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.
![[Green Flame] Industrial Solar is Destroying the Mojave Desert](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/09/green-flame-NS.jpg)
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.
For this episode, we speak with Laura Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch about dozens of large solar energy projects threatening the Mojave and Great Basin deserts in Nevada and eastern California. We explore why utility-scale solar built on habitat is not a solution.
From this episode:
Now that I have seen ten years of solar build out. I was opposing the giant Ivanpah solar power towers in Eastern California deserts. That was a beautiful sloping desert next to the Mojave national preserve, full of Mojave yuccas, rare plants, wild flower blooms. We’d find horn lizards, black throated sparrows. cactus rinds, beautiful little slidewater snakes, harmless, just wanting to live in this area. Tortoises, a lot of tortoises. And it all got flattened, graded, run over by heavy machinery. Now it’s just a disturbed weed field with a giant fence around it. I looked about it. The whole of project – I think it was about 400 MW of energy, but it had a natural gas backup. Then we saw others, and others, still others. Tens of thousands of acres of deserts going under the blades of solar panels. I have not noticed a decline in carbon emissions. Of course, this is just one part of the world: the Mojave desert.
But it does make me think more recently: how much solar will it take to cover the desert before we see that downturn in carbon emissions? I think never. It’s this never ending scenario of needing more and more land, but we are not going to reduce our standard of living. I’ve heard different numbers regarding the pandemic: 17% decline in carbon emissions, maybe it was 12. A sort of a gigantic lowering of carbon emission, what we’d been wanting to have. But it took us really lowering our standard of living. Being much more efficient. Not burning a lot of fossil fuels. That’s actually, maybe, what we have to do in a non-pandemic situation: alter our whole way of living on the globe. And it’s a daunting task. Here we are going to build 60,000 acres of photovoltaic projects. Some of them will have Lithium-ion battery bank storage on protected Joshua tree habitats. That, I predict, will not lower carbon emissions one iota.
Our music for this episode is Melodi från Vest-Agder by Tim Eastwood of Dic Penderyn.
This article examines a few things we all can do to enhance our leadership skills.
By Max Wilbert
A friend of mine defines leadership as taking responsibility not just for yourself, but for a larger group or community. As she explains it, a leader tries to ensure things go well.
In general, activists are not very concerned with leadership. We tend to have an understandable mistrust of leaders. This is no surprise, as most leaders in the dominant culture abuse their power for profit and exploitation. But there is another type of leadership that is wise and moral and just. Leadership is extremely important, and we should learn basic principles from those who study leadership most seriously—often businesses and military. We can learn principles from these organizations, even if we disagree with their entire foundation.
This article shares 18 tips for leadership.
Study those who came before, as well as present leaders you admire. Learn from their mistakes, as well as their successes – their weaknesses, as well as their strengths. Be a student of the past.
Writing, research, direct action, strategic thinking, fundraising, organizing, relationship building, outdoor skills, first aid, tactical skills—all these things can be learned. Study hard and apply your knowledge.
You will never step up without self-believe. If you believe you are destined to never be a leader, you will not work to apply yourself and study. Step up with confidence, but not arrogance. Recognize your own weaknesses, as well as strengths, and build a team to shore up your weaknesses.
Leaders should not sit back and wait for others to do the work. Lead from the front, and be an example for others.
Even if you don’t know how to solve a given issue, use your intelligence to bring the group together, facilitate discussion, gathering insight, and so on. Learn to ask the right questions and share your thoughts when you have them. Speak up.
Leaders need to listen to other people. Listen more than you speak. Learn from everyone.
Build trust with your community and team, and delegate. One person has a limited capacity. Therefore, we have to build skills in other people to expand our capacity. This requires trust, and investing in people’s education and learning. People are the most valuable asset we have. Invest in people, even if it takes time for them to learn and adapt.
Leaders who abuse power are not and should not be respected. As a leader, you must earn respect, and one way to do so is by respecting others. People should be given respect as a default, unless they do something to lose your respect. Even then, you should be forgiving of those alongside you in the struggle.
Some are loud, some are quiet. Some lead by planning and writing, others by action and speech. Some lead in private, others in public. Some lead while others rest. This is a strength. Cultivate all types of leaders.
People will not trust or follow a leader who is not willing to take the same risks as them, and get their hands dirty. Set an example for others with your action. Like the lead goose in a flying-V, the leader should do the most work, not the least (and when the time comes, the leader should cycle to the back, allow another to take the lead, and take a rest).
Be prepared to do what is right. Understand consequences, and be prepared to accept them, if it is the right thing to do. When you act cowardly, reflect on why, and what you could do better next time. Commit to excellence and growth.
Leaders should be prepared to take action in the physical world. Practice, prepare, and train in controlled situations to be ready for uncontrolled situations that will arise. Visualize yourself intervening in various scenarios. When opportunities arise, challenge your physical courage.
A team is a fragile, unstable creation. Leaders must constantly work to stabilize the team, encourage people, and foster a shared strategic vision. Aligning people as individuals and the group as a whole pays major dividends.
As a leader you have a duty to be as physically and mentally fit as possible so that your decision making is as good as possible in stressful and challenging situations. Also, training yourself hard physically ensures you are familiar with the feeling of exhaustion and burnout, and know when you do need a break. Physical health and mental health are closely inter-related. The healthy person can think, act, and fight harder and most effectively.
Success in any endeavor entails risk taking. You can never control all factors. Seek to control and understand a situation as much as possible before acting—do not act rashly. But action is almost always better than inaction.
Often, the wrong decision made quickly is better than the correct decision made too late. Rushing can be a path to failure, however, as well. Remember the saying: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Be methodical. Move as slowly as you have to in order to get the job done, and no slower. Move as quickly as you can, safely and intelligently.
Failures are inevitable. Prepare for them. Plan for them. Expect them. Then keep going. You will face setbacks, betrayals, losses and more. Organizing is not an easy path. Take care of your mind, spirit, and heart, so you can be in the fight for the long time.
Self-discipline is the foundational skill. Be gentle with yourself, but allow yourself no excuses.
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 author of two books, most recently Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Monkfish, 2021 – co-authored with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith). He has been part of grassroots political work for nearly 20 years.
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.
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.
To learn more, visit the Deep Green Resistance website.