The Amazon is burning. This is what the end of the world looks like. Oh, and there’ll be more forests burned, more forests felled by chainsaws, more wetlands drained, more rivers dammed, more grasslands plowed, oceans further toxified and emptied of fish.
And each of these is what the end of the world looks like.
The end of the world looks like factory trawlers pulling in net after net full to bursting with fish — the fish’s eyes popping out from the pressure of all those bodies squeezed together. It looks like puffins starving to death. It looks like emaciated polar bears. It looks like whales washing up on shore and walruses not finding ice on which to rest.
The end of the world looks like plows digging into grasslands, turning over soil and killing all who live there, even down to bacteria. It looks like rows of monocrops, as far as the eye can see.
The end of the world looks like humans staring at screens, clucking their tongues at the destruction of forests far away, never noticing that they themselves — whether they’re in London, New York, Paris, Rome, Athens, Beirut, Beijing or Baghdad — are standing in clear-cuts.
The end of the world looks like cities, with most of their residents never giving a thought to who and what was killed to build that city, never giving a thought to who and what was killed to mine, manufacture and move everything they consider necessary to their lives, and never thinking about what is necessary to life and what is not.
The end of the world looks like humans turning the planet to human use. Or rather attempting to, because it’s not possible to turn this wild and fecund Earth totally to human use, and this attempting is itself what is causing the end of the world.
From the beginning of this culture, it has been so. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s what it was like, prior to the beginning of this culture. The first written myth of Western civilization is Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to make a great city.
Have you heard of Mesopotamian elephants? Most of us haven’t. They were exterminated to make way for this culture. And when you think of the Arabian Peninsula, do you think of oak savannas? These forests were cut for export to fuel the economy, to build cities.
The Near East was heavily forested. We’ve all heard of the cedars of Lebanon. They still have one on their flag. The great forests of North Africa were felled to make the Phoenician and Egyptian navies. Greece was heavily forested. So was Italy. So was France. The great forests of Britain came down to make the navy that allowed the sun never to set on the British Empire.
This is what this culture does. Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.
The end of the world was not written into human existence. For most of our species’ time on Earth, we’ve lived sustainably. The Tolowa Indians lived where I live now for at least 12,500 years, and when the dominant culture arrived, salmon still ran so thick they turned entire rivers “black and roiling” with their bodies. There was no such thing as “ancient redwood forests.” There was only “home” — a home filled with trees thousands of years old, a home filled with nonhumans in abundance most of us literally cannot conceptualize.
Can you imagine — and this moves us across the continent — flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darken the sky for days at a time, flying 60 miles per hour and sounding like rolling thunder? Can you imagine so many whales that the air looks foggy, just from their breath? Can you imagine fish in such abundance that they slow the passage of ships? Can you imagine entire islands so full of great auks that one European explorer said they could load every ship in France and it would not make a dent? Well, they did, and it did, and the last great auk was killed in the 19th century.
How did the world get to be so full of life in the first place? By each creature making the world richer by living and dying. Salmon make forests stronger by their lives and deaths. Redwood trees do the same. Buffalo make grasslands stronger by their lives and deaths. Wolves do the same. And humans can do the same. But not living the way we do.
The Tolowa were not alone in their sustainability. There have been sustainable cultures the world over. The San of southern Africa, for example, evolved in place. They have lived there, in human terms, forever.
And how have humans lived sustainably in place? Simple. By not destroying the places where they lived, and by not destroying other places either. By improving the habitat on its own terms by their presence. The Tolowa made land-use decisions, just as all other beings on the land do, and just as we make land-use decisions. But the Tolowa made these land-use decisions on the assumption they would be living in a place for the next 500 years. That assumption changes everything about how you make decisions and how you live. It is the difference between life and death, between sustainability and the end of the world.
The end of the world was not written into human existence. It was, however, written into the story of Gilgamesh. The end of the world is written into this way of life of converting the Earth solely to human use. It was written into existence with the plow, and with the cities the plow makes possible.
