Resistance Radio: Alfred McCoy on Empire, Part One

Featured image: Gwadar, Pakistan, site of a $200 billion Chinese infrastructure investment.

Editor’s note: This is the first part of an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read the Part Two here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.

His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.

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Derrick Jensen: In the new book you mention the word “empire” a couple of times.  Can you talk about the fact that the United States has been and is an empire? What is an empire?

Alfred McCoy: First of all, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson said that basically there have been about 69 or 70 empires in world history over the last 4000 years. It’s essentially a system whereby a dominant power exercises control, whether directly, through what was known as colonization, or indirectly through what is called “informal empire.” Those mechanisms of control include financial; political, sometimes through political manipulations of various sorts; military; and very importantly, cultural. It is the soft power, the salve, if you will, that makes all of the above a little bit more palatable for the peoples that are subordinated.

The United States has not only been an empire, but in the opinion of British imperial historians like John Darwin of Oxford University, it has been the most prosperous and powerful empire in human history. Americans, during the long years of the Cold War, particularly American historians, were a population in denial of this fundamental political reality. To summarize and simplify the politics of that period, basically the Soviet Union used the Marxist-inflected term “imperialist” to denigrate the United States. They aggressively promoted anti-imperialism, they made heroes of people like the liberator of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. In the Soviet propaganda, we were the bad empire, the pernicious, dominant, exploitative empire. For historians in the United States the United States was a world leader, a superpower, a global hegemon. But not an empire, because it contained that pejorative.

Once the Cold War was over, within a decade, when we were mired in the Middle East and Iraq intervention and the ever-more difficult pacification of Afghanistan – when it looked like U.S. global power was being challenged, like our massive military intervention in Iraq was going very badly indeed, when it looked like our power was challenged; right across the political spectrum, from very conservative all the way over to very liberal and radical, everybody started using the term “empire.” Now it was shorn of its pejorative, its propaganda value.

And they were using it to ask the question: “Was the U.S. empire over?” And the answer, generally, under the Obama administration was “No, the United States would be an empire for as long as it wanted to be.” The U.S. was the maker, the shaper of world history. We would decide when we wanted to give up our empire. Nobody could challenge us. Well, that’s changed.

DJ: What has changed?

AM: In a word: China. From the beginning of 2004 to 2012, a period of eight or nine years, in the midst of this revival of this discussion of empire, what historians found, myself included, was that the United States was the most powerful and prosperous empire in human history. But because of that evasion and denial, we weren’t the empire, the Soviet Union was the empire, we were the exceptional nation, we had American exceptionalism. The belief in American exceptionalism and its many manifestations was an article of faith, literally, among American historians during the Cold War. Not only was the United States empire the most powerful in human history, but it was arguably the least studied of them all.

I got together with some colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, and very quickly we created a global network called “Empires in Transition.” We had, at our peak, about 140 historians on four continents. We probed the comparative rise of the U.S. empire to global power. That was our first volume, a real door-stopper. In our second volume, after our conference in Barcelona, Spain, held in collaboration with the Pompeu Fabra University, we did a volume called Endless Empires about the decline of various empires; Spanish, European and American.

Although we could see the signs in 2012 when that book came out, that U.S. global power was fading, there wasn’t at that time a challenger. What’s happened in the last four or five years, particularly events in the South China Sea have made China’s challenge blindingly clear. In my book In the Shadow of the American Century that just came out last month, I drew upon that decade of study by 140 scholars on the comparative history of empires and boiled it all down into terms that ordinary readers could understand. Then explored, in a comparative sense, the rise of the U.S. to global power. What kind of empire were we at our peak, what were the bases of our power, and then how were the bases of our power being challenged by China’s rise? Those are the two problems I explore in the book.

Now China’s challenge is straightforward. It’s a strategy that most Americans don’t understand. Those that claim that the American empire will last forever, the sun will never set on the American empire, to paraphrase. The people who believe that simply don’t understand the nature of the Chinese challenge, how fundamental it is.

The Chinese challenge is twofold. And to appreciate it, we have to go way back to a cold London night in January, 1904. That night, at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row in London, the head of the London School of Economics, a guy named Sir Halford Mackinder, stood up and gave a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” He proposed, by looking at the map, that Europe, Asia and Africa were not three separate continents. In fact, if you looked at them a certain way, as a geographer could and should – and he was a geographer – they were a single continent, a single land mass that he called “the world island.” And he said that the epicenter of world history, of global power, lay at the heartland of the world island: a vast zone stretching for 4000 miles, from the Persian Gulf north and east, all the way to the East Siberian Sea.

Then he said that the human history for the past five centuries had been changed by something very simple. The people of western Europe learned to sail around the world island, from Europe all the way to Asia. And by doing so, they conducted a kind of strategic flanking maneuver over the great nomadic peoples of the heartland of the world island. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Turks, the Arabs; that had pounded at the gates of great empires: China and Europe. And by sailing around the world island, we saw then the rise of a half dozen European maritime empires.

“But now,” said Sir Halfred Mackinder, and he was alluding to an event that everyone in that audience that night in 1904 knew well – “Now the world is changing.” Because, as he was speaking, the Trans-Siberian Railway was being built by the Czarist empire, and it was stretching from Moscow for 5000 miles, all the way to Vladivostok. For the first time, Europe and Asia were actually a single landmass. They were only two continents because of the vast distances in the great empty center of this, places like the Gobi Desert. But now that this was being crossed by a railroad, Sir Halfred Mackinder predicted that there would be more railroads and that the power that learned to tap into the resources of the heartland of the world island would be the source of a new empire.

Mackinder not only made an observation about the past five centuries and a prediction about the future of global power, but in that single lecture he invented, by the application of geography to global power, the science of geopolitics. It’s in that single lecture. Everybody that’s been good at geopolitics ever since has really been basically an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder.

Of course, it took a long time for Mackinder’s prediction to come true because World War II intervened. Hitler tried to penetrate, break through at Stalingrad and capture Lebensraum, in the heartland, because Hitler was tutored by Mackinder’s German acolyte, a guy named Haushofer at Munich University. When Hitler was in prison, after his aborted Beer Hall Putsch, he was tutored by an expert in geopolitics. That’s where Hitler got the idea of Lebensraum. And then the Cold War came and dropped the Iron Curtain right across the would-be world island.

Ten years ago China began realizing Mackinder’s vision. With their $4 trillion in profits from world trade, much of it with the United States, the Chinese spent a trillion dollars, starting roughly in 2007, to lay down an amazing grid – first of all, 9000 miles of high-speed rail all across China. Then transcontinental rail links that stretch from western China all the way to western Europe, right across the world island. More importantly, they laid down a grid of gas and oil pipelines from Siberia in the north to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the center, all the way down to Burma in the south. They are bringing the oil and gas resources of central Asia and the Persian Gulf via that southern pipeline, into China. The net result of this grid is to realize Mackinder’s vision for infrastructure that will tie this vast land mass together, and shift the epicenter of geopolitical power to the nation that dominates the heartland of the world island, in this case China.

China has overlaid that physical infrastructure. Last year they opened the Infrastructure Development Bank with 57 nations, including many of our closest allies. They contributed on opening day $100 billion, which is about half the capital of the World Bank. They have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and they had a big conference earlier in the year, where President Xi Jinpin announced another trillion dollars to tie together the world island, to continue this massive infrastructure investment.

China is also going to have about $1 trillion of capital invested in Africa by 2025. Already they have three times the trade of the United States with Africa. So they’re really fully realizing Mackinder’s vision of the world island.

That’s part one. Part two is that China is very deftly threatening to undercut the basis of U.S. global power. 70 years ago the United States emerged as the world’s greatest power. In the first decades after World War II, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower laid down the instruments of U.S. global power. But everybody’s forgotten about how they did it. We no longer understand what the pillars of U.S. global power are. That same historian I talked about earlier, John Darwin, wrote a book that surveyed a thousand years of imperial clashes in the Eurasian landmass. He said that the United States after World War II became the most powerful empire in human history, because we were the first empire in history to capture what he called the axial ends of the Eurasian landmass.

By that he meant that in 1949 the United States established the NATO alliance, which gave us a firm control over western Europe, one of the axial ends. Then in 1951, we signed four mutual defense treaties with a string of nations running down the Pacific island chain running down off the Asian landmass; Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. This gave us the other axial end of control. And then, between these two axial points in western Europe and the Pacific littoral, the United States laid down successive circles of steel. The first was a series of mutual defense treaties: NATO in the west, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in the east, and those four mutual defense treaties that I mentioned.

On top of that we had massive fleets. The 6th Fleet, based at Naples in the Mediterranean. The 7th Fleet, based at Subic Bay, Philippines, in the western Pacific on that Pacific littoral chain. After Britain pulled out of the Persian Gulf in the 1970’s, we established the 5th Fleet at Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Our most recent addition, on top of hundreds of air bases and strategic bombers and fighters and all the rest, our latest circle of steel is: a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily all the way to Guam in the western Pacific the United States has built over the last ten years. That allow us to strike over much of the world island.

Now, the second part of the Chinese strategy is to slice through those circles of steel and break the U.S. geopolitical encirclement of Eurasia. They’ve done it over the last three years by building seven bases in the South China Sea, using dredges to convert atolls to military bases. They’ve now got antiaircraft missiles and jet landing strips on those military bases.

