Infrastructures of Violence
Solarpunk isn’t new to debates about violence, its pros and cons, whether it is a true reflection of the movement’s values or antithetical to its ethical commitments. I figured I’d give my own two cents’ worth here; I know I might be retreading old ground, but given this season’s focus on housing in particular and the built environment generally, I wanted to address this topic specifically.
Before I begin, though, I want to note that I am deeply indebted in my thinking to Rob Nixon, specifically his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor for giving me language and a framework of thinking about this issue. There are many types of violence, it turns out! Some are just harder to see than others. On top of that, who is labelling what action as “violent”? Who gets to define violence? These are some of the questions I tend to chew over whenever the word is used.
An example of hostile architecture. Photo by Otacilio Maia on Unsplash.
Today, I want to talk about how infrastructure and violence are intrinsically linked, and not just in the sense of clashes between the people living there. Architecture can perpetrate violence simply in its design: take hostile architecture, for example. Apart from threatening violence in actual physicality, hostile architecture perpetrates a violent ideology: there are people who do not matter, who need to be shooed away, who don’t deserve basic human kindness or decency. This is a forerunner to genocidal action - the constant dehumanization of a particular population, making it easier to eventually do actual, physical, spectacular violence to them without causing much psychic damage to/causing protest from the rest of the population.
In my view, solarpunks’ goals are to create a world where that ideology is, as Christina put it, “beyond the pale”. A world where compassion reigns and every individual matters as an important part of the community. A world where disputes are resolved through skillful negotiation, where interpersonal conflict is arbitrated with compassion, where peace and care are valued and valorized.
We don’t live in that world yet. And it will take a lot of intentional choosing of nonviolence as well as organized opposition to a status quo that interprets any opposition to it as necessarily violent. Taking an example from my own society and culture, Canada has a history (though recent) of branding enviromentalists as terrorists, with terrible consequences. A recent episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) podcast “What on Earth?” explored how misogyny and racism can combine with anti-environmentalist sentiment into a toxic stew that greatly affects female environmentalists, and thus can have a chilling effect on women’s speech and actions. (Because Canada was first and foremost founded as a resource colony to extract goods for Europe, and only became a country after negotiating with the companies that had laid claim to Northern Turtle Island, any opposition to the extractive settler-colonial mindset is labelled domestic terrorism).
Speaking of racism, Canada, the status quo, and the violence inherent to certain forms of infrastructure, both 1990’s Oka Crisis and the current struggles of the Tiny House Warriors come to mind. The Oka Crisis, or Kanehsatà:ke Resistance, was basically a struggle over whether the township of Oka, Quebec, had the right to build condominiums and expand a golf course over disputed land that also included an Indigenous burial ground. Mohawk protestors blockaded a highway with trees and trucks; the Quebec Police, the Canadian Army, and the RCMP showed up with tanks. To defend infrastructure.
The Tiny House Warriors are a group of Indigenous-led protestors who are part of a mission to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline from crossing unceded Secwepemc Territory by building infrastructure of their own - tiny houses. Ten tiny houses were built in strategic places along the Trans Mountain pipeline route, reasserting Indigenous presence on their own land. They are now in court, after having been attacked and abused (sometimes physically) for their commitment to fighting violent infrastructure with infrastructure that asserts their sovereignty and provides homes.
The label of violence can be stretched, in this way, to cover even peaceful protestors. Or artists - Elizabeth LaPensée's short video game Thunderbird Strike, wherein the player directs a thunderbird to attack the oil pipeline and infrastructures encroaching on the land, was described by a Minnesota politician and oil lobbyists as “encouraging eco-terrorism”.
Much like the debater who takes a critique of their argument as an ad hominem attack, there are governments that see only violence in certain actions that solarpunks may not see as violent at all.
The violence against the Wet’suwet’en protestors, the #NoDAPL protestors, and many, many more is sourced in how those who defend the status quo see any movement against it as violence or the threat of violence, and feel justified in retaliating with force. Never mind the centuries of colonial violence and dehumanization, the official doctrine stating that non-Christians and their lands were fair game for European state invasion, the historical and ongoing land theft and consequent forcing of people out of their homes to live in unfamiliar places, the brutal repression of language and culturally important ceremonies… I could go on, but I won’t. According to the status quo, though, those aren’t technically violent acts - or, if they could be called “violent", they happened in the past, and so somehow do not count, as if history doesn’t shape our present or memory is no object.
All that said, I’m not sure where that leaves us. I do know that solarpunk is not okay with interpersonal violence at all, nor is it okay with war, oppression, torture, subjugation…. those are all the easy violences, the ones we can immediately see, identify, and react to.
But violence against infrastructure? When the term “violence” is defined by the very forces we are actively attempting to dismantle? I don’t think that acting in defense of one’s safety is wrong: pushing back against violent infrastructure might look like blockading a road or railway. It might look like tiny houses, built in the path of a pipeline. It might look like sabotaging the machines in a warehouse. It might look like a group of people united by the belief that human life and the health of the land is more valuable than any profit that could be made from this infrastructure, any benefit it might give.
To dismantle infrastructures that perpetrate violence is to commit violence. So perhaps the aims of solarpunk could be interpreted as violent in that sense, because destroying, hindering, and otherwise f&%ing up fossil fuel infrastructure, or military weaponry, or modifying hostile architecture to make it human-friendly… that is, in the eyes of society at large, violent.
I think I’m starting to think myself in circles, however. It’s time for some input, because this is just how I’m thinking about this issue, and it’s by no means any sort of manifesto or final word on the subject; it’s necessarily restricted by my own biases and location, and I need perspective. So, what do you think?