi-use devices (that combine the functions of computers, phones, and game consoles), I picked the second-least available increase in the total number of devices, up from about 6 to 8.5 for each urban household.
The TLP involves a rapid abolition of fossil, nuclear and biomass energy sources and a socially just transition toward 100% renewable sources, primarily small-scale wind and solar power. I argued above that this transition can occur in under a decade, when combined with a rapid decline of total energy usage. The Global Calculator is not able to capture anywhere near such a rapid transition, but in order to approximate it as much as possible, I input a “very ambitious” increase in wind, a “very ambitious” increase in solar power and energy storage, and the “minimal” option, signifying virtually no increase, for hydroelectricity and marine power. As a result, total energy demand falls, in the Global Calculator’s approximation, from 372 exajoules (EJ) in 2011 to 190 EJ in 2050, at which point 85% of energy comes from renewable sources, mainly wind and solar, and the remaining 15% coming from fossil fuels.
Although it slightly compromises the climate effectiveness of the pathway, I entered the greatest available increase, 45%, in passenger distance, to an average of 14806 kilometers a year. Since the long daily commute to the office will be a relic of the past, I imagine that people will use this increase in travel in order to explore the world at a leisurely pace on electric buses, bikes, trains, and sailboats, instead of cars and planes. As Soper (2020) notes, slower travel enables people “to enjoy sights and scents and sounds, and the pleasures (and benefits) of physical activity, and experiences of solitude and silence, all of which are denied to those who travel in more insulated and speedier ways.”
Based on UN Special Rapporteur Oliver De Schutter’s (2011) finding that agroecological techniques can double yields in much of the Global South, I picked a Level 2 yield increase and a Level 3 land use efficiency increase. Given the documented failure of GMO agriculture, a global ban would not negatively impact total yield growth (Hakim, 2016; IAASTD, 2016). By contrast, conventional breeding has created high-yielding varieties of many crops (GM Watch, n.d). Moreover, organic and conservation agriculture can radically boost yields with crop rotations, multi-cropping, push-pull pest management, no-tillage, and continuous soil cover (Ponisio & Ehrlich, 2016).
I found that human population is not a decisive factor in the ability to achieve the 300 ppm target. If I input the United Nations’ medium and high estimates of population growth, then a pre-industrial 288 ppm level is still achieved by 2100. I did choose the UN’s low estimate, an increase to 8.3 billion people by 2050, since the TLP, if successful, would address and eliminate the major causes of global population growth—poverty and patriarchy (Roberts, 2018; Sen, 1999)—and would implement policies proven to simultaneously improve equity and decreased fertility, including improved education for girls and young women, ending child marriage, and increasing access to voluntary family planning (Wolf et al., 2021). Eileen Crist (2019) writes that in an anarchistic society with widely accessible family planning services and with women in charge of their fertility, “‘Population control’ will not only be eschewed but also unnecessary,” since “most women will choose to have zero, one or two children.” After all, children would no longer be born for reasons such as “old-age insurance, or to labor in sweatshops or agricultural fields, or to keep the economy growing, or to aggrandize the armies of nationalistic tyrants.”
The Calculator does not offer a way to choose a starting date other than 2011, and so there are a couple options that could be taken to account for the TLP’s 2025 starting date. One option is to postulate that the TLP’s greater ambition cancels out the earlier start date of the Calculator’s approximation. The Calculator still assumes 15% fossil fuel reliance and 1.3 million cars in 2050, whereas the TLP abolishes fossil fuel use and cars by around 2035. So, even though the Calculator’s approximation starts the energy transition 14 years before the TLP, it finishes the transition more than 15 years later. It would be reasonable, therefore, to call it even. A more methodologically cautious option involves adding extra emissions to account for the Calculator’s later starting date. The scenario in Global Calculator (2021b) adjusts the original scenario (Global Calculator, 2021a) in order to add back the business-as-usual emissions from the years 2011 to 2025. During this period, the Global Calculator only gives the emissions totals for the years 2011, 2015, 2020, and 2025. Assuming that emissions changes are linear in between those years, the total difference is 292 GtCO2. To approximate a relatively smooth transition, I added another 200 GtCO2. Thus, levers are adjusted in this model (Global Calculator, 2021b) so that the total emissions double from 492 to 984 GtCO2. The result is still an atmospheric CO2 concentration below 288 ppm.
Both the 2021a and 2021b scenarios lead to a rewilding of more than 75% of the Earth. The 2021a scenario results in 81% of the planet’s ice-free and desert-free land becoming non-commercial forest and natural grassland. It is worth noting that restraining population growth and sprawl actually does not impact this percentage very much. Bringing population and urbanization levels from the most ambitious to the medium levels would only decrease the planet’s wild areas from 81% to 79%. The 2021b scenario brings wild areas down just a couple percentage points further to 77%. Both the 2021a and 2021b scenarios reflect the calculator’s conservative limits, since even the more ambitious 2021a scenario assigns 2% of the ice-free and desert-free land to pasture and biomass crop growth, whereas the true TLP would rewild this area, bringing total wilderness (including inhabited, tended wilderness) to 83% of the ice-free and desert-free Earth, or 88% of the planet in total.