There is also something that Americans haven’t paid too much attention to. The Chinese have actually got even a stronger position in the Arabian Sea, which is geopolitically very important because that’s where the mouth to the Persian Gulf lies. Ten years ago, China invested $200 billion to transform a sleepy fishing village in western Pakistan, at Gwadar, which is just about 300 miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf; about a day and a half sail, or steam. Then, a little over a year ago, President Xi Jinping went to Pakistan and he announced, with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, that China would invest $46 billion to build a road, rail, and gas oil pipeline corridor stretching from western China down the length of Pakistan all the way to Gwadar.

Then just last year, China opened a big naval base at Djibouti, at the other end of the Arabian Sea. So with their position in the South China Sea, and these two big bases in the Arabian Sea, China is slicing through that geopolitical encirclement. China is also using its trade to drive a wedge between America and its four major Asia-Pacific allies that are the foundation for the Pacific littoral that’s the axial end of U.S. geopolitical power.

So that’s the nature of the Chinese challenge. The American response has been mixed.

Resistance Radio: David Zirin on Sports and Politics

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s March 2, 2014 Resistance Radio interview with David Zirin. Zirin writes about the politics of sports for The Nation and many other magazines and newspapers. He is the author or co-author of six books, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.

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Derrick Jensen: How did you find your niche?

Dave Zirin: I grew up a very serious, intense, over-enthused sports fan in New York City in the 1980s. It was a pretty high octane sports time and not just because all of the players were doing cocaine. I didn’t think about politics a great deal during my upbringing, but that changed deal in the 1990s as I was coming of age. I made a real effort to try to find a way to justify or rectify the fact that I wanted to be someone who devoted his life to fighting for social change and I wanted to maintain my sports fandom.

Dave Zirin

The more I looked at sports, the more difficult it was to do. The more you actually look beneath the surface, beneath the adrenaline packed plays, the more you see the rampant nationalism, the insane sexism, the homophobia. If you believe in social justice, sports does not seem like the friendliest place to be. But that perspective really changed for me in 1996 when a basketball player named Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf took the position of not coming out for the national anthem before games. Today if that happened it would be a huge story for 24 hours and then we would go on to something else. But in 1996 this was a huge sports story, big profiles about it, and Rauf was eventually drummed out of the league. I’ll never forget one of the talking heads on ESPN saying that Rauf must see himself in the tradition of activist athletes like Muhammed Ali or Billie Jean King.

I was a huge sports fan and I was not aware that there was this alternative tradition in sports of people who tried to use this hyper-exulted, brought-to-you-by-Nike platform to actually say something about the world. And the more I investigated that the more I started to be fascinated by the fact that so much of this history was hidden from people like myself who were more mainstream sports fans. The second thing that fascinated me was I was seeing parallels to today. I was seeing all the things that a lot of the athletes, then, were talking about—that these struggles were ongoing. That’s really what inspired me to write about it, and it’s definitely not always easy—to put it mildly—because it’s not the friendliest of communities for these kinds of ideas. But, at the same time, the only reason I have a career is that there are a lot of Derrick Jensens out there. People who maybe like sports but hate the practice of viewership because it is so steeped in a right-wing draw and there’s an under-served audience of people who love sports but really don’t like what they’ve become and appreciate a kind of alternative analysis.

DJ: I’ve been a sports fan forever. But, it breaks my heart that they are considered so apolitical. Of course, nothing is apolitical. If something pretends to be apolitical, that supports the status quo.

Derrick Jensen

The Florida State Seminoles and the BCS bowl championship brings together so much of the sexism, the racism against indigenous peoples, and the corporate welfare that characterize so much of the big-money sports.

DZ: Sure, and don’t forget that Jameis Winston, the star quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner of Florida State, had just been cleared of accusations of rape. I’m not going to comment on his innocence or lack thereof. But the investigation itself stunk to high heaven, in terms of how much the local Tallahassee police actually were looking into it. The mentalities that Florida State fans showed towards the young woman for daring to come forward and say that she was sexually assaulted really was a head-spinner. I was getting these really creepy emails from people in Florida State who were, first of all, naming her and encouraging me to out her, which is a journalistic practice I disagree with profoundly. Secondly, they were saying “you should know the real story about her”—what I believe is called “slut-shaming”—talking about her sexual past, and who knows if any of that was true or not? They were actively courting a sports writer, and I wasn’t the only one. There’s a scary culture around sports.

DJ: You mentioned in a recent article that one of the lessons to learn from that whole incident that it’s better to be him than Trayvon Martin in Florida.

DZ: I wrote a piece about that because this country has an unbelievably horrific history of black men accused of rape, particularly in the American South. We can remember Malcolm X’s phrase, “The American South begins at the Canadian border.” But we all know that was a feature of Jim Crow—“hang first, ask questions later,” and famous cases like Emmit Till, a black kid killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and the Scottsboro Boys.

Of course, there are so many other times where lynchings took place against black men who were accused of rape. It says a lot about 21st century America that here’s Jameis Winston, accused of rape, and because he’s a football star, the old boy network in Tallahassee rushes to defend him. Tallahassee is not southern Florida—it’s not where my mom grew up, which was with Cubans and Jews. Tallahassee is the old south, and its defense of Winston says something about football culture in the south, and the bizarre effect it has on race and racism there.

Image Credit: Michael Nelson/Epa/REX/Shutterstock (7935715k)

Trayvon Martin was not an athletic star. He was just a kid trying to get home during halftime of the NBA all-star game and you saw the way his death was dealt with in the south and in the power structure, particularly among the police. I’m talking the difference between the sheriff where Trayvon Martin was killed, his not wanting to do anything about that, and the situation in Tallahassee where the local police force are actually telling the woman you don’t want to mess with this player on the Seminoles because that’s serious business right there.

DJ: We can also see the same dynamic in place in Steubenville.

DZ: Maryville, as well. Torrington, Connecticut. The number of cases involving sexual assault by athletes—the only reason we can reference them right now is because of social media and the work of groups like Anonymous who’ve tried to bring them to light. This is ongoing. Is something inherent in jock culture that produces rape culture? And if there is, then how do we combat it?

One of the most hopeful interviews about this subject that I did was with a woman named Katie Hnida. She was a field goal kicker, the first woman to ever score a point in a Division 1 NCAA football game. Katie Hnida’s story is rather horrific. She was going to play for the Colorado Buffaloes—big time NCAA football. She was raped by her teammates, quit the team, and went through every horror story you can imagine for a young woman who accuses someone of rape—let alone football players of rape. She played for New Mexico after that, so she didn’t give up football despite what had happened. And she had an incredibly positive experience on the New Mexico football team. I had a long interview with her where we compared and contrasted those experiences, so we could really try to get at what it is about football in particular, but jock culture in general, that produces rape culture? Can it be isolated? And, frankly, can it be destroyed?

Katie Hnida, an American football player who became the first woman to score in an NCAA Division I-A game, college football’s highest level, as as placekicker for the University of New Mexico Lobos on August 30, 2003.

DJ: What were your and her conclusions?

DZ: That jock culture left unattended becomes rape culture. You have to have people in positions of authority. Partly because of the mentality of football. It’s not grass roots, it’s very militaristic, very top-down, and it’s the people at the top that usually determine what the locker room culture is going to be. That means coaches, head coaches, athletic directors. At the pro ranks it means general managers and team presidents. They create the locker room culture, and unless you have people in authority actively intervening to make it something less toxic, then this is the fruit it will bear.

DJ: That reminds me of some of the stuff I’ve read about the relationship of military culture to rape culture.

A military is going to be at risk for being a high rape culture anyway, but there are some militaries that have had zero tolerance policies for sexual assault that have had much lower rates of rape amongst the soldiers.

DZ: A genetic cousin of rape culture is bullying culture, which we saw in the Miami Dolphins locker room this year with Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. Incognito bullied his teammate Martin to the point that Martin left the team. Incognito was suspended, and it imposed this discussion on the NFL of how you define “manliness.” Is Richie Incognito the real man because he’s the guy who’s going to beat up anybody who doesn’t do it his way? Or is Martin not the real man, but the real adult because he’s saying, “Wait a minute this isn’t a school yard, this is a workplace, this is a union workplace, and I’m going to stand up for my rights and actually blow the whistle on this thing?” Who do you actually respect more in that context? It’s a question a lot of NFL players had to confront.

What’s the connection between what we were just talking about with rape culture? The main one is that none of that nonsense in the Miami Dolphins locker room would have happened without the tacit, implicit, or explicit okay of the head coaches themselves. They’re the people who create the culture in the locker room. And that culture’s either productive or helpful, or not. A lot of NFL coaches talked about how they dealt with bully culture. There was a real variance. Some coaches had real philosophies about how to actively intervene in bully culture. Wouldn’t it be great if coaches could talk as openly and as publicly about how they deal or don’t deal with rape culture? They’re very similar dynamics. Groupthink, testosterone, a kind of mob mentality, not wanting to be the person who is singled out—all of these things are similar ingredients in both cultures.

When I say rape culture, when I say bully culture, it’s not that everybody who plays sports is a potential rapist or a potential bully. The question of culture is, to me, much more about turning the other way. So you see a potential rape at a party or you see a bullying situation and you don’t say anything. You’re silent in the face of that. That’s what it means by rape culture or bully culture.

