by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 24, 2017 | The Problem: Civilization
by Derrick Jensen
When I’m on the road, I always carry a baseball bat in the back of my truck to use each time I see a snake. If the snake is sunning herself, I stop the truck and use the bat to shoo her to safety. Sometimes, if the snake is especially sluggish, I loop her over the bat and carry her out of traffic. If she’s already dead I don’t use the bat at all, but carry her to my truck, then take her to some quiet spot where she can lie to decompose with dignity.
But most often when I stop I have to use the bat not to save the snake but kill her. Too many times I’ve seen them live and writhing with broken backs, flattened vertebrae, even crushed heads.
I hate cars, and what they do. I do not so much mind killing, if there is a purpose; if, for example, I’m going to eat what I kill. But I despise this incidental killing that comes each time a soft and living body happens to be in our way. Such a killing is without purpose, and often even without awareness. I have driven through swarms of mating mayflies, and have seen a windshield turn red blotch by blotch as it strikes engorged mosquitos. I once saw a migration of salamanders destroyed by heavy traffic in a late evening rain. I leapt from my car and ran to carry as many as I could from one side of the road to the other, but for every one I grabbed there were fifty who made it not much further than the first white line.
A couple of years ago someone dropped off a huge white rabbit near my home. Knowing the cruelty of abandoning pets into the wild and the stupidity of introducing exotics did not lessen my enjoyment of watching him cavort with the local cottontails a third his size. But I often worried. If at one hundred yards I could easily pick him out from among the jumbled rocks that were his home, how much more easily would he be seen by coyotes or hawks? Each time I saw him I was surprised anew at his capacity to live in the wild.
I needn’t have worried about predators. One day I walked to get my mail, and saw him dead and stiff in the center of the road. I was saddened, and as I carried him away to where he could at last be eaten by coyotes, I considered my shock of recognition at his death. I had, as I believe happens constantly in our culture–in our time of the final grinding away at what shreds of ecological integrity still remain intact–been fearing precisely the wrong thing. I had been fearing a natural death. But in one way or another, most of us living today–human and nonhuman alike–will not die the natural death that has been the birthright of every being since life began. Instead we will find ourselves struck down–like the rabbit, like the snakes, like the cat whose skull I had to crush after his spine was severed by the shiny fender of a speeding car–incidental victims of the modern, industrial, mechanical economy. This is no less true for the starving billions of humans than it is for the salmon incidentally ground up in the turbines of dams, and no less true for those who die of chemically-induced cancers than it is for the mayflies I killed by the thousands, blithely driving from one place to another.
All of us today stand as if transfixed by the headlights of the hurtling machine that inevitably will destroy us and all others in its path. Oh, we move slightly to the left or slightly to the right, but I think, as I carefully place the rabbit in a tufted hollow at the base of a tree, that even to the last, most of us have no idea what it is that’s killing us.
Originally published in the September/October 1998 issue of “The Road-RIPorter.” Republished in the January-March 2007 issue of “Carbusters.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 20, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, the planet is in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event. Strikingly, the scientists who wrote the article call this a “biological annihilation.”
This isn’t a random sequence outcome of a natural societal development. The dominant global culture (industrial civilization) is a culture of imperialism. We can define that as a culture that colonizes and extracts resources as a standard way of operating.
Industrial civilization has become the dominant culture by violence, and violence maintains it.
Timber is ripped from forests and shredded for sale. Rivers are enslaved to irrigate fields and power cities. Oil is burned to propel commerce. Fracking injects poisons into the planet in order to extract even more petrochemicals. Traditional ways of life and sustainable relationships with the land are destroyed, so the only alternative is the toxic (and profitable) cycle of wage labor, debt, and poverty. Patriarchy teaches men to objectify and dominate women, and women to acquiesce. The result is a loss of bodily autonomy to the point that half of all children are unwanted by the mother, and a culture in which eating disorders are a leading cause of death among young women and teenage girls. The legacy of slavery underlies the modern prison system, where vast profits are made by locking up the powerless and oppressed.
