Transcript: GOPAL DAYANENI on the Exploitation of Soil and Story /232
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I’m Ayana Young and today I’m speaking with Gopal Dayaneni.
Gopal Dayaneni And when we say rights are not given and rights are not taken away, that is because rights are only ever violated. And of course, that's what violence is: infringement upon rights.
Ayana Young Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980’s. Gopal is a co-founder of Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project. MG is rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies. Currently, Gopal supports movement building through his work with organizations including The Climate Justice Alliance, ETCgroup, and the Center for Story-based Strategy. He is also a Fellow with the Center for Economic Democracy. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy and empire. He lives in an intentional community of 9 adults and a squabble of kids.
Well, Gopal, thank you so much for spending this winter day with me and for being here to jump into some complex and far reaching topics.
Gopal Dayaneni Thank you for having me.
Ayana Young Wonderful. Well, I think many of our listeners are familiar with the critical importance of engaging with the future and radical imagination, but something I’ve heard you speak about that really piques my interest is how dominant society’s obsession with techno fixes and climate solutions should be understood as one of the strongest manifestations of our lack of imagination. And I appreciate this framing it this way because for too long we’ve bought into the idea that technological development is synonymous with human ingenuity, when in reality this pursuit is about attempting to save the status quo. In order to frame our conversation, I wonder if you can begin by speaking to this correlation between climate related technosolutions and a lack of imagination?
Gopal Dayaneni Sure, thank you so much for having me. It kind of seems counterintuitive, in a way, when we think about the scale, pace, and implications of the climate crisis and, and in fact, the urgency of the crisis, which is very real and important for us to think about is a double edged sword because urgency can motivate us to action, but urgency can also enable desperation and desperation and can enable false solutions. And the question is, what are you really desperate about? And I find it interesting that, you know, as you mentioned, this idea that increasing technological complexity is a defining feature of progress and we have this fantasy that every problem that we have can be solved through ever increasing technological complexity or technological innovation.
And what's interesting is that so many times we get caught up in or we get sucked into this, this idea of these incredibly sci-fi sounding, you know, amazing, kind of magical, sort of ideas that will suddenly be the “silver bullet” to address these complex problems like climate disruption. And on one hand, because it sounds sci-fi and creative, like Stratospheric Aerosol injection, the idea that we're going to pump particulates into the stratosphere that are going to block out the sun's radiation or we’ll put mirrors in space, or we’ll create these machines that will directly suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester them deep under these geological formations. These sort of fantastical, technofix solutions to me, while at once seeming creative, are actually a reflection of a much more profound lack of imagination, which is the inability to imagine a world different than the world you're in. Because they're actually, as you said, about maintaining the status quo.
All of the geoengineering schemes that are put forward, say, “Hey, we can solve the climate crisis for you.” But what they're really trying to solve for is the maintenance of the fossil fuel industry, the maintaining of inequitable distribution of resources. And actually, what's really most fundamentally problematic about it for me is that it not only misunderstands the climate crisis, but attempts to frame the climate crisis as simply this overly simplistic problem of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. When in fact, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 isn't actually the problem, it's the emergent consequence of the actual problem, which is the exploitation of land and labor and living systems all over the planet everywhere at once. So it's the planetary scale emergent manifestation of a whole different problem, which is the problem of the very nature of extractive economy.
And one thing I always point out, or that we like to point out in Movement Generation is that if you want to understand the climate crisis, you can't look up at the atmosphere and count carbon, you have to look down at the economy, at the erosion of land and labor and loving systems and the exploitation of seed and soil and of story. And I think that's the place where, for me, the real imagination lives, it lives in the ability to both imagine a different way of being in the world, a different set of relationships to each other. And even what's interesting here, it's like, maybe even imagination isn't the right word - because it's really about remembering, it's about remembering our way forward, not imagining something different, we don't need to imagine something different. We need to remember our way forward.
