After my presentation at the British Criminology Society’s Green Criminology in the Anthropocene conference, a woman asked me a question. It was a bit difficult to hear, since I was skyping in, and I will admit that between the presentation occurring at five in the morning for me, and spending all night awake anxious about it, I did not get a whole lot of sleep, and may not have been able to respond as well as I would have liked.
Thinking about it more recently, I’ll try to respond here, since I think it articulates a good critique and may help address weaknesses or places to improve, focus on, or clarify.
To summarize my own perspective, part of the claim I made was that terrorism stems from trauma stemming from solastalgia – the stress of seeing your home deteriorating – the source of which was the economic mode of production and the technical infrastructure that generated ecological disorganization and with it harms and crimes (like terrorism).
This is the general line of reasoning then:
- That civilization is a dissipative structure and as such must maintain its energy flow.
- That economic mode undermines this energy flow and as such creates an existential crisis for those deprived of the energy needed to exist.
- That this existential crisis is the basis for extremist mentalities: an in-group/out-group identity is forged in the context of a crisis-solution framework to generates grievances, with violence seen as the necessary pathway to ensure cultural continuity.
- Therefore, seeing that scarcity drives the conditions for violence, increasing vegetation and restoring ecosystems, while retrieving subsistence skills and ensuring direct relationships with nature to craft new infrastructures would reduce the potential for collapse, ensure sustainable energy flows, and as such resolve the crisis and lower crime. As one study puts it, “the more vegetation, the less crime.”
The question, comment, or response then, was essentially this (I think):
I’m not sure I agree with your characterization of trauma as the basis of terror. Some people are naturally selfish, and capitalism seems to align quite well with that instinct. I love the vision you’re presenting, and the world you want is great, but I’m not sure it can happen.
Fair enough. Ultimately what I presented was a paradigm, informed by green criminology, that I think has explanatory power to predict events and resolve conflicts. As Thomas Kuhn points out, paradigms are like a religious conversion in a way, not so much able to persuade or convince, because people have to have to change the entire way of looking at a problem. As such, I am offering this as a comprehensive model using a transdisciplinary method.
So let’s dive into it.
The question of trauma, I think, is especially tricky, because it is largely unconscious, especially in the case of solastalgia, when land is given little agency. However, the degradation of land is important because energy pathways are blocked or destroyed altogether. This means poverty, stress, sickness, etc. all of which can have indirect effects that, again, remain unconscious.
However, this problem is compounded by the fact that the particular trauma I am speaking about is intergenerational. In fact, to be quite candid, my premise is that this trauma crosses so many generations, I believe people actually mistake this trauma for human nature.
Let me explain.
Peter Levine suggests trauma is based on two things – intense fear, and a degree of paralysis. If I am frightened and cannot leave the situation that terrifies me, I am more likely to be traumatized. So, when it comes to intergenerational social traumas, I tried to make the case that this was due to the economic mode of civilization, which would then span millennia, likely going back to the Neolithic revolution, and really the moment where domestication and sedentism severs communities from the symbiotic whole.
In that moment, a boundary of control is institutionalized, separating human from nonhuman, nature from culture, natural from artificial. Binary thinking in turn provides the cognitive structure to begin valuing one side over the other, with exploitation following in its wake – the exploitation of nature through intensive agriculture, clearing habitat to make way for farmland, and exploiting human labor to work the fields. Domestication further establishes new socioecological relations as well as new values and worldviews: nomadic hunter-gathering is exchanged for pastoralism and sedentary horticulture or agrarianism, intensifying into urbanization where conditions are met, with property, power, and privilege upheld as people increasingly become insulated from the wild.
Meanwhile, as cities grow, the energy needs increase, more territory needs to be controlled, leading to imperial ambitions and wars of expansion. Philosopher Tim Morton calls the systems and processes needed to maintain this relationship as agrilogistics, which in turn undergoes a series of intensifications and updates as new technologies and developments occur, all the way up to today, when we take for granted ecocide as the natural consequence of human nature.
