All Ashley Dawson Events

Ashley Dawson is a professor of Postcolonial Studies at the City University of New York, who has spent two decades developing a cogent diagnosis of the contemporary climate, environmental, and biodiversity crisis. His research and public writing charts how European colonialism has decimated people all around the planet over the last 500 years, as well as how people have worked together to fight back. In this interview with The Natural History Museum’s Steve Lyons, Dawson unravels the tangled histories of colonialism and fossil capitalism, considering how corporations, states, and conservation organizations have worked together to re-colonize the formerly colonized world, supercharging the rapid loss of biodiversity in the Global South. He also explores some of the traditions of resistance from which non-capitalist modes of life have been and can be built, arguing that Indigenous sovereignty and #landback must be at the center of our collective response to converging crises of our era.

Steve Lyons  Several of your most recent works, including both Decolonize Conservation and Environmentalism from Below, raise the problem of what you and others call “fortress conservation,” which can be seen in so-called “nature-based solutions” to climate change. Could you explain how nature-based solutions like the “30×30” campaign pitch themselves as positive responses to the climate crisis—but also, what do they promise to do from the perspective of people living in the Global South? What is new about these proposals, and what have we seen a million times before? 

Ashley Dawson  To take a step back, we need to understand that although the lion’s share of attention around environmental issues today falls on the climate crisis and increasing carbon emissions, this is not simply a climate crisis. We’re facing what I call an intersectional crisis that has many different facets that are unfolding alongside one another. One of the other crucial elements is a crisis in biodiversity. 

In 2016, I published a book called Extinction: A Radical History, which shows how the capitalist system and its colonial pre-history are linked to a massive extinction of species around the planet. This extinction event has been happening for hundreds of years, but it’s been gathering pace over the last 50 years, where we’ve seen a huge die-off that has been linked to habitat destruction around the world. 

This is the context out of which many of the big conservation organizations, almost all of which are headquartered in the US, have started talking about “nature-based solutions”  to the crisis of the environment. When conservation organizations bring up nature-based solutions, they’re talking about this kind of intersectional crisis that we’re seeing happen right now: on the one hand, the increasing rate of extinction (not just of specific species, but whole ecosystems), and on the other hand, the climate crisis. 

On its surface, “nature-based solutions” is an attractive idea. The idea is that if we start factoring in the contribution that nature makes to human survival and prosperity, we will see how nature can provide a solution to the environmental crises of the current moment. In practice, a toxic system has been created under the banner of “nature-based solutions,” which allows polluting corporations to pay the governments of countries that have abundant forests and other natural ecosystems that could theoretically absorb the carbon that these companies continue to emit. This is the idea of carbon offsetting. 

If you have a system of carbon offsets, you can value those offsets, and then you can trade them like commodities, bonds, or any other capitalist financial instrument. This is what is happening now: corporations that continue to pollute the planet are figuring out ways to keep polluting, all the while convincing the international community that they’re “carbon neutral.” A “carbon neutral” company is simply one whose continued emissions are offset by its purchases of these carbon offsets. 

Out of this situation, over the last ten years or so, big conservation organizations based in the wealthy, core capitalist countries have discovered that they can make a lot of money by setting aside land in different parts of the world in order to generate carbon offsets. Organizations like the World Wildlife Fund are working to get in on the aggressive financialization of nature that was ushered in by carbon offsetting.

As you suggested, there’s a problem with all of this, even though it sounds like a win-win solution for everyone: you make polluting corporations pay, and they help people by paying for ecosystems to remain in place. The problem is that in most cases, it turns out these areas that are being set aside as sites of offsetting don’t absorb very much carbon. There was a recent report that said that 90% of the officially accredited carbon offsetting schemes in the world’s rainforests aren’t doing anything other than generating a lot of capital for conservation organizations and financial speculators in green capitalism. The climate crisis is actually intensifying. The biodiversity crisis is intensifying. And Indigenous peoples around the world who live in these new “protected areas” are being dispossessed of their lands. 

How is this even possible? Many Indigenous communities around the world have customary title to land, but do not have the kinds of property agreements and contracts that Western legal systems recognize. This means that when corrupt government officials decide to designate an area as a “protected area,” they can just kick out the Indigenous Peoples who have been stewarding that land for thousands and thousands of years. Once the Indigenous Peoples are dispossessed of their land, there is nobody left to defend that land and to protect it from extractive industries. So, when a protected area is set up in a Global South country, you will often find that the country will also grant concessions to European or North American timber companies, mining operations or fossil fuel corporations, which will immediately come in and start extraction on that land. 

So, the problem with “nature-based” schemes is not even simply that they are bad at reducing carbon emissions. They’re also fueling more carbon pollution in the Global North and more extractivism and carbon pollution in the Global South, thus accelerating biodiversity loss. They are also deluding the public into thinking that we’re solving the environmental crisis.

We need to organize against this. This means helping Indigenous people on the ground who are fighting these kinds of “protected area” designations. It also means getting the word out, in core capitalist countries like the US, about what is happening under the veil of “nature-based solutions” and carbon offsets. 

SL  Your recent co-edited book Decolonize Conservation is not only unveiling the problems you’re raising here. It is also exploring alternatives. What does conservation look like when it’s being decolonized? What might it look like when, for example, the big green conservation groups have been abolished and there’s a completely different understanding of what it means to protect the world we share in common?

AD The point of the Decolonize Conservation collection is to focus people’s understanding on the way that the big conservation organizations are using “protected area” designations to dispossess and displace people, and to historically situate this colonial dynamic within conservation. With the establishment of National Parks in the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States is famous for introducing what we call the “fortress conservation” paradigm of wilderness conservation. In the process of establishing the Parks system, Indigenous peoples were forcibly displaced from their homelands, and areas of land were enclosed and protected as examples of untouched wilderness. But just beyond their borders, the spoliation continued unabated. This “fortress” model of conservation was an experiment in creating a kind of vacuum-sealed natural space that would supposedly remain completely pristine without any human intervention. 

Environmental science has shown that this approach to conservation doesn’t work. When you attempt to seal off a relatively small space—even one as large as a National Park, biodiversity will gradually become impoverished. Without the external inputs you get in a healthily-functioning ecosystem, the ecosystem will begin to wind down. Fortress conservation is not viable in human terms, because it’s dependent on genocide. But it is also not viable in ecological terms. 

With Decolonize Conservation, I worked with comrades at Survival International to circulate a series of talks and reports given by Indigenous activists and allies from around the world, which together make a case for how the new ideas of “nature-based solutions” are simply a fresh way of packaging the project of fortress conservation, which has been in place for the last 100 years or so, but with much higher stakes, because as we know, the planet is in immense crisis. 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, among others, has been proposing that 30% of the planet’s surface should be designated as Protected Areas by 2030. Right now, about 17% of the planet is set aside. Some of the new Protected Areas will be coastal ocean areas that are not inhabited in a regular way by human beings, but even these areas are used by fisherfolk, whose livelihoods are going to be threatened as a consequence. More consequentially, a significant portion of the new Protected Areas will be on land occupied by Indigenous peoples. This is why we argue that 30×30 is massive neo-colonial land grab. 

What would an alternative look like? What my collaborators at Survival International and I argue is that the alternative to fortress conservation is indigenous sovereignty—land back. Scientists have shown that even though Indigenous Peoples comprise only about 5% of the world’s population, they are stewards on their remaining lands of 80% of the world’s biodiversity. We need to recognize Indigenous sovereignty in places where it’s not recognized, which unfortunately is most of the planet, including the formally designated “Protected Areas” where Indigenous Peoples have traditionally lived. 

Underlying all of this, we also need to shut down polluting industries in the Global North, because this whole system of conservation and nature-based solutions is totally unsustainable. You can’t set aside 30% of the planet or even 70% of the planet, if the other 70% or 30% is a site of rampant capitalist exploitation and pollution. Even on a commonsense level, it’s ridiculous to assume that you can kind of put up fences and protect some part of the planet against the rampant extractivism and destruction happening everywhere else. We need to have respect for Indigenous sovereignty. We need to fight for land back. And we also need to shut down the rampantly extractive capitalist system that dominates the planet right now. 

