by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 28, 2013 | Agriculture, Lobbying, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Connor Adams Sheets / International Business Times
Anger is growing against President Barack Obama the day after he signed into law a spending bill that included a provision opponents have dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act.”
That bill, the HR 933 continuing resolution, was mainly aimed at averting a government shutdown and ensuring that the federal government would continue to be able to pay its bills for the next six months.
But food and public safety advocates and independent farmers are furious that Obama signed it despite its inclusion of language that they consider to be a gift to Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON) and other firms that produce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds and crops.
And protesters have spent the past couple of days demonstrating in front of the White House, first calling on Obama to veto the bill, and now criticizing him for his failure to do so.
The protests come on the heels of a massive petition campaign organized by the advocacy group Food Democracy Now, which gathered the signatures of more than 200,000 people who wanted Obama to veto HR 933 in order to stop Section 735 — the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act” — from being codified into law.
But Obama ignored it, instead choosing to sign a bill that effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future.
“This provision is simply an industry ploy to continue to sell genetically engineered seeds even when a court of law has found they were approved by USDA illegally,” the petition stated. “It is unnecessary and an unprecedented attack on U.S. judicial review. Congress should not be meddling with the judicial review process based solely on the special interest of a handful of companies.”
Many food safety advocates maintain that there have not been enough studies into the potential health risks of GMO and GE seeds and crops, and the judicial power to stop companies from selling or planting them was one key recourse they were relying on to stop them from being sold if health risks come to light.
But the “Monsanto Protection Act” — referred to as the “Farmer Assurance Provision” by its supporters — removes that course of action, and those who are angry at Obama for signing the bill are also incensed with Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D- Md., who is accused of failing to give the amendment that inserted the language a proper hearing.
“In this hidden backroom deal, Sen. Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto,” Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, said in a statement. “This abuse of power is not the kind of leadership the public has come to expect from Sen. Mikulski or the Democrat Majority in the Senate.”
A number of the provision’s vocal opponents allege that it was quietly inserted while the bill was still in the Senate Appropriations Committee, which Mikulski chairs, and that her committee did not hold any hearings on its language. They say many Democratic members who voted for the bill were unaware.
From International Business Times: http://www.ibtimes.com/furor-growing-against-obama-over-monsanto-protection-act-1156459
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 21, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, NEWS
By Root Force
A series of recently released studies make it clear that wind power is not going to save us—not from global warming, not from high extinction rates, and not from the system of high-energy-consumption industrial exploitation that is killing the planet.
Let’s start with the most damning findings: even the most large-scale shift to wind power cannot slow greenhouse gas emissions enough to have any positive effect on the climate, although it may manage to make things worse. Why?
A study published in Nature Climate Change in September found that although hypothetically there is enough power in the earth’s winds to sustain current levels of energy consumption, in practice you could never harvest enough energy from wind to affect the climate:
Turbines create drag, or resistance, which removes momentum from the winds and tends to slow them. As the number of wind turbines increases, the amount of energy that is generated increases. But at some point, the winds would be slowed so much that adding more turbines will not generate more electricity. …
[T]he study found that the climate effects of extracting wind energy at the level of current global demand would be small, as long as the turbines were spread out and not clustered in just a few regions. At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit and affect precipitation by about 1 percent. Overall, the environmental impacts would not be substantial. (emphasis added)
Another study, published in Nature last month, found that wind farms being constructed in Scotland actually lead to a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions:
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.
But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.
British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.
Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. …
Richard Lindsay of the University of East London, said … “The world’s peatlands have four times the amount of carbon than all the world’s rainforests. But they are a Cinderella habitat, completely invisible to decision- makers.”
Finally, a study published last month in the journal Environmental Research Letters conducted a further analysis on the effects of wind turbine drag:
Each wind turbine creates behind it a “wind shadow” in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine’s blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith’s research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines’ slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
“If wind power’s going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that’s serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less,” says Keith.
