Abolition Ecology is a Seed Bomb

Abstract

Throughout a semester-long introduction to the field of political ecology, our class turned to Paul Robbin's notion of the "hatchet" and the "seed" to categorize the goals of the field. Exploring this metaphor through political ecology's past and present in 2021, we felt compelled to consider its full potential within an expanded view of how racial capitalism fundamentally structures socio-environmental relations. The hatchet points to political ecology's commitment to dismantling systems of oppression embedded in racial capitalism while the seed suggests the constructive pursuit of freedom, sustainability, and care within and for destroyed, forgotten, and embattled spaces left in capitalism's wake. After reading a series of case studies, we felt that our hatchets had been well-sharpened and our eyes attuned to the structural inequities not only in the geographically diverse locales we had read about, but also in our own state, our town, and our university. As the semester would to a close, we read a series of interventions entwining the Black Radical Tradition and abolition with political ecology and found ourselves with a new sense of political ecology's ability to not only diagnose inequities and harms, but to propose and enact novel interventions. The ideas we explored through works of authors such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nik Heynen, Megan Ybarra, and Malini Ranganathan resonated with us as cutting and vital critiques, helping us to imagine abolition within situated ecologies. To expand on Robinson's "hatchet" and "seed," we propose the "seed bomb" as a useful tool for thinking about the way that abolition ecologies intervene in, and destabilize, existing political-ecological regimes.