on autonomy
The following are excerpts from interviews we conducted with three community organizers. Keep reading to hear what autonomy means to our interviewees and the role that autonomy plays in the environmental movement.
Lyrica: Yeah of course. As a former Uplift coordinator, what is your opinion of the role of the autonomous youth-led organizations in the movement? And in your opinion what makes youth led groups feel the need to be autonomous or separate from the mainstream environmental movement?
Eva: So I guess where I was going with that is like that the role of these autonomous youth-led organizations is uhm simultaneously to push the rest of the movement or bring the rest of the movement along with us and also do the actual work that the rest of the movement isn’t doing which like can specifically look like taking greater risks in direct actions, or having actual authentic relationships with frontline communities that aren’t extractive or exploitative, uhm being in solidarity with other movements...all these things like - it’s almost always the youth taking the lead on that. Uhm, and sometimes non-youth organizations will follow, but a lot of the times the youth-led organizations have to drag them along.
I think that uhm my experience working in nonprofits was really eye opening to me in terms of what organizing work can actually be -in a nonprofit and what the many limitations are,
But like it was just really eye opening that like anything-any direction that I wanted to take that would actually have an impact and be most useful to the climate justice movement in the Southwest was like always shut down by some- by like bureaucratic policies, or straight up power tripping, or like a lot of alarmism over radical ideas which ultimately just like yeah led us to be pretty ineffective or like have our effectiveness limited a lot and I was simultaneously educating like the nonprofit.
Yeah, which is really eye opening for me in terms of this pattern of nonprofits like holding power uhm and like through resource distribution in our movements, and being able to like actually be obstacles to collective liberation. And so that kind of- that experience really turned me away from nonprofits in general like at least non profit organizing, like I don’t know if I’ll ever want to be a paid organizer again - I, ever since the have been doing all volunteer organizing.
Lyrica: So we have two more questions. The next one is, what does autonomy mean to you?
Kourtney: I love autonomy, I love that word, I love that it’s a thing that we can like indulge in and practice. Uhm, autonomy to me is-is very similar to like self-determination. Uhm, just having the right to-I wouldn’t say do as you please, but kind of like to-to live like how you want, live as long as you’re not causing people harm or abuse or violence, you know. Uhm, but autonomy to me is-and I don’t even think that in this lifetime we’ll ever get to feel what it truly means to be autonomous. Right, ‘cause it’s like, we still gotta show up to work, we still gotta do all of these things to survive that truly aren’t autonomous things that we do. So, I guess it’s like, autonomy is kinda like a horizon, right, it’s something you’re always trying to move toward. It’s something you’re always looking forward- you’re always trying to get to that point even if you can’t necessarily embody it at times, it’s something that you’re trying to embody. It’s kind of like, uhm, yeah like, you know you can’t make a specific kind of future happen if you’re not trying to embody it in the future, you know, but also yeah, just trying to understand that that’s not always possible, I also like-I think autonomy is super tied to, like I said, self determination and part of autonomy is like respecting other people’s autonomy, is like, especially, especially centering the autonomy of like Native people whose land you’re on and that’s self determination for them to do as they please, uhm no matter how you see their politics aligning with your own.
And I think a lot of people are still having a hard time letting go of that need to control everyone, and that need to make sure everybody is politically aligned, and I-yeah, I think that’s another aspect of it too. There’s a lot of infighting on the left, which is like good actually, I think ‘cause it’s like people shouldn’t all agree, I think there’s a lot of danger in like people all having the exact same opinions or like everyone identifying as an anarchist if that’s how they feel, like to me that’s really toxic like authoritarianism uhm, and it’s like stripping people of autonomy. I would like to see more like conversations of what that is. I think I have a lot more-I have a lot more understanding that needs to be built up here, you know, in like a theoretical sense, but also in like an individual sense too. ‘Cause I don’t, you know, I love autonomy, but here I am working like 40 hours a week, you know, that’s not autonomous at all.
Lyrica: [laughs] No. Yeah, I feel like- something I think about a lot is how in our lives, like when we’re young children, we’re very much under the authority of like our parents, and then it’s like our teachers who we are under the authority of, and then it’s like our bosses, and then it’s like, at what point do we gain-like regain control of our lives, even in like a daily sense, like thinking about how like your boss in a traditional way like decides when you get to be like at home with your family, sometimes when you get to go to the bathroom, even like when you get to eat, and I’m like, this is so messed up, and also something I think that we’re so ingrained to just like accept that we’re never going to have control of our lives. .
Kourtney: It’s kind of scary like how deep we are in-like we’re so far in. When you say, like our bosses control when we go to the bathroom. Like yeah, we have to ask permission to do everything, and we’re mostly denied.
