Ecologies of Care: A Conversation

Angela Anderson: Late one night in 2014, I found myself glued to my phone, reading an article in the Washington Post about the oil boom in the US state of North Dakota.1 This was two years before the uprising of water protectors at Standing Rock against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline under the Missouri River caught the world’s attention, and the first time I had heard about oil in North Dakota.2 Surprised and perplexed, I zoomed in near the capital city of Bismarck on Google Earth searching for any sign of what I was reading about. I followed the path of the Missouri River to the northwest until horizontal lines of identical small squares dotted the landscape and the shadows of oil pumpjacks became visible. Zooming out to grasp the scale of what was happening in the landscape showed hundreds, if not thousands of these small squares connected by roads to create a vast, networked checkerboard pattern covering a large part of northwestern North Dakota, including much of the Fort Berthold Reservation of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations.3 

As the first reports of the uprising at Standing Rock in 2016 appeared, the endless grid of small squares and the pixelated shadows of oil pumpjacks took on a more urgent quality. In March 2019, I spent ten intensive days filming oil infrastructure and interviewing people on the Standing Rock and Fort Berthold reservations for the film that became Three (or more) Ecologies: A Feminist Articulation of Eco-intersectionality—Part I: For the World to Live, Patriarchy Must Die. Many of the conversations I had with people felt cathartic, filled with the frustration and grief of witnessing their communities and landscape overrun by an industry beyond their control, creating a literally toxic environment, from the endless spills and incessant flaring, to dangerous truck traffic and violent oil workers. I wanted to interview you, Silvia, because all of your interests and extensive research, from the witch hunts in Europe to your Wages for Housework campaign, culminate in what is at the heart of this film, which is not just pollution or violence against women, but an entire ecology of violence with several different levels. We’ve talked a lot about the flaring I witnessed in North Dakota: driving through the Bakken region at night is like driving through a landscape of fire. And you experienced a similar situation in the Niger Delta in the 1980s, another region of extreme conflict and damage done by the oil industry. 

Silvia Federici: This issue is really a question of life and death. In the early 1980s I was in an oil area in southeastern Nigeria, in the city of Port Harcort in the Niger Delta. Oil was everywhere and on everybody’s mind. I learned that the areas where oil is extracted are like war zones. It’s difficult to get close to these areas, like nuclear war sites. Any road that led to an oil area was purposefully, I believe, underdeveloped. It always looked like a road to nowhere so that nobody would be tempted to go near it. All the managers and workers, the food they ate, everything came by helicopter or plane from Lagos. The companies didn’t want the local people to have any knowledge of what was going on because they knew that the locals would be antagonistic or interfere with their operations. In fact, there was constant warfare in these areas, because once the government allows exploration in an area, it doesn’t matter who lives there. It doesn’t matter if there’s agriculture. The company just moves in and pushes the people out. It’s an extremely violent process from beginning to end, down to the flaring of the natural gas that kills everything because it is so polluting. 

Oil extraction is highly symbolic of capitalism, where the production of life is always based on the creation of death. We know this about pesticides in agriculture and we know this about mining. So much depends on this constant production of scarcity, and we live in a kind of somnambulism with this production of death. If we were aware that our survival depends on the death of another person, we’d be horrified. But in some ways, this is what we have been forced to adjust to in this society through the use of things for our daily reproduction that are actually causing the death of other people. People, however, are fighting against it, with huge struggles taking place across the world in oil areas, but they are very uneven because the oil companies are protected by the most powerful governments in the world. Coups have deposed governments nationalizing oil, with the war against Iraq as an example. September 11th became a premise for attacking Iraq and accessing its oil fields.

Tanker truck driving up oil road. MHA Nation -Fort Berthold Reservation, ND. Photo: Angela Anderson.