SL In your newest book, you argue that “environmentalism from below” is “animated by struggles for collective control of the environment and social commons in the face of global environmental degradation and dispossession carried out by neocolonial extractivist capitalism.” I’m interested in probing this question of collective control, which in the context of Indigenous struggle in the United States, often rides on the question of Tribal sovereignty, which you’ve already raised. How should we think through the potential contradictions between, on the one hand, the urgent political necessity to respect the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations and, on the other hand, a normative environmentalist vision for how the world—from the land to the atmosphere—ought to be respected as a world in common. As we know, these things are not necessarily aligned. We could think of Bolivia’s investments in fossil fuels or the Navajo Nation’s commitment to coal, as Andrew Curley discusses in his new book Carbon Sovereignty. How should we think through, navigate, and politically engage these contradictions when they emerge? 

AD This is a hugely important question. Among white environmentalists, there is often a kind of unvarnished, uncomplicated celebration of Native environmentalism, eliding the fissures and complexities within Indigenous cultures and homogenizing incredibly heterogeneous cultures all around the planet. Having acknowledged that there’s not only heterogeneity within Indigenous cultures, but also political fissures and conflicts between and among them, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that there are traditions of resistance to the dominant colonialist capitalist framework, traditions which help us reconsider how humans are in relationship with the natural world. 

In his Two Treatises of Government, the English philosopher John Locke famously argues that God wants the world to be turned into a garden and flourish, which meant that the settler-colonial Europeans were doing God’s work when they occupied land, brought their agricultural techniques to bear on it, and dispossessed Indigenous people who were supposedly leaving it undeveloped. Locke’s argument was that by mixing their labor with the land, settlers had a right to the land. It was a case in which, as Robert Nichols has recently argued, theft became property.

The Indigenous cultures the settler-colonists displaced often had completely different attitudes towards the land—understandings of mutual reciprocity and responsibility between human cultures and the rest of the natural world, as well as collective forms of governance that enshrined these reciprocal relations to the land. These non-capitalist ways of relating to the land haven’t disappeared. In my work around the climate crisis and environmental crisis over the past fifteen years, I have been inspired by groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network, which has been making arguments about the importance of Indigenous worldviews in resisting all of the forms of dispossession that we are talking about, including those pursued in the name of carbon offsets. 

At the moment, in one of my classes I am teaching the testimonial of Rigoberta Menchu, a Mayan woman from Guatemala, who was part of the Indigenous resistance to the US-backed genocidal regime in Guatemala in the 1980s. Menchu talks about how the government sent troops into Mayan villages to violently take their land and crush their resistance. Many of these troops were Indigenous. The government found ways to recruit Indigenous people out of their communities, train them and turn them into foot-soldiers for its genocidal project against Indigenous people, which was also an effort to take Indigenous land away and occupy it for cotton or coffee plantations. 

How do we relate to those kinds of bloody histories? For me, it’s important to listen to people on the ground to understand their struggles and to figure out how, as someone with a settler history, I can meaningfully build solidarity with people who are trying to defend their claims to the land and to resist extractivism in all its forms. While Indigenous People may have taken the lead in fighting fake fixes like carbon offsetting, all of us have a stake in this struggle for our collective future.

SL In your new book, you write that we can learn from the oppressed people of the world who are “most vulnerable to—but also least responsible for—the climate crisis,” but who “also happen to be people who have not been wholly divorced by the capitalist system from sustainable ways of living and worldviews that makes such balanced lives possible.” Where do we see this non-capitalist alternative in the world today? What does it look like to organize around it? Why is it important to see practices and worldviews that have not been entirely captured by capitalism? And how can we do so without resorting to a kind of “primitivist” imaginary—locating the future in the past.

AD What I’m trying to emphasize in my book is that capitalism operates on a set of moving, roving frontiers, and some of the key frontiers for global extraction and destruction are in former colonized countries in the global South, which happens to be where the climate and environmental crisis is manifesting itself, both earliest and most severely. However, this constantly expanding colonial capitalist frontier is also a site where practices of resistance to extraction and dispossession are constantly being developed. 

I think you’re right to resist the kind of “salvage” orientation that has characterized anthropology and ethnography in relation to Indigenous Peoples. For most of the 20th century, anthropologists would go into communities in the non-Western world with the assumption that the lifeways of the people they encountered were on the brink of extinction, believing that they needed to record as much as possible about these people’s lives, customs, and cultural traits before they were mowed down by modernity and development. Resistance to this epistemological orientation towards Indigenous cultures is important because, as many Indigenous people point out, despite centuries and centuries of genocide, Indigenous people are still here, resisting and fighting back at the forefront of movements resisting colonialism and capitalism. People at the cutting edge of exploitation and extractivism are constantly finding ways to connect with the cultures that their ancestors created and passed down, recreating them in novel situations. 

There is an immense diversity of forms of struggle to protect the global environmental commons, particularly in the Global South. We need to support those forms in all of their heterogeneous variety, because, frankly, we’re not currently winning the fight against the environmental crisis. And even if we could stop carbon emissions today, there is so much locked in already. A lot of what we take for granted as “civilized people” in the Western world and in much of the rest of the planet since the Neolithic Revolution, when a certain form of agriculture and cities and civilization was created, will transform within our own lifetime because of the carbon already in the atmosphere. We need to be thinking about forms of environmentalism from below that are going to be able to carry humanity through these coming massive convulsions and transformations. 

SL You’ve joined us as a Red Natural History Fellow to think with us about “red natural history.” In my mind, “ren natural history” names the alternative to the colonial tradition of natural history, which you’ve raised several times in this conversation. What is red natural history, for you. What does it make possible, either as a concept or as a name for a cluster of practices ? What does it demand of our institutions of natural history? Where are you seeing it active in the world? And lastly, how can red natural history contribute to your vision for Ecological Reconstruction, which, as you point out in Environmentalism from Below, must be anti-capitalist, feminist and decolonial?

AD  I’ve talked at length now about how important respecting Indigenous sovereignty is to maintaining biodiversity. On one level, I would say if we want to talk about what red natural history is, we need to look into traditions of Indigenous ecological stewardship in more detail. There is some good recent work in this vein: for example, Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling’s essay collection Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows, as well as more popular accounts of Indigenous knowledge and ecological practices like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Jessica Hernandez’s Fresh Banana Leaves. But overall I would say that there’s a lot more work to do to understand what we’re here calling Red Natural History. 

This is not entirely surprising, because there are relatively few places on the planet where Indigenous people actually have sovereignty over their land. Exploring concepts like Buen Vivir, which comes out of Indigenous movements in the Pink Tide countries of Latin America, and seriously engaging the philosophies and practices that undergird these concepts, ought to be a key element of red natural history as it develops.

In addition, though, I think it’s important to see that there have always been contestations to the dominant tradition of natural history. In my Social Text essay on “red natural history,” I discuss the challenge to Darwinian thought that was articulated by Peter Kropotkin, who was an anarchist and a geographer. Darwin famously argued that evolution happens through a process of natural selection—in other words, competition, not just between species, but between individuals in a species—essentially taking the 19th century English capitalist world that he inhabited and exporting it to his analysis of evolutionary biology. By contrast, Kropotkin drew on his observations of natural ecosystems and species in the rugged conditions of Siberia to argue that, when one looks at the natural world within species boundaries, we don’t see competition as much as what Kropotkin famously calls “mutual aid.” 

We need to recuperate dissenting radical traditions within natural history, which, like Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, can offer counter-histories to the imperial discourses of natural history. If we can crack open the history and the discourses, hopefully we can also open up the dominant institutions and mobilize them within our struggles. Institutions like natural history museums can be sites for dissenting traditions, whether these traditions come from scientific observers and curators within the museum or from environmental movements outside the museum. 

I think that we need to have movements that cultivate dual power—movements that build power both through institutions and beyond them. Natural history’s institutions have serious structural constraints, and the project of working inside and outside at the same time is not an easy one. Working inside the institutions can drain power away from efforts to create autonomous alternative forms of environmentalism from below. But at the same time, we cannot simply walk away from important sites of public power and public culture, like natural history museums. We need to try to break them, transform them, and refashion them as movement resources.

