The organization Deep Green Resistance has existed for nearly a decade, since the book was released in 2011. For this piece, we look at four different answers to the question: “What is Deep Green Resistance?”
DGR is survival. We want to survive and we want the rest of the living work to survive too. You wanna live right?
Right now life is barely surviving. Right now the living world is being exterminated. What’s exterminating it? A group of people who live in densely populated, ever-expanding colonies. They get their food and other resources, most of which they don’t actually need, from far away places. Do you think they care about the other living beings in these places? Do you think they consider the damage their resource extraction does? Many of them don’t know about it because they can’t see it, some of them are too busy living to even think about it and the rest are too busy making money to stop it. So agriculture, mining and other forms of resource extraction continue destroying habitat, poisoning land and killing our kin.
And what about their poisonous toxic waste? Where do they dispose of it? Not where they live of course. They pile it up in far away places or bury it or drop it in the sea or sell it to the poor. Do you think they consider the harm this does? Their shit is piling up all over the world and they don’t care enough to stop. This is what happens when you live in one place, get your sustenance in another, and dispose of your waste elsewhere.
This is our culture. You can call it civilisation, or a city based way of living, or a culture of empire. Whatever you call it, we don’t think it’s a good idea. Life cannot survive this for much longer and neither can we because cities are still expanding, resource extraction is still increasing and our poisonous waste is piling up in the sea, on the land and in the very air that we breathe.
You want your children to live and grow in a world that is flourishing and full of life? That’s what we want too. We want to live and we want the other communities of life that allow us to live to survive too. So we are building a culture of resistance because time is running out for life and we are still alive.
We are an above ground movement that is willing to defend the relentless attacks on life. We are also willing to admit that defense is not enough. We need other brave, moral, and strategically aware people to form underground groups and fight this culture before it wipes out life. If we don’t we will die and so will nearly everything else from bacteria to blue whales.
If you want to live with others you need to enter into a relationship with them. You need to love them. Control is not love. Abuse is not love. Domination is not love. This culture does not live with, or even on, land it occupies. Like any invading force it is sucking its host dry. Both the parasite and the host are doomed in this type of interaction.
We want to end this culture of death and destruction, so we are no longer ashamed or embarrassed to be human. We want to live with land, rivers, trees, forests, mountains and all living communities that are both a requirement for and a functioning part of our own lives and happiness.
We want to swim in and drink clean water. We want to sing and breathe in fresh air. We want to live and love on flourishing land. We want our children and your children and all children to do it too. What are you prepared to do to help us build this future?
In a room full of DGR members, I don’t need to tell you why you are here, or what needs to be done.
We all have our lists of loved ones and our unspeakable lists, the ones we don’t write down. While there is nothing I can add to or subtract from them, I start here because our problems are relational. Some of our big family is terminally ill with forgetfulness, an incurable, devouring madness that puts the rest of our family in immediate mortal danger.
Maybe we have varying ideas about what needs to be done, or how it should be done. Inside the DEW strategy, there is plenty of wiggle room for differing philosophies, which will change the nature of any action. As much to myself as to anyone else, I offer three reminders I use to keep me from succumbing to the poison.
Please be respectful.
We are, none of us, always right and good and true, all the time. We have thoughts and ideas and beliefs, but we are subject to our environments: bodily, social and earthly. With humility about the reach of our visions, I ask us to strive to remember that sparring partners bow to each other before commencing. We would not have chosen our targets or forces to combat if they were not powerful, capable, and in their strengths, so worthy of our attention.
Please be bold.
With that in mind, our convictions are there because industrial civilization will destroy our only home and everyone in it if we do not stop them. So we must stop them. We must.
Please be careful.
With that in mind, there is more than one word to describe bravery, and they are all less flattering from there. Protect yourself. It is very expensive to bail you out of jail. County is no fun and it gets less fun from there. Be protective of your loved ones. Bailing your family and friends out of jail is very expensive and much easier than burying them or knowing that they suffer. To whatever extent you can, practice security culture like a religion of daily ritual: there is an inner sanctum and an outer one. We really cannot afford to lose, neither can our loved ones. Let’s win then. Let us win well.
