The Last Old-Growth Forests Are Being Logged in Western Canada

The Last Old-Growth Forests Are Being Logged in Western Canada

by | Jul 7, 2020 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction

In this episode of Resistance Radio Derrick Jensen interviews Michelle Connolly, who is an activist living in Prince George, BC, the traditional territory of the Lheidli T’enneh Nation. She has spent much of her life exploring and experiencing natural forests, and has an educational background in forest ecology, although she is not a researcher and does not do science for a living. Michelle is part of Conservation North.

Conservation North is a 100% volunteer-run community group based in Prince George, British Columbia (BC), traditional territory of the Lheidli T’enneh. We support and advocate for the protection of wild plants, animals and their habitats in northern BC.

Their mission is to advocate for the maintenance and protection of critical natural habitats capable of, and necessary for, maintaining long term regional biological diversity. To recognize and promote the fundamental importance of natural landscapes as living sources of adaptation to climatic and other environmental change.

Their goals include full legal protection for all remaining endangered old growth forest in the Inland and Boreal Rainforests, particularly the productive, accessible forests that are currently being targeted by industrial logging.

Resistance Radio covers ecology and feminist themes. Episodes can be found on YouTube or browse all of the interviews in our Resistance Radio archive.

See below for more videos of logging in the region:

Featured image via Conservation North.

Squeeze Every Drop of Slave’s Blood Out of Ourselves

Squeeze Every Drop of Slave’s Blood Out of Ourselves

by | Mar 29, 2018 | Colonialism & Conquest

Editor’s note: this is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s talk, which you can listen to here.

What does it mean to decolonize my heart and mind, and how do I go about doing that?

    by Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance

Many indigenous people have said to me that the first and most important thing we have to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Part of what that means is to question every assumption that you ever had about the way life is. Many indigenous people have told me the most important difference between indigenous and western ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners perceive listening to the natural world as a metaphor rather than a literal action. Indigenous people around the world generally perceive the world as consisting of other beings to enter into relationship with and to whom we have responsibility, as opposed to resources for us to exploit.

“When I look at trees I see dollar bills.”

If you look at trees and see dollar bills, you‘re going to treat them one way. If  you look at trees and see trees, you‘ll treat them another way. And if you look at this particular tree and see this particular tree, you‘ll treat them differently still. The same is true of course for women, which is one reason I am so completely opposed to pornography; when I look at women and I see orifices, I‘ll treat them one way; if I look at women and I see women I‘ll treat them another way, and if I look at this particular woman and I see this particular woman I‘ll treat her differently still. 

How you perceive the world affects how you behave in the world. So, a lot of the decolonizing is to change unquestioned assumptions that control how you perceive and act in the world.

A young writer approached Anton Tschechow and said he wanted to write a story and he didn’t know what to write. So Tschechow said: “I want you to write a story about a man, who squeezes every drop of slave’s blood out of his body.”

We have been trained since infancy to be slaves to the system. To be addicted to the system. The word “addict” comes from the same root as the word “edict,” and it means “to enslave.” In ancient Rome, a judge would issue an edict, that would addict someone to someone else, that would enslave them.

We are enslaved to the system, and we need to squeeze every drop of slave’s blood out of ourselves. Another way to look at this is to recognize that, as Robert J. Lifton has written about so well, before you can commit any mass atrocity you have to convince yourself that what you‘re doing is not in fact an atrocity, but instead a good thing.

So the Nazis were not committing genocide and mass murder, they were instead purifying the Aryan race. The North American settlers were not committing genocide and mass murder and land theft, they were manifesting their destiny. Today, nobody is killing the planet, they are instead developing natural resources.

I shared a stage with Ward Churchill one time and we were chatting backstage, and I said ”I can‘t believe how stupid the Nazis were to take such careful records of their atrocities, meticulous records of how much gold they pulled from teeth … why would they take such strict records of these terrible actions?” He just looked and me and said, “Derrick, what do you think the GNP is?“ GNP is a very highly detailed description of the conversion of the living to the dead, of the dismemberment of the living planet. 

So part of decolonizing is to recognize that things we think are good, like civilization, like industrialism, like developing natural resources, may in fact be quite terrible and atrocious. This is absolutely crucial work. One of the things that happens through this process that is crucial to decolonizing is transfering your loyalty away from the dominant system and toward the landbase. This is pretty much what all of my work is about. Once you transfer your loyalty to the landbase, everything else is just technical, you know, what to do then. But until you do that your loyalty will still be, by definition, with the dominant culture.

