It’s so telling that people scoff when you tell them “War is bad because it amounts to ecocide regardless of who wins and who loses”. As if our global home being directly mutilated and poisoned is a non issue. Because we’re clever, aren’t we? We’ll just rebuild what is lost. As if the intricate biological mechanisms that provide us with oxygen can be bought off Amazon with overnight shipping. As if we have the right to ignore the permanent nature of destruction. Cause we’re all so clever, right?
I truly believe that we can measure anyone’s intuition and intelligence purely by looking at their thoughts about ecocide. (And by ecocide I mean the effects that laissez faire neoliberal late stage capitalism has had on our planet. Climate change. I’m talking about imperialism, colonialism, the exploitation of the global south. The war machine, and the uber-powerful corporations that operate like parasites upon the earth.) Because, fundamentally, caring about the planet requires caring about other people… caring about people you will never meet, never know, and never relate to. Caring about the planet defacto requires you to excise yourself from the current day capitalist way of viewing the world, it requires you to completely change how you weigh importance.
If you’re a person who can meaningfully create change, whether because youre a billionaire or part of the political apparatus of a country or whathaveyou, it is your DUTY, your OBLIGATION, to CARE about the planet, and to spend every second of your life making it REALLY OBVIOUS that you CARE by DOING THINGS THAT STEER US TOWARDS SALVATION.
Failing to care about the planet is a mark of one’s inability to think. It is a sign of uncreativity, subservience, and fascist supremacy. A person with the ability to enact change who does not care about the planet, for whatever reason they may have, is a person that is worth less than the smallest microorganism. And they should be relentlessly made precisely aware of the destruction and death toll that their inaction contributes to.
I saw this meme and it reeks highly of fucking cherrypicked data from a really good source. I really like the authors, I really do but there is a lot of data errors I have gathered; they don’t understand huge problems such as the degradation of soil quality worldwide from overuse of certain fertilisers, degradation due to climate change and desertification, we also have the risk of dying because pollinators die out. There’s a lot of things fucked up with the world at the moment I feel I could write a 10000 word essay on the subject. I do agree with what it says but we have a lot of problems to achieve it to shortening supply lines to urban farming, stop relying off meat, moving to rights to repair. The entire meme feels an oversimplification of the paper as well. It talks about that the west needs to stop it’s consumption based habits which the meme doesn’t represent clearly. Once again I am an eco socialist wanting to critique stuff fairly
“Capital accumulation in advanced economies relies on massive inputs of cheap labour and nature from the global south. To maintain this arrangement, capital uses every tool at its disposal – debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasion to keep southern economies subordinate.”
Lebanon has accused Israel of spraying a herbicide linked to cancer on farmland in the south of the country as a “health crime” that would threaten food security and farmers’ livelihoods.
The country’s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned what he called “an environmental and health crime” and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and he vowed to take “all necessary legal and diplomatic measures to confront this aggression”.
Israel’s government did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment, but the alleged spraying bolsters accusations that its military is carrying out a campaign of ecocide with the aim of making southern Lebanon uninhabitable, similar to its activities in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
The latest incident is alleged to have taken place on Sunday morning. UN peacekeepers have said they were warned by the Israeli military to remain under cover while it carried out an aerial operation to drop what they said was a non-toxic chemical substance. Videos captured light aircraft spraying extensively over agricultural areas.
Lebanese authorities said that laboratory analysis identified that the spray contained glyphosate, a potent herbicide that was in 2015 classified by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.
One of the world’s most widely used herbicides, glyphosate is also sprayed on many crops just before harvest to dry them out. But studies have found glyphosate-based herbicides can interfere with various organs and biochemical pathways in mammals.
Blank & Pitiless– Confronting the inhuman in a time of genocide & ecocide– author Paul Hoggett
Climate psychologist and author Paul Hoggett explores the psychological mechanisms behind society’s paralysis in the face of climate breakdown and genocide. Drawing on his book “Paradise Lost” and his article “Confronting the Inhuman,” Hoggett examines two forms of inhumanity: the “blank and pitiless” indifference of corporate executives and bureaucrats (the “desk killers”), and the “laughing ecstatic destruction” driven by a perverse death wish.
Hoggett reveals how psychological “disavowal” and “splitting” allow individuals and societies to separate knowledge from feeling and action from belief, enabling complicity in devastating outcomes. He draws stark parallels between Holocaust bureaucrats and today’s fossil fuel executives who have known about climate destruction for five decades yet continue regardless.
