On December 4, politicians stole this incredible wildness, this product of the forces of deep time, from the public domain. Congress passed a measure ceding 2400 acres of Tonto to mining giant Rio Tinto Group‘s subsidiary Resolution Copper, attaching the theft as a rider to its latest “National Defense and Authorization Act.” The area is now slated for destruction for the largest operating copper mine in the United States.

This is a grand theft of heritage, especially for the Apache for whom Tonto remains a native place of worship. In an emotional piece for Indian Country Today Terry Rambler, Apache Tribal Chairman, wrote: “We are concerned for our children who may never see or practice their religion in their rightful place of worship … However, the Apache people will not remain silent. We are committed to shining light on the Land Exchange and the proposed mine until we have no breath.”

Enclosure movements devastate communities. Who we are, whether we realize it or not, is greatly influenced by our ties to the surrounding ecology. Land is emotion — a product of deep and lasting roots.

But, this is of no concern to the state. Any sacred tract inside the political borders or territories of the nation-state may be taken at will — a power as unjust as it is unnatural.

However, a number of libertarian wrenches may be thrown into the gears of such power-driven land acquisitions. Two are pertinent to this situation. A third offers liberation.

The first is the Paper Wrench. Activist groups can use any and all available legal decrees to delay mining operations. Paper wrenching refers to pursuing lawsuits that force industry professionals and teams of highly paid corporate lawyers to navigate an array of legal challenges. The method is proven. In the Appalachian coalfields, for instance, the Paper Wrench has delayed some strip mine operations for years. In some cases, legal expenditures prove so great that industry abandons mining operations altogether.

The second is the Monkey Wrench. Coined by desert enthusiast Edward Abbey in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the term “monkey wrenching” refers to acts of sabotage to protect wilderness areas. Willing activists may permanently incapacitate machinery and equipment to outright halt industry activity. The Monkey Wrench may also be used to inflict minor damage to force repairs thus buying time for legal negotiations (or paper-wrenching). For individuals up in arms about property destruction I pose the question: What is more violent — snipping a fuel injection line so an Earth mover will not start, or destroying a struggling arid ecosystem and place of heritage for all future generations?

The third wrench would free natural sites of sweeping land use policy by reimagining  governance. It demands a reclaiming of the commons so land is not viewed as a commodity, but felt as a connection — a place of labor and heritage. In such a system place is an integrating concept. Land is associated with the community and the individual in the commons — land is legacy as space is place. Here, land is liberated from the nation-state and its enclosure movements. None are denied the holy experiences awaiting us in our cool, still canyons. The Apache could forever worship in peace.

I speak of the Anarchy Wrench.

What is imperiling the desert is human domination of the landscape.

Planning, zoning and development ultimately seek economic growth. There are of course guidelines and restrictions, town hall meetings and financial statements, but at the end of the day centralized economic regimes will develop a landscape if there’s a profit to be made.

Landscapes have been divided, not based on the sciences of resource management, geology or ecology, but rather to serve political and economic ambitions. States draw fictional lines in the sand for the sole purpose of claiming landscapes as property to enclose, develop and regulate. The political boundary is a marker of centralized economic planning — an institution that sprouts cities, municipalities, lush green golf courses and dam construction in arid lands.

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In the Sonora, just outside of Coachella, California new development plans call for building tens of thousands of new homes on the landscape, converting wilderness to neighborhoods and town squares.

Media reports coming out of the southwest the past few months, however, note the great drought and water crisis gripping the region. Residents wonder where the water for even more sprawl will come from. NASA satellite mapping the region reveals incredible reductions in groundwater across the landscape. The trend is resource depletion, and we are warned it will only get worse.

But, the water shortage is not the crisis gripping the Southwest.

There is water everywhere in desert. Water flows in braided streams and deep channels such as the great Colorado. Water carves out canyons and gorges against quartz rich sandstone, occupies porous rock and nurtures incredible desert plants such as the flowering cacti. As desert enthusiast Edward Abbey writes in his book Desert Solitaire: “Water, water, water … There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount … There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

What is imperiling the desert is human domination of the landscape.