The logic is simple and inescapable. If you convert the land that previously grew bushes and trees that fed elephants into wheat that feeds humans, you can grow more humans per hectare. Many of these humans can become a standing army. And you can use those trees you cut down to build ships of war. You now have a competitive military advantage over those who live sustainably, over those who do not destroy their land base. Further, because you’ve degraded your own land base, you must expand into other land bases. But fortunately for you, you’ve got a standing military.
This is the last 6,000 years of history. This is the story of the end of the world.
More than 90% of forests on the planet have been destroyed. The same is true for wetlands, grasslands, seagrass beds, large schools of fish, wildlife populations in general.
This culture is killing the planet. It doesn’t have to be this way. Not every culture has lived this way. Not every culture has killed the planet.
Recently, more and more people are talking about the possibility of human extinction. That possibility has entered our consciousness enough that, in December 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed asking whether it would be better for the Earth if humans went extinct.
As the Amazon burns, here’s the thing that haunts me. How is it that this culture can contemplate the end of the Amazon rainforest, contemplate the end of elephants, great apes, insects, fish in the oceans? How is it that it can blithely destroy life on Earth? How is it that it can with not much horror contemplate human extinction, but cannot contemplate stopping this way of life?
If aliens came from outer space and did to Earth what this culture is doing — change the climate; burn the Amazon; deforest the planet; vacuum the oceans and put dioxin in every mother’s breastmilk; and bathe the world in plastics, endocrine disrupters and neurotoxin — we would know exactly what to do. We would resist. We would fight as though our lives depend on it. We would destroy the aliens’ infrastructure that allows them to wage war on the planet that is our only home.
Or, put another way, if the Amazon could take on human manifestation, what would it do? If salmon could take on human manifestation, how long would dams stand? If humans from the future could come to our time, how would they act?
As the writer Lierre Keith often says, “If there are any humans left 100 years from now, they are going to ask what the fuck was wrong with us that we didn’t fight like hell when the world was going down.”
Many of us who know history might have fantasies of how we would have acted were we alive under German occupation in World War II or under British colonial rule. Right now, we are facing the end of the world. We have the opportunity and the honor to protect the planet that gave us our lives.
The time is now. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Life on this planet needs you.
Skies in North America are falling silent. No, airplanes haven’t been grounded yet, unfortunately. It’s the birds who are missing. Since 1970 bird populations in the United States and Canada have collapsed by 29% (that’s 2.9 billion fewer birds), according to a recent report published in the journal Science. David Yarnold, president and chief executive of the National Audobon Society has declared a “full-blown crisis.” The results surveyed over 500 species and revealed that even historically abundant birds like robins and sparrows have begun to disappear at an alarming rate.
Healthy bird populations are critical. Without them, ecosystems become unbalanced, pollination rates diminish, seeds are not spread effectively, and forests become unhealthy. Although the public has focused on a few saving a few icononic species, like bald eagles and spotted owls, less popular species like sparrows can actually have a bigger impact; their disappearance may cause a cascade of devastating ecological failures. What’s staggering about this research is that it revealed that almost all bird populations, across the board, are plummeting at an alarming rate. Even starlings, an invasive species which are historically abundant and reproduce rapidly, have experienced a 49% decline.
These losses are not limited to North America. Europe is witnessing similar declines and, like in America, grasslands are worst hit. Modern agricultural practices and human development are the leading causes of plummeting populations, with neonicontinoid pesticides causing particular harm. In 1962 Rachel Carson predicted many of these outcomes in her book Silent Spring. When you step back and look at the situation, it’s obvious what’s really killing these birds: human overconsumption. The only way to save these birds, and the ecosystems which rely on them, is to protect their remaining habitats, stop the use of toxic chemicals, and reduce the footprint of humanity on the world.
