We, the surrealists, expect nothing from the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30, November 2025) in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon. Our hopes lie in the resistance against capitalist ecological destruction and catastrophic climate change by the forces of wild nature itself and by the communities that dare to fight against the monstrous power of modern Western civilization. Brazilian Indigenous and peasant movements, as well as other critical forces, will be present in Belém do Pará, raising the banner of disobedience.
Max Ernst’s magnificent painting, Jardin gobe-avions (Garden that Eats Airplanes), from 1935, is a true ecological surrealist manifesto ahead of its time. Fascinated by the wild jungle, Ernst painted many of them during the 1930s and 40s, populated by spirits and pagan deities. But in Jardin gobe-avions , nature doesn’t merely manifest its exuberant and enigmatic power; it savagely devours the machines of civilization.
There are three versions: in all three, lush, multicolored vegetation voraciously attacks scattered pieces of pale metal, which, in one version, explicitly take the form of airplane parts. You can’t help but be struck by the artist’s premonition: in the following years, from Guernica (1937) to the present day, the airplane would reveal its formidable power as a weapon of mass destruction. It is true that it is also a means of transport. But in the 21st century, environmentalists continue to emphasize its nefarious role: reserved for a privileged minority, it is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming. Hence the ecological struggles against the construction of new airports, as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where the Jardin des Zadistes (Garden of the Zadis) managed to engulf all the planes destined for the site…
In 1937, Benjamin Péret published in Minotaure (no. 10) a surprising article entitled “Nature Devours Progress and Surpasses It,” perhaps inspired by an experience he had during his stay in Brazil in the early 1930s. Here is an extract from that text, which describes the victorious—erotic!—struggle of the virgin forest against the machine that symbolizes the industrial progress promoted by capital, the locomotive.
“The forest retreated before the axe and the dynamite, but between two passes of the train, it leaped onto the tracks, directing provocative gestures at the train’s engineer (…). The engine will stop for an embrace it wishes would be fleeting, but which will last to infinity, according to the seductress’s perpetually renewed desire. (…) From that moment, the slow absorption begins: connecting rod after connecting rod, lever after lever, the locomotive enters the forest bed and, from voluptuousness to voluptuousness, bathes, trembles, and moans like a lioness in heat. It smokes orchids, its boiler harbors the games of crocodiles born the day before, while in the whistle live legions of hummingbirds that give you back a chimerical and provisional life, because soon the flame of the forest, after having licked its prey at length, will swallow it like an oyster.”
In the battle between the forest and the machine, Max Ernst and Benjamin Péret clearly chose their side…
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In L’Amour Fou, Breton pays homage to the “love of nature and primitive man that permeates Rousseau’s work.” This twofold love, inherited from Rousseau’s revolutionary Romanticism, would characterize the Surrealist spirit throughout its history, far beyond France or Europe: one need only think of the poetry of Aimé Césaire, the essays of Suzanne Césaire, or the paintings of Wifredo Lam and Ody Saban. Similar ideas were developed by the Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont in his brilliant essay on “Marx and the Iroquois” ( Arsenal, no. 4, 1989 ) . This Surrealist commitment takes on renewed relevance today, as Indigenous communities find themselves on the front lines of the struggle against civilization ’s destruction of nature . Leonora Carrington, in “What is a Woman, 1970,” wrote: “If women remain passive, I think there is very little hope for life on this Earth.” Fortunately, women are very active in all ecological struggles, sometimes at the cost of their lives, like Berta Cáceres, the Honduran indigenous woman murdered by military thugs in 2016.
READ MORE: https://rebelion.org/la-naturaleza-devora-el-progreso-y-lo-supera/