Colin Kaepernick, right, and Eric Reid kneeling during the national anthem before an N.F.L. game.

DJ: And we can say, of course, the same thing about sports writers or writers in general when they attend to it or don’t attend to it.

DZ: That’s absolutely correct. That’s one of the things that’s been difficult at times. Anyone who works at a workplace, whether you’re a professor at a university, or a teacher at a public high school like my wife, or at a hotel like my cousin, wants to feel like they have colleagues. Everybody wants to feel like they have the system’s support for the work that they do. It is difficult to do, sometimes, this kind of writing and sports investigative journalism because there are people who would rather you just shut up. You’re the turd in the punch bowl. That’s sometimes difficult, but it’s not as difficult, obviously, as the people who are actually victimized by rape and bullying. I think it’s very minor compared to that. But this is about fighting cultures. It’s not some kind of level playing field where the people with the best ideas win out. It’s much more complicated than that.

DJ: I think everything you’re saying is really great. It reminds me of this study I saw where they had a bunch of people in a waiting room with two people who were in on the test. One would say something overtly racist or overtly sexist to the group. What they found was that the response of the group as a whole was not so dependent upon what the first person said as it was on the response of the other person in on the test who would say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Then, everyone would look on the statement more approvingly. But if the second person said, “Wow, that’s a terrible thing to say”—expressing disapproval—it gave the other people in the room courage.

I say this in terms of the mob mentality and also what you were saying about the coaches helping to create a culture. If the coach sees it and shuts it down, it’s not going to be reinforced.

DZ: I think that’s absolutely correct. I’ve played on a number of teams over the years and I’ve only had this experience once. The best case scenario would be if the players themselves determined the culture in the locker room. If you have real leadership among people, among good people who attempt to create an atmosphere of respect, you can actually create something that’s positive, there. That’s something that can exist independent of the coach. Unfortunately, though, because hierarchy is so set in sports, that’s a very difficult thing to create organically. In my situation, it only happened because we had all played together on previous teams and then a new coach came in and that new coach was sensitive and smart enough to let us dictate how things went. He would only step in when he felt things going astray. This was basketball, where teamwork and trust is very important. Those are lessons I’ve taken with me my entire life. Most importantly, it keeps me from being too cynical about sports and about sports writing because as bad as it gets, I know it could be better.

DJ: In the face of many of the insanities of this culture, it’s really important to have examples we can look to either in our own experience or in history of people who resisted and actually made a difference.

DZ: It’s so interesting that you say that, too, because the other historical pattern in America (and this is what’s so frustrating) is that when people speak out they’re absolutely vilified for it in the present. Yet decades down the line, the same people who are vilifying them are praising them. Or their children or grandchildren. It’s so much easier to look back in the past than it is in the present day.

I was doing a story recently about the upcoming Sochi Olympics where a lot of athletes may be speaking out on LGBT rights in Russia. One of the heads of the International Olympic Committee was actually praising Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their memorable moment in ’68. He was asked, “Well, what do you think about athletes doing that now?” and it was like a switch flipped. The cognitive dissonance to be able to do that, to me, is absolutely stunning—to be able to just jump so quickly, so abruptly, and so crudely. The intellectual crudeness to be able to go from “Wow, dissent is beautiful” to “Well, not dissent today” to “Politics: keep them out of the Olympics.” It’s unbelievable. And yet, that’s the rhetoric, that’s the discourse, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time.

DJ: And, of course, this is not just in sports. We can say the same thing about John Brown. We can say the same thing about the Haymarket Martyrs. We can say the same thing with the suffragists.

DZ: That’s the truth. It’s usually one of two things—either you’re buried and forgotten or your political teeth are extracted and you’re smoothed down to become something else. We deal with it every year. There are articles about the “real” Martin Luther King by people on the left who try to remind everyone that King actually believed in things that are quite radical even today. Yesterday the Department of Defense was tweeting King quotes— I don’t even think they saw ghoulishness of this—“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.” Is that how the Department of Defense justifies drone bombings overseas? “Yeah, we may be limiting people’s lives but, hey, that’s not really what matters.” Is there any self-consciousness that goes into that? I’m sure if Martin Luther King had been in charge of the Department of Defense, he would have turned it into the world’s most luxuriant day care center. It’s just outrageous.

In sports, though, it’s particularly difficult to get the true stories out. One reason for that is oftentimes the retired athletes themselves don’t necessarily have a vested interest in going back to their more controversial pasts. There’s no money in that. You want to be able to be on the speaker’s circuit. You want to be able to go to autograph shows.

Also, context is everything. It’s easier to be a rebel in 1968 when the fires are burning all around than in 2014, even if those fires are still there just as much as they were in 1968. They just operate in a different way.

DJ: Can we touch on the mascot issue?

DZ: Why would anyone who doesn’t live in Oklahoma even know there was such a thing as the Oklahoma Seminole Nation? When are we taught that in history class? When is the Oklahoma Seminole Nation asked for comment on anything? This is some of the invisibility of racism. Few people in our society are treated with such abject invisibility as Native Americans.

I did a talk at a college in Oregon and I was asked a question by a perfectly well-meaning liberal college student. We were talking about the Washington name change, the “R” word, and this student said to me, “Do you think the reason why there are still teams with Native American mascots is because there are no Native Americans left?”

I understood what he was trying to ask. It’s a demographic question. The reason you don’t have teams named after Latinos or African Americans is because you couldn’t. Native Americans make up 0.9% of the United States. There was a Native American young girl sitting right in front of him. She was 12 years old and she stood up in the meeting and looked at him and said, “There still are some of us left, you know.” You could have heard a pin drop.

It’s this casual racism and invisibility. White people in particular get so damn defensive where if you talk about racism in society it immediately becomes, “Oh, so what we’re all racists.” Because it’s a lot easier to do that than confronting racism itself. This is one of those classic cases. I’m not saying everyone who wears a Redskins cap or a Seminole jersey is a racist like they’re George Lincoln Rockwell 2.0. I am saying we need to do some reflecting about why there’s a team named after a racial slur, about why the Florida State Seminoles are allowed to go around with impunity and say they do this with the seal of approval from the Seminole Nation when the Florida Seminoles don’t even make up forty percent of the Seminoles nationally. That gets to some very interesting points about why the majority of Seminoles are in Oklahoma, and then you have to look seriously at this nation’s past, about the Indian Removal Act. It’s like pulling a string on a sweater. When people are watching sports or enjoying sports that’s the last thing they want to do.

DJ: I didn’t know this about their mascot. Can you mention about Osceola and make a connection to Mandela?

DZ: Absolutely. When Nelson Mandela died, quite correctly he was discussed with the most hushed possible tones—not just in the United States, but around the world. I think one of the reasons why was this person who endured 27 years behind bars emerged as the leader of his country. A remarkable thing. And he was a freedom fighter, of course, behind bars.

Osceola

Osceola was an unbelievable freedom fighter in the Seminole Wars. He fought the US Army to a standstill on multiple occasions. There was supposed to be a treaty with Osceola and when he went to the treaty, he was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The United States was actually subject to international condemnation because of this. That’s how esteemed Osceola was. And he died in prison. I wrote in my article that Osceola was in many respects the American Mandela if Mandela had never gotten out of Robbin Island, or he is the American Steven Biko—the South African who never came out.

Yet, before Florida State games, you have someone dressed up like Osceola—usually a white person in war paint—who rides out on a horse. Osceola never actually rode a horse because he fought in the swamps. You see this constant miseducation as everyone cheers for Osceola. And, the thing about it that’s hardest to stomach is that Osceola was the replacement of Florida State’s first mascot, who was a step-and-fetch-it Native American character who went by the name of Sammy Seminole. That really was his name. In a weird way, though, Sammy Seminole is more honest for what this is, which is minstrelsy, than Osceola who is an amazing historical figure.

Can you imagine worldwide condemnation if South Africa had someone dressed up like Steven Biko or dressed up like Nelson Mandela to dance around a stadium to psyche people up before a game? You would never see that in a million years. You see that in this country, frankly, because that’s the price of colonialism, depopulation, genocide, Indian Removal. This is what you get.

DJ: Can we do a two-minute version of “sports are just fun and games?” No, actually, they’re big business, with massive corporate welfare.

DZ: There’s no getting around that. This has been a real change in the economics of sports over the last 30 years—the mass infusion of corporate welfare in sports and stadiums really operating like a neoliberal Trojan horse where cities are re-organized on neoliberal grounds.

You and I can go on a magical mystery tour through the former industrial Midwest—Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit. What all these places have in common is new publicly funded stadiums for basketball, baseball, and football. At the same time the erosion of union jobs, and the jobs that are created are service industry jobs. It’s not just the question of public tax money going into these stadiums, it’s the question of the return on the investment, and what jobs are actually created. Unfortunately, far too much of public stadium funding is a magical alchemy that turns tax dollars into private property.

DJ: It’d be like if I wanted to start a business and then I went to the taxpayers to the get funding to build my factory.

