In defence of life supporting systems: labour, land and the libinal and the struggle for liveable futures

I want to begin by saying that Ariel Salleh’s latest book, Decolonize EcoModernism is an erotic book, in that it centres on the defence of life (human and nonhuman) and the larger life supporting systems of this planet. Eros in ancient Greek and psychoanalysis denotes life, the ‘life instinct’, vitality and with it contingency and uncertainty. Against it is ranged Thanatos, decline, decay and the death instinct, also an impulse to control and dominate, impose certainty and authority. The book can be read as a defiant rejection of a techno-elite and an assertion of the corporeal, the bodily and the libidinal. It reminds us that we are not ‘just like’ animals, but we are animals, with context and culturally specific species modes of labour (reproductive and productive), modes of being in the world and with one another. It’s always relevant ecofeminist demand asks not only ‘Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?’ (Marçal, 2017) but also how much is it worth to the Telsa corporation (producer of what some now call the ‘swastikcar’ soon to be eclipsed by the Chinese ‘Build Your Dream’ electric car) that its CEO, Elon Musk, is toilet trained (at least as far as we know they are)? Before electric cars and all that they require such as lithium, for which said CEO ‘will coup whoever they want’ to get it (Rushkoff, 2023), there are living human and nonhuman beings. At the same time, there are increasingly obvious multiple and multiplying social and ecological harms of a so-called ‘green transition’ in the global north/minority world based on ‘green colonialism’ and ‘renewable energy extractivism’ (Dunlap et al, 2024; Andreucci et al 2023), that require a gender and ecofeminist lens in terms of both outlining the harm and injustice of such ‘decarbonisation by dispossession’ strategies, but also of agency and resistance (Cirefice and Sullivan, 2024). Life before lithium, and as Ariel’s book reassuringly confirms – life after lithium. But before the, it is life (and land and love) versus lithium. This is how I read the book’s injunction to resist dominant and powerful tech (and increasingly ‘tech bro’) centred visions of ‘sustainable futures’, which by definition are anti-democratic, or at least non-democratic, in that by definition such technological visons of ‘our’ future are dreamt up and controlled by ‘experts’ and based on knowledge only possessed by an elite minority. Ariel goes firmly against the ecomodernist groove that we should accept and support such ‘progress’ happening behind our backs – including reconciling with the fact that this is also done without our express consent – by supporting yet more technology to ‘fix’ the damage caused by techno-capitalist modernity.