If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, “the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severe — perhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2.” (emphasis added)
As if that weren’t enough, another study has just concluded that large wind turbines constructed offshore may snap like matches when hit by medium-size waves:
“If we do not take ringing into consideration, offshore wind turbine parks can lead to financial ruin,” warns John Grue to the research magazine Apollon at University of Oslo. …
Ringing does not just harm wind turbines. Ringing has already been a great problem for the oil industry. The designers of the YME platform did not take ringing into account, and lost NOK 12 billion.
“It is possible to build your way out of the ringing problem by strengthening the oil rigs. However, it is not financially profitable to do the same with wind turbines,” says John Grue.
And finally, let’s not forget what environmentalists have been warning about for decades: wind turbines murder birds.
ReWire has learned that the North Sky River Wind project, which attracted fierce opposition from environmental groups concerned about potential threat to eagles and California condors, was the site of a golden eagle death in January. …
The eagle kill apparently occurred on January 29, just a month after North Sky River started generating power.
So what’s the solution? Certainly not wind, solar, or any other industrial magic bullet. The solution is to dramatically scale back consumption and shift to local-based economies not dependent upon stealing resources from distant people and lands.
The solution is to demolish the global economic system.
Get started!
Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 17, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Survival International
Amazon Indians from Peru and Brazil have joined together to stop a Canadian oil company destroying their land and threatening the lives of uncontacted tribes.
Hundreds of Matsés Indians gathered on the border of Peru and Brazil last Saturday and called on their governments to stop the exploration, warning that the work will devastate their forest home.
The oil giant Pacific Rubiales is headquartered in Canada and has already started oil exploration in ‘Block 135’ in Peru, which lies directly over an area proposed as an uncontacted tribes reserve.
In a rare interview with Survival, a Matsés woman said, ‘Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born. What will happen to the fish? What will the animals drink?’
The Matsés number around 2,200 and live along the Peru-Brazil border. Together with the closely-related Matis tribe, they were known as the ‘Jaguar people’ for their facial decorations and tattoos, which resembled the jaguar’s whiskers and teeth.
The Matsés were first contacted in the 1960s, and have since suffered from diseases introduced by outsiders. Uncontacted tribes are also at extreme risk from contact with outsiders through the introduction of diseases to which they have little or no immunity.
Despite promising to protect the rights of its indigenous citizens, the Peruvian government has allowed the $36 million project to go ahead. Contractors will cut hundreds of miles of seismic testing lines through the forest home of the uncontacted tribes, and drill exploratory wells.
The government has also granted a license for oil explorations to go ahead in ‘Block 137’, just north of ‘Block 135’, which lies directly on Matsés land. Despite massive pressure from the company, the tribe is firmly resisting the oil company’s activities in their forest.
The effects of oil work are also likely to be felt across the border in Brazil’s Javari Valley, home to several other uncontacted tribes, as seismic testing and the construction of wells threaten to pollute the headwaters of several rivers on which the tribes depend.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said, ‘The Canadian state was founded on the theft of tribal land. When Europeans invaded Canada, they introduced alien diseases, seized control of natural resources, and brought about the extinction of entire peoples. It’s a great irony that a Canadian company today is poised to commit the same crimes against tribes in Peru. Why doesn’t the Peruvian government uphold its own commitments to tribal rights? History tells us that when uncontacted peoples’ land is invaded, death, disease and destruction follow.’
From Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/9023
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 14, 2013 | Agriculture, Strategy & Analysis
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
I’m writing this at 68 miles per hour in the left lane of I-5. The freeway is 8 lanes wide here, a laceration running north and south for 1500 miles. It is a major corridor of human trafficking.
A river of oil, a friend calls it. A river of blood, too.
A checkerboard of clearcuts scars the face of the mountains to the east. Silt turns the river brown as it runs beneath the road. Agricultural land comes in waves, green or brown fields flashing past. I wonder how many see them for what they are: biotic cleansing.
But no, most people see a natural system.
Mt. Vernon passes in a blur. The town is home to a massive drug problem, a conservative electorate, and a large population of poor migrant farmworkers. Not so different from many of the other small towns on the route.