In 1997, forest fires in Indonesia grew so large that they accounted for 40% of global emissions during that period. The Borneo rainforest is the most ancient in the world, having taken 120 million years to evolve into its current state of rich diversity. Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropic peat bogs, deep and vast stockpiles of carbon which have formed over millennia. When these peat bogs ignite they are almost impossible to extinguish because they burn deeply into the Earth and smoulder for weeks or even months, and they can also release millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere very suddenly. Although seasonal fires are common in the Borneo, climate collapse has made the rainforest more susceptible, and the magnitude of this year’s fires are already unfathomable.
Many of the fires we’re seeing right now are caused by exploitative agriculturalists who are burning the rainforest to open land up for human crops and livestock. In doing so, they are destroying 120 million years of evolution and rapidly annihilating one of the Earth’s most diverse and ancient living ecosystems. Although Indonesia claims to be doing “everything in their power” to extinguish the fires, they are not doing nearly enough to prevent them from happening in the first place. Only about 200 suspects have been arrested in relation to the arsons, and it is likely that many of them will be released without charges or consequences. It is understandable that individual farmers may be tempted by the prospect of opening more land for profitable exploitation, but the act of burning such an ancient ecosystem is among the worst crimes a human can commit; it not only endangers the rest of the planet’s climate, it destroys one of the most ancient living systems on this planet.
Most of the fires were started by palm oil plantations, which are often owned by large corporations. Officials estimate that about 80% of the fires were set intentionally and they now number in the thousands, with 2,900 especially bad hot spots. In all, only about two dozen palm oil plantations have been temporarily shut down in connection to arsons, they are primarily owned by Malaysian and Singaporean companies. These companies are unlikely to face significant charges or repercussions, and will likely return to increasingly profitable business after paying fines.
Forest ranger Bienvinido “Toto” Veguilla, Jr. was murdered last week while attempting to stop illegal loggers from ransacking a section of forest in the Philippines. Veguilla was on a routine patrol in the Sitio Kinawagan, Barangay Pasadeña region when he and fellow rangers discovered a group of illegal loggers using a chainsaw and other equipment to destroy the ecosystem for profit. After confiscating their equipment Veguilla and his team departed for their station, but were followed by the illegal loggers and eventually attacked. Unfortunately, Veguilla was unable to escape and was hacked to death by approximately six men.
Veguilla’s murder is a great loss to conservation efforts in the Philippines; he was known as one of the most diligent, hardworking, and courageous members of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). He is not the first ranger to be murdered — in 2017, captain Ruben Arzaga was also murdered by illegal loggers in retaliation for his conservation efforts.
These brave individuals and their colleagues risk their lives on a daily basis to protect Earth’s dwindling ecosystems against destruction, often facing death threats and severe retaliation. Sometimes it is easy for environmental activists in priveleged countries to lose sight of the brutal realities facing their comrades in other parts of the world. Next time you hear someone moralizing about the virtues or necessity of pacifism, remember that those notions are an extreme luxury and that the individuals who preach those sermons are generally far removed from risking life or limb.
Featured Image: thousands of acres of Pinyon-Juniper forest bulldozed by the BLM in Nevada / by Max Wilbert / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. This video is an interview between him and Deep Green Resistance co-founder and author Derrick Jensen. They discuss Ketcham’s new book “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West.” It’s the product of ten years of research and travel across the public lands of the West.
On Ketcham’s website, he describes the cover of his book as follows:
As for the image under that vast Western sky of egg-shell blue, well it’s a bulldozer that pulls a naval anchor chain across a stretch of pinyon-juniper forest in Utah, tearing out the roots of the trees, laying waste to the ecosystem…so that money can be made for a privileged few who wear cowboy hats. One of the many examples of “land management” as practiced by the federal government. Multiply this scene by hundreds of millions of acres, imagine the various forms of “management” for the profit of the few, and you might get a sense of the scope of the ecological tragedy unfolding. This land is your land…or perhaps we should amend that to “was.” And the crazy part of it is that green groups who purport to be “environmentalists” are in fact abetting the destruction. Read my book to understand what’s really going on.
