Apparently “Desert” is or was quite popular in some circles. I thought it was euro-chauvinist, Malthusian, straw nihilist, anthropocentric poser trash, but wanted to get some second opinions. Turns out lots of people disagree with me, but lots of people agree with me, too. Found this pod that goes in to it in detail and I broadly agree with their conclusions.

Here’s the original text on the anarchist library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert

I have many thoughts on this, but I’m only going to share one; The concept of a “wild” and a “nature” distinct from “Civilization” is euro-chauvinist bs invented to support a Euro legal fantasy that indigenous land was untouched and unused so the Europeans could move in, kill everyone, and seize the resources. Humans have been part of every ecosystem on earth except Antarctica and a couple of Islands for like minimum 30,000 years, 50k in Australia, and millions of years in Africa. We’ve been here the whole time, we’ve been part of the eco-system the whole time. The period of massive human population expansion and industrial pollution is only a couple of centuries and we’ve already seen dramatic evolution of plants, animals, fungi, and all kinds of bacteria to adapt to the new environments humans have created. Nature doesn’t stop at the edge of a parking lot. There’s weird bacteria living and doing their thing inside, under, and above the parking lot. (seriously! - https://www.livescience.com/1515-asphalt-munching-bacteria-discovered.html) There are radiotrophic fungi thriving on the radioactive graphite inside the Chernobyl NPP, arguably the most lethal and inhospitable location on the surface of the earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

Like seriously, seriously, stop. Stop. Put down all your learned notions about “the natural world” and nuclear disaster and apocalypse, put all that bullshit down for a second.

There are fungus living in the Chernobyl reactor, feeding on hard ionizing radiation and thriving.

That’s life. That’s nature. To quote Spock; Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Potential, possibilities, we can’t dream of. Unbelievable beauty and wonder that you’ll never see if you’re fixed in this framework where humanity is an intruder in to a pristine, magical, perfect system that exists outside of us.

And that means we have to drop whatever bullshit is weighing this author down, stop thinking of devastation in our time as the end of the world. There’s a saying in the Talmud; “Whoever saves one life saves the whole world.” When we save one organism, one plant, one animal, one bacterium, we’re not just preserving this fleeting moment in time. We’re creating a future. We’re creating potential. Via the inexorable process of evolution speciation can turn one organism in to an entire planetary biosphere. Every single creature alive today evolved from a very small number of primordial ancestors, possibly just one.

There’s a story I like, that I hold on to when all this shit starts to seem hopeless.

An old person is walking down the beach at low tide. They’re observing all the seaweed, flotsam, and starfish thrown up past the tide line by the storm last night. They come up on a little kid who is diligently picking up starfish from the hot sand and chucking them back in to the water. One starfish at a time. The old person says to the kid “There must be thousands of starfish on this beach. Why bother throwing them back? You can’t save them all.” The kid doesn’t even look at them. Just says “I can save this one”. And throws another starfish in to the ocean. The old person thinks about that for a second, then stops and joins the kid in throwing starfish back in to the ocean for a while.

If you position yourself outside of nature, if you cut yourself out of the world and make yourself an alien, then yeah, all you can really be is an intruder and a destroyer, or at best a tourist gawking at the sights. You need to stay grounded, to metaphorically and literally touch grass. You need to remember that the flesh and blood that supports your mind was once bare rock being blasted by the hard radiation of a young sun, that the hydrogen and helium in the water that makes up 70% of your corpse was born in the hot chaotic soup of a new universe. The water, the elixir of carbon based life, that let’s us live is made out of ingredients that are 13.8 billion years old. And we’re living at the absolute beginning of the universe. We’ve got 13.8 billion years behind us and something like 1.7*10^106 years in front of us. I don’t know how many zeros that is but it’s a lot of zeros (I can’t find a calculator that will actually write it out for me so I assume it is MANY zeros). We’ve got Time to fix all this shit. Deep time. Incomprehensible time. It’s not over yet, even if it’s over for us as individuals. Even if we never live to see better days we can try to improve the odds for comrades yet to come. Maybe comrades who won’t even be human, the ancestors of crows or honeybees or dolphins who will look back on our era and wonder what we were like.

idfk, just, like, you can give up and go back to brunch, but you can also keep going. That’s what nihilism is. You have to choose. You have to choose.