Planning, zoning and development ultimately seek economic growth. There are of course guidelines and restrictions, town hall meetings and financial statements, but at the end of the day centralized economic regimes will develop a landscape if there’s a profit to be made.

Landscapes have been divided, not based on the sciences of resource management, geology or ecology, but rather to serve political and economic ambitions. States draw fictional lines in the sand for the sole purpose of claiming landscapes as property to enclose, develop and regulate. The political boundary is a marker of centralized economic planning — an institution that sprouts cities, municipalities, lush green golf courses and dam construction in arid lands.

It is a pity that advocates of central planning, in the name of the environment no less continually deny that high-liberalism is a failed dogma. The market mechanism, however, coupled with common governance offers a fresh take on resource management. This adaptive approach allows us to analyze landscapes in terms of watersheds, ecosystems, capacity for food production, resources available for trade, cultural heritage and resource conservation.

Such an order would ensure that vast landscapes will rarely, if ever, be occupied by our bodies.

The market mechanism, free of sweeping land use policy, would naturally cap resource extraction at its maximum sustainable yield. There would be strong economic incentive for water conservation in arid lands, as opposed to the maximum utility we see today. This respect for natural boundaries would in turn limit the amount of sprawl into the landscape. In the commons, land is not a commodity, but a connection — a place of labor and heritage.

I have long admired the desert. In these lands geologic formations readily display the story of an ancient Earth, streams intricately carve new landscapes while deep canyons and alluvial fans speak to the power of time. The desert should not be subjected to the Anthropocene, but liberated from it.

Due to the crash’s violence, it took a week to transport Campos’s remains back to Recife, Pernambuco, the state he governed for eight years. His funeral was televised as an all-day Sunday spectacle. His pitiful performance in Tuesday’s interview was all but forgotten, his malformed thoughts elevated to slogans. “We can’t give Brazil up!” is shared and exploited as a catchphrase, while Recife’s people take the streets to sing “Eduardo/warrior/of the Brazilian people!” during the funeral.

Perhaps the exploitation of a famous politician’s death by the army of individuals who salivate for a piece of his memory is natural. Campos has been described as a “promising leadership,” a “negotiator,” a “statesman” who “transcended party lines.” All of these are lies. And that’s why it’s even more necessary to set the record straight on what Campos was and represented. He was an old school politician, inserted in the old system by the old elite, who protected our old crony capitalism; a personalistic politician firmly entrenched in the old habits of the Brazilian northeast’s elites.

Powerful institutions tend to perpetuate themselves and fluster attempts by outsiders to enact change. But Eduardo Campos wasn’t an outsider. He lived his life comfortably positioned inside in the power ranks, where he was placed by his grandfather, former Pernambuco governor Miguel Arraes. Campos wasn’t trying to subvert structures, but to put them to his service.

The state government employs “at least a dozen” of his or his wife’s relatives. Having supported the allied base of the federal government for many years, Campos successfully campaigned for the appointment of his mother to the Federal Court of Accounts and placed two of his relatives in the state Court of Accounts, a branch of government responsible for overseeing his own actions. Recife’s mayor is one of his trusted men, an unknown before the election, but leveraged by Campos’s name. Eduardo Campos justified the omnipresence of his relatives in the state as a result of their “abilities.” A prodigious family indeed.

Eduardo Campos has been described by the international press as “amicable” to markets and the Sao Paulo stock exchange reacted poorly to his death. That’s unsurprising: Tax exemptions and direct subsidies signs are displayed in front of virtually every industrial plant in Pernambuco. The Pernambuco Military Police, under the direct control of Eduardo Campos, repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the construction companies from the Novo Recife project — consisting of the privatization of very well located land in the Pernambuco capital to benefit contractors — beating up protesters and, later on, stating they wanted to talk. Marina Silva, his vice-presidential candidate, then hypocritically said she was against police violence and that several people in the movement against Novo Recife were members of her party.

