It’s often said that where there is oppression and brutalization, there is resistance; that resistance is fertile, and that it inevitably takes root in the cracks between the building blocks of exploitation and injustice. Even as industrial civilization drives indigenous peoples from their homelands and destroys what little remains of the living world, there is resistance. Even as men abuse and violate women, there is resistance. Even as whites oppress and exploit people of color, there is resistance. We continue to find determined resistance in the places we would think it least likely to survive in.
But there is another truth, a corollary to the undeniable will of resistance; where there is resistance, there is repression. Whenever and wherever people fight back, those in power—those higher on the social hierarchy—go to whatever lengths they deem necessary to protect their power and privilege. If resistance is inevitable, so is repression. Those of us determined to see justice need to be prepared for it, and use it to our advantage as much as possible.
This is becoming all the more immediately relevant as resistance against industrial extraction begins to enter a new phase of confrontation and action against those who would dismember the planet for profit. Across North America (and around the world), activists are increasingly turning to nonviolent direction action, having tired of the failures of legislative & administrative strategies. While this certainly represents a step in the right direction—that of physically confronting and stopping atrocity—it is also beginning to shed light on the way that power operates, and the means it will use to prevent dissent and resistance.
You may have heard about the anti-forest defense bills which are currently on the table in the Oregon State legislature. House Bill 2595 makes it a mandatory misdemeanor for the first charge of disrupting government forest practices, and a mandatory felony and minimum 13 months imprisonment for a second offense. House Bill 2596 essentially makes it easier for private entities to file suit against forest defenders. The laws come in response to direct action protests—including sit-ins, tree-sits, and blockades—by forest defense groups, including Cascadia Forest Defenders and Cascadia Earth First!, which stymied attempts to log the Elliot State Forest. Both bills have already been passed in the House and are now moving onto the senate.
Obviously, these bills are a blatant attempt to intimidate those who would act to defend the forests they love. It’s telling as well that the phrase “eco-terrorism” has been central in dialogue around the bill; labeling peaceful protesters using nonviolent tactics as “terrorists” is clearly an attempt to justify their political repression.
This sort of rhetoric and political repression extends far beyond the battle for forests in the Pacific Northwest. In Oklahoma and Texas, TransCanada—the corporation behind the Keystone XL pipeline—has filed lawsuits against individuals and organizations to stop them protesting and using nonviolent direct action to stop construction of the pipeline. It’s a blatant attempt to stamp out any interference or meaningful opposition to the pipeline.
In Canada, state security forces—including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—have begun viewing and approaching nonviolent protests, especially against the oil and gas industries, as “forms of attack” and “national security threats”.
Of course, this isn’t by any means a new or recent phenomenon, nor are these repressive measures outstandingly horrific. Take for example, the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) conducted by the FBI against indigenous, Black, Chicano, and other radical movements in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which aimed to discredit, disrupt and destroy those social movements and political organizations. COINTELPRO used infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and illegal state violence (among other tactics) to tear apart movements and render them ineffective.
While it certainly succeeded in its diabolical mission in many regards, COINTELPRO and other forms of intense repression were a key factor and motivation in driving many revolutionaries into underground and militant action and organizations. As Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues in his study Repression Breeds Resistance, when aboveground factions of the Black liberation movement came under increasingly heavy political repression, they turned to underground militancy to more effectively carry on the struggle. In his words, “Due to the intense repression against the BPP [Black Panther Party] and the Black liberation movement, it was necessary to go underground and resist from clandestinity.”
The potential of repression to fuel the formation and growth of underground resistance is also a trend to which Robert Taber speaks, in his 1965 study of guerrilla warfare, War of the Flea. In his survey of different guerrilla movements, Taber identified several prerequisite conditions that must be met for militant guerrilla struggle to be effective, among them the presence of “an oppressive government, with which no political compromise is possible.”
Political repression is a terrible thing; it has destroyed countless lives, families, communities, and movements, and continues to do so today. It is of course undeniable that repression hurts movements—and usually aims to destroy them, but it is also true that it can push them into new and much needed directions. One unintended effect of measures such as the Oregon House bills or TransCanada’s lawsuits may be to bolster support for and acceptance of militant & underground resistance. Certainly, we should not be surprised if this is the case, and rather than lament the means to which people resort in defense of the land, we should celebrate such action.
It should be clear that when nonviolent and aboveground means of fighting for justice & sustainability are criminalized, those who would otherwise limit themselves to legal means are motivated to take up more militant forms of action. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that political repression is going to get worse, the reins on acceptable political action continuously tightened, and the list of legally allowed responses to atrocity to be constantly shrinking. But this may very well (and very likely, if history is anything to go by) encourage and facilitate more serious and determined militant and underground action.
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
When I first read Andrew Nikiforuk’s book Tar Sands, I was deeply disturbed. The gluttonous use of water and natural gas, the destruction of mature boreal forests, the high rates of rare cancers, the sickening reduction in air quality, the malformations of local fish populations, the loss of farmlands, and more—a list of damages so glaring that the project stood out as exemplary of this culture’s insanity. At the time though, the Tar Sands existed there, in Alberta, not here, in the US.
