Archetype I: prototypes for a post-apocalyptic city

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words but their tasks

(G.Battaille, in Athey, 1997, 'Visions of Excess', p. 31)

May 2007, Titnore, West Sussex. Let me begin with a reflection on a series of key terms, written whilst I was resting on a couch, suspended 30 feet off the ground, hoisted on a tree; attempting to analyse the functioning of a treesitting protest site through it’s vocabulary:

Tree: Living amongst it’s branches the tree-sitter forces the logging companies to halt the cutting down of forests, as by endangering the life of the activist companies risk lengthy court battles, fines and possible closure. The tree inherits a quality alien to it’s common definition, on top of becoming a refuge it becomes a strategic node, a logistic necessity, an element of a battlefield. Lengths of climbing rope form a network between the trees allowing for fast access across the suspended web.

Temporality: the concept of property becomes precarious, refuges are exchanged, shared, constructed collectively, appropriated, the ‘home’ ceases to belong to the realm of commodification. The suspended refuges host kitchens, viewpoints, communal sleeping hubs and it is not uncommon that at the end of a protest (when a judge expresses a verdict in favour or against the logging company) the protesters burn the material that had sheltered them for years, before collecting parts of it which were recyclable and moving on to another site.

Suspended micro-communities: These protest sites represent first and foremost models of sustainable development, the strict use of recycled material (doors, frames and windows often coming from nearby skips), D.I.Y. insulation methods, solar panels as sole form of energy supply and hanging hydroponic gardens. The protest involves nearby communities and it is not uncommon to find spontaneous support groups in local villages and towns; allowing for both a point of contact and communication with what lies outside the confines of the protest camp, and collection point for donations in the form of money, or sur-plus of clothes, ropes and edibles in winter.

Construction: building involves the senses, experience in constructing solid treeshouses is handed down verbally from protester to protester; narrative substitutes planimetry, touch substitutes calculation, instinct prevails over architectural rationality; one must test and know the limits of tolerance in terms of weight and time that a tree can endure, with the constant knowledge of the possibility of collapse, of falling and of failure.

Walking the humid pathways strewn with leaves in Camp Bling, and later Nine Ladies (two treesitting protest sites respectively in Titnore and Stanton Moore, UK) at the beginning of spring 2007; yet it may have felt partially like 1850, and partially like 2050. This 200 year time gap was suddenly breached. Electricity was scarce and used mostly to run a few laptops and charge mobile phones, candlelight and bonfires lit late night drunken rambles, faces dropped in and out of the shadow frequently, huddled in blankets, under a sky pregnant with rain. That very rain that would then cascade into large tarpaulling sheets stretched out between the oaks and sicamores and end up in rainwater collection units, filtered (using stockings and sand pits) and drank in broken mugs and pint glasses the local pub owner had once left outside the camp. That would be the same water you’d have to use to wash yourself and your clothes as well as water you cooked with; taps, basins, showerheads and a flushing toilets were luxuries you quickly forgot. In Titnore the alternative was filling a 20 liter plastic bucket to the top at a stream using a pulley, and carrying it 600 yards on your back, feeling the weight push your soles against the rock. Either way you suddenly became very aware of the preciousness of each single drop. Every, single, drop.

The structures where as futuristic and provocative as some projects I’d seen in 1970s Archigram magazines yet the windows and doors clearly belonged to dilapidated Victorian houses, the wind howling violently through the crevices. Growing crops occurred at various heights, from small lettuce and radish plots on the ground to hydroponic gardens 30 feet up, rationing food and resources according to the growing and shrinking population of the camp. Toilets where as rudimental as they can get with the choice of a predug hole in the earth or digging a hole for yourself as far from camp as you could trek. If you got cold in winter (and boy did it get cold) you’d simply have to layer your suspended hut with another blanket, then another sheet of plastic, hoping the whole thing wouldn’t collapse on you whilst you slept.

