Post #3769662

#SFEastBay #anarchism "Anarchist-Utopian Manifesto for the SF East Bay Bioregion A proposal for direct democracy, economic equality, and ecological restoration organized through local watersheds. (. . .) In *The Ohlone Way the East Bay Bioregion* - before the arrival of colonialism and capitalism - is described as a landscape of remarkable abundance: salmon-bearing streams, vast wetlands, oak woodlands, grasslands, and thriving human communities. The East Bay once demonstrated that human communities can exist within a thriving ecological system. Remembering this inspires us to build a new egalitarian future. Today, the SF East Bay contains enormous suffering caused by brutal inequality and entrenched hierarchies. A small number of people enjoy luxurious wealth, while tens of thousands dwell dangerously in tents, vehicles and makeshift shelters. Life expectancy varies by up to 25 years due to crippling injustice. Non-human species are stripped of habitat and threatened with extinction. Two hundred years ago indigenous villages in this area treated land, water, and food as common property, but today, every basic necessity is only available if you can pay the accelerating price. The laws that govern our communities are often formulated by distant bureaucracies far removed from our everyday lives, and non-human animals are defenseless in their ravaged and polluted homeland. The alienation is not accidental. The disempowerment is structural. The concentration of wealth and power is not a failure of the system—it is one of its primary outcomes. Inequity is designed by capitalists, corporations, and the dominant elite at the apex of the authoritarian pyramid. Radical democracy needs to begin here, in the SF East Bay Bioregion. We believe artificial state and county lines need to be abandoned. Political communities need to be structured inside ecological geography. This manifesto proposes the creation of a federation of watershed democracies organized around direct participation, economic equality, and ecological restoration. This manifesto calls for the annihilation of hierarchy in all its forms—economic, political, social, cultural." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hank-pellissier-anarchist-utopian-manifesto-for-the-sf-east-bay-bioregion