A Forest Regenerates

Thoughts on how imperialism connects us all, the dire need to take a more active role in destroying imperialism & on lessons I learned on egalitarianism from an indigenous community in Namibia.

I love hiking. The woods were a place my dad and I both loved to be together. We often biked through the forest preserve system of Cook County, as our shaggy dog ran alongside us. Hiking in summer in Southern Indiana where my mother now lives remains a favorite way to spend summer. I love McCormick’s Creek State Park, with its fossilized corals, tall trees and its mile long limestone lined canyon. Two years ago, in March 2023, the park was hit by a tornado. The tornado’s path was the width of about 4 football fields in just about 30-40 seconds. In those 30 seconds of 150 miles per hour winds, thousands of old trees were uprooted, knocked down or damaged beyond recovery.

I hiked the path of the tornado the other day. One moment I was on the wooded path underneath the tree canopy and the next I was underneath blue skies absent of the ancient trees. I felt as if I had left the country. There were fallen trees that had stood 30 feet high. Trees split right in half and trees as wide as me chopped into logs and stacked on the edges of the trail. There were also signs of new growth in the remnants of old trees; mushrooms, flowers, spider webs, vines wrapped around the ancient bark stumps. Life was still abundant, still verdant. The forest’s power to rapidly transform felt unfamiliar. Western human society has felt incapable of change like in this mesic forest even though we too are of the land.

The tornado’s intensity was likely a result of human caused climate change, and who knows if it would have been as destructive without us. And yet, the forest moves forward and grows. It adapts so that everyone who calls it home can survive.

Transformation is possible in our human societies too when we understand not only the historic conditions that have shaped our lives but also how systems presently shape our lives. We are not living naturally right now. Systematized violence is a human invention. We need to build deeper connections with humans across borders to combat and take down imperialism. Revolutionary change toward peace and egalitarianism is possible in our lifetimes if we feel connected to all humans, even across borders. Thirty seconds can change the future of a forest and in just two years, devoid of our technology, it is already transformed.

Refusal to transform costs us everything, but in order to transform, we need to be clear about what our fight actually is and then deepen our commitment to that struggle.

The genocide in Gaza is not a singular occurrence; it is horrendous and exposes the barbarism of imperialism, but it is not exceptional in its terrors if we look at other historical and contemporary examples of imperialism. Vladimir Lenin wrote, “Imperialism is a striving for annexations.” It never stops. It cannot stop as long as capitalism exists.

I’ve been moved by the protests and activism for Gaza. I’ve often gone to these actions and heard talk of morality. The problem with this is that morality is not absolute or universal. It is shaped by material conditions, and is often used by the ruling class to impose a particular ideology. We need to be explicitly calling out imperialism and striving to understand how our lives are connected to the imperialist project. The other day a rally speaker said, “[The genocide] is not a foreign policy issue. It is a moral emergency.” This is a popular moralist take, but this take fails to account for why humans behave “immorally.” Moralists reminisce about a mythological American past in which the US government and other colonial powers were moral leaders in the world.

Genocide in Gaza is the result of American foreign policy. The West’s foreign policy is imperialist and Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign, which began decades ago, is not an aberration. If we don’t destroy imperialism as a system of power, there will always be “moral emergencies.” Right now, protests are focused on Gaza and rarely if ever mention Sudan or the Congo. Protestors never mention the violence Guarani-Kaiowa people face daily in Brazil. We are not only sending money and weapons to Israel, but we are actively bombing Somalia, which we have done continuously for decades. The fight is the same across borders; it’s a fight between imperialists and anti-imperialists.

Of course, many Americans are not even speaking out for Gaza because that would inconvenience them. The least impacted by Americanism, rich white Americans, and non-white rich people who have assimilated, are mostly doing what they always do; they’re distracting themselves. They’re setting career, hobby or “personal growth” goals that have nothing to do with destroying the imperial core, combatting climate change or feeding the hungry. I am wondering if most Americans, or westerners in general, understand how tethered our comforts are to the exploitation and suffering of others. I wonder if they know how much change we are capable of making.