AA: One of the most important things I took away from talking to people on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota who live in this area of intense oil extraction is that they deal with its effects every day. It’s impossible to talk about decolonization without acknowledging the destructive impact of the extractive industry. Like you said Silvia, oil companies have a lot of power. The right-wing lobbying group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) drafted legislation in response to Standing Rock to make any threat to so-called critical infrastructure such as oil pipelines or refineries a felony, where you can be fined $10,000 if they prove intent to cause damage.4 These draft bills are intended to curtail protest for states planning pipelines.5 South Dakota passed legislation in April 2019 under their Republican governor Kristi Noem allowing the state to sue individuals and organizations for “riot boosting,” in an attempt to silence activism against the Keystone XL pipeline.6 According to this law, if an organization is found to be promoting resistance to the extractive industries, they can be fined up to $100,000.7 

SF: Going back to the question of violence, when watching images of this machinery going down many kilometers into the center of the earth, I was reminded of the fact that throughout the Middle Ages, and into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many countries or communities considered mining taboo because there was a very animistic conception of the earth being like a body, similar to certain Indigenous communities today, with Pachamama, Mother Earth, etc. And that conception of the earth as a living body meant that mining inflicted a wound on something that was alive. When you see those machines drilling down, it makes this wounding of the earth and the destruction of people’s relation to it very real. You can see how an environmental movement and a movement against dispossession are really the same thing. There is a continuity between the destruction of the earth and the destruction of human community, of human lives. There is a powerful poem by the Nigerian poet Nnimmo Bassey, who is from the Niger Delta area, that George Caffentzis included in his book No Blood for Oil.8 In the 1980s George was in the same area in Nigeria as I was, and in spite of being a philosophy professor, he was impressed by the situation there so much that oil become one of his objects of study. The poem describes the destruction caused by the oil industry, punctuated repeatedly by the refrain “We thought it was oil, but it was blood.” This is really the essence of your film. 

AA: When I first learned of the North Dakota oil boom, I was working on a film at the intersections of multiple crises unfolding in Greece.9 It was a time when revolutionary hopes were fading with the suppression of grassroots movements in Tunisia, Occupy Wall Street in the US, Gezi Park in Turkey, etc., when suddenly two locations—the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava—relit the spark with their real-time exercises in social organizing based on egalitarian, feminist, and ecological ethics, albeit under violent repression. Although geographically distant, their concrete proposals for less exploitative ways of organizing economies, emphasizing solidarity and collaboration instead of competition, with an attentiveness to the more-than-human, inspired me to bring both of these places together in one video work through the crucial roles of oil and water in the material and geopolitical situations of both communities. 

Oil wells in Rojava, NE Syria. Photo: Angela Anderson.

I drove through the Bakken for the first time in the spring of 2018. As I began to see oil wells, I noticed tanker trucks barreled past me down the narrow two-lane roads, literally shaking my small rental car. Burning gas flares were visible everywhere on the horizon and I was shocked by the sheer amount of oil infrastructure that had been installed in the landscape. In August 2018 I was able to travel to Rojava, a journey that started in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and that crossed areas recently liberated from ISIS, passing camps for displaced people and the occasional natural gas flare from distant oil wells. Tanker trucks filling the roads gave me déjà vu of North Dakota. Crossing into Syria, we passed more oil pumpjacks.10 As Îlham Ehmed later explained to us, the relationship to oil in Rojava is complicated.11 Rojava has been largely isolated; Turkey built a wall on its border, the Assad regime wasn’t letting anything in, and Iraqi Kurdistan is quite neoliberal and profits from oil extraction. The government of Rojava ended up selling oil to the Assad regime, and while not an ideal arrangement, this allowed them to buy things and bring them physically into the territory.12

Audience: If their geopolitical isolation resigns them to participating in a regime that they’re not ideologically consonant with, does the idea of ecology become purely descriptive? Or is it still a form of activism? Is there a way to generate a purely anti-capitalist ecology while still capitulating to that sort of production? Is it even possible to have an ecology of care in Rojava while capitalism still exists? 