Yet this very sense of danger, trepidation and anxiety both actuated in the constant fear of falling, of houses collapsing, and in the possibility of having to fight the loggers off at any moment was the driving motor, the rush of adrenaline that kept the protesters there, living with a mountain-climbing harness resting on their hips. Once the attack would surpass so would the significance of the camp, and after 10 years, Flora, Ellis and the other inhabitants of Nine-Ladies packed up and left like they had never set foot in Stanton Moore. The protection of the vertical confines of the camp was the battle enacted on a weekly basis, when the men with fluorescent jackets would turn their helmet-covered heads up and smirk, the loggers were there.

The dynamics of protection of the forest were akin to those of protecting a country in case of war, yet it was ‘protection’ of a different kind than that often exasperated through warfare on a national scale, it was a protection of a slice of the ‘common’, threatened by private interest. Could this be one potential future of war-scenarios? A post-apocalyptic battle for the ‘common’ waged between civilian eco-warriors and slaves of capitalist corporations? However absurd and surreal this question may seem it is one possible scenario, afterall these protest camps encompassed practical confrontations with a number of issues we have been debating for over twenty years: peak oil, earth overshoot day, ecological debt, terminal decline. We were going to have to live like this soon enough and I was partially excited at the prospect.

Yet, it was the manner in which this futuristic ‘war dynamic’ articulated social relations which was interesting, pointing out towards the real possibility of a concrete social anarchist movement. On the ground both in Titnore and Nine-Ladies the manner in which the activists managed both the camp and their ‘war’ strategy fully supported the anarchic idea of a decentralized anti-hierarchical community; allowing for hierarchy only within the limits of its temporary settlement and only within the conception of the communal and egalitarian sharing of resources, skills and goods, much in the tradition of Bakunin’s socially-centered anarchy:

No-one rises above the others, or if he does rise, it is only to fall back a moment later, like the waves of the sea forever returning to the salutary level of equality

(Bakunin in Joll, 1979, ‘The Anarchists’, pg.91-92)

There were weekly meetings at both camps, a scrawled time and date handwritten with thick markers across damp pieces of cardboard and nailed somewhere at a crossway. One felt the duty, not the obligation, to attend; in terms of coercion these are two very different psychological states. The meetings would include the assigning of roles: who would go to court, who would collect water, who would cook, who would walk to the closest town to find an odd job for a week or two, visit the support group, collect the post. No need to mention that in a group of 30 some form of direct democracy is still plausible, dare I say attainable. Catherine remarked that was always some who didn’t help, especially when it got cold, that’s when it got hard. She shrugged her shoulders and that was it, it was no place for idealists.

What if I closed my eyes and thought of escaping from the schizofrenic urban landscapes of Code 64 and ended up here, in this paradoxical futuristic-cum-semi-archaic scenario: archetype I. What if the world was now composed of thousands of decentralised micro-communities that recycled scraps form now decaying industrial centres and built their villages suspended between trees? what if sustainability and political autonomy could be achieved at these scales? I thought of Hakim Bey’s communiqué n.7, and how it perfectly described the aspirations of the camp:

‘We have no interest in going "back to the land" if the deal includes the boring life of a shit-kicking peasant--nor do we want "tribalism" if it comes with taboos, fetishes & malnutrition. We have no quarrel with the concept of culture--including technology; for us the problem begins with civilization.’

(Bey, T.A.Z. ‘Ontological Anarchy, poetic terrorism’, 1985, pg.43)

For the activists the problem began with ‘civilisation’, at least with the current conception of it. Constant capital accumulation and unbound consumption, that was the core, that was the link between the enacting of protest in 2007 and the possible scenarios of 2050 as I have tried to describe them. I cannot tell you what it felt like to live in 2050 but I know I lived there, for a brief time, at Archetype I, and anyway, as novelist Pat Frank writes in the opening paragraph of ‘Alas, Babylon’, ‘to someone who has never felt a bomb, a bomb is only a word’.