When I do resistance radio interviews, I‘m always very clear before the interview that you can be as biocentric and ecocentric as you want. If we‘re talking about the Mississippi River, or talking about the Colorado River, or the Columbia River, I don‘t actually care about agriculture. My loyalty is completely with the river. If the water stays in the Colorado River, I don‘t care if that means that cotton growers will be driven out of business, or that golf courses in Arizona will go dry. Because my loyalty is not with industrial capitalism; my loyalty is with the living planet. 

How do we do it? We start to question every assumption. There is a sense in which it‘s very easy and a sense in which it‘s really hard.

The sense in which it‘s very easy is that, like many environmental activists, we begin by wanting to protect a specific piece of ground. But we end up questioning the foundations of western civilization. That‘s because we start to ask questions, and once the questions start they‘ll never stop. So we can ask: why is this land being destroyed? And the answer is usually: because someone is going to make money off of it. Or economic production; it‘s good for the economy. Then you ask: why is most land harmed? Well, it‘s good for the economy.

So then you ask: have all cultures had economies based on destroying their land base? No. And then you ask: what does it mean that you have an economy based on destroying the land base? And then you ask: what is the endpoint of having an economy based on destroying the land base? And of course, the answer is obvious: you destroy the land base, and you destroy the capacity of the earth to support life. As we see.

In that sense decolonizing is really easy. All you have to do is to ask one question. It‘s the same with rape culture. You ask: why was this woman raped? Then you ask: why is any woman raped? Why are so many women raped? Has every culture been a rape culture? And once those questions start, you head back to the roots of the problem. In the case of rape, the patriarchal violation imperative, in the case of civilization, well, civilization’s economic arrangements, and also the patriarchal violation imperative.

In another sense it‘s very hard. You have to give up on everything that brought meaning before. You die, that‘s the point. That‘s a very scary process, and it can be a very painful process, it‘s a process that many of us went through in our twenties. There is that great line by Joseph Campbell: if the signs and symbols of the dominant culture work for you, then there will be a sense of meaning in your life and a sense of accord with the universe. If the signs and the symbols of Catholicism work for you, then you have a 2000 year old path of meaning laid out for you.

If the American Dream works for you, and making money brings you meaning, then you have a couple of hundred years system of meaning set out for you. I would say that meaning is really perverse, but we‘ll leave that. Campbell then says: if those signs and symbols don‘t work for you, then basically you‘ll find your life meaningless, and you‘re set adrift. Then you have to go on what he called a hero journey, and I‘m sorry for the sexism of the language. That‘s the journey, that we all have to find to go through, to find meaning in our own lives. 

Life consists of a series of deaths and rebirths. It‘s pretty extraordinary that the central message of the Jesus story is completely missed. It‘s not that Jesus was a real human being who died and then was resurrected; instead it‘s that for a new part of us to be born, an old part of us has to die. This is true in any case. When we are in our late teens and early twenties, we have to die as children to be born as adults. That part is left behind, and a new part emerges. That can be incredibly painful and scary, which is why cultures around the world have had social means by which the young people would be shepherded through that process.

We don‘t have that. We certainly don‘t have any social approval for it. Instead, people are pulled back into the culture at every moment. This culture tries to bring us back through television, through books, through economically forcing you to stay in the system, making you economically dependent upon the system by telling you that you are a consumer, and not a citizen or a human animal who needs habitat. It‘s constantly reinforced. But if you can find another community, a community of people who value living trees over dollars, who value the real world, whose loyalty is with the real world, that can really help this passage.

The really difficult part of decolonizing is that it involves a great definite death and rebirth. A death of faith that the system will work out, a full internalization of the understanding that the dominant culture hates life, and that the dominant culture will kill everything on the planet unless it‘s stopped. That‘s what decolonization feels like; it‘s the death of one‘s loyalty to the system that raised you.

If space aliens had come down from out of space, and were vacuuming the oceans, changing the climate, putting dioxin in every mother‘s breast milk, obliterating the planet and giving us computers, and tomatoes in January, and whatever goodies we want; if space aliens were doing this, most of us would not have a hard time decolonizing because we would see it. But after five, and ten and fifteen generations, people won‘t see it any more.

