Unlearning alienation: a crucial component of a revolutionary movement

Michael Regenfuss / Deep Green Resistance Bay Area

Michael gave a talk at this year's annual DGR conference on the subject of overcoming alienation, quoting some pertinent passages from The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef by Charles Reich. He elaborates on those thoughts here.

What is alienation, how did we become afflicted with it, and how do we unlearn it? Alienation is created when you are being systematically undervalued, abused, and traumatized. We have all been undervalued from the day we were born. We are taught not only to expect less out of ourselves, but to expect less out of other people and also to undervalue the non-human part of nature.

Alienation gets built up layer by layer over the years through a process of false conditioning, which can get into your consciousness without your being aware that it is happening. The process of alienation is a learned thing, and so it can be unlearned. You can unlearn on your own, but it's easier and faster if you have the help of others to facilitate the unlearning process. All you have to do is first decide that you are going to do this, and then find other like minded people, and form an affinity group that focuses on personal growth and real community.

The earth's survival is the number one priority and needs to be our main focus, but there must be an emphasis placed on fundamental personal growth too. If you engage in this part of the revolution, it will not only improve your own lives, but make you a better activist and help guard against burnout.

Reich's book is a great educational tool that will help you to learn more how alienation works, and it has countless insights as to how to unlearn it. The way to read the book is to read 8 to 10 pages at a time, set it down and think critically about what you've read, and then read the next 8 to 10 pages. By reading it this way you will hopefully begin to comprehend the whole difficult concept of alienation.

Resilient, Life-Supporting Resistance Communities

Marilyn Linton / Deep Green Resistance Eugene

Derrick Jensen interviewed Stella Strega Scoz, a DGR member in the Canary Islands, for the December 6th episode of Resistance Radio. Scoz heads the Integral Permaculture Academy, which takes a radical approach to permaculture practice and teaching.

Balanced resistance movements have both the outward action and the inward support and strength of strong community behind them. A system in harmony with the living world, promoting reconnection to it, and resisting the oppressive dominant systems must be built with an awareness of the current circumstances, an inclusion of indigenous wisdom from many sources and experts in applicable fields, and a heart-felt love of life.

Integral Permaculture covers all this ground and more, while working toward food sovereignty and other forms of independence from civilization. The study of Integral Permaculture in tandem with a deep green resistance is an important part of building a stable culture of resistance.

Listen to the Resistance Radio interview below, or listen on our Youtube channel.

Browse all of Derrick Jensen's Resistance Radio interviews.

#EPICFAIL in Paris: COP21

Julian Langer / Deep Green Resistance UK

The President of the USA, Obama, is describing the Paris Climate Deal as a turning point for the world. The delegates stand up and applaud, in congratulations of this supposedly historic event in contemporary political history.

…… I’m sorry, but, what?!

James Hansen, among other experts, has already articulated criticism of this deal – “It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit …” and honestly, do we need more bullshit?

Al Gore and business leaders are claiming this deal might be the trigger for the end of the fossil fuel era, but emissions aren’t expected to peak until 2030. That’s more than 5000 days before peak emissions, 5000 days of everything getting even worse. Civilization is already driving 200 species extinct every day – to quote Lierre Keith “They were my kin. They were yours too”.

Even from a purely anthropocentric perspective, the situation is bad and getting worse. Low-lying coastal states are already at a critical point, facing the cost of rising sea levels in their daily lives. Even the UK, in a far better situation to respond to this worsening crisis, is facing the devastating consequences of this culture’s way of life. We’ve seen climate change trigger the current refugee crisis in Europe, and today's business-as-usual will make the future crisis even worse.

I’ll rephrase my previous question – can we afford (in terms of lives, not money) more bullshit?

It is time for us to reclaim environmentalism from the clutches of those wishing to make the destruction of our planet “sustainable.” It is time to create a culture of resistance to protect the natural world from the demands of this culture.

"Daily Affirmations for Revolutionary Militants" perpetual calendars

Our friend Stephanie McMillan has printed calendars of her inspiring cartoons for revolutionaries, reusable year after year. These perpetual calendar are spiral bound with a stand for display on your desk (or wherever). They feature 365 full-color drawings with inspirational messages for those who define success as overthrowing the capitalist system. Each day you can flip to a new page for guidance and encouragement on the revolutionary path.

Order one for $27 or two for $49 at Stephanie McMillan's store.

Testimonials

“Every time I read one of your affirmations, I want to shout it from the rooftops and tattoo it where I can see it everyday. You have a gift – and now I can pass it on. (Y)our calendar ... empowers us to share something delightful and special and revolutionary – something aligned with our deepest values and vision of who we are and the world we want.”

— Michelle Reyf

"For that revolutionary who has everything - or more likely wants almost nothing, this is the right present. Stephanie McMillan's work is clever, accessible and right on. Arm chair liberals can pass on this one; if you are scared by the artist calling herself a "revolutionary" this is the wrong desk calendar for you. If you think radical, militant protest and action is necessary to keep this world from imploding at the hands of industrial capitalism, this calendar is for you."

— Paxus Calta Star

Beats of the Antonov: documentary on Sudan

Sudan’s ongoing civil war is not mentioned often in US or other Western corporate media outlets but has been going on for years, and currently the country is split in two. Government/military missions utilizing Russian made Antonov aircraft are carrying out bombing runs on the small villages along the borders of the divide.

The inhabitants of the Blue Nile/Nuba Mountains don’t care about government solutions or war. Since they cannot respond to the ongoing assaults with firepower, they fight back with music, dancing and singing.

This documentary is beautiful and visually stunning. Why are the so called “civilized” attempting to wipe out everything that is beautiful? From the Deep Green Resistance book: “The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.”

Watch the trailer below:

Rang De Basanti: a modern inspiration for direct action

Review by Parag Dalal / Deep Green Resistance

Spoiler alert: important pieces of the movie plot revealed below.

Rang De Basanti opens with a British officer in pre-independence India walking along prison cells and finally entering one. The man inside, reading a book, instructs "Wait a moment, Mr. McKinley, one revolutionary is meeting another." Thus are we introduced to the legendary Bhagat Singh, engrossed in a book by Lenin. Singh rises calmly, ready to be escorted to the gallows. Mr McKinley, with sadness on his face, says “Sorry it has to end like this.” Bhagat Singh replies unwaveringly with a smile on his face “But this is not the end, Mr McKinley. There will be many more who will follow.” He starts walking and we see tears in the eyes of Mr McKinley.

Rang De Basanti goes against the regular Bollywood (Hindi) fare of romantic movies. It is a powerful commentary on the state of Indian politics and a call for direct action. Its ultimate clearance by the Indian Censor Board, albeit with a lot of controversy, delays, and reviews, is nothing short of surprising. The music by the Oscar winning A.R Rahman is visceral and evokes feelings of anger, rage and of freedom fighters and Indian independence.

In an interview with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, the writer, director and co-producer of the film said that when Aamir Khan heard the script, he immediately agreed to star in it. This is a telling fact since Aamir Khan, one of the biggest names in Bollywood, has since directed and starred in some of the most controversial Bollywood movies, bringing some very deep seated and taboo topics of Indian society to light. Amongst his films are a satirical comedy about the farmer suicides in India (Peepli Live); a story about Mangal Pandey, an Indian soldier who led a violent revolt against the British Rule in India in 1857 (Mangal Pandey: The Rising); and a story of a dyslexic eight-year old child which brought awareness to dyslexia in India (Taare Zameen Par).

Rang De Basanti is a story of four regular college going young men who are completely apathetic to Indian politics until they find themselves at the receiving end of the corrupt system. Before the main events in the movie, they are cast in a documentary about five Indian freedom fighters - Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru, Ashfaqulla Khan, and Ram Prasad Bismil. The choice of these specific freedom fighters is significant. While all of them were key in achieving Indian independence, all of them used all means necessary, including violence against the British empire. Four of them were hanged, and the fifth shot dead in a conflict with the British. While there is no way to ascertain the truth, story has it that as they were escorted to be hanged, these men wore gentle smiles, looked their executioners in the eyes, and were confident they did the right thing and were inspiring hundreds of Indians to do the same. History proves the last part was definitely true, not only during the independence struggle but also today.

