REPORT: NATIONAL-ANARCHIST MOVEMENT CONFERENCE (DAY ONE)

by Keith Preston

Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.

On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.

The conference was held at a hotel in Madrid, and while no leftist disrupters were present, on the morning the conference began a group of Madrid police officers showed up at the hotel. The officers subsequently followed the organizers to a pre-arranged meeting point where attendees were in the process of arriving.  Although I was not personally present when this incident occurred, I am told the officers began asking the arrivals for identification, almost comically claiming “anti-terrorism” as a motivation. Apparently, Big Brother is indeed always watching. However, the situation was resolved and the conference continued without further difficulty.

The conference attendees represented a range of national origins, including those from England, the United States, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Finland and Brazil. While the number of attendees was relatively small compared to other conferences where I have spoken, this was an extraordinary event considering that it was the first ever of its kind. I became interested in National-Anarchism shortly after the movement’s inception in the late 1990s. I had been involved with anarchist and anti-state movements for over a decade previously, and normally found movements of these kinds to be less than satisfactory in terms of both theory and action. The mainstream of the international anarchist movement was and continues to be oriented towards ordinary center-left “social justice” concerns. These may be good causes, or at least acceptable from an anti-authoritarian perspective. Yet there is little about most of this which is actually subversive to the state, or which threatens the rising global capitalist empire. There is also a parallel “anarcho-capitalist” movement which champions “free market” economic theory within a stateless context. While many in this milieu are adamant, sincere and admirable defenders of individual liberty, it is also true that libertarianism of this kind often veers off into bourgeois conservatism, centrist neoliberalism, or the social leftism of the mainstream anarchists, thereby undermining its subversive potential. National-Anarchism has always seemed to be a tendency that “puts the horse before the cart.”

If I had to come up with a working definition of National-Anarchism, I’d say it’s a philosophy that favors stateless societies based on autonomous, voluntary communities comprised of freely associating individuals and groups, with an orientation towards decentralized, pluralistic particularism, human scale institutions, mutual aid, an infinite array of individual and collective identities, and self-determination for everyone. A nation is this context simply means a common ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual or lifestyle affiliation, not a national state or national chauvinism. The same way indigenous people around the world often think of themselves as a nation (Kurdish nation, Sioux nation, Lakota nation, Ibo nation, Yazidi nation, etc.) even though few if any of these have states of their own. And a “nation” in this context doesn’t have to be an ethnic group. Presumably it could be Star Trek or Star Wars freaks or fans of football teams.

It was consequently a pleasure to finally meet in person the founder of the National-Anarchist Movement, Troy Southgate, whom I had known only online for 15 years, and to once again meet Welf Herfurth, whom I had previously met at a Washington, D.C. conference in 2011.

Welf Herfurth and Troy Southgate

It was also quite interesting to meet a range of other individuals involved with N-A, whom I had previously known only online, by reputation, or by a pseudonym in some instances. One of the more amusing thoughts that occurred to me during the course of the conference was the fact that despite the “fascist” label that is given to N-A by its enemies, a person that walked into the conference would immediately know they were at an anarchist gathering, and not a fascist one, based on the appearances of the attendees, and the ideas that were being discussed. The central focus of the conference was a range of presentations on some particular aspect of National-Anarchist thought, or exploring National-Anarchist criticisms of the system.

Adam Ormes: "Perspectives on Ancestral Health"

The first speaker on the morning of June 17 was Adam Ormes from England who spoke on the topic of “ancestral health.” He described how our human ancestors have been subjected or subjected themselves to a number of significant adaptations concerning their diet, environment, and lifestyle since Paleolithic times, and that it’s highly debatable as to whether many of these adaptations have been beneficial from the perspective of health. A central focus of Adam’s presentation was the impact of modern dietary practices on human health, and how aspects of the modern diet may actually have a retrograde impact on human physical development. In support of his arguments, Adam referred to the studies conducted in the early 20th century by Dr. Weston Price, an American dentist that was intrigued by the healthier teeth and better developed facial structures of people in societies where industrial dietary practices had yet to be adopted. Price concluded from his studies that the excessive consumption of processed sugar, flour, and vegetable oils has a dysgenic effect on human physiological development.

