Red Natural History urges those of us who take the side of the common to see ourselves as part of the storm that arrives from the past, not to produce chaos, but to rupture the status quo, draw capitalism’s structural violence and injustices into the open, and orient our struggles for a livable and egalitarian future for all.
read more...What would it mean to replace the dominant tradition of natural history, which emerged from colonialism and enforces a capitalist relation to the world, and what might such a replacement open up for the left?
read more...We have been arguing that our collective counterpower grows and develops in a dynamic relation to the counterpower we inherit from our ancestors, from revolutionaries whose struggles have informed our own. By recognizing that our struggles fall within a long tradition of resistance, and iterating on the means of communication that we inherit, we build power and make the future possible.
read more...Cultural forms and practices produce social bonds, allowing people to distinguish their comrades from their enemies. They are also the means by which collectives express counterpower. As cultural producers, we work on the terrain of culture (again, in the anthropological sense) to build, expand, and sharpen the language in common that holds us together as a “we.”
read more...While museums monumentalize and objectify the historical violence of capitalism and settler colonialism, they are not only keepers of the dead. They are haunted by a specter—the specter of primitive communism, a collective mode of life that neither capitalism nor settler colonialism could fully manage, contain, or eradicate.
read more...After Hurricane Katrina, the media called Black Americans forced out of their homes by nature, disaster capitalism, and an anti-Black federal government “refugees.” But this is the reality of many Black people in the US—we are constant outsiders, moving through spaces where we never really belong. The Great Migration never ended for so many of us. Because of gentrification and displacement, we are constantly moving to find decent lives for our families and the safety and the stability that comes with it.
read more...A lot of times the reference to land is a reference to a reservation. And a lot of times that’s not the homeland, that’s not the ancestral homeland of most Native people. Some people ended up being able to stay where they were. But for the most part, you’re referencing a different piece of land that you were removed to. And that’s a whole different kind of belonging. But in the same way that people now own the reservation land as their own and have that relationship to it, that’s the same approach I was trying to have to the city.
read more...The language in common is not merely the constellation of symbols, hashtags, and performative tactics mobilized in the context of social movements. It is the mode of communication of a revolutionary collective coming into being. The repetition of images, rituals, and signs builds and expresses collective power as it inscribes a gap through which noncapitalist modes of belonging appear. In this process, language becomes a material force as it voices an alternate imagination of the world.Â
read more...On the edge of many precipices, we are living in prophetic times, where the gifts of the ancestors are revealing possibilities for pathways forward. But the path forward can only be traversed after reckoning with the past. What can we do to transform individual and planetary consciousness to live respectfully with the land, its creatures and with one another?
read more...No one perspective holds a monopoly on truth, of course. I suspect, however, that absent the full inclusion of the most marginalized, whose perspectives might bring us closer to a more rounded and developed understanding of our present, we may once again live out Karl Marx’s warning.
read more...For Indigenous peoples, our pasts, presents, and futures involve living and being in reciprocal, consensual, and sustainable relations with the natural world, which includes human relationships to each other as well as with lands, waters, landscapes, atmospheres, and plant and animal nations. In this testimony, we imagine a world that fosters stronger human relationships with each other and with the land—the world that we need.
read more...Many of our biggest challenges in the United States today—from climate change to high rates of violence—have roots in laws that eradicated tribal sovereignty, commodified Indigenous lands, and dehumanized Indigenous peoples. As Americans, we will never live respectfully with the land and one another until or unless we restore the inherent sovereignty of tribal nations that the United States has, over centuries, worked so hard to destroy.Â
read more...Living respectfully with the land comes with knowing it. Knowing it as a place with a human and a nonhuman history and how those two are intertwined, as a place whose rocks, soil, plants, wildlife from the least spider to the largest raptor, seasons and weather, hydrology and maybe agriculture all have something to tell us, all work together to make it what it is, and make it something worth knowing.
read more...Decarbonization is not enough. We need to transition to less material-intensive forms of abundance, redefining the latter as the collective enjoyment of public amenities—from beaches to theaters—and the free time to cultivate the more-than-material relationships that bring us happiness.
read more...Although museums have historically served to legitimate racist colonial classifications of the world and its peoples, today they are far from monolithic, and are being placed under increasing pressure by current events and by climate justice activists, who push them to serve the public interest rather than the ecocidal perspectives and policies of the oligarchs who all too often populate their boards.
read more...In the face of climate emergency, many in the museum sector are asking what it means to be relevant to these communities today. Too often, however, the concepts of relevance, inclusivity, diversity, and participation lead museums to reinforce their claims to authoritative neutrality, diverting those of us working in museums from the deeper existential question that we ought to be asking: What is the role and responsibility of the museum in a time of climate crisis? The problem is not whether or not our institutions are relevant, but for whom and to what end.
read more...To be relevant in this time of environmental crisis, museums must move beyond the ambition to just be sustainable and carbon-neutral. We must also address and support the needs of frontline and fence-line communities that are struggling for a more just and sustainable world for all.
read more...How can you leverage a critique of institutions to force a division into the open, and then use that rupture to force a decision? With the Koch campaign, a gesture of institutional critique became the basis for a campaign. We see it as a symbolic gesture, something to point toward as we continue to pressure institutions to align themselves with a more radical self-understanding.Â
read more...Ideologically fractured, divided, and contested, government agencies in the age of Trump present themselves not just as sites of struggle but as opportunities for real left advances — especially against a president with little knowledge about the workings of the federal bureaucracy. And the National Park Service — an unlikely agent of rebellion considering its history — has emerged as one of the most prominent figures.
read more...Institutional liberation isn’t about making institutions better, more inclusive, more participatory. It’s about establishing politicized base camps from which ever more coordinated, elaborate, and effective campaigns against the capitalist state in all its racist, exploitative, extractivist, and colonizing dimensions can be carried out.
read more...The NHM operates in one respect as an activist organization, a pop-up museum and alternative institution with a mailing list, social media presence, and menu of cultural offerings. Yet it is also the generic museum that is present in every museum of natural history. It exists to force the already present split toward the common that every particular museum of natural history operating in a capitalist setting is forced to occlude.
read more...Politics in the Anthropocene is a matter of perspective: we can’t look at climate change directly. Relying on multiple disparate measurements, we look for patterns and estimate probabilities. We see in parts: the melting ice caps, glaciers, and permafrost; the advancing deserts and diminishing coral reefs; the disappearing coastlines and the migrating species.
read more...If there is to be a future for museums, we need to do away with the false promise of authoritative neutrality. We need our museums to function as both educators and yes, as advocates for a sustainable and equitable future. Only then can we equip visitors with the stories and tools they need to truly understand the rapidly changing world, and to shape it for the common good for generations to come.
read more...In an essay published in Natural History in 1941, anthropologist Margaret Mead identified museums as one of the few trusted sites remaining in a culture awash in advertising and cynicism. For Mead, the distance between the museum and propaganda made it a valuable ally in the service of American democracy against fascism. The museum could train its visitors to see just the way the United States wanted them to see. Â Â
read more...As we dug into the project, we saw the opportunity to move beyond critique to build counter-power—that is, to build an institution with the capacity to impact other institutions. So with the NHM we are borrowing from the aesthetics, pedagogical models and presentation forms of natural history museums in order to support a perspective that regards nature as a commons.
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