Paths are fragile. Nature is not.
Wandering an alpine national park recently my companion watched me duck off the trail to smell a flower and sample water in a stream. I was heading onto pineapple grass and other squishy high-altitude carpets. She felt something. Worry, perhaps. She spoke: “we should be careful not to leave the path as alpine vegetation is fragile.”
I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The more I think about what she said the more her suggestion feels like the utterance of a coloniser — so far from this person’s values as to be comedic. Like so many instances of late-colonial nonsense, my friend’s desire to “do the right thing” looks and sounds righteous but is ultimately a rule-following voice, not a revolutionary one. Let’s unpack it:
1) “We should…”
We all know by now that “you should, we should, they should, I should” are all ways to invisibilise an authority. And we know when an authority is being disappeared it’s because it can’t account for itself, don’t we?
“We should”?
Says who?
Ecofascism is “environmentalism through genocide”, opined Klein. Political researcher Alex Amend defined ecofascist belief as “The devaluing of human life — particularly of populations seen as inferior — in order to protect the environment viewed as essential to White identity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
We’ll see in a moment how important an untrammeled wilderness is to white identity.
2) “…be careful…”
Care should be taken. Attention paid. Prioritise this. And don’t forget yourself. Always remember! Victorian boarding school anyone? And did the children of empire learn anything good there? No. They absolutely did not. They learned to sub for the state. And when they’d done that for 12 years they were ready to arrest their own children’s instincts of curiosity and wildness.
“Be careful” feels great when it’s aunty Karla warning the kiddo about the hot plate, but “we should be careful…” sounds like I’m about to get stabbed in the eye with a British flag. Colonised.
3) “…not to leave the path…”
Ok. Um. Does Your Honour think path-following is a solution to ecocide? We can simply do what green-jobbed people tell us to do and that will arrest the extinction event in motion? To halt global warming, plastic-supremacy, and ocean-land-and-air fascism, we need to.. um… follow orders? When the apocalypse survivors are lamenting with the cockroaches in a burnt-out Tesla with a rusty can of condensed milk for dinner, will they be saying “if only the white hikers had stayed on the paths”? Or will the tiny performative self-flagellations of guilt-ridden settlers be of precisely no consequence?
Of course it won’t matter. Of course the cause of extinctions will crystallize. Individual choices will dissolve into a forgotten sea, atop which will rest three icebergs, cold and unmistakeable: Corporations, State, and Policing. The three towers of colonialism. People are but bees in a hive. Our global hive is what’s broken and future cultures will know that, just like present day indigenous cultures already know it.
4) “…alpine vegetation…”
Can you hear the science in that construct? This ecosystem has been studied. By science. This statement is laboratory-certified. FACTS. It wouldn’t do to say “don’t step on the plants I feel for them”. It wouldn’t have every white bourgeois settler within a two mile radius nodding scientifically, sincerely.
A remarkable thing about alpine areas in places like Australia is they’re largely unmodified by settlers. Well, except for the first ecocide they executed there (a genocide, in fact). Colonisers de-populated the land and then mistook what was left for “the natural state of things.” That’s how racist all this is — we think nature is a place without people because that’s how we cooked it. And this where we get into the meat of the problem…
5) “…is fragile…”
Nothing in nature is fucking fragile, you concern-trolling, pretend-to-be-a-good-person alabaster mutherfucker. Hey, stay with me. I’m only five minutes recovered from this shit myself. Now listen up: Nature is so fucking resilient and robust that every person on earth could flock here for a long weekend and, so long as they didn’t pack Roundup and DDT, the place would be back to it’s old brilliant self within a week. Nature is so much bigger than us, obviously.
Against relentless colonisation however, she’s faltering. The year-after-yearness of colonisation, and it’s pure-venom hatred of indigeneity, of people-loving-land-loving-people is finally choking her out. And as everyone can sense, course correction means changing more than the things we buy. It means, among many things, evicting the cop in our head. Policing people who walk where they want is very literally what colonisation is. No, really. Just about the first thing colonisers did after planting flags was employ cops to arrest those who wouldn’t adhere to the great imaginary of private property. Crushing those who won’t follow the rules of movement — of paths.
https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSFoRDsSf/
