What will it take to save the living planet? What will turn the tide of climate change and lead to forests rising again? What will defeat or transform the empire that is consuming our living world?
How can we win?
These are the largest and most important questions we face, and they are our mission here at Deep Green Resistance. We dedicate ourselves, relentlessly, to pursuing answers to these questions. And answers we have found—some of them. History and analysis teaches us that transformative, revolutionary political movements rise and fall with cultures of resistance: the people and communities that provide support, material aid, and solidarity to fuel movements.
You are part of this culture of resistance, and we salute you. We thank you for your solidarity, your material aid, and your support. We are humbled by our community: your dedication, your work ethic, your experience, your power, your passion.
Last Sunday, November 22nd, we hosted a 4-hour live streaming event called “Drawing The Line: Stopping the Murder of the Planet,” and we received an outpouring of support. We have raised over $5,000 USD, which for a small grassroots organization like us is a significant portion of our budget. If you didn’t have a chance to donate yet, it’s not too late, and we still very much need support. We hoped to raise $15k, and are still operating in the red. If you can support us, please visit this link to donate, or this link to sign up for monthly contributions. As always, you can contact us to discuss other options.
You can watch the recording of the event here:
We want to thank everyone who contributed to us last week, and over all the years. We are so grateful for the support we receive from our readers, friends, family, donors, and allies. Our work is truly a group effort, and support is truly an essential part of this.
Image: Mother bear and cubs in the redwoods, photographed by Derrick Jensen.
REMINDER: This Sunday, November 22nd, join us for a live streaming event—Drawing the Line: Stopping the Murder of the Planet—featuring Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Chris Hedges, and grassroots activists from around the world.
The event will begin at 1pm Pacific (2100 UTC) and will be live streamed at https://givebutter.com/deepgreen.
This Sunday, we ask: where do you draw the line? What is the threshold at which you will fight for the living planet? And how shall we fight?
This event will introduce you to on-the-ground campaigns being waged around the planet, introduce various strategies for effective organizing, rebut false solutions through readings of the forthcoming book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, and discuss philosophy of resistance. There will be opportunities to ask questions and participate in dialogue during the event.
The mainstream environmental movement is funded mainly by foundations which don’t want foundational or revolutionary change. Radical organizations like Deep Green Resistance therefore rely on individual donors to support activism around the world, which is why Drawing the Line is also a fundraiser. We’re trying to raise funds to support global community organizing via our chapters, fund mutual aid and direct action campaigns, and make our core outreach and organizational work possible.
Whether or not you are in a financial position to donate, we hope you will join us on November 22nd for this event! There will be a chance to ask questions and participate in dialogue. We hope to see you on Sunday.
Where do you draw the line? What is the threshold at which you will fight for the living planet? And how shall we fight?
This November 22nd, join Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Chris Hedges, organizers from around the world, and guests for a special 4-hour live streaming event, Drawing the Line: Stopping the Murder of the Planet starting at 1pm Pacific time and hosted by Deep Green Resistance.
This event will introduce you to on-the-ground campaigns being waged around the planet, introduce various strategies for effective organizing, rebut false solutions through readings of the forthcoming book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, and discuss philosophy of resistance. There will be opportunities to ask questions and participate in dialogue during the event.
The mainstream environmental movement is funded mainly by foundations which don’t want foundational or revolutionary change. Radical organizations like Deep Green Resistance therefore rely on individual donors to support activism around the world, which is why Drawing the Line is also a fundraiser. We’re trying to raise funds to support global community organizing via our chapters, fund mutual aid and direct action campaigns, and make our core outreach and organizational work possible.
Whether or not you are in a financial position to donate, we hope you will join us on November 22nd for this event.
In this video clip Derrick Jensen talks about how to support direct action, both through loyalty and physical, material support. Derrick lists many ways people can support others on the front line, using examples such as supporting indigenous people opposing oil pipelines and the importance of using your skill set from accounting and writing to others who can cook and sew.
When one cannot go to support an action directly, how can one still support that action?
Napolean, or maybe it was Frederick the Great, famously commented that an army marches on it’s stomach. What is meant by that is that the quartermasters are just as important as the soldiers. Another way to say this is that in battle, in World War II, for example, only about 10 per cent of the soldiers ever fired their gun in battle. The vast majority of soldiers were clerks, or truck drivers, or people who delivered ammunition, or medics, or cooks, or something else. That is a pretty common figure—about, 10 per cent, or often less. I think it was only 3 percent of the IRA that picked up any weapon.