Ashley Dawson is professor of postcolonial studies in the English department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet (Haymarket, 2024), Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common (Common Notions, 2023), People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the Public Power Observatory, he is a long-time climate justice activist.



Ernst Haeckel, Chelonia. Schildkröten, 1904. Photo: Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-07619.

In his essay “Of Cannibals” (1580), Michel de Montaigne wrote of the recently discovered inhabitants of the so-called New World, “the laws of nature govern them still [
] it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches, or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of.” Montaigne’s celebration of the egalitarian character of Indigenous culture bears striking similarity to many subsequent accounts of European encounters with Indigenous people, from Gonzalo’s famous utopian speech near the outset of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) all the way to Françoise de Graffigny’s bestselling epistolary novel Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747).

The idea of what came to be known as the “noble savage” was, in other words, wildly and enduringly popular in Europe. For many critics, this discourse was foundational to European racism. Yet in a talk given a year before his death, the anthropologist David Graeber remarks that scholars today tend to assume that Europeans of the time were so utterly racist that anytime they wrote of Indigenous culture they were essentially fabricating a series of stereotypes. In other words, these tropes may have allowed writers to satirize European society without being put in prison but were nonetheless based on completely imaginary versions of Indigenous culture. But what, Graeber asks, if the “dialogue with a savage” genre that developed in the years after Montaigne’s essay was instead a fairly accurate reflection of withering Indigenous critique of European social hierarchy and inequality?

How might texts such as those of Montaigne and Graffigny reflect a genuine unsettling of European assumptions about the “advanced” character of their grossly unjust societies, a disturbance resulting from encounters with Indigenous people? Furthermore, might we not see the ideas of racial hierarchy that were a mainstay of the disciplines of natural history that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a defensive reaction to these critiques from the peoples Europe was trying to subjugate? What points of friction, what dissenting bodies of thought within the tradition of natural history testify to these challenges to scientific racism during the age of empire?

In this essay, I discuss Russian anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin’s under-acknowledged but groundbreaking book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), arguing that the text reflects a politically radical stream of thinking within the discipline of biology. Kropotkin’s investigation of the forms of mutual aid within different animal species and, perhaps even more importantly, among different human cultures in the not-too-distant past retains its radicalism in a moment when solidarity and egalitarianism are pressing political exigencies. Kropotkin’s work resonates in significant ways with the tradition of thinking that derives from Montaigne and, if we follow Graeber’s argument, from the Indigenous critique of European social inequality. The mixture of scientific observation, speculations on evolution, and cultural critique evident in Mutual Aid might therefore be situated within a tradition that can best be termed red natural history.

How were European doctrines of racial supremacy generated and sustained in the face of the scathing Indigenous critiques of inequality evident in the work of Montaigne and subsequent writers such as Graffigny? During the eighteenth century, when these texts enjoyed such popularity in the context of critiques of European society, the natural history museum developed as one of the key sites for the manufacture of European doctrines of racial supremacy. As  , natural history museums functioned from their inception during the Enlightenment as repositories for the objects and specimens collected on European colonial expeditions around the globe. They thereby provided public legitimation of European colonialism. The natural history museum developed alongside and functioned as a display space for taxonomy, the scientific discipline that named and classified biological organisms based on their shared characteristics. Das and Lowe report that in the eighteenth century, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who is generally considered the father of modern taxonomy, divided humanity along racial lines, describing Europeans as “governed by laws” while representing Africans as “governed by caprice.” Following this reasoning, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1776) helped to inaugurate the discipline of physical anthropology by classifying humanity into five fundamental types based on the geographical distribution of peoples.

By the nineteenth century, such typologies were linked to craniology, which established the purported superiority of white Europeans over other peoples through measurements of the shape of their skulls. Natural history museums displayed—and still display—these relics prominently, and scientists and other “collectors” competed to amass remains of Native American and other subjugated peoples. Assertations about anatomical difference between “races” of humans were linked to assumptions about civilizational inferiority and superiority after the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. For example, Thomas Henry Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” wrote in his article “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society” (1888) that the animal world is akin to a gladiatorial contest, in which “the strongest, swiftest, and cunningest live to fight another day.” A similar situation, Huxley argued, obtained in human societies: “so among primitive men, the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest [
] survived.” Drawing on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Huxley assumed that all life on Earth was characterized by a Hobbesian war of all against all and that the history of civilization was about the taming of these underlying violent drives.

Huxley’s views squared with those of Social Darwinists during the age of empire, who saw the European nation-state as proof of white male superiority and as a legitimation of the right to rule over other purportedly less advanced peoples, including the colonized peoples of the world, as well as the European working class and women. But there was a central, unacknowledged contradiction in these social-Darwinist arguments. For if life was at bottom a struggle in which the strongest and most cunning survived, what exempted the European ruling classes from this logic? Were they not simply the violent and wily victors of this struggle for survival? And, if so, weren’t European civilizational pretensions nothing but a veneer covering over and legitimating cruel rapacity? This is the import of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, the supposed emissary of European light, whose genocidal behavior and dying words (“The Horror! The Horror!”) reveal the lie of European claims to civilizational superiority in Heart of Darkness.

Yet the social Darwinism consecrated at powerful institutions such as natural history museums was not universally accepted. Indeed, there was an important but still underacknowledged scientific tradition that explicitly challenged this dominant strain of European natural history. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is the most powerful articulation of this dissenting, radical perspective. Born into the Russian aristocracy, Kropotkin chose to do his military service as a youth in the remote eastern provinces of the Russian empire, where he became involved in geographic survey expeditions in Siberia and Manchuria. There, he wrote subsequently in Mutual Aid, he observed two dominant factors in the natural world: first, the extreme severity of climatic conditions, which meant that animals, far from struggling with one another, struggled simply to survive; and, second, that animals of the same species did not fight one another but rather, in Kropotkin’s words, engaged in “Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life.” Drawing on these observations, Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid as a direct challenge to the work of Huxley and other social Darwinists.

Despite his opposition to Huxley, Kropotkin did believe that species competed with one another. Indeed, he was explicitly critical of writers such as Rousseau, who saw in nature only love, peace, and harmony. Kropotkin agreed with Darwin’s arguments about competition among species as one of the motors for evolution. Importantly, though, Kropotkin suggested that mutual aid was the dominant feature of life within particular species, and thus within the animal world in general:

As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

In making these arguments about mutual aid as a fundamental law of nature, Kropotkin drew on and developed the work of Russian naturalists such as zoologist K. F. Kessler, whose 1879 lecture on mutual aid in the animal world was an inspiration for Kropotkin’s subsequent book. As historian of science Daniel Todes argues, mutual aid was a broadly accepted core of the Russian intellectual tradition during the nineteenth century, which welcomed Darwin’s ideas about natural selection while also seeing the Malthusian assumptions about social stratification as a law of nature that undergirded Darwin’s early work on evolution as a product of a particular bourgeois English school of thought.

Far from being universally valid, this Malthusian influence on Darwin conveniently helped legitimate the class, race, and gender hierarchies of the Victorian age. In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin argues that Darwin in fact came to reject this facile position in later work such as The Descent of Man (1871), where, according to Kropotkin, Darwin pointed out how, “in numberless animal societies [
] struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival.” A great part of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid consists of detailed studies of the complex forms of social solidarity found among species such as ants, parrots, and chimpanzees, sociability that he argues is responsible for these species’ superior self-organization and evolutionary success.

As Iain McKay explains in his excellent introduction to Kropotkin’s work, the insights about the animal world advanced in Mutual Aid have been abundantly corroborated by biologists in recent decades. Leading contemporary primatologist Frans de Waal for example writes that Kropotkin “rightly noted that many animals survive not through struggle but through mutual aid,” a position that he documents in detail in his book Good Natured. Noted paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould concurred, arguing that “Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to co-operation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals.” As Iain McKay has documented, many other scientists have joined this chorus, including biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin, whose Cooperation Among Animals extends Kropotkin’s catalogue of animal mutualism exhaustively. Perhaps most surprisingly, this list also includes biologist Richard Dawkins, whose book The Selfish Gene shows that what he calls “mutualistic cooperation” is in fact often central to the successful transmission of an organism’s genetic heritage. George Monbiot’s account of the myriad form of cooperation that unfold among the organisms living in the ground under our feet in his recent book Regenesis is only the latest take on the complex, self-organizing systems that structure the natural world.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid was not only the first work to prove that cooperation was central to the survival of animals—it also extended this insight to human societies. Challenging the writing of previous utopian philosophers of the European Enlightenment, Kropotkin argued that human solidarity was based in the practices of mutual aid that had helped our species survive and evolve for thousands of years:

It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.