In the movie, an ace air force pilot friend of the actors is killed during a practice run in a MIG-21 crash. The government closes the investigation concluding that it was the pilot’s fault, covering up the true cause: a politician bought cheap spare parts for the MIGs in return for a bribe. The young men and their community hold a rally and vigil, but the police violently disperse it, brutally injuring their friend’s mother. With peaceful protest not an option, and at their wit’s end as to what to do, they decide to kill the politician involved in the deal.

The parallels between the modern protagonists and the freedom fighters they portrayed are reinforced repeatedly with cuts to black and white clips of them playing their older versions. This vividly highlights similarities between the modern power structure and British rule. One of the most inspiring poems written during the Indian independence ― Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna by Bismil Azimabadi ― which to this day inspires countless Indians and brings up visceral feeling, is featured in the movie at key moments.

सरफ़रोशी की तमन्ना अब हमारे दिल में है
देखना है ज़ोर कितना बाज़ू-ए-क़ातिल में है

which loosely translates to:

The desire for revolution is in our hearts
Let us see what strength there is in the arms of our executioner

The youth carry out the assassination, but the elites spin the news to paint the corrupt politician as a martyr in the media. So the modern freedom fighters take over a radio station to reveal the entire truth and their reasons for killing the minister. The police declare them terrorists and kill all of them, the scenes moving back and forth between the deaths of the historic freedom fighters and those of the protagonists.

The movie had a noticeable impact on Indian society. Internet bloggers increased their criticisms of corruption and bureaucracy in the Indian Government and intense political discussions were common after the movie’s release. Young people took to streets protesting many contemporary issues and injustices, most notably the 1999 Jessica Lall Murder Case, in which the court acquitted the accused which caused intense civil protests for his re-arrest. One group of demonstrators carried out a candlelight vigil similar to that in the movie. In another instance, large rallies were organized in India and the US in response to the Priyadarshini Mattoo rape and murder case. A survey revealed Rang De Basanti as the cause of this sudden increase in Indian people’s political involvement.

The movie is revolutionary in its subject matter. The audience, especially youth, are not only sympathetic but even identify with the protagonists, average college going men. The sympathy does not wane even after they assassinate the corrupt politician and take over the radio station at gunpoint to deliver their message. The message is clear: violence is not only justified but required in certain situations. The politicians and the police force are depicted in a negative light, something almost never seen in any media, Indian or Western. The movie inspired a generation of Indian youth to take direct action and continues to inspire people to this day.

Rang De Basanti is available in the US for rental from Netflix, or purchase at amazon.com

Soom T music videos

We recently posted a review of Bullets Over Babylon, the latest album by Soom T. Here we highlight some of our favorite videos.

Soom T singing “Ganja Ganja” live

Soom T and Naaman “freestylin” on live radio in Toulouse, France - spectacular jazz, dubstep and reggaeton

Soom T and the Reggae Rajahs singing “Boom Shiva”

We just lost two million hectares of forest and two years to prevent runaway climate change...

...but at least they released the trailer for the new Star Wars film.
Julian Langer / Deep Green Resistance UK

Children are choking to death and being prepared for evacuation as forest fires ravage Indonesia in what is probably the most severe environmental disaster of the 21st century. Endangered orangutans are losing their homes and food sources, which, obviously, has a severe knock on effect for their survival. Every day, the carbon emissions from these fires equals those from the USA, and we all know how much Americans love to be “green”.
“Apocalyptic hellish scene” said Ben Henschke of BBC Indonesia. This is a tragic event of unparalleled proportion, but what is this culture talking about? Star Wars!
What is the (extremely) probable cause of this devastation? Corruption and corporate greed! Already there is palm oil being grown illegally on the decimated remains of the forest homes of orangutans. Palm oil giants, sourcing from independent smallholders, are profiteering from what is choking children to death, but what trends on Twitter? Star Wars.

“It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

Book review by Daphne Francis of Deep Green Resistance

I have just enjoyed reading Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? by Katrine Marcal, translated from her Swedish into English and published by Portobello books in 2015. It certainly is a change for me to find an economics book not only informative and accurate, but also highly readable and even entertaining, with at times trenchant analysis and cutting comments.

Marcal is not the first to highlight the absence of care work, done mostly by women, from calculations of Gross National Product and the decisions of that fabricated entity 'economic man'. When valued at all, this work is severely undervalued. But for me she breaks new ground in stating that, if the body was taken seriously as the starting point for the economy, it would have far-reaching results. In her words "a society organised around the shared needs of human bodies would be very different from the one we know today."

She dissects the notion of economic man which has now become such a keystone economic assumption that even our feelings of love and care are treated as preferences and impersonal sets of desires. This reduction reaches a low point in an analysis that "Faking ecstasy in bed is part of a 'rational signaling model'." Books have actually been published with the sickening title (and probably more sickening content) of how to Find a Husband after 35: (Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School) - a damning indictment of that particular academic icon. The body is turned into human capital. The disposal of radioactive waste can be sorted by cash payments to the desperately poor. Whether we shut down a life becomes a business decision; there is no more meaning in death than is left in life. Whilst the focus of Marcal's analysis is on the erasure of women, readers of this blog will be all too aware of the effect of economic man on the rest of the natural world as well.

Finally, who did cook the illustrious classical economist's dinner and organise his domestic life? We have to wait for the final chapter of the book to bring to life the story of this key part of Adam Smith's economy, a woman he effectively erased from the celebrated text into which so much of her life energy went. I won't spoil the revelation but leave you to find out for yourself the full story behind Adams Smith's academic output.

Dezeray Lyn interviews Khaden Adnam, Palestinian resister

Dezeray Lyn just returned from Palestine where she was working as an international observer, activist, and author. She defended Palestinian families’ homes scheduled to be demolished, assisted with the olive harvest, documented human rights abuses, and witnessed the atrocities and the ongoing Israeli occupation.

Khader Adnan, a baker with a degree in Mathematical economics currently working towards his master degree in Israeli studies in Al Quds University, father and a former captive of Israeli occupation prisons has brought himself to the brink of death by starvation twice in protestation of the illegal system of jailing of occupied Palestinians termed Administrative Detention.

During this trip, Dezeray sat down and spoke with Adnan, one of Palestine’s heroes. Her piece clearly defines what ongoing resistance IS. Read the entire article: “Portrait with Fire: Khader Adnan”.

From the Deep Green Resistance book: “A culture of resistance exists to encourage and promote organized political resistance, nurturing the will to fight. It helps people break their psychological identification with the oppressive system and create a new identity based on self-respect and solidarity. It offers the emotional support of a functioning community that believes in resistance as well as an intellectually vibrant atmosphere that encourages analysis, discussion, and the development of political consciousness. It produces cultural products like poems, songs, and art organized around the theme of resistance. It builds the new institutions that will take over as the corrupt ones come down. And it provides loyalty and material support to the aboveground frontline resisters and political prisoners.”

Soom T's "Bullets Over Babylon" Album: Tribute to Resistance

HouseofReggae.de

 

Dubstep, Reggaeton and Electronique Gives Voice to Culture

Soom T (Sumati Bhardwaj) is an Indo-Scot from Glasgow who is known for her musical melange of DubStep, Hip Hop, Electronique, Reggae and Reggaeton. She's created her own distinctive style and genre to accompany her eclectic, poetic, socio-political lyrics and versatile vocals. She also adds in other modern and world influences with her music. The genre is called several different names and hard to reduce to one label, but one that fits accurately is “Digital Laptop Reggae.”

