Originally named Ohi:yo’—“beautiful river”—by the Seneca, the Ohio River is now the United States’ most polluted river. The dominant culture teaches us to view natural beings like the Ohio River as objects to be used, consumed, and destroyed for human benefit.
This is a primary reason the destruction of the natural world is intensifying. How would our relationship to the natural world change if, instead of viewing nonhumans as objects, we viewed them as living beings capable of speaking to us? As allies who desire to communicate valuable lessons to us?
This journey – like the Ohio River – has many beginnings. A river’s physical beginnings are often called headwaters. Water wells up from the ground or falls from the sky. Then, aided by gravity, water navigates the specific peculiarities of the land to collect and form the first wet trails distinct enough to earn names such as creek, brook, or stream. These creeks, brooks, and streams tirelessly search for each other, perpetually seek communion with their kin. And, when enough of them join together, they become rivers.
Where should we say a river begins? Which of those first passages of water in the round Pennsylvania hills or the thickly-wooded West Virginia mountains, which of those first liquid motions over white Indiana limestone or black Kentucky coal can we name as the beginning of the Ohio River?
Many mapmakers seem determined to pinpoint precise headwaters for the world’s rivers. This is strange because the idea that a river has only one starting point is belied by the very maps declaring this to be true. Google Maps has grown to be one of the most widely used maps in the world today. When I look at Google’s map of the Ohio River basin, I am told that the Ohio River begins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in Pittsburgh, PA.
Tracing the River’s Veins
But, if I follow the thin ribbons of blue twisting and curling across the map to their disappearance on the page, I am taken to dozens of different places. I trace the thin blue line representing the Allegheny River to the hills of Potter County in northern Pennsylvania. I trace the line representing the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh and the line quickly splits in two. The map continues to label the western line “Monongahela,” but the eastern line is labeled “Youghiogheny River.”
I follow the eastern line up into the mountains near Aurora, West Virginia where it disappears. I go back to the line representing the Monongahela but it splits in two once more at Point Marion, Pennsylvania. The western line once again remains “Monongahela” and the eastern line reads “Cheat River.” Following the eastern line south, the Cheat River splits in two, one “Shavers Fork” and another “Black Fork.” The “Black Fork” line is joined by a line labeled “Blackwater River” which then splits into three lines named the “Dry,” “Glady,” and “Laurel” forks. These three lines then disappear in the hills of West Virginia near the Virginia state line.
Tracing each of the Ohio’s tributaries’ tributaries’ tributaries would take a long time. At the very least, we should understand that arbitrarily locating the headwaters of the Ohio River at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in Pittsburgh is inaccurate, at best, and downright dishonest, at worst. So, why are geographers, topographers, and cartographers so determined to name a river’s headwaters? Is this a peculiar side effect accompanying the choice to don the suffix “-ographer.” Or, more likely, is it a symptom of the colonial impulse to control, to define, to destroy ambiguity, to produce one true answer as there is one true ideology, one true religion, one true God.
Stories Are Rivers and Rivers, Stories.
The Ohio River is not so much concerned with either accuracy or honesty as she is concerned with creativity –the land she shapes, the communities she forms, the songs she sings, and the lives she makes possible. Metaphor is a creative channel. It is a way of knowing far older than science or philosophy. I suspect that metaphor is a way of knowing far older even than logic. The Ohio River beckons me to swim in the channels of metaphor.
Stories, of course, are rivers and rivers, stories. The story of my journey with the Ohio River has many headwaters. These headwaters will flow into streams of written consciousness, lyrical vignettes, and fluid reflections. Like water, they will seek their kin who share thematic similarities and topical currents. The strongest writing, achieving a certain depth, will collect in pools as essays and chapters. One day, I hope, these stories may join together to form a book worthy of the Ohio River.
As I begin this journey, I feel the headwaters of many stories gathering within me. They well up from my lifelong love affair with oceans, lakes, rivers, and marshes; with fish, turtles, toads, and tortoises; with ripples, tides, waves, and the way crescent moons are best seen from a still pond face; with the infinite voices water sings with; with all water creates and all the lives water facilitates.