The second half of Mutual Aid consists of an exposition of this claim that the cooperative instinct is the basis of human society and solidarity. Drawing on recent anthropological research, Kropotkin argues that “the earliest traces of man, dating from the glacial or the early post-glacial period, afford unmistakable proofs of man having lived even then in societies.” This evidence directly contradicts the assumptions of Hobbes and successors of his like Huxley, who falsely represented, in Kropotkin’s words, “primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species.” For Kropotkin, “societies, bands, or tribes—not families—were thus the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors.” The upshot of these insights about the prehistory of humanity is a damning indictment of contemporary European society and the competitive ethos that undergirded capitalism: “Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.”

When Kropotkin writes “primitive” in the preceding quotations, he refers to Homo sapiens during the earliest period of our existence as a species. But it was hard for even as radical a scientist and activist as Kropotkin to wholly escape the dominant evolutionary discourse of his day. Indeed, the chapters of Mutual Aid that deal with human cooperation are organized into analysis of “mutual aid among savages,” “mutual aid among the barbarians,” “mutual aid in the medieval city,” and “mutual aid among ourselves,” in an evolutionary schema that seems to replicate the kind of racist thinking on display in so many museums of natural history.

Yet Kropotkin inverts the evolutionary typology that these distinctions seem to encode by arguing that the forms of human solidarity evinced in the social organization of “savages” and “barbarians” have been eroded by the subsequent establishment of the state. Thus, for Kropotkin, the rise of the centralized state in the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe generated the conditions of selfish individualism necessary for the growth of capitalism. He argues that there were two main reasons for this: first, “in proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.” Equally if not more importantly, however, Kropotkin argues that states “systematically weeded out all institutions in which the mutual-aid tendency had formerly found its expression.” The success of this campaign of ideological and physical annihilation can be measured by the near-universal acceptance of the doctrine in biology that “the struggle of each against all is the leading principle of nature.”

But the battle of elites to destroy popular traditions of mutual aid and solidarity was not completely victorious. Kropotkin argues that “the nucleus of mutual-support institutions, habits, and customs remains alive with the millions; it keeps them together; and they prefer to cling to their customs, beliefs, and traditions rather than to accept the teachings of a war of each against all, which are offered to them under the title of science, but are no science at all.” As in the portion of Mutual Aid focused on the world of animals, Kropotkin elaborates myriad examples of institutions of cooperation and solidarity established by the multitude. Among these were the communal forms of agriculture practiced in peasant villages.

Kropotkin’s take here was likely shaped by the founder of the Women’s Union during the Paris Commune, a young Russian woman named Elizabeth Dmitrieff. Influenced by Nicolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done? (1863), Dmitrieff believed that collectivist rural organizations such as the Russian obshina could be nodes of the radical society to come. Other historical moments Kropotkin discusses include autonomous cities of medieval Europe, contemporary labor unions, and the “countless societies, clubs, and alliances, for the enjoyment of life, for study and research, for education, and so on, which have lately grown up.” Beyond the inherent interest of the historical examples he adduces from various epochs, however, the overarching point in Kropotkin’s account is that the elites who wield state power cannot succeed in stamping out the human instinct to engage in mutual aid. As Kropotkin puts it, “the mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”

Herein lies the significance of Montaigne’s account of Indigenous cultures with “no name of magistrate or political superiority.” Like the many other stinging Indigenous critiques of European society that David Graeber excavates in his lecture on the origin of theories of social inequality, Montaigne conveys the sense of life in a society in which mutual aid and cooperation had not yet been eclipsed by the divine right of kings, in which egalitarian values of social solidarity had not yet been suppressed by the rampant inequalities generated by capitalist class warfare and racist imperial science.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid rekindles this critique, grounding a vision of what it means to be human in the social commons and practices of commoning. The links he laid out between cooperation in nature and solidarity among the multitude were incendiary and remain so. His insistence on the persistence of the human instinct for solidarity, of mutual aid as the foundation of morality, could not be more important as humanity collectively confronts the struggle against a capitalist system bent on planetary ecocide. Kropotkin’s arguments for mutual aid offer inspiration for a vision of scientific inquiry and political struggle for the common good rather than for profit. His work reminds us that there are alternatives to capitalist competition, plunder, and feckless, ceaseless growth. It is a vision of a world without inequality and without the cops and jails and racism that maintain and intensify such inequality.

A complementary vision can be found in the work of the many Indigenous activists who have fought to preserve and elaborate traditions of care for kin and planet. Today these struggles for alternative futures are articulated in the work of contemporary activists such as the Red Nation, whose Red Deal lays out a series of key signposts for radical climate action, proposals that call for action beyond the scope of the US colonial state. For the Red Nation, decolonization must be paired with the total cessation of carbon extraction and emissions that climate scientists are calling for. It is from these interwoven practices of decolonial work and radical scientific inquiry that a red natural history adequate to the task of ending planetary ecocide will blossom.

Ashley Dawson is professor of postcolonial studies in the English department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include >em>People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist.

“Cooperative Nature” was originally published in Periscope: Red Natural History, Social Text (online, February 28, 2023).

This essay discusses the exhibit Kwel’ Hoy!: Many Struggles, One Front, a collaborative art installation featuring a sixteen-foot totem pole created by the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation in northern Washington State and southern British Columbia. The exhibit was the product of a collaboration between the Lummi and The Natural History Museum, a mobile and pop-up museum founded by composed of a collective of radical artist-activists. Kwel’ Hoy! appeared in different forms in two natural history museums in the eastern US during the 2017–18 year, helping uplift Indigenous leadership and movements whose activities center around protecting land, water, and our collective future. The exhibition focused on connecting communities on the frontlines of the environmental crisis with movements fighting fossil fuel expansion projects. In this essay I argue that the collaboration between members of the Lummi Nation, The Natural History Museum, and museums and conservation organizations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey intersects with broader struggles to mobilize cultural institutions in the fight against extreme extraction. Museums are a key site in this regard: they see more visitors annually than sporting events and theme parks combined. Although museums have historically served to legitimate racist colonial classifications of the world and its peoples, today they are far from monolithic, and are being placed under increasing pressure by current events and by climate justice activists, who push them to serve the public interest rather than the ecocidal perspectives and policies of the oligarchs who all too often populate their boards. Kwel’ Hoy! offers an instance of what I term the art of articulation: artist-activists using ideological fissures within dominant institutions to crack open and realign them, thereby forging connections among cultural institutions, front-line communities fighting for climate justice, and activist scientists seeking to mobilize natural science for the public good. The Kwel’ Hoy! exhibit is exemplary in its strategic effort to create rhizomatic links between diverse constituencies who can be mobilized to fight fossil capitalism, and in its determination to alert large segments of the public that a just transition beyond extractivism is possible.

Totem pole carved by House of Tears Carvers; an ever-growing stone altar initiated by members of the Ramapough Lenape Nation and added to by members of the public contributing stones and prayers for the water; and videos and graphics that map the fossil fuel ecosystem—encompassing land, energy, economics and culture.