Even more unique about her lyrics and sound are all the other musical acts she has collaborated with. Her writing, producing, recording and worldwide touring schedule is constant and rigorous and her global fan base is already huge and still growing. She is probably one of the hardest working women in the music industry in Europe and has produced more than 50 releases since 1999. She currently is signed to Renegade Masters.

MySpace.com

To get the music out, Soom T uses all the tools in the toolbox. She is online everywhere, with uploaded videos, sound bytes, photos and a presence on viral sites such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Spotify, Last.fm, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and more. Her upcoming recording, “Free as a Bird” is due to be released on November 13th, 2015.

“Bullets Over Babylon” was recorded as a collaboration and produced by Monkey Marc, released on April 20th, 2015. This album surprises with lush instrumentation and dedicated lyrics, multi-layered synth, keyboards and electronique. No two tracks sound the same:

1. “Aliens in Jars” -- driving rhythm, looped drums, electronique, rapped lyrics, special effects with the vocals, reverbed keyboards.
2. “Bullshit” -- world rhythms in the intro, rapped angry socio-political lyrics, lots of instrumentation, synth.
3. “Complex Simplicity” with MC Karma -- Far East sounding strings and chord progressions, MC Karma rapping lyrics, chorus done by Soom T, yearning and melodic vocals, world music sound, some vocal parts sound Middle Eastern. Another standout track.
4. “Drill”
5. “Boom”
6. “Slave” -- darkness, slow, minor keys, rhythmic, synth and special effects, jazzy vocals.
7. “Rebellion” with Combat Wombat -- rapped lyrics, electronica, mix of dubstep and reggaeton, layered vocal riffs.
8. “Under the Bubble” -- organ/keyboards intro and throughout, rapped and sung lyrics
9. “Sick of it All” -- spoken intro, rapped lyrics about corporatism and resistance, great special effects, vocals about the corporate culture.
10. “Storms Come” with Marina P and Solo Banton-- slow rapped reggae by Solo Banton, dancehall rhythms, Soom T’s lyrics are soft and beautiful used in the chorus and as a backdrop for Marina P’s soul voice in the verses. Outro with the sound of rain and thunder. Definitely a standout track! This writer’s favorite.

Review by Anita Stewart of Deep Green Resistance Florida, originally published at Rock at Night.

DGR members harassed at US / Canada border

Adam Federman wrote last summer about FBI harassment of Deep Green Resistance members, and now follows up on an incident last week, in which three DGR members were held for hours trying to get into Canada, turned back, and then held for several more hours before finally being allowed back into the US. Border crossing agents interrogated the DGR members, and took their computers out of sight for hours - presumably searching them for any useful data, and possibly installing malware to permanently compromise them.

Following on the rash of FBI contacts, this seems more than coincidental. Though annoying, it's mostly harmless, at least for now. It's important to remain aware of the risks of targeting by federal and state officials in various roles, to be ready for legal defense if necessary, and to prepare carefully for situations such as border crossings where activists are particularly vulnerable. This incident validates the need for a firewall between aboveground activists and any hypothetical underground: those of us who make ourselves public in our opposition to power will be targeted and scrutinized. Only those who stay off the radar can carry out illegal actions with a reasonable level of safety.

Read about the latest incident: Deep Green Resistance activists interrogated at US-Canada border

Deep Green Resistance in the news

A reporter for Fusion recently interviewed Dakota, the youngest member of Deep Green Resistance, for a story about militant resistance. Fusion is a media company focused on a young demographic of activists, so they drew on Dakota's perspective to discuss the necessity of immediate and serious action to confront climate change. Unfair though it is, the threats of ecological breakdown weigh the heaviest on our youngest generation, as does the responsibility to fix the messes made by those who came before. Dakota articulates why he's felt so moved to get involved in activism, and why he chose DGR.

Please read and share this article; hopefully it will inspire more youth to take up resistance!

Meet the teen member of Deep Green Resistance, a group that supports paramilitary action to confront climate change

We Are Seneca Lake newsletter: "We Are Family"

We wanted to pass on to this newsletter from the Seneca Lake resisters to fracked gas storage and transport, especially since, due to security measures, they do not generally allow us to forward info about the struggle. They are amazingly organized, smart about the resistance, and committed to winning and to one another.

The Banner, Vol. 1, No. 38 - September 15, 2015

We Are Family

Families work together, play together, dine together, agree and disagree together, share good and bad days together, support one another, and love each other. The family We Are Seneca Lake does all this and more.

We are a family of thousands. Hundreds of us are trained. We have come together 40 times in ten months. Over 500 of us have put our bodies on the line. 334 of us have taken that special ride downtown, earning 400 tickets in all.

This family has it goin' on!

We are fiercely dedicated and persistent defenders of health, home and community. We protect what we love: the waters, tillable land, sustainable jobs, and clean air of the Finger Lakes and, of course, our families. We say NO to global warming and social injustice, we refuse to allow trespassing corporations to pollute the natural commons we depend on for life and living , and we say YES to renewable energy! That's our thing. That's how we roll.

We have accomplished a lot together. Our family continues to grow. Our story, once told locally and then regionally, is now gaining national attention. Our family name is recognized by more and more Americans each day. These Americans are learning why Crestwood's plan to store fracked gases under the banks of Seneca Lake is a bad idea. We continue to teach.

I am proud to be a member of the We Are Seneca Lake family. And I am proud to have such worthy brothers and sisters as you. Our family name continues to gain great respect due to your ideals, ethics and action. You are awesome!

Together we are unstoppable

— Doug Couchon

About Last Thursday...

The excitement in the air Thursday morning was palpable as the Seneca Lake cavalry rolled. It felt a bit like a reunion. The excitement to get back on the line was evident. First timers and veteran defenders listened carefully to their instructions.

After my second arrest last November, I didn't think I would need to risk arrest again. Maybe I was naive to think we would have beaten this thing by now. All of the return offenders offered up their reasons for coming back: Judge Berry's refusal to dismiss the 84 cases, their friends and family still facing charges, the fire at Crestwood earlier this week, a stronger resolve to finish this fight.

Things went as usual with the exception of a crazed pickup driver nearly running down a couple defenders. We were not there long before the police arrived and escorted us off in the paddy wagon. I've seen it so many times over the past 8 months. We chatted on our way down to booking like old friends. It was just another day at the gates of Crestwood, but it was so much more. We reached 400 arrests.

On my drive home, I thought about the magnitude of this. On 400 occasions, someone put their body on the line to fight this project. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, the part that we see. Those people went home and told their friends about what they'd done, woke up early on their days off to table at events, canvassed, passed out information, collected signatures on petitions, supported their fellow defenders outside the court house, attended rallies, made donations, wrote letters to their elected officials and made daily phone calls. They are living this battle against Crestwood.

My experience today only reaffirmed what I've learned over the last year. This is a family. We have joined together to do something incredible. Four hundred arrests is a remarkable accomplishment. We should pause and celebrate the amount of work that has gone into this: time away from family, early mornings, missed work, freezing toes, sweaty brows. But let us pause for only a minute, because there is so much work to be done. We must continue to foster our connections with each other and the water of Seneca Lake, because the battle against Crestwood is far from over.

—Laura Salamendra

To learn more or join members of DGR NY in getting involved, visit We Are Seneca Lake

Chris Hedges on Resistance Radio

Chris Hedges, one of the great intellectuals of our time, opens this important interview with two quotes. James Baldwin says of the rebel and the artist that it's not so much that they have a vision, but that they're propelled by it. Hannah Arendt writes of people who resist that "It's not those who say 'This shouldn't be done.' or 'We oughtn't to do this.' It's those who say 'I can't.'"

