From the Margins to the Future. Cultures that can Survive Eco-Apocalypse
We are facing a complex, entangled ecological crisis that is already causing the extinction of countless species and the destruction of habitats all over the world, as well as tens of millions of human deaths every year. The ecological crisis is not ›anthropogenic,‹ it is caused by capitalism and the State. It should have been fully predictable that a society based on domination and extraction would bring us to our current scenario of ecocide and global suffering. But not all human societies have been based on domination and extraction, and all societies that have such a foundation also contain significant cultures of resistance. An anticolonial and anarchist lens can illuminate the cultural traits and organizational methods that allow human societies to be ecocentric and liberatory: these are also the cultures that prefigure how we can survive the gravest threat humanity has experienced.
Peter Gelderloos is an anarchist and independent researcher. His writings focus on the history of state formation, the causes and dimensions of the ecological crisis, and effective resistance movements. He has participated in land struggles in urban and rural environments, for free access to housing, and against gentrification; for ecological gardens, orchards, and food forests, against extractive and ecocidal capitalist enterprises; for transformative justice, and against the police and prison system; for collective, rooted historical memory, and against the alienation and imposed amnesia of capitalism; in solidarity with Indigenous liberation struggles, and against the State in all its forms. He has spent most of his life in Virginia, Catalunya, and Cleveland. He has no university degree, and has supported himself by driving taxis and trucks, working in restaurants, translating, teaching language and writing classes, doing agricultural work, and other jobs.
»Trump’s Censorship Campaign Draws on Decades of Infrastructure Built by Big Tech,« in: Truthout, 14 May 2025.
»Dams, Forest Fires and the Hidden Commons – Part I: Social Control and the Ecological Crisis in Catalunya,« in: Undisciplined Environments, 3 September 2024.
»Two Years and $300 Billion into Biden’s Climate Plan, Emissions Are Higher Than Ever,« in: In These Times, 26 August 2024.
with Alexander Dunlap, »›The poisons are already in here with us‹: framing for ecological revolutions from below,« in: Globalizations (2024), 21(4), pp. 758–775.
The Solutions Are Already Here. Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, London 2022.
We are facing a complex, entangled ecological crisis that is already causing the extinction of countless species and the destruction of habitats all over the world, as well as tens of millions of human deaths every year.