Then, suddenly, Seattle appears—a glittering inflammation on the land, arteries connecting the city to resources around the world, pipelines and trucks and barges and tankers bringing fuel and food and consumer goods.
The police department is—once again—under federal investigation for racial profiling. The poor (mostly brown) people of the city are withering under a devastating flurry of foreclosures, layoffs, and gentrification.
This city is home to a flourishing biotechnology industry, massive weapons manufacturers, an imperialistic coffee corporation, and an online bookstore that is destroying local businesses in an ever-accelerating downwards spiral.
Some of the richest people on the planet live here. Meanwhile, as I walk into the local grocery store, I pass a homeless indigenous man who went to war in Vietnam, was ordered to kill other poor brown people, and lost everything to the nightmares that now come every night. He says hello and smiles, just like always, and I walk on with a heavy heart, feeling I am not doing enough.
This culture is sick in brain and body. We all recognize this at some level. The reality of this civilization is red in tooth and claw—or perhaps more accurately, red in bulldozer and stock option.
The archaic notion of morality is long gone in today’s digital world. In fact, it’s not gone, it’s something much worse: ironic. Post modernism has spread insidiously to every nook and cranny of the culture, and in that twisted and depressed world view, oppression is inevitable and resistance is futile. The inevitable conclusion: “why don’t we just party?”
And people wonder why this ideology has risen to the fore! Hmm… let’s think. Maybe because it beautifully serves those in power?
Profit is the highest god of the land. Patriarchy, white supremacy, human supremacy, capitalism: these are a few of the overlapping systems of power in place across this planet that are impoverishing people, killing people, killing the land, and squeezing profits out of the last spindly forests, the last desiccated soils.
A few—a bare handful really—choose to fight back.
For me, the journey to revolution—to fighting back—began early. I read The Communist Manifesto in the 6th grade – those first lines were imprinted in my brain: “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” To my young mind, the teachers were the bourgeoisie – content in their comfortable salaried jobs, while we students slaved away under a system of forced industrial schooling. It was a joke, albeit a serious one, among my friends and I, but soon enough I would be able to apply the model to more brutal systems of power – white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and civilization.
We all owe Marx a debt – he was the first to articulate the model of class struggle, and since then political classes have been and remain the basis of radical organizing. Don’t get me wrong: Marx had many failings, extreme racism not the least among them. I am not a communist. That has shown itself to be the path to another industrial nightmare.
I organize now with a movement called Deep Green Resistance, or DGR. Our movement is made up of an international network of activists and community organizers with a radical political vision. The DGR analysis is different from anything that I had heard previously.
We go deeper than I used to think possible – 10,000 years deep, to the end of that shadowed time called pre-history and the fragmentary beginnings of history. The end of the Paleolithic era; the beginnings of the Neolithic.
At this time, several communities around the world began to cultivate annual monocrops in a process known as agriculture.
Maybe you are thinking that agriculture has little to do with social and environmental issues. I would have thought the same, years ago. But now I know better.
10,000 years of evidence paints a bleak picture of agriculture. When they begin to cultivate fields, the archeological record shows that human skeletons shrink in stature and health. The pollen records, trapped in lakes and bogs, show that forests began to fall en masse around 8,000 years ago, as agriculture spread. Wetlands and grasslands show the same decline; they have never recovered.
Agriculture requires land clearance. Annual plants require bare soil, and that bare soil was created by unnatural disasters. Understand: agriculture is when you take a piece of land—a forest, wetland, or grassland—you clear every living thing off it, and you plant it to human use.
That energy is no longer being shared. Instead of sustaining biodiversity, you are now sustaining an artificially high human population.
When we say agriculture is theft, we are not joking.
Anthropologists and archeologists also explain to us that agriculture marked the beginning of dense population centers – cities – that became the first nation-states as these early cities devastated the lands and soils around them and began imperialist conquests further and further afield.
Make no mistake: civilization is not just characterized by aggressive resource wars, it is defined by them.
The history of civilization is the history of conquest. The first standing armies were created by the first civilizations; their progress around the world is written indelibly on the land, a patchwork of gullies and deserts, the ghosts of forests, and desertified soils.