Now that has changed. In January, the Utah Division of Oil Gas and Mining voted in favor of U.S. Oil Sands moving forward with a Tar Sands test-site in Uintah County of eastern Utah. Other companies stand close behind, waiting to tear into hundreds of thousands of acres of land for the heavy oil that rests beneath.
If these extraction projects are realized, much of Utah wildlife will come under assault. A snapshot of some of the creatures that call the high-elevation lands of the test-site home include sage grouse, antelope, mule deer, black bear, cougar, California myotis, and faded pygmy rattlesnake. Their fate at this time looks unpromising. Tar Sands extraction leaves only “one potential fate for this land—scorched, foul, dusty, hot and dead.” [1]
Beyond the horrific material effects, the Utah Tar Sands is the crux of a transformation in the larger Tar Sands struggle, a transformation from importation to importation and domestic production of tar sands fuels. If the Keystone XL Pipeline is the Tar Sands’ frontal attack, the Utah Tar Sands is its Trojan horse—from which numerous domestic projects will spring off.
Imagine the message it would send to investors if they saw the first US Tar Sands mine opposed in full force. Imagine the momentum it would give us if through our actions this first mine was stopped. The success or failure of this project will set the stage for future Tar Sands mines in the US. Now is the time to mobilize.
Fortunately, there are many people and groups already committed to fighting the Utah Tar Sands. Several actions have taken place already, and an action camp is planned for late July. We can help their efforts by offering either our physical support in person or our material support from afar. So much is already in place that has the capacity to stop the Utah Tar Sands that it would be a shame if finances were the limiting factor.
Several DGR groups—including Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, Deep Green Resistance Colorado, DGR Mojave, and Deep Green Resistance Great Basin are converging in Utah this summer to add their voices and their strength to the existing struggles. Deep Green Resistance is also working to help bring Lakota warriors to Utah, warriors who have been at the forefront of resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline. This is a crucial way in which we can connect the Tar Sands resistance movements and show indigenous solidarity.
Tar Sands extraction in the US can and will be stopped. I have already made my donation, and I hope you will too.
This article was originally published by Trouble & Strife, and is republished here with permission from the publisher.
For a couple of weeks in early 2013, it seemed as if you couldn’t open a newspaper, or your Facebook newsfeed, without encountering some new contribution to a war of words that pitted transgender activists and their supporters against allegedly ‘transphobic’ feminists.
It had started when the columnist Suzanne Moore wrote a piece that included a passing reference to ‘Brazilian transsexuals’. Moore began to receive abuse and threats on Twitter, which subsequently escalated to the point that she announced she was closing her account. Then Julie Burchill came to Moore’s defence with a column in the Sunday Observer newspaper, which attacked not only the Twitter trolls, but the trans community in general. Burchill’s contribution was intemperate in both its sentiments and its language—not exactly a surprise, since that’s essentially what editors go to her for. If what you want is balanced commentary on the issues of the day, you don’t commission Julie Burchill. Nevertheless, when the predictable deluge of protests arrived, the Observer decided to remove the piece from its website. The following week’s edition carried a lengthy apology for having published it in the first place. Senior staff, it promised, would be meeting representatives of the trans community for a full discussion of their concerns.
Liberal consensus
This was a notable climbdown by one of the bastions of British liberal journalism. Only a couple of weeks earlier, another such bastion, the Observer‘s sister-paper The Guardian, had published an opinion piece on ‘paedophilia’ (aka the sexual abuse of children), which argued for more understanding and less condemnation. In the wake of the Jimmy Savile affair that was certainly controversial, and plenty of readers found it offensive. But it wasn’t removed from the website, nor followed by a grovelling apology. Evidently it was put in the category of unpopular opinions which have a right to be aired on the principle that ‘comment is free’. But when it comes to offending trans people, it seems the same principle does not apply.
It’s not just the liberal press: a blogger who re-posted Burchill’s piece, along with examples of the abuse Suzanne Moore had received on Twitter, found she had been blocked from accessing her own blog by the overseers of the site that hosted it. Meanwhile, the radical feminist activist and journalist Julie Bindel, whose criticisms of trans take the form of political analysis rather than personal abuse, has for some time been ‘no platformed’ by the National Union of Students—in other words, banned from speaking at events the NUS sponsors, or which take place on its premises.
More generally, if you want to hold a women-only event from which trans women are excluded, you are likely to encounter the objection that this exclusion is illegal discrimination, and also that the analysis which motivates it—the idea that certain aspects of women’s experience or oppression are not shared by trans women—is itself an example of transphobia. Expressed in public, this analysis gets labelled ‘hate-speech’, which there is not only a right but a responsibility to censor.
The expression of sentiments deemed ‘transphobic’ has quickly come to be perceived as one of those ‘red lines’ that speakers and writers may not cross. It’s remarkable, when you think about it: if you ask yourself what other views either may not be expressed on pain of legal sanction, or else are so thoroughly disapproved of that they would rarely if ever be permitted a public airing (and certainly not an unopposed one), you come up with examples like incitement to racial hatred and Holocaust denial. How did it come to be the case that taking issue with trans activists’ analyses of their situation (as Julie Bindel has) or hurling playground insults at trans people (as Julie Burchill did) automatically puts the commentator concerned in the same category as a Nick Griffin or a David Irving?
