by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 26, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the third installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
via Deep Green Resistance UK
Societal violence
Structural violence is the deaths and suffering caused by the way society is organised so that huge numbers of people lack the means necessary to avoid starvation, prevent illness etc. [1] Cultural violence is the prevailing attitudes and beliefs regarding power and the necessity of violence. [2]
In Violence, Slavoj Žižek, a controversial philosopher and cultural critic, differentiates between what he calls subjective and objective violence. “Subjective violence is experienced in a truly peaceful work where there is no violence of any sort. Objective violence is the inherent violence of the ‘normal’ state of things.” [3]
Žižek describes two kinds of objective violence. Symbolic (objective) violence is embodied in language and its forms, which is similar to the concept of cultural violence described above. Systemic (objective) violence includes the terrible consequences of the everyday functioning of economic and political systems, similar to structural violence described above. This kind of violence is inherent to the system itself: direct physical violence; subtle forms of coercion that sustain domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence. He also describes ideological violence, which includes racism, incitement, and sexual discrimination. [4]
Žižek observes that there is a focus on subjective violence (social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds) to distract our attentions from objective violence and our complicity in the oppressive systems that perpetuate it.
State monopoly of violence
A defining characteristic of the modern state is the state monopoly of violence. This is the concept that only the state has the right to use or authorise the use of physical force. The German sociologist Max Weber first described this concept in his 1918 lecture Politics as a Vocation: “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about the state monopoly of violence in his 1921 book Critique of Violence.
The state monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is a concept to mean that the state and other actors are using violence but the use of violence by those that are not the state is illegitimate or illegal. Whereas the state monopoly of violence means that the state is the only one using violence, which is where we have got to in most Western countries. So the state is deeming self defence as illegitimate (more on this in the future article on self defence).
Ecological violence
Author Marty Branagan calls the damage to ecosystems caused by industries or armed conflict “ecological violence,” [5] but quotes three studies that state that the extent and intensity of warfare are decreasing. [6] I completely disagree and think it’s clear that structural, cultural and ecological violence are all increasing. 180 million to 203 million people were killed by wars and oppression in the twentieth century alone. [7]
Property destruction
Finally, it is important to distinguish between violence against property and violence against people. Some reject that violence is an appropriate word to use to describe property destruction. Property destruction can be achieved without harming any sentient beings and can be effective at stopping an unjust system. It can also be used to intimidate, which is perhaps why some advocate against it. [8]
When considering if property destruction constitutes violence, a number of questions need to be asked: what objects will be damaged; for what purpose; using what kind of force; will any living beings be injured in any way? Do you believe that “property rights” can be “injured?” Radical environmentalists argue that violations of property rights can in fact constitute violent acts or be the result of past violence. “Property” is created when land and animals are forcibly enclosed or when people are separated from the products of their labour. This is a violent process as it involves the actual or threatened use of force to control. Violence will then be needed to maintain this property.
There’s a critical difference between the legitimate use of force, and violence, which is always illegitimate. We need to stand in solidarity with those who use justifiable force by putting their bodies on the line. And then be critical of those that use the dire situation on the earth as an excuse for reckless aggression or selfish violence. [9]
The British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst had this to say about property destruction: “There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.”
This is the third installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- Historical materialism chapter, Critical Security Studies book, Eric Herring, page 157 https://ericherring.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/eh-hm-and-security-09.pdf
- Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence and the State, Jeriah Bowser, page 7, read online
- Violence, Slavoj Žižek, 2009, page 2
- Violence, Slavoj Žižek, 2009, page 1-10
- Global Warming: Militarism and Nonviolence,The Art of Active Resistance, Marty Branagan, 2013, page 7
- Global Warming: Militarism and Nonviolence,The Art of Active Resistance, Marty Branagan, 2013, page 40
- Jeriah Bowser has done a great job of describing the increasing amounts of violence in the world in the last century in Elements of Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence and the State, 2015, page 22-31, read online
- Deep Green Resistance, Lierre Keith, 2011, page 81 (link to DGR book, online version ideally if ready in time see this forum post https://deepgreenresistance.org/forum/index.php?topic=5188.0)
- Igniting a Revolution, Steven Best, Anthony J. Nocella, 2006, page 324/5
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 23, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the second installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
via Deep Green Resistance UK
Before looking at nonviolence, it’s important to define what violence is, as it is often understood in varied and misleading terms. The aim of the next three posts on violence is to move away from the binary thinking of violence versus nonviolence and to appreciate the complexity of this topic.