As a friend put it, “oppression is always in service of resource extraction.”
The shiny gadgets used to enthrall us are made possible by child miners in the Congo, by workers toiling to the point of mass suicide in Foxconn factories in China, and by the exportation of e-waste to conveniently isolated locations.
And of course, the military, police, and private security (mercenaries) are ready to beat, imprison, or kill anyone who stands in the way of this system. Finally, this culture’s atomized families and recent trends like the rise of neo-liberalism help ensure we remain isolated physically and emotionally, without the strength that comes from being part of a community.
Between the threat of violence, bribery, and the sense of helplessness that comes from isolation, most people aren’t willing to resist. American culture has been built on genocide for 500 years; at this point, most settlers can’t even imagine a society not based on violence.
For those who can, we need to get serious about our strategies.
MYTHICAL STRATEGIES
In the west, and especially in the United States, most activists operate within a mythic framework of non-violent resistance that’s far different than the liberation politics of the 1960’s and 70’s. In this mythology, violence doesn’t solve anything, and non-violence has a magical ability to win conflicts—even if those victories only occur in hearts and minds.
“We win through losing,” a friend says (sarcastically) of this mindset.
Don’t get me wrong. Non-violence can be a supremely elegant and effective technique for social change. Applied correctly—forcefully—non-violence can immobilize a repressive regime or corporate power, making it impossible to move in any direction. Violence should, of course, be avoided anytime it can be.
But non-violent resistance doesn’t always work. As another friend writes in his excellent multi-part series, “The destruction of our world isn’t an ‘environmental crisis,’ nor a ‘climate crisis.’ It’s a war waged by industrial civilisaton and capitalism against life on earth–all life–and we need a resistance movement with that analysis to respond…the decision about what strategy and tactics to use depends on the circumstances, rather than being wedded to one approach out of a vague ethical dogma…the choice between using non-violence or force is a tactical decision. Those who advocate for the use of force are not arguing for blind unthinking violence, but against blind unthinking nonviolence.”
So what’s next? What happens when non-violence doesn’t work? What should you do when you have voted, petitioned, demanded, protested, raised awareness, locked down, blockaded, and it hasn’t worked?
Do you keep using the same tactics that have failed again and again, hoping they’ll work this time?
Do you give up?
This is not a theoretical question.
It’s a situation that has been faced by many resistance movements throughout history. Lately I’ve been reflecting on one in particular; the Oka Crisis that went down near Montreal in 1990.
After 400 years of gradual land theft, the Kahnesetake band of the Mohawk Nation was left with a fraction of a fraction of its traditional territory. With land “development” encroaching continuously, tensions came to a head in 1990 when plans began moving forward to expand a golf course into an extremely important site: a pine forest next to the tribal cemetery.
Members of the Kahnesetake community went through various channels to fight the expansion, including petitioning local government and the federal Indian Bureau. Nothing worked, so they began a non-violent occupation of the golf course. After a gradual escalation—police beatings, threats from masked assailants—many of the Mohawks began carrying weapons. Special police forces were called in to raid the camp, and women stood them down. Someone began shooting—from which side is impossible to say—and a policeman was killed. After a weeks-long standoff during which many more shots were exchanged, the Mohawks were eventually evicted—but the land was protected from development.
Are we committed to winning as much as those Mohawk warriors?
Species extinction, fascist and Nazi extremism, global warming, police violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, resource extraction, industrial expansion, the prison industrial system. Are we committed to stopping these injustices?
If so, we must consider all means, including the use of force and violence.
This is an emergency.
HOW A REVOLUTION MIGHT BEGIN: THE CUBAN PRECEDENT
Perhaps one of the more important lessons of revolutionary history comes from Cuba, where in 1956, a small group of revolutionaries landed near the Sierra Maestra mountains. Almost immediately, the rebels were attacked and routed. Of the original group of 80, only about 20 regrouped in the mountains.
Nonetheless, over the next several years, their movement grew. They recruited locals, coordinated with underground cells in Havana and other urban areas, and built support networks elsewhere in Latin America. By January 1959, the revolutionaries had overthrown the rule of the Batista government.
