“Flyover” is part of a programme of 30 projects aimed at transforming Thessaloniki into a “metropolis of the Balkans”. Through it, a complex of environmental destruction, capitalist expansion and tightening social control is revealed. Opposing this design through a radical perspective allows us to attribute a material basis to a system that would like us to believe is unmistakable.
The project includes the overhaul of 13.5 km of Thessaloniki’s regional road and the addition of a 4 km Flyover, for which 187 hectares of the Sheih Su forest will be destroyed. To ensure social acceptance of the Flyover project, managed by the AVAX-Mytilineos consortium, a conscious green-washing practice is used. Its main argument is better regulation of traffic to reduce CO2 concentrations in the city. However, it is proven that larger transport infrastructures tend to increase traffic. In addition, Flyover will further cement the nature of the area, harming fauna and flora and favouring the ‘heat island’ effect, i.e. the rise in local temperature due to the heat-absorbing property of the cement.
In other words, this is all bullshit! But even if the project was viable, it would remain problematic. This is an issue with important socio-political implications which should not be dealt with solely from an environmental point of view.
Control: the spacetime of the metropolis
Capitalism needs infrastructure to ensure its enforcement and maintenance. Infrastructures like Flyover help to further control the movement of people and therefore define the relationships we build with each other.
In recent decades, global capitalism has been reorganized around regional metropolises. A network of production units that destroy the earth, exploiting the lives of humans and non-animals. With rural reforms and the use of land for infrastructure, quality of life and employment opportunities are becoming increasingly scarce in rural areas, forcing their inhabitants to move to cities. And in turn, this exponential growth of metropolises leads to further destruction of natural areas. The continuous expansion of the metropolises strengthens the power, strengthening our dependence on the capitalist-state system.
As the metropolis expands, city centres are refined and standardised. What used to be a place of residence, meeting and organisation, it is now becoming a showcase for attracting business and tourism. In the metropolis, the city itself is a product. Those who disturb the superficial ideal, the “undesirables”, the working class, the immigrants and the squatters, are pushed to the periphery. This ‘cleansing’ is made possible as roads, the metro and other modern means of transport allow displaced people to move daily from the degraded neighborhoods where they live to the shops, offices and factories where they are exploited. And as the metropolis expands, so does the portion of their day devoted to commuting. As a result, leisure time is constantly being reduced, absorbed by overtime work and transport.
At the same time, public spaces become smaller, more controlled, uninviting (when they simply do not disappear), or are replaced by cafeteria terraces, parking lots or Christmas markets. The “third places” are exhausted, with every corner of the city being used for financial profit. There is no place for socialisation without honor, let alone political organisation, which is increasingly difficult as spaces that offer alternatives (squats, universities, squares, etc.) are attacked. The only form of protest that is accepted is not only the non-violent, but the one that either does not disturb the production-consumption cycle or actively feeds it. Political discussions are transferred to the online world, social media posts replace our presence on the streets and walls of the city. We are building our own surveillance. Our opposition to the system is expressed solely through our lifestyle, from where and what we consume. Therefore, activism, as it lacks its necessary social character, turns into individual consumer practice, supplying dominant systems instead of opposing them.
So, through the control of space and time facilitated by roads and modern transportation, governments direct our behaviors to prevent any disruption to the capitalist machine.
Moreover, for this transport system to work, it requires a high level of organisation and specialisation of work that only the state can provide. It creates a vicious circle where it is at once the means, the consequence and the source of capitalist expansion. It operates in every aspect of the economy: urbanisation, fossil fuel extraction, agribusiness and nature management. A chain reaction, where the capitalist-state system spreads like a virus until it consumes every living creature, every piece of land and wildlife.
Disconnection: the nature of the metropolis
To assert and maintain its dominance, the capitalist-state system must appear as the logical evolution of our civilisation, inevitable if not desirable. And to trap our consciousness, it shapes our horizon.
In the world of the metropolises, the ground is covered by behemoths and shopping malls, motorways and railways, parking lots and data centres. People penetrate the mountains with tunnels and dig the land for minerals. They mix the limestone and the clay they get with sand from exhausted beaches to make cement and concrete. Containers and giant fishing boats empty the seas, while planes fill the skies. And as capitalism colonises wildlife, the smell of fresh air, the sense of grass and the songs of the birds disappear from our daily lives. In the smell of exhaust fumes, in the sounds of car horns and in the hasty crowd of the city-worker, we find isolation and alienation. By separating us from the natural world, the capitalist-state system separates us from each other.
In the name of the god of profit, it plunders fauna and flora, reducing them to resources that are sacrificed on the altar of civilisation. Non-human animals become meat, winds become kilowatts, trees become oxygen, soil becomes building materials, people become labour. Everyone and everything becomes a commodity.
Although capitalism has driven ecosystem destruction to unprecedented levels, most civilisations have been promoting human domination over other species for centuries. Anthropocentrism, the idea that human civilisation is separate from nature, that man comes first, allowed them to naturalise the unbridled exploitation of the rest of the living beings. A multitude of dipoles runs through our world to ensure the machine runs smoothly: male-female, white-non-white, civilisation-nature.
Many environmental discussions don’t question anthropocentrism and therefore don’t challenge the system. But it is not about “conserving our natural resources” to ensure the future of humanity, nor about “defending nature” as an unattainable ideal separated from us. It’s about refusing to stay on paths that others have mapped out for us. The non-human world is not ours to destroy or protect.
WE ARE NATURE DEFENDING ITSELF
THE DEFENSE OF THE FORST IS SELF-DEFENSE
Defend Seih Sou
defendseihsou@espiv.net
Source: Blessed Is The Flame