DZ: It’s a hell of a scam. Often, it’s a popular thing to get a new stadium, although much less so according to polls over the last fifteen years, as they have clearly and dramatically not returned on their investment, like what happened in Seattle where the beloved Supersonics basketball team was ruthlessly ripped from the city. I think you see the price much more deeply in a place like New Orleans where the levees broke and the only place suitable for shelter was the Superdome, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, when many of the people huddled in there could not have afforded to buy a ticket to actually see a game.

DJ: I read a study back in the early ‘90s about the “multiplier effect” when a new stadium is built. Could you comment on that?

DZ: That’s a classic line about stadium funding. If you literally dumped a billion dollars from a plane, and people just picked it up and spent it, it would have a better economic multiplier effect than the building of stadiums. That in itself exposes these things for what they are.

This is the truth, Derrick, I used to go on radio shows and debate people about public stadium funding and you can’t debate it anymore, because there’s so much data that it’s a terrific waste of money. It’s like debating whether or not the sky is green. No one wants to take that position on it, either. In the context of the new normal of perpetual crisis, in which we find cities starved by gentrification and privatization, the giving of public money isn’t through referendums or public votes, but in paying off the right politicians for their stadiums.

DJ: What’s the take home message of all this? What would you like for sports fans and people who want social change to see? I’m think about the basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the guy you said influenced you back in the 90s, who played for the Denver Nuggets. It seems to me that his courage helped give you courage. I think that’s part of how social change takes place. One person stands up, and you stand up and hold his hand. Now the hope is that someone else will stand up and hold your hand, until we don’t have to have these discussions any more.

DZ: I think that’s great. I would also say that for a lot of these athletes the best thing we can do in the media is to be an ally. That’s like being an offensive lineman—you want to clear space so their voice can be heard. If people are saying your name too much, you might be doing something wrong.

DJ: This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. Thank you so much.

DZ: Thank you, Derrick.

Resistance Radio: Lierre Keith on Agriculture, Part 2

Resistance Radio: Lierre Keith on Agriculture, Part 2

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith.  You can read Part 1 here.

Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
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Jensen:  Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?

Keith: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.

You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.

That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.

The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.

It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.

J: It’s a functional problem.

K: That’s why it always ends up militarized. That’s one big reason. Another reason is, as you mentioned, human slavery. This is backbreaking labor. Hunter-gatherers tend to work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week to provide for their basic resources, and the rest of the time they do spiritual activities, art, naps apparently are very important, and also gossip. So that’s what they love to do, and they’ve got a lot of free time to do it.

You can contrast that with farmers: it’s just neverending, from dawn to dusk. For anyone to have leisure time in an agricultural society, they have to have slaves. To put a real number on it, by the year 1800—a lot of people demarcate that as the beginning of the fossil fuel age—fully three-quarters of the human beings alive on this planet, three-quarters of them, were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom. That’s what it requires.

J: It was mainly agricultural, right?

K: Yes. We’ve forgotten how much work is involved because we’ve been using machines now to do that work. I can guarantee that when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly what kind of work this is.

Once you have that number of the population living in slavery, you need someone to keep them there, and those people are called soldiers. When they go out into the hinterlands, into the colonies, to get those resources that everybody now needs, one of those resources is always going to be other human beings.

We talk about Athens, the great birthplace of modern democracy. Ninety percent of the population of Athens were slaves. That carries through until the year 1800. So that’s number two, slavery.

The other problem with agriculture is it creates a surplus. That’s how the whole thing keeps going. You have to make enough so that you have some surplus. Hunter-gatherers can just move on a little bit and there’s more food to eat, but with the agriculturalists, of course, starvation is always one season away, so there’s always this surplus. The thing is, if you can store it, you can steal it, so you always have to have somebody to guard the food stores. And again, those people are called soldiers.

J: In the first cities—I learned this from Lewis Mumford—the first cities did not have walls around the outside to protect them from so-called raiders. They actually had walls around the granary to make sure that the king was able to keep control of the food supplies because it was only through keeping control of the food supplies that he was able to keep control of the labor force.

K: Yes, so you see this makes a really vicious little circle. Another point to keep in mind is if you can picture one of those great big naval ships that the British Navy or whoever used to conquer various colonies, it can take 600 old-growth trees just to make one of those ships.

War is really resource-intensive. And it ends. A lot of things you might produce create value in this society, and the value can keep either building or at least transferring, but with things that revolve around war, it just dead-ends right there because it’s only got one purpose. And when it’s over, everybody’s dead and that’s sort of the end of it.

Those ships—entire forests of the world were pulled down to make ships just for war. And this is true everywhere. It’s not just the British Navy. It’s all of them. That’s what was required to build those great big fighting vessels.

So you’ve destroyed your forest to live in this energy-intensive way, and you’ve poured a whole bunch of resources particularly into your military, not in defeating people but into the military, and now around again in the vicious circle, you have to go out and conquer the people living in the region next to you so you can take their forest to make more ships to conquer more people.

This is the temporary advantage that agricultural societies have. Because they’re willing to destroy their forests, they can build these great big ships. They can do all this smelting of iron and make these incredible weapons, which are a lot harder than just wooden spears. So they’ve got this superior military force because it’s all draw-down.

Then you’re stuck in this position where you then have to conquer. You have to use that military to go out and get more resources because you’ve used up yours. But it gives you that temporary advantage over the people who aren’t willing to destroy their forests.

If you’re the people who aren’t willing, now you’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either become militaristic and devote your forest to making an army—you kill your land—or you stand on principle and you’re killed and they take it. This is why war spreads. The gentle, peaceful matrilineal people that we all love to romanticize, and in our dreams that’s where we go, this is what happens. This is what they’re up against every time.

It’s a double bind. There’s not really any way out, and that’s why we’re in the state we’re in.

J: Since the problems are functional, as opposed to just something we can change by being nicer people, why are you telling us this? That’s one question. Another question is what do you want people to do with this information?

K: The reason I’m telling everybody is because I want to be hated. [Pause.] That’s supposed to be a joke.

The reason I’m telling everybody is because I feel like the people who care the most—and by that I mean radical environmentalists, radical feminists, people who are profoundly committed to the planet, to justice, to a better way—by and large do not understand the depth of the problem. And if we don’t address the actual problem, we’re never going to come up with solutions. That seems kind of obvious.

Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to these issues don’t understand that it all goes back to agriculture, that that’s the original activity that started us down this path of destruction. That’s the primary destruction. Eventually, global warming will outweigh that, but to date, it’s still the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Because that’s what it is. It’s not like agriculture on a bad day, agriculture done really badly. No, this is what it is. You pull down the forest. You rip up the prairie. You destroy those biotic communities, and you replace them with this monocrop for humans, for as long as it will last. That’s the problem.

Then once you start doing that, you’re stuck with this militaristic cycle because you’ve got to keep doing it again and again. When you’ve destroyed your own, you have to go out and get someone else’s. Militarism isn’t just, “Oh gosh, we happen to be warlike. We have a bad story in a book we consider holy. We’d better tell new stories.” I’m a writer. I’m all for new stories, but that’s not going to change this.

The problem is we have a way of life based on draw-down. Materially speaking, we’ve used it all up. And we need to face that. That’s why I’m trying to get people to understand this. It’s not because I actually want them to hate me although a lot of them end up hating me. I guess that’s just the way it goes when you go up against people’s beliefs.

We really have to get the basic wound that’s been done, the basic damage. This has got to be at the forefront of our consciousness as activists and environmentalists and feminists. We’re never going to be able to face it otherwise.

J: I want to comment on the whole hating you thing. What you’re saying is not actually new. Basically, every generation, there have been a number of people who say agriculture is destructive—can you just list a few of the people who have talked about this? There’s Jared Diamond and Richard Manning with Against the Grain, and how about Edward Hyams? Talk about a few of those precedents.

K: What you’re saying is absolutely right. Every generation there’s somebody who says the same thing, and you can go all the way back to ancient Greece to some of the earliest written texts that we have anywhere in the world, and you’ve got Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all mentioning the fact that the world was being destroyed, that the rivers were being flooded with this mud and silt, and so there were no more fish, and all the soil was washing down off the mountains.

In fact, some of the ports of the ancient Roman Empire had to be moved ten kilometers—ten kilometers—because so much silt ran off the mountains and clogged the harbors that they kept having to move, just literally move the cities, to a new spot where the ships could actually dock. This was all commented on. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that nobody knew how to stop it.

Then you have people like George Hill in the nineteenth century, then Edward Hyams in 1930, 1940, and more recently, you have David Montgomery and his book Soil, which is absolutely fabulous. Jared Diamond basically won a Pulitzer Prize for saying more or less the same thing. Richard Manning has this great quote that I love. I’d like to read this. It’s just a few sentences:

“No biologist or anyone else for that matter could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it.”

That’s it right there. It’s a war against the natural world.

No, I have nothing to say that’s particularly original. I think I put it together in my own way, but none of this is new information. It’s not getting to the people who care the most, and that’s why I feel impassioned about this.

J: So what do you want people to do on two levels, both the personal level and the social level?

K: I think that the social level is heads and shoulders, far and way above, way more important than anything that anybody can do in their personal lives. And I really want to emphasize that, because there are no personal solutions to political problems, and we should know that.