Marx informs any revolutionary, but I am not a Marxist. Like China and the Soviet Union, Cuba followed a highly centralized, industrialized development path that contains much to criticize (while still representing an inspiring alternative to the capitalist model). The events that took place after the Cuban revolution are, to me, less interesting than the methods used to carry out the revolution itself. Che’s guerilla warfare techniques were well suited to the rural countryside and have influenced every revolutionary group since. And there is much to learn from how the Cuban underground organized.
The most important lesson, I think, is that the revolutionaries just got started. They didn’t wait for the perfect conditions, which they knew would never appear. They suffered major setbacks, but they persisted, and they had unshakeable confidence that they would prevail. Despite their lack of numbers, they had a good foundational strategy. By playing to their strengths, avoiding unwise confrontations, and by gradually building strength, they defeated a force that was initially much superior and initiated a tectonic political shift from capitalist vassal state to socialist nation-building experiment.
DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE SABOTAGE
On July 24th, two women—Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek—publicly admitted to sabotaging the Dakota Access Pipeline in an attempt to stop the desecration of native territory, the ongoing destruction of the climate, and threats to major rivers.
In an interview with them shortly after, they explained their motivations. Ruby, who was a kindergarten teacher before quitting her job to fight the pipeline, was in tears as she explained that those kids would have no future without action.
Jessica and Ruby have repeatedly called for others to take similar actions of eco-sabotage.
Last year, I published a call for ecological special forces:
“Small forces of ecological commandos that could target the fundamental sources of power that are destroying the planet. We have seen examples of this. In Nigeria, commando forces have been fighting a guerrilla war of sabotage against Shell Oil Corporation for decades. At times, they have reduced oil output by more than 60%.”
As we noted, “no environmental group has ever had that level of success. Not even close. In the U.S., clandestine ecological resistance has been relatively minimal. However, isolated incidents have taken place. A 2013 attack on an electrical station in central California inflicted millions of dollars in damage to difficult-to-replace components used simple hunting rifles. The action took a total of 19 minutes, displaying the sort of discipline, speed, and tactical acumen required for special forces operations.
“Our situation is desperate. Things continue to get worse. False solutions, greenwashing, corporate co-optation, and rollbacks of previous victories are relentless. Resistance communities are fractured, isolated, and disempowered. However, the centralized, industrialized, and computerized nature of global empire means that the system is vulnerable. Power is mostly concentrated and projected via a few systems that are vulnerable.
“Even powerful empires can be defeated. But those victories won’t happen if we engage on their terms. Ecological special forces provide a method and means for decisive operations that deal significant damage to the functioning of global capitalism and industrialism. With enough coordination, these sorts of attacks could deal death blows to entire industrial economies, and perhaps (with the help of aboveground movements, ecological limits, and so on) to industrialism as a whole.
“Implementation of this strategy will require highly motivated, dedicated, and skilled individuals. Serious consideration of security, anonymity, and tactics will be required. But this system was built by human beings; we can take it apart as well.”
That strategy, while not sufficient on its own, would help us move towards a more effective, forceful movement. Read that article here.
This may sound drastic to you. But consider: the planet is being destroyed. We’re living through the sixth great mass extinction event. The most powerful nation in the world just elected Donald Trump. There is no sign of a looming political shift, and alternative parties and movements are largely sidelined or co-opted.
CHARLOTTESVILLE COMES HOME
As I write this, I’m at my sister’s house; she’s just given birth to my (first) nephew, who has beautiful brown skin and is what’s called “mixed race.” Before long, he will emerge into the world, and he will be perceived as a black child, and then as he grows, a black man.
White supremacy is experiencing a resurgence. Days before I write this, at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hundreds of virulent racists marched, chanting “blood and soil” and “white lives matter.” In front of studiously inactive police, they severely injured more than two dozen anti-racist protestors and one fascist plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing a woman and severely injuring others.
