The Seeds of Hope: Cultivating Utopias Amidst Chaos

By Sacha Mouzin, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford

Lebanon, as a nation state, is collapsing. 78% of people are now living below the poverty line (Al Jazeera, 2021). The lira was devalued by up to 90% and inflation reached 157% in March 2021. Beyond these numbers is a reality people are experiencing. Supermarkets are emptying. Petrol, electricity, and water are missing. Amidst the polluted black cloth that hangs above Beirut, piled up trash, gun shots, forest fires and other daily catastrophic headlines, people are exhausted. In addition to the dollar and lira, the ‘lollar’ now made its way into daily vocabulary, marking the difference between ‘fresh’ dollars and the ‘frozen money’ stuck in people’s bank accounts that can only be  withdrawn at exchange rates five times under the market value. One’s sense of agency is stripped away as every day becomes a fight for survival. Survival without the help of government institutions, imports, international aid, and social support, as everyone who can afford it is leaving.

I spent four months in Lebanon this summer, going back and forth between a farm in the mountains and Beirut where my grandma lives. Four months living with 2km queues to get a full gas tank and watching children push cars that had run out of gasoline on highways. Living with one hour of electricity each day, running every time we heard ‘jaye al kahraba’ (‘the electricity arrived’) to charge our vital electronic devices. Living with water shortages, going back to communal dish washing at the spring above the house…The scenarios of climate dystopias and collapse were playing out live before my eyes. For several weeks I roamed around streets in Beirut where I couldn’t tell whether a shop was opened or closed because of electricity shortages. Bypassed piles of trash that hadn’t been collected for weeks. I walked at night down pitch black streets with always the same questions: how did we reach this stage? How could people not succumb to despair and find a way to regain some sense of agency?

And then I started noticing: vegetable gardens on roofs, a rooster singing in the abandoned garden behind my grandma’s house, chickens living on top of a toilet manufacturing company, solar panels multiplying amongst people who could still afford them, methods to collect condensed water from AC devices to water plants on balconies.. People’s initiatives to adapt to this living hell.

The fantasy of ‘tiny houses’ built out of upcycled materials and converted vans, a longing to get away, live alone or in a small community, on a piece of land with a vegetable garden, fruit trees, some chickens. No state. No need for infrastructures. Be as autonomous, well rounded and self-sufficient as possible. In other words, realise the dream of ‘ecotopia’.

Although the term ‘ecotopia’ originated from Callenbach’s 1975 novel, these longings are far from new. Ecotopianism, a long standing part of the utopian tradition, can be traced back to Greece antiquity (Alberro, 2020). Akin to visions espoused by anarchist thinkers, ecotopianism advocates the need to create egalitarian counter spaces within the ‘now’ to resist further colonisation of life by the state or corporate capitalism (Alberro, 2020). During a literal apocalypse, as in the collapse of an existing social order, the shift towards praxis to explore alternative socio-ecological orders gives more hope than the usual ‘place-lessness of future oriented utopias’  (Alberro, 2020). The popular alternative of technocratic sci-fi utopias influenced by the modern ideals of technological progress and abundance also made little sense in a context of general black out and dysfunctioning of most technological tools whose status of ‘saviours’ got reduced to useless electricity- contingent devices on which we had become all too dependent. The defining characteristic of the resurgence of these ecotopias within radical[1] environmental groups around the world (be it eco-villages, cooperatives, climate camps, occupy movements, etc.) is the desire to experiment with different modes of relationality between living beings to move away from relations of commodification and exploitation and ethically regenerate one’s surroundings (Alberro, 2020). Although the questionings around human-non human relations wasn’t a prominent aspect in Lebanon, green anarchism’s ideas of autonomy, voluntary associations, self-organisation, mutual aid and autonomous self-governance seemed especially relevant in a context of state collapse. The feeling of alienation from the prevailing (lack of) order led to a ‘refusal’ of the ‘now’ and a longing to actively resist. As Graeber claims, the most effective way to oppose capitalism and the liberal state could be through what Paolo Virno called ‘engaged withdrawal’ (Graeber, 2004) to create enclaves where the substance of the state apparati would be pulled out and reduced to ‘window dressing’.

Such ‘engaged withdrawal’ is already happening in Lebanon. Utopias are performed, experimented. Abandoned places along the Beirut (trash) River were being reclaimed by a group afforesting the area following the Miyawaki method. Planting hundreds of trees at a time, reclaiming squares and roundabouts. ‘More than my jobs, it’s in here, planting trees that I find a sense of purpose that keeps me going in this time of crisis. Most of my savings have gone so I don’t want to spend my time feeding the same system’ mentioned the person behind this initiative. Buzuruna Juzuruna (‘our seeds our roots’) has also been enacting an ecotopia for years. They’re a collective of people preserving and reproducing heirloom seeds as well as conducting educational workshops in the Bekaa, the Lebanese agricultural valley. People from around the world come and visit as they’re associated with Longo Mai, a network of agricultural co-operatives with an anti-capitalist and egalitarian focus. For them, the search for autonomy, specifically food self-sufficiency, couldn’t be more pertinent than now, when the state is collapsing. ‘We’re constituting a living proof that alternatives can exist’. Given the  impossibility to import fertilisers and pesticides because of inflation, the lack of petrol to use heavy machinery on farms and the lack of electricity to power the irrigation system, small scale, agro-ecological farming is becoming a necessity.  More and more individual people and farmers are reaching out to get their seeds and advice. On another small scale agroecological farm, I met a group of circus performers, living in a squat outside of Beirut.  Again, they were performing their utopia outside of state control, organising parades, building toys out of the recycled bins for children left to roam in the villages as the schools were shutdown. ‘Circus is human permaculture’, they said. How can we rethink entertainment now without electricity and petrol? Parades, street theatres, street art…ephemeral forms of art that expressed people’s frustration. Walking in the mountains, I encountered an old hair dresser, who had just decided to leave town and become a shepherd, starting a milk business with his sheep. ‘Farming and animals are the most beautiful things in this world, it’s what gives us purpose despite everything’ he said. Just a few of the many examples of enacted micro-utopias, where one is allowed to hope for better worlds.

Native Awassi Sheep © Sacha Mouzin  

To believe such worlds of self-organisation, return to the land, mutual aid and autonomy are possible outside the state is an ‘act of faith’ (Graeber, 2004) but it’s the unavailability of solutions and sources of hope within the current system that make the exploration of alternative organisations and modes of relation, inspired by anarchism and radical environmental groups, a necessity. As my Lebanese friend said ‘a revolution in Lebanon is to create livable alternatives’ or as Feldman puts it ‘basically if you’re not a utopianist, you’re a schmuck’. Seeds to foster different worlds are emerging out of this crisis. Let’s hope they’ll bloom. 

[1] Radical here is used in its etymological sense, referring to the 'root’. Radical environmental groups usually believe solutions to the environmental crisis must entail the transformation of the system itself, address the ‘root’ causes of the problem, rather than engage in ‘piecemeal engineering’ (Popper, 1960). This can be opposed to ‘mainstream’ environmentalism and its will to change the current system with practices such as recycling, voting green, etc (Alberro, 2020).

References

Alberro, H. 2020. Ecotopia rising: an ecocritical analysis of radical environmental activists as ecotopian expressions amid Anthropocene decline. PhD, Nottingham Trent University

Graeber, D.  2004. Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Al Jazeera, 2021. UN urges Lebanon to implement reforms as extreme poverty grows | United Nations News.