*This Olio will be a conversation between the Out of The Woods collective & Lauren Hudson*

Climate disaster is here. Capitalism can’t fix it, not even with a Green New Deal. Our only hope against hope is disaster communism.

Wildfires, coastal flooding, and even COVID. The urgency of finding solutions to climate crisis has never been more apparent. As we experience climate disaster, how do we not succumb to doomsday scenarios, but instead recognize the current “seeds beneath the snow” and imagine the possibilities of climate utopia? What might climate utopia even look like? What forms of resistance will we need to take to create the “expansion of ways of being in the world”? How will current spatial relations (from borders to homeless encampments to prisons) need to be abolished and/or reimagined? 

In this Olio, we will explore these questions and more, with Out of the Woods collective, who explores ecological crisis from the perspective of political theory, and an Olio favorite, Lauren Hudson, a geographer and activist. We will begin the conversation around this article, by an Out of the Woods collective member, “The Only Realism: Utopia Within, Utopia Against, Utopia Beyond.” 

We hope you join us for this conversation, which will spark hope amidst the heaviness of the moment. 

A Collaboration with Common Notions Press and Out of the Woods Collective

HOPE AGAINST HOPE: WRITINGS ON ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

In Hope Against Hope, the Out of the Woods collective investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism and calls for the expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize within and against ecological crisis characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and—relatedly—more frequent and devastating disasters. While much of environmentalist and leftist discourse in this political moment remain oriented toward horizons that repeat and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions, Out of the Woods charts a revolutionary course adequate to our times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Out of the Woods is a transnational political research and theory collective, a loose grouping of decolonial, small-c communist, antiracist queer-feminist thinkers working together to think through the problem of ecological crisis.