The problem is that a lot of the environmental movement—we’ve kind of been sold this idea that if we just make different consumer choices, we can somehow buy our way out of these massive, global political problems. We can’t. There’s no set of things you can buy that’s going to make a damn bit of difference on any of this. This is not a problem that you can address in your personal life and really have that make anything but a nano-difference. These are really just horrendous systems of power that we are going to have to challenge.

J: Can you say what you were going to say, but in addition can you give a three-minute liberal/radical distinction? Is that possible?

K: There are two main differences between liberals and radicals. The first is that liberals are idealist, and what that means is that liberals tend to think that social reality is an idea. It’s a mental event. And therefore, the way to make social change is education. You change people’s minds. And social change happens because people have some kind of consciousness transformation, or a personal epiphany, or even a spiritual revelation, but that’s how social change happens. It’s one by one and it’s through education or rational argument because it’s a rational problem, right? It’s just a mental event.

J: If we recognize that agriculture is destructive, then we’ll stop it.

K: Yes. Somehow if we just get the information to people, it will somehow just happen. It’s very different on the radical side because radicals think that material conditions are primary, that society is not made up of ideas, it’s made up of material conditions and material institutions that create those conditions. The way you change things is by taking power away from the powerful and redistributing that to the dispossessed. That involves struggle.

Down the line, you have to make decisions how you’re going to wage such struggle, whether it’s violent or nonviolent. All that is really important, and often very ethically grueling to come to grips with, but that’s a much later discussion.

The thing to recognize is this requires force. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s not a mistake. The powerful aren’t there because the rest of us aren’t educated. They’re there because they have power, and they’re not going to give it up willingly.

You need to use some level of force, whether that’s nonviolent, whether it’s boycotts, whether it’s sit-ins—there are plenty of nonviolent ways that have worked, so it’s not about violence and nonviolence.

It’s simply to recognize that this is not a mistake or a misunderstanding because it’s not a mental event. It’s about material systems of power that have got to be changed, that have to be confronted and brought down. That’s idealism versus materialism.

The other big difference between liberals and radicals is the basic social unit. For liberals it’s always the individual. The individual is sacrosanct. It’s always the individual against society. And again, this leaves you with a strategy of sort of one on one. You’re going to change people one by one, and that’s how you change society.

For radicals, again, this is totally different. We understand that society is actually made of groups of people—so it’s always a class condition, whether it’s economic class, whether it’s a sex caste system of gender, whether it’s a racial caste system. These are groups of people, and some of those groups have power over other groups.

So it’s not about you as an individual. The bad things that happen to me aren’t because my name is Lierre and I have blue eyes and I like reading. The bad things that happen to me are because I’m a woman, because of the different class positions that I hold. Those are the things that happen to people who are in my position. Nothing to do with me as an individual.

Social change happens when the dispossessed come together and make common cause. The solution is really written into the problem. Groups of people have power, but the dispossessed can come together and fight for themselves to change that. There’s always hope in that condition.

That’s the difference between liberals and radicals, and the problem with a lot of the environmentalists of course is that they’ve completely taken up this liberalism. So it’s only going to change by education, and you’re only going to do it one on one. What has dropped out completely from of the conversation is that there are people in power, they’re making money, they control armies, and they’re in control of things like Exxon/Mobil. They are gutting the planet for their personal profit. They’ve got names and addresses, as Utah Phillips very famously said. We know where they live, and we can see how their power is organized.

Our job is to take that apart. It’s to take down those institutions in whatever way we can and redistribute the power so that we all have some say in the material conditions of our lives.

What do I want people to do? In really broad strokes I actually think that there’s still a lot of hope because the things that we need to do to solve these problems are actually things that we should be doing anyway if we care about justice. To get justice for people is also the only way we’re going to save this planet. It’s not human race vs. planet. I think it gets set up that way in people’s minds. It’s not. It’s actually quite the opposite.

So, to get down to brass tacks, the number one thing you can do to drop the birth rate is teach a girl to read. That’s a really profound statement. When women have even that much more power over their lives, it means they have a little more control over the uses to which men put our bodies, and that’s sexually, reproductively, economically. The number one thing that drops the birth rate across the globe is teaching a girl to read. And we should care about that because we care about girls.

As it turns out, it’s one of the main things we’re going to have to do to save the planet. Right now somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of all children that are born are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give women control over their bodies and the birth rate drops. That’s happened in 32 countries. We now have negative or zero population growth in 32 countries. This is not the human rights horrors of China or places like that where they’ve instituted these draconian and misogynist laws. This is simply giving women power over their lives. And that’s what happens when women have a little education and a little bit of power, over and over.

The number one thing that we have to do is empower girls, and that means confronting a system of power that’s called patriarchy. We’re all going to have to be feminists. Gosh, what a shame.

The other thing that drops the birth rate is when you increase people’s standard of living. People end up having lots of children when they’re very, very poor. So if you raise the standard of living, the birth rate drops, very quickly in fact. Often in a generation you can see this happen.

The reason that people are poor is not because they’re stupid. It’s because the rich are stealing from them. And that is a global system called capitalism. So we’re going to have to be against capitalism, and we’re going to have to do something about patriarchy. That is the only way that we’re going to save this planet.

Again, it’s not humans vs. planet earth. If you care about human rights, that is the only thing that’s really going to save this situation.

My goal is, over the next two or three generations, we could very easily, by simply caring about women and girls and giving them some rights over their lives, some decision-making power, we could drop the birth rate dramatically and then we could let the planet repair. We could be part of that repair. It’s actually not that hard, because the grasses and the forests want to come back. If we simply get out of the way, they will.

I’ll end with one final bit of information, and that’s really about grasslands. If we were to take 80 percent of the trashed out grasslands around the planet, which have been destroyed by agriculture and return them to the grasslands that they would like to be, within 15 years we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We could stop global warming in its tracks.

Grasslands of the Flint Hills in Kansas. ©Jim Richardson

Because it’s not us doing it. It’s the plants that are doing it. It’s those incredible grasses that would do it for us. Because life wants to live. And they will do that. The one thing they are really good at is building soil. That’s what prairies do. The basic component of soil is carbon, so they’ll suck it out of the air and they’ll store it once more in the ground, and that could be the end of global warming.

But we’ve got to stop being these monsters and destroyers. A lot of times people make this argument that this is human nature. My response is that it’s not. We were on this planet for over two million years and we didn’t destroy anything. In fact, you can look at the first art that we ever made, and to me it’s a celebration. You have the mega-fauna and the mega-females. Those were our first art projects, these giant animals and these giant women. To me that says that in our bodies, in our brains, in our bones, we have that awe and that thanksgiving, that we were trying to say thank you for our lives and for our homes, and so that was what we celebrated.

I don’t think it’s that far from us still. I think we could repair this planet and remember how to participate rather than dominate.

Resistance Radio: Lierre Keith on Agriculture, Part 1

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s  December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith.

Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
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Jensen: Today’s guest is Lierre Keith, the author of multiple books including The Vegetarian Myth and Deep Green Resistance.

Jared Diamond has said that agriculture is the biggest mistake that humans ever made, and Dick Manning had some things to say about it too. Can you talk about what’s wrong with agriculture?

Keith: Yes, and I would like to  first explain why that’s important. The reason it’s important is because agriculture is the basis of civilization, and I think the whole point of this show is to make people understand that this is a living arrangement that had no future. So the end was written into the beginning.

And the reason is, primarily, because agriculture is an inherently destructive activity. So you have to understand what agriculture is.

In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it—and I mean down to the bacteria— then you plant it to human use. So it’s biotic cleansing. All those other millions of creatures who should be living there have nowhere to go. That’s a long way of saying mass extinction. Because that’s what agriculture is.

There are a few problems. The first is that it lets the human population grow to some rather large numbers because instead of sharing that land with all those other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. So we had this catastrophic rise in human numbers which we’ve seen over the last 10,000 years.

The second problem is that you’re destroying the topsoil, and topsoil is the basis of  terrestrial life. We owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains. Right now 80 percent of the food calories that are used to support the current human population come from those agricultural foods.

It’s only possible to support this number of people by taking over vast swaths of the planet from all these other creatures  and then using it to support human beings.

So, except for the last 46 remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race has made itself dependent on this inherently destructive activity, on agriculture, and it’s killing the planet.

This is not a plan with a future. It’s draw-down. The end was written into the beginning. What you’re mostly drawing down is fossil soil. We’ve all heard of fossil fuel, probably fossil water, but fossil soil is another really basic concept that we should all be familiar with.

It takes many, many centuries to grow an inch of soil, and in a very brief period of time agriculture destroys that. In one season of planting your basic row crop—wheat or corn or soy or whatever—you can destroy 2000 years of soil.

And if you don’t believe me, you can go to Google Images and type in “Dust Bowl first day.” You can see pictures of these farms in South Dakota that literally lost all their topsoil, all of it, in a 12-hour period, on the first day of the Dust Bowl. That’s draw-down and it’s draw-down in a really big way.

J: How does agriculture actually actually work? How does it actually, first, commit the biotic cleansing? And second, how does it destroy the soil? What happens?

K: I want all the listeners to think about what’s outside their bedroom window or their back door or even their front door. Probably it’s a little piece of land, ten feet by ten feet. Maybe you live in the country, but if you live anywhere urban or suburban, you’re going to see a tiny little patch of land, and it’s mostly going to be grass, probably Kentucky blue grass or something like that, that was put there as a decoration.