Silencing their critics, often with the active support of institutions that would normally deplore such illiberal restrictions on free speech, is not the only remarkable achievement the trans activists have to their credit. It’s also remarkable how quickly and easily trans people were added to the list of groups who are legally protected against discrimination, and even more remarkable that what was written into equality law was their own principle of self-definition—if you identify as a man/woman then you are entitled to be recognized as a man/woman. In a very short time, this tiny and previously marginal minority has managed to make trans equality a high profile issue, and support for it part of the liberal consensus.
Here what interests me is not primarily the rights and wrongs of this: rather I want to try to understand it, to analyse the underlying conditions which have enabled trans activists’ arguments to gain so much attention and credibility. Because initially, to be frank, I found it hard to understand why the issue generated such strong feelings, and why feminists were letting themselves get so preoccupied with it. Both the content and the tone of the argument reminded me of the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s, when huge amounts of time and energy were expended debating the rights and wrongs of lesbian sadomasochism and butch/femme relationships. ‘Debating’ is a euphemism: we tore ourselves and each other apart. I don’t want to say that nothing was at stake, but I do think we lost the plot for a while by getting so exercised about it. The trans debate seemed like another case where the agenda was being set by a few very vocal individuals, and where consequently an issue of peripheral importance for most women was getting far more attention from feminists than it deserved.
But as I followed the events described at the beginning of this piece, and read some of the copious discussion that has circulated via social media, I came to the conclusion that what’s going on is not just a debate about trans. There is such a debate, but it’s part of a much larger and more fundamental argument about the nature and meaning of gender, which pits feminists (especially the radical variety) against all kinds of other cultural and political forces. Trans is part of this, but it isn’t the whole story, nor in my view is it the root cause. Actually, I’m inclined to think that the opposite is true: it is the more general shift in mainstream understandings of gender which explains the remarkable success of trans activism.
Turf wars
It is notable that the policing of what can or cannot be said about trans in public is almost invariably directed against women who speak from a feminist, and especially a radical feminist, perspective. It might be thought that trans people have far more powerful adversaries (like religious conservatives, the right-wing press and some members of the medical establishment), and also far more dangerous ones (whatever radical feminists may say about trans people, they aren’t usually a threat to their physical safety). And yet a significant proportion of all the political energy expended by or on behalf of trans activism is expended on opposing and harassing radical feminists.
This has led some commentators to see the conflict as yet another example of the in-fighting and sectarianism that has always afflicted progressive politics—a case of oppressed groups turning on each other when they should be uniting against their common enemy. But in this case I don’t think that’s the explanation. When trans activists identify feminists as the enemy, they are not just being illogical or petty. Some trans activists refer to their feminist opponents as TERFs, meaning ‘trans-exclusive radical feminists’, or ‘trans-exterminating radical feminists’. The epithet is unpleasant, but the acronym is apt: this is very much a turf dispute, with gender as the contested territory.
At its core, the trans struggle is a battle for legitimacy. What activists want to get accepted is not just the claim of trans people for recognition and civil rights, but the whole view of gender and gender oppression on which that claim is based. To win this battle, the trans activists must displace the view of gender and gender oppression which is currently accorded most legitimacy in progressive/liberal circles: the one put forward by feminists since the late 1960s.
Here it might be objected that feminists themselves don’t have a single account of gender. True, and that’s one reason why trans activists target certain feminist currents more consistently than others [1]. But in fact, the two propositions about gender which trans activists are most opposed to are not confined to radical feminism: both go back to what is often regarded as the founding text of all modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic The Second Sex, and they are still asserted, in some form or other, by almost everyone who claims any kind of feminist allegiance, be it radical, socialist or liberal. The first of these propositions is that gender as we know it is socially constructed rather than ‘natural’; the second is that gender relations are power relations, in which women are structurally unequal to men. On what exactly these statements mean and what they imply for feminist politics there is plenty of internal disagreement, but in themselves they have the status of core feminist beliefs. In the last 15 years, however, these propositions—especially the first one—have become the target of a sustained attack: a multi-pronged attempt to take the turf of gender back from feminism.
Trans activists are currently in the vanguard of this campaign, but they didn’t start the war. Some of its most important battles have been fought not in the arena of organized gender politics, but on the terrain of science, where opposition to feminism, or more exactly to feminist social constructionism, has been spearheaded by a new wave of biological essentialists. The scientists with the highest public profile, men like Stephen Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen, are politically liberal rather than conservative, and claim to support gender equality and justice: what they oppose is any definition of those things based on the assumption that gender is a social construct. Their goal is to persuade their fellow-liberals that feminism got it wrong about gender, which is not socially constructed but ‘hard-wired’ in the human brain.
This attack on the first feminist proposition (‘gender is constructed’) leads to a reinterpretation of the second (‘gender relations are unequal power relations’). Liberals do not deny that women have suffered and may still suffer unjust treatment in male-dominated societies, but in their account difference takes precedence over power. What feminists denounce as sexism, and explain as the consequence of structural gender inequality, the new essentialists portray as just the inevitable consequence of natural sex-differences.