First of all, I want to apologize. I’ve been in the wilderness the last 7 days. I’m grizzled, dirty, have cuts on my face and bags under my eyes. I was up at 2am yesterday, hiked 20 miles, then traveled for 10 hours to get home. Needless to say, I’m not at peak mental function right now, but I’d like to take a stab at answering the question anyway.
It’s an incredibly important question, because this is the movement I have dedicated my life to for the past decade. Not out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, or some sort of hero worship or cult following. The reason I’m involved in Deep Green Resistance is because I believe in what we are trying to do. I believe in the mission of this organization, I believe in the world we are working towards.
We are living in an era of cascading ecological collapses. We are witnessing the death of the oceans, the climate falling into chaos, soil desertification and increased wildfires sweeping across the world. We’re seeing hurricanes, drought—whatever sort of unnatural disaster you think of, almost every one of them is getting worse – driven by this industrial civilization that we live in.
This culture is churning out plastic, cars, endless streams of products emerging from factories with no thought to the consequences. In a healthy culture, before you make any decisions, you have a conversation about them. You talk to other people in the community, and you ask “is it a good idea for us to do this?” That’s not a conversation that happens in this culture, which instead says “if it can be done, it will be done.”
That’s why the idea of “progress” is like a god in this culture, and it’s a death cult that is worshiping this god of progress, because anything will be sacrificed to it: the oceans, the mountains, the rivers, the grasslands, the forests, the climate. The future of all generations of life on this planet is being sacrificed to this death god of progress.
Deep Green Resistance wants to stop this. We’re some of the people who are willing to be honest about what is happening, to look unflinchingly at the reality of industrial civilization, this culture of empire, which is eating through every biome on the planet. And we’re willing to talk about fighting back. We’re not the old environmental movement, that’s purely dedicated to saving one wild place here, and one wild place there. While that is good and honorable work, it’s not enough. We want to stop this entire death machine, this omnicidal industrial civilization. We have a strategy to do this, and we are working to carry out this strategy.
It’s not an easy task we have set ourselves. As I said, I have been working on this for a decade and I expect to continue working on it until the day that I die. But it is the most important work that can be done in the world today, and that is why I am here.
DGR is an organization that advocates for the living world. It recognizes that organizing people in hierarchies of civilization, by design, destroys life on the planet down to the bacteria. While DGR is itself an aboveground organization, members acknowledge that inside our socio-political climate, only an underground resistance has the capacity to do this and they need our support.
DEW, the strategy endorsed by DGR, draws on successful aspects of guerilla tactics and military strategies, from across our known global history, to form a cohesive plan of action to instigate and perpetuate cascading systems failure of the interlocking systems of civilized infrastructure, while laying the spiritual, material and social groundwork for its replacement with regional, land-based, carbon sequestering ways of life that are themselves compatible with planetary life.
That includes isolated cells in tiers of increasing trust within a greater network of the dedicated who can and will do what needs to be done.
Understanding that industrial civilization is genocidal and will, if unfettered, extinguish all life, it is urgent that those well-organized and money-disciplined infrastructures (commerce, fuel, communications, the electrical grid, etc.) be dismantled.
In the face of Earth-scale destruction, considerations for those owning, operating and defending such institutions may not be allowed to interfere with the ultimate DGR goal: a living planet.
This is a heavy policy, demanding resolve and a clear, sober vision of the many grave repercussion that may result from potentially dangerous actions.
To MEND a creature or habitat from injury or infection, the harm must first be removed.
It is up to the aboveground structures to protect the underground actors from complete social condemnation and to continually push for less murderous and deadly solutions to be possible and preferably legal. It is for the underground to help keep a living planet inevitable.