The day after, as my sister lay in bed nursing her new beautiful baby boy, more white supremacists were gathering in downtown Seattle, about two miles away. Later, the Amerikkkan president defended the supremacists, saying there were “great people” involved in the white supremacist protests.
To anyone who is paying attention, this isn’t a surprise. Our nation has been built on foundation of systematic white supremacy in service of the extraction of resources. Those are the roots of this society, and the trend continues today. The everyday violence of this culture fuels its operation. The system is functioning perfectly, exploiting every possible method for economic, social, and political gain while funneling wealth to the top.
How can I make a better world for my nephew? How can I make a survivable world? My answer—at least one part of it—is by halting that everyday violence.
It’s time that we organized and carried out a revolution.
—
Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 17, 2017 | Obstruction & Occupation, Strategy & Analysis
by Norris Thomlinson / Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i
Puget Sound Anarchists and It’s Going Down have reported on four recent incidents of simple sabotage against rail operations. Using copper wire to signal track blockage (as depicted in a video on how to block trains), actionists have executed cheap and low-risk attacks to temporarily halt:
The Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy of Deep Green Resistance aims for cascading systems failure to shut down industrial destruction for good. Though these acts of sabotage are unlikely to cause more than minor inefficiencies in rail transport, they offer more return on investment than even the most successful aboveground actions.
For example, last year three DGR members halted a coal train for 12 hours before being arrested. Compared to other aboveground efforts, this was a very efficient operation, achieving a lengthy stoppage with a minimum of arrests. However, the total cost to carry out the action was high. Not only did the three activists spend significant time planning and executing the blockade itself, but a support team ensured rail employees and police couldn’t harm the activists without being documented (though this by no means guaranteed their safety.) Afterwards, the three arrestees faced multiple court dates consuming time and money, and causing stress. All charges were eventually dropped, but presumably the state would be less lenient for recidivism, raising the cost for repeated use of this tactic.
Contrast that to the statement by the Columbia River track saboteurs: “Trains were stopped for at least several hours and maybe more. Carrying out the action took less than an hour, about $40 materials, and little-no risk of being arrested.” (Presumably they also spent time beforehand to scout and plan.) Their use of underground tactics allowed them to hit and run, minimizing their risk, stress, and total investment in the action, and leaving them free to repeat the attacks at will. Not sticking around to be arrested is an enormous advantage, and our resistance movement must increase its use of guerrilla tactics to leverage our relatively meager resources.
DGR members don’t have the option of using underground tactics. By publicly opposing industrial civilization and calling for physically dismantling it, we’re obvious suspects for law enforcement to monitor and interrogate following underground attacks. Our role is to spread the analysis of the necessity and the feasibility of bringing it all down, and to support anyone who is able to carry out underground attacks.
We commend and thank those involved in these recent successful actions. We hope they’ll use the skills and confidence they’ve built in a low-risk environment to escalate their attacks to critical industrial infrastructure. And we hope none of them ever get caught, but if they do, we’ll be there to support them.
Analysis of Efficacy
On an Earth First! Journal page hosting the video on how to block trains, two commenters suggest this tactic isn’t effective at all:
“Lol if theres no reason a train should have a red signal, the dispatcher will have a crew sent out to find the problem, and in the mean time simply give trains authority past it. Try again.”
“Railroads have signal maintainers on duty 24/7/365 to troubleshoot issues like track circuits and keep trains moving on any given operating subdivision. I guess what you don’t understand is regardless of what you’re jumpering out there, trains can still move down the line.”
The posts are anonymous, and the authors express contempt for the actions of the saboteurs. Since they’re clearly not trying to give constructive feedback, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the critiques. If anyone has concrete knowledge of the impact of this tactic, please share. The better we understand the systems we want to disrupt and dismantle, the better our chance of success.
Read about more attacks on rail and other infrastructure at our Underground Action Calendar
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 14, 2017 | Alienation & Mental Health
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Last night, I dreamt that I was trapped in a box.