In Endgame I: The Problem with Civilization, [1] Derrick Jensen maintains that many words and contexts are needed to approach a more complex understanding of what violence means and entails. He lists the following categories of violence in a discussion meant to provoke readers into (re)considering what forms of violence they oppose:
- unintentional and intentional violence
- unintentional but fully expected violence (when you drive you can fully expect to kill insects)
- distinction between direct violence and violence that is ordered to be done by others
- systemic (and hidden) violence
- violence by omission – by not acting leading to harm
- violence by silence – witnessing violence and not acting
- violence by lying – supporting those that carry out violence
Peter Gelderloos, author of The Failure of Nonviolence, writes critically of a typical human mindset, particularly by humans who occupy positions of institutionally maintained privilege: “If it’s done to me it’s violence. If it is done by me or for my benefit, it is justified, acceptable, or even invisible.” [2] He argues that violence doesn’t exist as an act but rather as a category; and that it is a concept regularly redefined by the state for the purpose of protecting and perpetuating systems of oppressive power. Gelderloos also asserts how common it is for people to describe things that they do not like as violent.
In Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Uri Gordon suggests that “an act is violent if its recipient experiences it as an attack or as deliberate endangerment.” [3] He offers a comprehensive review of the thinking on violence in relation to activism by asking two fundamental questions: what is violence, and can violence be justified?
Gordon makes a useful distinction between the violence of the anarchist movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the violence of today. The political violence of past centuries often involved mass armed insurrection and the assassination of heads of state and business leaders. Today, it tends to involve non-lethal violence during protests, property destruction, and clashes with law enforcement. [4]
Gene Sharp, known as the “father of the nonviolent revolution,” argues that violence is a way to influence behavior by intimidating people. His list of what constitutes violent actions includes conventional military action, guerrilla warfare, regicide (the killing of a king), rioting, police action, private armed offensive and defence, civil war, terrorism, conventional aerial bombing, and nuclear attacks. [5]
Bill Meyers argues that the corporate state intentionally confuses language used to discuss issues of violence in order to neutralise opposition: “It is important to distinguish exactly what is meant by violence, not being violent, and the ideology of Nonviolence. Most people have a pretty clear idea of what violence is: hitting people, stabbing them, shooting them, on up to incinerating people with napalm or atomic weapons. Not being violent is simply not causing physical harm to someone. But gray areas abound. What about stabbing an animal? What about allowing someone to starve because they cannot find means to pay for food? What about coercing behavior through the threat of violence? Through the threat of losing a job? Violence as a dichotomy, with the only choices being Violence or Non-violence, is not a very useful basis for political discussion, unless you want to confuse people.”
A good place to start is the Oxford dictionary definition of violence: “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.”
In Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, Mark Boyle seriously considers if inaction can be considered violent. He asks whether there is a definition or understanding of violence that can take into account the idea of inaction, the act of witnessing gross injustice and doing nothing within one’s power to effectively combat it. [6]
Boyle argues that when asking if an action is violent or an appropriate use of force, the intention of those that carry out the action needs to be considered. He offers the example of a tooth being pulled out either as an act of care by a friend if the tooth is causing a lot of pain, or by a torturer to inflict pain.
Boyle’s ultimate definition of violence is the “unjustified use of force in ways that are intentionally or culpably injurious to another entity, or insensitive to that entity’s own needs or The Whole of which it is one part. It encompasses actions that, through willful neglect, indirect conscious complicity, or the imposition of a set of conditions, contribute to the injury of another entity.” [7]
For Pattrice Jones, both concepts and context must be considered when defining violence. When many people say “violence,” they often mean some sort of violation that involves actual or the threatening of physical force. Following this logic, both force and violation must be present for an act to be considered violence. She observes that in law there is a distinction between violence and justifiable use of force, and between violent and nonviolent crime.
