Deep Green Resistance stands for the resistance against the culture of empire, aka civilization. For many people this may sound very new, strange and, understandably enough, frightening; most people associate something positive with the term “civilization”. As a person born into this culture it is not easy to question it, and even harder to perceive the culture itself as the major problem. This is where DGR’s analysis comes in.
So, what is civilization?
History begins about 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped grunting in caves, invented agriculture and gradually settled down. Agriculture and sedentariness enabled the construction of ever larger cities, innovations such as the monetary economy led to trade relations and an increasingly complex division of labor. The development of writing systems made it possible to literally write history. From then on, a period of constant development began, with higher and higher, ever more complex forms of technology. Civilization was so successful that it has spread all over the world to this day.
This is just a short attempt to describe the common myth. Another description from writer Fabian Scheidler1:
“The standard version – the myth of Western civilization – tells of a process of tediously achieved progress which, despite all adversities and setbacks, has led to more prosperity, more peace, more knowledge, more culture and more freedom in the end. In this version wars, environmental devastation and genocides are slips, relapses, setbacks or undesirable side effects of a generally beneficial process of increasing civilization.”
Wikipedia provides the following definition:
“A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.”2
According to Derrick Jensen, civilization is “(…) a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (…), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (…), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth.”3
Deep Green Resistance uses Derrick Jensen’s definition of civilization. Civilizations are by definition not sustainable and never can be. Yet there are two possible ways for civilizations to end: Either they are consumed by a even larger and/or more powerful civilization, a process which is usually accomplished by the use of brutal violence and leads to deep, intergenerational trauma (as we’ve seen with the example of the Aztecs), or they collapse because they used up their resources and cannot expand any more for some reason (as we’ve seen with historical civilizations, and we experience nowadays with our own industrial civilization, which is on the edge of abyss because it is killing the planet).
This is why we advocate for a culture of resistance and the building of alternatives.
Civilization usually looks good only from the perspective of the civilized; Samuel Huntington puts it very aptly: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”4
We, as members of Western civilization, should listen very carefully and respectfully to the voices of others, in particular indigenous peoples, since they have been and and still are being hit hardest by the violence of our culture. The Osage chief Big Soldier said:
“I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”5
Apart from indigenous peoples, it is sometimes ethnologists who are able to see our culture from an outside perspective:
“On his expeditions, Lévi-Strauss came across a tribal culture that seemed irritable and highly dangerous to him. It plundered nature, devastated entire regions, worshipped arty idols, massacred its own kind and was notorious for its historical carnages. In the meantime, this exotic tribal culture has defeated all competitors and rules the world. Its name is ‘civilization’.”6
Let me end with the words of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore:
“The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of ‘divide and rule’ in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition.”7
“Civilization, civilization, pride of Europeans… Whatever you strive for, whatever you do, you always move within a lie. When you see it, the tears flow, the pain screams. You are the violence before the law. You are not a torch, you are a conflagration. Everything you touch, you consume.”
“European civilization... is a cannibal civilization; it oppresses the weak and enriches itself at its expense. It lets envy and hatred shoot up everywhere, wherever it goes, no grass can grow anymore… Its power comes from directing all its forces towards the sole aim of enrichment… Under the codename patriotism, it breaks the given word, shamelessly throws out its nets woven from lies, erects monstrous giant images in its temple dedicated to profit, in honor of the God it worships. Without the slightest hesitation we prophesy: this will not last forever!”8
1Fabian Scheidler (2015): Das Ende der Megamaschine, p.10 (translated from German)
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” ― Carl Sagan
David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Australia, recently warned us that “no political, social, or military system can cope” with the outcomes of climate collapse. The consequences are almost too extreme to process: global crop failures, water shortages, extreme natural disasters, dying ecosystems, and unstoppable climate feedback systems. These increasingly chaotic variables can lead to crippling uncertainty; should you dedicate all of your energy to fighting against greenhouse gas emissions and ecological destruction? Should you balance your time between resistance and preparing for adaptation? What are the skills and resources needed to survive? This article is the first in a series designed to help frame and answer those questions.
I grew up in the wilderness and was a stranger to civilization until my mid teens. Outside my childhood home I could have walked for weeks or months without encountering another human, and I often spent extended periods of time doing just that. It was a difficult environment to survive in because the summers were searing hot, the winters were far below freezing, there was little water, and vegetation was sprase. My classroom was the natural world, my teachers were the native species, and some of my tests were high stakes. I learned how to quickly build shelters, how to find clean water from miles away, and how to find enough food to survive. It was a perfect childhood, despite many challenges and hardships.