If you want to grow a garden, you have to dig up that grass. You can’t just throw lettuce seeds on top of it and hope for the best. I can tell you what will happen, and it’s exactly nothing. There is no way that the annual seeds of those domesticated vegetables are ever going to out-compete that grass. Grass is fabulous stuff. It does not die; it’s pretty much invincible.

To remove it you have to apply a whole bunch of labor. Then, with the soil bared, you can plant whatever annual crop you were thinking of planting. To have a garden, it would be lettuce or tomatoes or squash or whatever. But those are annual crops. They only come once. They’re not going to be here again next year. That’s what an annual means, that they only grow for an annum, one year.

That’s in contrast to perennials, which grow many years. Trees are perennials, clearly. They can grow 2000 years out here in the redwoods. Grasses are perennials. There are annual grasses, but most grasses are perennials. Then there are lots of things in between that are also perennials, like shrubs and vines and whatnot. But then there’s another category of plants that are annuals, and they only grow for one year, or maybe two or three seasons, then they’re done.

These two different categories of plants have very different functions in nature. Everything of terrestrial life depends on those perennials being in place. They do a couple of really basic things, one of which is, because they live a long time, they have the capacity to have a really deep root system. Their roots go down really far, because they have many years to get there. Once they’re there, they can  break up rock, the substrata that our planet is made from, and by breaking up that rock they make the minerals available to every other living creature on the planet. They are the ones who recirculate those minerals and keep them coming up to the surface, so that other plants and soil creatures and ultimately animals can eat them. Without those minerals we’re all dead.

J: Like iron.

K: Yes, like iron.

J: Calcium.

K: Like zinc, manganese, anything, you name it. Selenium. It’s the plants that do that, and they’re the only ones that can do that.

Annuals do not have deep root systems. This is really important for people to understand. They don’t live long enough to develop root systems. It’s not part of their genetic code to make deep root systems. They have one purpose, and that’s to create a giant seed head. That’s what annuals do. They have a really short period of time. They’re only going to live two or three seasons, and everything is about the continuation of the species. Their one shot at a future is to have a great big seed head. It’s to produce that baby and wrap it in as many nutrients and as many defenses as it can. And that gives you a great big seed. That’s why annual seeds tend to be way bigger than perennial seeds. It’s got to last. It’s got to make sure that that plant baby survives when the time comes.

Not only do those perennial plants break up the rock and do the mineral thing, but also those really deep root systems are what let the water table recharge because every little tiny filament of root helps water. Every time it rains, the water can now enter the soil down through that channel of the root system. When the community needs that water again, later in the summer, say, when it’s dry, it’s like a great big sponge. Those perennial plants can pull on that water as they need it and keep the whole community alive. That’s what perennials do.

The third really important thing is they keep the soil covered at all times. If you think about a forest, or a prairie, you do not see bare soil. You’ll see duff in a forest, which is decaying plant matter. And of course in a real prairie, you’re not going to see any bare soil. You’re just going to see plants for as far as the eye can see. It will just be perennial grasses.

That’s really important because without being protected, the soil, just like the rest of us, it dies when it’s exposed. The sun bakes it, the wind blows it away, the rain compacts it, and you just end up with dust essentially instead of living matter. So that’s what perennials do.

There are opportunities in nature for annual plants. If there’s an emergency situation, some kind of disaster like a fire or a flood, an earthquake, a landslide when the ground might be bared for some reason—that’s an emergency in nature because that’s the basis of life now being degraded. So immediately the annuals spring to life. It’s because the perennials have been cleared away by this disaster.

You can picture the bank of a river that’s been wiped clean by a flood. It’s just mud. The first thing that happens is all those annual seeds, they’ve been waiting in the soil for their moment. There’s no competition now from the perennials and the perennial root systems, so now they can spring to life, . They will cover that bare soil for a year or two.

It’s like if you cut yourself, you would put a Band-Aid on it. That’s what those annuals do. They provide that Band-Aid. Eventually your skin is going to knit back together, and that’s the perennial grasses or the forest trees coming back in and and you don’t need the Band-Aid anymore. In the same way, the annuals—you won’t see them anymore in the landscape. And their seeds again lie buried until they’re needed for an emergency.

So it’s not like annuals are bad and perennials are good, it’s just that most of the plant matter, the cellulose matter on the planet is going to be perennials. But the annuals have their moment. And it’s when those emergencies happen.

The problem with agriculture is it’s that emergency over and over and over. In order to plant those giant seed heads, in order for them to have a chance, you’ve got to clear the land. You have to remove the grasses or pull down the forests and then you can plant those seeds—corn or wheat or whatever it’s going to be. That’s the only way that you can do it. You cannot simply sprinkle them in the grass and hope for the best or sprinkle them in a forest. Nothing will happen. We all know this as gardeners.

So just extend that across the planet. That’s where all of those annual monocrops come from, by destroying the grasslands of the world and ultimately pulling down a lot of forests as well. These are the demands of agriculture. You can’t just do it once. It has to be done over and over. It is a war against the living world. Because the world doesn’t want to be a monocrop. This is a living planet, and it wants to stay alive. That means protecting that topsoil. It also means that all those plants and animals really want their homes. So you’re going to be fighting a war against all those plants and animals that want to come back, all the perennial grasses, all the trees. Anybody who’s gardened knows that you’re forever fighting the grasses that want to be there.

If you let it go for a few years, what will eventually come back is of course is the succession of either the forest or the prairie, which in one way is ultimately the hope. If we just get out of the way, this planet will repair. That drive, that life wants to live, it’s such a profound impulse in every living creature, that they would take their homes back if we simply stopped fighting that war.

But that’s what agriculture is. A lot of people don’t understand this. I think it’s because we’ve been living in an agricultural society for really 10,000 years now. Ultimately this started way back in ancient Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, and all that, but it’s a direct line. Eventually it conquers Europe. Then the Europeans bring it to North and South America, and they do a bunch of conquering as well, and eventually this is what you end up with; the whole world is just covered with these annual monocrops, as much of it as could be.

We’ve reached the end. By 1950 the world was out of topsoil. Since that point we’ve actually been eating fossil fuel instead of soil. Because the soil’s gone. We’ve skinned the planet alive. So fossil fuel took over instead, which certainly brings with it another whole set of horrors, which are frankly worse.

J: I want to mention a book I  recently read, which was pretty fabulous, and pretty heartbreaking. It was called A Country So Full of Gain. It was early European explorers’ accounts of Iowa.

I know for most of us that when we think of Iowa, we think of nothing but cornfields, but Iowa was one of the most wildlife-rich regions of the country, with the sort of interplay between the eastern forests and the Great Plains. When I think of Iowa, I don’t actually think of a place that’s rich in wildlife. That’s a great example of what agriculture does.

K: Yes, and of course another example is Indiana, which, again, we don’t think of as being a place filled with wetlands, but there was the Limberlost, which was a swamp essentially, just a great big wetland. It was made famous by a series of books. The Girl of the Limberlost was the first one of these novels that were written, in the 1930s and 40s. Many, many people still go there. There’s a state park that memorializes the place where these books took place. And everyone wants to see the Limberlost. It’s not there. So over and over these park rangers have to say, “It’s gone. It’s completely eradicated. It was drained and turned into a cornfield. You can’t see it because it’s not here anymore.”

The girl in that book—it’s a novel, but you can imagine that some of this might be true—is living in terrible poverty, with a really abusive situation with her family, but she’s very determined to get herself to school. She does this by being essentially a naturalist because she knows the place so well and loves, particularly, the butterflies and the moths. This is how she’s able to provide for her school fees.

In that way, they are amazing books, because the woman who wrote them, Jean Stratton Porter, really loved that swampy area, that wetland. It’s gone. It’s all been turned into corn.

J: I just read last night that this year has been a complete catastrophe for monarch butterflies, that even recently where they would still have a few we are seeing none. In this case it’s because of milkweed, because Roundup has been killing all the milkweed.

K: And that’s so we can all have soybeans, right? And there are descriptions not even from that long ago, a hundred years ago, of swarms of butterflies miles long. If you can imagine ― a cloud of butterflies miles long on the horizon. And this was just a regular sight that people would see everywhere across the Americas.

J: Can we talk for just a moment about the Fertile Crescent?

K: Everybody has seen pictures of the Iraq War at this point. It’s been going on for ten years or whatever. You picture that region, and you picture rock and sand. Nobody on the planet would call that place the Fertile Crescent, but it was once upon a time quite fertile. You can go to all the places where agriculture first started, in seven places around the globe, and pretty much all of them look like that now.

That is the inevitable endpoint. That’s what happens when you clear away the forests and the grasslands and you drain the wetlands. You remove the life that wants to be there.

You can keep that going for somewhere between 800 and 2000 years. That’s the length of every civilization. They last as long as their topsoil. When their topsoil is gone, they collapse.

Look at ancient Rome, or at any of these giant power centers from history, and it’s the same pattern over and over. By the end, Rome was so desperate that Egypt, with the wonderful fertility of the Nile River, was a personal possession of the emperor of Rome. Anybody who interfered with the off-loading of grain into the Roman ports along the coastline—summary execution. Because that’s where they were getting all their food from at that point. If you did anything to interfere with the off-loading of that food, you would be killed on sight. Everybody got that this was the end.