Meanwhile, in less liberal circles, we’ve seen the rise of a lobby which complains that men and boys are being damaged—miseducated, economically disadvantaged and marginalized within the family—by a society which has based its policies for the last 40 years on the feminist belief that gender is socially constructed: a belief, they say, which has now discredited by objective scientific evidence. (Some pertinent feminist criticisms of this so-called ‘objective’ science have been aired in T&S: see here for more discussion.)
Another relevant cultural trend is the neo-liberal propensity to equate power and freedom, in their political senses, with personal freedom of choice. Across the political spectrum, it has become commonplace to argue that what really ‘empowers’ people is being able to choose: the more choices we have, and the freer we are to make them, the more powerful we will be. Applied to gender, what this produces is ‘post-feminism’, an ideology which dispenses with the idea of collective politics and instead equates the liberation of women with the exercise of individual agency. The headline in which this argument was once satirized by The Onion—‘women now empowered by anything a woman does’—is not even a parody: this is the attitude which underpins all those statements to the effect that if women choose to be housewives or prostitutes, then who is anyone (read: feminists) to criticize them?
This view has had an impact on the way people understand the idea that gender is socially constructed. To say that something is ‘constructed’ can now be taken as more or less equivalent to saying that in the final analysis it is—or should be—a matter of individual choice. It follows that individuals should be free to choose their own gender identity, and have that choice respected by others. I’ve heard several young (non trans-identified) people make this argument when explaining why they feel so strongly about trans equality: choice to them is sacrosanct, often they see it as ‘what feminism is all about’, and they are genuinely bewildered by the idea that anyone other than a right-wing authoritarian might take issue with an individual’s own definition of who they are.
The gender in transgender
Current trans politics, like feminism, cannot be thought of as an internally unified movement whose members all make exactly the same arguments. But although there are some dissenting voices, in general the views of gender and gender oppression which trans activists promote are strongly marked by the two tendencies just described.
In the first place, the trans account puts little if any emphasis on gender as a power relation in which one group (women) is subordinated to/oppressed by the other (men). In the trans account, gender in the ‘men and women’ sense is primarily a matter of individual identity: individuals have a sovereign right to define their gender, and have it recognized by society, on the basis of who they feel themselves to be. But I said ‘gender in the men and women sense’ because in trans politics, gender is understood in another sense as well: there is an overarching division between ‘cisgendered’ individuals, who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth, and ‘transgendered’ individuals, who do not identify with their assigned gender. Even if trans activists recognize the feminist concept of male power and privilege, it is secondary in their thinking to ‘cis’ power and privilege: what is considered to be fundamentally oppressive is the devaluing or non-recognition of ‘trans’ identities in a society which systematically privileges the ‘cis’ majority. Opposition to this takes the form of demanding recognition for ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ as categories, and for the right of any trans person to be treated as a member of the gender group they wish to be identified with.
At this point, though, there is a divergence of views. Some versions of the argument are based on the kind of biological essentialism which I described earlier: the gender with which a person identifies—and thus their status as either ‘cis’ or ‘trans’—is taken to be determined at or before birth. The old story about transsexuals—that they are ‘women trapped in men’s bodies’, or vice-versa—has morphed into a newer version which draws on contemporary neuroscience to argue that everyone has a gendered brain (thanks to a combination of genes and hormonal influences) which may or may not be congruent with their sexed body. In ‘trans’ individuals there is a disconnect between the sex of the body and the gender of the brain.
In other versions we see the influence of the second trend, where the main issue is individual freedom of choice. In some cases this is allied to a sort of postmodernist social utopianism: trans is presented as a radical political gesture, subverting the binary gender system by cutting gender loose from what are usually taken to be its ‘natural’, biological moorings. This opens up the possibility of a society where there will be many genders rather than just two (though no one who makes this argument ever seems to explain why that would be preferable to a society with no genders at all). In other cases, though, choice is presented not as a tactic in some larger struggle to make a better world, but merely as an individual right. People must be allowed to define their own identities, and their definitions must be respected by everyone else. On Twitter recently, in an argument about whether someone with a penis (and no plans to have it removed) could reasonably claim to be a woman, a proponent of this approach suggested that if the person concerned claimed to be a woman than they were a woman by definition, and had an absolute right to be recognized as such. In response, someone else tweeted: ‘I’m a squirrel’. Less Judith Butler, more Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Proponents of the first, essentialist account are sometimes critical of those who make the second, and ironically their criticism is the same one I would make from a radical feminist perspective: this post-feminist understanding of social constructionism is trivializing and politically vacuous. What trans essentialists think feminists are saying when they say gender is socially constructed is that gender is nothing more than a superficial veneer. They reject this because it is at odds with their experience: it denies the reality of the alienation and discomfort which leads people to identify as trans. This is a reaction feminists ought to be able to understand, since it parallels our own response to the dismissal of issues like sexual harassment as trivial problems which we ought to be able to ‘get over’—we say that’s not how women experience it. But in this case it’s a reaction based on a misreading: for most feminists, ‘socially constructed’ does not imply ‘trivial and superficial’.