The other thing, you know, silver bullet is an expression we use to talk about these kinds of techno fixes, but what I really like about the expression, silver bullet, it is a metaphor based in a linear narrative of conquest. You know, it's a war metaphor, or a killing metaphor, or a conquering metaphor, and whenever you hear people talk about the climate crisis, or climate disruption, with a linear narrative of conquest, you know, it's a problem to be solved, it's a battle to be overcome, it's a mission to be won, chances are, they're walking you down a path of false solutions. And the way to think about the climate crisis is through a spiral narrative of interdependence. The climate crisis is a message to us that our relationships are out of balance with each other, and the rest of the living world and that we must be part of, as we always have been, and as we cannot escape in a grand conspiracy, with all the rest of life and the living world. And every time we breathe in and out, we are conspiring with the soil, and we are conspiring with each other and we're conspiring with our ancestors. And when things are out of balance, those are offerings, those are gifts, those are messages to us to change the nature of our relationships, our dynamics, our feedbacks, our processes, and our economy.
Ayana Young That was such a beautiful introduction. Yeah, thank you for that. And now similarly, I’m thinking about how we need to continue to reckon with the reality that we aren’t going to undo climate change; disasters will continue to happen and our ecological systems are going to change, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create a livable world. In fact, we can create an even more just world than the one we’ve been living in. But this work is intergenerational, and there are no finite solutions, and I think this reality is hard to come to terms with when everyday it feels like the possibility of a soft transition is eroding from under us... Can you speak to the importance of a framework that isn’t solution-oriented, but is instead deeply committed to acceptance, accountability, and adaptation?
Gopal Dayaneni Yeah, I think the framework that we speak to at Movement Generation a lot is the notion of resilience. And by resilience, we don't just mean you know, like, the more we get beat up, we bounce back kind of thing, but the capacity to navigate the transition in ways that are both mitigating the causes of it, but also creating the capacity to stretch and transform and change, and integrate the changes that are coming, that we are in. We say transition is inevitable, and justice is not. But actually, I think ultimately the only transition that leads to our collective well being is one in which we are actually engaged with justice. And here, I'm going to use the definition of justice from Dr. Cornel West “justice is what love looks like in public”, as kind of our guiding path.
But I also don't want to suggest that there are no solutions. It is that the scale at which we understand the problem is manipulating how we understand the solution. So how do I say this, the scale of the problem, does not dictate the scale of the solutions. This goes back to the thing that I was saying about like, please do not think of climate disruption as this planetary scale problem, you have to understand it in terms of actually what's happening on the ground in communities everyday all the time, at once. And the liberation of our communities from those unjust relationships of white supremacy, of settler colonialism, of hetero-patriarchy, of eco-cide of you know, that disconnection from each other, that way of seeing the world as made up of objects and parts and things as opposed to a complex of relationships. Like the economy, that is, you know, destroying our communities is the strategic point of intervention. And it is in that process of transforming those relationships, that the thing that's freaking some people out on the planetary scale, this idea of climate disruption is transformed. So it's like the strategic point of intervention and the nature of the changes that we need are at a very, very different scale than the way we have, or the way that the issue of climate disruption or the collapse of biological and cultural diversity, or the erosion of biological and cultural diversity have been framed for us or are imposed upon us, which is at the planetary scale.
You know, you will only ever experience the world through the economy. All economies are nested in living systems. And you will only ever experience the world through the economy you are in, which is why there's no such thing as a natural disaster, right, you know a 5.0 earthquake in California might rattle our dishes and knock some things off the shelf, a 5 point earthquake in Bangladesh could collapse a sweatshop and kill 1000 people. And that's because that's because you will only ever experience the earthquake as it navigates the economy and an inequitable unjust economy will inequitably and unjustly distribute the consequences. And it doesn't matter if it's an earthquake, or climate disruption or a superstorm or a pandemic, you will only ever experience the living world and your relationships as it is mediated by the economy, which you are nested within, which is why your relationship to the soil outside of your house is based on whether the economy paved over the soil or not. And the reason this matters is because reimagining our relationship to each other through rethinking and redesigning the economy is the only strategic point of intervention if you want to navigate the climate crisis over the long haul. And so it's not that there are no solutions, it’s that the nature of the solutions are at a scale different from the way the issue has been presented to most people presented to us.
