Madhusudan Katti, Assoc Professor and Director of Science, Technology and Society + Leadership in Public Science, Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at NCSU, gave this testimony at the People’s Hearing on Wednesday, June 11, in Greensboro.
My name is Madhusudan Katti, and I am humbled to follow such a remarkable range of powerful testimony over these two days.
As a reconciliation ecologist, I speak on behalf of all living beings who cannot stand here to testify.
I am an immigrant from India (mark Mumbai down on your map, nerds!), here in this settler colonial empire to study nature and teach at a land grab university that refuses to stop poisoning its own students and knowledge workers.
I stand in these contradictions and draw hope for revolutionary change from the collective strength witnessed here.
To paraphrase bell hooks, the system we resist is a colonial – capitalist – white – supremacist – (- and – Brahmin – supremacist) – cis – hetero – patriarchy.
It has that multi-hyphenated name because it is intersectional in its oppression, even as it denies us our own intersectional identities and collective histories.
Global in its violence, this hyphenated hydra seeks to enrich a handful at the expense of all life on this planet, even as it corrals us within artificial national boundaries that it deems open only to capital.
From Gaza to Kashmir to Los Angeles this empire of many faces strains violently to keep its hold on power, but its extremist reactions also tells us that it is afraid… of the power of our collective action.
To beat this hydra we need a revolution that is also multi-hyphenated, that draws strength from the intersections of diverse lifeways, that is rooted in our kinship with one another and celebrates our differences, that refuses to collapse our beautiful rainbow into a monotone of passive consumers obeying their rules as they drive us off the cliff into some AI fantasy of escape to an inhospitable Mars after destroying the only living planet we actually know.
It is easy to despair when those running our so-called democracies are so eager to unleash violence against anyone who dares challenge oppression and demand justice. They tell us not to trust our eyes and ears and hearts even as they invent machines to hallucinate an alternative reality.
Do not let them control the narrative.
Look around this room, hear those with grey hair and twinkling eyes who still stand despite the system’s best efforts to beat them down, take away their loved ones and destroy revered places. Take their stories back to your communities and organize your people to join the many revolutions we need.
The future must be built on love and justice, truth and reconciliation.
As an educator, let me leave you with this:
Remember where you come from, draw strength from your relatives, not just the ones you can place on a family tree, but all our relatives, all beings with whom we share ancestry on this pale blue dot we call home.
Slow down, go outside, breathe deeply, take joy from the birds singing of an ever earlier spring, hug the trees that have seen it all and endured.
Know that nature is not about brutal conflict—red in tooth and claw—for individual survival but a collaborative struggle to assert the beauty, exuberance, and resilience of life in an indifferent universe.
Remember we are part of this much larger community of life; we bear responsibility to reconcile humanity with nature, to hold the oppressors accountable for their violence, and to work together to build the Indigenous futures, the African futures, the Dalit futures, and all the other subaltern futures we can imagine. Onward!
