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....