With regard to context, she notes that “if we understand violence to be injurious and unjustified use of force then we can never discern whether or not an act is violent apart from its context.” Thus, there is no need to waste time arguing about abstractions; justifiable use of force isn’t violence. We can move on to consider the more important question of how much force is justifiable in defence of human and non-human life and the earth. The line between force and violence can only be determined based on the context of the situation.
Jones poses intriguing questions when contemplating the use of force in any given situation: is the action likely to result in a desired outcome; is the same outcome likely to be achieved as quickly or certainly by some other means; and is the level of force being contemplated proportional to the level of harm that is trying to be prevented? [8]
This is the second installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Endnotes
- Endgame Volume 1, Derrick Jensen, 2006 page 399-400
- The Failure of Nonviolence, Peter Gelderloos, 2013, page 20/21
- Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Uri Gordon, 2007, page 78-95 https://libcom.org/files/anarchy_alive.pdf
- Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Uri Gordon, 2007, page 79-80, read online
- Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp, 1973, page 3
- Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, Mark Boyle, 2015, page 38-43
- Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, Mark Boyle, 2015, page 45/6
- Igniting a Revolution, Steven Best, Anthony J. Nocella, 2006, page 323
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 22, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
Trump’s election has sabotaged any prospect of reigning in the global warming crisis
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
On Tuesday night, the American people decided to elect Donald J. Trump, a billionaire business mogul and reality TV star who has been accused of raping or otherwise sexually assaulting twenty-three women, who has called for banning immigration to the United States, and who has built a campaign on virulent racism.
He received more than 60 million votes.
There is a lot to process. Those conversations, about the growing tide of white supremacy, about Trump’s pending sexual assault cases, about the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, about the left’s failure to engage with the white community on issues of race, and about the gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement that characterizes the American system, are already taking place.
I want to focus here on one specific issue: global warming. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the sun outside my home. It’s November, and temperatures are more than 20 degrees above the typical average here. This year, 2016, is predicted to be the hottest year on record, beating out last year, which beat out the previous year, which beat out the previous year, each of the last five setting a new mark.
Records are being smashed aside like bowling pins. We are in the midst of a global catastrophe, and it is even worse than previously thought. On the day after the election, news broke that the climate is more sensitive to global warming than most calculations had suspected.
The study in question predicted nearly double the warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had previously expected. The new data predicts between 9 and 14 °F warming by 2100, enough to potentially lead to the extinction of the human species and flip the Earth into a completely new regime more similar to Venus than Earth. Michael Mann, one of the most well-known climate scientists in the world, says these findings and the changing political situation may mean “game over for the climate.”
Into this mess strides Donald Trump, who has said that if elected, he would “immediately approve” the Keystone XL pipeline, roll back environmental regulations, further subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and back out of the Paris climate agreement. Coal and oil stocks, as well as shares of equipment companies and railroads, jumped in price after news of his victory hit.
Right now, thousands of native people and allies are gathering on the cold plains of North Dakota in an attempt to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Under President Obama, such popular movements had a chance—a small chance, but a chance—of success. Under Trump, there won’t be so much leniency, and the road to victory will be much harder.
History is clear; social movements have generally flourished under slightly more progressive administrations, and waned under right wing leadership. What does this mean for our strategy?
I would like to have a peaceful transition to a sane and sustainable world, but it seems increasingly impossible. The American people have shown themselves to be a reactionary force, clinging to their privilege as if it can shield them against the arrows that originate in American foreign policy. Immigrants come here because their lands have been destroyed for American capitalism, and groups like ISIS have emerged from a slurry of war, oil, racism, and fundamentalism.
Perhaps, then, we need a different type of change. When it comes to protecting the planet, stopping pipelines needs to be one of our first priorities. And like other Earth-destroying machinery, pipelines are very vulnerable. They stretch on for miles with no guards, no fences, and no protection.
Recently, a number of activists, including some who I know, were able to approach and shut down all five pipelines that carry tar sands oil into the United States in a coordinated act of non-violent civil disobedience. Their action was brave, but its long-term efficacy depends on whether courts will agree with them that their action was necessary and create a precedent to normalize actions of this type. With another Antonin Scalia on the way to the Supreme Court, a positive outcome is in doubt.