So the whole thing collapses. Then it starts over somewhere else.

But that entire region around the Mediterranean was destroyed piece by piece by those successive empires—the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and then the Greeks and finally the Romans. Then it collapsed. And the only thing that saved Northern Europe from the Romans was the Alps, mountains that they simply couldn’t cross. Eventually, though, agriculture pushed its way up through there as well. There are only four freely flowing rivers left in Europe now. The rest have been dammed.

J: You’re talking about this not being sustainable. But I don’t know how you can say that it’s not sustainable when there are seven billion humans on the planet, and clearly humans are continuing to multiply, so doesn’t that mean that this way of living works? I’m thinking about a New York Times op-ed I just read about a week ago, that said that ecology doesn’t actually matter to humans because human survival is based on technology and innovation, as opposed to the world. The guy who wrote it is a scientist, so he must know.

K: [laughs] I would say that human survival depends on having a livable planet and recognizing its limits. If you don’t start there, you’re going to end where we ended. 98 percent of the forests are gone and 99 percent of the prairies, and we are looking at complete biotic collapse. It’s just insanity. To not recognize basic physical limits just seems so out of touch with reality.

J: But there’s still a lot of humans. There’s like seven billion humans on the planet, so obviously we’re doing really well.

K: Yeah, and counting. What we are doing, what we have been doing for 10,000 years, is what’s called draw-down. This is when some—we can call it a resource, but maybe there are better words—a living community, and that community is being dismantled piece by piece and used. While that dismantling is happening, while the soil is being destroyed, while the rivers are being drained, while all the fish are being killed, while the topsoil is sliding off the mountain, clogging the harbors around the Roman Empire—or take your pick of empires—and the trees are going, and everything is being pulled down, yes, there’s a temporary blip, where the population gets larger.

But of course you’re not letting the world replenish, you’re not taking from it in an actually sustainable way. That’s why it’s called draw-down, because you’re drawing down the capacity of the world to replenish itself. You’re taking the soil. You’re taking the trees, whatever. Eventually you hit zero, and that’s when the thing collapses.

I referenced fossil fuel. What’s been happening since 1950—that’s the beginning of what’s called the Green Revolution.  Scientists figured out through the Haber-Bosch process how to take oil and gas and turn it into usable nitrogen.

Originally that was used for making bombs, for killing people.  Scientists were well aware of the fact that we were going to run out of nitrogen and that was one of the basic things plants need. If you’re a gardener you know this. There wasn’t going to be enough nitrogen left on the planet to keep doing agriculture. So they thought they hit a bonanza when they figured out they could use this Haber-Bosch process. By 1950 they’d taken all these munitions plants and turned them into fertilizer factories for farming. Then all of a sudden . . .

J: Which is one reason you can end up with a fertilizer factory exploding in Texas.

K: Yes, it’s explosive. It’s exactly the same process, so it’s, very dense energy essentially. They also did a lot of plant breeding and made the plants shrink, so less plant energy has to go to things like stems and leaves, and more can go to that giant seed head to make it even bigger with less input. They’re very clever. They do these things. But of course the ultimate problem is that it’s still draw-down. Except we’ve moved on from soil, since that’s all gone, and now we’re drawing down fossil fuel.

Fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West, Texas.

As long as oil and gas are cheap enough, we can keep eating oil on a stalk, but again this is not a plan with a future. I think everybody listening probably knows that oil doesn’t reproduce. The little drops of oil don’t get a birds-and-bees talk from the big drops of oil. It’s not going to come again once those resources are gone, so it’s still draw-down, only it’s an even more destructive kind of draw-down because with fossil fuels, of course, you’ve got the oil spills, the global warming and all the rest of it.

So having blown through the topsoil of the planet, they’re now using what’s under the earth as well. There’s no happy ending here. The only way this can end is with total collapse. You can’t keep drawing down resources that are going to come to an end and think there’s any kind of future. This was not a way of life that was ever going to last.

J: A couple of other problems with agriculture are if you are drawing down your own land base, that’s going to lead you to militarism. It leads you to conquest because if you don’t conquer somebody else you’re going to starve. So basically once you’ve drawn down your own land base, then you have a choice. You can either collapse or you can expand. So can you talk about the relationship between agriculture and expansion, and also the fact that agriculture is really hard work, so agriculture and slavery?

K: That’s the pattern of civilization everywhere. There is no exception. There can’t be an exception, because once you’ve used up your own resources, you have to go out and get them somewhere else.

J:  Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?

K: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.

You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.

That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.

The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.

It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.

Read part two

Interview with DAPL Eco-Saboteurs Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek

Interview with DAPL Eco-Saboteurs Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek

Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert of Deep Green Resistance interviewed Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek following their press release claiming responsibility for multiple incidents of sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline and construction equipment. Listen to the audio, or read the transcript:

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Jennifer: First, thank you so much, Jessica and Ruby, for having this conversation today. Could you talk a little bit about who you are?

Ruby: My name’s Ruby. I’m 27 years old. I found out about DAPL when I was a pre-school teacher in Boulder, Colorado, and that motivated me to quit my job and go to Standing Rock. I was following the issue very closely. When I arrived at Standing Rock, I was really relieved and comforted to see so many people there willing to do whatever kind of work was needed.

I saw that Standing Rock was really taken care of, and I noticed that there were 1200 other miles of pipeline that had to be stopped. I saw a news article in a local Iowa paper about Jessica Reznicek starting an encampment by herself down at the Mississippi River, the largest waterway here in the United States in the northern continent. I went down there, to Mississippi Stand. I plugged in immediately, willing to do whatever.

I worked on media and participated in boycotts and marches and the whole traditional model of civil disobedience, and here I am today talking today to you.

Jessica: My name’s Jessica Reznicek, 36 years old. I really started delving into activism about six years ago during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I joined the Zuccotti movement in New York. When I learned that back in my home city of Des Moines, Iowa, there was a local Occupy movement occurring, I returned home and plugged in there. I began working tirelessly on the Occupy campaigns on a local level in Iowa, in the Iowa state capital, and around the caucuses.

Through that movement, I met Catholic Workers who were at the forefront here in the local struggle. For about six years I’ve been plugging in and working on resistance via the Des Moines Catholic Worker house, and have been engaged non-stop in various campaigns, everything from anti-war to saving the planet and trying to save the human race!

I met Ruby here in Iowa last summer. It’s been an incredible journey with the two of us together, and I’m eager to share that journey at this point.

Jennifer: When you met each other, did you find common ground in motivation and inspiration?

Jessica: I think that’s how Ruby and I ended up pairing off. The bottom line for both Ruby and me was to stop this pipeline and to do it peacefully and nonviolently, and to explore and exhaust what you might call traditional avenues. Hundreds of thousands of people resisted this pipeline, so by no means did only Ruby and I care so deeply about these issues—but we really hit it off. Our personalities hit it off.

We did a hunger strike at the Iowa Utilities Board over the winter, boycotts, marches, lockdowns. Mississippi Stand was notorious for lockdowns, and they were effective. I think that’s where we got a taste of it.

One of the lockdowns I did with another close friend of mine was on a construction site, the boring site under the Mississippi River on the Iowa side. We locked onto a backhoe, and stopped the construction at the boring site for about four hours.

Ruby and I had some great conversations after that ― it was great to shut down a construction site for four hours, but ultimately we need more. We need to delay construction not just for days, but for weeks and months for the ultimate purpose of shutting this pipeline down and having investors pull out. Ruby and I were in that vein together.

Jennifer: You’ve been very courageous. Where do you pull that well of courage?

Ruby: Directly from my heart. I’ve tried to stop caring about this, honestly, and I can’t. I’ve been involved with other campaigns since DAPL, and those are also courageous, but I just can’t let this go. All of this destruction needs to be stopped, absolutely. But I saw with Standing Rock that DAPL in particular was a turning point for a lot of things, and we have yet to win a victory.

For me and for a lot of people, the bottom line was to stop the pipeline. That is what motivated me to act the way I have, having exhausted every other tactic.

I was a preschool teacher and I love kids. [chokes up with grief] We’re not leaving them anything. It’s scary, it’s scary what everyone is going through, and I see a lot of fear preventing people from acting. I was afraid as well, but it had to be done. That’s why I’m here talking to you now, because these are the conversations that we need to be having, as a collective, as a whole. How do we effectively stop this desecration that continues day in and day out?

Jennifer: Those are the questions that we all have to ask ourselves, and I’m really glad that you’re raising those questions. Thank you.

Max: The question of how we actually stop them is critical. So is recognizing that when what we’re doing isn’t working, we have to do something else. What was your psychology as you moved toward taking the actions that you did, and what did you actually end up doing?

Ruby: Our lockdowns gave us a teaser for stopping construction. One day, after another pullback had occurred at the Skunk River, Jessica and I got together and had this idea to mess with the engines of these heavy machines.

We brainstormed back and forth all day . . . you know, what if we take the oil out of the thing . . . we really don’t know how to do that. So why don’t we just burn it? Okay, I know how to light a fire. You strike a match. Going and doing that action was really liberating and empowering and at the same time scary. Oh my gosh, I just committed arson. But it had to be done. That was the first night that I really felt empowered as an individual. I did actually make a difference and a concrete contribution by my standards as a person.