Let’s think about a professional basketball team, or a professional baseball team. You not only have the players. You’ve got all the minor leagers. You’ve got the trainers. You’ve got the dieticians. You’ve got the people who sell the tickets. You’ve got the groundskeepers. You’ve got all these others.
Or in a movie. A movie does not just consist of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There are gaffers and stunt people, and editors, and caterers. So the point is that there are very few accomplishments that people actually do solo. Most of us require support in whatever we are doing. That support work is just as important as the more glorious aspects.
My friend Lierre Keith often says that what an activist movement needs is two things. It needs loyalty and material support. For example, right now, there are people, primarily indigenous people, some non-indigenous people, who are opposing pipeline that is going across their land. Of course, every pipeline goes across indigenous land, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. For people whom, for any number of reasons, cannot go there to be there physically, there are a near infinite number of things they could do.
They can write letters to the editors locally. They can advocate in one way or another for them. They can send them supplies. The people actually in the frontline still need to eat. They are going to have shoes that fall apart. Or, they’re going to tear a hole in their jeans. Or, they’re going to get sick.
When we were attempting to stop timber sales, we would sometimes have to work very hard to meet the deadline. We’re having to have till midnight to finish our appeal. There was a post office that stayed open till midnight, for whatever reason. We would oftentimes be working as hard as we can. We were working for hours and hours. We’ve only got two hours left to go. We’d actually get very hungry. Somebody has to go get some food. That’s just as important as the person who drives it to the airport, where the post office was. That’s just as important as the person who writes it up.
Physical material support is very important. There’s also the notion that a guerrilla army swims in the ocean of the people. You need to develop support among the people in order to have a guerrilla army. That’s not just true for the guerrilla army. That’s also true of activism. We need to raise public support for our positions.
I’ve thought often of an experiment called something like “The Second Person Experiment.” They had a bunch of people sitting in a room, like a doctor’s office. They’d have a couple of people come in who were part of the experiment. One person would say, for example, something very racist. The others would not believe it. They would just say it was the part of the experiment.
What they found was that the response of everybody in the room was heavily influenced by the response of the second person in on the experiment. Let’s say that the first person says something racist. If the second person says, “That’s pretty funny, that’s great.” Everybody in the room is much more likely to respond positively than if the person said, “Hey! That’s not very cool.”
I think about that a lot. In fact, it came across a very very small way in the past few weeks. I’m on an email list in my neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood watchlist, where they will announce when somebody gets their house burgled. They’d say, “Everybody watch out. There’s somebody burgling a house. They were seen leaving in a whatever.” So, that’s pretty handy.
But another thing that the people running the list would do, that kind of annoys me is they will complain every time anyone in the neighborhood sees a mountain lion or a bear. And, they’ll say, “We need to call fishing game and get rid of the animals, cause a mountain lion was seen carrying a great kitty.” Nothing personal to the great kitty sitting in the house.
They’ve been doing this a lot. I’ve been keeping silent. Finally, I just couldn’t keep silent anymore. I wrote a very nice note saying, “We need to remember that we’re in their homes. If you have a cat and you leave your cat outside, that’s the risk you’re taking. The mountain lion or the bear should not be harmed for the risk that you took or your cat took.” Nevermind that cats kill birds, but let’s leave that aside.
It was a very nice note, but it had to be said, because I wanted to break the hegemony of it. It’s the same on the larger scale. There’s a line I’m going to mangle, I believe it was from Gandhi. “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they oppose you, then you win,” or something like that. I think that’s awfully simplified. But, it’s really true that somebody has to go and say something. And then somebody else has to repeat it. And, somebody else has to repeat if, till it gains cultural currency.
Let’s think about this in terms of the attempts to support the indigenous people opposing the pipelines. If they had 50,000 people show up, that’d be great. But, if that 50,000 people show up, but they have no body show up with a port-a-putty, and they had nobody show up with food, that 50,000 people thing would last about six hours and leave a mess. You need to have support in order to have a long-term campaign. That’s absolutely crucial. It’s just as crucial as anything else. What can people do, who are not on the frontline?
I have a friend who is an accountant. Part of her activist work is she does accounting for various organizations that need accounting. That’s something you have to to do too, especially if you have a non-profit. You have to have a 501C3, means that you have to go through all of that stuff. It’s nice to have someone to navigate that territory.
I don’t care what your skills are. If you’re a good writer, they need good writers. If you’re a good cook, they need good cooks. If you are a good accountant, they need good accountants. It is so true. I get tired of being called the “violence guy,” because I talk about resistance. Truth is, we need everything. We need school teachers. We need accountants. We need cooks. We need sowers. We need everything.