On other occasions, Campos had no problem in giving building companies the land they demanded, such as when they wanted to build Riomar Mall over a swamp area, displacing hundreds of people from their stilt houses. These people had similar fates to the thousands of families who were expropriated and forcefully evicted for the construction of the Arena Pernambuco for the World Cup. It’s not by chance that construction companies, formerly lukewarm toward Campos’s party, made generous donations this year to the Socialist Party of Brazil. And it’s not by chance that large banks, industries and agribusiness companies lamented the loss of such a trustworthy ally.

His mellifluous narrative of favoring the poor hid a policy of control, suppression and infiltration of social movements. Campos’s political choices were always obfuscated by the convenient lie of “efficiency” in public management. In a recent interview, he said that abortion should not be legalized, reaffirmed his support for the war on drugs, recycled the tired idea that crack cocaine is a vicious drug that enslaves people, and stated he wanted to put “drug dealers” behind bars.

The more than 100,000 people who cry on streets because Eduardo Campos is dead remember only his most cynical side: The “modern” politician, who wanted to rid the country of “cronyism” and “favoring,” someone who was willing to “build alliances,” promote “sustainable growth,” “think about the poor,” and to defend “more humane politics.”

Someone like that really would have a lot of problems in the political system. Eduardo Campos didn’t have many.

He died, but his ideals live on — unfortunately.

On June 3, #OcupeEstelita had their victory (partial, up to this point) formalized by the municipality, whicht begrudgingly suspended the authorization of demolition of the warehouses.

Decades abandoned, the Estelita warehouses are relics from the old sugar cane economy of the state of Pernambuco, and used to belong to the now defunct Federal Railway Network. The land where the warehouses are located was auctioned off in very sweet terms to a consortium of developers who planned, along with the municipal authorities, the New Recife project.

New Recife consists in the building of 12 skyscrapers of over 40 stories in the area, one of the best located in town. Moreover, the project also consists in the capture of the debate by the government. By the mayor’s and the developer’s plutocratic logic, which has been able to find adherents, there’s the camp in favor of progress, new apartments and urban development, and there’s the team who favors the past, backwardness, the continued abandonment of an area potentially very valuable like the José Estelita Docks.

It’s obviously a bogus dichotomy and has been challenged by the Direitos Urbanos activists, who debate urban solutions for the city. As a forum for discussion and activism, Direitos Urbanos gathers many different positions on how to occupy and plan the city. Unfortunately, not only are they diverse, but they’re also vague and a little bit too slanted towards a middle class urban outlook. They emphasize not the legitimacy of use and property of urban land, but a specific view on how these spaces should be put to use: mixed communities, plazas, squares, trees, bicycle lanes instead of car roads, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with mixed urban spaces, which should be favored rather than disincentivized by legislation (as they are nowadays), but the fundamental problem of the use of urban land remains, even with a aesthetic rejection of the developers’ claim to Estelita’s warehouses. The fundamental discussion should be: Who should be able to use the land?

We can sort out the details about how later. First, we should talk about how to take the state out of public land. Clearly, a privatization that puts a huge and extremely well located plot of land in the hands of a consortium of developers is unjust.

And the government doesn’t have any legitimacy to sell them off and exclude the rest of the population of the possibility to homestead the area. Unfortunately, the details of such a process of taking the land out of the control of the government can be messy.

So, I’d like to advance a modest proposal.

In Brazil, it is calculated that between 200 and 250 thousand families have been evicted from their houses because of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Many have gotten laughable compensations for their property while others haven’t received rent assistance at all, or it has been insufficient to pay for any decent place to live.

I propose a solution: Developers can build all the skyscrapers they want in the area, but the apartments should be occupied by people who were violently evicted from their homes by the government.

It seems fair: If the government conducts an excluding process of privatization, it’s only natural it should favor those who were previously excluded. Land for the people.

If the victims of the World Cup benefit from it, we can think about urban impact later. What do you think, Urban Rights people?