Clearing forests, plowing fields, and harvesting grain is not easy work; thus, these early agricultural societies were characterized by slavery. Indeed, until the mid-1800’s (when fossil fuels burst onto the scene) fully 3/4ths of all the people on the planet lived in some form of slavery or indentured servitude: this is the future of agricultural societies, once the fossil fuels run out.
From the beginning, this social structure we call civilization has been defined by hierarchy, slavery, imperialism, and relentless destruction of the land. This cannot last. It is not sustainable nor is it just.
For these reasons, DGR advocates for the dismantling of industrialism and abandonment of civilization as a way of life.
The genesis of the DGR movement was a strategy based in this knowledge: that the culture of civilization is killing the planet, and that time is short. The system must be seriously challenged before it is too late. Part of the work we do in DGR involves preparing for the eventual collapse of civilization. The rest hinges on, to quote Andrea Dworkin, ‘organized political resistance.’
We recognize that mainstream politics is largely a distraction. The votes are tallied, the lobbyists scurry about their work, and Earth is consumed by global capitalism.
In the face of a global system such as this, we feel that many of our options for resistance have been foreclosed. But regardless of the ideological and political strength of industrial civilization, its physical infrastructure is fragile. This system (or global capitalism) rests on a brittle foundation of fossil fuel pipelines, refineries, mining sites, international trade, communications cables, and other similar infrastructure.
This centralization makes the system strong, but also vulnerable.
Let us not mince words: we call for militant, organized underground action to bring down the global industrial economy. Simply put, we need to stop this death economy before it completely destroys the planet. The pipelines need to be disabled, the power stations need to be dismantled, the mining sites need to be put out of commission. Global capitalism needs to be brought to a screeching halt.
The ticking of stocks is the death knell of planet Earth, and our response is that revolutionary refrain: by any means necessary.
As a group that operates within the boundaries of state repression, we do not engage in underground action ourselves. We limit our work to non-violent civil disobedience – an elegant political tactic that has been used for many decades with great success. If we had the numbers and the commitment, this system could be brought down through non-violence alone. But the numbers simply aren’t there. If anyone can make them appear, I will be forever grateful. But for now, I see no other option—we must fight back.
I ask myself all the time if these tactics are justified – after all, we are talking about the collapse of a global industrial system that supports billions of people. The end of this system won’t be pretty. Won’t the culture make a voluntary transformation towards justice and balance? Will people wake up? Isn’t it great hubris to claim to have some sort of answer?
But then I remember: like a good abuser, civilization systematically works to destroy alternative ways of thinking and being. Indigenous communities, which are living examples of ways to live in balance, have been the number one enemy of civilization. Against them, it is especially ruthless. We must always remember that members of settler culture (such as myself) are living on stolen land. Any plan for the future must take into account the needs and wishes of the original inhabitants.
With the same cold logic used by abusers of women and children, the system has made many of us dependent upon it for our survival. Our food, medicine, shelter, water, transportation, even our entertainment all comes from the system that is killing us and killing Earth.
When I walk down the street, I see people who are locked into a system that is killing the planet. Many of them—Democrat and Republican alike—have bought into this system. Will they demand change? Will they sacrifice for it?
Against all odds, and only for a few, the answer may be yes. But for the majority, the answer is a resounding no. Many are adopting a defensive posture, hunching around the elegancies and comforts of modern civilization and blocking out the cries of a bleeding world. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.
But we hear the cries of people slaving away for a system that is killing them. We see more forests falling for shopping malls and strip mines. We choose to speak, and to not turn aside.
Max Wilbert was born and raised in Seattle and lives in Salt Lake City. He works with the activist group Deep Green Resistance. He can be contacted at max_DGR@riseup.net.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 9, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Mongabay
More than 60 percent of Africa’s forest elephants have been killed in the past decade due to the ivory trade, reports a new study published in the online journal PLOS ONE.
The study warns that the diminutive elephant species — genetically distinct from the better-known savanna elephant — is rapidly heading toward extinction.