In the current of feminism T&S represents, which is radical and materialist, gender is theorized as a consequence of social oppression. Masculinity and femininity are produced through patriarchal social institutions (like marriage), practices (like the division of labour which makes women responsible for housework and childcare) and ideologies (like the idea of women being weak and emotional) which enable one gender to dominate and exploit the other. If these structures did not exist—if there were no gender—biological male/female differences would not be linked in the way they are now to identity and social status. The fact that they do continue to exist, however, and to be perceived by many or most people as ‘natural’ and immutable, is viewed by feminists (not only radical materialists but most feminists in the tradition of Beauvoir) as evidence that what is constructed is not only the external structures of society, but also the internalized feelings, desires and identities that individuals develop through their experience of living within those structures.
Radical feminists, then, would actually agree with the trans activists who say that gender is not just a superficial veneer which is easily stripped away. But they don’t agree that if something is ‘deep’ then it cannot be socially constructed, but must instead be attributed to innate biological characteristics. For feminists, the effects of lived social experience are not trivial, and you cannot transcend them by an individual act of will. Rather you have to change the nature of social experience through collective political action to change society.
The rainbow flag meets the double helix
When I first encountered trans politics, in the 1990s, it was dominated by people who, although their political goals differed from feminism’s, basically shared the feminist view that gender as we knew it was socially constructed, oppressive, and in need of change through collective action. This early version of trans politics was strongly allied with the queer activism of the time, emphasized its political subversiveness, and spoke in the language of queer theory and postmodernism. It still has some adherents today, but over time it has lost ground to the essentialist version that stresses the naturalness and timeless universality of the division between ‘trans’ and ‘cis’, and speaks in two other languages: on one hand, neurobabble (you can’t argue with the gender of my brain), and on the other, identity politics at their most neo-liberal (you can’t argue with my oppression, my account of my oppression, or the individual choices I make to deal with my oppression).
Once again, though, this development is not specific to trans politics. Trans activists are not the first group to have made the journey from radical social critique to essentialism and neoliberal individualism. It is a more general trend, seen not only in some ‘post-feminist’ campaigning by women, but also and perhaps most clearly in the recent history of gay and lesbian activism.
In the heyday of the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements, the view was widely held that sexuality was socially constructed, and indeed relatively plastic: lesbianism, in particular, was presented by some feminists as a political choice. But in the last 20 years this view has largely withered away. Faced with well-organized opponents denouncing their perverted ‘lifestyle choices’, some prominent gay/lesbian activists and organizations began promoting the counter-argument that homosexuals are born, not made. Of course the ‘born that way’ argument had always had its supporters, but today it has hardened into an orthodoxy which you deviate from at your peril. Not long ago the actor Cynthia Nixon, who entered a lesbian relationship fairly late in life, made a comment in an interview which implied that she didn’t think she’d always been a lesbian. She took so much flak from those who thought she was letting the side down, she was forced to issue a ‘clarification’.
Since ‘born that way’ became the orthodox line, there has been more mainstream acceptance of and sympathy for the cause of gay/lesbian equality, as we’ve seen most recently in the success of campaigns for same-sex marriage. Though it is possible this shift in public attitudes would have happened anyway, it seems likely that the shift away from social constructionism helped, by making the demand for gay rights seem less of a political threat. The essentialist argument implies that the straight majority will always be both straight and in the majority, because that’s how nature has arranged things. No one need fear that granting rights to gay people will result in thousands of new ‘converts’ to their ‘lifestyle’: straight people won’t choose to be gay, just as gay people can’t choose to be straight.
If you adopt a social constructionist view of gender and sexuality, then lesbians, gay men and gender non-conformists are a challenge to the status quo: they represent the possibility that there are other ways for everyone to live their lives, and that society does not have to be organized around our current conceptions of what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. By contrast, if you make the essentialist argument that some people are just ‘born different’, then all gay men, lesbians or gender non-conformists represent is the more anodyne proposition that diversity should be respected. This message does not require ‘normal’ people to question who they are, or how society is structured. It just requires them to accept that what’s natural for them may not be natural for everyone. Die-hard bigots won’t be impressed with that argument, but for anyone vaguely liberal it is persuasive, appealing to basic principles of tolerance while reassuring the majority that support for minority rights will not impinge on their own prerogatives.
For radical feminists this will never be enough. Radical feminism aspires to be, well, radical. It wants to preserve the possibility that we can not only imagine but actually create a different, better, juster world. The attack on feminist social constructionism is ultimately an attack on that possibility. And when radical feminists take issue with trans activists, I think that is what we need to emphasize. What’s at stake isn’t just what certain individuals put on their birth certificates or whether they are welcome at certain conferences. The real issue is what we think gender politics is about: identity or power, personal choice or structural change, reshuffling the same old cards or radically changing the game.
[1] A more detailed discussion of feminist ideas about gender, which looks at their history and at what is or isn’t shared by different currents within feminism, can be found in Debbie Cameron and Joan Scanlon’s article ‘Talking about gender’.
More than half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change – according to research from the University of East Anglia.
Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and found that more than one half of the plants and one third of the animals will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080 if nothing is done to reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.
This means that geographic ranges of common plants and animals will shrink globally and biodiversity will decline almost everywhere.
Plants, reptiles and particularly amphibians are expected to be at highest risk. Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia would lose the most species of plants and animals. And a major loss of plant species is projected for North Africa, Central Asia and South-eastern Europe.
But acting quickly to mitigate climate change could reduce losses by 60 per cent and buy an additional 40 years for species to adapt. This is because this mitigation would slow and then stop global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times (1765). Without this mitigation, global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100.
The study was led by Dr Rachel Warren from theTyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. Collaborators include Dr Jeremy VanDerWal at James Cook University in Australia and Dr Jeff Price, from UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Dr Warren said: “While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species.
“This broader issue of potential range loss in widespread species is a serious concern as even small declines in these species can significantly disrupt ecosystems.
“Our research predicts that climate change will greatly reduce the diversity of even very common species found in most parts of the world. This loss of global-scale biodiversity would significantly impoverish the biosphere and the ecosystem services it provides.
“We looked at the effect of rising global temperatures, but other symptoms of climate change such as extreme weather events, pests, and diseases mean that our estimates are probably conservative. Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants.
“There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling, and eco-tourism.
“The good news is that our research provides crucial new evidence of how swift action to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases can prevent the biodiversity loss by reducing the amount of global warming to 2 degrees Celsius rather than 4 degrees. This would also buy time – up to four decades – for plants and animals to adapt to the remaining 2 degrees of climate change.”
The research team quantified the benefits of acting now to mitigate climate change and found that up to 60 per cent of the projected climatic range loss for biodiversity can be avoided.
Dr Warren said: “Prompt and stringent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally would reduce these biodiversity losses by 60 per cent if global emissions peak in 2016, or by 40 per cent if emissions peak in 2030, showing that early action is very beneficial. This will both reduce the amount of climate change and also slow climate change down, making it easier for species and humans to adapt.”
Information on the current distributions of the species used in this research came from the datasets shared online by hundreds of volunteers, scientists and natural history collections through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Co-author Dr Jeff Price, also from UEA’s school of Environmental Studies, said: “Without free and open access to massive amounts of data such as those made available online through GBIF, no individual researcher is able to contact every country, every museum, every scientist holding the data and pull it all together. So this research would not be possible without GBIF and its global community of researchers and volunteers who make their data freely available.”
In no other industry today is it more obvious to see the culmination of affects of social, political, economic, and ecological instability than in the global production of food. As a defining characteristic of civilization itself, it is no wonder why scientists today are closely monitoring the industrial agricultural system and its ability (or lack thereof) to meet the demands of an expanding global population.
Amidst soil degradation, resource depletion, rising global temperatures, severe climate disruptions such as floods and droughts, ocean acidification, rapidly decreasing biodiversity, and the threat of irreversible climatic change, food production is perhaps more vulnerable today than ever in our history. Currently, as many as 2 billion people are estimated to be living in hunger – but that number is set to dramatically escalate, creating a reality in which massive starvation, on an inconceivable scale, is inevitable.
With these converging crises, we can readily see within agriculture and food production that our global industrial civilization is experiencing a decline in complexity that it cannot adequately remediate, thus increasing our vulnerability to collapse. Industrial agriculture has reached the point of declining marginal returns – there may be years of fluctuation in global food production but we are unlikely to ever reach peak levels again in the foreseeable future.
While often articulated that technological innovation could present near-term solutions, advocates of this thought tend to forget almost completely the various contributing factors to declining returns that cannot be resolved in such a manner. There is also much evidence, within agriculture’s own history, that a given technology that has the potential to increase yields and production (such as the advent of the plow or discovery of oil) tends to, over time, actually reduce that potential and significantly escalate the problem.
Peak Soil
A largely overlooked problem is soil fertility. [1] A civilization dependent on agriculture can only “sustain” itself and “progress,” for as long as the landbase and soil on which it depends can continue to thrive.
The landscape of the world today should act as a blatant reminder of this fact. What comes to mind when you think of Iraq? Cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? “The Fertile Crescent,” as this region is also known, is the cradle of civilization and if we take a look at it today we can quickly deduce that overexploitation of the land and soil is inherent to this way of life. The Sahara Desert also serves as a pressing example – a region once used by the Roman Empire for food cultivation and production.
But this problem has not escaped our modern industrial civilization either, even despite some technological advances that have been successful at concealing it. The only thing we have genuinely been “successful” at is postponing the inevitable.
Currently, industrial agriculture depletes the soil about a millimeter per year, which is ten times greater than the rate of soil formation. Over the last century, we have solved this problem by increasing the amount of land under cultivation and by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and crop varieties.
Industrial civilization has expanded so greatly, however, that we currently already use most of the world’s arable land for agriculture. To solve the problems of peak soil today, as we have previously, would require doubling the land currently used for cultivation at the cost of some of the worlds last remaining forests and grasslands – most notably the Amazon and the Sahel. Not only is this option impractical, given the current state of the climate, it is wholly insane.