It has felt surreal to see images of starving Sudanese and Gazan children juxtaposed with pictures of restaurant meals and beach vacations posted by Americans (and other Europeans/Global North) as if their ability to travel is not directly connected to other people’s starvation. I’ve listened to colleagues talk about their workout goals and desire to “tone up,” and I struggle to focus on their words because I’ve seen too many pictures of emaciated Palestinians who would do anything for food.

People either feel defeated or feign defeat by saying, “There’s no ethical consumption in capitalism, so there’s nothing we individually could do differently. All of our labor is exploited.” While I understand the intent of this popular colloquialism, and I even partially agree with its broader critique of corporations and governments, I think it’s a cop out. People say it to justify their [insert selfish/capitalist/wasteful behavior/consumption]. They want to continue watching TV ads and buying the things they see in the ads. They want to consume and participate in “wellness culture,” buy plastic pilates gadgets and disposable face masks. They want to meander through charming European streets. They don’t want to do so and think of the Atlantic slave trade that generated the wealth to build the charming streets. They don’t want to think about the ironies of “wellness” on a planet we make less inhabitable for our species in our pursuit of fossil fueled immortality.

But everything is political. Even our leisure. When I was into running in run clubs, the whole culture surrounding running in those clubs, I think unbeknownst to participants, was hyper-capitalist. Marathons are sponsored typically by banks. Run clubs are sponsored by brands and in major cities, photographers are often at group runs for “content creation.” Many runners run hours a week to prepare to travel to marathons, where they will try and beat their individual goals. Their Nikes are made out of plastic products in sweatshops with workers who cannot afford to buy the shoes they make or medical care from the cancer they get from the carcinogen exposure in their factories. Running is neutral, but this common way of engaging with it in America, is a political activity. It is all consuming too, which means people don’t have the time to participate in political organizations, which is the point of distraction. Racial Capitalism is an ideological system and when we participate in it in these ways, when we create propaganda for the system, we are acting politically. I am not saying that we shouldn’t have hobbies, but we are always moving politically. Rather than say, “there’s no ethical consumption in capitalism,” we should say, “all our consumption in capitalism is political.” We do have agency in what we choose to consume and how/why we choose to consume. Activism and political organizing are not hobbies reserved for the few, but they are the responsibility of us all in the belly of the American empire.

I know from experience that it’s easier to feel hopeless than it is to move with hope, but to remain neutral is to abandon the majority of the world’s people who suffer to sustain other people’s bourgeois lifestyles.

The great historian and teacher, Howard Zinn wrote in his memoir that he often told his Spelman students, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train. .... [Events] are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.”

The planet has not been able to sustain our endless quest for consumption and the unending desire for growth for quite some time, and simultaneous genocides, fueled by insatiable imperialist hunger for resources and power, should reveal that humans cannot survive imperialism. We either are propagandists for capitalism or for socialism. Our participation in the capitalist system is changing the lives of people around the world, mostly for the worse.

Western hegemony alters cultures around the world materially and ideologically. We spread the most vacuous and capitalist elements of our culture, which makes building global solidarity a challenging task. In 2011, I was studying in Catania, Sicily and stayed there long after because I had been working with refugees and migrants at an organization called Centro Astalli, on the edge of the sea. I taught Italian to new arrivals and manned the desk when people would come in for legal or medical support. Sometimes they’d just come by to shower or grab food, and we’d often chat about their journeys to Europe while they waited.

Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown in nearby Libya and boatloads of people fleeing–mainly West African men accused by Libyans (mostly racially fueled) of being Gaddafi’s mercenaries–began arriving on the shores of Sicily. I interviewed them, and many others who fled the “Arab Spring,” Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and other countries for what would eventually become a 110 page thesis called, “No Destination in Sight: A Political Anthropology of Migrants and Asylum Seekers in Sicily.”