Capitalism’s Organic Crisis and Populist Extractivism

Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of a deep crisis. In order to make sense of the horrors of the present, we can turn back to another period of extreme counterrevolution. Writing after the Fascist seizure of power in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s, the revolutionary Antonio Gramsci argued that his society had experienced an organic crisis, a comprehensive convulsion wherein the various parts of the social order refused to cohere, which generated a breakdown of social consensus. For Gramsci, this organic crisis encompassed not only the economic and political elements of society, but also the entirety of the social and cultural terrain. Capitalist societies, Gramsci argued, are prone to such periodic crises of hegemony. Indeed, writing about the clashes of the 1970s that led to the rise of neoliberalism, British radical Stuart Hall described the way in which an organic crisis ramifies across society, sparking what he called “debates about fundamental sexual, moral and intellectual questions 
 a whole range of issues which do not necessarily appear 
 to be articulated with politics.”[1]

Since the ruling classes are unable to resolve the multiple contradictions that provoke an organic crisis, such a breakdown is also—and above all—an opportunity to assert a new set of values and orientations for society. These new values are not always progressive, let alone revolutionary. Indeed, the contemporary rise of authoritarian populist movements around the world, from Trumpism in the US to the constitutional coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, is an expression of the contemporary organic crisis of capitalism: the economic and social orthodoxies that have held sway for years are bankrupt. After nearly four decades of neoliberalism unchained, years during which dominant political parties of all stripes accepted the necessity of austerity, global deregulation, and flagrant giveaways to multinational corporations, popular discontent has flared, unseating members of the political establishment and leading to a right-wing surge that is grounded in the ginning up of overt white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia. This naked bigotry is combined with a fresh round of tax cuts for the plutocrats, producing an unwieldy assemblage that will generate neither the economic nor ideological stability longed for by its adherents.

The scapegoating of immigrants and other marginalized social groups is a tried-and-true tactic of popular authoritarianism, a strategy employed since the beginning of the conservative counterrevolution in the 1970s to galvanize public support for administrations ruled by and for the one percent.[2] The rhetoric of figures like Reagan and Thatcher, for example, suggested that the economic and social crises roiling people’s lives in this period were not the product of a dysfunctional capitalist system, but rather the result of lawless ethnic and sexual minorities and the liberal permissiveness that abetted their disruptive behavior. Over the last four decades, bigotry, law and order rhetoric, and heavy-handed repression have gone hand in hand with the dismantling of the redistributive elements of the post-1945 welfare state and a massive upward redistribution of wealth. Contemporary figures such as Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have revived and intensified this toxic stew of tactical scapegoating and class warfare. To it they have fatefully added an ecocidal populist extractivism. Bolsonaro has, for example, promised to mow down much of the Amazon in the name of national development.[3] Trump, for his part, has pledged to “bring back coal” and to promote American energy dominance, promises that have resonated with not only the coal bosses and oiligarchs but also with sectors of the US labor movement, which has supported his greenlighting of the Keystone XL pipeline.[4]

But Trump’s America First Energy Plan dooms the planet. Even the notoriously pro-fossil fuel International Energy Agency (IEA) has concluded that “the world has so many existing fossil fuel projects that it cannot afford to build any more polluting infrastructure without busting international climate change goals.”[5] As Fatih Birol, director of the IEA, bluntly put it during the launch of the think tank’s World Energy Outlook 2018, “We have no room to build anything that emits CO2.” Today’s organic crisis thus has an ecological dimension. Vast swaths of our planet are becoming literally too hot and dry for human beings to endure. Weather- and climate-related disasters are intensifying, with typhoons and hurricanes killing scores of people and inflicting unprecedented economic damage. Last October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Global Warming of 1.5° C report issued a clarion call for rapid transition: “Pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems.”[6] The IPCC report made it clear that contemporary capitalism will experience an intensifying breakdown of the environmental systems upon which it depends unless dramatic political action of the kind that elites have refused to engage in is taken very soon.

The Art of Articulation

What would it be like to think about winning? What strategies can movements fighting against capitalism’s pillaging of society and the planet adopt in order to overcome popular authoritarianism and win power? For far too long, the Left has ducked such questions.[7] But in order to reverse capital’s headlong sprint towards planetary ecocide, radicals will have to knit the diverse movements resisting popular authoritarianism together into a force capable of vying for power at various political scales. They will also have to forge solidarities between committed cadres of activists and those broad swaths of the population that are increasingly disaffected with the status quo. In order to do so, radicals must challenge longstanding traditions of elitism on the Left and among artist-activists. Take Situationism, for example. One of the major inspirations for the Global Justice Movement and affiliated efforts in the art world in the 1990s and after, Situationism, as theorized by figures like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, consisted of creative and often hilarious but nonetheless piecemeal assaults on what was perceived as the passivity and tedium of life in post-1945 capitalist societies.[8] Underlying these tactical assaults was a wholesale denunciation of consumer society, which was represented in totalizing terms as homogeneous and utterly alienating. Postwar social democracy and the Keynesian welfare state were accordingly seen not so much as hard-fought victories to be built on but as forms of co-optation that helped consolidate a stultifying consumerism. This left little room for any kind of political transformation short of a full-scale proletarian revolution. Until the revolution, all that one could do was engage in isolated acts of symbolic dissent.

In contrast with the work of the Situationists, many thinkers of the New Left saw society not as a totality but rather as an amalgam constituted by complex and contingent configurations of elements. The key was to figure out how to break apart the current consensus and reimagine a more just arrangement. From Deleuze and Guattari to Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and Stuart Hall, a broad array of thinkers conceived of capitalist social and cultural formations as the outcome of relatively contingent processes of articulation and assemblage. For example, in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, Ernesto Laclau described Plato’s allegory of the cave in terms of a theory of articulation: “Common sense discourse, doxa” Laclau wrote, “is presented as a system of misleading articulations in which concepts do not appear linked by inherent logical relations, but are bound together simply by connotative or evocative links which custom and opinion have established between them.
 Knowledge presupposes, then, an operation of rupture: a disarticulation of ideas from those connotative domains to which they appear linked in the form of a misleading necessity, which enables us subsequently to reconstruct their true articulations.”[9] The task of anti-capitalists, then, is to rupture or disarticulate the existing common sense (or figure out where the contradictions of the system have already produced such ruptures), and then reconstruct ideas in a manner that serves the political struggle for social justice.

In developing their theories of articulation and disarticulation, Laclau and other New Left thinkers were drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci. Indeed, Gramsci’s theory of organic crisis is an effort to understand how the dominant order cracks apart under the weight of capitalism’s contradictions. After the failure of proletarian movements in Italy and other Western European capitalist nations, Gramsci rethought the reductive social theories of leaders like Lenin, giving future revolutionaries a toolbox for building counterpower. In Two Tactics of Social Democracy, Lenin emphasized the need to create a “single will” between the peasantry and the proletariat but paid little attention to how these connections might be generated from within the groups in question. Seeing “the masses” as “backward and ignorant,” Lenin argued that a vanguard party needed to forge alliances between groups whose identities remained fixed and static.[10] By contrast, writing in 1926 following the dissolution of factory council movements in industrial cities like Turin, Milan, and Genova in Northern Italy, Gramsci sought to understand how these movements might have built connections with the peasantry in Southern Italy, who at the time were occupying large estates and uncultivated lands.[11] Key to Gramsci’s assessment was the refusal of soldiers recruited from rural Sardinia to attack the workers occupying factories in Turin. For Gramsci, this subaltern solidarity—forged in the face of immense geographical and cultural differences—was produced by a recognition of common oppression. The alliance Gramsci witnessed unfolding in Turin suggested broader possibilities for articulating a common front between the peasantry of Southern Italy and the industrial workers of the North, one that might challenge the nationalist rhetoric of the Fascists by emphasizing solidarities born out of a shared fight against exploitative elites.

Gramsci’s astute analysis of the challenges of political mobilization in a time of conservative counterrevolution has much to say to radicals today. The key question of our time is how to defeat a popular authoritarianism whose lineage traces directly back to the Fascist forces Gramsci confronted. Moreover, the questions he addressed concerning the building of solidarities among political groups with very different geographical and cultural backgrounds are remarkably relevant to the present. How can we link diverse frontline communities, such as Indigenous groups who have taken the lead in protecting land and water in rural areas, with urban environmental justice groups that are challenging the disproportionate presence of toxic facilities in communities of color? Further, what stories can we tell and which institutions can we mobilize in order to generate solidarities between those on the frontlines of climate crisis (in both the Global North and South) and the broader publics in wealthy countries, most of whom are not yet deeply impacted by the climate crisis but are nonetheless aware of the hair-raising scientific assessments of it? How can we generate solidarities between people across national borders at a time of rampant xenophobia and racism? And, informing all of the previous questions, how can we rearticulate dominant neoliberal narratives that have inculcated a gloomy sense that the default state of human relations is a war of everyone against everyone else?[12] For many decades, the Left has had its own version of this nihilistic perspective, championing subaltern and fugitive knowledge but holding little hope of overcoming neoliberal hegemony. The insight that the dominance of reactionary forces does not obliterate cultures and acts of resistance is certainly a valuable one, but history has returned us with the greatest urgency to the question of how to articulate these counter-knowledges into a bloc that can take on and defeat popular authoritarianism. Since we are faced with the prospect of planetary ecocide, all of our thinking must center on cracking open vulnerable institutions, exploiting and even producing crises of hegemony, and articulating new, unexpected, and potent solidarities to revive our capacity to shut down fossil capitalism in order to care for one another and the planet.