Industrial civilization is killing the planet, and it’s not good for human beings either. But how can we live without it? We are dependent and addicted.
In this episode of The Green Flame, we ask what comes after industrial civilization and speak with Michel Jacobi, is an ecologist working in western Ukraine to preserve pastoral traditions and revive rare threatened breeds, including the ancient Carpathian water buffalo. He talks about using the animals as allies, in restoring the health of the land. Mitchel considers working with local people key to restoring the health of the land.
Michel learnt the local language from elderly people who also taught him how to breed cattle. Michel is 33 years old. He comes from Kiel, a city in northern Germany, situated near the Danish border. His parents have their own business, and his brother recently opened a factory. Michel studied forestry and ecology in Freiburg — a city near France and Switzerland — but did not want to stay and work in his own country.
— I thought that I could find ecological conditions that our ancestors shared because they don’t exist in Germany anymore. People should live closer to nature; this is what I want to demonstrate through my experience.
You can watch and listen more about the karpaten buffello here.
The second person we speak with for this episode is Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, Deep Green Resistance, Bright Green Lies, and more. You can find out more about Lierre’s work here. Lierre speaks about the impact of chemical fertilisers, the increase of human population and the need to face reality of the current situation.
Our song for this episode is “Wake Up Call” by Nicholas Tippins.
You can listen to this episode here:
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
In this piece, Max talks about revenge porn and deepfakes as a new form of pornography. Pornography has always been a tool for the subjugation of women by patriarchy. The article further relates subjugation of women to the subjugation of the natural world.
Our culture is a culture of violation, a culture of breaking boundaries: the boundaries of women, of children, of forests, of oceans, of the living planet itself, even of the atom and the gene.
Where does the impulse to violate come from, and how is it encoded and transmitted from generation to generation?
One method of transmission is via pornography, one of a broad set of cultural tools used to inculcate patriarchy and pass it from generation to generation. Susan Griffin, in her book Woman and Nature, writes that “above all, pornography is ritual. It is an enacted drama that is laden with meaning, which imparts a vision of the world. The altar for the ritual is a woman’s body. And the ritual which is carried out on this altar is the desecration of flesh. Here, what is sacred within the body is degraded.”
As Gail Dines and other radical feminists argue, the sadistic brilliance of pornography is that is sexualizes these rituals, hiding them behind a veil of arousal, so that excitement becomes linked to dominance and subordination. Acts that would be anathema to our child selves become normalized, then eroticized.
Revenge Porn and “Deepfakes”
This understanding of pornography as ritualized degradation helps explain two of the newer forms of pornography: revenge porn and “Deepfakes.” As the slow burn of printed pornography exploded with the advent of the internet, now the internet is enabling new forms of ritualized degradation of women and violation of boundaries.
Most people are unfortunately familiar with the phenomenon of “revenge porn“—the practice of men sharing explicit photographs or videos of women online in order to degrade them—which has become all too common over the last decade. “Deepfakes” are newer and make degradation so much easier: computer-generated pornography, often created using AI/Machine Learning technology to swap a woman’s face onto another person’s body.
The technology to create Deepfakes has escalated quickly over the past several years, and now realistic-looking Deepfakes can be created relatively easily, or even automatically. Last month a report exposed that users had uploaded images of more than 680,000 women, without their knowledge or consent, to an automated service on Telegram to create photo-realistic Deepfake pornography. And another expose showed that TikTok stars—often underage teenagers—are ending up on porn websites.
Digital Rape
How can we describe this new form of violation? Sophie Maddocks, a PhD candidate at the New School, writes that feminist activists are increasingly seeking to re-name revenge porn and Deepfakes as ‘Non-consensual pornography’, ‘image-based sexual abuse’, and ‘digital rape.’
Like Susan Griffin, Maddocks points towards an understanding of pornography not as sexual expression, art, or the singular act of bitter men, but as what Andrea Dworkin called “the blueprint of male supremacy.”