By that, I mean, the way we imagine energy, if we just think about it as like shifting the entire world over to solar, we misunderstand what the real problem is. It's not just about where we get our energy. Right? It's actually about how we govern it, what we use it for, how we relate to it - so energy democracy is really the answer to that question of how do we address the energy transition. It's democratized, decentralized distributed, and that we damper down our consumption, and equitably redistribute the resource. And we can do that, because of the incredible fact that our own planetary system is nested in a solar system, we can do that in a decentralized industry, and distributed fashion, all over at once. Like we can deeply decentralized energy. And in fact, the scale at which we produce it now is part of the scale of the problem. The same is true for food sovereignty, and thinking about food systems, right? Peasant agriculture, on less than 25% of the arable land, feeds over 80% of the world's population, peasant subsistence and Indigenous food ways. Industrial agriculture, which is not actually growing food at all, it's mining for calories, controls 75% of the arable land and feeds less than 25% of the world's population. The solution is in decentralized, distributed democratically controlled land processes. It's not about you know, precision agriculture, or digital agriculture, or, you know, or any of those things, it's actually in relationships. It's an agro ecology.
So I say this because complex problems don't have simple solutions, but that does not mean there are not interventions that we can make. And those interventions, which make meaningful improvements in the quality of our daily lives, changes our relationships to each other, help us be in right relationship, responsive relationship with the living systems upon which we depend, including each other - will have consequences at the bioregional and planetary scales. It's true for climate change, it's also true for, you know, for a lot of other things, it's about re-understanding what we think of when we think of solutions. And, you know, the other thing is like, every time we engage with these kinds of transformative processes, that change our relationships with a problem, and that intervene, we actually also change the nature of the time horizon. So this static story of like, we have 12 years, or we have 10 years, now we have eight years to peak emissions, there's something important about that, but what's really important for us to think about is when we make transformations towards greater equity, justice, and you know, liberatory, self governance, these kinds of processes, we change our very relationship to the crisis, which changes every aspect of it in every dimension, including time horizons, a way to think about this is like, I often say, I used to say like, the best thing we can hope for is the equitable distribution of the suffering, and people are like, well, that's just depressing, why would you say something like that? And the reason is, because when you equitably distribute the suffering, you change the very nature of suffering, it's not suffering anymore. If we were all navigating it together, it becomes the way we live, who we are, right? It's like, what makes it suffering is it's deeply inequitable navigation of the consequences of climate disruption. And as we change our very relationship to it, and as we navigate it together, it changes what it feels like. Right? It sounds depressing to say equitable distribution of suffering, but if you think about it, if we're all going through it together, it's a different quality experience, then suffering. It's hard, but hard and bad are not the same thing as I'm very fond of pointing out to my kids.
Ayana Young Something I’ve really been feeling these past couple of months, is just the incredible surplus of knowledge, stories, and imagery that we are being flooded with. And so much of it is vital for us to know and grow from, but I do also have an aversion to the idea of content, and content for content’s sake. And my mind does wander a bit to think about the ways in which we think about growth, or endless growth from the ecological standpoint, which is inhospitable to diversity, and the sort of content that is being generated currently. I know the Center for Story-based Strategy, really recognizes the importance of creating visions, and telling stories; and so from your perspective why is it still vital to create stories, but how to also navigate this overwhelm?
Gopal Dayaneni Yeah, first, I just want to say I really appreciate the way you related endless growth, which is, which is antagonistic towards diversity, and diversity is our best defense - diversity is resilience, and I actually think it's also true that the endless growth of content and the propagation of that content through the new kind of platform supremacy that is represented by the internet is also actually averse to diversity. And that can be seen in the ever deepening fragmentation of our of our consciousness, the feedback dynamics of outrage without accountability that are enabled through the internet and the way those kinds of emotional responses you get from being vitriolic, end being privileged through the platforms, because those are the things that make the most money. I think there's something really important about that, it's actually, again, it seems a little bit counterintuitive, but the overwhelming flooding of noise is actually corrosive to diversity of thought and ideas, because it's actually hyper bubbling us. And making us less and less capable of seeing, hearing and engaging with others. And engaging in the edge, you know, the ecotones, the tensions of home, where new diversity can arise. And so I just find that a really useful framework that you just offered us, so hope you don't mind I'm gonna start using that.
