A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: PIRATE ECOLOGY (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The increasingly pressing climate crisis should reorient our choices and 
actions. After decades of studies and complaints by scientists and 
climate scholars, even the institutions recognize the need for 
interventions, more or less urgent. However, this new institutional 
sensitivity has translated more into announcements and the coining of 
expressions good for the media, green new deal or ecological transition 
to give two examples, than into very specific choices. On the other 
hand, climate movements show an "inexplicable" weakness and 
fragmentation if one thinks of the urgency and gravity of the issues.

To make an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate and to try to 
clarify the direction of a movement against climate change, a small 
booklet written by Fatima Ouassak, a French political scientist, 
environmental activist, anti-racist and feminist, has been available for 
a few months, published by Tamu editions, a young Neapolitan publishing 
house that is pursuing a specific editorial project, with the suggestive 
title: For a pirate ecology... And we will be free. This is a dense 
pamphlet that allows us to penetrate the tangle of injustices that are 
suffered daily by the subaltern classes and at the same time tries to 
unravel some threads capable of freeing them from the grip in which the 
system forces them. Therefore, no generic appeals for the protection of 
the environment but a precise class position. From this point of view, 
qualifying Fatima Ouassak as a feminist, anti-racist and ecologist 
militant is not a pure attributive exercise but indicates the global 
perspective from which today's complex reality must be viewed and the 
precise positioning of those who want to implement an action of radical 
transformation: the struggles for the climate must be intertwined with 
the struggles against racism, against patriarchy, against every form of 
oppression, from a class point of view.

The starting point of a broad and radical ecological movement, according 
to Ouassak, is the recognition of the greatest freedom of movement for 
all, for white Europeans of the wealthy or middle classes, as well as 
for non-white Europeans of the working classes or for migrants crossing 
the Mediterranean. Only the freedom to move - the possibility of leaving 
the ghetto neighborhoods in which the exploited classes are confined and 
controlled by a violent security system, the possibility for migrants to 
reach Europe without legal constraints - can create the preconditions 
for a struggle to take off that marks a substantial change. "We agree - 
she writes - on the need to solve the climate problem, but from whose 
point of view and in whose interest? Is it humanity that we want to save 
or only the rich and fortunate white minority? What kind of ecology 
guarantees all freedoms, including that of movement and settlement for 
all, without distinction? What kind of ecology are we defending? An 
ecology that adds borders to borders or an ecology that seeks to break 
down walls".

It is colonial capitalism, as the author calls it, that "needs to 
produce race and territory. To accumulate maximum profit it needs to 
hierarchize individuals and lands, to produce respectable living beings 
and despicable living beings"; being in a position to be able to escape, 
through freedom of movement, from this mechanism represents a first step 
towards a process of collective liberation. While mainstream ecology, 
whether right or left, does not consider freedom important and ends up 
siding with the "maintenance of the current social order". Symptomatic 
of this conformist way of thinking is the idea that we need to be 
increasingly informed, that information can give us the push to change 
our way of living and contribute to changing the general fate of 
humanity. But, Ouassak objects, in the meantime information is 
unilateral, it emanates from the top down, from the presumed holders of 
knowledge to the uneducated population to sensitize them in the right 
choices and, above all, what use is knowledge if the popular classes do 
not have the possibility to decide and change things because they are 
oppressed, controlled and ghettoized to be exploited? It then becomes a 
moralistic discourse to say that to change it is enough to only change 
lifestyles and that this ultimately depends simply on our individual 
choices.

Radical change certainly does not happen by chance, the author 
immediately clarifies which main subject can promote it and what change 
needs to be implemented. Pirate Ecology is part of a trilogy, which 
began with La puissanse des mères, which identified the revolutionary 
subject, mothers, continues with Pirate Ecology, which questions ecology 
as a tool for liberation, and will have to conclude with a third volume, 
which will analyze "the question of the organization of society".

"Although these books deal with different themes, the question we intend 
to answer is the same: how can we make the world a more breathable place 
for children? The ambition is twofold: participation in the awareness of 
popular neighborhoods as a political subject and the definition of an 
ecological project. The method is[...]to take a step aside to think and 
design militant practice and reflection. This step aside is based on the 
militant work of the past and aims to strengthen the militant work of 
the future". The appeal to children is not a mere rhetorical expedient 
or a humanitarian and moral appeal; throughout the book, children are 
considered subjects capable of understanding and making requests, of 
becoming promoters of the process of change. Also exemplified in the 
liberating metaphors to which the author refers: pirates, dragons and 
the sea.

In such an oppressive and repressive world as the one imposed by the 
capitalist-colonial system, a true path of liberation from below, 
suggests the author, can find concreteness "in mutiny and secession", in 
escaping and creating spaces of freedom. To do this, it is necessary to 
"change course[...]and go towards the South, the South of the 
Mediterranean and the South present in Europe. The way out of ecocidal 
capitalism will be neither civilized nor barbaric. It will be conquered 
through a war of liberation, a revolution whose center will certainly be 
the global South. It is from there that everything will start again. And 
in Europe we will do our part".

All this is not stated in an abstract formula but practiced in the daily 
life of a struggle that, although still embryonic, has found substance 
in Vendragon, the first house of popular ecology, which Fatima Ouassak 
helped to found in Bagnolet, a suburb of Paris.

A compact book, therefore, to be read in one breath and to be meditated 
upon, the fruit of the author's militant passion and the awareness of 
taking that "lateral" view, capable of making us look at the world from 
other perspectives. In fact, it closes with a fable entitled A tale of 
pirate ecology, in which children are the architects of change, with 
their imagination and their resourcefulness.

Angelo Barberi

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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