“Pornography incarnates male supremacy,” Dworkin wrote. “It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual sadism, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us; not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized. From the perspective of the political activist, pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy.”
The Ecological Crisis and Patriarchy
As Lierre Keith says, if you could reduce feminism to one word, it would be: “No.” The drawing of boundaries is essential to not just individual bodily and mental health, but to the health of the entire planet. And what is industrial civilization but the cultural urge to violate the entire planet?
Patriarchy is thousands of years old, and it will not be dismantled in a day, or a year, or a decade. But for as long as it has existed, so has resistance. Movements to dismantle porn culture and stop the proliferation of digital sexual abuse are widespread and growing. These problems are deeply entrenched, and confronting the culture of violation will require people in all walks of life to make commitments and take action, over lifetimes.
Deep Green Resistance is primarily an ecological organization, but we are also a feminist organization, because we recognize the links between patriarchy and the destruction of the planet.
Only to name one of the most obvious, the problem of overpopulation is mainly caused by the subjugation of women—legally, economically, culturally, sexually. And the path to solve overpopulation is simple: educate women, and provide culturally appropriate family planning and healthcare. When this is done, population growth disappears. There is no technical mystery here; the problem is changing the culture and restructuring power.
In Margaret Atwood’s prophetic book Oryx and Crake, global warming wreaks havok on a world falling further into dystopia. The most violent forms of child rape pornography are normalized, and young kids watch the “Nitee-Nite” show for live streams of people committing suicide. Soy-based artificial foods and genetically-engineered creatures fill every plate, and as the world descends further into chaos, well-meaning people spend their money airlifting food to starving polar bears in an ice-free Arctic rather than in confronting or dismantling the systems that are destroying the planet.
This is the world we are heading towards, but it is not inevitable. Our only hope lies in what Dworkin calls organized political resistance. Each day, I read these words and remind myself of our task:
[W]hen I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I’m not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. I’m not talking about a feeling. I’m not talking about having in your heart the way things should be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart.
I’m talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and you commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live… A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and people can’t. It is passed from generation to generation. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.
This episode of The Green Flame revolves around a group discussion ofNaomi Klein‘s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. We discuss the points of the book that are on point, other areas where the book fails, and how in some ways Klein’s own analysis describes how her mainstream climate movement operates.
In this book, Klein describes the spread of neoconservatism (aka neoliberalism, in some cases), and how it has been facilitated by a deliberate strategy of “shock treatments.” The shock treatments, Klein argues, has always required dictatorship for enforcement. Also read an analysis of the book.
Our music for this episode is “Drag the Forests Down” by Foxpockets.
A new space race has begun. Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have begun the process of privatizing the night sky. What comes next? Will humans colonize the solar system and beyond? In this third in a series of articles [Part 1, Part 2] Max Wilbert asks why this culture worships “progress.”
It began with wood and blood; trees and muscle power; the fire and the slave. This built the first megacities on Earth. The first civilizations grew: in Mesopotamia; along the Yangtze River and the Ganges; in the Andes; in Egypt; and elsewhere.
As they grew, they displaced other societies, tribes and nations who had existed for eons. By war or trade or marriage, assimilation or extermination, they grew, and as they grew, forests shrunk.
The limits of muscle and fire soon became apparent. By cutting down the forests, by plowing the earth and turning soil carbon into human carbon, they eroded the soil, they salinized the land, and what was a Fertile Crescent became dust. But these societies had created an ideology based on “more.” The result was war and a feverish search for new sources of energy and power.
The next frontier was to dig deeper, to find carbon that was buried deep under the soil in the crust of the planet itself. The burning of coal and oil was a revolution in energy. Suddenly mines could be pumped dry and shafts sunk deeper than ever before. Goods could be moved more quickly. Factories and war machines belched great clouds of smoke into the air, and the logging became industrial. The conversion of a living planet into a necropolis accelerated.
