#rose baker

The earliest forms of this ideology spoke of “progress of the race”, and they meant it. So much of this is about the progress of the ability of the white race to conquer the world and build white comfort. It is a similar term to “development”. To destroy a thing and call it growth. To grow a thing destructive to all life and call it the bringing of further life. This is not viable. It is violence.

Domestication can happen in a variety of ways, some I think are pretty antithetical to liberation, others are pretty much directly in line with anarchist values.

I think that, in its best form, it is the way our or another species biology is changed to better live with the species around us without violence and for a combined and circular system, in which we meet a need for each other that we each could not have met for ourselves. I think this is something we especially see in plant species with long mutual relationships with humans, where humans adapt (socially) to effect an environment in a way that changes the growth habits and biology of that species so that it benefits the humans more, and also makes that species more abundant. In an ideal system, these changes have positive effects on other members of the ecosystem. I think fire dependent environments in North America hold many examples of this, like with Camus in the pacific north west. I also think we see this with fruiting species like the American persimmon or the hickory family (carya).

In the worst cases of domestication, I think it is our species utterly subjugating another species on a biological level to strip away not just their autonomy, but also their relationship with ecology, and their ability to participate in the environment. In these worst cases, we force these species to become engines of climate disaster, ultimately leading (potentially) to our and their destruction.

Here are some pictures from more recently. Most of the silly ones are with his friends, and I don’t want to post their faces without permission. But yeah. I love each of them so much and I am so lucky his friends have been sharing with me. If you knew my nephew and have any videos, pictures, or recordings of his please send them to me. Same with art. Thank you so much.

Very little of what people are suggested to read when they start out is about solutions.

If we are going to dream a new dream of a better tomorrow can we dream a little farther than a new version of the now? Do we need a state? Really, do we? Why not at least try to live without one? Why not at least try to fight for a better world?

I won’t say we Must fight for anarchy. I won’t even say we Ought to, or that we Should. I won’t say that anarchy is inevitable, or the inherent result of grand historical forces. We don’t need to shame ourselves into the future, or say it is written in stone. I think anarchy can stand a truer test than that. I think it’s worth fighting for simply because we can fight for it.

We always want the bad things that are happening to be the result of someone’s plan, because if they are, we can simply stop them by disrupting that plan. The more sinister and evil and masterminded we imagine the enemy, the easier it is to justify our failure to beat them, and the easier it is to daydream heroic solutions. But the reality is that most of the harms in the world are not planned for, they are simply the byproduct of people with money trying to get more money, and of power trying to sustain itself.

So, let me give a very simplified overview of what’s happening with ticks and mosquitoes.

My understanding is this:

There are a lot less predators for them. Insect populations overall are dropping, meaning there isn’t enough food for birds and small mammals to reproduce. These insect populations are falling due to habitat loss primarily, and loss of host plants (basically, there is a lot less land for them to live on. Even when they have land to live on, they might not have the right plants to live on, because there are so many invasive species and monocrops).

In general, the few insect species that have rising populations are those that feed on humans and livestock, which is mostly things like ticks and mosquitoes. Humans and livestock are the most abundant food source left around. A lot of the things that feed on us have had more opportunities to adapt to the ways we’ve changed the world, so they can survive things other insects can’t

Most predators can’t survive on ticks and mosquitoes alone, so there aren’t many other bugs and animals left to eat them.

Also, most of the things we do to kill mosquitoes and ticks kill their predators more than they kill them. This means that every time we spray insecticides, we end up with more mosquitoes and ticks, because we kill the bugs that eat them.

To stick to the summer camp idea - in a lot of those settings, there really wasn’t anyone in charge. There were people with different responsibilities (nurse, cafeteria workers, musicians). But if you tried to ask around in these spaces about who was in charge, I think you would get a lot of different answers and a lot of people saying “what do you mean?” At one camp environment, a few may have pointed to the camp director. His job was literally just to live there and take care of the grounds throughout the year. Most people didn’t know who he was. Other people might say the head councilor. But his job was just to decide when staff meetings were, to read the bedtime story, and distribute milk and cookies. And that position rotated regularly.

Some of those camp environments were more anarchistic than others. At one, there wasn’t even councilors. There were just layers of responsibilities based on experience level, and people rotated through equal but different responsibilities at different sessions. The person who was “in charge” was more of a master of ceremonies. They made announcements and read off the things everyone had agreed upon, and marked when a certain part of the day was over. Before the event they helped call everyone and see what they wanted to do. They weren’t anyone’s boss, but they were responsible for making sure people found the role they wanted and that the day went as folks had agreed.

Some of these environments had a more strict delineation of “who is this for” and “who is here to do labor”, with it being “for” people who were either younger, or their for the first time. Others, there were organizers and coordinators, but it was for everyone all together. These were youth centered spaces run primarily by youth. I rarely ever heard an adult command someone there. The vast majority of the time, they were there really as consultants, problem solvers, question answerers, and specialists. They were just participants with responsibilities.