Blood and Water
My experiences as a practicing rights of Nature attorney and my work to stir bravery in the souls of those who love Nature begin gathering as another headwaters. I feel the waters in my body boiling for the respect they deserve. My heartbeat pounds, insisting on the sacredness of the water in the blood my heart works so consistently to move. My organs agitate against the poisons they must filter out of my daily drinking water.
I find the trickle of yet more stories in my family history. I recall how, in Evansville, IN on the banks of the Ohio River, my grandmother was prevented from being a Poor Clare nun. And how, if this didn’t happen, I would never have been born some 30-odd years later in Evansville not far from the Poor Clare convent. I hear the metaphors growing in clarity. The other sisters feared my granny was too talkative to take a vow of silence. Fortunately, my granny’s signature chattiness, her need to gossip and share stories, are properly understood as a beginning of my life’s story.
Current events are natural springs of stories. As much as I wish I could bury some of those springs, plug the wells, I can’t. I can’t ignore the images of black people being murdered in the streets for having the simple audacity to walk those streets. I can’t deny the scenes of indigenous people being teargassed on their own land for having the simple audacity to protect water. I can’t forget the reality that the natural world is being polluted, clear cut, dammed, consumed, and driven to extinction for having the simple audacity to exist. Thunder clouds and lightning appear on my inner horizon. These are the dark stories. The stories of mental illness, psychiatric hospitals, and court-ordered involuntary commitments. I need the rain, but I fear the acid that may fall with the guilt and shame. I fear the floods. I fear where those floods may carry me.
Rivers and Stories: More than One Beginning
Just like the Ohio River, it would take far too long to trace these stories’ tributaries’ tributaries’ tributaries. It is enough to say this:
No river has only one beginning. No story has only one beginning, either. But, writing is linear and sooner or later, but before the story is heard by a listener or read by a reader, the story teller must locate all of the story’s headwaters and direct her audience’s attention to one beginning. I will need some time to decide where that will be.
Give me a few days, and I’ll be back with my decision.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. For the rest of 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”
Featured image: Not far from the Ohio River’s true headwaters in Potter County, PA. Photo by Melissa Troutman.
In this lecture, we will cover a wide range of 10,000 years of agricultural history. Starting with the initial question “how old is human culture” we argue that humans have been living in a wide range of different cultures, long before some of them started applying agriculture about 10,000 years ago. We distinguish 5 different human cultures, according to the way they get their food and basic resources: Hunter/gatherers, horticulturists, pastoralists, agricultural, and finally industrial culture.
Agriculture of different character developed in some places in the world, and some forms are more destructive than others. The form of grain monoculture that developed about 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent has proven to be the most aggressive one, it is spreading very fast and with it the agricultural society, the people and their genes. It also causes the most devastating consequences for ecosystems. Europe was already ecologically badly damaged towards the end of the Middle Ages, by agriculture and the mining and extraction that was needed to fuel countless wars between European lords and kings.
The Issues with Agriculture
Environmental problems caused by agriculture are not a new phenomena. As a consequence, the European people had a large pressure to expand. The conquest of the Americas is the most recent disaster of this clash of cultures that has been going on for 10,000 years. The American Holocaust is the greatest mass murder in human history, the annihilation of at least 500 unique cultures, languages, peoples and world views that will never come back.
Since “unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture” (Robert Combs), and “Culture” means “enacting a story” (Daniel Quinn), we continue exploring some of the myths of agrarian culture. The question “why we are doing all of this” leads us back to biblical times and a spiral of violence that started with early agrarian empires and their efforts to conquer and colonize the middle east.
Following the development of apocalyptic thinking that originated in the ruined and deeply traumatized societies the empires and their wars left behind, we discover that “authoritarian religion and technocracy are not opposites, but part of a continuum” (Fabian Scheidler).
Transformation through Technology
Finally, we enter the 20th century. Central to apocalyptic thinking is the complete destruction of the old and the creation of a new, better state. To replace the heavenly state for the souls heard by the Last Judgment comes the belief in a transformation of the world through technology. Nature, which is perceived as brutal, raw, wild, imperfect is to be replaced by a better system, created by man.
This is what we are currently doing with our modern capitalist economy. In modern times, especially in the 20th century, the mega- machine, into which agricultural culture had evolved, once again gained enormous momentum through the input of the newly discovered energy sources fossil coal and oil. Also the destructiveness gained enormous momentum which we can see in climate change, ecocide, critical state of freshwater resources etc.