Coal and oil, when combined with the engineering necessary to create the engine, enabled expansion on a scale never before dreamed of. Soon nations had the power to move mountains, and they did. Coal and oil enabled the construction of the first large hydroelectric dams, and now the circulatory system of the planet was bound to civilization’s endeavors as well. And before long, the next boundary was breached: that of the atom itself.
This is the story of civilizations breaking the covenant humans had lived with for 200,000 years; the story of human beings constructing ideologies and megamachines that demand limitless power, and then pursuing that power to—quite literally—the end of the Earth.
Progress as Sort of God
There is a fundamental premise underlying not just capitalism, but all civilized societies: the premise is that “progress” in technological development is an inherent good; that any harm is overshadowed by this good; and that the pursuit of technological development and the power that results should be one of the primary goals of human society. Expansion is good. Growth is good.
This premise underlies not just capitalism, but civilization itself, and much of modern science.
This article is third in a series of essays responding to a scientific study published in the journal Scientific Reports back in May. The study models the future of global civilization, tracking population growth and deforestation, and finds that there is a 90 percent chance of civilization collapsing within the next 20-40 years. I discussed their collapse prediction in the first essay in this series.
The authors of the study theorize, as Salonika pointed out in the second essay, that the only way to avoid collapse is via expansion, especially expansion in energy generation, which they suppose would allow industrial civilization to surpass ecological limits and expand throughout the solar system. They write, “if the trajectory [of civilization’s technological development] has reached the Dyson limit we count it as a success [in our model], otherwise as failure.”
They are referring to a “Dyson Sphere” or “Dyson swarm,” a theoretical megamachine which would encompass a star and capture a large portion of its power output, which could then be used by a civilization.
The idea of a Dyson sphere has been around since the 1930’s, and has a rich life in science fiction. But it is not something to dismiss. Scientists have been working on the theoretical and technical foundation for space-based solar energy harvesting devices for many decades. More deeply, it is an idea that is deeply reflective of the ideology of civilization, which demands power in unlimited quantities. It is the same idea which has underlain civilization since the first slaves were shackled in rows and lashed and set to work building monumental architecture for the emperor. It is the same idea that drove the deforestation of the planet. It is the same idea that built the Grand Coulee Dam, and the Hoover Dam, and the Three Gorges Dam, and the Belo Monte Dam, and that will build the Batoka Gorge Dam unless we stop them. It is the same idea that has infected politicians and rulers and technocrats and theocrats and entire societies for thousands of years.
It is the idea that expansion is the highest good.
The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations as Type I (a planetary civilization, which can use all the energy available on its planet of origin), Type II (which can use all the energy within a given star system), or Type III (galactic civilizations). In this scale, a Dyson sphere corresponds to a Type II civilization. Global civilization today, using Carl Sagan’s extrapolations, is approximately at Type 0.73.
In this scale, the more energy a society can appropriate for themselves, the more advanced they are.
Those who have slaves can appropriate more energy than those who do not.
Those who cut down the forest and burn it can appropriate more energy than those who do not.
Those who plow the grasslands under can appropriate more energy than those who do not.
Those who break the boundary of the atom will have more energy than those who do not.
And those who are willing to capture sunlight itself—through a Dyson sphere or other forms of technology—will have more energy than those who do not.
It goes without saying that striving for higher levels on the scale is the goal of most people in power. From the beginning, most western science has been underpinned by a philosophy that the more human beings can control nature, the better. From Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance thinkers to Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, scientists have willingly hitched themselves to tyrants and democracies alike to fund their unending curiosity, and in return they have delivered weapons, energy, and economic development.
Control and expand: this is the ideology of conquest.
The Study of Consequences
Legendary science fiction author Frank Herbert wrote in his classic Dune that “ecology is the study of consequences.” The term is appropriate, then, to describe the study of the consequences unleashed by the decisions made by civilizations up to this point.