Another problem we face today is that more than a half-century of reliance on fertilizers and pesticides has severely reduced the level of organic matter in the soil. An advance in chemical fertilizers and/or genetic engineering of crops, while promising boosted yields in the near-term, will only further delay the problem while at the same time possibly introducing even greater health risks and other unforeseen consequences.
Decreasing Yields & Reserve Stocks
According to an Earth Policy Institute report in January, global grain harvests and stocks fell dangerously low in 2012 with total grain production down 75 million tons from the record year before. [2] Most of this decrease in production occurred as a result of the devastating drought that affected nearly every major agricultural region in the world. The United States – the largest producer of corn (the world’s largest crop) – has yet to fully recover from the drought last year and this is a cause for major concern.
Overall, global grain consumption last year exceeded global production requiring a large dependence on the world’s diminishing reserve stocks. And this isn’t the first time it has happened – 8 out of the last 13 years have seen consumption exceed production. In an escalating ecological crisis this is likely to be the new “normal.” This fact, in itself, is a strong indication that industrial civilization is dangerously vulnerable to collapse.
The issue here is two-fold: resource scarcity (industrial agriculture requires fossil fuels in every step of the process), soil degradation, and climate disruptions (droughts, floods, etc.) are severely reducing the yields of industrial agriculture; at the same time (and precisely because of those facts), we are becoming increasingly reliant on carryover reserve stocks of grains to meet current demands thus creating a situation in which we have little to no capacity to rebuild those stocks.
As Joseph Tainter describes in The Collapse of Complex Societies, a society becomes vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a declining marginal return. Stress and perturbation are common (and constant) features of all complex societies and they are precisely organized at high levels of complexity in order to deal with those problems. However, major, unexpected stress surges (which do occur given enough time) require the society to have some kind of net reserve, such as excess productive capacities or hoarded surpluses – without such a reserve, massive perturbations cannot be accommodated. He continues:
“Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, often ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.” [3]
Current global reserve stocks of grains stand at approximately 423 million tons, enough to cover 68 days of consumption. As population and consumption levels continue to rise while productive capacities fall, we will be more and more dependent on these shrinking reserves making our ability to address future stresses to the system significantly low.
Disappearance of the Arctic Sea Ice
One such “insurmountable calamity,” may be quickly on the horizon. This week, senior US government officials were briefed at the White House on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. One of the leading scientists advising the officials is marine scientist Professor Carlos Duante, who warned in early April:
“The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train.” [4]
Over the last few years, the excessive melting occurring in the Arctic region due to rising global temperatures has altered the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia leading to the very unprecedented heat waves and droughts responsible for most of the declining returns in agricultural production in recent years. As the warming and melting continue, these extreme weather events will exponentially get worse. In addition, the melting of the sea ice will significantly raise sea level with the potential to displace more than 400 million people.
The UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group recently released a public statement also indicating:
“The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue.” [5]
Social, Political, and Economic Instability
No civilization can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population, largely because continued pressures on the system will result in the disintegration of central control as global conflicts arise over scarce necessities. [6] This process can occur rapidly and/or through a gradual breakdown. A likely scenario of rapid collapse would be the breakout of a small regional nuclear war – such as between Pakistan and India – which would create a “nuclear winter” with massive global consequences. If that could be avoided, then the threat of collapse will likely be more gradual through the continued decrease of marginal returns on food and essential services.
As these crises continue to increase in frequency and severity, their convergences will usher in a period of prolonged global unrest. [7] This was directly seen as a result of the 2007-08 grain crisis in which many countries restricted exports, prices skyrocketed, and food riots broke out in dozens of countries. Many of those countries were located within the Middle East and are credited as the fundamental circumstances that gave way to the Arab Spring in 2011.
This year the food price index is currently at 210 – a level believed to be the threshold beyond which civil unrest is probable. Further, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is already reporting record high prices for dairy, meat, sugar and cereals and also warns – due to the reduced grain stocks from last year’s droughts – that prices can be expected to increase later this year as well.
Another factor driving up the costs of food is the price of oil. Because the entire industrial agriculture process requires the use of fossil fuels, the high price of oil results in a corresponding rise in the price of food. The future of oil production and whether we have reached “peak oil” may still be a matter of contention for some, but the increasing reliance on extreme energy processes (tar sands, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, etc.) is a blatant indication that the days of cheap petroleum are over. This implies that costs for energy extraction, and therefore the price of oil and food, will only continue to rise dramatically in the foreseeable future.
As the struggle for resources and security escalates, governments around the world will rely more heavily upon totalitarian forms of control and reinforcement of order, especially as civil unrest becomes more common and outside threats with other countries intensify. However, this is also likely to be matched by an increase in resistance to the demands of the socio-political-economic hierarchies.
Emerging Alternatives
As system disruptions continue to occur and food and other essential resources become scarcer, remaining populations will have to become locally self-sufficient to a degree not seen for several generations. The need for restructuring the way in which our communities have access to food and water is greater now than perhaps ever before – and there are more than a few examples being built around the world right now.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of hearing a presentation at the Ecosocialist Conference in NYC on precisely these alternatives. Speaking on a panel entitled “Agriculture and Food: Sustainable or Profitable?” was David Barkin, a Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, who has been collaborating with thousands of communities in Mexico and Latin America involved in constructing post-capitalist societies. [8]
In his presentation he spoke greatly about local groups – comprising of 30,000-50,000 people each, together being more than 130 million people – throughout Mexico and Latin America that are rebuilding their societies based on five principles that were written by the communities themselves and then systematized.