“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.” —Derrick Jensen
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Deep Green Resistance is a radical environmental movement, dedicated to shifting activists towards strategies that have a real chance to stop the murder of the planet. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the land around us; we fight for the salmon, the pine trees, and the songbirds, not the solar panels and space shuttles so many ‘environmentalists’ have fallen in love with. We in DGR don’t want a more sustainable nightmare. We want a living world.
Deep Green Resistance recognizes that industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet – and when our way of living conflicts with the needs of the land, our way of living must go. This transition to a healthy and just relationship with the natural world is a massive undertaking, one that won’t be achieved with individual lifestyle changes and a green coat of paint on the latest mountain-killing mining rig. Real change will take a revolutionary heart. Anything less is a recipe for failure.
Deep Green Resistance has a roadmap for that revolution. We call it Decisive Ecological Warfare. We’ve studied the most successful movements in history, from the Irish Republicans to Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, and applied the lessons they can teach us to the fight for Earth liberation. Our goal as aboveground activists is to promote this strategic resistance, with the goal of triggering cascading systems failure within industrial infrastructure. In this mission, we are guided by a strict code of conduct, a steering committee of seasoned revolutionaries, and, most of all, an unwavering dedication to the land on which we live.
HOW CAN I HELP?
In the midst of all this destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But there’s one nice thing about living in such dark times – anywhere you look, there’s great work to be done. Deep Green Resistance isn’t afraid to make the connections between open-pit mining and police brutality, between rape and deforestation, between acidified oceans and settler colonialism. We are proud anti-capitalists, anti-racists, and radical feminists, with members working on everything from pornography and prostitution to indigenous land rights and prison reform.
Whether on the front lines or behind the scenes, there is room for you in this war. So get in touch! We have members across the globe and resources in multiple languages. Head to our website, check our Facebook, or send us an email and introduce yourself. We’ll help you learn more about DGR, find opportunities for volunteering, and apply for greater involvement. You’ll also be able to download a free ebook copy of the Deep Green Resistance book.
DGR is working to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. In order to succeed, we’ll need teachers, healers, warriors, and workers. If you’re tired of the false solutions and the feel-good failures, Deep Green Resistance is for you, whatever your skills. In a fight like this, we need it all.
Remember: Deep Green Resistance is an aboveground organization, meaning we don’t engage in violence or property destruction. If you feel your talents would best be put to use in more militant actions, please do not contact us. This will keep you safer, and help us be more effective. We will not answer any questions related to any underground that may or may not exist.
“Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. But the fire is merely a symptom of deeper problems, not root cause. Therefore, simply putting out the fires does not solve the problem. To protect the Amazon rainforest, we need a deeper understanding of threats to it. For this, we turn to the indigenous people, the guardians of the Amazon, to learn from them.
The Kayapo Nation
The Kayapo (or Xingu) are an indigenous nation in the northwestern Amazon rainforest, who live on roughly 27 million acres of rainforest and savannah territory claimed by Brazil and currently subject to the rule of American ally and genocidal fascist Jair Bolsonaro.
The Kayapo, who are split into many different groups, live a largely traditional lifestyle, hunting and gathering and practicing small-scale agriculture. They use at least 900 species of plants as food an medicine. They live in small villages which are periodically abandoned to return to forest. Beauty is highly valued in the Kayapo culture, as is oratory. Each tribe has different colors, and leaders often wear a headdress made from the birds of native feathers.
The Kayapo are threatened by mining, logging, and hydroelectric dams which are rapidly destroying their way of life. This conflict has simmered for decades as a clandestine war, with farmers, loggers, miners, and ranchers murdering Kayapo people and the Kayapo protesting, lobbying, and violently fighting back in self-defense of their forests, rivers, and people.
The Altamira Conference
In 1987, the Brazilian government announced plans to dam the Xingu River, the largest tributary of the Amazon. As Survival International explains, this project was “a central part of Brazil’s Accelerated Growth Programme, which aims to stimulate the country’s economic growth by building a huge infrastructure of roads and dams, mainly in the Amazon region.”
In response, 26 indigenous nations led by the Kayapo organized the Altamira Conference in 1989, in what was then the small frontier town of Altamira.