Kwel’ Hoy!: Many Struggles, One Front

For the last seven years, members of the Lummi Nation have been traveling on Totem Pole Journeys to unite communities on the frontlines of the environmental crises generated by unsustainable fossil fuel projects. The totem poles, which are created by master carver Jewell Praying Wolf James and the House of Tears carvers, are part of a Lummi tradition of carving and delivering totem poles to areas struck by disaster or in need of hope and healing. Seven years ago, the Lummi Nation faced its own potential disaster: the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal, the largest coal export facility in North America, was slated to open on tribal lands at Cherry Point, known in the Lummi tongue as Xwe’chi’eXen. Rail lines running from Wyoming and Montana through Idaho, eastern Washington, along the Columbia River Gorge, and then up the coast of Puget Sound would connect to the coal port, where bulk cargo carriers would arrive to ship the coal through the Salish Sea and across the Pacific to Asia. In 2012, the Lummi Nation formally declared their opposition to the project, which they concluded would result in “significant, unavoidable, and unacceptable interference” with treaty rights and “irreversible and irretrievable damage” to Lummi spiritual values. As Lummi Councilman Jay Julius put it, in opposing the proposed coal port, “‘Kwel hoy’: ‘We draw the line.’”[13]

In September 2013, the Lummi Nation launched the Kwel hoy’ Totem Pole Journey to oppose the Gateway Pacific Terminal project. The journey began in the Powder River Basin, a region which supplies roughly forty percent of the coal consumed in the US. The totem pole followed the coal train route through Indian country up to Xwe’chi’eXen and then continued on to British Columbia, where it was placed in the homeland of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, demonstrating unity with the Canadian First Nations’ position opposing the transport of tar sands by pipelines across their territories. There, the totem pole was met by members of First Nations who had traveled from all directions to reinforce the message of Kwel hoy’. As the Lummi Nation states, one primary goal of the 1,700-mile long Totem Pole Journey was “to connect tribal nations along the coal corridor.”[14] But the Lummi are clear that the coal port proposal had dire implications not only for the sacred landscapes and treaty rights of Tribal Nations, but for all of the communities in the region. The rallying cry of Kwel hoy’, they argue, brings together the Peoples of the West, whose “communities, commerce, livelihoods, public health, tourism, agriculture, fisheries, air and water safety, natural resources, quality of life would all be adversely impacted.” The journey of the totem pole thus helps forge precisely the kinds of solidarities that Gramsci argued for, linking groups separated not just by geography but also by longstanding cultural traditions of settler colonialism and racism. By bringing “cowboys and Indians” together, Kwel hoy’ generated a new collectivity—the Peoples of the West—who stood together in opposition to the environmental despoliation of fossil capitalism.

Produced by Freddie Lane, a member of the Lummi Nation Tribal Council and a videographer, and Jason Jones of The Natural History Museum, From the Ancestors to the Grandchildren insists that in addition to linking disparate communities in a common struggle, the totem pole journey also identifies connections across time. The video documents a process of temporal articulation that links the Lummi activists of today to their ancestors, who have bequeathed important knowledge about how to maintain sustainable relations with the natural world. These connections across time in turn link the ancestors and warriors of today to future generations, whose fate will be determined by actions in the present. This rearticulation of temporality ruptures the time-order of contemporary capitalism, which is organized around a homogeneous, empty, and eternal present in which the sole claim to meaning is derived from feckless accumulation through various forms of extreme extraction.[15] Rearticulating time challenges the neoliberal dictum that “there is no alternative” (to the present state of affairs). In addition, the totem pole journey and the Indigenous traditions that animate it also make connections between humans and other living creatures visible in what artist-activist Subhankar Banerjee calls “a struggle for multi-species justice.”[16] As Freddie Lane puts it in his voiceover to the video, “The road that leads to death is not an option. The world is not made up of dead objects, resources to be burned. From the ancestors to our grandchildren, we draw the line.”

This line has come to extend across the North American continent. In the spring of 2018, the Lummi Nation and their allies brought a totem pole to New Jersey, where communities faced threats related to those that catalyzed the original Kwel Hoy’ journey. The Marcellus Shale formation, which stretches through western New York and Pennsylvania down to West Virginia, is the biggest natural gas field in the US, and one of the largest in the world.[17] With the advent of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in the late 1990s, massive quantities of “natural gas” or methane became relatively easy to exploit. The US is now awash in fracked gas, but all that fossil gas has to be shipped out of rural areas like western Pennsylvania to cities along the coast and to Europe and Asia, where prices for fossil gas are far higher. This has led to a frenzy of fossil infrastructure construction in states such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, whose governor signed a ban on fracking but has been more than willing to greenlight pipeline projects. Though the oil industry has assured the public that the pipelines are safe, abundant evidence suggests the opposite. In addition to their frequently leaking and exploding,[18] the pipelines also feature “compressor stations” that belch endocrine-disrupting and cancer-causing chemicals like formaldehyde into the air.[19] In reaction to the massive buildout of fossil infrastructure in the Northeast, communities across states such as New York and New Jersey have mobilized in opposition to these toxic projects.[20]

In 2014, the aptly named Pilgrim Pipeline Holdings development company announced plans to construct a pair of pipelines that would stretch from Albany, New York to Linden, New Jersey, running straight through the territory of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, a group of Munsee-speaking Indigenous people native to the highlands around Mahwah, New Jersey. Two-hundred thousand barrels of crude Bakken shale oil were projected to flow through the pipelines each day, endangering water supplies for one of the most populous regions in the US. Inspired by protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which drew thousands of people to Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016, the Ramapough mobilized in reaction to this threat to their land and ancestral sacred sites, organizing the Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp along the Ramapo River to resist the Pilgrim Pipeline. Although the Ramapough Nation’s stand against the pipeline was embattled—with the local township penalizing the tribe for raising tepees that allegedly violated zoning regulations—their fight has drawn the support of activists in the area as well as coverage in the national press.[21]

In late April of 2018, leaders from Lummi Nation joined members of the Ramapough Lenape Nation to support the latter’s tribe’s efforts to stop the proposed Pilgrim Pipeline from threatening water and sacred sites.[22] Alongside them were local residents, activists, and scientists from the New York and New Jersey area who are also fighting local pipelines. The protests included the placement of a totem pole and a blessing ceremony on Ramapough land, both of which were also part of Kwel’ Hoy: Many Struggles, One Front, a traveling exhibition organized by the Lummi Nation and The Natural History Museum that drew attention to the efforts of communities across the country to fight the buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure. Following the blessing ceremony on Ramapough land, the Kwel’ Hoy exhibition opened at the Watershed Institute, an organization located just south of Princeton, New Jersey, that is devoted to conservation, education, scientific research, and environmental policy advocacy. According to the institution, the totem pole helped “connect the scientific community’s efforts to protect local watersheds from the proposed PennEast Pipeline to the Ramapough Lenape Nation’s efforts to stop the Pilgrim Pipeline, and to the Lummi’s struggles to protect the waters of the Pacific Northwest from oil tankers and pipelines.”[23]

Liberating Institutions

Speaking about the impact of museums on public consciousness, author and activist Winona LaDuke states that “Most Americans know little about Native people: what they know comes mainly from some history books, a lot from Westerns [movies], and some from a museum. And when we are always frozen in the past, they are surprised when they see us walking someplace and we are still here.”[24] Museums of natural history thus participate in and reinforce what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian called “the denial of coevalness,” the idea that anthropologists are “here and now” while their objects are “there and then,” that non-European people exist in a time not contemporary with that of the West.[25] Cloaking themselves in the mantle of scientific knowledge, anthropologists and the natural history museums that exhibit their findings participate in an inherently violent erasure of the enduring presence and struggles of the people they represent. In depicting Native Americans and other groups as “frozen in the past”––for all intents and purposes as collectively dead––museums participate in ongoing acts of colonial genocide.