For this work, I spent time reading Danish anthropologist Hans Lucht's writing on the theory of “existential reciprocity.” Lucht argued that people migrate and make deadly journeys to reach the West often because of dominant western hegemony, or what he called existential reciprocity, rather than simply because the material conditions of their lives are unbearable. Of course economic exploitation, post-colonial conflict and environmental degradation caused by the West, are the largest factors for migration.

Still, migrants in Lucht’s ethnography and in my research, sometimes left home in search of abstract promises and ideas rather than just to fulfill their basic needs. Lucht wrote about the ways in which migration can be, “a means of reconnecting with one’s aspirations.” What I didn’t understand explicitly then in 2011 but do now, those aspirations are capitalist. They’re spread across the globe through Hollywood, Top 40 hip hop, Coca Cola advertisements and the Real Housewives. This propaganda makes everyone feel connected to us, without any reciprocity on our end. Inundated with constant images of shiny plastic Americanness, some people choose to migrate to get what they feel is owed to them. Instead, after enduring the ultimate suffering and hardships on migratory journeys and upon reaching the “West,” they become what Lucht called a “subproletariat.” The western world is not one of opportunity but one of exploitation.

It makes sense why people would seek what we have because at home, they suffer, starve and die so that the bourgeoisie in the west can have convenience and luxury. Many Americans would likely describe what I’m calling luxury as basic comforts. This is part of the psychological damage capitalism has done to us all. I recently read a piece on here in which a writer claimed that Amazon is a necessity for poor and disabled people. This is untrue. There is a whole world of people living without Amazon Prime.

After Sicily, about eight years later, I found myself in Tsumkwe, Namibia in 2019, learning about indigenous knowledge and pedagogy from the nomadic Ju’hoansi, a Khoisan people. The experience was one of my most meaningful, and I could write ad nauseam about what I’ve learned from this Khoisan community. When I first went to Tsumkwe, my Ju’hoansi host, Ui Kunta, had one request. He requested that I bring him a tin of Illy coffee. A traveler had given him the espresso years ago, and he had thought of it ever since. I of course did. In exchange, he lent me a tent and changed my entire worldview.

Ju’hoansi societal choices and structures feel aspirational to me. Hunting is collaborative, as is all decision making. Schooling is centered around learning traditional uses for plants. In Ju’hoansi culture if anyone is too bombastic, knocking them down through mockery is culturally encouraged. Marx would’ve referred to their society as "primitive communism.” This indigenous group has practiced this egalitarianism through collaborative decision making and relative peace for centuries. The Ju’hoansi are one of the oldest continuous human cultures on our planet, and they are closely related to our oldest human ancestors. They’re not infallible, but we have much to learn from them.

Unfortunately, the Ju’hoansi have not been completely isolated from western exposure, and they face external pressure to assimilate in a capitalist world. As I was leaving, my travel companion, a Tswana man who comes from a Bantu pastoralist tradition and urban home said he would raise money to get a TV for their local community center/gas station/shebeen. I hope the TV never reaches Tsumkwe. I think it would take a lifetime for one Ju’hoansi person to emit as much carbon as an average American does in a week through our consumption, travel and our meat heavy diet. And yet, it is western consumption that has threatened the Ju’hoansi’s native lands in Namibia with irreversible drought. It is global imperialism, which took the form of apartheid in South Africa, that threatened their hunter-gatherer way of life and increased their dependence on the “state.” The South African apartheid government made the Nyae Nyae area, Ju’hoansi hunting grounds and homeland, a game reserve. Once their land became a game reserve, the Ju’hoansi could no longer hunt on the land and had to rely on government food handouts.