But stories matter, and it doesn't actually just have to be news stories. We are narrative creatures, we make meaning of the world through metaphor. And the metaphors we use to make meaning of ourselves in the world really matter. Because that is how we make meaning. It used to be that life was the metaphor for everything, and now machines are the metaphor for life. We talk about DNA as code, we talk about our minds as being wired, we talk about our bodies as engines, our food is fuel. The idea that our DNA can be edited and deleted and cut and pasted. That idea that we simply understand ourselves as parts, that we don't talk about our phones is running out of batteries, but as dying and when we get tired, we say we're running out of batteries or I don't have the bandwidth for something. We are making meaning of ourselves through machines. And that matters. The metaphors we use to understand the world matter because now we understand the Earth as a machine made up of parts that can be taken apart and put back together. That can be engineered.
We have synthetic biology, the production of novel life forms through engineering, that is because of a worldview made up of stories and metaphors and it matters. It matters. Again, the linear narratives of conquest weren’t the predominant stories that were told on planet Earth. It is stories of interdependence that define who we are in our relationships to each other, stories of sacredness, and caring. The metaphors we used were trees of life, web of life. You know, coyote as trickster, there's so many stories, all of us have stories, in which the metaphors are living metaphors, versus machine metaphors. That's just one example. So it really matters. Stories are how we make meaning. And we don't tell stories, we live stories. They are how we navigate a world. And so to me, that is still vitally important. We do need transformative narratives. Many of them are based on our old stories, but some of them are based on new stories or new ways of thinking, I have this children's book that I keep on my shelf, well, I have two children's books I keep on my shelf, one that I assign to all of my students, even at the graduate level, and all the programs that I teach in, is the Lorax. And I always tell people, I'm like giving talks and people and people are like, what should I read, and I’m like well, I've got a really good book for you, they take out their pencil and paper and they're getting ready to write it down and it's the Lorax. And the point of the Lorax, of course, is that you cannot extract from a finite system faster than its capacity to regenerate and get away with it. Because if you do, your economy will collapse, you cannot chop down the truffula trees faster than they grow back and expect to get away with it. Your economy will collapse. And there will be consequences along the way.
And the other children's book I keep on my shelf is an amazing story, retelling of the birth of the universe, from the Big Bang, but instead of telling the story as the Big Bang, it's told as the everything seed, this book is called The Everything Seed. And it's the idea that the Big Bang is just a metaphor and we could just as easily use the metaphor of the infinite small, highly dense, everything seed from which all of the material of the universe was born. It's not the only story we can tell to make meaning of our origins. But it's an origin story that allows us to engage with a living metaphor to talk about the universe, then the Big Bang, which is obviously an explosive war metaphor. So for me, stories matter, not just because it’s about inspiring or convincing, but because it's about changing the way we actually understand the world. The language we use, can be relational, can be less objectifying, can be more liberating - if we choose to embrace and live into a different way of making meaning of our experiences through the metaphors we use. I just think there's too much of; we over privilege this idea of new, new ideas, new thinking, new this, new that, new technologies, new whatever. I think this is mostly about remembering, there hasn't been an original thought in 1000s of years. This is really about remembering.
Ayana Young I think about the level of defensiveness, and rigidity that is becoming somewhat common in movement spaces, but also in society at large...really...and I know your work with Movement Generation has changed, but as I understand it, MG’s formation really focused on how to integrate ecological consciousness into organizing, and so I’m wondering if you could speak to how is it, that when we are in alignment with ecological behaviors and patterns, this climate of defensiveness becomes incompatible. And that’s not to say that defensiveness is inherently bad. Could you share a bit about finding regenerative and healthy movement between defensiveness, resistance, and disturbance, as well?