The naked oppressiveness of such depictions is obscured, in part, by the aura of objectivity and neutrality cultivated by museums and by science in general. In the wake of the notorious 1996 Sokal affair, in which the cultural studies journal Social Text published a hoax article wherein physicist Alan Sokal purported to show that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct, critic Stanley Aronowitz wrote, “So the issue is not whether reality exists, but whether knowledge of it is ‘transparent.’ Herein lies Sokal’s confusion. He believes that reason, logic, and truth are entirely unproblematic. He has an abiding faith that through the rigorous application of scientific method nature will yield its unmediated truth.”[26] Against Sokal’s insistence on “objective truth,” Aronowitz argued that “The point is not to debunk science or to ‘deconstruct’ it in order to show it is merely a fiction 
 The point is to show science as a social process, to bring it down to earth, to remove the halo from its head
. If science reflects on the social and cultural influences, on its visions, revisions and its practices, and perhaps more to the point, on its commitments, then there is hope for a liberatory science.”[27] Aronowitz’s points about the need for science to reflect on its influences and its commitments remains salient today. In fact, in the same issue of Social Text in which Sokal’s hoax article was published, eco-socialist scholar Joel Kovel argued in a remarkably prescient essay that the ecological crisis had generated a new conjuncture in which science needs to be reevaluated:

Science can never more be taken at face value. The record of its violations must be held before it: the reduction of the universe to brute, mechanically driven matter, the adjunctive role toward domination. In the present conjuncture, certain aspects of so-called normal science must continue: how, after all, are we to contend with the damage that is being done, or devise appropriate technology for an ecological society, if we reject the collective intelligence embedded in the scientific project? But science has to be reworked for an abnormal conjuncture. The myth of its autonomy from society is gone, perhaps forever. What remains must be refashioned according to the revealed crisis of ecology – science now seen in the light of what it has so far largely expelled. What has been reduced away must be restored: respect for the integrity of complex wholes rather than atomized parts; the primacy of dialectical becoming over static, mechanical being; the recognition of our embeddedness in nature and hence nature’s immanent consciousness and vitality.[28]

Against the naïve belief in scientific neutrality and objective truth that Sokal espoused, Kovel reminds readers of science’s history of ontological reduction and complicity with imperial domination of the natural world and colonized peoples. Yet for Kovel, despite this record of violations, scientific traditions cannot be abandoned, rather they must be remade in light of and in order to address an age of overlapping crises of capital and the environment. Science must be “reworked’ for what Kovel calls “an abnormal conjuncture.”[29] This injunction to transformation applies not simply to science, which must be rearticulated around ideas of commitment and the public good, but also to museums of natural history, where scientific knowledge of the natural world and the West’s (colonized) Others is displayed.

As the group’s name suggests, The Natural History Museum is engaged in precisely such a rearticulation of science and its institutions of representation. As Beka Economopoulos, a member of the group, puts it, The Natural History Museum’s work is animated by a central question: “How can institutions and disciplines that have had fraught histories with Indigenous communities and have been hamstrung from playing a meaningful role in environment and social movements because of the myth of neutrality—how can they reevaluate their roles in the current moment of crisis, perform science and perform solidarity with communities who are most impacted and also showing the greatest leadership in contemporary struggles?”[30] The group’s determination to reorient museums is facilitated by the fact that such institutions are not monolithic entities. Natural history museums are tugged, Jodi Dean argues, between competing imperatives to truth and collective good in the face of opposing political and economic demands.[31] The work of The Natural History Museum exploits and animates potential splits in the museum by challenging museum professionals and scientists to stand up against fossil fuel greenwashing.

The Natural History Museum is not alone in this enterprise. It is part of an upsurge of insurgent movements acting in and against museums around the world, including groups such as Art Not Oil, BP or Not BP, Gulf Labor, Liberate Tate, Occupy Museums, and Decolonize This Place.[32] For many activists working in this terrain, museums are, in the words of the Not An Alternative collective, a “cultural commons.”[33] Along with related institutions such as libraries, universities, and even parliaments, museums are public institutions that “supply an infrastructure for creating and communicating common understandings of the world.” For Not An Alternative, neoliberalism has become hegemonic in part by seizing and repurposing these public institutions: “the capitalist class relies on ideological apparatuses like museums to produce and reproduce the subjects it needs.”[34] As public support for these institutions has dwindled, they have become increasingly dependent on donations from corporations and one percenters that always come with strings attached. The time has come, Not An Alternative argues, to take these institutions back from the oligarchs. To occupy and ultimately liberate an institution is to exploit the fissures within that institution: “When art activists commandeer a museum, they split it from within. The already existent divisions within the institution are activated. Anyone affiliated with the museum is forced to take a side: few or many, rich or poor, past or future?” Efforts to liberate institutions are certainly not carried out in unanimity; indeed, some of the art activist groups mentioned above have a far more hostile attitude towards the institutions they seek to occupy than The Natural History Museum does, and in fact, some institutions are far more resistant to transformation than others. Nonetheless, while attitudes and tactics may vary, Not An Alternative convincingly argues that the Left’s abandoning of the struggle to liberate institutions in recent decades is a strategic failure: “Refusal and subtraction have been disastrous as Left political tactics. They have surrendered the power aggregated in institutions to capital and the state. The tactics of institutional liberation treat institutions as tools, weapons, and bases of political struggle. They take on and over the institution’s radical premise: the collectivity and futurity that underpins any collection.”[35]

The Natural History Museum works in a particularly fraught—and consequential—conjuncture. The group’s activities materialize the links among museums, science, and environmental movements during a time of corporate climate change denial and greenwashing, the Trump administration’s efforts to quash critical research and environmental regulation, and the resurgence of militant Indigenous resistance to planet-annihilating extractivism. This explosive conjuncture shows that the possibilities for cracking open and reorienting particular institutions is a product of the immense pressure such institutions have been placed under by the organic crisis of capitalism. As existing hegemonic alignments have recently come under increasing strain, The Natural History Museum has been able to build coalitions that have won startling victories against fossil capitalism. For example, by helping orchestrate an open letter in which dozens of the world’s top scientists urged museums of science and natural history to cut all ties to the fossil fuel industry, The Natural History Museum successfully persuaded a group of such museums to divest. The group then played a pivotal role in removing climate change denier David Koch from the board of the American Museum of Natural History.[36] The extent to which The Natural History Museum has reoriented discourse within museums of science and natural history was apparent when the Carnegie Museum of Natural History—located in Pittsburgh, the heart of fracking country—welcomed the Kwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line exhibit on the occasion of the International Council of Museums conference on the Anthropocene.

Carnegie Museum director Eric Dorfman’s declaration of his institution’s determination to be an ally to Native Americans—notwithstanding the open challenge the exhibition posed to the fossil capitalist interests that bankroll his institution—testifies to the success that The Natural History Museum has had in turning the museum into a “base of political struggle.” Equally if not more striking is the perception of exhibition visitor Kayah George of the Tsleil-Waututh/Tulalip Tribes that “our voices are being heard, like they should be for the first time in a long time. I believe the message of this totem pole is very clear. It’s the message that we are rising.”[37]

When Kwel’ Hoy: Many Struggles, One Front opened at the Watershed Institute, the rearticulation of museums and conservation institutions, science, and the struggles of frontline communities against ecocide reached a powerful zenith. For Jim Waltman, the executive director of the Watershed Institute, Kwel’ Hoy had a phenomenal impact by bringing the issues on which the organization works to life in the most visceral way and giving everyone connected to the institution a strong sense of solidarity with Indigenous people and people across the world who are fighting the same fossil capitalist foes.[38] The exhibition was laid out in a manner that dramatized this active forging of solidarity. A red line winding across the museum’s walls tracked various examples of the deadly ecologies of fossil capitalism, and then linked these examples to sites of struggle against fossil capitalism, including the Ramapough Lenape Nation’s fight against the Pilgrim Pipeline, the Lummi Nation’s struggle against the Gateway Pacific Terminal project, and the Watershed Institute’s fight against the PennEast Pipeline.