SF: It sure is. We have five hundred years of documentation showing how capitalism needs to continuously dispossess people, to continuously engage in wars killing millions of people. Capitalism is unsustainable. The contradiction facing women in Rojava is the contradiction of our own lives, where we should not use electricity and the digital technology imposed on us, yet our lives are dependent on it. Precisely for this reason, this contradiction must be one of the centers of our struggle. You see it clearly in areas where basic conditions of our existence are produced. In these locations there is the production of death on many levels. I was reading a collection of interviews with women from the Ecuadorian Amazon who have fought for a long time against all forms of mining, particularly oil extraction. And a theme running through their testimonies is that soon after the oil company arrives, the community ends: everything is polluted—the crops, the land, the water, and so on. The other recurring theme is the violence produced in the area against women. Oil extraction exacerbates the violence of men against women, including the violence of men in the communities who may not have a job and want the wages that the oil company brings for its extraction. The power promised by this money makes men very violent when women oppose the oil companies, putting their bodies against the machines. These men don’t see that the wages will soon come to an end. Because when the land is gone, everything else is gone. 

And then there is the violence of the paramilitary, and of the security guards. In many cases, these companies have private armies to keep people out of the areas where they work, to defend the company against opposition to extraction. Furthermore, oil field work is very hard, and people feel empowered by making money, which they might use to buy alcohol. Many women say that they used to feel free in their communities, going out at any time of the day. But with the oil extraction, they stay close to their homes, fearing going out at night because acts of violence against them have escalated. So violence is done to the earth, but also to all social relations through dispossession, long-term impoverishment, and gender-based violence.

Entrance to Jinwar - Village of Free Women. Rojava, NE Syria. Photo: Angela Anderson.

AA: Rojava’s social and political project is in transition, and I was only there for a week so I’m no expert, but each day I spent in Rojava involved visits to different communal projects—agricultural communes, a film commune, communal markets, communal stores—and the government offices coordinating them. It was incredible to experience the energy of a society actively creating cooperative alternatives to capitalism, and putting feminist politics into literal action, and under the harshest geopolitical circumstances. The women’s village of Jinwar, for example, a pilot project to create a community of women free from the pressures and stigma of patriarchal society, was constructed using traditional building techniques, and consists of individual houses, a school, a bakery, a clinic, an academy, orchards and gardens, even a swimming pool.13 Throughout the territory they are trying to organize agricultural communes, communal markets, and communal stores in an attempt to create a different kind of economy, and of course not everyone agrees. Some people want to just buy something at the store and go home. It’s a process, and it’s very inspiring, with all of its flaws. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, honestly.

With regard to the topic of violence against women, in North Dakota in particular, the influx of a massive labor force mostly made up of men from out of state brought with it a real threat of women being disappeared or killed. This came up with every single person I talked to there. People were scared for their young daughters to go out alone, others had been stalked or followed in supermarkets. It’s a real crisis. The entire industry and the way it’s organized are extremely toxic, both on the level of subjectivity and on a material, chemical level.

SF: It reinforces colonial relations, which are very important for the oil industry. Things are done in especially cruel ways in areas that are being colonized, or where Indigenous people live in the United States, or in Black communities. Oil companies go to these places because they can maximize profit and minimize the care taken in doing so. It’s possible for oil extraction to be less damaging, but the fact is that they don’t care if people get sick, or if they die, or if the water gets polluted. For example, natural gas flaring doesn’t have to exist. That natural gas can be processed, but the oil companies let it flare knowing that it releases poison every minute of the day into the atmosphere, the soil, the rivers, and the seas. In Nigeria I visited a village called Ibano where all along a very long, wide beach, Exxon Mobil was flaring an enormous amount of natural gas. All of that went into the ocean, and spills were continuous due to the lack of maintenance. The company’s unwillingness to spend money to prevent oil spills only produced further damage. Capitalism has built hierarchies among people, and the colonial relation ensures that many people across the earth are considered disposable. It’s a struggle on multiple levels because it has to do with built-in hierarchies, the built-in coloniality of relation, the built-in machismo. These dynamics are instrumentalized. When we talk about toxicity on many levels, we’re talking about industries and activities that powerfully reveal the physiology of the system, its premises and consequences.