“The analysis confirms what conservationists have feared: the rapid trend towards extinction – potentially within the next decade – of the forest elephant,” said study co-author Samantha Strindberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
“Saving the species requires a coordinated global effort in the countries where elephants occur – all along the ivory smuggling routes, and at the final destination in the Far East,” added co-author Fiona Maisels, also of WCS. “We don’t have much time before elephants are gone.”
The study is based on the largest-ever set of survey data across five forest elephant range countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. The study involved more than 60 scientists who spent 91,600 person-days surveying for elephants, walking over 13,000 kilometers (more than 8,000 miles).
The study shows that elephants are increasingly scarce in areas with “high human density, high infrastructure density such as roads, high hunting intensity, and poor governance”, according to a statement from WCS.“Historically, elephants ranged right across the forests of this vast region of over 2 million square kilometers (over 772,000 square miles), but now cower in just a quarter of that area,” said co-author John Hart of the Lukuru Foundation. “Although the forest cover remains, it is empty of elephants, demonstrating that this is not a habitat degradation issue. This is almost entirely due to poaching.”
The decline in elephant populations has significant implications for the forest ecosystem. Elephants are considered “architects of the forest” for the role in opening clearings and maintain trails.
“A rain forest without elephants is a barren place,” explained Lee White. “They bring it to life, they create the trails and keep open the forest clearings other animals use; they disperse the seeds of many of the rainforest trees – elephants are forest gardeners at a vast scale. Their calls reverberate through the trees reminding us of the grandeur of primeval nature. If we do not turn the situation around quickly the future of elephants in Africa is doomed. These new results illustrate starkly just how dramatic the situation has become. Our actions over the coming decade will determine whether this iconic species survives.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 6, 2013 | Direct Action, Human Supremacy, Strategy & Analysis
Environmentalists today have our work cut out for us. Caught between the urgency of the ecological crises and reactionary capitalist forces that continue to push (quite successfully) for ever more outrageous and egregious destruction, finding an effective and timely path forward is no easy task. There are a wide variety of strategies for change vying for our attention, broadcast to us by a diversity of folks with a diversity of motivations—some of which are mixed, others confused, and more that are dangerous. By and large, the strategies we’ve adopted for our movements go unchallenged and unquestioned.
But given where we find ourselves—in the middle of an irredeemably exploitative and cruel society fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels—and what we’ve been able to accomplish so far in the fifty-some years of the environmental movement, it’s time to stop a moment and reflect.
What we’ve tried so far—everything from alternative consumer choices, lobbying, and symbolic protests to education, and localized permaculture lifeboats—has proven incapable of addressing the scale and severity of the crises at hand and ineffective in forcing change. While these tactics can be used to achieve certain goals, and certainly have their place within a serious movement for justice and sustainability, they will never be enough to accomplish what we must in the end.
So with that in mind, the time has come to have serious conversations and ask ourselves serious questions. What do we want to achieve, and how can we best achieve it?
Do we want to perpetuate a way of life that affords some of us with incredible material prosperity? Are we merely looking for new ways to sustain the unsustainable? Or do we want first and foremost to stop the destruction and exploitation of the living world, and are we prepared to adjust our society—our way of life—to what that requires of us? Are we prepared to see and name that destruction for what it is,industrial civilization, and do what’s necessary to bring a halt to it?
If so, are we willing to face what’s necessary to be successful? Are we willing to work for that goal by any means necessary, including sabotage and property destruction? Will we support those who do? For if the ends don’t justify the means, what does?
Are we willing to set the health of Earth as the ultimate metric by which we will be judged? As many others have said, those who come after us will not be swayed or moved by how deeply we ached at the world dying around us. They won’t forgive us no matter how big our marches and rallies were, nor how clever our slogans and chants. The precise harmony and abundance of our permaculture gardens will be irrelevant to them if the forests, rivers, and fish are gone. The spiritual fulfillment and inner peace we’ve found we be meaningless and resented if all the mountains have been ripped inside out, the air and water filled with poisons.
Fighting the good fight may satisfy us emotionally, but are we more concerned with emotional fulfillment or the health of the planet?