The people of Ukraine won’t soon forget the summer of 2025, a period that saw a significant increase in Russian attacks on the country, including the largest number of drones sent to kill and terrorize Ukrainians.
This summer farmers witnessed another invasion of their lands — a locust outbreak that devastated crops across southern and eastern Ukraine.
Videos shared with The Revelator show swarms of locusts — each as wide as a human hand — ravaging fields of sunflowers and corn in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kherson, and Odesa regions, adding to the dangerous effects of war on these ecosystems.
It’s not a coincidence that the regions most affected by the outbreak are among those experiencing some of the worst fighting.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered an environmental crisis, experts say, that is manifesting in the rise of invasive species.
“The fields with proper agrotechnical tillage are not conducive to laying eggs for the locusts,” says Andriy Fedorenko, a senior researcher at the Institute of Grain Crops of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences in Ukraine, who spent several weeks this summer researching the breeding patterns of locusts in the affected regions. “But abandoned agricultural lands and dried-up ponds are ideal.”
He says the locusts have gained a foothold in vast farmlands made unusable by the Russian invasion, as well as the area affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
“A single locust consumes vegetation equivalent to 1–1.5 times its weight every day,” Viter wrote. Crop fields “flooded and abandoned because of the war as well as on the bed of the former Kakhovka Reservoir” offered just that.
Locusts also need favorable climate conditions — very high temperatures — to breed. Climate change may have furthered their recent reproductive success.
In a statement shared with The Revelator, the Ukrainian government also provided a similar assessment, terming the phenomenon “Russian ecocide” — the destruction of the environment resulting from Russia’s invasion.
Since the Russian invasion, however, Ukraine’s agricultural sector has suffered direct losses of more than $80 billion in infrastructure and production, according to studies.
Evidence also suggests that not only has Russia deliberately targeted agricultural equipment, logistics and storage facilities, they’ve also stolen Ukrainian agricultural products.
On top of that, landmines now contaminate more than 54,000 square miles of Ukraine — 20% of the country and one of the highest concentrations of the lethal devices in the world, according to the UN.
Israel uses conservation designations (national parks, forests, and nature reserves) to (1) justify land grabs; (2) prevent the return of Palestinian refugees; (3) dehistoricize, Judaize, and Europeanize Palestine, erasing Palestinian identity and suppressing resistance to Israeli oppression; and (4) greenwash its apartheid image.
[…]
Settler-colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts people’s relationships with their environment by “strategically undermining the collective continuance of Indigenous communities on the land”. Seen in this way, settler-colonialism is ecological supremacy. In this respect, Shourideh Molavi similarly argues that colonial violence is “foremost an ecological violence”, an attempt to overwrite one ecosystem with another.
“Nature devours progress and surpasses it” - Surrealism and Nature
We surrealists do not expect anything from the UN Summit on Climate Change (COP 30, November 2025) at Belem, in the Amazonian region of Brazil. Our hopes rely on the resistance against capitalist ecological destruction and catastrophic climate change by the forces of wild nature itself, and by the communities that dare to fight the monstrous power of modern Western civilization. The Brazilian indigenous and peasant movements, as well as other critical forces, will be present in Belem do Para, raising the banner of insubmission.
Max Ernst’s wonderful painting, Plane-gobbling garden (Jardin gobe-avions) from 1935, is a true ecological surrealist manifesto ahead of its time. Fascinated by the wild forest, Ernst went on to paint a large number of them during the 1930s and 1940s, populated by spirits and pagan deities. But in Plane-gobbling garden nature does not merely manifest its luxuriant and enigmatic power; it “savagely” devours the machines of civilization. There are three versions: in all three, we see lush, multicolored vegetation greedily attacking scattered pieces of pale metal, which, in one of the versions, take the explicit form of airplane parts. One cannot help but be impressed by the artist’s premonition: the airplane was to reveal, over the following years, from Guernica (1937) to the present day, its formidable power as a weapon of mass destruction. Admittedly, it is also a means of transportation. But in the 21st century, environmentalists are quick to point out its harmful role: reserved for a privileged minority, it is a major emitter of greenhouse gases , thus contributing to climate change. Hence the ecological battles against the construction of new airports, such as at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where the Zadists’ Garden has managed to swallow up all the planes destined for the site…
In 1937 Benjamin Péret published an astonishing article in Minotaure (no. 10) entitled “Nature devours progress and surpasses it”, perhaps inspired by an episode he experienced during his stay in Brazil in the early 1930s. Here is an extract from this text, which describes the - erotic! - victorious struggle of the virgin forest against the machine that symbolizes the industrial progress promoted by capital, the locomotive.