One of the reasons we‘ve become so stupid about this is because from childhood we pledged allegiance to this culture. We were taught that this culture is more important than a living planet.

Once again, we need to think about this as though it were space aliens who were destroying the planet. Because it doesn’t really matter who is destroying the planet; they are destroying the planet and they need to be stopped.

So for me, the process of decolonizing has, as its very essence, making one‘s loyalty to the real world.

Yellowstone National Park Starts Capturing Wild Bison

Yellowstone National Park Starts Capturing Wild Bison

by | Jan 10, 2017 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction

     by Buffalo Field Campaign

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK / GARDINER, MONTANA:  Yellowstone National Park has initiated wild bison capture operations in their Stephens Creek bison trap, and plans to send hundreds to slaughter in coming weeks. Yellowstone asserts that these actions are necessary to appease Montana’s livestock industry which claims wild bison pose a threat. Bison were recently bestowed with the honor of being designated as the United States’ National Mammal.

“Bison were recently granted national mammal status by the U.S. Congress because they embody such monumental significance in this country, as a symbol of the wild, untamed land, as the true shapers and stewards of native grasslands and prairie communities, and for their profound cultural importance to many indigenous tribes,” said Stephany Seay of Buffalo Field Campaign. “Yet here we have the supposed care-takers of the country’s last wild, migratory herds shipping them to slaughter to cater to the whims of producers of an invasive species – the domestic cow.”

Bison once roamed most of North America, numbering tens of millions strong. They were nearly driven to extinction in an effort to subjugate Native Peoples and to clear the land for livestock grazing. Yellowstone National Park boasts the last stronghold of continuously wild American buffalo in North America. The roughly 600,000 bison who exist in the country today are largely privately owned and ranched as domestic livestock, or intensively managed on public lands. The migratory wildlife species is ecologically extinct throughout its native range, with Yellowstone and small fractions of neighboring Montana being the last place they continue to survive.

Capture operations at Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek bison trap began Saturday, January 7, 2017. BFC field patrols in the Gardiner Basin report that forty-four wild buffalo are currently being held. Yellowstone and other bison managers plan to slaughter or domesticate — if a controversial quarantine plan is approved — upwards of 1300 wild bison this winter, all in an effort to appease the powerful Montana livestock industry. Livestock interests claim that wild bison may pose a threat of spreading the livestock bacteria brucellosis back to cattle, something that has never happened in the wild. Livestock proponents also claim that Yellowstone’s bison population is too numerous for the land base, yet Yellowstone’s grasslands are thriving, and wild buffalo have never come close to overreaching sustainability within the Park.

“Montana’s livestock lobby continues to play deadly political games with this keystone species which is not in the least guilty of the crimes cattlemen blame them with,” said Seay. “In truth, invasive cattle have left death, pollution, and destruction in their wake across the lands of the West, and only wild, migratory buffalo can heal these injuries. Only wild buffalo can restore the grasslands and prairie communities, which are some of the most threatened habitats in the world.”

In addition to capture, wild buffalo face other fatal dangers if they migrate out of Yellowstone’s boundary into Montana.  Like other migratory ungulates bison must leave the park in order to survive Yellowstone country’s harsh winters. Less than a mile from Yellowstone’s trap, just outside the boundary, hunters wait, ready to shoot any who leave the park.

Capture operations are going to interfere significantly with state and treaty hunting, which is currently in full swing. Wild buffalo are being hunted along Yellowstone’s border by hunters who hold Montana tags, and by four Native tribes — the Confederated Salish & Kootenai, Nez Perce, Shoshone Bannock, and the Umatilla Confederacy — who hunt buffalo under treaty right. Hunters are upset that Yellowstone has begun capturing so early, and most are adamantly opposed to the capture and slaughter of wild, migratory buffalo.

“In one direction lies the trap, in the other the gun, and these attacks last for months on end without respite,” said BFC’s Seay.

While BFC does not agree with the way buffalo hunting is currently taking place, given the limited landscape, small buffalo population, and firing line-style, we do hope that we will strengthen our common ground with hunters and bolster solidarity efforts aimed at ending the trapping of wild buffalo for good. Unfortunately, the limited landscape where buffalo are allowed to roam facilitates highly unethical hunting practices which not only manifest in the gunning down of wild buffalo at Yellowstone’s borders, but forces the buffalo to flee back into Yellowstone and become trapped by park officials.