Introducing the Watershed Institute’s mission, Waltman boldly declares that “scientists have an obligation to deploy the tools of science in protection of the environment.” This, he argues, means that “scientists have an obligation to stand up and speak truth to power.”

Included in the exhibit was footage that showed the important role of scientists in documenting the damaging impact of fossil fuel infrastructure on local ecosystems. This includes citizen scientists, among them the thousands of children who attend science camps at the Watershed Institute every summer. Their efforts in discovering and documenting endangered species whose habitats are threatened by fossil fuel infrastructure have been key to fighting back against pipeline projects in the area.

The fate of the PennEast and Pilgrim Pipelines is not yet determined, but construction of fossil fuel infrastructure continues around the country and the world. The US alone is set to drive nearly sixty percent of global growth in oil and gas supply between now and 2030—with plans to expand production by four times the amount of any other country in the world.[39] Upwards of ninety percent of this expansion would depend on fracking, which would bring with it tremendous threats not only of near- and long-term climate change but also air pollution, health risks, and growing competition for water. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on 1.5°C of Global Warming warns that the world needs to cut carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030 to keep warming within that limit. In the face of this deathly prospect, we need, as Lummi Nation activist Freddie Lane puts it, “to summon all the forces of life that run through everything to come together in a common collective fight.” The collaboration among Lummi Nation carvers and activists, The Natural History Museum, and institutions like the Carnegie Museum and the Watershed Institute offers a powerful challenge to the fossil fuel industry. We must build on such hopeful alignments if we are to reroute the road to death that fossil capitalism has put us all on.

My deepest thanks to the members of The Natural History Museum for their collaborative efforts during the period described in this essay. I am also grateful to my research assistant Robin Renée Robinson for her wonderful work during this collaboration. In addition, I am indebted to my colleagues and the staff at the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Center for Humanities at the Graduate Center/CUNY for their support, as well as to the Mellon Foundation, The Environmental Humanities Lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, for their economic support.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons(O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change(Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist.

“The Art of Articulation” was originally published in Dispatches #002 (April 25, 2019).

  1. [1]Stuart Hall, “Gramsci and Us,” in The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988), 168.↩
  2. [2]Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: MacMillan, 1978).↩
  3. [3]Philip Fearnside, “Why Brazil’s New President Poses an Unprecedented Threat to the Amazon,” Yale Environment 360, November 8, 2018, https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-brazils-new-president-poses-an-unprecedented-threat-to-the-amazon.↩
  4. [4]Norman Solomon, “AFL-CIO To Planet Earth: Drop Dead,” The Huffington Post, September 19, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/afl-cio-to-planet-earth-d_b_12080618.↩
  5. [5]Adam Vaughan, “World has no capacity to absorb new fossil fuel plants, warns IEA,” The Guardian, November 12, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/13/world-has-no-capacity-to-absorb-new-fossil-fuel-plants-warns-iea.↩
  6. [6]The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5 ÂșC, October 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/.↩
  7. [7]There has, however, been an efflorescence of strategic theorizing over the last few years, one that includes work such as Andrew Boyd and Dave Osward Mitchell’s edited volume Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution (New York: OR Books, 2016); Jeremy Brecher’s Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual (Oakland: PM Press, 2017); adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017); Mark and Paul Engler’s This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-first Century (New York: Nation Books, 2017); Jane F. McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Jonathan Matthew Smucker’s Hegemony How-To (Chico: AK Press, 2017).↩
  8. [8]Jeremy Gilbert, Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (New York: Berg, 2008), 100.↩
  9. [9]David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed, 2012), 27.↩
  10. [10]Featherstone, Solidarity, 27.↩
  11. [11]George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 2017), 19.↩
  12. [12]Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (New York: Verso, 1979), 7–8.↩
  13. [13]“About the Journey,” Totempolejourney.com, https://totempolejourney.com/about-the-journey/.↩
  14. [14]“2013 Totem Pole Journey Archive,” Totempolejourney.com, https://totempolejourney.com/2013-totem-pole-journey-archive-2/.↩
  15. [15]Christophe Bonneuil, “What Time Will It Be After Capitalism?” Verso Books (website), February 26, 2019, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4252-what-time-will-it-be-after-capitalism.↩
  16. [16]Subhankar Banerjee, “Resisting the War on Alaska’s Arctic with Multispecies Justice,” Social Text Online, June 7, 2018, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/resisting-the-war-on-alaskas-arctic-with-multispecies-justice/.↩
  17. [17]Hobart M. King, “Marcellus Shale – Appalachian Basin Natural Gas Play,” Geology.com, https://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml.↩
  18. [18]Justin Nobel, “The Hidden Risk in the Fracking Boom: Are pipeline safety regulations keeping pace with the flood of natural gas?” Rolling Stone, February 20, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pipeline-explosions-fracking-796569/.↩
  19. [19]Sullivan County Residents Against Millennium, “Millennium Pipeline Highland NY Compressor – FLIR,” YouTube video, 2:39, February 20, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuAJAqwE-G8.↩
  20. [20]Sane Energy Project, You Are Here, https://www.saneenergy.org/our-programs/you-are-here.↩
  21. [21]Noah Remnick, “The Ramapoughs vs. the World,” New York Times, April 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/nyregion/ramapough-tribe-fights-pipeline.html.↩
  22. [22]Monsy Alvarado, “Totem pole journey highlights Native Americans’ fight against fossil fuel development,” Northjersey.com, April 21, 2018, https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2018/04/21/totem-pole-journey-highlights-native-americans-fight-against-fossil-fuel-development/536550002/.↩
  23. [23]“Kwel’ Hoy: Many Struggles, One Front,” website of the Watershed Institute, https://thewatershed.org/kwel-hoy-2/.↩
  24. [24]The Natural History Museum, “Winona LaDuke: What is the Museum of the Future?” YouTube video, 1:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SxjkaYypLk&index=13&list=UUMBBYHDnN2tSX_iMOET3ReQ.↩
  25. [25]Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).↩
  26. [26]Stanley Aronowitz, “Alan Sokal’s ‘Transgression,’” Dissent 44 (Winter 1997): 107–110.↩
  27. [27]Aronowitz, “Alan Sokal’s ‘Transgression,’” 107 (emphasis original).↩
  28. [28]Joel Kovel, “Dispatches from the Science Wars,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring–Summer 1996): 171.↩
  29. [29]Kovel, “Dispatches,” 171.↩
  30. [30]Beka Economopoulos, in conversation with the author, January 23, 2019.↩
  31. [31]Jodi Dean, “Exhibiting Division, Seizing the State: The Natural History Museum,” in Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene, ed. Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw (London: Routledge, 2018), 205–222.↩
  32. [32]Not An Alternative, “Institutional Liberation,” e-flux journal 77 (November 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76215/institutional-liberation/.↩
  33. [33]It should be noted that The Natural History Museum is an institution born out of the Not An Alternative collective.↩
  34. [34]Not An Alternative, “Institutional Liberation.”↩
  35. [35]“Not An Alternative, “Institutional Liberation.”↩
  36. [36]“Open Letter from Scientists to the American Museum of Natural History,” January 25, 2018, https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/open-letter-from-scientists-to-the-american-museum-of-natural-history/. See also John Schwartz, “Science Museums Urged to Cut Ties With Kochs,” New York Times, March 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/science/science-museums-urged-to-cut-ties-with-kochs.html.↩
  37. [37]The Natural History Museum, “Kwel Hoy – Totem Pole JourneyExhibition at The Carnegie Museum Of Natural History,” YouTube video, 3:56, January 21, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hQu5Iydec&list=UUMBBYHDnN2tSX_iMOET3ReQ&index=14.↩
  38. [38]Jim Waltman, in conversation with the author, February 13, 2019.↩
  39. [39]Kelly Trout, “The U.S. Oil and Gas Industry is Drilling Us Towards Climate Disaster,” Oil Change International (blog), January 16, 2019, http://priceofoil.org/2019/01/16/us-oil-and-gas-industry-is-drilling-us-towards-climate-disaster/.↩