Ecoanarchism in Three Simple Principles

6th October 2025

1. The world is insane.

We live in a world where just nine men - the leaders of the nuclear-armed states - have the power to launch weapons that could kill every one of their 8.3 billion fellow humans and, quite possibly, destroy every other living thing on the planet. Simultaneously, our global civilisation now extracts, processes and disposes of so much natural material that the ecosystems that sustain the life of our species and countless others are breaking down at increasing speed. It is quite plainly a form of insanity that such a self-destructive situation has been allowed to emerge. The fact that it is tolerated even as the risks to the planet’s survival accelerate reveals that the self-destructive madness has taken a profound hold over humanity.

2. Hierarchy is the root cause of the insanity.

The technologies behind the insanity may be relatively new but the root cause is not. Around 5,000 years ago, the way human society was organised began to shift. The small-scale, largely egalitarian communities that had been the bedrock of human life for 300,000 years were gradually replaced by sustained hierarchical, larger-scale settlements built around agriculture. The elites at the top of these hierarchies needed two things above all else. Firstly, evermore sophisticated weapons and armies to fight their competitors, seize land, and control their own populations through violence. Secondly, ever greater resources to buy-off at least some of their subjects, to fund their wars and empire building, and to feed their appetite for monuments, temples, palaces and luxury goods. The violent, competitive, resource-hungry dynamic set in train by the emergence of these ‘goliaths’ (as the author Luke Kemp calls them) has intensified over the last five millennia to the point where weapons are now so powerful and resource extraction so extensive that the hierarchical elites that run the world today are putting all life on earth at risk. 

3. The solution to the insanity is to dismantle hierarchy.

Over the millennia, many have claimed to be able to deliver the world from the profound problems created by goliaths. We have been told, and still are, to follow countless religious leaders, military figures, political parties, and revolutionary groups - all promising to usher in a new era of peace and equality. Each one has failed because they all sought hierarchical power for themselves. They assumed that the world’s problems could be solved if only the right people with the right ideas were in control. They ignored the fact that being in control has its own dynamic that irresistibly requires powerful weapons and huge resources no matter how good your intentions or pure your ideology. This is why the world’s egalitarian religions, revolutions and parties have all ultimately ended up becoming the very thing they claimed to be overthrowing. The lesson is clear: if we want to save humanity and the planet from its own self-destruction, we don’t need to replace one hierarchical elite with another, we need to dismantle hierarchy itself.

How we do that dismantling is a subject for another blog. But the bottom line is this. Goliaths, as Luke Kemp shows, are prone to collapse particularly when they become highly unequal and face environmental stress. As such, our current globe-spanning goliath is showing early signs of collapse as super-wealthy elites increasingly choose state oppression and manipulation to keep them in power in the face of growing popular disaffection; and as global heating and other environmental crises interfere with the normal workings of the world economy. 

The collapse will not happen suddenly (unless nuclear war occurs), nor will it happen evenly and identically in every part of the world. But ecoanarchists everywhere need to be building and promoting the non-hierarchical alternatives here and now ready to fill the voids left by dissolving hierarchies. This is what the Zapatistas did in 1994 as the Mexican elites lost their grip on the Chiapas region of the country; and it is what the Kurds of Rojava did in 2016 as the state collapsed in the north east of Syria. These two examples can seem marginal right now but they chart what may be an increasingly important, non-hierarchical course out of the insanity of a world bent on self-destruction and which is looking ever more fragile.