by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 5, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Defensive Violence, Human Supremacy
By Chris Hedges, for TruthDig
Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.
The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism “a machine for demolishing limits.” This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are “plunder,” “fraud,” “criminality,” “deceit,” “murder” and “repression.”
Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” wrote the philosopher John Locke, “they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”
The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.
The white men “made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Chief Red Cloud said in old age, “but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book “League of the Iroquois,” written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois’ “whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. …” This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.
Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. “Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was,” Ian Frazier writes in his book “Great Plains,” “because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.” His “dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic,” Frazier writes. “He never met the President” and “never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table.” And “unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.”
Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man’s cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief’s body and said, “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
From TruthDig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/time_to_get_crazy_20120702/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 21, 2012 | Toxification
By EcoWatch
To borrow a popular hockey term, Canada has scored a hat trick of the worst kind: Three major oil spills in just over one month.
The culprit this time around is Enbridge, the Calgary, Alberta-based operator of the world’s longest crude oil and liquids pipeline system, situated in Canada and the U.S. On June 19 the company confirmed that about 1,450 barrels (230,000 litres) of crude oil spilled from a pumping station onto farmland near Elk Point, Alberta, according to The Globe and Mail. Fortunately, this spill managed to occur in an area devoid of waterways.
Others haven’t been so lucky.
On June 7, Albertans living downstream from the Red Deer River suffered a scare when a pipeline owned by Plains Midstream Canada ruptured, spewing around 3,000 barrels of oil and posing a severe risk to the drinking water supply of 100,000 people, according to CBC News—Calgary. This spill began beneath Jackson Creek, a tributary of the Red Deer River, ending in Gleniffer Lake and reservoir where the majority of clean-up efforts and monitoring continue to take place.
According to Canada.com, the “province is still advising people not to draw water directly from the river or lake, and it’s telling people not to swim or fish in the lake, either.”
Topping them all is Pace Oil and Gas Ltd., which spilled an estimated 22,000 barrels of oil mixed with water near Rainbow Lake, in the northwestern corner of Alberta, according to Bloomberg.
Because of its remote location, the Pace Oil and Gas spill managed to stay relatively quiet despite being one of the largest and most calamitous oil spills in North America in recent years. The spill released more oil into the environment than the much higher profile Kalamazoo River spill almost two years ago in Michigan, compliments of—yet again—Enbridge, that pumped around 19,500 barrels into the Kalamazoo and surrounding marshes.
The latest Enbridge oil spill near Elk Point is one more to a tally exceeding 800 spills since 1999, and this is the corporation lobbying to build the massive Northern Gateway Pipeline stretching from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia—crossing the Northern Rocky Mountains and innumerable streams, marshes and vital wildlife habitat.
Will we ever learn from this ongoing train wreck? If history is any indication—and it always is—the answer is probably not. Here in the U.S., we still suffer the relentless indignities of elected officials and company men assuring us that projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline pose no risk to the millions who depend upon the Ogallala aquifer for drinking water.
Perhaps a trip north to Gleniffer Lake might put things in perspective, or a trip to our own southern shores along the Gulf of Mexico. But clearly, this debate isn’t about logic or learning from our mistakes at all.
From EcoWatch
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 14, 2012 | Human Supremacy, NEWS
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
Scientists warn that the Earth may be reaching a planetary tipping point due to a unsustainable human pressures, while the UN releases a new report that finds global society has made significant progress on only four environmental issues out of ninety in the last twenty years. Climate change, overpopulation, overconsumption, and ecosystem destruction could lead to a tipping point that causes planetary collapse, according to a new paper in Nature by 22 scientists. The collapse may lead to a new planetary state that scientists say will be far harsher for human well-being, let alone survival.
“The odds are very high that the next global state change will be extremely disruptive to our civilizations. Remember, we went from being hunter-gathers to being moon-walkers during one of the most stable and benign periods in all of Earth’s history,” co-author Arne Mooers with Simon Fraser University explains in a press release.
If it all sounds apocalyptic, the scientists say it probably should.
