I recently got an email from a fellow planner who is an anarcho-syndicalist and an anti-primitivist --- almost opposite of my own perspectives on the anarchist city. Anarcho-sydicalism is dead or dying now with the rise of the green anarchy movement.

In their email they wrote:

Regarding primitivism: If 2 bears crap in the woods, it is an ecosystem---if 4.1 million bears (the pop of LA) crap in the woods, it is an ecological calamity. =-0 That’s why we need proper sewage treatment.

I could go on and on about the evils of technology, including the evils of sewage treatment: It depends on a much larger power structure than local people working together, independently to survive. When you depend on higher technologies and infrastructure, you cannot perceive that your actions are not bringing harm to the larger environment.

As anarchist planners, we need to advocate local sewage processing using home, human-waste composting systems, and both black and greywater systems of waste water processing, not super-human waste processing structures, which also make us reliant on a huge, global power structure.

It is amazing that there are still people out there advocating technology and larger power structures, when such structures are in the long-term, unsustainable.

I am also aware of the presently popular waste processing facilities -- that it puts water into the streams and rivers and where industrial pharmaceuticals which people consume are still not removed from the waste water, and thus by the technologies of pharmaceuticals and the technologies of waste processing, the water bodies and aquatic life are polluted.

If you’re not getting your water from a nearby well, river, or spring, if you’re not then processing it yourself, if you’re not healing yourself with the herbs nature has provided us, you are walking on a path of planetary destruction.

If you are not building or repairing the dwelling in which you live with locally found and prepared materials such as straw you’ve grown or cob or adobe you’ve made from the earth at your feet, then you have no idea that for sure your actions have not exploited some body or piece of earth or hill or mountain or eco-system in some far off land. Higher technologies depend on immense global power structures. As anarchists, for the liberation of all people and of the plants, animals, and earth everywhere, we want and choose to abandon such structures of power.

Anarcho-sydicalism is dead, and if not dead, merely a stepping stone now for those learning to adopt true anarchism as a social and political philosophy, a stepping stone toward the end setting of green-anarchy.

To comment again on the email, “if 4.1 million bears (the pop of LA) crap in the woods” it’s only an ecological calamity if people are consuming things which defile them and the earth and they leave responsibility for their actions to the egoism of bureaucrats, engineers, and planners, or leave responsibility to their “children” who will inherit their polluted earth. Right now, people may not be thinking about the consequences of their actions, but as anarchists, the consequences of our actions stand foremost in our minds, and we are, step by step, taking responsibility for those actions.

Capitalism, authoritarianism, and industrialization are the epitome of disconnectedness from our actions, and leave us on a course set for planetary destruction. As anarchists, we want no part in this.

We want no part in an “economy,” nor in “trade,” nor in “mechanization” --- we live together, we work and play together, and we choose together. We are not apart from our world or from each other. And we choose liberation for all, not enslavement to politicians, wages, or technology, nor do we choose the destruction such enslavement brings. We choose freedom and paradise for ourselves and this earth, not the nightmare of destruction and enslavement.

May 26, 2009