I want to challenge everybody who’s listening to this. I’d like you to take at least one hour every week and do some form of activism, or support for somebody else’s activism.
I am going to tell a story, which is how I got started as an activist. When I was about 24 or 25 or 26, I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gas. I wasn’t covering up the social and economic costs. Every time, I would buy gas, for every dollar I spent on gas, I would donate a dollar to a local environmental organization, cause they need it. But I didn’t have any money. I was completely unemployed. I had very very little money. So, what I’d do instead is I’d give myself a choice. Either pay a dollar for every dollar of gas. Or, I could pay myself $5 for every hour of activism. If I spent $10 on gas, I could either give $10 to a local organization or do two hours of work of activism.
I want to challenge everyone to do that. Take some amount, and either give a “tithe” to some local organization, or do two hours of work for a local organization. Or, one hour of work. Everybody can take 1 hour away from their lives. I don’t care how busy you are. You can take 1 hour. You can write a letter. You could go to a protest. You could help start assembling a package. You can do just that much to start. It’s a wonderful start.
You can listen to more videos by Derrick on this YouTube channel or visit his website at http://www.derrickjensen.org
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a co-founder of the group Deep Green Resistance and longtime board member of Fertile Ground, a small, grassroots environmental non-profit with no employees and no corporate funding. His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays, was recently released. It’s called We Choose to Speak, and Other Essays.
He is also the co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies” (with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith) which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” such as solar panels, electric cars, recycling, and green cities. The book makes the case that these approaches fail to protect the planet and aim at protecting empire from the effects of peak oil and ecological collapse.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
I’m not a Leninist, but I think it’s worth reading Lenin and all those famous revolutionaries throughout history, I think it’s very worth studying and reading their work even if you disagree with large portions of it, even all of it depending on who you are, but Lenin talked about revolution as not being something that people make happen. Ultimately, revolution comes about more or less organically because of those interactions between people, and society, and environment, and that whole socio-political, ecological context gives rise to these revolutionary conditions, and whether or not there is a revolution that depends on people’s ability to harness and change the situation in some way. This whole conversation I’m always thinking of this quote of James Connolly who was an Irish Republican around the early 1900s, active around the 1900s in the independence movement in Ireland, and James Conolly said “revolution is never practical until the hour the revolution strikes, then it alone is practical and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings, and the whole idea of revolution to me is fascinating because in this context that we find ourselves in today, so many people have trouble imagining, you talked about this in your work Derrick, so many people have trouble imagining another way of life. People can imagine the end of the world, the collapse of the biosphere, the end of all human life and perhaps, most non-human life as well before they can actually imagine living a different way of life or living without the conveniences, and the consumption, and the high energy lifestyle of modern civilization. So, I think part of revolution, part of building towards revolution is how do we envision a future world that is better than the one we live now, and then how do we concretely begin to work for that world in here and now, and be prepared for those revolutionary moments that we know are coming, because that’s the truth as we know these revolutionary fractures in society are coming, and if you were in Paradise California when that fire came through, as the James Connolly quote talked about, all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers were the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings in that moment when the inferno is sweeping through your town and the climate apocalypse is upon you, and that is just a small taste of what’s coming. This collapse has been an on-going process for a long time, but it’s getting so intense as the ecology of this planet really has taken such a hammering over the last hundreds and thousands of years, but specially in the last hundred years and the last decades as this culture’s hyper powered on so much fossil fuels, and so much energy that is destroying and extracting the last of all the resources of the planet, blowing up as many mountains as it can and exploiting everything, right? In that context we need to begin to build the seeds of the future and I think it has to combine that imagination, that ability to imagine a different future with like a very hard-headed, a very practical organizing mindset.
Browse all of my Resistance Radio interviews here.
PLAYLIST
0:11 – Introduction
1:22 – The Need for Change in Large-Scale Social and Environmental Movement Approaches
6:59 – Reform Can Be Very Helpful but Doesn’t Address the Fundamental Problem
12:26 – Revolution as a Consequence of Ecological Collapse
18:26 – Deep Green Resistance: Luck is Where Preparation Meets Opportunity
24:34 – We Can’t Out-muscle the Empire, We Have to Be Able to Out-think It
29:19 – Strategy and Organization is How We Build Power
35:06 – Where Does the Power to Exploit Comes From?
41:01 – Dismantling is Scary and Difficult Yet We’re Not Alone
44:05 – Pre-revolutionary Phases and How to Reach Out