“In a nutshell, humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst because the social structures for doing something just aren’t there,” says Mooers. “My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the earth’s history are more than pretty worried. In fact, some are terrified.”
A new bleaker world?
Much like a single ecosystem can collapse if overexploited or degraded for too long, the scientists argue that the global environment could also reach a tipping point, leading to a whole new world. While planetary states have changed throughout Earth’s history—such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals—this would be the first global shift caused by a single species. The 22 authors—including ecologists, biologists, complex-systems theoreticians, geologists and paleontologists—examined how human pressures are modifying our atmosphere, oceans, land, and climate to an extent in which current ecological states could collapse, impoverishing the world.
“The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations,” says lead author Anthony Barnosky, with the University of California, Berkeley. Some species would likely come out as winners in this scenario, but overall biodiversity would crash with drastic impacts for human society.
Research on ecological collapse has shown that once 50-90 percent of an ecosystem is altered, it risks imminent collapse. Extrapolating this to the world as a whole, the researchers point out that today 43 percent of the world’s terrestrial ecosystems have been converted to agriculture or urban use with roads covering most wild areas. Experts say that by 2025, half of the world’s land surface will have been altered. Even untouched areas, however, are feeling the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
“Can it really happen? Looking into the past tells us unequivocally that, yes, it can really happen. It has happened,” Barnosky says. “I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from that 50 percent mark.”
The scientists also compared today’s environmental pressures to past tipping points that led to wholesale planetary changes.
“The last tipping point in Earth’s history occurred about 12,000 years ago when the planet went from being in the age of glaciers, which previously lasted 100,000 years, to being in its current interglacial state,” explains Mooers. “Once that tipping point was reached, the most extreme biological changes leading to our current state occurred within only 1,000 years. That’s like going from a baby to an adult state in less than a year.”However, he adds: “The planet is changing even faster now.”Co-author Elizabeth Hadly says that tipping points may have already occurred in some regions, leading to a ruined environment, worsening conflict, and human misery.”I just returned from a trip to the high Himalayas in Nepal, where I witnessed families fighting each other with machetes for wood—wood that they would burn to cook their food in one evening. In places where governments are lacking basic infrastructure, people fend for themselves, and biodiversity suffers,” she says. “We desperately need global leadership for planet Earth.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 3, 2012 | Strategy & Analysis
By Carl Nussbaum / Deep Green Resistance Orlando
We are in the middle of the largest mass extinction in 65 million years—an extinction that many scientists have argued is the fault of human activity over the last 10,000 years. Around 200 species go extinct each day. 90% of the world’s large fish populations have been decimated by industrial fishing and other industrial activity (This includes cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish, marlin, and others). According to a report issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (An association consisting of around 1,000 organizations and “thousands of participating scientists”), “One in four mammal species, one in eight bird species and one in three amphibian species” are currently threatened with extinction. The majority of coral reefs are dying. The International Energy Agency has said that if fossil fuel infrastructure is not changed, that is, reduced, within 5 years, the earth will be “locked in” to irreversible climate change. Every major life system on this planet is in decline—there is not a single academic peer-reviewed article that says otherwise.
These are serious facts that demand serious responses. However, instead of serious responses, the majority of the left (and I say “left” here because although these issues are relevant to anyone who cares about the continuation of life on the planet, the left is where the bulk of environmental discourse is coming from) has offered up solutions and responses that in no way match the size or the scope of the problem we’re facing. We’ve been told that in order to mitigate environmental damage we must change our diet, our cars, our minds, and of course, our light bulbs. Though, it has occurred to a number of us that these solutions (and similar others) are not only ineffective; they’re downright irresponsible as “ends” meant to address the destruction of the planet. To place the blame squarely on the individual and then expect the individual to be the source and ends of social transformation is to completely ignore the role of power and particular unjust and brutal arrangements of power (Not only that, but the sum of these actions if—and this is a big “if”—everyone undertakes them, is still nowhere near the kind of reduction needed to halt the destruction of the earth). Critique aside, what would the grounds, philosophically, look like of a movement that could take into account the workings of power and hold as its ends a livable planet and just social relations?