Gopal Dayaneni Yeah, you know, it's interesting - defensiveness. This kind of relates to the storytelling thing or like how we make meaning of the world and objects. We tend to think of defensiveness as the quality of a person or it's like a person's being defensive. And every time somebody doesn't take feedback it’s like, “Oh, they're being defensive.” But defensiveness isn't the quality of a person, that defensiveness is a reaction to an unhealthy relationship, all living things when their integrity, that is that which makes them whole, living things when that which makes them whole is threatened will become defensive. If you threaten the young, or you threaten the life or threaten the safety of living things, they become defensive. And it is a totally as you said, a totally appropriate reaction. And for human beings, when you feel that your humanity, your value, your worth, your integrity, that which holds you together is being questioned, then the appropriate response to the feedback is defensiveness. So then the question we have to ask ourselves is, how do we cultivate the kind of relationships with each other, that allow us to view feedback as an investment in a relationship rather than an assault on our integrity?
I think the problem is the, you know, the profound lack of accountability that's facilitated by the internet is a big part of the problem. But it's also just this, ironically, even in the left this, this assimilation of the atomization of us as individuals, rather than seeing ourselves as interdependent whole communities, in which our well being is dependent on the well being of others, right, we've learned in this period of the pandemic, that health is actually - health and well being are a common pool resource. It turns out that I am deeply interdependent on the health of everyone around me and the well being of others around me, and that we all are. And that the way we have always understood health in the United States in this settler colonial individualist mind frame as being about your personal body. Or even, maybe just your family turns out to be a total fiction. Because my health is deeply dependent on the health of those around me, and even those quite distant from me, as health and unhealth propagate through a population. So it's the unhealthy relationships that lead to the defensiveness.
The question that we have to ask ourselves is how do we get into right relationship? And it's not enough to be in right relationship only with each other, we have to see those relationships as interdependent on the living systems that we are interdependent with. And one interesting thing about the living world is, particularly say the microbial life in the soil, is your engagement with it gives you quite rapid feedback and with consequences without judgment. That is to say, you know, you try and plant some seeds, and you're going to get some feedback pretty pretty quickly, and you learn, you learn to care and cultivate in a different kind of way. I hope, I hope we do. And we learn lessons along the way. And there's a way in which that feedback comes without judgment. I think maybe I could be wrong, I'm just riffing right now. But that I think is a useful lesson for us and how we can engage with each other.
You know, during, during my time and Movement Generation, one of the great gifts of the collective is the ability to give each other feedback and help each other grow. And there was a period where, where I got really, really intense and super helpful feedback around gender, gendered patterns, patriarchy, and even fraternity, I would argue that we don't simply live in a patriarchal society, we live in a fraternal society, in which all of the brothers have all the privileges and all of the power of the patriarch, but with none of the accountability, it's almost more dangerous. But at any rate, there were some periods of intense feedback around patterns of practice in the collective and patriarchy and, for me, a lot of really, really great and helpful feedback. And I was reflecting on it over the very challenging year that it was to struggle together through that, on how much it was a gift, because I never, ever, ever felt that I was not valued or loved or cared for by the other members of the community. That it was in fact, a gift to have people care about you enough to support you to be a better person, because you know if being a better person was as simple as an act of will, I'd be a way better human being by now. It's not as simple as an activity, it takes a community of practice. And, you know, the collective offered that and again, it gets all the way right back down to defensiveness, which is like, you don't have to be defensive if you know that the feedback is about the process of, you know, collective liberation. Nina Simone says it best; “Ain't nobody perfect, ‘cause ain’t nobody free”, it's important for us to have some grace for each other.
That is not to say that we should not have serious judgment about systems and structures of oppression, and that we do not point to and recognize that very particular people benefit from those systems and structures and manipulate and exercise power, coercive power, narrative power, and all kinds of power to subordinate us. I'm not suggesting it's like, we shouldn't exercise judgment. We should. Jeff Bezos is incredibly dangerous, you know. As is Bill Gates and so many others, but as a movement, I think, having a little latitude for us to, to learn and grow together and to be able to admit to each other that none of us have the “right answer.” Like one of our our members in Movement Generation, one of the Planning Community Manager’s, David Henson offered us this, this slogan that we use to talk about ourselves, which is Movement Generation doesn't have a political line, it has a political line of inquiry, because we're not interested in just insisting on a right answer, we're interested in constantly engaging in the question, how do we realign movement strategy with the healing power of living systems? And what is demanded of us as a movement in this moment on what Grace Lee Boggs calls the “clock of the world.”