We are traumatized, and the “dis-eases of civilization,” climate change, species extinction, and continued structural violence are the evidence of it. Each of us are situated within this economic mode and technical infrastructure that produces suffering, violence, and death, and moreover, none of us can escape, habituated as we are from it. As our homes and social relations are increasingly affected by these stresses, we absorb them physically, emotionally, and psychologically, until…we can’t any more.
An exemplar case would be when Unabomber Ted Kaczynski snapped after seeing a wild area he felt connected to was destroyed by development, prompting him to plan an assault on the symbols and agents of the technological infrastructure he felt were responsible for the destruction of humanity and nature.
Okay, so that’s why I root terrorism, as an insurrectionary tactic, part of the wider category of political violence, itself a crime, in trauma: physical conditions are felt and manifest as violence, even if the root is unconscious, even thought to be human nature. To be clear, this line of reasoning is most developed I think by anarcho-primitivism, a radical critique of concentrated power, which is grounded in cultural materialist approaches to anthropology, which to be frank, seems to inform Kaczynski’s argument. Hence my controversial claim we need to incorporate insurrectionary perspectives in the field of criminology.
This is my segue also to the point about capitalism. As mentioned, the unconscious trauma I point to is rooted in the severance of the human from nature, which over time is intensified through technology, until it characterizes the Anthropocene: human mastery over the earth system itself. However, it’s important to remember what the Anthropocene does not, namely that it is not all humans that are responsible for the particular crisis it signifies. Rather, it is a particular kind of human, in a particular kind of economic mode of production that is driving this crisis. As Jason Moore makes clear however, the Anthropocene might better be described as the Capitalocene. Others have suggested it be called the Plantationocene. In which case, how far back does it go? Certainly, human impact is observable from very early times, and macrolevel impacts are similarly evident, for instance both the Mongol wars as well as the European invasion of the Americas were both responsible for so many deaths that a period of global cooling followed due to the absence of human impacts on forests.
I have located this period as having began in the moments of domestication, in which case the Holocene itself might as well be renamed the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene even extending into the Pleistocene, and it is only when we have realized just how problematic the technical manipulation of nature is that we need to create a new era to emphasize this. The point here is that symbolic consciousness has always been a geologic force, and the quest to find a golden spike that inaugurates the Anthropocene proper is largely a fallacy.
What is especially critical to consider, is that symbolic-consciousness-as-geologic-force is responsible for changing the thought patterns, and with them, socio-economic patterns that themselves are interwoven with ecological patterns. Domestication might allow communities to change the carrying capacity of a bioregion for themselves, but their dependency on human techniques and the economic mode of production will remain, these modes justified even on religious terms since that which promotes life is often made sacred and a sign of divine blessings.
So, to answer the second point that people are naturally selfish and capitalism works well with natural instinct, certainly that case can be made, but a cultural materialist or anarcho-primitivist paradigm might reverse that relationship: capitalism, as an economic mode grounded in a particular symbolic relationship promotes selfishness, as does colonial settlerism, domestication, and sedentism that privileges territory and property, and moreover runs counter to the so-called “original affluence” of hunter-gatherer relations tend to be more egalitarian, and therefore able to sustain their cultures over time.
Finally to the last point that this world I want is great but can’t happen – this may be the case, but it is a matter of political will on the one hand. I am simply suggesting that if there is a relationship between environmental scarcity and violence or crime, there is likely one between ecological restoration and peace or social justice.
Really, this is a hypothesis and research question driven by the paradigm that I think green criminology has done much to establish, and really just wanted to share this I find it a helpful framework to address critical issues of our day.
In the case of terrorism, the reigning assumption is that the phenomenon is a response to a failure of governance, in which case groups resort to armed struggle to institute new governance models. I have tried to suggest that what is being governed is a wider thermoeconomic flow structure, and only in reforming it to more equitably distribute power throughout the mass over time will we see a drop in terror, violence, and crime.
The truly funny thing about a hypothesis is that its validity is proved or disproved by testing it. To test the theory then would require massive efforts in ecological restoration and community autonomy, self-sufficiency, and improving mechanisms for equitable distribution of resources. Even if the test failed to lessen terrorism, it would still improve the conditions we assume are responsible for terrorism, so we could potentially eliminate other hypotheses and continue to refine our understanding of what appears to be an increasing threat.