Weston Price’s research is only one example of the dramatic effects of such changes; degeneration seemingly likewise occurred on a monumental level with the advent of agriculture, and is now occurring once again on numerous fronts exponentially. What is significant about this process in terms of human evolution is that both degeneration and regeneration are possible trajectories, depending on the decisions that humans make, both individually and collectively. The talk examined significant factors that have been at play over the ages, focusing in particular on how different cultures have treated their soils, and how this in turn has informed their long-term viability.

With regards to human dietary choices, Adam proposed this prism through which to consider the question of “what is good for you”:

1. Ancestral adaptation: Were your ancestors eating these foods, and are you adapted in such a way as to be able to make use of them?
2. Soil, plant & animal conditions where food was grown: How are the soil nutrient levels where the food was produced? How have the plants and animals been bred and cared for? Have toxins entered the food chain?
3. Processing: Have the foods been processed in a way that preserves or destroys nutrients / increases or decreases digestibility?

Further considerations included the question of how to adopt the trajectory of regeneration through detoxification, “biohacking” (e.g. the Wim Hof method), and remineralizing our soils with permaculture practices, along with the necessity of a community effort in order for these goals to be attained in time – before humans are reduced to a pale shadow of their potential.

To be sure, dietary health is an issue of concern in modern industrial societies. While mass starvation of the kind that often plagued pre-industrial societies is less common in modernity, newer health concerns have certainly emerged due to the normalized consumption of industrially processed food. An obvious example is the epidemic of obesity in the United States, particularly among the lower classes, which is no doubt a result of American fast food and junk food culture. This phenomenon is now being exported to nations such as Japan which are traditionally known for their healthy diets and long life expectancy. The Japanese are now experiencing a dramatic rise in rates of obesity as well. Another issue is the cancer epidemic of modern societies. For example, nearly forty percent of Americans will develop cancer at some point in their lives, and dietary practices such as the consumption of processed foods are a likely contributing factor to this as well. Adam also mentioned the benefits he has experienced from adopting what is commonly called the ‘paleo’ or ‘keto’ diet – an effort to mimic the dietary practices of hunter-gatherer peoples – something he feels has helped him to significantly improve his cognitive abilities.

Peter Topfer: "The Foundations of German National-Anarchism"

The second speaker was Peter Topfer, whose life story I found to be quite fascinating. Peter explained the way he found National-Anarchism and what it means to him. He was born and raised in East Germany, and described how he became a Maoist in his teens much to the disdain of his parents, coaches, and authority figures in the DDR. In the mid-1980s he became interested in the political right, but found the right-wing to be too rigid, and not particularly satisfying or interesting. At one point he was involved in a collaborative effort with the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany during the 1980s. On another occasion, he was involved in the development of the QUERFRONT ("cross front") left/right collaboration in Germany as well. During a time of personal crisis he was faced with the questions of who am I, what do I want, and how do I want to live? In 1995, he heard of Hans Cany who promoted the idea of National-Anarchism in France. Peter found this to be a very interesting concept as he had previously encountered the ideas of the National-Marxist Reinhold Oberlercher, without actually becoming a National-Marxist or a National-Anarchist.

Peter Topfer

Thinking that his rightward tendencies had made him "too hard" on a personal level, Peter began making his way back than to the left in the sense of embracing more softness and flexibility. This led him to finally create his own conception of National-Anarchism, which Peter considered to be a very libertarian and emancipatory position, and related to the pursuit of personal truth, together with an affirmation of nation, ethnicity, community, culture and tradition. He considers this personal evolutionary process to be a natural and personal way of embracing National-Anarchism, or more precisely Neo-National-Anarchism, because in the 1920s there had already been National-Anarchists such as Helmut Franke. Peter subsequently contacted Hans Cany in France, and not just as somebody interested in National-Anarchism but as a National-Anarchist comrade. It was at this point that he learned from Hans that someone else had initiated a very comparable tendency at the same time, and established a new position that he called also National-Anarchism. That was Troy Southgate in England.

Peter's version of National-Anarchism is closely related to self-emancipation. As long as we are not self-emancipated in the Stirnerian sense, he says, we are not really alive and have no real motivation to live. Our will to live, to survive and to assert ourselves is lost deep inside of us. He integrated not only the pro-national and pro-ethnic standpoints of the Right into his Weltanschauung, but also the most radical self-emancipatory theories and psychotherapeutic techniques developed from the theories and practices of Wilhelm Reich and Arthur Janov, both of whom originated from the radical Left.

