Building Utopias in Anhalterra - Part I.
Mika Ansel sits on a low stone ledge in Anhalterra's community garden. I see terraces of herbs and beans stepping down toward a clear lake that once was an open-pit mine. Sun glints off the water, it is midday. Fae wear work-stained overalls and a clipped badge from the Utopia Planning Council on "Fossil Legacies and Energy Presents". Fae jot notes on rotation schedules when I arrive, but then stops.
Charlotte: Okay. Hello. It's the 7th of August, 2052. We are recording live from the sunny garden at Anhalterra commune. I'm Charlotte and I will interview Mika, one of the founding members of Anhalterra. Fae work in the Utopia Planning Council on "Fossil Legacies and Energy Presents". Are you ready?
Mika: Yes.
Charlotte: You can introduce yourself first.
Mika: Yeah. I am Mika. I knew you wanted to come to talk to me and at the moment I don't have any shift. So I can talk to you. I just have to say that I am quite young. So maybe it's easier to talk about how things are organized at the moment, but I can try to do my best to answer all questions.
Charlotte: That sounds amazing. Okay. First of all, maybe let's talk about the energy consumption here in the commune right now. How much electricity do you consume today, and what are the habits?
Mika: We want to make sure we take responsibility- everyone should, we think. And we want to use electricity so that everyone can live a good life within a shared boundary. So we calculate how much everyone can use, and of course we do it on a collective level, so it's not individual, it is not about pointing fingers. Because if we work together, we can use less electricity as well. That's why we are in the commune, and we cook together and stuff, to make sure we don't use more than we need. But back in the day, I think in the 2020s, they thought they were already thinking about these things, and I think they called it "degrowth." But it was considered like, "oh, we have to live a very poor life." But that's not really the case if you just share well. That's what we found out.
Charlotte: Wow! So basically, this was before my time, but I think what you are saying right now, it really seems like the electricity sources, or the sources of energy, are mainly wind and solar. We all know from the history books that there have been quite severe uprisings in South America for some rare earths, so maybe you can talk about this a little bit more.
Mika: So essentially, back in the 20s, we still thought that we would not really need to change anything about our energy consumption, because we could simply supply all of it with wind and solar in the future. But then, in 2030, when the BRICS countries installed a massive halt on exports of rare earths in order to convince countries, states, and communities in the Global North to make up for the extractivism and colonization that had happened in the century before, and to at least some extent repay that with reparations, this really distorted all the plans that, as my parents tell me, our communities had for using wind and solar power, because these rare earths like neodymium or lithium are crucial for providing these energy sources. It really came as a shock to the states, and there were uprisings in the Global North as a consequence, because it completely distorted the plan. At first, of course, the extractive industries were trying to push for extending extraction, but when it became clear, at the higher international level, that it could not continue like this, we also slowly started adjusting our energy use practices to enable similar energy budgets for everyone on Earth.
Charlotte: Thank you. I'm learning a lot right now. And it seems like this global movement really had a success. Yeah, relatedly, I was thinking about the issue of surface healing, given that we are in what was formerly known as Germany, and especially in the commune of Anhalterra. How do you deal with the problem of Asphalt?
Mika: The problem, as it used to be, was that we ignored the need for permeable ground. A 'membrane' that lets the earth breathe - between soil and air, instead of sealing it under hard surfaces. They knew back in the 2020s that it was a problem, but they did not really care about it. The interests of the big companies, the fossil fuel companies, went for planetary considerations. So, after the revolts happened, there was a lot of tearing up of surfaces that had been put there as barriers, so they had to be removed. There was a lot of tearing up of what had formerly been asphalt paths where people had driven their private cars. It is just insane that there used to be hundreds of square kilometers of soil covered by asphalt so people could drive their private fossil fuel burning two ton vehicles from A to B, which is obviously unnecessary if you have a functioning train system, like now. Within the city there is a higher density of surface sealing. Even then, people looked closely at their specific context and made sure to tear up more backyards that had been closed, and the removal of the car freed up so much space that could then actually be torn up and turned into public pathways, and at times these could be treated instead with paving stones, which are better for the permeability of rainwater. And yes, the abolishing of the private car was the biggest step toward that, and the subsequent reuse, partial reuse, and partial destruction of former car centric infrastructure.
Charlotte: Thank you. I think this is a great summary of everything that had to go, and I think one thing that has to be added, and what has been given more attention over the last twenty years, is greening cities and the role of urban gardens and trees. Maybe you can say more about that?
Mika: Yeah, a big way to reduce carbon emissions is localized farming, and, building on my previous point, breaking up the asphalt freed up a lot of space for urban farming. We now live in a community with a high-density population because of climate refugees, so we have also had a lot of infrastructure development. We build farms around the buildings and on top of the buildings, and, by removing asphalt, we help regulate the ecosystem and weather patterns. We are also able to bring down temperatures during heat waves through the greening of roof spaces and urban farming. And through this, we feed our communities while reducing emissions.
Charlotte: How did your community move from depending on fossil fuel companies for jobs to choosing food and care for the land, and what made that change possible? Can you draw the parallels between fossil legacies and the food systems of today?