Ayana Young The lens of the pandemic has revealed how cruel our unfettered quest for efficiency has become as it relates to our labor, and I know for many this statement is nothing new, but I do think about it in context to the pandemic and this moment where so many are without work, and many outside of the echo chamber are beginning to question how we have been living and working, and in Movement Generation’s “Resilience Based Organizing”, the following is written; “The first rule of ecological restoration is the restoration of our own labor. Human labor is the precious natural resource, concentrated, controlled and exploited, that has been wielded like a chainsaw against the rest of the natural world. Because of this, we must take it back from the chains of the market and restore it to the web of life. This should be the basis of our organizing at every scale, from the school to the workplace; from grassroots organizing to trans-local movement building.” And, this point about the connection between ecological restoration and the restoration of our own labor, is often so overlooked and strikes incredibly close to home. What does this look like for communities when labor is restored, and what are the rights-based organizing strategies we can use to work towards this future?
Gopal Dayaneni Oh, thank you for reading that, it’s been a while. So first, I want to just say a little something about what we mean when we say “labor” and “work”, because we have a tendency to just think of it In the very narrow way that has been imposed upon us by, you know, racialized monopoly capitalism and settler colonialism, and industrialism and efficiency and you know, in the factory, and I would like to take a moment to say that all living things, we take energy from the sun, we convert it in to power to do work. And that work is what matters. And when we define it that way, we are not distinguishing between the beating of a heart or the singing of a song with a hugging of a child, or the telling of a story, of the building of a building, or the planting of the seed, or the blinking of an eye. It's all work. It's all work. And it allows us to stop thinking about labor in terms of jobs, and it allows us to stop thinking about labor in terms of these very narrow notions of what a productive body looks like. It allows us to accept in much greater diversity, all the different ways we can be and collectively contribute to our well being, like, the thinking of the thought is work just as much as the beating of the heart or, you know, the building of something. So I want to, you know, kind of reclaim work a little bit.
And Michelle Mascarenhas Swan for Movement Generation writes a lot about, you know, thinking about roles versus jobs, thinking about all the ways in which we exercise, our labor, our bodies, our work, and all the different diverse forms that that can take, and to value all of them and to not simply reduce ourselves to the job. It's funny because I set up a meeting recently where folks were talking about how they were excited to take a break from work, and I kept reminding them that they were going to take a break from their jobs, but they weren't taking any kind of break from work. Because you take a break from work, your heart stops beating, and your lungs stop filling. So don't stop working, what you were looking forward to is laboring in your own interests. And, you know, if you cannot withhold your labor at any time for any reason, then you are not free. Or that is to say, your freedom is infringed upon. Because freedom is not given or taken away. It is only ever violated. And that's the origin of violence. Which gets to rights based organizing, which is that we often think of rights as - rights is one of those funny words that like, you know, if you ever had the experience of saying like, you know, somebody asks you, if you if you can get together at 12 noon, and you say, “Oh yeah, I'm free.” And you don't mean, you're free free, you just mean the time is available. You know or if you have a coupon for ice cream, and it says “buy one, get one free”, it doesn't mean that the ice cream’s actually free in any grander, existential sense, or even in the fact of it, you know, the term free simply means you don't have to pay for that doesn't mean there isn't a cost.
Rights is another one of those words where sometimes it means entitlement, like property rights. Sometimes it means a declaration, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but may only be as paper thin as that. It's a word that has lots and lots of different meanings, it can be an assertion, it can be a declaration, it can be an entitlement. But when we say “rights based organizing”, we're using it in a very fundamental way. This idea that rights are not given and rights are not taken away, rights are inherent, and they are exercised by people to meet their needs. And when we say rights are not given and rights are not taken away, that is because rights are only ever violated. And of course, that's what violence is: infringement upon rights. And the only way rights are ever asserted is when they are exercised. And in fact, the only reason you need rights is because something which was understood to be customary, is threatened with infringement or is infringed upon. You don't have to say you have the right to breathe until someone tries to take it away. Before that, and for the vast majority time, we've been on the planet. Breathing was customary. You could just do it. But the infringement upon the right to do it requires that we articulate it, the infringement upon it requires that we articulate it and that we then figure out a way to assert it to defend it.