“The forest retreated before the axe and the dynamite, but between two train passages, it lunged onto the track, making provocative gestures at the train driver (…). The machine will stop for an embrace that it will want to be fleeting, but which will be prolonged to infinity, according to the perpetually renewed desire of the seductress. (…) From then on, the slow absorption begins: connecting rod by connecting rod, lever by lever, the locomotive enters the bed of the forest, and, from pleasure to pleasure, bathes, trembles, groans like a lioness in heat. It smokes orchids, its boiler shelters the frolics of crocodiles hatched the day before, while in the whistle live legions of hummingbirds that give it a chimerical and temporary life, because soon the flame of the forest, after having licked its prey at length, will swallow it like an oyster.”
In the battle between the forest and the machine, Max Ernst and Benjamin Péret clearly chose their side…
In L'Amour Fou, Breton pays tribute to “the love of nature and of primitive man that permeates Rousseau’s work”. This dual love, inherited from revolutionary Rousseauist romanticism, will characterize the surrealist spirit throughout its history, well beyond France or Europe: one need only think of the poetry of Aimé Césaire, the essays of Suzanne Césaire, or the painting of Wifredo Lam, and Ody Saban. Similar ideas were developed by Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont in his brilliant essay on “Marx and the Iroquois” (Arsenal, n° 4, 1989). This Surrealist commitment takes on a new relevance today, when indigenous communities find themselves on the front line in the fight against the destruction of nature by “Civilization”. Leonora Carrington, in “What is a Woman, 1970” wrote, “If women remain passive, I think there is very little hope for life on this Earth.” Fortunately, women are very active in all ecological struggles, sometimes at the sacrifice of their lives, as Berta Caceres, the Honduran indigenous woman killed by military thugs in 2016.
In contrast to the capitalist ecocidal exploitation of nature, one finds among the “savage” communities - a term charged with defiance that the Surrealists prefer to “primitive” - of all the continents a perception of nature as an “enchanted forest”. This relationship of respect for the sacred world of natural spirits, and of harmony with nature, is one of the reasons why the Surrealists, from the very beginning of the movement in the 1920s, showed their sympathy, admiration and support for the “savages” in their fight against the murderous oppression of colonialism and its claim to impose, by iron and fire, “civilization” and “progress” on the colonized.
In a wonderful 1963 text entitled “Main première”, Breton pays tribute to the Australian aborigines and their “land of dreams” (Alcheringa), whose “raw art”, described in the works of Karel Kupka, “outlines a certain reconciliation of man with nature and with himself”.
Is this not the ultimate surrealist utopia, the reconciliation of humans with nature? A utopia more relevant than ever, at a time when progress is waging a relentless war to ransack and crush, with its machines, with “the axe and the dynamite” (Péret), the enchanted garden that surrounds us.
In his theses On the Concept of History – a document criticized by Jürgen Habermas, that unconditional apologist of “Modernity”, because it drew inspiration “from the awareness of time as conceived by the Surrealists, which approaches anarchism” - the Marxist Walter Benjamin discreetly distanced himself from Marx’s progressist illusions: “Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. Perhaps things are different. It may be that revolutions are the act by which humanity, traveling on the train, pulls the emergency brakes.”
We surrealists believe that Benjamin’s image is very relevant today. We are all passengers on a train, led by a suicide locomotive called “Modern Industrial Capitalist Civilization”, which is running faster and faster towards an abyss: ecological disaster. It must be stopped as a matter of urgency, and nature must be allowed to reassert itself, by quietly devouring the locomotives of the so-called “progress”.