As we know, the 20th century brought new weapons and new wars. A particularly important man, who‘s inventions shaped our recent history, was Fritz Haber. He developed the process of ammonia synthesis in 1909. Ammonium nitrate is the basic material for explosives and also chemical fertilizers. The 20th century was marked by an explosion of human population that planet earth had never seen before. Fritz Haber inventions indeed broke the planetary boundaries by artificially producing more nitrogen than there would be naturally. This was the birth of modern industrial agriculture.
Ecological Restoration
After we have covered all these startling facts, we can finally start thinking about solutions. But we have to learn that “The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity. The major forces that shaped and shape our world –disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth– are all part of the culture agriculture evolved. (…) Just as surely, agriculture dug the tunnel of our vision.” (Richard Manning).
We‘ve probably understood during this lecture that the dominant culture, the civilization that is based on agriculture, inevitably leads to colonialism and conquest, and ultimately to the destruction of all life on this planet. That is the history, the present and that will be the future. But the future is ours, and we can change it. We can stop the destruction, and we can build alternative, life-centered cultures with structures and institutions that are based on cooperation, mutual understanding and respect. Whatever happens, the future must be an age of ecological restoration.
After millenia of agriculture, war, colonialism and suppression, all of us are, over generations, severely traumatized by all this violence. We went crazy and thought that we have to conquer and subdue nature and change the world fundamentally with our technology. All peoples who stood in the way of the expansion of agrarian culture were either destroyed or robbed of their land, their spirituality, their culture, and traumatized by violence and oppression, so that they became equally insane. (This is what Jack Forbes called Wétiko disease in his brilliant book Columbus and Other Cannibals.)
Why Permaculture?
I want permaculture to become a remedy that helps us to recover from this delusional state, so in the last part of this lecture we get to know permaculture, its founder Bill Mollison and its basic principles and ethics as a viable alternative. Coming to an end, I want to answer the initial question “Why do we need permaculture?”. Do we want an era of collapse, the apocalypse? Or do we want to take the chance and be protagonists of a new age of ecological restoration?
You may know the slogan swords to plowshares. It comes from the bible and has been used by movements for peace for a long time. But even they did obviously not understand that no lasting peace is possible within agricultural culture. Any peace movement that fails to recognize this must fail. Because whoever has plowshares will soon need swords. Actually, the plowshare itself is already a sword that injures the earth. It is the same analogy as explosives and chemical fertilizers, pesticides and chemical weapons. But we obviously had to break the planetary boundaries first to see these connections.
The more I think about it, the more permaculture becomes a new peace movement for me. So I would like to answer the question “Why do we need permaculture?” as follows: Agriculture is permanently at war (against nature and other people). Permaculture offers the chance for lasting peace.
Boris Forkel is a radical environmentalist, social rights activist and permaculturalist located in Germany. You can learn more about his work on his website BabylonApocalypse.org.
After 31 years of resistance including contributions from Deep Green Resistance, Las Vegas has abandoned a water extraction project on indigenous lands in Nevada.
On May 21st, after a series of legal defeats stretching over years, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) began to withdraw its remaining federal and state applications to build a $10 billion water pipeline.
For three decades, SNWA (the water agency for the Las Vegas area) has worked towards building a 300-mile pipeline and dozens of wells to pump vast amounts of groundwater from Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone indigenous land in eastern Nevada.
Deep Green Resistance began fighting the SNWA water grab in 2013, organizing a series of annual ecology and resistance gatherings in Spring Valley that continued through 2018, participating in lawsuits, elevating voices of the land, and supporting community organizers on the ground. We cannot and will not take credit for this victory, but we are happy today to see this news.
When I first visited the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation in 2013, the building bore a stark message: “SNWA: Sucks Native’s Water Away.” The tribe has stated that “SNWA’s groundwater development application is the biggest threat to the Goshute way of life since European settlers first arrived on Goshute lands more than 150 years ago.”
Life in the Great Basin’s valleys, human and otherwise, depends on shallow groundwater, springs, and creeks, which in turn depend on groundwater flows from rain and snow in mountain ranges. Water is life.