I was in high school again, sitting at an antique desk with a wraparound writing surface (right-handed of course, for a left-handed child) and I was more bored than any person should ever be. As the teacher played out their sanctioned role, trying to make compulsory education “fun” and “engaging,” I sat in a stupor, craving some stimulation lest the torpor become permanent and turn me into a compliant drone for life.
I refused to be turned into a cubicle occupant. In the dream, my solution was to stand up and start removing the bug screens from the windows. My boredom was temporarily cast aside, and the fresh air flowed into the classroom, enlivening the other occupants, reminding them of the real world. The teacher frowned in annoyance.
It was a win-win. A small act of rebellion, no doubt, but I would not be cowed into sitting meekly.
This dream could have been a flashback. I behaved this way in high school, pushing the boundaries as far as I could, ignoring teachers unless they earned my respect (and even then ignoring rules that seemed silly to me), giving friendship only to those teachers who in turn pushed the boundaries. I respected them as people, but after all, they were being paid to attend school. I was legally obligated.
Education can be a great experience, but at least here in the United States, the school system exists entirely to serve the dominant economic system. Grades separate out those with the combination of traits—intelligence (defined in the most culturally blinkered and capitalist terms) and obedience—that make them suitable to be the next managers. Those who fail will make up the poor and working class from which wealth will be extracted. Punitive measures and the brutal, relentless school-to-prison pipeline enforce and inculcate white supremacy.
It’s the Prussian educational model, barely modified in the last 250 years.
Industrial schooling also deepens the damage caused by abuse, homelessness, and neglect. Children in distress, far from receiving the love and care and attention that they need, are expected to sit still, shut up, and play nicely. The school system’s academic framework not only fails to serve these kids; it makes everything worse. Bullying, social competition, stigmatization, criminalization, and social cliques that mature in full-blown xenophobia are the inevitable results of a framework designed for one demographic: white, bourgeois, nuclear-family, patriarchal households.
As a system of education and social control within a brutal empire built on slavery, imperialism, and land theft, our schools function perfectly.
I’m all for reform. Small improvements are meaningful where they can be made. My 10th grade journalism teacher kept me—and countless others—thinking critically with his hard-hitting analysis of how advertising and mass media manipulates thought to encourage racism, nationalism, warmongering, consumerism, and objectification. There were a few other bright spots, islands of sanity in an ocean of conformity to the status quo.
But by itself, reform is never enough. The school system isn’t broken; it’s functioning exactly as it was meant to. Liberalism’s incessant focus on education as the solution to social problems channels endless streams of idealistic young people into the school system, where they are almost inevitably broken by endless bureaucracy and 50-hour work weeks. Otherwise that energy could be put to revolutionary purposes, and that doesn’t suit the system.
My dream last night reminded me of the truth. School, far from enlightening us, is stultifying. The school system—like capitalism, like American empire, like industrial civilization—is functionally irredeemable. Beyond a certain point, it’s incapable of being meaningfully reformed. Sure, improvements can (and should) be made. But might we be better off just scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?
I’ve been told that in Mohawk culture, children are treated as “miniature adults,” and are expected to learn mainly through participation in the activities of the community. Real learning comes from being embedded in a functional community engaging in the tasks of survival and self-governance—not from being trapped in a box.
This is taken so seriously that children remained beyond the barricades during the Oka standoff near Montreal in 1990, standing with the warrior societies as the Canadian military flexed its colonial muscle to stifle indigenous sovereignty. We can learn from this level of commitment to teaching children things that have real value, and exposing them to the real world.
In a world flush with refugees, overwhelmed by neo-colonialism, sweltering under global warming, sweating in fear of rising fascist elements, and yoked with the chains of sex and race oppression, perhaps it’s time we gave up on the school system and started working to tear it, and the system it supports, down.
***
Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 11, 2017 | Lobbying
Our first-in-the-nation lawsuit seeking personhood for the Colorado River was dismissed. After the Colorado Attorney General filed a motion to dismiss and threatened sanctions against attorney Jason Flores-Williams for the unforgivable act of requesting rights for nature, Flores-Williams withdrew our case.
