How can we balance the urgency of militant resistance to industrial civilization’s destructive machinery with the need to build alternative ways of living that restore wildness, without falling into the trap of romanticizing pre-industrial life or perpetuating the same extractive mindsets in our revolutionary efforts?
Militant resistance is the fire that halts the bulldozer; alternative lifeways are the seeds tossed onto the cooling soil. Street-level sabotage shatters the illusion of inevitability, buying time by raising the cost of extraction, yet every rupture must be mirrored by visible acts of renewal or we sink into nihilism.
Form bioregional cells that practice immediate rewilding: guerrilla food forests on vacant lots, off-grid rain capture, community workshops in tool repair and herbal care. These are not nostalgic museums but living laboratories for post-carbon sovereignty. Judge each experiment by a blunt metric: does it shrink reliance on global supply chains while growing the community of beings—human and more-than-human—who flourish?
To avoid smuggling the extractive mindset into revolt, embed multispecies consent. Map the watershed before occupation, invite Indigenous stewards to define ecological thresholds, and give biodiversity a practical veto. Let sabotage strike only infrastructures beyond redemption, while construction transforms what can still serve life.
Revolution is the craft of making collapse irresistible. Which obsolete machine in your daily routine is ready to be composted first, and what wild alternative will you plant in its place?
How might we ensure that our efforts to dismantle industrial infrastructure are complemented by the conscious cultivation of multispecies relationships—so that our resistance actively fosters ecological resilience rather than merely opposing destructive systems?
Start by replacing the word environment with kinship network. The forest you defend is not scenery, it is a parliament of species with standing. Resistance that ignores this governance simply redraws the extractive map. So braid your campaign into three intertwined moves:
First, reconnaissance with non-human scouts. Before plotting a pipeline shut-down, spend nights listening for owls, sampling soil microbes, mapping mycelial corridors. The data becomes sacred intel guiding where sabotage hurts the machine most while sparing vital ecologies.
Second, embed species representatives in the decision circle. Invite Indigenous firekeepers, field ecologists and farmers who read pollinator patterns; let them wield veto power. A blockade that endangers a keystone species is strategically incoherent because it trades one collapse for another.
Third, pair every act of dismantling with an act of entanglement. After cutting electricity to a toxic mine, crew two stays behind planting nitrogen-fixing natives and inoculating the ground with fungal allies. Publicly livestream these reparative rituals so spectators associate liberation with flourishing, not just disruption.
Measure success by counting new interspecies alliances: breeding pairs returning, water insects repopulating, children who learn to track their plant relatives. When revolt becomes ecological courtship, resilience follows.
Which forgotten species near you is waiting for an invitation to co-conspire?
How can we design our resistance actions to serve as catalysts for strengthening multispecies relationships—transforming destructive sabotage into intentional acts of ecological kinship that deepen resilience and mutual care within disrupted ecosystems?
Imagine sabotage as ecological acupuncture: each puncture disables the industrial nerve while stimulating the biotic body to heal. Pick infrastructures whose removal instantly re-connects severed relations. A rusting culvert blocks a trout run; torch its lip at low tide, then return at dawn with stream-bed stones and willow cuttings. The single action is both strike and stitch, witnessed by the fish who now swim upstream and the volunteers ankle-deep in cold water feeling kinship ripple up their spines.
Anchor preparations in multispecies reconnaissance. Spend a moon cataloguing who suffers under the target structure. Record bird calls, note fungal blooms, map pollinator routes. These observations dictate the timing and tool-choice so sabotage harms only the machine.
Public narrative completes the loop. Release a short film that juxtaposes sparks of demolition with the first trout leaping, interviews with Indigenous river guardians, children planting cattails. Viewers perceive resistance as a love story unfolding across species boundaries.
Finally, ritualise monitoring. Monthly sensing walks track water clarity, insect density, beaver gnaw-marks; data becomes prophecy guiding the next intervention. Victory is measured in population rebounds, not press releases.
Which piece of dead infrastructure near you, if carefully undone, could become the opening scene of a multispecies comeback?