Hedges uses these quotes as a launching point into an important conversation with Derrick Jensen about rebels, revolutionaries, and revolt. How do people willing to defy power develop, and what contributes to their success or failure in fighting injustice? Are such people born with a unique spark required for them to stand up against those in power? Can this impulse be cultivated in them, or in those willing to follow the rebel? What conditions need be present in society to launch a larger movement of resistance? Can these conditions be cultivated? What are the differences between rebels working for the good of others vs abusers who call themselves victimized rebels? What are the dangers of using violence in a struggle for liberation?

Jensen and Hedges discuss the difficulty of getting a radical or even progressive message out to people in these days of society in decay, spectacle, and unwillingness to hear uncomfortable truths. Between the entrenched political parties shutting out any discourse critiquing power, the control of mass media by corporations carefully filtering what gets through, and even the erosion of intellectual freedom in universities, the process of building an opposition to business as usual is painful and deadly slow. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we must work harder (and smarter) than ever to break down these corrupt structures, restore local decision making, and rebuild healthy communities.

Hedges believes the system is irredeemable, and any attempt to work with or within it is a waste of precious time we don't have. Everything we do now must be oriented towards overthrowing the system and corporate power. If we don't overthrow it soon, we're faced with the extinction of not just the human species, but all others as well.

Hedges has many insights into our current crises of political, economic, and moral systems; and into what is necessary to correct our course. Listen to his June 21, 2015 interview below, download mp3, or listen on our Youtube channel. For more of his brilliant analysis, read his latest book Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt or any of his many other books.

Browse all of Derrick Jensen's Resistance Radio interviews.

Blockades in British Columbia and Western Canada

In the past year, we're seeing a surge of land defense actions in BC and elsewhere in Canada. Zoe Blunt of Victoria Forest Action Network compiled this list to help keep track of current, ongoing, and flying blockades, along with ways to get involved and support the actions.

We are ALL BEING CALLED to support these land defenders. To answer the call, email Zoe at wildcoast@riseup.net - she can help set up ride shares and give advice for fundraising.

Current and ongoing blockades

Also see a November 15, 2015 addition of two blockades on Vancouver Island.

• Injunction and arrests at Shawnigan Lake, Vancouver Island: Community residents, including members of the Cowichan First Nation, are seeking an injunction to shut down toxic soil dumping in their drinking watershed. The dump overflowed during heavy rain November 13, 2015. Meanwhile the company is seeking an injunction to shut down the protestors, two of whom were arrested Noveber 13.
• Walbran Valley blockade: Members of the Pacheedaht First Nation and non-native environmentalists have built a camp to stop the clearcutting of ancient cathedral forests just outside a park boundary. The Walbran has been the site of massive protests, civil disobedience, and sabotage for twenty years.
• Ongoing: Coastal First Nations vs. Grizzly hunters. For two years, the Coastal Forest Guardians have been patrolling the central coast of BC and "educating" grizzly hunters and guides about the ban on hunting on their territory. The province continues to issue trophy hunting permits and now the Guardians say they are escalating their enforcement of the ban.
• Happening now: Ahousaht First Nation on Vancouver Island is using boats to stop a new salmon farm in their territorial waters. Media reports here.
• Ongoing: Gitdumden Clan of the Wet'suwet'en (neighbours to Unist'ot'en) in Northern BC. They are occupying their territory to block pipelines, logging, and mining. 
• New: Likhts'amisyu Clan of the Wet'suwet'en (neighbours to Unist'ot'en), Northern BC. They are occupying their territory to block pipelines. This is Chief Toghestiy's camp. FB page.
• Ongoing: Lax Kw'alaams First Nation vs. LNG pipeline terminal, near Prince Rupert BC. The drilling platform was barged into position near Lelu Island in a bay that holds millions of young salmon. The community is mobilizing to occupy the island and surround the barge. News story here.
• Occasional: Shawnigan Lake, Vancouver Island: The community has been trying to blockade a contaminated soil dump in the drinking watershed for Victoria and the south island. It is largely symbolic but it has potential. News report.
• One-day blockade near Powell River to protect wildlife. In May nine women surrounded a feller-buncher to stop it from working in a sensitive habitat area. They are demanding logging stop during nesting season, and an end to clear-cutting on the Sunshine Coast. More protests are expected.   
• Nicola Valley Chiefs and locals are blockading a biosolids dump near Merritt, BC and preventing sewage sludge from being trucked into their community. No shipments have made it through the blockade in over a month, and the companies responsible are preparing for a court hearing to have the protestors removed. Fundraising link here.
• Ongoing: Voices of the Voiceless camp is an Indigenous re-occupation of Junction Creek area, St'at'imc Nation, 50 km north of Lillooet and about 250 km north of Vancouver. This camp was set up March 2015 under the direction of Xwisten elders to stop logging. The site is near a heritage site and the Junction Creek summer village, a traditional meeting place where people hunt, gather and process food. Video: Re occupying Junction Creek, Christine Jack's Welcome - YouTube
• Victory: The Heiltsuk First Nation is fighting for the recovery of herring stocks on the Central Coast of BC. After the feds opened their territory to commercial fishing in March 2015, they occupied offices and set off solidarity rallies.  UPDATE: Their blockade is now over and the government has caved in and closed the fishery.
• The Sapotaweyak Cree Nation in Manitobais protecting sacred sites by blockading workers cutting trees for a hydroelectric transmission line.
• Ongoing: Burnaby/Langley - KM pipeline: 120 locals and allies were arrested in two weeks at a tarsands pipeline test drill site near Vancouver. In 2015, drillers and surveyors are trying to do their work in various locations but people report their whereabouts and they are confronted and prevented from working. The Kwantlen First Nation is leading the charge for the next round of resistance, which shows signs of escalating further (workers threatened, truck vandalized, equipment stolen).
• The Nuu-chah-nulth Nations have closed the spring herring fishery in the strait off the west coast of Vancouver Island. They are promising to intercept commercial vessels with their own boats. 
• Blockade down: The Northern Trappers Alliance, a traditional Dene group, was blocking forest roads near  Ducharme, Saskatchewan to push back against the loss of wildlife and land to drilling, pipelines, and gates. The protest camp and picket line were moved to the side of the road  after an injunction was issued and RCMP seized a trailer.
• Victory: Tseshaht Nation, Port Alberni, Vancouver Island:  Blockade down and victory - the province has agreed to stop timber sales in old-growth forests of the Nahmint Valley. The Tseshaht are monitoring to make sure this agreement is respected.
• Blockade down: Klabona Keepers, Talhtan Nation (near Iskut) Blockade removed after injunction issued. They were blocking Imperial Metals mine in Sacred Headwaters and other projects in various locations. They are still seeking volunteers, rideshares, donations, and legal help. These traditionalists boycotted the injunction hearing and withdrew for now.
• Victory: Penelakut (Grace Islet, near Salt Spring Island) Development site on burial ground. Blockade down: The province is moving to intervene and purchase the development site.
• Sabine Channel (between Lasqueti Island and Texada Island) Oct 4: One-day blockade of coal tanker traffic.
• Ongoing: Unis'tot'en Camp, (near Smithers) Permanent camp - blocking tarsands and gas pipelines for five years. Get info about the Caravan.
• Ongoing: Madii Lii Camp (Gitxsan) New permanent camp - blocking tarsands and gas pipelines.
• Ongoing: Sutikalh (near Lillooet) Permanent camp on St'at'imc territory, blocking resort development for over ten years.

Eco-Sabotage is Planetary Self-Defense

Max Wilbert and other members of Deep Green Resistance Seattle participated in a May "ShellNO" protest against Shell's arctic drilling rig. Their display of signs reading "Sabotage the Machine" and "Eco-Sabotage is Planetary Self-Defense" attracted a lot of attention. Elliot Stoller conducted a short video interview in which Wilbert explains his concern about ineffective tactics and strategies in the face of dramatic threats to biodiversity, climate, and social justice.

Wilbert discusses DGR's radical evaluation of systems of power and what might actually work to alter their destructive course: targeting critical communication, electrical, and oil infrastructures, and addresses some common questions about what that means for the safety of activists who undertake such work, and what sort of life humans can live without the comforts and elegancies of industrial civilization.