AA: The philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, whose Three Ecologies book I reference in the film title, talks about the flattening effect of capitalism and its leveling of all registers of value, and you see this in all extractive industries.14 Take, for example, when the oil industry announces that a pipeline broke and spilled hundreds or thousands of gallons of oil, which will cost a certain amount to clean up—in actuality it’s not possible to clean it up entirely. Money does not correlate to the damage done. Reports appear in the news constantly with this false equation. There are also other levels of value, such as the love you feel for a place or the pain felt when you see a place you love being destroyed. An important part of the movement at Standing Rock was care for the land and the water, which are affective relations worth nothing to the extractive industries. 

Silvia, when you and I first met we had a long talk about the care industry and the labor of caring for people who are sick, aging, or need help. For example, the way decisions are taken in the United States is especially brutal, where you only get help if you will get better and rejoin the capitalist economy. Otherwise, you will just be shoved out the door. The way those in need are treated really reflects on the rest of society, as you say in the film:

Capitalism communicates and imposes a view of the body like an island. Cut off. It’s a process of real impoverishment, because the body extends and connects, and draws its life—its energy—from all of the surrounding atmosphere. That’s why there are certain things in our body that, if they are not satisfied, make us very depressed. It’s part of a whole devaluation of processes that are reproducing life—that are seen as “natural,” as having no value.

Whereas everything that is productive—with industry, and with effort—is valorized. And I think one extreme expression of this logic—of the kind of logic that is animating this—is the way wealth is considered in the capitalist economy. The activities that produce weaponry—an essential part of warfare—are seen as productive. They are seen as really producing wealth. Whereas activities like raising children and creating life [are considered unproductive]. So, the activities that destroy life are productive—for example, an activity that pollutes a river, like mining. Whereas the activities that generate life are considered unproductive. And I think this is very essential. This is an essential component [of capitalism]. And you find this contrast everywhere, particularly in the activities of the energy sector.

SF: The film raises the question: What is wealth? I think that the desire for commodities is the consequence of a big material and social impoverishment—a long process whereby people have been divided from each other. We are isolated, living separately, with anxiety about the future and our survival. Life is impoverished, so we acquire things to fill the vacuum. When people have powerful relationships with each other, they do not need things in such a way. The successful struggles are those in which people create affective relations and forms of cooperation between themselves. 

I think we haven’t sufficiently appreciated the amazing lesson that Standing Rock was for all of us. At a certain point there were almost seven thousand people in the most violent environment—in the country’s most inhospitable climate with temperatures reaching twenty degrees below zero, and surrounded by cops and dogs. And yet they were able to organize a whole reproduction of life over months for thousands of people, organizing schooling for kids, organizing food, organizing the strong, affective relations and solidarity that allowed them to continue. In my understanding, Standing Rock came to an end when President Obama declared a moratorium on the pipeline construction. People then began to disband—an amazing mistake just months before the new government came into office. Everybody was told that the problem was being solved by the government.

Oil, water and natural gas pipelines. MHA Nation -Fort Berthold Reservation, ND. Photo: Angela Anderson.

Until that point, it didn’t matter if police used water cannons in temperatures of twenty degrees below zero. People continued to resist. What kind of relation enabled those people to resist? This is a very important part of the question of care, and a lesson from many different communities fighting against forces that are far more powerful and seem invincible. And yet, they resist for a long time and sometimes reverse the situation because they can change their own life in ways that create solid ties between them. Going back to the testimonies from women in the Amazon, they say that it’s very important to resist, to not give up, because for an oil or mining company, time is money, time is precious. Often, if a community puts up a strong fight, the company will go away. They might decide to go somewhere else because they don’t want to waste money. Sometimes, at the beginning, the struggle seems impossible. But the fact that they cannot push you away gives you time, which can reverse the situation when people create another form of existence, when they connect with each other and reproduce their community in a different way. What happened at Standing Rock is a lesson in how people come together and organize a different form of reproduction based on cooperation and collectivity, breaking down the isolation that people are experiencing. These two things need to be thought together, otherwise it’s a defeat. 

