The-Solution:-Resistance

Editor’s note: Civilizations are defined by the growth of cities, vast acreages of agriculture, and hierarchical social systems—and after creating short term surpluses of energy and wealth at the expense of sustainability, they inevitably collapse. Today, we live in the first global civilization. The harnessing of fossil fuels has brought unimaginable power, but also terrible destructiveness. No technological innovation or social organization will be a simple silver bullet to solve these issues. Nevertheless, people around the world continue to experiment with alternative social arrangements. One is permaculture, which is often reduced to “gardening” but is actually a systems-thinking approach for deliberately designing human settlements, societies, and subsistence economies for sustainability and justice. In this era, systems-thinking around sustainability inevitably includes strategy and action to defend the planet, in addition to building alternative ways of living. In this piece, Jennifer Murnan argues that permaculture practitioners, who often becomes insular “lifeboaters” or “survivalists,” should link their work to political resistance movements working to dismantle industrial civilization before it’s too late. ...

By Max Wilbert We are living in an ecological catastrophe. Our world is being killed before our eyes. This hurts. And so for many people, their response is either apathy, complete emotional shutdown, or a nihilistic embrace of powerlessness. There is another option. While our power to change the course of ecological collapse is indeed limited, limited is different from non-existent. The truth is, we do have power. And we can change the world. No, our power is not limitless. No, the world will not change easily. And no, we cannot fix everything. Some things are broken beyond fixing. But these difficulties do not absolve us of responsibility. ...

Politics isn’t a dirty word. It simply means “how we make decisions about the direction of our society.” This process has become mired in corruption. Making political change (and therefore economic and social change) requires that we get organized. Countless activists through history remind us to " Organize, organize, organize," to " Join an organization." In response to the question “what can one person do?” they answer: “don’t just be one person.” ...

Florence Nightingale, the English pioneer of modern nursing is quoted as saying, “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.” Editors note: Never give up your agency. If your goal is to save life on the planet, sometimes you have to sink your own boat. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW7J2Ii1uxU&t=8s[/embed] Derrick Jensen This is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Diane Wilson. She’s a mother of five, a fourth generation shrimp boat captain and an environmental activist. She’s been fighting to save the bays on the Texas gulf coast from chemical and oil development for the last 30 years. I also have to say that you have for at least 15-18 years been one of my heroes so thank you for that. ...

This story was first published in Learning Earthways. By George R Price. [Part 1 of this essay can be found here.] The points in time at which various ancient human societies began to go the wrong way (whether by force from outsiders, or by bad decisions made from within) are numerous and span thousands of years, but, thankfully for our future, some few remotely-situated Indigenous societies around the world never departed from those basic, ancient ways of seeing and living with the natural world and still have enough of their ancestral homelands not yet confiscated or destroyed by colonialist predators to make that continuance possible. The Kogi people of the northern Andes mountains in Colombia are a prime and now well-known example, [20] as are some of the more remote tribes to the south and east of them in the Amazon rainforest. Other relatively intact traditional indigenous societies exist in remote locations in central Africa, the Pacific islands, northern and southeastern Asia, and a few other remote locations in the Americas and elsewhere. [21] It is by learning from people such as these, and from all of our relations in the non-human world as well, that we might be able to find our way back to truly green, sustainable and regenerative ways of life. There are also many more Indigenous peoples throughout the world who have just a little or none of their ancestral homelands still accessible to them, retain only pieces of their traditional cultural values and practices, and have just a small number of tribal members who are still fluent in their ancestral languages. Colonialism, capitalism, cultural oppression, and intercultural relations have brought many changes to them, but, even so, for people whose encounter with wrong ways of living is more recent than most of the rest of humanity, the way back to truly green eco-harmony might be a little easier. [22] Unless a community consciously agrees to put the needs of their entire local ecosystem and all lives within it first, above what they conceive to be human needs, their community will someday fail and collapse. ...

This story was first published in Learning Earthways. By George R. Price The oral traditions and origin stories of many Indigenous peoples, worldwide, include some stories of the endings of previous worlds. In such stories, the end of one world usually coincides with the beginning of a new world. Typically, the end of one world is the end of a grave error, the end of a world gone wrong. The life-endangering wrong way had to end for life to continue anew. [1] To have a fresh start, venturing into many unknowns, might be somewhat scary, but it is really a wonderful gift. ...

This story first appeared in Mongabay. Editor’s note: This is what environmental justice looks like. Not NGOs dictating what lands will be set aside for 30x30, which is just greenwashing colonialism. It is the people whose land it is making those decisions and the governments enforcing them. By Maxwell Radwin An Indigenous community in southwest Colombia established a protected reserve in the face of illegal logging, mining and coca cultivation being carried out by criminal groups. The Eperãra Siapidaarã peoples are especially interested in protecting the extremely poisonous golden dart frog, which they historically used in their darts while hunting. Despite establishing the reserve, the community has more work to do to fend off violent non-state armed groups. One of the most poisonous animals on earth, the golden dart frog carries enough toxins in its body to kill 10 people. If it enters the blood stream, the toxin paralyzes the nervous system and, in only a few minutes, stops the heart from beating. ...

This story first appeared in Mongabay. Editor’s note: THE FIRST LARGE SCALE NATURE CONSERVATION AGREEMENT (NCA) IN THE WORLD. You should be afraid, very afraid. (NCA) is a different acronym for (NGO). It is the new colonialism, green , clean and renewable. The market will not solve climate change or loss of biodiversity. The market can only cause those problems. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. Free and Informed Prior Consent and may I add control by keeping corporations out. Abolish all corporations and their money. ...

This story was originally published by the Indigenous Environmental Network. The Indigenous Environmental Network condemns the actions of Canada as it inflicts settler violence against the Wet’suwet’en peoples, hypocritically breaking both Wet’suwet’en and Canadian law to push TC Energy’s illegal Coastal Gaslink pipeline through unceded territories. By entering sovereign Wet’suwet’en territory with RCMP, dogs and assault rifles we are witnessing state-sanctioned violence on behalf of an Oil company, and such barbarous acts of violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples cannot be defended. These attacks by RCMP are nothing less than Human Rights violations as defined by the United Nations, and acts of extreme detriment to the inherent sovereignty of the Wet’suwet’en. The Wet’suwet’en have asserted self-governance over their territories since time immemorial, and it is their inherent right to defend their lands, resources and bodies from foreign aggressors. They have signed no treaties nor have they relinquished title to their lands. They are not part of so-called Canada and have not consented to bearing the burden of the world’s dependence on an extractive industry such as oil. ...

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy , a project of the Independent Media Institute. By Koohan Paik-Mander The U.S. military is famous for being the single largest consumer of petroleum products in the world and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Its carbon emissions exceed those released by “more than 100 countries combined.” Now, with the Biden administration’s mandate to slash carbon emissions “at least in half by the end of the decade,” the Pentagon has committed to using all-electric vehicles and transitioning to biofuels for all its trucks, ships and aircraft. But is only addressing emissions enough to mitigate the current climate crisis? ...