an ecological reading of the prodigal son

local power grids, local supply chains, and ecological humility

photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

This week I finished Black Earth Wisdom, in which Leah Penniman gathers ecological insight through interviews with Black earth stewards across a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. There were two moments in the book that stood out to me as having overtly anarchist sentiments:

I believe we need to plan our societies around watersheds, rather than political boundaries. Orienting ourselves to fresh clean water as the organizing principle for building our settlements makes good sense. We need to govern at a regional scale and determine population size and development based on natural resource availability. 

-Ibrahim Abdul-Matin

We are oriented to the artificial construct of the nation state, whose borders are not acknowledged by weather patterns or migrating birds. Human survival will involve relinquishing these borders and instead tuning in to watersheds and natural formations of the land… It is time to root down, find some land, some place on this earth to belong to, and get into a deep relationship. There is a shitstorm coming one way or another, and we need to build our land-based communities to survive through to the other side. 

-adrienne maree brown

When I read these afro-anarcho-ecological remarks I immediately thought of a few similar thoughts that Murray Bookchin shares in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. He says that anarchy, “far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles and consequently for human survival.” For him, “the absolute negation of the centralized economy is regional ecotechnology—a situation in which the instruments of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem.” 

Anarchic societies refuse to create social structures that would overwrite or disregard the social structures of the land around us. How can we cultivate a loving relationship with our Mother if we organize our societies in ways that seek to create alternate “ecosystems,” often over against the ones Earth has cultivated? If the land is just raw material, then sure, we can shape it any way we want. If it’s just a blank canvas, sure, we can draw anything we want on it. But if she is a living being with history, wisdom, and heart, to know her is to recognize the ecosystems she has already created and lovingly given to us to be a part of.

When we outsource our decision-making to central bureaucracies, we orient ourselves away from decentralized ecosystems. When we outsource production and distribution of the means of life to centralized industries, we become dependent on systems that work outside of and contrary to our local ecosystems.

Capitalism, statism, and all forms of rulership make us into prodigal sons. We go to our parent and say, “You know how you’ve been providing for me throughout my life? Why don’t you calculate the value of that extrapolated over the next thirty years, and write me a check for that amount. I have no interest in an ongoing relationship with you. Your only worth to me is in the resources that I can extract from you. You, yourself, are as good as dead to me.” 

Then we go off and live our prodigal lives. And after much time, even when their diminishing returns leave us impoverished and unfulfilled, many of us continue to preach the prodigal values of capital and state. We do not begin to think about how to apologize to our parent and plead for reincorporation into the ecosystem, even with the humblest standing. We continue to focus our attention on those who persist in prodigal living and seem to be prospering, and we hold out hope that if we continue to model ourselves after them, we can somehow achieve the invulnerability we seek.

But others of us come to a moment of clarity. We realize that it wasn’t a lump sum that we needed. It wasn’t a transaction or an extraction. It wasn’t the ability to be our own closed system. It was the ecosystem we left behind. The ecosystem crafted over generations by our ancestors. The ecosystem we were born into and lovingly included in and given a chance to contribute to. The beauty and totality of symbiotic relationships between beings with their own dignity and inner lives. That’s what we needed. That’s where the replenishing, fulfilling value is. 

Some of us, upon realizing this, have determined to return to the ecologies of our ancestors. And even when we are still a ways off, our Mother (is God our grandparent in this illustration? if so—rad) is at the door waiting for us, and then running to us, forgiving us and accepting us back not into the transactional relationship of servant and master but into the loving relationship of parent and child. Into the ecosystem of the household.

Capitalism and statism are both prodigal systems built on the domination of beings. Anarchy is an ecological system built on cooperation between all life. Anarchic communities make decisions face-to-face—not merely human to human but also human to nonhuman—finding consensus between all of their members. This requires the human members of the community to not only restore and reclaim a loving relationship with the land, but to build human societies that produce and distribute their means of life in cooperation and solidarity with their flora and fauna siblings, with the soils and watersheds of their Mother. 

Anarchy and ecology are both fundamentally opposed to rulership—anarchy to rulership of humans over humans, and ecology to rulership of humans over nonhuman life. We cannot have anarchy without ecology, nor can we have ecology without anarchy. To admit rulership anywhere is to admit it everywhere. To embrace anarchy is to embrace solidarity with all life, humility toward all life, love for all life. It’s the determination to reconstruct relationships between us and the rest of nature; relationships of balance and harmony. Ecology, carried through to all its full logical extension, requires anarchic ways of living on the part of its human participants.