Metabolism

Chapter 2 jumps off from an indigenous/corporate encounter in the Philippines in 2017 to which the author was party, to sketch a broad frame for the meandering investigation of these essays. At core the argument seeks to provoke imagination in the direction of perceiving our current emergency as the culmination of a 5,000-year history of settlement, in which city-states first emergent in Mesopotamia and Egypt not only begin coercively organizing labor into surplus production and ecosystems into inordinate and destructive yields of “goods,” but in the process, also simultaneously deform the “Spirit-World-haloing” of natural phenomenon into an outsized service of imperial reach. Fault lines in social relations (race, class, gender, sex, etc.) are matched by and inseparable from fracture-zones in spiritual concourse and manifestation. Tracking such in broad stroke also entails a personal “siting” of the author’s own journey and itinerary in inner city Detroit and the Great Lakes Basin, while simultaneously outlining the big structures of decimation today (AI conscription, petrocapitalism, white supremacist colonialism) as well as incipient movements of resistance attempting to push back (Standing Rock, The Poor People’s Campaign, water struggles in Detroit and Flint). Such a framing likewise entails noting more indigenous modalities of recognizing and relating to potent natural forces like oceanic waters and metallic ores in a spiritual practice of ritual and myth, as well as registering the cultural codifications attempting to name and wrestle such forces once they are crowbarred out of more natural fields of reciprocity into political duress as “weaponized” tools and monstrous infrastructure. A personal experience (with my Filipina wife) of indigenous counsel linking the healing of racialized trauma with the healing (of the environmental abuse) of the Detroit River both concludes the overview and opens the wandering (and wondering) through the menagerie of chapters to follow.