Cecil Rhodes, the megalomaniac British imperialist who is the forefather of apartheid, understood that imperialism was essential in preventing domestic class warfare. One night he walked through a working class area of London and stumbled into a meeting of the unemployed who cried out for bread. The scene left an impression and he said, “I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. … We colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population. … The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”

Imperialism and racial capitalism are not ideas conjured up in bubbling cauldrons in ominous towers. They are political systems. There is no conspiracy theory, as these men have been vocal about their depravity and their intentions.

Many of us are struggling here in the Empire. We are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay for healthcare and have crippling debt. Those of us struggling, have more in common with our brothers and sisters in Gaza, Sudan and throughout the Global South, than we do with the bourgeoisie among us. We need to always think about the intrinsic ways we are connected to one another, even when those connections are exploitative. “It’s a bread and butter question.”

A lot of Americans though are not struggling even if they imagine themselves to be. One estimate says that about 18% of US households have a net worth of $1 million or more, which translates to about 23 million people. People who make six figures, even in expensive cities like NYC, are making a lot of money whether they think they are or not. They always want more. Many of them own homes that in many parts of the world, either wouldn’t exist or would house multiple families. They spend tons of money on leisure. They accumulate lots of stuff they don’t need. I don’t think it matters if we think they’re behaving morally or not. They’re behaving in response to the material conditions of their lives and in response to dominant hegemonic ideology.

Imagine if these Americans asked questions like, “Who grew the coffee beans I brewed for my morning cup? How did tea become a part of anglo-cultures and at what cost? What was the environmental and human toll for mining the oil that became fuel for my car? Where do all my clothes go once I throw them away or donate them?” They would not only acknowledge their connection to the suffering of others, but in reflecting on their role in imperialism, they might then ask, “Am I ensuring that this system continues sustaining my excessive lifestyle until the last bit of fresh water is depleted or am I working to destroy and replace the system?”

I’ve been thinking of the Black working class coalition in Harlem who mobilized in support of Ethiopia in 1935 after Italy’s invasion of the East African country. The western world left the Ethiopian people to fend for themselves. Black Harlem residents, many members of the Communist Party (CPUSA), took to the streets, boycotted Italian goods and traveled around the US to try and get people to fight overseas with Ethiopia. This mission largely failed, although two Black aviators, Hubert Julian and John C. Robinson, did make it to Ethiopia. Robinson even trained Ethiopian pilots and helped build up the Ethiopian air force.

I often think of Che Guevara’s 1965 mission to the Congo with his cadre of Afro-Cuban fighters. They joined the revolutionary “Simbas,” who were working to revive assassinated Patrice Lumumba’s Leftist movement. Che wrote in his diary recounting the failed mission and his learnings, “For my view, any importance the story might have, lies in the fact that it allows the experiences to be extracted for the use of other revolutionary movements.”

We can learn from these examples of revolutionary fervor and from people who saw their struggle connected to humans outside their nation’s borders and outside of their lifetimes. We have been left with tools imperfect as they may be. We need to resist the urge to become callous, as we reap the benefits of the American Empire.

A post-capitalist society will not be a laborless Eden for art making and abundance because that elitist fantasy would require someone else to fly our planes, dispose of our trash and grow our food. Our freedom dreams should be of collective labor, mutual care and leisure that isn’t at the expense of others, just like I experienced among the Ju’hoansi.

Our communities are capable of adapting and changing like tornado stricken forests. We are capable of destroying imperialism and capitalism even if the task feels amorphous. We owe it to ourselves and to all life on this planet. I felt uneasy toward the end of my hike that day in McCormick’s Creek. The landscape was unfamiliar, albeit beautiful. The change initially left me feeling anxious, but that feeling soon left my body. There was so much life around me, and we all had everything we needed from the forest; No more and no less.

Back in 2019 in Tsumkwe, Namibia on an enormous Baobab tree “Holboom” that had lived ~1,700 years.

My Ju’hoansi guide and friend, Ui (Steve) Kunta, on the same enormous tree, only at a different part of the trunk.