By the sheer magnitude of the problem—that is, overcoming the structures and institutions who seem hell-bent on destroying the planet—an acceptance of predetermined or a priori boundaries, whether moral, legal, ethical, religious, etc., is undeniably a privileging of the dead over the living, of the ideal over the real. Predetermined principles and boundaries for action as well as the structure that they’re situated in and emit from, assume that we take their being and continuance as primary and given, and that we take what is to be changed (or the object of change) as a kind of dependent variable. In this case, the dependent variable treated by the proponents of civilization as well as mainstream environmentalists is the biosphere. This is implicit in action and stated ideological aims. Author Derrick Jensen has pointed this out and notes that this sort of thinking—that which, at any cost, seeks to save civilization—is “entirely backwards.” Instead, he argues, “We need to do whatever it takes to save life on the planet.”
Submitting action to, say, a moral or ethical category—a purely metaphysical category to be sure—betrays the material thing that gave rise and meaning to the ethic or moral. What we ought to be doing is an entire reconfiguring—consulting the meaningful thing in the world (humans, nonhumans, a landbase, etc.) and then tailoring an ethos, i.e., action, to fit. It is the material grounds that make possible (and impart meaning), in the first and last instance, any ideal, metaphysical principle.
But what we see on the left (and the right for that matter) is an obsession over one’s own personal moral purity—of “action” that, in every way possible, fits into a moral/ethical framework, magically relieving the individual of any moral burden and, more importantly, guilt. The tendency of activists to focus almost solely on the individual as the basic unit of social change is, traditionally, within political theory, the hallmark of liberalism (this is not, to note, meant to name the political Left or Right). At its fundamental level, the liberal understands change as emitting from the individual “where the idea,” activist Cameron Murphey explains, “is that social change happens step by step, person by person…and in this way society is seen as some fluid collection of individuals where the sum of these individuals still equals its parts.” Essentially, this thinking, from its subjectivist (and ultimately narcissistic) roots, leads to conceiving of the means of change, in total, Murphey explains, as “an idealistic process—meaning that it happens in the mind.” The problem here is what instigated the Marxist critical tradition—the “tyranny of ideas,” the neglect of material circumstance in favor of the more gentle fantasy of ideas. Granted, there certainly does need to be a change regarding individual consciousness, moving away from the dominant ideology and so forth, but it is not to be taken as a primary end.
Yet it is taken as a primary end in the liberal tradition. Theodore Adorno’s insight regarding constitutive, i.e., bourgeois, subjectivity is relevant here: The liberal, supposing that simply and solely changing one’s mind or attitude constitutes, correlatively, the necessary (and only necessary) change in the world, forgets the objective circumstances that constituted the problem (as well as the subject) in the first place. As Marx had argued that the point of philosophy is to change reality, the liberal argues that we must change ourselves. Thus, goes the liberal argument, that if enough people can make this inner change, then it will inevitably change external circumstances.
Internal/external philosophical problems aside; I think it’s much more useful to consider if such a tactic, solely considered, has ever worked in struggles for liberation. The answer, historically, is a resounding “No.” To illustrate, author and activist Lierre Keith parallels the history of colonialism and indigenous people with the ideals of the contemporary “alternativist” environmental ideology (The idea that by living differently, i.e., “green,” people will naturally be attracted to adopt a different way of life.). She explains that if this liberal model of “personal example-as-political strategy,” was indeed an effective method at creating change (and not just a feel-good, religious-like purism), then those who encounter communities that seem to embody the ideal most, i.e., those living sustainably and in ostensible harmony with the earth, will likely want to adopt such a way of living. The go-to example, indeed the often-cited inspiration for such an ideal, is, for the most part, indigenous cultures. But, as Keith explains, in the history of colonizers and invaders into indigenous lands “the face-to-face example of an egalitarian sustainable culture has never once changed the invaders. It has never once brought on an epiphany amongst the invaders.” She adds, “The dominant culture will not change because it sees the non-violent values that we embody and it will not change because it beholds our beautiful free-range compost pile.” When it has been employed, moral example and persuasion has worked in converting a few, but it has never been enough to convince those in power to renounce the privileges and benefits that come with such power. The difference is between liberal ideal and material reality. Again, to stress: changing oneself is necessary, but it is not the ends of change.