Self-management; through a process of participatory democracy
Solidarity; through rejecting the notion of wage-labor and re-organizing the entire work process
Self-sufficiency; which includes contacts and exchanges between many organizations so that you are not limited to the resource or climate-base of a single community but a development of trade networks
Diversification
Sustainable regional resource management; most communities in Mexico and Latin American define a region based on the natural definition of watersheds, although that may not be the most applicable natural definition in other parts of the world
He also spoke of groups such as the EZLN as examples of groups building alternative models – not models that are working at a super-structural level to change government policy, but models that give power and control directly to the community for the purposes of self-sufficiency and sustainability.
In Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador there is a phrase “El Buen Vivir” or “Sumak Kawsay,” – a cosmology that is said to come from indigenous cultures – that is actually informing how communities are rebuilding. It is proposed to promote sustainable relationships with nature and for communities to be less consumerist.
In addition to radically rebuilding our communities so that they exist not only wholly independent from industrial agriculture but also in harmony with the natural world, we need to build a greater resistance movement against industrial infrastructure that continues to threaten the very possibility of people all over the world from taking these steps.
Mining and its infrastructure, which is required for the development of solar panels and wind turbines, uses gigantic volumes of water for it to work. Because of this, in many parts of Mexico (where North American mining companies currently have concessions on 40% of the country’s land area) and Latin America, mining is a question of taking water away from agriculture. The struggle against mining is not just a struggle against environmental destruction, but it is a struggle for food.
The same can be said of foreign investments in wind turbine farms in Mexico and Puerto Rico, where local communities actually oppose these “renewable energy” infrastructures because they not only degrade the environment but also because it steals land that might otherwise be used for the direct needs of the locality.
Those of us in the most developed and industrialized nations need to radically alter our conceptions of sustainability and what is possible – a process that should be guided and influenced by those currently most vulnerable. Many well-meaning activists in the West tend to take perspectives that never really question our own standard of living – a standard of living David Barkin so rightfully articulated as an abomination.
We tend to favor “green energy” projects and the further development and industrialization of the “Global South” so that we don’t fundamentally have to make any sacrifices ourselves. Embedded in these perspectives are the racist and colonialist ideas that less developed countries in the world either don’t know what they want or don’t have the ability to create what they want themselves and thus need the technology and advances of the West to save them.
David Barkin’s presentation was a blatant reminder that this is far from the truth. Right now, in Mexico and Latin America, there are communities directly involved in building their own alternatives. And these aren’t communities of just a few hundred people; these aren’t small, insignificant projects. These are communities as large as 50,000 people each – an entire network of more than 130 million people – directly struggling and fighting for a radically different future.
We have much to learn and our time is running out. As industrial agriculture’s ability to produce food for the global population continues to decline, our resistance and our alternatives must escalate in lockstep – and there’s no reason for us to continue to ignore the alternative models and successes of our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world.
To the cheers and applause of the dozens of supporters below, anti-fracking activists unfurled a two-story banner with “Don’t Frack Illinois,” from the balcony of the state capitol rotunda. During impassioned testimony from activists with the Illinois Coalition for a Moratorium on Fracking (ICMF), the brightly colored banner gave visual support to the voices gathered from throughout the state who came together in Springfield for this the second lobbying and day of action called for by the coalition. “We won’t allow water, air, and living communities to be traded for short-term jobs,” If the industry pursues fracking in Illinois, we will hold these corporations and the policymakers who support them accountable.” said a member of Deep Green Resistance.
Oil and gas companies have bought mineral rights to land and are poised to start fracking in Southern and Central Illinois. Meanwhile, state lawmakers are debating on how to handle this threat. In February a regulatory, bill HB 2615, was introduced. This bill was crafted by a select group of industry, lawmakers and a few large green groups. This bill puts in place some safeguards, but largely leaves communities vulnerable. Chiefly, HB 2615 does not give local counties local control to ban the practice and it does not require that companies disclose proprietary chemicals used in the mining process prior to introducing them into the environment.
In contrast, a Moratorium bill, SB HB 3086 would put a two year moratorium on fracking in Illinois and require that the state conduct a thorough, independent assessment of the effects of hydraulic fracturing. Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing our Environment (SAFE) a grassroots group based out of Carbondale, IL and a growing number of environmental groups are pushing for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in Illinois.
“It’s ridiculous that our lawmakers see hydraulic fracturing is an opportunity for our state. Out of state corporations will be making most of the money while residents and our climate will be suffering from this polluting industry” said Angie Viands of Rising Tide Chicago.
This day of action in Springfield included citizen lobbying, a morning press conference with the banner drop, and Illinois Peoples Action storming the Illinois Manufacturer’s Association (IMA) offices. IMA is a main proponent of bringing hydraulic fracturing to the state.
