Talk delivered by Osha Neumann on October 29, 2026, at an event sponsored by the Bay Anarchist Free School on the occasion of the publication of Osha’s latest book, “Is Hope Necessary?: Thinking about Language, Justice, and Melting Glaciers in a Time of Fear and Foreboding,” published by Street Spirit, and available from vendors of Street Spirit newspaper (“Justice News & Homeless Blues”) as well as the more usual outlets.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together in the midst of crisis that may mark the beginning of a new phase in the ancient struggle for justice and for a life worth living. That struggle has gone on for millennia. I believe, however, that this moment is unprecedented. Why?
(Deep breath)
Because never before has the extent of the devastation that could result from the crisis we are in been so extensive. Never before has the biological basis of life on this planet been threatened by the actions of one of its sentient species.
Many times prophets have claimed,“The end is nigh!” and sometimes the end has been nigh for a people or a civilization — Ishi was, in fact, the last of the Yahi people — but always there have been other people and other civilizations to walk in their footsteps and build temples from the rubble of the past.
And always nature has survived. I believe this moment is different, because now the survival of the entire human species, or at least the survival of life as we have known it and have come to expect, is at stake. The consequences of the crisis we are in may well be apocalyptic, and in some places on the planet are already apocalyptic. The apocalypse is just not evenly distributed.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around apocalypse. I vacillate; I believe and then I disbelieve. Dylan told us, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” When it comes to justice that’s true.
When Derek Chauvin placed his knee on the neck of George Floyd and choked the life out of him, the crowd that gathered on the sidewalk in front of Cup Foods didn’t need an expert to tell them what they were witnessing was cold-blooded murder. We who watched the footage filmed on their cell phones didn’t wait for experts to tell us what we were seeing before rushing out into the streets.
But to know what we are doing to nature with our collective knee on her neck, we do need a weather person. So I started reading what scientists are saying and came to the conclusion that the worst case scenario for the environment is a very real possibility as we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere and blowing past tipping points.
Every once in a while I mention my concern about the climate crisis and I overhear conversations other people are having, and it’s clear to me I’m not alone in wondering whether we’ve really fucked things up good this time. There’s a drone of fear and foreboding beneath the drumbeat of our lives. It can be heard from the street corner where Jimbow the Hobow sells Street Spirit, to the corporate boardrooms where billionaire tech bros hawk their IPOs. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in a new book describe what they call End Times Fascism. Maybe what we need is an end time anti-fascism, an end time Antifa.
I was writing about all this — the sense of doom, the climate crisis — and then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters broke out of the open-air prison that is Gaza and killed 1,200 Israelis, men, women, children, giving Israel the excuse for what followed, a genocide that continues to this day.
The genocide was an event I could not ignore. At first, I thought that by turning my attention to Gaza I was abandoning my concerns about the approach of climate catastrophe. I thought of Gaza as an interruption. I’d been asking, “How did it come to this?,” meaning the climate catastrophe. But then, as the days went by and the genocide continued, that question merged with the question: “How did it come to this, that we are witnessing a genocide and can’t stop it?” What is the connection between genocide and ecocide? When those questions merged, Gaza no longer seemed like an interruption, but an important piece of the larger question I was trying to wrap my head around.
How did it come to this?
I imagine it’s a question people ask who find themselves facing a terrible end — a firing squad, a jail cell that will never be unlocked in a lifetime, the torturer with his pliers and electrodes. “How did it come to this?” that I am here, blindfolded, tied to a stake; here, locked behind bars I cannot bend; here, facing a torturer without mercy? How far back do I go searching for an answer? Before my birth? To my childhood? To choices I’ve made? To choices I didn’t make? To circumstances beyond my control?
What is the answer to the question, How did the human race come to this — to ecocide and genocide? How far back should we go to look for answers?
And here is a question that in my mind is linked to that question:
What is it that distinguishes human beings from all other sentient beings on the planet so that we alone have amassed such power that we overwhelm all other species and can bring the whole shebang down around our heads — all at once with nuclear weapons, or as a culmination of a gradual process of changing the composition of the atmosphere by failing to halt the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in greenhouse gases?
How is it that we have become so separate from nature that we can dominate and destroy her? How are we different?
Why am I thinking about language?
As physical specimens, we are not particularly impressive. All sorts of animals are stronger, swifter, more agile. What is impressively swift and agile is our minds and what is unique about our minds is that they are full of words. With words we conceive, we think, we grasp the world. With words we can shake nature till it quivers and quakes and maybe dies. I know, whales, chimps, ravens and other animals communicate perhaps quite complex intentions and observations, but I do not believe that they have concepts and ideas. They can announce to their peers, “Dog! Here! Now!” but they lack the concept of “dog,” a concept that is embedded in a chain of increasingly abstract concepts — mammal – animal – sentient being – being — which leads away from the immediate and connects the disparate.
We humans, with all the words in our heads, are separated by those words from the world we think about, from nature. That separation involves loss, but our comparative lack of entanglement with nature enables us to control, to manage, to dominate her. It’s the source of a power we have exercised in ways that have been beneficial for us, perhaps not so much for nature, and now perhaps not so much for humanity. Our history is the record of ever-increasing domination over nature, ever increasing separation from her, ever increasing exploitation of her.
The acquisition of language may have started us on a journey that sets us apart, but the beginning of a journey does not determine its end. Language gave us power, but it did not determine what we did with that power.
We use language to make love to each other and to nature and to coo sweet nothings to the universe. “Oh the stars, the beautiful stars! Oh the magnificent ocean! Oh little butterfly, you are so gorgeous!” We don’t do that enough. Nations do not coo sweet nothings to each other; they compete for domination, as do corporations. If you catch a corporation spouting sweet nothings you can be sure it’s lying. Capitalism is not a lovefest.