Mika: I think one of the fundamental things that changed in our relationship to fossil fuel companies, or however they were called, is that in the past they were very important to our community because they provided jobs, which were associated with money, and with money you could get everything, and this created a lot of identity. It was a very complicated relationship, but basically your life depended on having a job, which was often provided only by these companies. Over the years we were forced to realize it was more complex than that, and as the situation changed, as nature faced the consequences of fossil fuels, and as the fossil fuel companies became more authoritarian and fascist, we had to choose between having money or having food by growing it ourselves. We made the right choice. Ta-da! No seriously: luckily we chose food. I think food helped us change the way we see land. In the past, in all these mining sites, we were just destroying the land, and we thought we could turn land into money forever and live from that, but then we realized how important land is. I remember a long time ago visiting the camp Lützerath, and they started their own community-supported agriculture, as they called it, and they were planting vegetables right next to the mine. For many people that looked very strange, but more and more thought it might not be a bad idea, and more and more joined. Now, on all the sites that have not been mined and on the remaining land, we have started planting our own food, and luckily some people already knew how to do that, so they showed us, and now we have very, very nice tomatoes. I have to say, the best ones.
Charlotte: Thank you. But this makes me wonder: who has the time to work on the community gardens, and who is taking shifts? I feel like, with this new world where you rotate, there must have been a large identity change regarding the role of labour and your profession. Especially in the 20s, we had rampant militarization and funding of the police in different fascist states, and the military, the police, and the coal industry were associated with pride, cultural heritage, and masculinity. How did this get dissolved, and what was it funneled toward?
Mika: Yeah, I mean, as it is today, we are of course taking turns and taking care of the garden. We are now very used to just doing different tasks throughout the week, taking care of our community. But when I was younger, when I was in primary school, I was still being told this image of the police and the military as very reputable jobs. I played with police cars and imagined becoming such an authoritative person. As the years went by, we had a big shift, I would say, in how and what we perceive as societally valuable functions and jobs, or skills that really bring us forward. Maybe there was also a shift because, in the 2020s, there was this dichotomy between the authoritarian state and figures within it, and then the civilians. Now we live in a society that is much more democratic, and civilians feel they have a valuable role within the community, caring for the land, being self sufficient, and caring for others, which has redirected these antiquated notions of nationalism. And of course that was built on a lot of propaganda and the idea that wealth for a certain region needs to be fought for by winning over another. There was this notion in the Western pre revolt states that they were the enlightened ones and must bring this to others, and that was then used to justify massive military interventions and really massive violence. But it was later realized that this was a sham, a propaganda trick and a narrative twist that, at the end of the day, served the interests of the fossil fuel companies, which included the weapons manufacturers. So when the weapons manufacturing companies were dismantled, this whole idea of nation states needing a military to justify themselves fell apart, and then, of course, we had the whole new Shakti Monday, which built on a better structure than before. I think it was called the UN Human Rights Charter or something; it was named after some city, I do not remember.
Charlotte: How did you turn the idea of equal sharing into daily practice, like rotating shifts and valuing every role, and how do you keep old domination narratives from coming back?
Mika: And what I said at the beginning about sharing things in an equal way is not only about material stuff or electricity, but also about what we realized around 2020: we were all stuck in what I would call the American dream, that if you work very hard you earn wealth, while the world was so unequal, and it is hard to imagine that was normal. That is also why we rotate shifts; it is also a political idea that we know all roles are important. We also learned from Indigenous Native American knowledge that we are all diverse, but we know our own parts in sustaining the whole, so that our individuality is always sustaining the whole that we are together. But we also need to learn those things. We are not watching many films from the past anymore because they are so strange; if you look at them, they are so often based on one person dominating another person and feeling good about that. We try to learn from those things, we can study them, but we try to make our new stories and new artistic films because we can see how ingrained that was in so many ways. We really need to invent new stories and new ones. So we have to be careful not to fall into that again and to check in with each other.
Charlotte: Yeah, you have been telling me a lot about the transition from the old, and composting the old, to something new. Especially about how the erosion of the military, the prison complex, and the coal industry, the whole collapse of this, has enabled the emergence of a different worldview of what labor should be. But I wonder how you went about the creation of new skills and the emergence of different mutual aid networks. Was that spontaneous, or can you plan that, and what were the topics? Because, as we know right now, there are many parts of the world that are not inhabited anymore. We have a lot of migration, and we have a lot of extreme events right now.
Mika: Well, it is always both. Mutual aid networks and catastrophe response are very natural human reactions. Even back when I was a kid, the first large pandemic of the 21st century, called COVID, happened, and mutual aid networks emerged spontaneously, even in this late-stage capitalist society. But those need to be sustained. So now we really put practice into making these networks sustainable, making them available before they are needed. For instance, the canteen system we have means we always have enough to catch people if they need it. There is also the abolishing of the idea that you should have to pay for basic necessities. To a certain extent, that makes mutual aid less necessary, because people's basic needs are taken care of. Earlier, people had to pay for the place they lived, and they had to pay for basic food. A lot of mutual aid was geared toward simply helping people survive and toward self-defense. That is not needed anymore. And, in the end, the old narratives and ideas made people feel depleted, and life became so hard that people started to change because it was possible. By living by example, they showed others that it was better. People did not believe you could live differently, but by doing it together, we showed them, and that is how it works.
Charlotte: Thank you. I really learned a lot today. Our time is up. It's lunchtime already. And I think we're both hungry. And thank you again for inviting me to the Anhalterra commune.
Mika: Let's go eat!