Coordinated action of another type could be more effective in protecting the planet. In plain language, I speak of sabotage. Individuals or networks of people conducting coordinated, small-scale sabotage over a widespread area could cripple the fossil fuel system with a minimum of expense, technical expertise, personnel, and risk. It is simple to disappear into the night, and with proper security culture the possibility of capture is remote. We’ve seen how vulnerable this network is; anyone could do this.
It isn’t idle speculation that such attacks would have a substantial impact. Its actually been done before, most notably in Nigeria, where indigenous people in the Niger River Delta have risen against polluting oil companies many times over the past several decades. Most recently, attacks on oil pipelines earlier this year shut down some 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil processing. Months later, the oil industry still hasn’t recovered.
To many people, this plan will sound insane. Modern life is dependent upon oil in so many ways. But when oil is killing the planet and those in power will not respond to rational argumentation or peaceful protest, and when sixty million people are willing to vote a climate-denying sexual abuser into office, what options are we left with? It is time for serious escalation.
Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 19, 2016 | Strategy & Analysis
This is the first installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
Via Deep Green Resistance UK
2016 is predicted to be the hottest year since records began and environmental devastation is increasing. With so little time left and the whole world at stake, are the radical changes to halt climate change and ecocide being made? The simple answer is no, based on species extinction and the continuing global extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Resistance movements need to be strategic to be effective. This involves selecting appropriate tactics to use and if a tactic is not effective, then choosing another. Nonviolent direct action (NVDA) is important to our struggle to stop environmental destruction, but it is only one tactic. I have found discussions about the appropriate uses of nonviolence, force, and violence unclear and often confusing, which led me to research the topic in greater depth.
Within activist communities and broader society, there are two widely-held perspectives on nonviolence. Some choose NVDA for strategic reasons. They may also see the importance of using force in some situations, if appropriate, but may or may not ever use force themselves. There are also those people who oppose the use of force no matter the circumstances. Any criticism in my articles is directed at the latter perspective as those who hold this perspective routinely mandate nonviolence across whole movements, and categorically reject the use of force or militant resistance, even in self defense. I will refer to people from this perspective as “nonviolence fundamentalists.”
In future articles I will explore what thinkers of the last 150 years have about these ideas, starting with violence. For now I will list those on either side of the debate that I have studied. There are of course others.
Nonviolence fundamentalists include:
Those that support NVDA and the use of force/militant resistance include:
I would also add that most of the people that have written about violence, nonviolence, the use of force or militant resistance are men. I extensively researched women’s contribution to these topics and included everything relevant, without shoehorning them in to appear right on. Women have been very active in struggles using force and nonviolence tactics but it is mainly men that have written about it. This is consistent with men’s dominance in most areas of life. If I have overlooked anyone, I apologise and do set me straight. Some of the amazing women that have been so important to past struggles include Harriet Tubman, Blanca Canales, Angela Davis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, Ulrike Meinhof, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Sojourner Truth.
Featured image: Nonviolent Direct Action at Livermore Lab, byJames Heddle/EON
This is the first installment in a multi-part series. Browse the Protective Use of Force index to read more.
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 18, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health, Listening to the Land
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
This first appeared on Jason Howell’s Howlarium. Special thanks to Jason for his graphics.
From Jason: “Where it’s not uncommon for contemporary writers to root their work in mining—lived experience, the depth of the canon, the cultural moment, whatever—Will Falk, poet, lawyer, and environmental activist from Park City, Utah, makes the whole of his work about listening to the natural world. The effect, in this reader’s opinion, is a kind of anthropocentric-for-biocentric blood transfusion.
“I asked Will to describe what it took for him to get enough media and concrete out of the way so as to hear from the biosphere loud-and-clearly. As fate would have it, he and his partner were gearing up for a camping trip in southern Utah, so he’d have some space to think about it. Here’s what he came back with.”
Survival compels me.
My own survival, the survival of those I love, and the survival of the biosphere compel me. Listening to the land saves my life.