Please share this radical analysis, and help put sabotage on the table as a viable tactic in our struggle for life and justice!

Climate Change Painting Series

Andrew Carr has painted a series depicting weatherpeople of the 2010-2014 era reporting on extreme weather events. Each painting links to further details on the event depicted.

Broken Records reveals many faces of climate change – from the slaphappy smiles of our weather prophets to the extreme weather events afflicting nations across the geographic and political spectrums.
Broken Records is a time capsule of inaction, circa 2010-2014. In 50 years, as the children of both believers and disbelievers face the long term consequences of climate change, they will wonder how we could have forecasted our doom with such sexually-infused, hyperactive ignorance.
Aesthetically, weather reports provided another opportunity to use “my colors” – the vivid, intense hues also seen in Game Shows and Prom Girls. I did not paint from still images, but rather clipped together the most apt elements of various weather reports to convey a time, a culture, and a missed opportunity to panic.

View the paintings at Broken Records.

Always see Deep Green Resistance Facebook posts

For a while, even if you "liked" the DGR Facebook page, there was no guarantee that our posts would show up in your news feed. Now Facebook has introduced a way for users to always see our posts. To enable it:

1. Go to Deep Green Resistance Facebook
2. "Like" our page if you haven't yet
3. Hover your mouse cursor over the "Liked" button on our page, then select "See First".

Thanks for following our page!

Civilisation's assault on traditional Himalayan cultures

by Elliott Ford, Deep Green Resistance UK

Whist traveling in the North Indian State of Uttrakhand, my beloved (Rachel) and I decided to visit a small village in the Himalayas called Khati, that had yet to receive a connection to the national electric grid. We hoped to get a brief insight into existence of a people that hadn't become 'developed' and at the same time take in some beautiful views of the Himalayan range. I also thought this would be an appropriate time to start a book I'd been meaning to read called Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge which describes the effects of 'development' of the Ladakhi people in the 1980's.

We set off on an old Enfield motorcycle traveling North into the mountains until the road turned to a treacherous uphill track and then eventually stopped altogether. We left the bike by the house of a friendly local man and started the walk to Khati which would last three days and take us over passes of 3500m.

As we approached Khati and walked through terraced monocrops of wheat, we realised it was unlikely we would be visiting a village unaffected by globalisation. Growing a single crop usually indicates that a rural area has switched from being self sufficient to selling the produce of monocrops to earn money and buy the necessities of life, as well as alluring luxuries. Our suspicions were confirmed when we stopped in a local tea shop and were offered Coca-cola and a selection of packaged foods that were essentially refined wheat and sugar, processed and marketed in different ways. Continuing on our journey we noticed litter was increasingly present as we neared the village. Prior to development there would have been no litter as everything would have come from the local area and eventually returned to the cycle in a different form. Plastic is different, it has no cycle to return to, it remains as litter, is burnt (releasing lots of carcinogens) or is thrown into a river to be carried to the ocean.

Many empty alcohol bottles were amongst the litter indicating a high level of alcohol consumption, another consequence of 'development' said to be caused by increasingly stressful lifestyles and exposure to advertising. And it appeared that these people were consuming plenty of advertising because, as houses came into view, we could see that each had a small solar panel and satellite dish on the roof. This meant that each house had a TV, exposing its residents to all the material things they "need" to be happy, and making them firmly aware of how much they lack. Prior to having the lifestyles of people from faraway places transmitted into their homes, it is likely that people would have been more content with what they had.

As we walked though the village to a guesthouse we passed a group of uniformed children who were returning home from school. It seemed that the Western education system had been adopted meaning children no longer spent their days learning knowledge and wisdom from their elders about local traditions and how to live on the land. Instead, children would compete with each other to learn abstract knowledge, chosen by people that had never set foot in their village. The result would be young people who lack skills to live on the land and instead have a skill set designed to serve the global economic system that will often involve them leaving the community for an urban centre.

It's not just lack of appropriate skills that motivates young people to leave their community, as through exposure to T.V and tourists, young people reject their own culture, which is now viewed as inferior or backward, and strive to adopt the new Western culture and image. Teenagers we passed later were dressed in a way that meant they wouldn't have looked out of place in any European city. Older generations still dressed in a more traditional way, wearing locally woven fabrics suggesting that the development process started relatively recently.

We stayed the night in the village and left the next day feeling sad, but not surprised, that the Western civilisation, based on endless expansion, had grown to envelop such a remote place. Norberg-Hodge describes the process of being enveloped as a "systemic transformation of society", including many of the recent changes we'd observed in Khati.

I later reflected on what would cause the people of Khati to sacrifice their independence and rich, complex way of life to strive for 'development' where they'd become servile in a system of billions of people, with little chance of success, having their lives determined by activities and decisions made in distant places. Norberg-Hodge claims that looking at the modern world from the perspective of undeveloped people, "our culture looks infinitely more successful from the outside than we experience it on the inside." In other words, it is a carefully crafted illusion that lures communities into an inescapable grasp before they realise the fallacy. Or maybe, like the majority of people in the West, they won't realise the fallacy and instead continually strive for something that is just beyond their reach.

In the past, communities would be violently coerced to adopt ways of living for the benefit of ruling groups. "Today’s conquistadors are development, advertising, the media, and tourism." Norberg-Hodge states, a process considerably more insidious than previous techniques and as a tourist one I must accept my part in. Although tourism to Khati is small compared to Ladakh, our presence would have far-reaching and unknown consequences.

My lasting impression was that if Western civilisation stopped tomorrow, after an initial period of readjustment, the people of Khati would experience a considerable improvement in their lives. Generations of people are still alive that possess knowledge that the younger generations seem unable and uninterested to receive. But those elders won't be alive for much longer. Western civilisation must be stopped as soon as possible.

Celebrate achievements, or be lulled by hope?

Those of us who care about life and justice are often, understandably, disheartened by all indicators of the health of the planet continuing to worsen. Equally understandably, we tend to grasp at those rare signs that we may succeed in turning things around: a big turnout to a protest, hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition of national significance, or a year in which carbon emissions don't increase over the year before.

We need fuel to keep us going as activists ― reason to believe our work can make a difference. We need to nourish our resistance by celebrating achievements. We know this is a long-term struggle and that we won't achieve ecological sustainability overnight, that we must set strategic goals and allow ourselves to feel accomplishment when we complete tasks that contribute to meeting those goals.

But it is dangerous to conflate a possible support base, willing to make symbolic statements, with an actual effective movement. It is dangerous to confuse things-getting-slightly-less-bad with actual victory. We need to keep grounding ourselves in a big picture view of reality and of our strategy, tactics, and goals, and regularly ensure that our daily actions are consistent with a carefully thought out plan. When we reach milestones in enactment of our strategy, we should review them with pride and satisfaction, and build on them to further goals. But we shouldn't seize on any bit of vaguely good news to make ourselves feel better in a bout of self-delusion.

We recommend reading the new post "Deep Green Resistance Seattle: The Climate Movement is Failing. Here are Two Models to Turn the Tide." It opens with the Lauren Hill quote “Fantasy is what people want but reality is what they need,” then examines the lulling effects of a one-year leveling off of carbon emissions and of the excitement generated by the #ShellNO campaign. It puts these in context of what needs to happen, and introduces two model strategies ― CELDF as an aboveground approach to direct democracy in the US, and MEND as a belowground campaign of strategic sabotage against the oil industry in the Niger Delta.

And if you haven't yet, read the strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare. If you've been uncertain as to how your activism fits into the big picture, these two links are a great starting point for you to contemplate how you can be most effective.

The Desert Star

by Unblind

There once was a little boy, who lived in the Middle East.
His family had been murdered when bombs rained in the streets.
He huddled silent upon the rubble of his crumbled home,
Suffering, starving, terrified, he survived there on his own.