Silvia Guiard (Argentina), Ameli Jannarelli, Alex Januário, Elvio Fernandes, Guilherme Ziggy, Diogo Cardoso, Leonardo Chagas, Rodrigo Qohen, Marcela Mendes Mejias, Otavio Moraes, Leonardo Silvério, Renato Souza, Liz Under, Pedro Spigolon, Nitiren Queiroz, Flávia Falleiros, Maria Regina Margini Marques. (Brazil) Beatriz Hausner, Sheila Nopper, Ron Sakolsky, Susana Wald (Canada), Yoan Armand Gil, Patrick Lepetit, Mylene Lang, Victor Latenoy, Michael Löwy, Muriel Martin, Isidro Martins, Ody Saban (France), Giovanni di Benedetto, Luca Matano, Gennaro Pollaro (Italy) Miguel de Carvalho (Portugal), Vicente Gutierrez Escudero, Jesús García Rodríguez (Spain), Jay Blackwood, Stuart Inman, John Richardson, John Welson (United Kingdom), Gale Ahrens, Laura Corsiglia, Beth Garon, Jon Graham, Robert Green , Stelli Kerk, Gina Litherland, Paul McRandle, Allan Poobus, David Roediger, Hal Rammel, Penelope Rosemont, Mark C. Rosenzweig, Tamara Smith, Abigail Susik, Debra Taub, Joel Williams, Craig Wilson (United States).
Well, since my blog has been gaining a lot of traction lately from the biphobes, yt butchfemmes, and lesbian exclusionist, I might as well use this opportunity to bring awareness on what is currently happening in West Papua.
Do note that there are more of this history that you can search online and do your own research. Many of these sources are banned in Indonesia, and so I cannot access them.
Before you read below, I do implore you to read this article.
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History of racism
I will cite the article from Al-Jazeera here. But a quick history lesson, after Indonesia’s independence in 1945, West Papua and part of Maluku demand independence, as we were not—never been part of Indonesia. West Papua became part of Indonesia after the Act of Free Choice in 1969, which was heavily criticized, due to the government cherry-picking less than 1% of papuan to “vote” whether or not they want to become part of Indonesia. This was under military surveillance.
As papuans, our distinction from the rest of Western Indonesia has not only been caused by our culture and physical features, but also racial discrimination and exploitation.
Indonesia invaded West Papua in 1962; the Dutch were pressured by the United States into negotiating and signing the New York Agreement a year later. This agreement provided for a plebiscite, supervised by the United Nations, that would let Papuans decide if they wanted to join Indonesia. But, as Drooglever describes in a chapter entitled ‘Under Jakarta’s Thumb’, the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority was continually manipulated, pressured and fooled. Lambertus Nicodemus Palar, then the Indonesian representative to the United Nations, openly admitted that Subandrio, the Indonesian foreign minister, didn’t want a plebiscite. Instead, the Indonesian authorities organised a referendum known as the Act of Free Choice, in which about 1,000 government-selected delegates voted for a merger with Indonesia. Most Papuans say they were denied their right to choose and continue to demand a separate nation. Although the independence movement is largely peaceful, there are some long-standing armed groups. Today, West Papua remains Indonesia’s most underdeveloped and poverty-stricken province and human rights abuses are rife.
“Until today, there is a stigma against Papuans who have curly hair and black skin. They have a mindset that we are dangerous. They do this military approach to repress our psychology so we don’t think about being free from Indonesia. These 60 years of racism come from people who have important positions in government,” Ambrosius, a Papuan human rights defender and former head of the Association of Papuan Central Highlands Students in Indonesia, remarked.
In 2022, the former president also stated as follows:
Megawati then went on to say that she was glad that black West Papuans were starting to intermarry with migrants — like coffee with milk (kopi susu) — therefore becoming more Indonesian.
The reason why I’m citing many articles as much as possible is because I’m trying to source as many of the limited coverage we have. Then you can conduct your own research. This has been going on for six decades and it has to stop now.
What is happening right now?
The exploitation of West Papua’s resources. Recently, there have been further ongoing attacks by the Indonesian military upon villages in highland regions. This time the attacks took place in Puncak Regency in the central highlands, and it involved airstrikes on villages.
Do note that even many of these sources are calling it a “conflict”. This article explains what it actually is: an ecocide and systemic racism.
This documentary on West Papua might help to gain understanding on what is happening:
“Modern life is waging a war against ecosystems inside us and surrounding us,… When people think about the nature crisis they probably think about vanishing rainforests or species going extinct, but there is another, hidden extinction happening at a microscopic level.”
[Polly Higgins] defined it as “the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished”. (via What is ecocide and could it become a crime under international law? | The Guardian)