Language can be used for tender holding and for pummeling. Language gave us the capacity to grasp the world and shake it until it hurts, but it did not require us to misuse that capacity. It did not require us to create institutional arrangements that are unjust and hurtful.
So why the path that leads to ecocide and genocide and not some other path?
Is there a moment in time we took a wrong turn?
Various candidates have been proposed.
The agricultural revolution of the Neolithic approximately 12,000 years ago is one of them. Anthropologists seem to agree that before then our ancestors lived in small egalitarian bands; they were hunters and gatherers; they were predators but also prey, and if they were like present-day hunters and gatherers, they viewed the trees, the rocks, the mountains, the grottoes, the streams, the rivers and meadows and the flowers, the fish and fowl, and all beings they encountered as sentient, conscious like themselves. As the story goes, with the coming of agriculture that all changed. Equality was replaced by hierarchy; nature was no longer inhabited by spirit; spirit rose up into the sky and took the form of gods overseeing and commanding all of creation. Back on earth we got kings and nobles and servants, peasants and slaves, and growing inequality in the distribution of resources.
And ever since, the many have suffered so the few can reap the benefits of their labor.
Hierarchy, exploitation, inequalities have been passed down from generation to generation for millennia, changing their form with each “advance” in civilization but not their content. In Europe we got feudalism. And then in the 18th century, we get the Industrial Revolution — more exploitation of nature, new forms of servitude, a new class that owned the new means of production, the bourgeoisie, and a new underclass, the proletariat. We got capitalism.
In the book I quote Alice Walker, “Only justice will stop a curse.” She was speaking at an antinuclear rally where she had just recited a terrible curse, collected by Zora Neale Hurston and attributed to the famous voodoo priestess Marie Laveau.
The long history of the human race is not a history in which we find justice prevailing. It is more a history of competition, domination, repression, and exploitation, with caring and justice surviving on the margins. But I believe Alice is right — only a just society will be capable of freeing nature from the curse we have placed upon her and that means only a society that does not commit genocide will save nature, and a society which perpetuates genocide will perpetuate the destruction of nature.
So, What are the chances of justice prevailing, given our long history in which justice has been an aspiration realized only most fleetingly?
That question brings us to where the book begins and ends and to where we are now today — to Trump and Netanyahu and Israel and the war with Iran.
And to Gaza.
The cage match between the Mullahs on the one hand and the Orange Monster and Bibi his blue-and-white draped co-conspirator on the other, is a cage match between the perpetrators of genocide, and those who oppose it. Palestine is at the center. The Jews are at the center. The Zionists are at the center. The fate of the world, the human world and the natural world, may depend on the outcome of events in which Gaza is the center.
We are meeting here today, at a strange in-between time. Can we end the war in West Asia? Can we undo the damage the Orange Monster has already caused and restrain him from causing more? Can we end the genocide in Gaza? Is that possible? We have many questions and few answers.
“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” So said Otto von Bismarck hundred years or so ago, and his aphorism has been repeated many times since. But how can we know what is possible?
And what if what is possible is not enough?
What if what is possible will not prevent catastrophe? What if what is possible will not relieve the suffering of the most vulnerable people of the planet, who are already suffering beyond what’s bearable? What if it will not bring justice? For Palestine? For the wretched of the earth? What if it will not be enough to save nature from damage that threatens the biological basis of all life on the planet?
In that case, the politics of the possible is not enough and we must at the same time as we practice the politics of the possible, practice the politics of the impossible. Recall the slogan of the 1968 workers/students uprising in Paris: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”
And let’s face it. The politics of the impossible is more fun — and dangerous — than the politics of the possible. It involves running in the streets, shouting “Whose streets? Our streets!” when we know in fact the streets are not ours, or will only be briefly . before fighting with the cops and getting our heads bashed in; and it involves the flagrant skewering of sacred cows, issuing manifestoes calling for the whole shebang to come tumbling down, and living as best we can lives that pre-figure the freedom possible only in a utopia, living as much as possible free from “surplus repression,” free from the demand to conform to binaries that only restrict us, sexually free and respectful of each other’s boundaries, free of the curse of white supremacy, living in a great commingling, woke as woke can be, in a manner that scandalizes many in the 99% who should be our allies, a manner that threatens the psychosocial foundations of their view of themselves.
And there’s the rub, there’s where the politics of the impossible, which is necessary to push the boundaries of the possible, nevertheless comes into contradiction with it.
And that is a contradiction we cannot theorize ourselves out of, nor do we have a practice that reconciles the poles of our politics.
So without theory, as best we can, without a clear path from here to there, we resist. We continue to resist. And the book is dedicated to those who with or without hope resist.
There is a large question mark on the cover of the book, and the title is a question:
“Is Hope Necessary?
Is there hope for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank?
I honestly don’t know.
Is there hope for stopping global warming in time to prevent environmental collapse?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that hopeful or without hope we must continue to resist. And we will.
We have no choice.
We resist.
Naked, we resist
Armored to the teeth, we resist
Backs to the wall, we resist
Hanging by our fingernails, we resist
Quietly, we resist
Loudly we resist.
With tears in our eyes, we resist
Laughing uncontrollably, we resist
Hand in hand, we resist
All alone, we resist
In the light of day, we resist
In the dark of night, we resist
With hope, we resist
Without hope, we resist
Loving and merciful
Angry and unforgiving
With no end in sight
Until death or until we really live
WE RESIST
For only if we resist — and even if we lose— do we have a chance of salvaging, for as long as possible, as much as we can, all that is threatened and all that we cherish.
And this I believe:
The Left, the big, dark, beautiful, life-affirming, freedom-loving, erotic Left will never be defeated.
We may not win, but our struggle will not end.
La luta continua. Always and forever.