When I agreed to serve as a next friend, or guardian, of the Colorado River, I saw the opportunity as a win-win. Either, we would win the lawsuit and the Colorado River would gain a powerful new legal tool to protect herself. Or, the lawsuit would be defeated proving that the American legal system privileges corporate rights to destroy the natural world over the natural world’s right to exist.
I knew it was highly unlikely that corporations, the courts, and the Colorado Attorney General would let rights of nature gain traction in American law. I wanted to be there, when the case failed, to remind everyone who invested hope in our cause that lawsuits are not the only way change is made.
I do not want this essay to come off like I am saying “I told you so.” I am heartbroken. A small part of me clung to the hope that Flores-Williams could resist the threats, that the Colorado Attorney General would, at least, litigate the case on the merits, and that the legal system would do the right thing. This hope, of course, was misguided.
***
Federal Building, Denver, Colorado (Photo: Deanna Meyer)
Several weeks ago, I wrote for the San Diego Free Press, “When has the American legal system been concerned with doing the right thing? While every ounce of my being hopes we win, if we lose, I want you to know why. I want you to be angry. And, I want you to possess an analysis that enables you to direct your anger at the proper targets.”
We lost because the American government and legal system are designed to ensure that corporations maintain the right to destroy nature for profit. We faced a centuries-old American legal tradition that defines nature as property. Property rights grant property owners the power to consume and destroy their property. The Colorado River is defined as property, and those who own her, possess the right to use her, extract her, destroy her – and they are. Because corporations also wield most of the world’s wealth, they have the most power to gain property rights over nature. Or, in other words, they have the most power to buy living non-human communities to turn them into dead, human products.
Making matters worse, the American legal system grants corporations the same rights as citizens. So, courts recognize corporate constitutional rights to free speech, protections from search and seizure, and guarantees to due process, equal protection, and reimbursement for lost future profits. One of the worst political ironies of our time is that abstract legal contraptions like corporations have rights, but the natural communities who give us life don’t.
It’s not just that corporations, and the courts and governments that protect them, will not let the rights of nature movement take hold; corporations cannot let the rights of nature take hold. They cannot let the rights of nature take hold because granting nature the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve would restrict corporate access to the natural world, which is the very source of corporate power.
Corporations gain their power by turning nature into commodities, which are then sold for profit. The more nature corporations can turn into commodities, the more profits they make. And, the more profits they make, the more nature corporations can turn into commodities. If this cycle does not stop, the planet’s life support systems will collapse.
In order to understand corporate dependence on the natural world, consider the five most powerful corporations according to this year’s Fortune 500 list: Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Exxon Mobil, and McKesson. Walmart, for example, depends on its ability to cheaply manufacture, distribute, and sell products as diverse as clothes, beauty items, toys, and food. To manufacture and distribute, a corporation must have access to raw materials to turn into products and must have access to energy to deliver those products. This is an abstract way of saying that Walmart must clear-cut (or pay someone to clearcut) living forests for wood, must rip-up (or pay someone to rip-up) living grasslands for agriculture, and must destroy (or pay someone to destroy) mountains and subterranean earth to extract oil for plastics, for the energy required to manufacture, and to power the planes, ships, and trucks that carry their products to markets around the world.
The same goes for Berkshire Hathaway who manages factory farms while running Dairy Queen, who burns massive amounts of fossil fuels while running BNSF Railway, who engages in one of the most destructive agricultural processes – cotton farming – while running Fruit of the Loom, and who perpetuates an ancient, bloody form of mining while running Helzberg Diamonds. Apple, similarly, could not produce iPods and iPhones without highly oppressive rare earth mining. McKesson could not create its pharmaceuticals without the highly toxic industrial processes that yield the necessary chemicals. Do we even need to talk about Exxon Mobil?
The rights of nature are diametrically opposed to corporate rights. Environmental philosopher John Livingston describes this opposition: “We sometimes forget that every time a court or a legislature – or even custom – confers or confirms a right in someone, someone else’s right is nibbled at: the right of women to equal employment opportunity is an infringement of the freedom of misogynist employers; the right to make a profit is at someone else’s cost; the right to run a motorcycle or a snowmobile reduces someone else’s right to peace and quiet in his own backyard; the rights of embryos impinge upon the rights of the women who carry them. And so on.”