When I moved into the town I was around 14 years old. I found the endless, often arbitrary, rules perplexing and frequently amusing. The “city people” were alien to me. I was utterly convinced that they would die of dehydration if they couldn’t get water from a tap, and that if they were told to walk off a cliff by someone wearing an adequately authoritative costume, they would do so. My amusement with this alternative reality soon turned into frustration. City cultures were full of people whose minds had been filled with often useless information by school curricula that insisted knowing the names and birthdays of bygone presidents was more important that knowing how to grow your own food, purify your own water, or build your own home. I was disturbed by this culture which had stripped people of their ancestral knowledge, of their independence.
Several decades later, my frustration has given way to activism. The brutal reality is that most of us, at least among the English speakers, have no clue how to survive without industrial civilization; which makes us the slaves and victims of that dominant culture. With climate collapse rapidly approaching, one of the most radical things we can do is restore our ancestral knowledge and rebuild the self sufficiency of our families and immediate communities.
Food and Water Security
Fast moving water is generally cleaner than slow or still water. Morning dew is often abundant. Conserving water is as important as collecting it. Sand, rocks, and charcoal purify still water. Trees and bushes transpire. Beaches produce freshwater. These are the lessons we used to learn as children and they provide us with security; indigenous cultures knew thousands of these variations, and specialized them for their local ecosystems over millennia. We need to restore this knowledge and disseminate it widely among our communities, both for our own individual security and also to maintain as much social stability as possible in the midst of collapse. There will be a day when your community attempts to turn on the tap for a glass of water to discover that it’s no longer working, and the ratio of infrastructure downtime will increase until we’re left to fend for ourselves. Communities with better developed skills will be better equipped to avoid desperation and violence.
Likewise, our food security needs to be addressed. Some ecosystems will soon become completely uninhabitable, others may remain habitable but become chaotic and prone to extreme weather events. Most of the food we eat today comes from industrial scale farming, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels for pesticides, fertilizers, heavy equipment, refrigeration, and shipping. There will come a day, sooner than most people realize, when none of that infrastructure will work. This poses an immense challenge for communities whose farmers have forgotten how to produce crops without tractors and pesticides. Likewise, the average person has no idea how to grow or store their own food, and when the grocery store shelves go empty they’re going to become extremely desperate.
This is why we must prioritize local food and water security, which involves upskilling our communities and also leading efforts to build sustainable local systems. Every child needs to know the basic principles of permaculture, they need to know how to blend perennials and seasonals in regenerative rotations, they need to understand soil balance and which plants produce nitrogen, and they need to learn these things very quickly. Additionally, we need to replace lawns with gardens, ornamental plants with edibles for ourselves and pollinators, and we need to urgently protect the habitats of interdependent species and ecosystems. This starts by forming a group, knocking on your neighbours’ doors, and helping them build their first small garden.
Community Stability
Whether we like it or not, most of us are surrounded by larger communities of people. When people become too thirsty or too hungry their desperations leads to violence, which often ends up exacerbating their condition in a vicious cycle. For this reason, I think the worst possible place to be during climate collapse are cities. By nature of their design, city cultures are largely anonymous, callous, and unsustainable. The only way to feed the inhabitants of a city is to take food and other resources from the surrounding region, which will become increasingly difficult. Scarcity with lead cities to experience worsening class stratification, xenophobia, and misogyny; fear and poverty will also lead to reactionary movements and fascism, as it always does.
Communities will fare better when they’re small enough for the inhabitants to either know each other or recognize each other based on shared relations. I personally think populations between 2,000 and 5,000 are ideal because they’re large enough to significantly share resources and protect themselves, but small enough to be deeply integrated. In sufficiently rural or wilderness settings I would be inclined to live in even smaller populations.
The single most important thing you can do to maintain or prolong local stability is forge strong bonds with your neighbours, and to intentionally do so across preexisting divisions like class, race, and tribe. It’s important to foster a shared identity. One of the best ways to establish these bonds is to lead local permaculture, ecological, and economic adaptation efforts. If it can be at all avoided, never blame individuals in your local community for climate collapse or the worsening state of the world; even if it’s true, you’re now all in this together and those petty divisions can fester into dangerous conflicts as external tension builds.
Also focus on preparing today’s children. The next 10-20 years will be very difficult, but the following 50 years will be inconceivably difficult and we need to provide intensive training for the generation that will be attempting to survive it. Today’s 10 year old will probably be 25-30 years old when civilization as we know it collapses, those of us who are still alive will be relying on them to maintain order and potentially to help care for us as we age, experience illness, or become less independently capable. We will have great regrets if we fail to adequately prepare the next generation for what lies ahead.