After discovering the limitations of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy while at Janov's institute in Paris, Peter began to develop his own theory and practice that he called "Deep Truthing." Peter describes himself as a "post-intellectual" who has no interest in theories and prefers to focus on life and survival, believing that theories are no good unless they have a practical application, but he says that the crucial point of human history and evolution is the Neolithic Revolution. Everything changed at that point.

The Neolithic Revolution

Ever since, we have had all of the gifts of civilization but also its problems: war, mass murder, violence, sickness, alienation, etc. And we are divided between affirmation and criticism of the post-Neolithic world. Peter says he is not an intellectual except for when seeking understanding he has to fall back on, resort to, or to recourse to something intellectual. He says this is important because National-Anarchism should be post-intellectual, at least in his own-understanding or in his version of National-Anarchism, in order to distinguish it from other philosophies. Intellectuality is the old world. Now, National-Anarchism proposes to go in new ways which are the indeed old ways from before the Neolithic revolution when there was no intellectualism.

Peter says that on the one hand we have the historic example of people who discovered wondrously how to survive in the desert (regions that were green and fertile until the desert appeared). They discovered that if they put seeds in the soil and watered them, there will be plants emerging some months later. While some primitive peoples remained sedentary, others handled the new situation of desertification in an extremely violent way. They hijacked and conquered the lands which had not become deserts. Peter points out that conquest of this kind can occur not only by means of violence as was the case with the Huns, the Mongols, and other marauding groups, but also by means of intelligence, deception, and manipulation. Just as people are able to learning how to breed animals and use them for their own purposes, so are they also able to use other human beings for their own purposes as well.  For them, other human beings are just cattle.

Ideology can be a tool of manipulation of this kind. Peter noted that at the conference other participants and debaters denounced "totalitarian humanism" (as term popularized by yours truly as a synonym for the modern phenomena of "political correctness," "social justice warriors," the antifa, authoritarian progressives, and other parallel or overlapping trends) but Peter thinks this concept of totalitarian humanism is not radical enough. Instead, he argues that humanism is always totalitarian, and that there is no good humanism.

The proponents of humanism ultimately engage in hypocrisy. An example is the Zionists, which preach humanism and universalism to others. Humanism insists that all that matters is the global citizen, while the Zionists practice ethno-nationalism and dismissing outsiders as goyim. Consequently, humanism used in this context merely becomes a weapon of Jewish ethnocentrism and supremacy. Peter points out that many people are fixated on Islam and criticize the Islamic culture as the "religion from the desert," noting that even the Jewish Defense League makes alliances with Odinists against the Muslims nowadays. But he argues that while Islamism is a threat, it is far more acceptable to criticize Islamism than to criticize Zionism and the Jewish ethnocentrism that it represents, and which exercises a much greater influence.

Gaza

Humanism becomes imperialistic and seeks to dominate other peoples by destroying their group identity, and the means towards this end are humanism and universalism. This is done by means of corrupting the indigenous intelligentsia and making them herders of the defeated peoples.

The ambition of humanism is to transform all kinds of human beings with vastly different culture into humans, regardless of language, customs, mentality, and other specificities into a polymorphous mass with only "culture" which will not be a culture because it is not necessary for slaves to have a culture. The main ideological weapon of the humanists is to preach universalism while staying for themselves extremely particularist. We are all equal, they say, but they are more equal than others. They wage war by means of ideas that are placed in the heads of other peoples (with ideas assuming the same role as seeds), a way that is much more effective than other conquerors who were more violent but not as successful in the end.

These have been among the changes that the Neolithic Revolution has brought to the external, political world. But the Neolithic Revolution, Peter says, also brought with it a break in the human psyche, and a huge change of the inner world. In the same way and at the same time that people discovered they can breed animals and plants they also discovered their own reproductive capabilities. When a seed is placed into a woman’s womb, there will be a child in nine months. Until the Neolithic Revolution fatherhood, was not known and had no importance. The "patristic" structure was born and its first victim was the man who had to be the "father." This became the main reason for the higher levels of stress experienced by males with their life expectancy being less than women.

