The Science Behind Solidarity with Earth

Societies are becoming more unstable and less able to adapt because of technological and procedural innovations and efficiencies. This hypothesis is explored and supported by equating efficiencies with the reduction in effective societal dissipation. Dissipation stabilizes systems and enables the emergence and scale separation that are necessary for memory and cultural adaptation. Resistance movements are both stimulated by the resulting instabilities and inject dissipation back into society in a way that partially stabilizes it. In this nonlinear, long-time-scale sense, resistance has been co-opted by capitalist societies to act as a check, a feedback, on their own instability. Absent external and confounding factors, a statistically steady-state level of instability and resistance is possible, although unlikely because of cascading co-optation of and creative recreation of resistance movements. Using complex systems science, I argue that Earth's responses to resource exploitation, such as climate change, species extinction and soil loss, are dynamically equivalent, in their interaction with human societies, with social resistance movements, and so these responses justifiably can be referred to as resistance. Solidarity between social resistance movements and Earth's resistance might form the best and perhaps only pathway to a stable relationship between human societies and the environment. However, the success of this solidarity critically depends on a parallel struggle for marginalized peoples most affected by Earth's resistance to be able to freely migrate.

Marlene Brito-Millán, Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Janin Guzman Morales, Emma Harrison, Jessica Ng, Leslie Quintanilla, Amrah Salomón J and bt werner (2022) Rejecting Green Colonial Solutions: Towards Decolonial Solidarity with Mother Earth’s Revolt, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 21, 338-359.

We reframe climate crises as Mother Earth’s fevers and revolts against an anthro- pocentric, patriarchal, and racial colonial order of domination and extraction by undertaking a decolonial feminist, anti-capitalist complexity science, and Indigenous re-examination of how the scientific enterprise engages with climate politics. As the patriarchal state-centric technocracy and imperial mode of living that created the crisis perpetuates itself through “green” climate-disaster capitalism, we challenge “green” techno-scientific solution-driven governance and analyze climate upheavals as a portal for decolonial solidarity with Earth’s revolt – an alignment with the multispecies struggle for the liberation of all human and nonhuman relatives, waters, and lands.