Inside the Fight Against Green Capitalism: An Interview with Xander Dunlap

This System is Killing Us sheds light on the devastating impacts of energy infrastructure and mining on Indigenous communities and their land. Can you share some of the most striking or surprising experiences you encountered during your decade of living and working with these activists?

Xander Dunlap: Well, at this point there is little that surprises me—which means, unfortunately, that I can believe anything considering the things I have witnessed in terms of politics, betrayal and so on. But thinking back about ten or so years, I guess I was shocked at the level of repression against people fighting so-called “green” and “renewable” energy projects but also the negative impacts wind turbines could have on semi-subsistent peoples.

When life is organized around fishing from the sea and farming on the land, these impacts appear rather obvious, but myself and still many others today remain insensitive to these realities. I took for granted how aircraft warning lights scared fish deeper into the lagoon and the way wind turbine vibrations make sea life go a bit crazy. Or the realities of building concrete foundations on agricultural lands with fresh groundwater. These rather normal modernist constructions have profound impacts if you directly subsist from the land and the sea that obviously extends beyond Indigenous communities. That said, directly attacking the food supply of Zapotec and Ikoot people via wind turbines, or other Indigenous nations by factories, data centers, solar panels, train lines, pipelines or what have you, genocidal/ ecocidal politics are surprisingly close in matters of megaproject interventions.

This is all to say, whether Zapotec land defenders taking up machetes, slingshots or shotguns or French farmers making barricades and rioting, any communal or, even, national opposition challenging ‘black,’ ‘grey’ or ‘green’ capitalism related to coal, oil, copper or wind extractivism is met with violent force. I guess this is only surprising if you believe the myths—or aspirations—of the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s regarding “renewable energy.” Multi-billion-dollar energy companies are multi-billion-dollar energy companies, competing, cooperating and using whatever legal and extra-legal means to confuse, put-down and neutralize opposition into active or passive acquiescence.

While there have been many life-threatening instances of being in autonomous areas in Mexico or Europe, I guess most significant was by a stroke of luck and random collision when I was able to interview an ex-military personnel working security, I believe at that time for 17 years within hydrocarbon and mineral extraction companies in Peru. They are referred to as “Jim” in This System is Killing Us. Many years before this, because there is a significant amount of expenditure dedicated to “security,” I thought I should give attention to military, police and paramilitary organizations since that is what enforces megaproject development from copper mines to wind turbines. This led me to study the counterinsurgency warfare—a military doctrine, and accumulation of tactics and strategies for articulating population management emerging from a century of colonial warfare. I had already began to cross reference the experience of people, and my own, with military doctrines to show profound overlap and similarities in lower-intensity conflicts over wind extraction zones, coal mines and later copper mines, and Jim, well he explained to me the system of counter-intelligence networks common to mining companies, often engaging in dispersing money to officials, using social development as a weapon and, if that did not work, engaging in campaigns of assault and, and if need be, strategic assassination. This interview was unexpected, surprising and rarely do you get candid admission from people who actually do this type of work. State, capitalist and extractivist systems, however, tend to treat people poorly, leave them isolated and make them feel insignificant that can lead to this sort of honesty. And, violence, no matter what side you are on will have enduring and lasting effects on the mind and body.

In the book, you highlight the tensions between socialist modernists and degrowthers in climate debates. How do you envision these ideologies evolving in the face of growing environmental crises, and is there a way for climate activists to resolve these differences?

XD: I am deeply dissatisfied with the political conversations over socioecological catastrophe, or climate change, and, even more so with the popular academic debates. I guess this was the main motivation for This System is Killing Us, as I feel research critically assessing lower-carbon infrastructures falls short, clouded by the hope and public relations that seed the unrealistic claims governments and energy companies are selling people. I see this both in socialist modernists and degrowthers, even if the latter to a lesser degree.

Academics fail to adequately challenge modernist infrastructures, logistics and high-technology—or the “high-modernist ideology,” as James Scott called it. Academics, and most people for that matter, have been taught to think and see like states—they view the world from the perspective of power, policy makers, planners and engineers when these are the ideologies, perspectives and ways of life that are responsible for socioecological catastrophe and generalized drudgery—related to schooling, poverty and the likes—reinforced by the pleasures of capitalist consumerism. Oh man… Leslie Sklair’s words still haunt me: “In one sense, therefore, shopping is the most successful social movement, product advertising in its many forms the most successful message, consumerism the most successful ideology of all time.”

If we think about capitalism as social movement, we can see the true significance and horror of the enchanting features of malls, clubs, bars and Netflix among others. The psychosocial and enchanting features of market or modernist societies need to be challenged, which eco-modernists or its more socialist variety—socialist modernists—seem comfortable to accept. The wonder of infrastructural and technological domination is celebrated, and eco-modernists double-down on what is ultimately an ecocidal pathway reinforced by abstract data collection, modeling and the religious statist high-modernist ideology.