There is a place on the floor of the “Sacred Water Valley” or Bahsahwahbee, more commonly known as Spring Valley, where there grows an ecologically unique grove of Rocky Mountain Juniper Trees, where violets bloom and springs bubbling pure water from the Earth.
My friend Delaine Spilsbury, a board member of the Great Basin Water Network and Newe indigenous elder, writes:
“Bahsahwahbee is not just a piece of tribal history. It is American history and a harbinger of the future of indigenous communities. Military officials and vigilantes murdered Newe people there during three massacres between 1850 and 1900. Victims included women, children and elders whose bodies were viciously mutilated. Because it was such a violent event, the spirits of those desecrated are believed to remain in the shallow-rooted Rocky Mountain Juniper trees, referred to as Swamp Cedars. We Shoshone people still visit this location to show our respect for our Elders. To this day, Bahsahwahbee remains a place of mourning for my people.
My grandmother, Laurene Mamie Swallow, survived the Bahsahwahbee massacre of 1897. Oral histories that she and other tribal elders shared, along with documentation from military officials, have served as the historical basis for what we know about the site today.
Despite that information, it is important to note that Bahsahwahbee is more than a place in history. The Swamp Cedars would be lost forever if large-scale pumping were to occur at the site. And, therefore, the ability for indigenous people to practice their spiritual beliefs would be gone too.”
Today, the spirits in the Swamp Cedars can, perhaps, rest a bit easier. But only for now. There still remain countless threats to the Great Basin. Mining is devastating the region. The destruction of Pinyon-Juniper forests continues. Urban sprawl continues to metastasize into the desert, and countless species are on the brink of extinction. Nuclear waste continues to impact indigenous communities. As global warming melts snowpack in the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River shrinks, cities like Las Vegas will continue to hunt for water—potentially leading to new water grab projects.
The pure springs of these valleys are not safe, and nor are the Swamp Cedars. While land protectors focus on climate change and the Amazon rainforest, countless other parts of our living planet face destruction without appreciation. We must protect all of this world, and that means challenging every water extraction project, every logging plan, every new mine, every factory—even to the fundamental pillars of industrial civilization itself.
For life on this planet to continue, industrial civilization must come to an end. So rejoice, because the water grab is dead. And then get back to the struggle.
Prayer walk for sacred water in the Mojave desert, home to numerous indigenous nations, a wide array of biodiversity, springs, wildflowers, ungulates, tortoises, lizards, birds, and some of the more remote lands in North America. The Mojave’s most serious threats come from the military, urban sprawl, and industrial solar development.
Featured image: on the evening of May 28th, protesters stormed the 3rd Police Precinct Building in Minneapolis and set it aflame.
This week has seen a series of uprisings in major cities across the United States, touched off by yet another execution carried out in the streets by the racist police forces. This time, the victim was George Floyd in Minneapolis – but his murder comes only weeks after a SWAT team gunned down another black civilian, Breonna Taylor, in Louisville and vigilantes murdered Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia.
Deep Green Resistance condemns these white supremacist killers, the cowards who enable them, and the entire structure of our settler-colonial law enforcement system. Further, we stand with the revolutionaries who are struggling against these oppressive forces in Minneapolis, Louisville, and beyond.
Police violence is one of the great injustices of our time. All told, police in the United States have killed at least two hundred citizens since the beginning of this year, and will likely kill more than five hundred by the year’s end. We often describe these killings as “senseless,” but in truth they hold a perfectly sensible function: Terrorizing and traumatizing oppressed communities.
These killings are not random, nor are they the result of individual bad actors. They disproportionately impact black and brown people – by some estimates, unarmed people of color are 60% more likely to be gunned down than unarmed whites – and they are encouraged by systematic racism at every level of the law enforcement system. Combining this atrocious violence with obvious and inexcusable racial disparities in stops, searches, and arrests, victims of colonialism in this settler nation have every right to see the police as an occupying force and resist them accordingly. The state has made its values clear.
Not every action undertaken during an uprising like this will be justifiable, either strategically or morally. But any supposedly “progressive” or “social justice” organization – let alone a revolutionary one – ought to save its condemnations for the white supremacists who have impoverished and abused these communities for generations, and we must offer our support and assistance to those activists and organizers on the ground who are working hard to struggle effectively against tyranny.