An old, gray seagull flying wobbly through thick, wet snow to speak to me from the concrete ledge of a window I watched Lake Michigan from while I recovered from a suicide attempt in St. Francis Hospital in Milwaukee, WI saved my life. A pregnant mother moose, who shared our single-track 17-mile snowmobile trail at the Unist’ot’en Camp turned to stare me in the eye giving me a glimpse into the wisdom of the wild, saved my life. The wind whispering questions through aspen leaves in Park City, Utah pulled me from my depressed mind a few weeks ago and, again, saved my life.
The compulsion will last as long as my survival. My survival will last as long as the compulsion. I suffer from major depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder caused by the same forces producing total ecological collapse. I must listen to the biosphere to resist depression and humans must listen to the biosphere to stop the destruction of Life.
A novice attorney, I wanted to die. I was so tired.
Before I was a writer, I was a public defender in Kenosha, WI doing my best to push back against a criminal justice system intent on perpetuating institutional racism. I spent all my time rotating between the wooden walls of the courthouse, the glass walls of the office, and the steel walls of the jail.
A novice attorney, I was determined not to let my inexperience affect my clients, but I made mistakes. The only solution I could come up with involved working more urgently and working longer hours. I woke up at 3AM to review my case files. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. I walked back to my beat Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot of the Kenosha County Jail after telling another client there wasn’t much I could do for her, and broke down sobbing with my forehead against the steering wheel in broad daylight. I became exhausted. I made more mistakes.
One night, I came home from dinner and took all the Ambien sleeping pills I had just been prescribed that morning. I wanted to die. I was so tired.
I was also living a life completely mediated by humans. This mediation was total. Physically, my life happened almost completely within atmospheres created by humans: the office, the jail, the courthouse, my apartment building. Spiritually, I had forsaken the Catholicism I was raised in, but instead of recognizing the sacred in every living being around me, my development into a mature member of a natural community stalled in an adolescent insistence that life had no meaning outside the meaning humans could create.
This insistence imprisoned me psychologically as surely as the jail physically imprisoned my clients. I became Sisyphus pushing my boulder up the hill, blind to the countless non-human others producing my life and cut off from natural allies in the biosphere.
As the pills entered my bloodstream and I settled into what I thought was my deathbed, time froze on my consciousness. I’m not sure I believe in a spiritual afterlife, but this last moment before I passed out was a functional eternity. I was confronted with the totality of my life and I realized that if I died this night, I would have failed my role. And, if the pain that was branded onto my mind with my recognition that I could give so much more to Life was the last experience frozen on my consciousness forever, then hell is very real, indeed.
A heavy snow began to fall.
After this suicide attempt, I spent a week in the psyche ward of St. Francis Hospital in Milwaukee. The St. Francis psyche ward was on the seventh floor of an eight-floor building. For exercise, and because there was nothing else to do, I braved the fluorescent lights outside my room and paced the long hallway that made up most of the seventh floor.
At each end of the hallway were wide windows. One looked west into the rows of old company housing for the Milwaukee Iron Company. The other looked east over the waters of Lake Michigan. Patients are not allowed off the seventh floor and there were rusty iron bars outside the glass just in case we were tempted to take that route to fresh air. I tried to open a window facing Lake Michigan anyway. It would not open. A heavy snow began to fall surrounding the hospital in more white. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass pane. The cold felt good.
It was not long before I saw an old spotted seagull awkwardly wheeling and diving through the falling snow. I was mesmerized by the odd gracefulness in his seemingly drunken turns through the snow. His circles brought him closer and closer to my window. I wondered why he was flying through such treacherous conditions. He was, of course, the only bird in the sky. As he flew closer, I was stricken with the beauty of his grayness against the white.
Gray. Color. A contrast to the blankness. I began to believe the drunk old gull was braving the snowstorm to speak to me. He passed a few feet from my window, dipped a wing, and wobbled back toward Lake Michigan. A few moments later he was back. He squeezed through iron bars over my window, faced me, made eye contact, and flew away.
The waves on the lake rippled gray, too. The heavy snow fell slowly, gingerly over the waters. The waves hesitated, hanging a moment in the air, before being swallowed by the lake. White became gray. I drank up the color for hours following one gray wave after another from their birthplace on the horizon until they washed not far below me onto the shore.
