It is ironic that after writing yesterday about colonization and the enclosure of the commons in Europe, then in this country, to find this article today:
The Pentagon recently announced that the United States has deployed weapons in space, in defiance of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that declares space as a commons. The US has had plans to dominate space for decades for mineral extraction and military control of the planet through its offensive Golden Dome Project. Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space joins Clearing the FOG to explain what the US intends to do, the dangers involved, how the rest of the world is responding and what people are doing to stop US domination of space. October 3 to 10 is the Keep Space for Peace week. Find resources at Space4Peace.org.
United States Defies International Law To Colonize And Control Space By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. September 28, 2026
Proving the point
I’m not going into the specifics of colonizing space. The details are beside the point I want to make.
What could be a clearer example of the fundamental principles I’ve been writing about? You cannot repair injustice using the tools of those unjust systems.
We (the people of this country in general) have refused to address the history and ongoing injustices of settler-colonialism and capitalism. Because of that, space is seen, ‘naturally’, as a new opportunity for dominance, militarism, and extraction of resources. ‘Space-the new frontier’, is a phrase from decades ago.
Disaster Visions
I’ve often written of a vision that set the course of my life, related to a photograph I had taken of Long’s Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. It was taken in the late 1960s, which means I developed the film (negatives) and then printed to photos in a primitive darkroom I setup in the bathroom.
The vision was imagining that beautiful vista hidden behind clouds of smog. This was before catalytic converters were available for auto exhaust. They virtually eliminated the visible smog, but not the heat and greenhouse gases. Cities were covered in huge clouds of exhaust.
That vision resulted in my living without a car for my adult life in Indianapolis.
Unfortunately, the threat now is the mountains hidden behind clouds of smoke from massive wildfires, which are the result of extreme drying conditions, which result from fossil fuel emissions.
Colonized Militarized Moon
My new disaster vision is the colonized militarized moon. (Its not like I’m intentionally collecting them.)
This vision re-enforces what I’ve been led to work on related to building resilience in the face of rapidly deepening environmental, political and economic catastrophe.
Decolonization is an essential part of this. You can sign up here to learn about decolonial efforts in the Midwest: https://www.honornativelandfund.org/decolonialrepairnetwork
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