Fire lit skies from ravaged landscapes burned into the night,
But when the smoke clouds cleared a lonely star came into sight.
Deep from within his broken heart, the boy wept out his wish;
End the massacre of his people by the hands of the Western Rich.

There was something magical in that star,
No one could understand it.
Even the boy didn’t realize that his wish would soon be granted.

What then followed was not what he had perceived,
Something far more incredible would make the world believe.
An army of one million spirits taken by the war,
Rose up from their graves that night to walk the earth once more.

They marched in silence hand in hand, mother father, child,
Through the endless battlefields that spread for miles and miles.
When the invaders' outposts had finally been reached,
The spirits simply stood there until the gunfire ceased.

The soldiers were all dumbfounded as they looked on in disbelief,
There they stood hand in hand the spirits of their casualties.
One by one the soldiers dropped their heavy guns,
Staring at the ghostly faces, they realised what they had done.

Thinking of their own families and of those who they loved best,
The soldiers stripped off their uniforms, turned and headed to the West.
War machines stood empty, with weapons in the sand,
Smoke cleared to blue sky as peace fell upon the land.

The little boy stood there smiling, for his wish had come true,
Now he stared up at his mother’s face and asked;
“Can I come with you?”

The spirit embraced her child and gave him one last kiss,
She took his little hand in hers and granted him his wish.
His soul followed the others as they floated to the light,
Free from their deaths misery, they each glowed with renewed delight.

Wide-awake the world now sees,
Through the eyes of others new found empathy.

---

also see Unblind's "Older But Not Wiser..."

Guardian article on FBI harassment of DGR members & lawyer

The DGR News Service reported last October about a string of FBI contacts with Deep Green Resistance members. Adam Federman, a reporter with The Guardian, has just published an article about that wave of harassment and three recent detainments of lawyer Larry Hildes. Federman shares details of the initial FBI contacts with multiple members, including an especially intimidating pair of workplace visits, and with their families.

The FBI has a long and shameful history of surveillance and disruption of legal organizations working against the status quo. From outright intimidation and assassination to more subtle interventions to destroy the social glue of resistance communities, the FBI has engaged in illegal and undemocratic activity for decades. The recent incidents may be part of a Modern COINTELPRO directed against DGR and other environmental movements.

The article begins:

Deanna Meyer lives on a sprawling 280-acre goat farm south of Boulder, Colorado. She’s been an activist most of her adult life and has recently been involved in a campaign to relocate a prairie dog colony threatened by the development of a shopping mall in Castle Rock.

In October of last year, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security showed up at her mother’s house and later called her, saying he was trying to “head off any injuries or killing of people that could happen by people you know”.

Read the entire article about FBI harassment of Deep Green Resistance.

Prairie dog liberation campaign: report-back & video

The DGR Southwest Coalition recently held their annual Southwest Gathering, sharing skills & good food, and engaging in many discussions & strategy sessions. As part of the gathering, Deanna Meyer of Deep Green Resistance Colorado joined Brian Ertz of Wildlands Defense to discuss their recent campaign against a Castle Rock mega-mall development. We've reported here a little bit on the struggle, and are excited to share this video of Meyer and Ertz describing the campaign in more detail.

The campaign initially petitioned the developer to "do the right thing": delay construction until June, so that threatened prairie dogs on-site could be relocated with the best chance of survival. Though this would leave the prairie dogs as refugees, displaced from their homes and with the rest of their community killed, at least they would have a chance to try to rebuild their lives. When the developer responded by poisoning the prairie dogs en masse (along with many others, human and nonhuman), the campaign focused on saving those who were left, and on creating an example of the developer by inflicting as much pain as possible.

The campaigners were unable to stop the development or to save all the prairie dogs, but their dedicated grassroots organizing succeeded at achieving their secondary objectives. They forced the developer to halt construction for months, allowing workers to rescue those prairie dogs who survived the mass slaughter. They've probably cost the developer millions of dollars and countless headaches, demonstrating the practical value to future developers of doing the right thing from the start.

Learn how these defenders of life leveraged their strengths to overcome a powerful opponent despite mainstream environmental groups saying "it can't be done", and how they plan to build on their win:

See more videos at the Deep Green Resistance Youtube channel

Deep Green Resistance "After Dark" short video

This short video gives a glimpse into social interactions in the life of a Deep Green Resistance member, friend, or family member. There's a lot of good food, talking, laughing, good food, playing, learning, and some good food. This footage was taken after the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) in spring 2015, and shows a group of DGR attendees and presenters relaxing after their days of sharing and learning.

DGR After Hours from KITTYHAWK on Vimeo.

If you're interested in joining us as we build a culture of resistance, please visit our website: Join Deep Green Resistance.

Baltimore & Black Lives Matter by Dominique Christina

Deep Green Resistance member Dominique Christina wrote a very powerful piece sharing her perspective and experience as a black woman in an institutionally racist America where black people are killed almost every day via state sanctioned, extrajudicial executions. Christina watched in anguish and grief and anger and terror as the murders of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore drove home the knowledge that her fierce motherly devotion could not guarantee protection of her children from our unjust society. Black mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters have watched life after life stolen with little or no consequence to the vast majority of the killers.

Christina got involved with Denver Freedom Riders, a movement to attain liberation, self determination, and healing for the black community. She journeyed with other members to Baltimore, to witness and participate in the uprising of anger catalyzed by the latest prominent brutality in an all-too-long string. In her post, she shares her experiences there and relates them to a bigger picture analysis of racism in this country:

My grandfather was born in 1911. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He knew all about the spectacle of black bodies dangling from trees, burned alive, castrated and beaten. What I could not personally reconcile was that I was having the same conversations about the same culture of violence that he was having as a boy growing up in the West End of Little Rock, Arkansas. Nothing had changed. Martin Luther King’s magnificent legacy did not result in black people being a protected class. Malcolm X’s unapologetic, larger than life, tell you the truth to your face way of being in the world did not stop the slaughter.

Both of those men were cut down by bullets in their prime anyway, which should have been all the evidence the following generations needed that this country is willful about its acts of brutality against black and brown people. If we couldn’t be slaves anymore we could be prisoners. We could be disenfranchised. We could be economically dispossessed. We could be squeezed and starved and relegated to barrios and ghettos that would kill us one way or another anyway. We should have known better. But we couldn’t see it…too much blood in our eyes.

Christina's writing is an important view into the ongoing repression faced by blacks, and what blacks and those in solidarity with their struggles are starting to do about it. Read the whole article and share with friends: Baltimore & Black Lives Matter.

Why civilization must be stopped

Most of us born into industrial civilization assume that this is the way things are meant to be, and that any comforts and elegancies we can derive from its systems of exploitation are well deserved. Rarely are we willing to question what our culture will leave for future generations, or how it impacts other species and people around the world and right next door.

We in Deep Green Resistance feel it necessary to examine and challenge the dominant way of life, for both ethical and practical reasons. The short video below, portraying civilization from the perspective of some of the oldest people around, illustrates why.

If you'd like to help stop this omnicide before it's too late, join DGR and a growing culture of resistance!

A visit to Hambach Forest

By Dan Planet, Deep Green Resistance

Just a short post on my visit to Hambach Forest in Germany, a resistance camp set up to defend the forest and prevent the RWE mine (Europe's largest CO2 emitter) from further destroying the planet. (For background on the struggle, see The Battle for the Hambach Forest.)

I arrived for the skill share camp which was a whole week of people hosting workshops on everything to do with activism from tree climbing, blockades, dealing with police, discussions on politics, philosophy etc. The defenders are very welcoming and will speak in English even if like me your German is almost non-existent! The determination to protect the forest is really quite something else when you see the blockades, tree houses and the protectors doing what they do. I camped in the woods not far from the main camp, which is considered a little risky, but I wouldn't have it any other way as the woods are truly amazing to wake up in.