I was compelled to write this down. I’ve been watching and listening ever since.
Writing only for myself is masturbatory.
Depression is a chronic illness. Doctors know now that our biological stress response is largely responsible for depression. A body experiencing too much stress, for too long can overproduce stress response hormones. If these hormones are present for a long enough time they literally damage the brain. Depression results from this brain damage. The dominant culture (which I call “civilization”), based on ecological drawdown and enforced scarcity, creates profoundly stressful lives for its members.
Depression bends my mind over itself and makes listening a constant struggle. A classic depression symptom is social withdrawal and isolation. The brain reacts to depression in a similar way to other illnesses. When you get the flu, your body tells you to isolate. The same instinct is triggered with depression.
With the flu, the instinct is adaptive and good for the way it prevents contagion. But with depression the instinct can prove deadly. Isolation leads to rumination and rumination perpetuates the release of the very stress hormones that damage the brain and produce depression. In this way, withdrawal creates a vicious cycle and the cycle must be interrupted. Personally, I experience suicidal ideation too frequently making interruption of this cycle imperative for my personal survival.
Doctors strenuously encourage depressed patients to socialize even when every instinct tells them not to. Spending time with loved ones releases hormones that counteract stress hormones. Socializing also occupies the depressed mind so it cannot ruminate. When doctors insist that their patients spend time with loved ones, however, most people understand this to mean exclusively human loved ones.
That ancient seagull opened me to the vast possibilities for relationship in the natural world. The impulse to write about my experience with the seagull pulled me out of my depressed mind and gave me something to ponder beyond my own pain. I do not typically understand what non-humans are saying right away. Pinyon pine trees do not have tongues, the wind is too vast and too busy for words, and great blue herons do not speak English.
So, I have to ponder the experience. Life speaks in patterns, gestures, and themes that must be teased out. We understand through story and it is no wonder that we discover Life’s meaning in the act of telling stories. I feel that writing only for myself is masturbatory. It might feel good, but it doesn’t help anyone but me. Writing with the desire to share my experience publicly forces me to order my experience in such a way that it makes sense to other humans. In this way, writing becomes social on multiple levels. I listen to non-humans and then I begin public conversations with humans about what I think I’ve heard.
Listening to the biosphere goes well beyond my own survival.
The dominant culture exhibits many of the classic symptoms of depression as well. This culture has isolated itself from the biosphere and is suicidal—stepping ever closer to the brink of total ecological collapse.
This collapse, this suicidality, is produced, in part, by the dominant culture’s belief that humans are the only beings capable of speaking, the only beings worth listening to, the only beings capable of relating with. My friend, the brilliant environmental writer, Derrick Jensen, has given us a name for this phenomenon. He calls it “human supremacy,” and the myth of human supremacy is a foundational story the dominant culture is built upon.
Human supremacy is propagated by the dominant culture because it derives its power from ecological destruction. Before you can destroy non-human others you must silence them. Deep ecologist Neil Evernden has pointed out that the first thing scientists do in vivisection labs is cut the vocal cords of the animals they are going to operate on. The dominant culture cuts the vocal cords of non-humans, of people of color, of women, of anyone it wants to dominate.
I ignored non-human voices for too long and I almost destroyed myself as a result. The dominant culture ignores and actively suppresses non-human voices and is destroying Life as a result. I am not naive enough to believe that writing alone will stop the murder of the biosphere, but writing helps me understand non-human voices, helps me resist the seductions of depression in the process, and is a tool to remind humans of their heritage. I always seek to contribute my writing to serious, organized resistance. I believe my role in this resistance is to combat human supremacy through reminding my readers of the countless, beautiful voices—human and non-human—to listen to in the biosphere.
I am in love with aspen trees, with pinyon-juniper forests, with my one-year old nephew, with my four-year old niece, with their aunt (my amazing partner), with a rainbow trout that tickled my feet in a pool I soaked them in after a 50 mile hike in the Sierras a few summers ago, with that seagull that woke me up to it all. I am in love, so I listen, and when I listen I hear murmurs of fear about ever-growing threats. When you’re in love, you act to protect your beloved. We cannot fail to stop the dominant culture, because if we fail every voice will be silenced forever.
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