Too often, we are forced to live in a mindset of scarcity: our time feels scarce from having to work shit jobs to earn wages, our access to space has been systematically limited, from colonizers’ original theft of land from Native folks to the ongoing treatment of land as a commodity. When we talk about “the system”, we are indicting a way of life that is fundamentally premised on non-consensually taking the wealth and beauty of this world, and enclosing, commodifying, and ruining it. And making us miserable in the process.
Yet, in actuality, we still inhabit a “sacred web of abundance” (SWoA): an interdependent ecology of beings that supports life, which long predates – and lives on despite – “the system”. The more we leverage and lean into that web, the stronger we are, the less we rely on the system we want to overcome, and the more we show others that another world is indeed possible.
While perhaps too abstract for some, the SWoA concept was offered recently by friends in the Stop Cop City movement, who saw real world benefits in tapping into wild nut trees, backyard food production, reclaimed Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, and mutual aid networks that skim wealth from the excesses of consumer society. When we witness the abundance we hold and offer, within human communities but especially that of our nonhuman kin, we reframe our struggles to survive, and start to see greater possibilities.
At a time of deep depression, loneliness, poverty, and learned helplessness, the sacred web of abundance can help us focus our energies on building the new world in the shell of the old, but also shed the productivism and ecological ignorance of past radical movements. We learn about our actual places, our actual homes, and the way they hold us. We partner with our nonhuman kin to increase mutual abundance, care, and place-fulness. We leverage that abundance to feed, house, clothe and help people in other ways. And in generating an upward spiral of abundance in a shifting, disaster-prone climate, we build the resilience we need for our struggles to come.
To learn more see Defending Abundance Everywhere at crimethinc.com