My time in Hambach was inspiring but what I remembered more than any of the workshops or connections that I made was the forest itself. Nowhere more than Hambach have I found such contrast between natural and unnatural, sane and insane, ecology and industry, life and absolute devastation. The forest and the RWE mine couldn't be more different. To use the Tolkien mythology, I literally at times felt like I was in Fangorn Forest and that Mordor was somewhere lurking near at the edge ready to eat up what is now left of the beautiful and delicate forest. In England we have pockets of ancient forest but I still wasn't prepared for how enchanting this particular forest was and the bravery and determination of the people who want to defend it.

In short, if you can then please visit and stay a while...or stay until RWE encounter too much resistance and give up their ecocide!

View my pictures of Hambach Forest (it will be much greener now!), and visit the official Hambach Forest website.

Lierre Keith on "Peak Moment" discussing The Vegetarian Myth

In March 2011, the popular video series "Peak Moment" interviewed Deep Green Resistance author Lierre Keith about her book The Vegetarian Myth. Keith summarizes, with well-researched eloquence, some of the primary myths of vegetarianism:

• Eating vegetarian is good for our bodies
• Eating vegetarian is good for the earth
• Eating vegetarian will stop world hunger

Keith, formerly a long-time vegan herself, explicitly acknowledges and honors the morals, values, and passion that vegetarians and vegans bring to the struggle against factory farming and unethical and destructive food production. But she asks them to examine these "vegetarian myths" to get to the root causes of our horribly dysfunctional systems. Throughout the conversation, she stresses the primary problem of civilization and its prerequisite of agriculture, which requires a shocking amount of energy to fight nature. Maintaining monocrops is a never ending war. Whether to feed caged animals on concrete, or to directly feed humans, this is a war we can't afford to win.

Read a transcript of the interview or watch the video below, and if you'd like to learn more, we highly recommend reading the full book: The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith.

For more videos featuring Lierre Keith, the other DGR authors, and DGR members, visit Deep Green Resistance on Youtube or our Member Appearances page for both audio and video.

Deep Green Resistance on Instagram

A new DGR member has revived our Instagram page, posting beautiful pictures, political cartoons, thoughtful quotes, and all manner of resistance oriented memes. Follow our page to receive regular doses of visual inspiration, and please share our page with friends and family!

Deep Green Resistance Instagram

Are You Ready To Resist Roundup?

Deep Green Resistance member Raven Gray is actively writing for her new blog, Wild Awake, on subjects ranging from "reskilling" and permaculture to listening to the land and protecting it against industrial civilization. Her whole blog is worth following and exploring, but we wanted to especially highlight her recent piece about planned use of Roundup and other broad spectrum herbicides along the Point Reyes National Seashore: Are You Ready To Resist Roundup? Following on a prior look at Invasive Plants: Friends or Foe?, Gray explores how legitimate concern for the health of native plant communities has been twisted into its toxic mimic: support for the widespread application of poison. This provides a quick-fix "solution" while not coincidentally feeding profits of companies like Monsanto which heavily fund anti-"invasive" propaganda.

For those with much exposure to permaculture, the notion of so-called invasive plants as healers of civilization's multitudinous damages to our soils is not new. But as with so much other greenwashing promulgated by mainstream environmental groups on behalf of their corporate partners ― renewable energy technologies are good for the planet, clearcuts are good for the environment, and on and on ― many people accept the carefully crafted message: "We must poison to preserve life." Gray's articles debunk this variant of the notion that humans know best how to "manage" the land.

The evidence is mounting, and it is too large to ignore. Glyphosate has wide-ranging adverse effects on all of life. Several countries have banned (or are in the process of banning) glyphosate. But while the rest of the world appears to be waking up to its dangers, it’s business as usual in the US.

What is the true cost of polluting our world with toxic chemicals? What if Roundup is the next DDT, and responsible for the new Silent Spring? How exactly is Roundup going to protect the endangered plants, birds and animals that live in the Point Reyes National Seashore? The red-legged frog? The snowy plover? Tidestrom’s lupine?

Roundup does not serve plants or animals. It does not serve the public interest. It does not serve life. It serves the US biotech industry and the US government who are pushing glyphosate around the world in an attempt to dominate global agriculture.

DGR NY on Guy McPherson's Nature Bats Last

Pauline Schneider and Guy McPherson interviewed Frank Coughlin of DGR NY for the March 3rd episode of the Nature Bats Last podcast. Coughlin gives a basic overview of Deep Green Resistance: our philosophy, our strategy, our campaigns, and our goal of building a culture of resistance. He speaks, from his perspective as a health care practitioner and his experiences abroad, about the need for resistance in the heart of empire, rather than leaving the responsibility for revolution solely to those most oppressed and with the fewest resources. He also ties this exploitation of global capitalism to social injustices at home, and to ecological devastation.

Coughlin helped organize a workshop in New York City in late February featuring McPherson, and explains how the recent event grew out of a successful partnership the year before. McPherson presents a sober assessment of the state of climate change and the dire circumstances for all life on earth, including humans. Deep Green Resistance presents a strategy based on such a realistic assessment, proposing action on the same scale as our predicament. This sort of eyes-wide-open learning and decision making is likely to lead to more effective action than analyses and approaches oriented towards feel-good personal actions.

Listen to this episode as a good introduction to Deep Green Resistance with a personal spin: Frank Coughlin on Nature Bats Last, and visit Deep Green Resistance New York if you live in the area and would like to get involved.

Chris Hedges on the State of Extraction: exploitation, capitalism, and patriarchy

Chris Hedges spoke last weekend at the State of Extraction conference at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. While most speakers focused exclusively on natural "resources" ripped from the planet, Hedges brilliantly linked this environmental devastation with the social impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism on our most vulnerable populations. He challenged the narcissism, individualism, and identity politics that have come to dominate modern culture, including most of the left. He identified as especially insidious the widespread acceptance of prostitution and pornography: no other subjugation is so widely rationalized and dismissed as these abuses of women. Even in so-called progressive and radical circles, sexualized violence and racism are fiercely defended where no one would try to justify such violations in any other circumstances.

In fact, Hedges was temporarily deplatformed from the State of Extraction conference precisely for calling on the left to recognize the war against women as part of the larger colonialist project, in his recent article amplifying the voices of women on the front lines. Even in venues actively opposing the status quo of capitalism and extraction from the earth, any challenge to the accepted wisdom of patriarchy is met with knee-jerk attacks and an unwillingness to listen. We've seen this again and again in recent years as radical feminist speakers have been silenced: deplatformed from venue after venue, threatened with rape and murder, and attacked in vicious smear campaigns. The only thing unique about this latest incident is Hedges' position as a privileged white man.

Deep Green Resistance strongly advocates for a radical view of our interlocking crises, environmental and social. We need to get to the root of our problems to fashion effective solutions. In our FAQ Is DGR a Feminist Organization? we explain:

Right now, patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. Women are just another resource for men to use in their endless quest to prove their toxic masculinity and breed soldiers for civilization’s constant state of war. The masculinity and the war—against people, against the planet—together have created a perpetual motion machine of domination and destruction of the land and human rights. This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, since, as Sheila Jeffreys points out, fascism’s root is ultimately the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.

Please ponder this as you watch Chris Hedges give this amazing and truly radical speech:

Trigger warning: Besides the generally disturbing nature of this subject, Hedges reads a graphic account of a brutal rape from minute 46 to 48.

Also read DGR member Jonah Mix's analysis of the speech and male backlash against it: When “Paternalism” is Worse Than Commercial Rape: #StateofExtraction and the New Manarchist.