“Buffalo are bottled up in the Gardiner Basin and have no escape. Hunters at the Park’s boundary are in competition with each other, and also in a race against the trap,” BFC’s campaign coordinator Mike Mease. “In the midst of such management madness, wild buffalo have nowhere in the Gardiner Basin where they aren’t being shot by hunters or captured for slaughter by Yellowstone officials.”

At a fundamental level, Montana and its livestock industry are responsible for the buffalo slaughter. Buffalo Field Campaign is working to change and challenge the status quo of the Interagency Bison Management Plan. Wild bison advocates must work to repeal MCA 81-2-120 and remove the Montana Department of Livestock’s authority over wild buffalo, and also insist on a new plan that respects wild buffalo like wild elk in Montana.

“Any action that does not fight this intolerance and excessive killing, or that fails to advocate for the buffalo’s ability to live freely on the lands that are their birthright, poses a threat to the buffalo’s long term survival and evolutionary potential,” said Stephany Seay. “Montana has played its cards so slyly that they aren’t feeling much of the heat anymore; instead, all the entities who should be the strongest allies for wild buffalo — Native Peoples, subsistence hunters, Yellowstone National Park, buffalo advocates — are pointing fingers at each other. It’s the same old game of divide and conquer.”

Buffalo Field Campaign exists to protect the natural habitat of wild migratory buffalo and native wildlife, to stop the slaughter and harassment of America’s last wild buffalo, and to work with people of all nations to honor the sacredness of wild buffalo.

Strangely Like Gulag

by | Jul 31, 2016 | Colonialism & Conquest

By Suprabha Seshan / Journal of the Krishnamurti Schools

A slightly different version of this piece first appeared in Local Futures: Economics of Happiness.  Thanks to all for their permission and assistance in republishing.

We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken into two: others like himself, and those to be used. He will never realize that he still has all his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again.

–Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

Every morning between 8:00 and 9:00 am in this upwardly-mobile-yet backward district, the country-roads are full of children commuting to school, hoisting bags laden with what they believe is the wisdom and know-how of modern culture. They are going for vidyabhyaasam (education, or more literally speaking, ‘the exercise of knowledge’), and they go to the keepers of this knowledge, to teachers in schools. Everyone (parents, children, the state and society) deems this to be good and necessary.

For many years, I’ve been observing more and more of my rural and tribal neighbours pack their children off to school. While I’ve long been a champion of equal opportunities (including equal wages), I’m now starting to believe that a dark and dangerous psychic predicament is falling upon this land, in part aided by the simultaneous entry of television into village homes, and a slew of fickle government policies, in the bid for progress, modernity and the end of poverty.

I’ve been observing how self-reliance and land-based sustenance have been, more or less, replaced by a mobile populace commuting daily in the hope of finding skills, knowledge, support, wisdom and security elsewhere. I believe that the notion that the ‘other is better’ than self and home, that this ‘other’ can be acquired through hard work, enterprise, subsidies and bank loans which constitute progress, that everyone is now entitled to this ‘other’, is here in our midst.

Since mental and social strife are also increasing (in the form of various disorders and illnesses), perhaps this version of modernity, underneath all the glitter and promise, needs some examination. Is it for instance, instilling aspirations that can never be truly fulfilled? Is it exchanging one type of poverty for another? What happens to family and community relations once the young leave? Where do these children go on to, once schooled?

The subsidiary thesis of this essay is that modern education serves a version of Gulag, by forcing our young to suffer unspeakable conditions at an early age, by compelling them to do school work and home work for a greater part of their day. By sustaining this over long periods, at the most crucial time in their vulnerable years, it breaks them, to refashion them into a pliable workforce. By the end of schooling, the young are yoked, through fear and the promise of salvation if they succeed. If they fail, as indeed most do, they are consigned to lesser destinies. This arduous entrainment, under enforced routine and vigilance, is essential for the great global workplace, and can only happen with various forms of rewards, promises, threats, violence and incarceration.

Incarceration (both voluntary and involuntary), when sustained and normalized, leads to a range of issues—shutdown, frustration, disorder, escape, split psychologies, helplessness, dissociation, physical ailments and phobias. These can be seen amongst children, prisoners, slaves, caged and beaten animals, controlled peoples.