So the psychology of it is you’re battling with fear, because we’re all living in this oppressive system. That’s something we have to overcome. Otherwise we continue to allow this to go on, and we continue to be oppressed. We have to liberate ourselves through our own actions.

Jennifer: I appreciate that your statement distinguishes living beings from objects when discussing violence. You point out that destroying infrastructure isn’t violence.

Jessica: I’ve been trying to get this message out to the activist community here in Iowa and elsewhere. Our culture and our society and we as people put so much emphasis on property, but we have to start understanding that these machines are desecrating the earth and the people and all of the earth’s inhabitants. We need to get out of that paradigm where we place property on such a high pedestal, especially when that property is destroying every natural resource available to us and not leaving a future for the generations to come.

It’s really difficult for people to understand that Ruby and I were actually preventing destruction. I like to focus on the property improvement that we’ve made versus property destruction. At every turn, we were acting from our hearts and from our spirits and with all life on this planet in mind. Absolutely no life was in jeopardy while we were acting, and in fact our goal was to save lives.

Max: The methods that we’re taught are acceptable for changing the world usually aren’t very threatening to those in power. I don’t think it’s a mistake, for example, that we get taught the history of Martin Luther King in school but we don’t get taught about the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. We learn about the struggle against apartheid, but we don’t get taught that Nelson Mandela organized and committed sabotage and engaged in actions that caused him to be labeled as a terrorist by the U. S. and South African governments.

You have a history and a background as activists trying to do the right thing and make the world a better place. What’s your understanding of how your actions fit into the history of social movements and people who are called to do what’s right even though it may be illegal?

Ruby: I know a little bit about the Black Panthers. I know that narrative that the government hijacked everything, but I didn’t know that Nelson Mandela organized sabotage. That’s awesome.

It was a very personal thing for me. It’s the right thing to do. I live here, in the United States, in a country that perpetuates violence everywhere, including here. I saw that I had the opportunity to act in this way, and that’s what motivated me.

Jessica: We’re not taught these things, so Ruby and I feel isolated or alienated from the wider movement when we decide to take these actions. That’s really unfortunate, not to feel in solidarity with a historical narrative. A lot of our energy is expended, unfortunately, on defending ourselves to the movement, and you just wonder . . . it’s disheartening when I don’t know whether I’m going to be supported by anti-pipeline activists.

We do go back over these stories. Fortunately, I’ve been intimately engaged for six years in the Catholic Worker Movement, which has a rich history and tradition of property destruction via a Biblical narrative. I’ve embraced this tradition and found my little niche.

I live in a small intentional community here in Des Moines, and when when we released our press statement a few days ago, we were immediately supported by our close friends and family. Thank goodness. That’s basically due to an ongoing historical struggle created in the 1930s with Dorothy Day. It gives us something to which we can attach ourselves and find legitimacy, which we’re having a really hard time finding in other circles. That’s due to lack of information and lack of being taught these histories as children.

Jennifer: I’m part of the Political Prisoner Support Group in Deep Green Resistance. What do you need right now? What do you need into the future, and how can we be part of that?

Ruby and Jessica: First of all, thank you.

Jessica: Thank you so much. We love you. Thank you for asking. It’s been kind of a blur for the last couple of days. Ruby and I got out of jail yesterday morning on pre-trial release. We’re scrambling now to do a couple of things before . . . who knows? The feds could come knocking at our door at any moment.

One thing is to get a website set up where we can have postings such as joint statements that Ruby and I release, and also future hearings, court dates, solidarity actions, and support network information.

We’re representing ourselves, but do have a fantastic federal attorney, Bill Quigley, out of Loyola Law School down in New Orleans, as a stand-by counsel. He’s a great guy and available, but we’d really like to find someone here in the Midwest who would be more accessible and willing to at least assist us in filing motions or communicating with a prosecutor, and serve as a stand-by counsel here locally in the case that Ruby and I are incarcerated and facing serious charges. It’s really difficult to work from inside the oppressive prison system, so it’d be valuable to have a legal advocate here locally that we can work with.

Ruby: Yeah, just the offer of support is amazing. Thank you for doing what you’re doing. I’m sure I’ll have a request or two once I’m inside. As Jessica said, if you know anyone for defense in Iowa, that would be really helpful. We’re having a hard time trying to find a lawyer in Iowa, I think because this stuff doesn’t go on in Iowa.

Max: I don’t know anyone off the top of my head, but we do have some friends in the legal community, activist lawyers, who we can talk to. We’ll definitely be in touch with you two.

Oftentimes speaking out can be dangerous. They try to discourage people from building solidarity and speaking about what they did. They want to keep people isolated in the legal system and afraid. Why did you feel called to speak out about what you did, even to the point of saying that you hope other people consider these kinds of similar actions as a way to effectively defend the planet?

Ruby: Because really we’ve tried everything, hot dog under the sun, man. I’ve exhausted my creative possibilities. The No DAPL campaign fragmented pretty quickly, and we lost focus on stopping the pipeline. We were called by The Intercept about two weeks ago for interviews, so I had hope that the No DAPL issues could stay alive in the media. But The Intercept focused instead on the illegal surveillance of activists.

So after we got off the phone, we talked together, and it was like, “Fuck it, man, let’s claim it.” Because we didn’t stop the pipeline. We both feel personally responsible for that, and this is the last thing we can do. And you know what? People need to talk about it.

I remember trying to talk about it with people that I trusted. I’m pretty fresh on the activist scene and security culture, but it felt like I was encountering a fear-based immediate shut-down, do not talk. That sucks because we need to be doing these things. Apparently this is the only way they’re going to actually listen.

We anticipated the repercussions of every action that we took. Although I view these repercussions as unjust, we were fully prepared going into it, in that mental mind game of “I’m driving myself to jail right now.” So we’ve been prepared for jail for several months, and we still feel passionate about this — I still can’t let this go because this is still really flipping important — and we both have the mental fortitude to step forward. Well, let’s step forward then.

People need to have these conversations. It’s important for our own evolution as a people, as a whole, to take a step back, look at what’s going on, look at what we’re doing and whether it’s effective. We want to stop the pipeline, or we want to save the old-growth forests. We have so many battles. So let’s do it. If the methods that we’re using aren’t working, let’s change the methods. Let’s not get stuck in some ego, celebrity, whatever.

Max: Reading your press release, I was struck with, frankly, how easy it seemed to be to pull off some of the actions. I went to an event recently with the Valve Turners, the people who shut down the tar sands pipelines. They talked about how they actually had pretty bad security culture in planning of their action. They didn’t know how to use the encryption technology well. They didn’t do a super-secretive job, and they expected that maybe the cops would be there waiting for them when they showed up to carry out their action.

But the cops weren’t. The action was a total surprise to the authorities. Could you speak to how easy some of this stuff is and how maybe most of the barriers we actually face toward shutting this earth destruction down is more in our minds and our hearts than in actual danger?

Jessica: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. I think we created this whole narrative in our minds that this oppressive state and industry were listening to everything we were doing, following us everywhere we went, and that we would inevitably be caught.

Ruby and I did a sloppy job so much of the time at many points. I mean you hate admitting it, but it’s just the truth. We went to these places with knowledge self-garnered within a matter of weeks and were effectively halting construction for weeks on end just via one fire or one valve piercing.

We built our confidence up each time. Like wow, this is really doable. It’s insulting on some level, but it needs to be cleared up. Ruby and I acted solely alone. Nobody else was involved in any of these actions. I think it’s hard for people to believe ― “How could these two women pull this off so easily?”

It’s a matter of determination. It’s a matter of breaking through your own fears and doubts and perceptions of this undefeatable empire. Really this is doable for lots of people. That’s one of the main reasons we wanted to come out and tell people ― because this is easy stuff to do. If Ruby and I had had a crew that had doubled or tripled or quadrupled our numbers, we really could have stopped this thing, I truly believe at the bottom of my heart, just via actions like we did.

Ruby: I think that narrative that’s in our head that they’re always watching us and blah blah blah, it’s oppression, dude. They come out with the NSA and blah blah blah and their television shows with forensic evidence and this is how they catch a criminal. It’s all crap. It’s all crap. They are incompetent.

Have you ever talked to a cop? They are instructed to just follow orders. They do not know how to think critically. And that continues to worsen.

If you’re acting with integrity and utilizing your own critical intelligence, you can do a lot of good. Recognize that fear as oppression. Liberate yourself!

Max: Inspiring words. Thank you so much.

Jennifer: Yeah, thank you so much. It has been really great to be here with you today.

Ruby: We really appreciate talking to you. It seems that you all have a strong network of solidarity. That is super-hopeful; we need that kind of communal infrastructure. So thank you all.

To Contact Jessica & Ruby’s Legal Support Team:
Attorney Bill Quigley: 1-504-710-3074 AND quigley77@gmail.com

 

Editor’s note: Deep Green Resistance advocates a militant strategy for saving the planet: Decisive Ecological Warfare.  We invite you to read this strategy, and to undertake a long and sober assessment of the situation we face. Time is short.

Note: Though the resistance movement will have different phases and parts, the Deep Green Resistance organization is, will always be, and is committed to only being an aboveground group.