Rights based organizing is this idea of recognizing that when a people are organized enough to assert, through exercising rights, that they test the legitimacy of existing authority. And see, when you think about rights, if you think about rights in a very fundamental sense, then you realize if something is a right, like so, for example, if we say housing is a human right, then all economic activity has to be subordinate to that, right. Otherwise, it is an infringement upon the right. So if you ask people, how many people believe housing is a human right? The vast majority of people think housing is a human right, it's a basic need, everybody has it, we should ensure that everybody gets it. Then the question is, what economic activity is currently infringing upon that right? And that's the ability to speculate on land, profit, off of rent, all of those kinds of things.
So if you actually assert that housing is a human right, then you are subordinating all economic activity to those rights. And that's a different way of thinking about organizing than how we have historically thought about organizing. We've historically thought about organizing as what is the need that isn't being met? And how do we make demands on existing authority to meet those needs. Instead, we would argue through resilience based organizing that we as a community should meet those needs directly. And the way that we do it should broadcast into the world, the vision of what that looks like. And by doing it and doing it in a self governed, deeply democratic way, and as a right, we're contesting the legitimacy of existing authority. Because the basis of revolution isn't really actually the struggle for power, the basis of revolution is rights. It's when a people assert rights, that the existing authority says you can't do that. And we as a people get to say, “You misunderstand the meaning of the term rights and you and some armies are going to have to stop us.” And that's where the struggle for power comes.
So what are the rights upon which we are going to organize? That's the question. And for us at Movement Generation, we advocate for some very fundamental kinds of rights. The first, of course, rights of living systems, rights of Mother Earth, and rights of nature. And there are ways to do that at all these different scales. And the other is the right to the resources required for people, these are collective rights, mind you, these are not individual rights, rights of Mother Earth and the right of people to the resources required to create productive, dignified, and ecologically sustainable livelihoods. And that's different from the right to housing or the right to a minimum wage or the right to healthcare. It’s the right to the resources to meet those needs as a people and if you believe that people have a right to those resources, that peoples have a right to those resources, then they must be governed in such a way that sustains them over time, which is the definition of commons.
So land is one of those resources, control of our own labor energy, even I would argue in this period of transition, financial capital - that we should be organizing capital as a commons, as opposed to in an enclosure, because everybody needs access to those resources to create those productive, dignified and ecologically sustainable livelihoods in this period of transition. So what does that look like pragmatically, like I said, it looks like energy democracy, community owned cooperative energy systems, it looks like non-extractive revolving loan funds in communities where lending is a tool of the people. The capital is a tool of the people and people are a tool of capital. Where people control the resources, they utilize them, they return them, they add value to the shared common pool resource so that others in the community can access it further, as opposed to feeding an enclosure. It looks like community control of land and housing. And so those are the kinds of pragmatic interventions that we're trying to make, from the perspective of how do we build permanently organized communities that are resilient in the face of the disturbances that are coming from what has been set in motion already, that also doesn't add fuel to the fire of those disturbances and disruptions that preserves biological and cultural diversity that cultivates impact. And that increases our capacity to democratically compassionately, equitably self govern.
And there's a bunch of ways we do that, I'm part of the People's Solar Energy Fund, which is a non-extractive lending cooperative, that supports community owned clean energy solar projects that are cooperatively governed. And so it's an intervention not just in energy and energy democracy, but it's also an intervention in finance, we'd help support and participate in something called the Seed Commons, which is a federation of non-extractive revolving loan funds across Turtle Island that are supporting community owned and worker owned cooperatives, from Richmond, California to New York to the Gulf South to northern parts of the state. So these are the sort of pragmatic kinds of implementations of this idea of what resilience based organizing can look like.