The mythology of white America has always centered on a supposed love for freedom and admiration of resistance. Yet the same white people who shout about “authoritarianism” when the state requires them to wear a face mask will demand black and brown people in this country submit to arbitrary humiliation, abuse, and even murder. As an organization, we reject this racist, cowardly nonsense, and we affirm the right of oppressed communities to defend themselves by any means necessary.
In the Deep Green Resistance book, Derrick Jensen asks, “What would you do if space aliens had invaded this planet, and they were vacuuming the oceans, and scalping native forests, and putting dams on every river, and changing the climate, and putting dioxin and dozens of other carcinogens into every mother’s breast milk, and into the flesh of your children, lover, mother, father, brother, sister, friends, into your own flesh? Would you resist?”
And we can ask the same question today of those who condemn these uprisings: What would you do if space aliens patrolled your community, killing innocents with impunity in the middle of the street? What if they promised every time to do better, while the bodies kept piling up? What if they stopped you on the way to work, or to school, or to the playground with your children? What if they harassed you and abused you and jailed you for petty crimes, or no crime at all? What if you weren’t safe, even in your own bedroom at night? Would you resist? Would you condemn those who did? If not, then you must not let the familiarity of this barbarous system pacify you.
Deep Green Resistance also condemns those who use uprisings like this as an opportunity to act out their macho fantasies. Already, we have seen reports of white “allies” engaging in pointless vandalism and deliberately provoking confrontations with police, or making increasingly reckless calls for escalation. There is no place in a serious revolutionary movement for the glorification of violence and disorder, especially by those who come from communities that will not bear the brunt of the consequences. A world of difference exists between strategic resistance, militant or otherwise, and random destruction; both dogmatic pacifism and reflexive violence can derail revolutionary movements.
The struggle for environmental justice is inseparable from the struggle against white supremacy, just as it is inseparable from the struggle for women’s liberation. And in turn, the abolition of patriarchy and settler-colonialism is necessary to save the land we live on. The dominant culture that is killing the planet cannot be stopped without sustained resistance against all forms of oppression, and we applaud those who are risking their lives to resist white power.
Should any revolutionaries in the area need of support, please reach out to us. We can provide platforms to amplify your voice, training, access to resources, allies, and more.
We speak with Jeff Gibbs, director of the new film “Planet of the Humans” (produced by Michael Moore) about why green energy won’t save the world, the need to focus on consumption, and how the environmental movement has gotten off track.
Since this interview was recorded, the film was viewed more than 8 million times and a copyright claim was filed against the film for using 4 seconds of copyrighted footage. The film has been taken off YouTube, but is now on Vimeo.
Excerpt from this Episode
[ 21:15 ] Michael [Moore] and I went to a talk at, I think, the University of Michigan in Flint and the talk was [about] if you get involved with the system to change it, does the system change or do you change?
The speaker’s feeling was it’s probably going to be you who changes. So [because Bright Greens are] getting into bed with capitalism and renewable energy, that’s why I think they’re so angry about breaking down the fantasy that you can’t have renewable energy without giant industrial processes that are destructive to the planet, and you can’t have it without capitalism… without these investment schemes… without the subsidies it would be very difficult to have.
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.
This episode includes two tracks, “Shi-baytz” and “Radio-daylong” from the Filipino group Katribu Collective, off their new album “The Gathering.”
Katribu Collective is the unified effort a few individuals from the Philippines playing indigenous instruments from different tribes all around the world. Their vision is to promote culture and unity. Katribu’s passion and commitment to exploring the musically rich culture of the tribes of Mindanao leads its music to fuse these elements.
Right now, Deep Green Resistance organizers are at work building a political resistance resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild just, sustainable human communities.
In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We need your help.
Not all of us can work from the front lines, but we can all contribute. Our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Foundations and corporations won’t fund us because we are too radical. We operate on a shoestring budget (all our funding comes from small, grassroots donations averaging less than $50) and have only one paid staff.
Monthly donors are the backbone of our fundraising because they provide us with reliable, steady income. This allows us to plan ahead. Becoming a monthly donor, or increasing your contribution amount, is the single most important thing we can do to boost our financial base.
Current funding levels aren’t sustainable for the long-term, even with our level of operations now. We need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build stronger resistance and grow our movement.
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