We’ve already spoken of the forests that are now past tense and the Fertile Crescent that is fertile no more. Agriculture—not gardening, but totalitarian agriculture—is no more than organized appropriation of primary productivity, habitat, and soil fertility from non-human species to benefit a single species (humans).
Primary productivity, or photosynthesis, is the basis of terrestrial ecology—the basis of life on land. On average, in agricultural areas, 83% of primary productivity is extracted by humans, leaving 17% for the non-humans who remain. This is a consequence of civilized agriculture, just as global warming and ocean acidification are consequences of the choice to seek energy from coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
The Fermi Paradox and The Great Filter
We cannot speak of civilization, Dyson spheres, and ecology without discussing the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox.
Astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake created the Drake equation in 1961 at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. The equation estimates the probability that there are other intelligent life forms in the galaxy with whom we might communicate. The equation is a rough tool, more thought experiment than precise scientific measure, and plugging in different variables can give wildly different results. It’s all conjecture; life has only ever been observed on one planet.
The Drake Equation, however, does suggest that there could be as many as 15 million planets with intelligent life in the Milky Way alone; we just don’t know. This is where the Fermi Paradox comes in. The Fermi Paradox is a mystery posited by Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi: given these huge numbers, why have we found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? A 2015 study concluded that Kardashev Type-III civilizations are either very rare or do not exist in the local Universe.”
Why has SETI failed?
There are many possible explanations, many of them revolving around the idea that the formation of complex life-forms is actually extremely rare, and that life on Earth has passed through some sort of “Great Filter” to arrive at this. An alternative explanation is that societies that develop the ability to transmit radio waves and travel off their own planet tend to destroy their own ecological founds and collapse.
Each of these explanations is horrifying in its own way.
The Colonization of Space
Incidentally, rockets used in spaceflight destroy the ozone layer, release as much carbon dioxide in 2 minutes as a car would produce in two centuries, and are changing the composition of the upper atmosphere, releasing gasses and particles in areas they have never before naturally existed. And this process is accelerating as corporations such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic begin to colonize near-Earth orbit with thousands of satellites and increasing numbers of commercial craft.
It is expected that the number of rocket launches will increase by an order of magnitude within the next few years.
Another Path
Does it have to be like this?
Some would have us believe that science, technology, and progress are the only possibility—the only option that is thinkable. But is this true?
The science of conquest is not the only type of science. There is another; a science that is based on observation, thesis, and evidence, that is based on a peer-review that does not take place in university buildings, but rather in forests, in grasslands, along rivers, in the oceans.
This is the science of the Polynesian sailors, who set out across ten thousand miles of ocean on boats made of sustainably-harvested wood, who navigated the seas and found islands like a pin in the oceanic haystack without compasses, GPS satellites, or steel-hulled boats.
It is the science of the Kalapuya people, who practiced a scientific ecology through prescribed burning of their land, cultivating species beneficial to biodiversity and abundance not just for humans, but for all life, and thus gardened the entire landscape and created one of the most diverse habitats on Earth, and of the Klamath people, who use fire to geoengineer climate on a small scale by setting their hillsides alight when inversions cause the smoke to gather in their river valley, cooling the river and triggering the salmon runs.
It is the science of the Aborigines, who encoded language and culture in songlines and land, and created a continuous culture that has lasted at least 65,000 years. It is the science of those who remain, keeping these traditions alive, who often don’t use the term science, because it is too small a word for what they do.
There are other ways to live, ways that are no less complex or rewarding, no less respectful of human intellect, but which are build on relationship.
What future do we want? The dystopian future of science fiction? A world of control? A world of Dyson spheres and continental solar arrays? A world “red in tooth and claw,” where survival of the fittest means those who will extract more ruthlessly will gain power? Or do we want a world of connection and participation, a world of mutual aid, where we give back as much or more than we take?
I dream of a world where humans practice a different kind of science—not the science of conquest but the science of cooperation.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018. He lives in Oregon.
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