The consequence of civilization is that people began to breed not only cattle and plants but human beings. They began to consciously reproduce and sexuality developed a purpose. This purpose was the utilization of their offspring as labor and so from the beginning of their lives children were subjected to involuntary servitude. This became the first and deepest form of child abuse. Until the Neolithic Revolution, a child was just himself or herself. Now, children had to become slaves to their breeders. They were not themselves anymore, and this was the beginning of the alienation. Peter says one of the main goals of National-Anarchism as he defines it is to reverse this process of conquest, subjugation, and alienation. He observes that, “We should become ourselves again (the goal of Deep Truthing) and let our children develop themselves freely so they can stay themselves. They should not live for others and others’ purposes, just for themselves and their community.”

Thom Forester: "Green Independence on the Welsh Borders"

Thom Forester discussed his activism in England, involving a range of different fronts, and the possibilities that he has observed for the construction of alliances against the global capitalist empire, based on his experiences with people of different cultural, geographical and political backgrounds. Thom described how his family background included a long tradition of land-rights struggles and involvement in local politics. Among the issues that he has been involved with include ecological and sustainability concerns, and efforts to develop self-sufficient communities. Thom overlapped the unique history, geology, culture, and narratives of the place he was born with his own journey, and how he became interested in the controversial subjects of regional independence and the ultimate taboo of desiring the preserve the "ethno-sphere."

His talk explored the possible lessons separatists and N-A's can learn from the thousand years of land-rights struggles that gave birth to the regional identity of the Forest of Dean, a land between two rivers on the Welsh borders, with a long history of independence and resistance to enclosures. Thom is the founder of the "Wum Land Party," a fledgling independence movement that campaigns for a "progressive devolution" from London, for the Forest of Dean. More information can be found about the Wum Land Party, here… http://wum.land

Wum Land

Describing how he became interested in regional identity and culture, Thom talked about growing up between two opposing cultural forces, that of the Forest’ traditional culture and way-of-life, and that of encroaching modernity. Sharing some of the stories of the place he grew up, he explored the "song-lines" of inter-connectedness between place and people through time and how through his Grandfathers involvement in local happenings and controversies, he caught a glimpse of what a truly resilient local culture and identity once looked like. The narratives that wove the community together, and he saw how that had been undermined by television and synthetic popular culture.

Thom has been a land rights 'activist' and was involved in establishing several anarchist land occupations in and around the Forest of Dean, including re-opening an environmental education centre after the local authority decided to sell it off, on the open market. He talked about his efforts to create self-sufficient eco-villages and productive 'community farms'; and how this process led to his realization of the importance of shared narratives, of shared culture- rather than just ideology- as the glue that holds true community together, binding the polarities of ideology with a rooted narrative of shared land and history. Thom spoke of his attempts to construct alliances against the global capitalist empire, based on his experiences with people of different cultural, geographical and political backgrounds. These concerns have led towards efforts to develop alliances between National-Anarchists and the English freeman movement (roughly the equivalent of the US “sovereign citizens”), and between members of local communities and left-anarchists (who were amusingly and predictably less than enamoured with the perceived “racism and sexism” of the locals).

Thom talked about the architecture of community, about the sources of inspiration we have to draw from, when trying to envision what national-anarchist communities could look like, structurally. He touched on the subject of bio-mimicry, the possibility of looking at other biological systems as a framework, or way of interpreting the architecture of community. He talked about permeability of ideas and of people; the importance of 'selectively permeable membranes' for preserving diversity in both the eco-sphere and the ethno-sphere’; and how he sees regional culture/ economy as essential for achieving ecological harmony. He talked about the regional language of the Forest of Dean - a mixture of pre-Shakespearian old English on the Anglo-Saxon derivative, Cymraeg (Welsh) and archaic mining slang, and postulated the central role of  regional languages, as 'ways of seeing the world' in preserving the Earth's biodiversity noting that "70% of the world’s languages are found within the planet’s biodiversity hotspots… Out of 6,900 or more languages spoken on Earth, more than 4,800 occurred in regions containing high biodiversity." Describing how regional culture and economy works to diffuse our various cultural ‘dis-harmonies’, ensuring that when a culture fails, it doesn’t take the entire world down with it.

One of Thom's most intriguing ideas was his proposal for an "International Secessionary Movement" that would work to cultivate a federation of global independence movements similar to the Communist and Anarchist Internationals of past times, and which would be oriented towards the cultivation of a revolutionary challenge to the hegemony of global capitalism. He proposed that for the separatist movement to be successful in dismantling the globalists' "New World Order" some kind of 'international' organization will be needed as a form of protection, a counter-balance to globalism, whilst functioning to support the emergence of more human-scale systems of organization (micro-nations) by offering a non-coercive, platform for sharing ideas and resources between groups as-well-as for dealing with conflict resolution, via free-participation/ delegation of that role by those concerned.

