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Like it or not climate change is probably now the context in which ecological struggles are fought, not a subject against which one can struggle.

— Desert by Anonymous

Peoples who have found refuge in wild areas — and wish to defend them — can use and construct ethnicity and aboriginality myths to both carve out protective land rights, mobilise romantic support from outside and present a self-protective image whether of ‘peaceful sages’ or ‘violent savages’ depending on utility.

— Desert by Anonymous

[T]he genocidal nature of civilisation ensures that the resistance of minority indigenous communities from the mountains of Orissa to the forests of the Amazon is often an ecosystem’s best defence. Solidarity and joint struggle with such peoples is often the most successful strategy for wilderness defence and one that usually involves few compromises and contradictions for biocentric libertarians.

— Desert by Anonymous

The problems vastly outnumber those of us wishing to engage them from our perspective and, thus, we should be able to concentrate on only those battles which most reflect our ethics. We can leave the majority of those messier situations, which abound in conservation, to when the struggles that don’t raise significant contradictions for us are ‘dealt with’. This is likely to be never.

— Desert by Anonymous

Effectively, in my bioregion it is a ridiculous choice between wild (i.e. self-willed) land and biodiversity. From a radical environmental perspective (not to mention one with an eye to island biogeography) the solution would be rolling back human management of habitat over a large enough area that the ecosystems could function effectively. Realistically it now looks more probable that much of the world’s wildernesses will increasingly resemble my bioregion than my bioregion resemble the world’s wildernesses.

— Desert by Anonymous

What I will say, is that many slum inhabitants could be seen and see themselves as in transition. Transition from country to urban. From refugee to worker. From dispossessed to propertied. From slum dweller to somewhere else. This narrative is as old as capitalism. Peasants/agricultural workers are dispossessed and end up in city slums. In the West, horrors upon horrors followed, eventually manufacturing the industrial worker, but not before the near century of revolutions born in France in 1848 and dying in Spain in 1938. These insurrections were largely fought by transitional classes somewhat similar to those today, who in the process of being proletarianised lived in, “neither industrial nor village society but in the tense, almost electrifying force field of both.”

— Desert by Anonymous

In Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century North America, Individualist Anarchism (especially that influenced by Henry David Thoreau) was framed directly by the idea and existence of frontiers and thus the real ability to build some level of autonomy and self-sufficiency — admittedly on stolen land! In crowded Europe at the same time there was less ‘outside’ available, and so despite strong currents with an ecological and anti-civilisation perspective, many individualist anarchists turned to bank robbing, insurrection, assassination and art. We can expect the opening up of new lands within Europe and North America to have a significant impact on both those who wish to desert civilisation as well as those who wish to expand it. There will be many possibilities for lives of liberty on the expanding frontiers, though drop-outs and renegades may themselves lay the foundations for a wider ‘gentrification’ of the wilderness.

— Desert by Anonymous