The focus, considering what’s at stake, must extend beyond the illusion of the isolated subject, beyond the notion of a singular self and an identity that is based on what one consumes. We are reminded of Gandhi’s famous line—the dogma of contemporary liberals—to “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” This notion becomes problematic if one does change one’s consciousness, yet the objective material reality still stays the same. That is, if I have resolved to approach the world with a kind of responsible, ecological consciousness yet, en masse, the world continues to be destroyed, my response betrays the purpose of my resolve in the first place. On the other hand, we could argue that a truly “responsible, ecological consciousness” is, indeed, one that looks beyond personal change and into the shared material world.
The internal logic of current political and economic structures requires that they cede nothing that would invite their own collapse; in plain terms, the State and major economic entities will not, voluntarily, stop destroying the planet. They must, instead, be stopped. This means creating and implementing a formidable revolutionary praxis with strategies and tactics that are faithful to the end goal of a living planet. It means asking what kinds of responses are appropriate given our situation. A philosophy of resistance to the dominant ideology, if its guiding principle is the ensuring of a livable planet (livable for both humans and non-humans), isn’t concerned, necessarily, with moralism, idealist ethics or the like, but is, instead, pragmatically concerned with the creation or bringing about of conditions such that the planet’s destruction by those who could otherwise not engage in such destruction is rendered impossible. The agency of those destroying is the primary difference from other more “natural” mass extinctions. And it is the fact of agency in all of this that affords the possibility of active resistance—of naming power and overcoming that power.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 28, 2012 | Climate Change, NEWS
By Yale University
Are members of the public divided about climate change because they don’t understand the science behind it? If Americans knew more basic science and were more proficient in technical reasoning, would public consensus match scientific consensus?
A study published today online in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that the answer to both questions is no. Indeed, as members of the public become more science literate and numerate, the study found, individuals belonging to opposing cultural groups become even more divided on the risks that climate change poses.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study was conducted by researchers associated with the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and involved a nationally representative sample of 1500 U.S. adults.
“The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses,” said Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School and a member of the study team. “The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public’s limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values. The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first,” he said.
“Cultural cognition” is the term used to describe the process by which individuals’ group values shape their perceptions of societal risks. It refers to the unconscious tendency of people to fit evidence of risk to positions that predominate in groups to which they belong. The results of the study were consistent with previous studies that show that individuals with more egalitarian values disagree sharply with individuals who have more individualistic ones on the risks associated with nuclear power, gun possession, and the HPV vaccine for school girls.
In this study, researchers measured “science literacy” with test items developed by the National Science Foundation. They also measured their subjects’ “numeracy”—that is, their ability and disposition to understand quantitative information.
“In effect,” Kahan said, “ordinary members of the public credit or dismiss scientific information on disputed issues based on whether the information strengthens or weakens their ties to others who share their values. At least among ordinary members of the public, individuals with higher science comprehension are even better at fitting the evidence to their group commitments.”
Kahan said that the study supports no inferences about the reasoning of scientific experts in climate change.
Researcher Ellen Peters of Ohio State University said that people who are higher in numeracy and science literacy usually make better decisions in complex technical situations, but the study clearly casts doubt on the notion that the more you understand science and math, the better decisions you’ll make in complex and technical situations. “What this study shows is that people with high science and math comprehension can think their way to conclusions that are better for them as individuals but are not necessarily better for society.”
According to Kahan, the study suggests the need for science communication strategies that reflect a more sophisticated understanding of cultural values.
“More information can help solve the climate change conflict,” Kahan said, “but that information has to do more than communicate the scientific evidence. It also has to create a climate of deliberations in which no group perceives that accepting any piece of evidence is akin to betrayal of their cultural group.”
From PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-05-yale-apathy-climate-unrelated-science.html
Photo by Saif71.com on Unsplash