Such an approach would help resolve the "archaic revival" problem of technology involving differentials in power, and the question of how to ensure more technologically advanced groups respect the sovereignty of others, including more 'traditional' / primal societies. This is an essential concern as the technological divide grows between those whose cultures choose to diverge from the ravages of modern technology, focusing on more the organic, agrarian 'life-ways' so essential for regenerating the biosphere and those whose cultures continue to embrace technological expansion. The international level of organization Thom envisions would be a decentralized, non-coercive entity that campaigns for the right of all peoples, to pursue their own political, economic and cultural destiny. Thom closed his talk with a request for anyone interested in building a decentralised communication and information service platform to assist the innumerable independence campaigns, to contact him on the address below.

Email: contact@ism.land
Separatists of the world, unite!

Kostas Exarchos: "Anarchy against Politics"

Kostas Exarchos has for several years been a writer, editor, musician and activist in the Greek movement. His presentation described the Greeks’ terrible economic situation, the consequent rise of both the far right and far left in Greek politics, and the intense conflicts that are presently occurring in Greece between Communists on the far left, Golden Dawn on the far right, and anarchists.

An important aspect of Kostas' presentation was his criticisms of parliamentary democracy, and its failure both as a means of effectively representing public interests and concerns, and effectively addressing contemporary crises. This is perhaps one of the most important criticisms of modern states that anarchists, of any tendency, needs to advance. An overwhelming majority, perhaps a super-majority, of people in contemporary liberal democracies, which now represent nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations, regard liberal democracy as the only legitimate kind of state. The number of people who take seriously forms of government such as an absolute monarchy, a hereditary aristocracy, an oligarchy with no pretensions of popular accountability, theocracy, military dictatorship, fascism or communism is comparatively extremely small. It is only liberal democracy that continues, for the most part, to maintain an aura of legitimacy. Therefore, while it is true that the anarchist struggle is a struggle against states generally on sufficiently abstract level, on a practical level the anarchist struggle in the twenty-first century is a essentially a struggle against liberal parliamentary states.

Keith Preston: "Anarchism and the History of Anti-Imperialist Struggles"

In my own presentation, I attempted to dispel the myth that anarchism is a fringe or marginal ideology, and presented evidence that anarchism has a vast of array of prototypes in ancient philosophy, in most of the traditional religions, and in a range of traditional, indigenous or pre-modern societies. Anarchistic ideology, philosophy, and practice have always had left-wing and right-wing dimensions since the advent of modern anarchist tendencies during the time of the Enlightenment. Classical anarchist movements from the 19th and early 20th century were at the forefront of anti-imperialist struggles long before Marxists developed any kind of serious anti-imperialist analysis of their own. Drawing on the work of both classical anarchists as well as contemporary post-colonial anarchist theorists, I also explained how anarchists understood the difference between the idea of a nation as an organic cultural formation, and the nation-state as a political entity.

Keith Preston

I also described how both anti-imperialist and anti-state struggles over the course of the past century have been extraordinary successful in many way leading to the advancement of humanity, but how a new threat has emerged in the form of the global capitalist empire. Drawing on the work of military historians and fourth generation warfare theorists, I explained how both the nation-state system and the state itself are in the process of breaking down on a global scale, and how these are being challenged by a virtually infinite array of non-state actors to whom people around the world are transferring their loyalties. However, I pointed out that the struggle against imperialism is not enough by itself, as the Marxist co-option of anti-imperialist movements in Cold War period indicates. Instead, anti-imperialism is merely an aspect of a wider popular emancipatory struggle with which anarchism is the most compatible political outlook.

Lastly, I attempted to convey the vastness of anarchist thought, and point out a considerable number of trends which indicate the 21st century will be the century of anarchism just as the 20th century was the century of totalitarianism.

Piercarlo Bormida: "Ecological Society and Sustainable National-Anarchist Communities"

Piercarlo Bormida, a Piedmontese (Northwest Italy) esotericist electronic musician, closed the first day of the conference with an extensive and highly detailed discussion of the issue of ecological sustainability. After providing an overview of the present ecological crisis and its relationship to the rise of modern systems of industrial production, Piercarlo described a range of possible alternatives involving more decentralized systems of production that would be capable of providing for human needs, while avoiding the ecological devastation that is associated with contemporary industrial society.