Ayana Young I actually want to go a bit deeper into some of the topics you just brought up in your last response. And in preparing for our conversation, I came across a really beautiful interview you had with Naomi Klein on Intercepted, about your intentional living situation, and what this looks like amidst a pandemic. And within this conversation, you talk about “taking soil out of the speculative market”, and I’ve spoken with previous guests about this in terms of agrarian land reform, land back, and rural cooperatives, but I’ve yet to really venture into this in terms of what it looks like in urban areas, in places like the Bay Area. Can you share with us why it’s so important to bring in decommodification of land, and land rights, and the liberation of land from the speculative market, alongside conversations that have previously focused on the right to housing?
Gopal Dayaneni Well, for one thing, some of the most overly commoditized land is going to be urban land. So as a strategic point of intervention in disrupting the legitimacy of commoditizing land, which is the basis of enclosure right? When I teach about enclosure, I jokingly talk about everything being under “Locke and Keynes”, you referring to Locke whose notion of the rational man and the individual as the basis of rights and freedom and ownership, and Keynes in terms of the economics of enclosure. You know the place where enclosures are most powerful, and least contested, are in urban spaces. Often, it is where you have high concentrations of federally unrecognized Indigenous peoples and Indigenous peoples who are working to rebuild land bases and reclaim territory, and it's not an accident that the places where there's high property values, that the idea of recognizing Indigenous peoples is not happening in terms of federal recognition. So that's one important thing.
But I actually think there's a huge movement, an incredible movement around the de-speculation of soil in the urban context, both through land trust's, including Indigenous land trusts, but also community land trust's. There's various forms of what Sustainable Economies Law Center has been working on, permanent real estate cooperatives, various creative and smart interventions on land and land tenure. Ways of intervening in the ability to develop and speculate on land, thereby curtailing its capacity to, “grow in financial value”. Again land is one of those resources upon which everyone depends. We depend on it for livelihood, for food, for identity, for how we make meaning of ourselves, for housing, and if we're just demanding more housing, we are missing what is really at the heart of the issue, which is who controls the land, to what end and in what way.
And so when we think of land reform, historically, particularly around Third World land reform movements, land reform was about redistributing land from the few to the many. And so one aspect of land reform is the distribution of land. Another way we can think about land reform is through land use, which is land going to be used for, for private benefit, or public benefit, are we going to build parks or freeways? Are we going to pave over it? Are we going to liberate the soil? So there's land use questions that are part of land reform. And the third part of land reform is how land is governed. Will it be held as private property? Will it be held as public land through existing structures of governance? Or will it be held by the people through various forms of commoning, and for our perspective, land reform has to be about all three of those things, it has to be about how we deconcentrate control of land, how we change our relationship to land and how we utilize it, to serve the interests of our communities, including our community in the largest sense of that, the biotic including the biotic communities upon which we depend, are interdependent, and how we govern that land.
And so those are the kinds of experiments that are really exciting, that are happening in urban context. And some of us are engaging in different aspects of different pieces. And, you know, part of transition is going to be collapse. It's not like there's going to be some smooth, kind of easy little, like, glide into a better way of being, it's going to be challenging, and some of the existing structures will collapse. And in their collapse, new opportunities will emerge. But that does not also mean that within their collapse, there will be challenges. But some people think that navigating some of that collapse, it's going to be all about, like how to grow food and what people call these hard skills, strange expression, but I'd like to point out that when push comes to shove, we'll figure out how to grow food. That's not the issue. And in fact, we already know how to grow food. The harder thing to figure out, the more challenging skills are, how do we navigate harm and hurting in our communities? How do we do it without policing in prisons, and that's where the transformative justice movement is essential to adjust transition. It's about how we are going to organize together in ways that are radically inclusive, meaning that they prioritize those who are most excluded. And that's where worker and community owned cooperatives and the daily practice of self governance matter. You know, that's, to me, an important part of what I value about living in community is learning how to self govern. That and of course, it's just so much, so much happier and healthier living in community. So I think both the relationship to land and the speculation of land but also collective, and community governance of these shared common pool resources is really an important learning for us in navigating, living into making real the world that we know we need.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Skeppet, Shingai, and Yesol. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.