Environmental movements always seem to be facing some kind of impasse. There are frequent attempts to delegitimize them for being too radical or to critique them for being too reformist by propping up forms of “green” capitalism that create new sets of losers. Perhaps more fundamentally, environmentalists are often lambasted for their failure to attain their goals. In Guerrilla Ecologies, John Maerhofer explains why and how environmental movements face these impasses and why they struggle to attain their goals. He posits ways of moving beyond these impasses that center our relationships with the planet that sustains us and with indigenous and other marginalized peoples. It does this through deep engagement with radical ecological ideas and practices from the late 1960s until the early 2000s.
The book hammers home how capitalism and colonialism, as all critics know, are exceedingly pervasive and bullying forces that disrupt labor-nature dynamics. They generate significant crises in their relentless quest for the generation of surplus value, dispossessing people of land and resources in the process and creating new dependencies that perpetuate poverty and suffering. As the book explains, capitalism’s green tentacles are also pervasive and dangerous. Colonial extractivism remains central to the provision of critical minerals for so-called green alternatives to fossil fuels, and corporate control of resources seems to be a central motivating factor for biotechnology firms. By drawing on a variety of case studies from across the world, the book moves us beyond a narrow climate-centric focus, encouraging us to think about land, food, and resources more generally. It rightly iterates that the struggle for eco-socialism needs to address all of capitalism’s attempts to dislocate humans from the land and its resources. This is illustrated through further case studies beyond fossil fuel resistance, including biotechnology and the industrial-scale abuse of animals.
To help environmental movements escape these impasses, Maerhofer recommends that they adopt “guerilla ecologies,” drawing on historical examples of revolutionary praxis. Guerilla ecologies adopt confrontational tactics so as to move beyond reformism. Rather than accommodating green capitalism, they embrace a grand refusal of capitalism for ecological ends. Chapter 6 offers five key action points for guerrilla ecologists: to defend indigenous peoples; to develop eco-pedagogy, which finds ways to redress problems caused by capitalism’s hijacking of nature-labor dynamics; to link resistance struggles; to use communing and eco-militancy to create regenerative economies; and to protect eco-communism from the pitfalls of shallow green reform.
Every chapter begins in an imaginative and compelling way, with either a vignette detailing eco-guerrilla tactics or with a scene from a documentary, movie, or novel. The reader will doubtless finish the book with a list of films they feel compelled to watch and a few must-read novels to add to their bookshelves. The chapters are organized across space and time, starting in the late 1960s with Eco-Commando Force ’70, Rachel Carson, Chinese Maoism, the Red Guerrillas and the Wounded Knee Occupation in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 moves to deep ecology, Edward Abbey, Judi Barri, Earth First! and the conterminous development of the green capitalist complex, which disguised itself as a force for good to deliver sustainable development. In Chapter 3, Maerhofer’s attention turns to biopiracy—that is, in this account, corporations seeking control over biocultural resources using mechanical science. He explores Indian farmers’ struggles against biotechnology, as well as modern slavery and environmental damage from critical mineral mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Throughout the book, Maerhofer emphasizes the impact of colonial capitalism on the lives of marginalized people through dislocation from their environment and its natural resources. Chapter 4, for example, looks at the Indian Maoists who fight against green extractivism. It links guerrilla ecology struggles in India with the Adivasi resistance against semi-feudal conditions, strengthening the case for bringing labor and environmental struggles into synergy. Chapter 5, in turn, looks at the relationship between war, states’ counter-terrorism actions and the marginalization of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts (ALF and ELF) through repressive anti-terrorism laws. It frames violent resistance to capitalist accumulation as a corporeal necessity—a requirement for survival. In this reckoning, capitalism itself is framed as a much more significant terrorist threat than so-called eco-terrorists, and the fight back against it is conceived as justly motivated, if not crucial.
Chapter 6 considers ways of moving beyond the paralysis within which climate catastrophe politics often suspends us. How do we provide more time and space for creativity, planetary recovery, and eventually more acceptable limits on production and consumption? The answer seems to be in shifting ourselves away from the market dependence that capitalism traps us in and reconnecting our relations to nature, labor, and survival, using the five action points I mentioned earlier. Maerhofer’s key message is that humans have “the right to recreate militant interconnectedness in the face of annihilation” (p. 173), and that this is best done through a “radical biophilia” (p. 173), by which he means a practice of connecting to nature. This is conceived of as a sense of place where we can live, recover, heal, and interconnect, where we can live independently from the “repressive technics of entropic capital” and its fake-green alternatives.
The book’s overall argument is compelling. But there remain questions about how to make guerrilla ecologies happen and how to mainstream their benefits. Maerhofer’s five action points are hardly new, and they have not yet succeeded in circumventing the power of green capitalism by implementing alternatives. I would ask, what is different at this point in human development that can help us to realize these sorts of ecological changes?” Yes, we face possible annihilation by the capitalist system, but we are also confronting new challenges, including the rise and popularity of right-wing populism and fakery from artificial intelligence that will bring further untold and currently unimaginable disruption to nature-labor dynamics. It seems a missed opportunity for the book to leave AI and anti-data center struggles out of its case studies.
One might also raise some questions about the historical starting point Maerhofer chooses (i.e., the late 1960s), especially given the frequent mentions of settler-colonialism throughout the text. While the book focuses on the Anthropocene era, the systemic disruption of the nature-labor dynamic massively precedes this era. That Guerrilla Ecologies itself draws on scholars like Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse suggests the need to look back further than the late 1960s.
As my brief synopsis illustrates, Maerhofer selects a broad range of thought-provoking cases from around the world to illuminate his key arguments. A comparativist might, however, ask questions about the case selection. It is not clear why certain examples were selected or how representative they are of broader struggles elsewhere. In places, I was left wanting to know more about the cases of resistance themselves, and less about imperialist plunder. The book establishes its case against capitalist extractivism early on, and more space might have been made to illuminate the praxis of guerrilla ecologies.
Overall, the book is a very compelling read. It provides a range of insights into historical guerrilla ecologies and offers suggestions as to how we can bring these lessons to bear in the contemporary era. It will be a useful text for scholars and students on green movements as well as for those engaged themselves in trying to prevent our planet from becoming unlivable.
