Welcome to the first installment of Peak Civ, an original column by Kevin Tucker that takes on the news from an anti-civilization perspective, only on It's Going Down.

"Civilizations are artificial cultural constructions, not biological organisms, and they would be poor biological performers if we insisted on considering them as organisms." – John Bodley, The Power of Scale

The goal here is to provide an anarcho-primitivist analysis to our dumpster fire of a reality. In nearly every realm of civilized life, the world we are sold is bursting at the seams. Daily life feels like a perpetual onslaught of depressing news and calamities, that's because it is. The history of civilization is a timeline of the consolidation of power from the mouths of priests to the coding of programmers.

Our lineage, as nomadic hunter-gatherers, still shapes the way we see, interact and understand the world. That is a lineage shaped by millions of years of egalitarian, anarchistic existence. That is a lineage that defines each of us, but is perpetually being torn apart, repackaged and sold to us through the domestication process. It keeps us from existing with the greater wild community as capable beings finding our wants and needs within each other. Ultimately turning us into consumers putting our wants and needs over each other.

Anarchism needs ecology.

If we want to understand power, if we want to understand where and how inequality arises, then we need to stop granting the illusions of the power-hungry. The State exists because it has bent carrying capacity, prolonged itself (albeit temporarily) through agriculture and technological intrusions. The State had to create the concept of nature as a separate place so that it could have us believe that civilization had conquered it. That the State was no longer held to the same realities of ecology.

Anarchism needs ecology because we need to understand that the oppression and domination of the State don't start and stop with human lives.

The reality is that we are animals. And the State is a construct upheld by physical infrastructure. It is real, no doubt. But its ideological disconnect doesn't make it true. As the industrial vigor amplified the ecological consequences of agriculture, the earth and its fluid balance began to take the hit. As forest felling timber-based fuel led way to coal mining and on to fossil fuels and nuclear power, that wound opens wider. As communities are broken down into laborers turned into slaves, that pain feels more personal.

As we are learning, we are not exempt from that wound. While the first flood of climate refugees face increasingly hostile borders and rampant xenophobia, it is clear that the fate of humanity is not separate from the fate of the wild world. Deny though we might, it doesn't stop reality.

Anarchism needs ecology because we need to understand that the oppression and domination of the State don't start and stop with human lives. If we want to understand civilization, the states that define it and the agriculture that underpins it, then we need to understand how biological organisms function. Civilization is not living, but it is parasitic. It exists on a finite planet, it bleeds its resources and communities, but it cannot exist without them. If we want to take on civilization, the State or any form of political power, then we need to see it in the way it refuses to acknowledge: an organization built upon the very ecology it denies.

The weakness of political power lies in seeing it outside of its own narrative. If you want to solve a crime, you follow the money. If you want to stop the powerful, you follow the fuel. We are all connected: our past, our present, our futures, and our fate.

Conversely, ecology needs anarchism.

Ecologists, biologists, and environmentalists can equally feed into the notion of nature as an abstraction. Many are willing to recognize that we too are animals, but they forget that we can do anything about it. Absorbed by political and corporate entities, they are fighting for an expansion of rights, for value within the terms of the State. The default becomes relying on NGOs or research that is either a corporate tax or, worse, the philanthropists' tithe.

From this view, the feed of disturbing news feels no less daunting. It might feel a little more frightening. But within that, there's the reminder that we are never alone in this.

The narratives of political power become the baseline understanding for humanity and the world. Biologists tend to regurgitate myths of domination and subservience within the wild to justify ourselves with our own captivity. They seek to anthropomorphize the wild to universalize our political dynamics so that even in the wild there is no escape. Socio-biologists, social Darwinists: narratives like Richard Dawkin's "selfish gene" seek to naturalize the historical creation that is civilization.

A wave of ecologists and ethologists have broken and been