Corporations cannot allow the Colorado River to possess rights because her rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve may trump their rights to destroy her for profit. This makes the rights of nature a dangerous idea.
***
Federal Building, Denver, Colorado (Photo: Deanna Meyer)
But, the natural world needs more than dangerous ideas.
After we filed the lawsuit, I spent a month traveling with the Colorado River. As a “next friend” or guardian of the river, I agreed to represent her interests in court. To better understand her interests, I set out with the brilliant photographer Michelle McCarron to ask the river, “What do you need?”
I was naive to believe I could receive her answer in a month. After a month, I had only traveled the northern third of the river from her headwaters in La Poudre Pass, CO to just north of the Confluence where the Green River joins her in Canyonlands National Park. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to answer. She answered. And, her answer overwhelmed me.
In La Poudre Pass, standing in half a foot of snow in mid-October, she told me she needs snowpack and lamented that climate change causes less and less snow to fall. Near Grand Lake, where her waters are pumped through an industrial tunnel under Rocky Mountain National Park and across the Continental Divide, she showed me how theft is weakening her. In the orchards of Palisade, CO, where she is lacerated with ditches and canals to grow peaches and grapes, she begged to flow to willow thickets and marshes, instead, where she could grow birds and fish. Through the red rock near Moab, UT, where the wind sings in praise across the canyons the river has sculpted, she shuddered and whispered about the new, concrete walls that dam her path and that she cannot topple.
I will need much longer than a month to listen to everything the Colorado River needs. But, in all the time I spent listening, I did not hear her speak of a judge’s gavel, of evidentiary proceedings, or of the State of Colorado’s motion to dismiss. She cited no precedent, no binding legal authority, and no argument made by silver-tongued attorneys. She did not fear questions of jurisdiction or the threat of sanctions.
No, the Colorado River’s needs are real and physical. She needs snowpack. She needs a climate that facilitates her replenishment. She needs humans to stop manipulating her flows. She needs industry to stop wasting her waters on cash crops when wild beings are desperate for her. She needs dams to be removed.
We can give the Colorado River what she needs. We can stop burning fossil fuels. We can fill in the ditches and canals. We can let the desert reclaim the peach orchards and vineyards. We can, finally, remove dams.
Winning rights for the Colorado River would have helped, but they are not necessary. Better than the right to naturally evolve is naturally evolving. Better than the right to replenish is replenishing. Better than the right to exist is existing. And, better than the right to flourish is flourishing. Yes, it would have been a hell of a lot easier, if we could have gained a court order to remove dams along the Colorado River. But, court orders aren’t the only way dams fall.
When those who are supposed to protect us fail to do the right thing, we have to do it for them. There are recent examples of activists putting this principle into practice. On October 11, 2016, five climate activists (now famous as the “Valve Turners”) traveled to remote locations in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, and Washington state and turned shut-off valves on five pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada into the United States. Elected officials would not shut down oil pipelines, so the Valve Turners did it for them.
Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, two brave women involved in Iowa’s Catholic Worker social justice movement, began a sabotage campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline on Election Day 2016. Reznicek and Montoya burned heavy construction equipment, pierced steel pipes, and used oxyacetylene cutting torches to damage exposed empty pipeline valves. These actions delayed completion of the pipeline for weeks. Elected officials failed to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, so Reznicek and Montoya stopped it for them.
The brave actions of the Valve Turners and Reznicek and Montoya notwithstanding, most of us are engaged in tactics that leave it up to someone else to do the right thing. The dismissal of our lawsuit is one more failure in a long list of failures to recognize the power we do possess and to use that power to protect the natural world. We fail and Earth continues to heat up. We fail and human population continues to grow exponentially. We fail and the rate of species’ extinction intensifies. Each failure begs us to answer the question: Why do we still seek change through means that have never worked?