Either we win, and permanently put an end to this cancerous way of life—in no uncertain terms, dismantle industrial civilization—or it’s game over; baked topsoil devoid of bacteria and oceans empty of even plankton.
As all the tried and tired strategies, the benign, begging and ineffectual hopes for change fail repeatedly, are we prepared to take a new path? Are we willing, as a movement, to revisit our long-sworn oaths against direct action, sabotage, and property destruction? Are we left any other choice?
This is not an exhortation to action, not a dictate on what our tactics can or should be. And it’s certainly not an effort to incite you into doing anything you aren’t comfortable doing. This is an attempt to open the conversation, to humbly consider different strategies and tactics. Because what we’ve been doing so far isn’t working.
On the contrary, as a whole, the environmental movement is playing directly into the hands of the established systems of power. The solutions put forward by the mainstream fail to challenge industrialism, capitalism or civilization, and the mostly center around consumerism and economic growth—whether or not the planet survives is a moot point and is confined to the realm of rhetoric. The tactics proffered and peddled to us pre-packaged in marketing glitz and glamour will never be enough to carry us to our goals, because they refuse to confront and dismantle the material systems that are waging a relentless war against life. Instead, we plead with those in power, hoping in vain that they’ll change their hearts and minds.
But it is material systems—physical infrastructure of extraction and production—that are doing the deforesting, the strip mining, the fracking, the polluting, damming, the trawling; it’s not a few bad apples or an “unsustainable consciousness.” We can change hearts and minds until the sun burns out, but if we don’t confront and dismantle the structures of power that necessitates the devastation wreaked upon Earth by this culture, those compassionate hearts and minds will be irrelevant and quickly replaced by those better fitting the demands of the dominant power systems.
One measure of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and to expect different results. It’s long past time to admit that things aren’t changing; in the last 30 years, there hasn’t been a single peer-reviewed study that showed a living community that was improving or stable.
A recent study found that it’s twenty times more likely that climate change will be more extreme than forecasted than less extreme. Clearly what we’ve been doing isn’t working, or things would be getting better instead of worse (and the rate at which they’re getting worse is accelerating).
So where does that leave us? If the safe and fun strategies—the non-controversial and the convenient; the “green tech,” the lobbying, the consumer lifestyle choices—don’t work, what do we do? If we know it’s not working, how can we continue along the same path and expect anything different?
With so much—everything—at stake, will we collectively step over the line of comfort and safety that is afforded to us in exchange for our compliance and use whatever means necessary to stop the literal dismemberment of the planet’s life-support systems? If not us personally, will we support those who do?
When we look back in history we find countless examples of past movements facing near identical questions, and all too often they came to the decision that the use of physical force was necessary for fundamental change.
From the women’s suffrage movement which used arson against politicians who opposed the woman’s right to vote, to labor movements in the coal fields of Appalachia where miners battled company thugs. From the Black liberation struggles’ unabashed armed self-defense, to indigenous sovereignty struggles which employed militant land reclamations. From the ANC in South Africa and EOKA in Cyprus sabotaging electric transmission lines, to resistance forces across Europe during WWII attacking rail and transport infrastructures, and liberation movements around the world since using whatever means necessary to fight against colonialism. Strategic sabotage and other forms of militant action are proven to possess incredible potential for social movements to materially undermine the foundations of abusive power.
What will we do with that knowledge? How long will it take to decide, remembering that with every setting of the sun, another 200 species disappear from the world forever? Aren’t we overdue to have these conversations, to stop and ask these questions?
There isn’t any more time to be lost; we have lots of potential tools—tactics and strategies—available to us, and we need to put them all on the table, rather than limiting ourselves to least controversial (and least effective) among them. We need to accept the use of militant tactics, and support those who do. Strategic sabotage against industrial infrastructure has been used by countless movements to fight exploitation, and is undeniably effective.
When nothing else is succeeding in stopping the physical destruction of industrial society, can we finally accept militant action in defense of Earth as a viable option? With what’s at stake, can we afford not to?
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