One of the principal considerations involves the need for substitute energy sources beyond those derived from fossil fuels, natural gas, or nuclear power, each of which presents unique dangers to human beings or the environment, and the cultivation of alternatives such as biofuels, solar power, wind, biomass, and geothermal energy. The inadequacy of centralized states to effectively address ecological concerns was also discussed, in part by an acknowledgement of the fate of former Soviet satellite nations when the Soviet Union collapsed.

"After the collapse of the USSR, North Korea and Cuba found themselves without oil or agricultural aid. North Korea, with its centralized and statist structure, has faced a famine that has caused millions of deaths. Cuba, liberalizing agriculture, maximizing agricultural land (on roofs, palaces, parks, abandoned land, etc.) and using permaculture techniques has succeeded not only in allowing the population to survive, but also in increasing the production and quality of food."

Urban farming in Havana, Cuba.

Much of the presentation dealt with such issues as how small, self-sufficient communities could provide for their own needs, concerning necessities like water, feeding, health and hygiene, energy, education, defense, and social life. There was also a discussion of the possible solutions offered by National-Anarchism to the problems involving ethnic conflict that are endemic to multicultural societies.

"The overwhelming, incontrovertible, widespread return of a series of racial issues is undeniable, especially in large urban agglomerations; National-anarchist communities can be the positive answer to the problem. Tribal and ethnic understanding must not be a taboo, as it should not be a preconception. As we have already said elsewhere, the community can be based on any principle of belonging (food choice, sexual orientation, religion, etc.), but in this context, I would like to focus on ethnicity, obviously far from being labeled as "racist."

Ethnicity is a more concrete and less abstract concept than race. It is historical, dynamic, complex, and rich: it encloses culture and nature, genetics and environment, myths and destiny. Ethnicities are coached by common history and passions, ways to feel and see the world, affinity with blood and ties to your own land. Each and every one belongs to an ethnic group and it belongs to us. There are micro-ethnicities and macro- ethnicities, almost like a system of Chinese boxes (e.g. Tyrolean and German). The creation of differentiated ethnic-cultural communities, separate national anarchist communities, should among other things allow people who live there to interact, to know each other, to create ever-widespread ties, following their own rhythms and customs, inverting the processes of mutual extradition so widespread in mass civilization.

The creation of micro-communities would be very profitable even in contexts free from ethnic tensions. In fact, the process of progressive loosening of interpersonal bonds is a tremendous problem, which makes the megalopolis unobtrusive, leading to the mechanization of social relationships and hence to an increase of violence typical of those environments which are populated by anonymous subjects, disconnected from each other and from the wider context."

Piercarlo presented a social and political vision that in many ways synthesized the ideas of Otto Strasser with those of Murray Bookchin.

"The thought of ​​Otto Strasser conveys the idea perfectly: Volk, the people who form the community, must be based on a peasant middle class capable of expressing every other social and intellectual activity: worker-peasant, intellectual-peasant, soldier-farmer. Personally, I am fascinated by medieval monastic-chivalrous communities, I believe that the normalization of the planet must be fought by small and self-centered communities spiritually and economically, strongly cohesive with common goal.

I agree with Murray Bookchin when he says that most of our ecological problems have their roots in social problems, and the current disunity between humanity and nature can be traced essentially to social conflicts. I do not think there can be balance between humanity and nature unless there is a new equilibrium within society. It is necessary to honestly address the fact that if we do not transform society in a libertarian sense, the attitudes and institutions that make us mad at the ecological disaster will continue to operate despite all the efforts that can be devoted to reform the dominant social system. The ecological implications of these systems are even more important than their economic determinations, as they involve the destruction of ecological values ​​such as complementarity, mutual support, sense of limitation, a deep sense of community, and an organic conception based on unity in diversity."

Also included in Piercarlo’s presentation was an extensive discussion involving statistical analysis of the specific ecological harms that are presently being generated by industrial capitalism, including issues of human health, waste of resources and inefficiency, pollution related to agricultural production, soil degradation, deforestation, chemical pollution, energy and water consumption, waste disposal, global warming, and acid rain, along with ethical concerns involving animal abuse and the extermination of animal species. The sum total of the ideas presented made for a very comprehensive overview of present day ecological problems, their origins, and possible methods of addressing and correcting these difficulties.

This ended the first day.