Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis - Paperback

by Out of the Woods (Author)

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

Back Jacket

Hope Against Hope investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and-relatedly-more frequent and devastating disasters.

Out of the Woods Collective charts a revolutionary course in and beyond our perilous times. The journey, they argue, requires an abolitionist approach to border imperialism, reactionary ecology, and state violence that underpin many green solutions to climate change as well as dominant modes of understanding nature. Crucially, they remind us of the frequent moments and movements of solidarity emerging from the ruins that surround us. Their daring response to the disarray of politics in our seemingly end times is the urgent and hopeful project of "disaster communism"-the collective power to transform our political horizons and establish a climate future based in common life.

Hope Against Hope is a devastating critique of the current environmentalist and leftist discourses on climate change that rely upon and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions. It is also a visionary call for the critical expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize solidarity within and against ecological crisis.

Author Biography

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.

Out of the Woods began in 2014 as a collective investigation into the various historical, contemporary, and future relationships between capitalism and climate change. We are exhausted by the way in which hegemonic ecological politics in the so-called Global North oscillates between a return to a romantic naturalism with reactionary tendencies and a pragmatic green capitalism. We are also inspired by and seek to amplify real movements abolishing the present state of things: survivors of Hurricane Katrina, Indigenous water protectors opposing transnational pipelines, migrants fighting border imperialism, struggles for Black lives in Ferguson and safe water in Flint.

We recognize the need for a much wider lens on both the breadth of ecological crisis and the historical forms through which it perpetuates exploitation, dispossession, exhaustion, and maybe insurrection. Out of the Woods is evolving with the intention of further multiplying our positions against homogeneity. We invite you to contact us, and to think, write, and struggle with us. As disaster engulfs spaces and times around us, what will it take to get out of the woods, together?