Healthcare Essentials
Collapse will be most immediately horrific for people with serious health conditions. I relate deeply to this issue because my own medical condition, if left untreated, will probably significantly shorten my life and result in an unpleasant demise. It will be worse for people with conditions like kidney failure, who will be unable to receive dialysis treatments, or for cancer patients who will be unable to receive chemo therapy. Childbirth will also become increasingly dangerous. The good news is that we can mitigate some of these effects by connecting the dots between modern medical research and the active compounds found in various plants and fungi. Most of the world’s pharmaceuticals were initially derived from medicinal plants and fungi, and indigenous peoples have used those plants (often effectively) for countless generations. There will be increasing demand for local sources of medicine to treat things like infections, chronic pain, epilepsy, and even certain cancers. We need healthcare leaders in the future who are able to connect scientific medical research to processes which employ local plants and fungi.
We also need to improve our relationship with death because, unfortunately, there’s going to be a great deal more of it in the world. Most of our cultures have exacerbated our fear of death, in part because we have become so removed from it. For example, almost everyone eats meat, which obviously involves death, but how many people have slaughtered the animals themselves and processed through those complex emotions? Many of us have had loved ones die, but how many of us have been one of the primary caregivers, washed their body, and cremated/buried them ourselves? We have build entire economies around cultural desires to hide death behind layers of abstraction, and very few of us have learned to deal with it in healthy ways. The dominant culture prefers to pretend that death doesn’t exist; sometimes by ignoring our own mortality until the last minute, and sometimes even by denying mortality at all by propagating superstitions about eternal afterlife.
How we deal with death relates, in many ways, with my final point about healthcare: mental health. Our current frameworks for understanding and addressing mental health are deeply inadequate in the context of climate collapse. As our global and local situations progressively worsen, and as people realize that it will never return to their understanding of “normal” it will cause significant psychological trauma, persistent anxiety, and spiraling depression. I predict that suicide rates will increase dramatically, and I can’t blame those people. Likewise, it will become inceasingly difficult to deal with individuals whose mental health conditions may be significantly disruptive or even dangerous for other members of their communities. We will reach a point where we’re no longer able to access antipsychotic, antidepressant, antianxiety, bipolar, or any number of other mental health medications; this, combined with the intense psychological pressures of collapse will create great volatility among some of the most at risk members of our communities.
Part 1 Summary
This is first article is an overview of the scale of our challenges and some of the most essential priorities (food, water, community, and healthcare). As you can see, we have immense challenges ahead of us and it’s going to be a difficult road even for those of us living in the most temperature ecosystems. In the next article I’ll delve deeper into specific food and water systems, and provide detailed processes for organizing our communities toward those objectives. From a resistance perspective, it’s critical that we begin to address the details of how to resolve these issues. Our communities will be much more supportive of radical, direct action toward preventing global extinction if they feel like their most essential needs can be met in a post-collapse world. If we cannot provide and implement clear strategies for addressing these needs, people will retreat into denialism and delusions, eventually responding violently toward any group or information which threatens their fantasies. This is why we must take urgent action.
In this series of videos, DGR cadre Will Falk and Max Wilbert discuss the moral issues surrounding the Deep Green Resistance strategy, which calls for dismantling the global industrial economy by any means necessary, as rapidly as possible.
“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.” —Derrick Jensen
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Deep Green Resistance is a radical environmental movement, dedicated to shifting activists towards strategies that have a real chance to stop the murder of the planet. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the land around us; we fight for the salmon, the pine trees, and the songbirds, not the solar panels and space shuttles so many ‘environmentalists’ have fallen in love with. We in DGR don’t want a more sustainable nightmare. We want a living world.
Deep Green Resistance recognizes that industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet – and when our way of living conflicts with the needs of the land, our way of living must go. This transition to a healthy and just relationship with the natural world is a massive undertaking, one that won’t be achieved with individual lifestyle changes and a green coat of paint on the latest mountain-killing mining rig. Real change will take a revolutionary heart. Anything less is a recipe for failure.
Deep Green Resistance has a roadmap for that revolution. We call it Decisive Ecological Warfare. We’ve studied the most successful movements in history, from the Irish Republicans to Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, and applied the lessons they can teach us to the fight for Earth liberation. Our goal as aboveground activists is to promote this strategic resistance, with the goal of triggering cascading systems failure within industrial infrastructure. In this mission, we are guided by a strict code of conduct, a steering committee of seasoned revolutionaries, and, most of all, an unwavering dedication to the land on which we live.
HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED?
In the midst of all this destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But there’s one nice thing about living in such dark times – anywhere you look, there’s great work to be done. Deep Green Resistance isn’t afraid to make the connections between open-pit mining and police brutality, between rape and deforestation, between acidified oceans and settler colonialism. We are proud anti-capitalists, anti-racists, and radical feminists, with members working on everything from pornography and prostitution to indigenous land rights and prison reform.
Whether on the front lines or behind the scenes, there is room for you in this war. So get in touch! We have members across the globe and resources in multiple languages. Head to our website, check our Facebook, or send us an email and introduce yourself. We’ll help you learn more about DGR, find opportunities for volunteering, and apply for greater involvement. You’ll also be able to download a free ebook copy of the Deep Green Resistance book.
DGR is working to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. In order to succeed, we’ll need teachers, healers, warriors, and workers. If you’re tired of the false solutions and the feel-good failures, Deep Green Resistance is for you, whatever your skills. In a fight like this, we need it all.
Remember: Deep Green Resistance is an aboveground organization, meaning we don’t engage in violence or property destruction. If you feel your talents would best be put to use in more militant actions, please do not contact us. This will keep you safer, and help us be more effective. We will not answer any questions related to any underground that may or may not exist.
“Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
Editors Note: the international refugee crisis is driven by war, imperialism, and destruction of the planet. In other words, it is driven by civilization, or “the culture of empire.” DGR is opposed to empire and we see the refugee crisis as a humanitarian emergency. We believe that the best way to fight this crisis is to fight it’s underlying cause, by dismantling civilization. Learn more on the DGR website.
Washington, D.C. – May 16, 2019 – Today, the International Mayan League denounces the latest victim of death and murder at the U.S/Mexico border, a 2 ½ year-old toddler, a boy from Chiquimula, Guatemala. This tragic loss comes on the heels of the death of 16-year-old Juan de León Gutiérrez of the Maya Ch’orti’ people – also from Chiquimula. For the last year our people have been under constant attacks at the border. Since May 2018 we have lost five lives from Guatemala. First, Claudia Patricia Gómez González (Maya Mam) 20 years old who was shot in the head by a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Agent; then 7-year-old Jakelin Caal (Maya Q’eqchi’), and 8-year-old boy Felipe Gomez Alonzo (Maya Chuj) both died in December while in CBP custody. Now, we have lost two more lives. How many more children must die before there is collective outrage, actions, denouncements? How many more times do we need to say this is a crisis specifically affecting indigenous children and youth?
We, indigenous peoples, are the majority in Guatemala and continue to be disproportionately impacted because our basic human rights are denied by the Guatemalan government and all sectors of society. We are forced to flee only to encounter inhumane treatment and human rights violations at the U.S./Mexico border in violation of international law. The Guatemalan and the United States governments must be held accountable for the deaths of our children. Impunity for their deaths is not an option and we demand justice and peace for their families.
Children, explicitly indigenous children, are some of the most victimized. In fiscal year 2019 alone, 19,991[1] Guatemalan unaccompanied children have been apprehended at the border. The number of Guatemalan family units has soared to 114,778, the highest for all the Central American countries[2]. Considering indigenous peoples are the majority in Guatemala, contrary to government admission, we strongly believe that these statistics reflect that thousands of Maya children and families are seeking refuge. Their indigenous identities must be acknowledged and documented.
Each indigenous child whose life has been stolen was forced to migrate because they are the most affected by centuries of structural inequality and discrimination in Guatemala. They often have no future in their rural and extremely impoverished communities. Many have little access to formal education and likely only speak their native language, an additional barrier that hinders their communication with authorities or service providers when migrating. We are outraged by these tragedies and demand the following from the government of the United States. There must be exhaustive, fair and transparent investigations by the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security into all the deaths at the border; a dialogue with leaders of the Guatemalan Maya diaspora for the development of humane immigration policies; and recognition and implementation of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the bare minimum standard for the respect and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights in forced migration.
Almost exactly at the 1-year anniversary of the murder of Claudia Patricia Gómez González of the Maya Mam Nation, we are reliving another nightmare, the death of a toddler. We are tired of being treated as if our lives do not matter. We will not stand idly by as our children are murdered by inhumane policies and practices rooted in hatred, fear, and racism.
The International Mayan League has been working in defense of indigenous human rights for many years, and since last year, trying to raise awareness that most of the children, youth, and families coming from Guatemala are indigenous. They are a Mayan women-led grassroots organization working directly with and for their people, and are entirely volunteer-based.