And, in terms of resolving this difference, I would suggest the importance of taking the best from modernist technologies and to move in radically convivial directions—having technologies emerge from communal, or bioregional, need and production. If socioecological catastrophe is going to be mitigated in any way—it’s too late to avoid—modernist societies need to degrow energy and material use. I do not want to reinforce the people, ideologies, technologies and pathways that led to this mess in the first place, or at least minimize it and speak against it. The level of material and energy-use is irresponsible and ecocidal—this is not controversial—and people do not need this to be happy or existentially fulfilled.

There needs to be a voluntary rejection of consumerism by every means—on the individual and public policy level—to make it “uncool” despite the century of public relations industries and The Merchants of Cool. There are great parts of modernist systems to be salvaged from trains, solar panels, wind turbines, micro-hydrological dams, decentralized grids, medical technologies and early 2000s level internet, but it has gotten out of control and these extractive systems are forced on people—the right to say ‘NO’ does not exist and direct action is the only participation available to poor and middle classes.

There needs to be greater respect for ancient traditions, stressing responsibility to our habitats over rights to exploit them; acknowledging herbalism over pharmaceutical industries; small-holder agricultural techniques over so-called “climate smart agriculture” and the supply-chain that entails. Knowledges and traditions of the land must be revisited, and, at the least, begrudgingly respected in the face of materialist ontologies—that only view the living world as “resources” to be mined—that pre-emptively locks the world on an ecocidal path.

I see grounds to make a healthy socialist modernism, but as it stands it—and the authors advocating it— seem strangely disconnected from habitats, land defense struggles and comfortably takes on the role of the planner and vision of the state; all the while ignoring and rejecting the success of convivial—small-scale—ways of organizing food, shelter, energy and so on. And sadly, in the end, it will probably take natural disasters to create a break in the modernist habits that eco-modernists pander to. I think we should break with this system voluntarily by creating these conditions by every means—individually and institutionally. And, finally, let’s be honest: universities and academic lifestyles are rigged in favor of modernism or some type of eco-modernism, making it challenging to reconnect with the land and difficult to reject industrial lifeways.

Given your extensive work with grassroots movements, what do you believe are the most effective strategies for resistance against the exploitation of land and resources? Can you share any examples of where this has been particularly successful?

XD: All strategies, but I think the key factor is the relationship between the different parts, for example civil society groups, various community spaces, anarchists, queer, Indigenous peoples and so on, and embracing those tactics and strategies in a decentralized way. This means embracing a diversity of tactics or better, following the Stop Cop City movement, an ecosystem of tactics that instead of “working against or in spite of each other, it’s several tactics working in conjunction and in relation to each other.” This means combining, implicitly, informally and in unrelated functions like an ecosystem: sabotage with community organizing; community organizing with dance parties and marches; and unpermitted marches with information nights and food events, like Food Not Bombs, and so on. The connections, people and tactics are only limited by the imaginations, and the ecosystem they inhabit that city planners, architects, engineers, non-profits, judges and police are constantly trying to circumscribe and control.

All parts and functions are important and builds a movement or an ecosystem to stop megaprojects and change the relationships in place. This movement must have teeth, while being open and, at the same time, protected; coming from a place of joy but being fierce. I speak generally here, because it really depends on people’s vision and what they want to create. I think most importantly is that people work indirectly and informally and communicate through action—whether through organizing events, graffiti, sabotage and parties. Struggle needs to be joyful even if scary, hard and with consequences, which—in my mind—begins with the individual and their friends and scales ‘out,’ as opposed to ‘up.’

The goal is to not become demoralized, it’s about developing the capacity to care, organize and act. Then, if successful, it’s about the relationship between the parts and developing an ecosystem of tactics that can survive the egos, in-fighting, surveillance and repression.

As it says on one of my tote bags, which I suspect was written by a wise BMXer: “Some very rich people need to feel the suffering they cause if things are going to change…. Have fun.”

You’ve chosen to donate all royalties from this book to the Stop Cop City Movement and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, could you elaborate a bit on the connections between their objectives and the broader themes of the book?

XD: This System is Killing Us is a 10-year review and reflection on all the struggles I have participated and researched with, and over the years I have done countless fundraisers for many of the sites referenced in the book. While compiling the book, I was so impressed and pleased with the development in the Defend Atlanta Forest movement that I wanted to contribute in someone way, especially with the repression—jailing and abusing people for flyering, the absurd RICO case trying to criminalize a movement and, of course, the general police terrorism directed at the movement and the communities around it.

The Stop Cop City movement successfully developed an ecosystem of tactics, and is going up against very power corporate and institutional actors. The movement has set out, in many ways, to demand the impossible and has done well to nearly accomplish it. This System is Killing Us, is about the idea of permanent ecological conflict, which means engaging in permanent conflict with oppressive institutions and people destroying habitats. The Stop Cop City movement is an example of engaging in permanent ecological conflict, and remains such a fundamentally important struggle for defending trees and people in the face of police militarization and the reproduction of scientific violence (e.g. counterinsurgency and torture). Considering this struggle, and it not being all the far from the School of the Americas (SOA), now called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, saving forests against military/police urban warfare centers remains a global problem and the least I could do is give my royalties to this struggle.