Fundraiser: systemic change to protect prairie dogs from developers

As we've reported here before, members of Deep Green Resistance Colorado, in partnership with Wildlands Defense, have been campaigning to protect a large prairie dog population from developers intent on building the largest mall in America. Many local Castle Rock, CO residents gave near-unanimous testimony on behalf of delaying construction a few months, to at least relocate the prairie dogs in a marginally humane manner before destroying their homes. Yet the town council and the developers collaborated to painfully gas the prairie dogs, to make "the problem" go away. (And to minimize the danger of any protected raptors, who predate on prairie dogs, complicating the project by being present at a required upcoming bird count.)

This behavior is unacceptable. Though the developers have already murdered many of the prairie dogs, there is still time to stop the developers from further slaughter. Equally important is the need to show that communities will impose repercussions on companies which behave in such a wantonly destructive and cruel manner, to send a message that such actions will not be profitable. If we can sufficiently damage their bottom line, it will help protect other communities against reckless corporations in the future.

To this end, prairie dog supporters have launched a fundraiser to support:

...a referendum on the zoned planning amendments that pave the way for the prospective Promenade mall. The referendum will give the people of Castle Rock the ability to decide if they want this development company, who just slaughtered in the cruelest way imaginable thousands of prairie dogs, to continue their development of the largest commercial property in the history of the town.

[...] The example in Castle Rock has the opportunity to cast a far-reaching message to all future developers that have prairie dog colonies on the land they plan to develop.

Please support this effort by visiting the prairie dog fundraiser page, spreading the word, and donating money if you possibly can.

Deep Green Resistance on reddit

Check out our new Deep Green Resistance subreddit, where we have postings from our chapter websites, Facebook pages, and the DGR News Service, plus stories submitted by visitors. Reddit provides a great platform for finding, discussing, upvoting, and sharing articles of interest, so take a look and Subscribe to the subreddit if you find it interesting. As the subreddit becomes more active, we'll draw on it as a source for our other media channels, so it's a great place to add anything related to radical activism and resistance to civilization which you think we should share more widely.

We look forward to growing this newest platform for Deep Green Resistance outreach!

"All These Days I" by Jamie Little and the filthy politicians

the filthy politicians, with Jamie Little, make a musical (and succinctly logical) argument for forcibly stopping the insane dominant culture, which is akin to an axe murderer frantically killing everything within reach. They reiterate a point often made by Deep Green Resistance: we need it all in this fight - propagandists and fighters, books and bullets. And those fighters on the front lines depend on supplies from a support base. There's a place for everyone in this culture of resistance, so find yours before it's too late for life.

Listen to this track and read the lyrics below, and hear more songs at the filthy politicians on bandcamp and at the filthy politicians on soundcloud.

all the days i threw away
it's obvious i just don't trust what comes my way
all the days i walked away
i never realized what controls my mind to be

check it - for every day i just threw away
now i'm grown up or so they say
all this bullshit comin my way
but i'm told this is life - til i'm old i should stay
in line like a rollerblade
but fuck that this life ain't an arcade
do you think it's a game to the slave who made
your i phone, blue jeans, or your microwave? no
no, and yo it's not your fault
but we're livin in the midst of a heist from the vault
nothin is sacred - for riches they'll rape it
take a look around before the forest is pavement
tell me where the ice caps, whales, and their ways went
why i should give a fuck about outer space when
runnin away ain't the answer
we can't escape it - we need to stop the cancer
stop creatin and makin poison
stop feedin it to all the little girls and boys and
stop burning oil, stop all this toil, stop bein loyal
to the same system that destroyed the soil
to the way of life that made this pot boil
your privilege is faced with a choice to continue
keep on keepin on or do you have it in you?
to reject all their bribery
it's not for the poor it's for you an me so
we gotta re-imagine - we gotta fight back
and not stop until we've stopped their attack
it's not abstract - it's as clear as day
there's an axe murderer and he's swingin away
but with so much already gone we've got used to livin this way
but all we've ever seen is proof
that this shit won't stop anytime soon
if we don't act now then we seal our fate
if they have their way it's gonna be too late so
go do what you gotta do
get a bullet or a book or a breath or a clue
this depends on me, it depends on you
life is the front line - sad but true
we don't all have to fight
but for supplies in the night, can we depend on you?

Older but not wiser...

by Unblind

I love you Dad, I really do.
So, it kills me to feel this way about you.

There was a time when we could converse, talk late into the night about the universe.
We shared stories, sipped drinks and poked fun at the world, we agree on so much it was great to be heard.
Your opinions were from life and they were your own, you gave me advice when I felt so alone.
I valued your views and made mine the same, never could I of guessed that that would some day change...

We barely talk now when we get together, the only safe topic seems to be the weather.
The stories you share now all come from TV, there's nothing about you, us, or your family.
Your opinions aren't your own, in fact they're quite sour, we can't talk politics or we argue for hours.
Your views no longer make sense they are based on the news, we're at odds now even my kids are confused.

I love this planet, you used to love it too. Can't you tell from the villains and those who speak true?
You challenge every thing that I say, yet you don't take a minute to see things my way.
It hurts to be belittled by someone you trust, I guess we're done talking....

I'll just leave you to rust....

Reality check on resource requirements of wind power

As we've pointed out in our Green Technology & Renewable Energy FAQs, so-called "clean" energy sources such as solar and wind become anything but, when harvested via industrial means. Each PV solar panel, each wind turbine, and every other proposal for generating electricity depends on mining, inherently destructive to the earth. In addition, each requires fossil fuels for mining, transportation, assembly, and installation. There's nothing "sustainable" about any of it.

energy skeptic backs up some of our concerns with quick calculations on the reality of how many tons of what materials would be required to have wind turbines generate half of US electricity usage. Notably, it would take 52 years worth of worldwide steel production to build enough turbines. It's interesting to look through the rest of the numbers too.

Bottom line: not only can't we meet our current electricity usage with "renewables" like wind energy, but it'd be horribly destructive to try. It's counterproductive, even dangerous, to hold onto fantasies of green energy saving us.

The Battle for the Hambach Forest

By Michael Regenfuss of Deep Green Resistance

There is an ongoing fight, just north of Düsseldorf, Germany, to save the Hambach Forest, Germany's last old growth forest. The forest is a 1,000 hectare old growth oak forest right next to the largest open cast coal mine in Europe. The mine is 12 kilometers long, 4 kilometers wide, and 300 meters deep. The mine produces 100,000,000 tons of coal per year, used to supply 5 power plants.

The coal is used primarily for the weapons manufacturing industry in the nearby Rhineland industrial district. The mine is set to operate until 2045. The forest was acquired in 1978 by RWE, which now operates the mine. The forest was originally 5,500 hectares and since 1972 had been owned by the municipality of Niederzier. Since 1978 the forest has largely been cleared to make way for brown coal mining.

The company has also been using a law that the Nazis used to take land from people to evict people from entire villages. Over a ten year period this relocation process has removed entire village populations and demolished the structures to mine the coal underneath. During the relocation process some elders have died due to the stress and heartbreak of losing their homes. Many people are coming down with cancers, heart disease, and emphysema from airborne toxic particles.

The remaining forest, despite its dramatic diminution, is still a functioning habitat. It consists primarily of oak and hornbeam, who shelter endangered Bechstein's bats.

An ongoing blockade has been in place since April 2012 to save this remnant forest. The blockade was evicted from the forest in November 2012, but after only one day they regrouped and occupied a meadow next to the forest. In April 2013 they reoccupied the forest. More recent actions included a treesit in a 250 year old oak at the edge of the forest, a group of Earth First! members blocking the loading of coal trucks, and a protest in nearby Bergheim against a newly built coal burning plant.

The struggle continues to save the Hambach Forest. For slides, videos, and more information on past actions and on the current blockade, visit Hambach Forest (English) or Hambacher Forst (German). If you can physically help with the blockade, please join them in person. You can also donate money through their website. Whatever you can do would be really appreciated. Time is running out for this place; the final showdown for this forest will probably happen by August 2015. Thank you for your interest and support to save this beautiful place.