Audience: There’s also a flip side to this with colonialism and with capitalism in how greenwashing has been used in places like Palestine to dispossess people of large swaths of land to create greener technology. 

AA: One needs to be critical at all stages of production. The fact that minerals are needed for batteries to store power from solar panels, windmills, and other technologies means that consumption should ideally be reduced. 

SF: Green capitalism—the greening of the planet—is equally destructive. It all goes back to the question of mining, because to build a wind farm one has to do a lot of damage to the earth. A lot of metals have to be extracted, which is not acknowledged because there’s a lot of money to be made out of it. We need to redefine the necessary conditions of our existence in order to have a just society. Everybody needs to make a decision about what wealth is, and at what price we can accept a certain type of technology or form of living. This has to be central in all forms of organizing and in every political movement. We cannot simply say we’re concerned about climate change so we should abolish fossil fuel. It’s much broader, and about what kind of society we want to have, and the price we are willing to pay for it. The capitalist system is based on the production of scarcity, which is why it always has to dispossess people as its first act throughout its history. You cannot have capitalist production without massive dispossession. 

Capitalism needs to produce scarcity, not just wealth. We’re always being indoctrinated with the idea that capitalism is producing enormous amounts of wealth, but we don’t see the decimation of entire populations, the extinction of humans and plants and animals that has been constant in the history of capitalism until the present, and that is now accelerating. There needs to be very profound thinking when we see these images that signify something much broader that is not only happening in North Dakota. There is a production of death that runs through what is called the reproduction of life in our society.

Audience: Earlier you mentioned the draft legislation to prevent mobilization from happening in North Dakota. Has there been any further activism there?

AA: There are people organizing on the ground, but the situation at the Fort Berthold Reservation is different from Standing Rock. At Fort Berthold, the oil industry brought income to people who were relatively poor before, claiming they would be responsible and not pollute with phrases like “we’ll get the job done” or “we’ll take care of it” in response to spills and leakages. The rhetoric in North Dakota is incredible in its use of metaphor and euphemism. People are organizing, but it’s difficult; as Silvia said, where there’s oil, people will be pushed out. Ten years on, people are realizing that the effects of the industry are unbearable. It’s not only the oil spills and spills of poisonous fracking fluid, or the natural gas flaring and methane being released into the air. Because they’re drilling down so deep—two miles into the earth—radioactive material comes up with the oil. Currently the industry is trying to raise the level of radioactivity permitted at waste dumps in North Dakota, since they just bury this radioactive material in the ground.15 

SF: In the mid-1990s, the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta led a very peaceful movement taking on Shell. There was a long boycott of Shell gasoline for the role they played in attacking the Ogoni movement together with the Nigerian government. This was a local Indigenous population whose lands were destroyed by oil extraction.16 Shell built pipelines straight through the village without regard for the people living there. People would walk out of their homes to find a pipeline running through the village. They demonstrated peacefully, carrying flowers, and amassed a huge movement that threatened Shell directly. It’s now been proven that Shell brought weapons into the country and helped the Nigerian government organize a massacre. The soldiers destroyed village after village of the Ogoni. Nine leaders of the movement were hanged, falsely accused of murder. Afterwards, in the same areas, an armed movement forced the company to cut production significantly, and for a long time. I believe this struggle is still happening. It’s the same in Indonesia, where oil areas are still on fire because the company just left after they had extracted what they could without bothering to cap the wells. You have land on fire as well as people. So there is an international struggle to be aware of, and to which we have to relate.