“Some of the tribes present at the meeting had not encountered each other previously while others were traditional enemies,” wrote observer Jeff Gibbs. “Each tribe could be identified by their unique body paint and beads, distinct feathered headdresses, particular chants and songs, and even their weapons of choice (ironwood clubs, machetes, bows and arrows). Some arrived in small chartered bush planes from far-flung dirt airstrips while others had traveled by river in canoes for days or weeks.”
Representatives from government, industry, and indigenous nations spoke in front of the crowd. Engineer José Antônio Muniz Lópes (later president of Eletronorte, the state power company in charge of the dam) addressed the room, arguing in favor of the dam and the “benefits” it would bring—jobs, electricity, civilization.
As he finished speaking, a woman named Tuira Kayapó rose to her feet, brandishing a machete. Kayapo women are powerful and direct, and do not defer to men. As Gibbs writes, “The tension in the room was immense as Brazilian military officers with automatic weapons watched on, along with arrow-clad indigenous body guards charged with protecting their people.”
Kayapó walked towards Lópes, and running the blade of her machete three times over his cheeks, then slapped him with the flat of the blade. She proclaimed his act on her people and on the entire Amazon as an act of war. She then stated in Kayapo:
“You are a liar – We do not need electricity. Electricity is not going to give us our food. We need our rivers to flow freely: our future depends on it. We need our jungles for hunting and gathering. We do not need your dam.”
Another chief brought his daughter with him. Embracing her, he said “What I am saying is not for me – it is for her, and for my grandchildren. We want the waters of the Xingu to be clean, and full of fish.”
After the Altamira Conference, the World Bank cancelled a $500 million loan and the Xingu Dam proposal was shelved.
The Undead Wetiko Returns
However, capitalist and colonial forces of civilization wouldn’t be thwarted that easily. In 2011, permits were again granted and construction began shortly thereafter on the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, over the protests of the Kayapo and countless others.
The Belo Monte project, which is the fourth largest dam in the world, is largely completed now. The dam has been built, flooding some 6500 km² of rainforest and destroying more forest with roads, building construction, worker housing, transmission lines, supply dumps, and more.
The result is devastation. Hundreds are species are now committed to extinction as a result of this dam. Greenhouse gas emissions from the dam and the reservoir are estimated to be at least 110 million metric tons. Twenty thousand indigenous people are now refugees from the land their ancestors have lived on for a thousand generations.
It is expected this project is bringing 100,000 migrants to this area, triggering a wave of “development” that will utterly destroy the intact rainforest that remains.
Civilization’s War Against the Planet
The electricity from the Belo Monte Dam will be largely used to power aluminum smelting, an extremely energy intensive industry in which one smelter can use as much energy as a small city. Aluminum production is dependent on bauxite mining, which is it’s own atrocity.
Across the Amazon, we see the same story. Iron ore and gold mining. Logging. Grain and soy agriculture. Factory farming. Industrial production. Pollution, destruction, despoiling. The greatest rainforest in the world is being murdered before our eyes.
The Belo Monte Dam is one battle in civilization’s war on the planet. The dominant culture is murdering all life for economic profit. It is a death cult perpetuating a murder-suicide of the entire world.
In his book Columbus and Other Cannibals, the Powhatan-Renapé and Delaware-Lenápe writer, scholar, and activist Jack D. Forbes expanded on the ancient idea of the wétiko.
Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters simply “greedy” men whose “ethics”were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live). The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.
The wétiko disease is a defining characteristic of modern civilized culture.
It is long past time that we gave up our illusions and understood reality. We are living in a time of war. To stand on the sidelines is to remain complicit. Once we know the truth of this war, it’s our responsibility to fight back on behalf of the living world and sanity.
The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is thousands of miles away. But the system that makes that destruction possible is global, and it is vulnerable. We must work to expose these vulnerabilities and call all warriors to arms in defense of the planet. It is time to fight and dismantle the economy of destruction by any means necessary.