The primary thesis of this essay is that the psychic predicament just outlined goes hand in hand with the destruction of life, with the catastrophic end of the biosphere.

I am the resident environmental educator of the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a tiny conservation centre in a rural setting at the edge of a forest in Kerala. My work is to enable educational processes ranging from the short-term single encounter to entire curricula based on nature. While my friends and I teach mainly about plants and animals and the tropical forest environment, our mission is to grow a culture based on nature. We believe this to be of paramount importance in the coming decades—to create places of resilience, where plants, animals and humans have a chance of surviving the ecological holocaust that is upon us all.

Image: the blooming of the Titan Arum, the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence, more than 3 meters in height. Ananda Banerjee, Live Mint

Image: the blooming of the Titan Arum, the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence, more than 3 meters in height. Ananda Banerjee, Live Mint

A DIY manual for starting schools in a new land might read:

First persuade, seduce, bribe or devastate the people. Break up their society, their beliefs, and their ways of life. Take over their rivers, and their forest. Do this by hook or crook. Or use plain force, no pretence. Convince them that it’s for their own good; even better, work on the young. Instil the idea that you have something supremely better to offer.

Draw them into the concrete jungle, into the cyber machine, into the factorial workplace, into the idea of the good life in the shining city. At all times control their food and water; this instills fear and compliance. Then, sever their allegiance to their bodies and psyches; hook them to the machine.

Be the mighty provider.

Evicted populations, trans-located communities, weakened land-based cultures, migrant workforces need to be dealt with; they need to be fed, watered, educated, employed, treated, housed and kept docile with entertainment. You have them when you’ve sold them the idea of choice while you’ve closed all the exit points, and they eat what you supply. Enter a new species of human bred on petroleum-driven food, petroleum-driven water, petroleum-driven health, petroleum-driven culture, petroleum-driven mind. The trademark of this taxon? Supreme entitlement.

Little bodies I’ve known, bodies tumbling, climbing, swimming, running, now sit still for long hours, with book/notebook/pencil in hand, in thrall, if not of the authority at the far end of the classroom, then of their fantasies. Little minds I’ve known, curious, aware, sensitive, attuned to the lives of creatures, rivers, land and each other thrown into the maw of the global machine, to be carried away to faraway lands and cities.

The word teacher comes with hefty lessons. The young are given thoughts, ideas and behaviours to follow or imitate, and to believe without question, to accept without dispute, and to ignore the call of their own bodies. By the end of schooling students take the following to be truths—everything comes with a price tag; it’s possible to have an economy without an ecology; the earth is irrelevant; other humans are irrelevant; life is a matter of goods, gadgets, cash transactions and services.

It’s a rare teacher who hugs a child, a rare school where children spend more time playing than sitting at desks; a rare home, and a rare community that does not send its children away to the cold vigilant ‘care’ of ever-distant adults of varying backgrounds and temperaments, teaching ever-distant things, for the sake of progress and human betterment.

This sending away, for many children, experienced variously as severance, uprooting or exile, is done with good intention, and full conviction. Indeed, the state of most homes, and most communities, is pretty bleak. Adults send their young ones away, to be saved mostly from themselves, from lives of mental, social or physical penury.

At school the attention-commanding teacher spawns inevitably a secret second life for the child, open eyes with still bodies, and minds ranging far and free. ‘The split’ that is now widely recognized to be at the root of social dysfunction and psychopathy is spawned by authority, in other words fear, and mostly in school. Forced bodies, forced behaviours and forced thoughts. Deviance is the only way out.

The Left, the fringe, the rebels and the spiritually-minded have clearly outlined how schools breed factory workers, zombies and psychopaths. I’d like to propose that schooling is necessary for building a hierarchy of egos by destroying the individual’s inherence in community through an insidiously brutal system of reward and punishment normalised in the name of education and social advancement. This hierarchy of egos, with an elite at the top commanding much of the world’s wealth and people, is essential to genocide and ecocide.

Today, I’m on a journey with a friend of mine, a Kurchiya tribesman. We’ve just come out of a forest to a town bursting with tourist operations, shops selling trinkets, hippie clothing, foods and multinational beverages. A protest march is spilling onto the streets. I look back towards the jungle, with its thousands of species of living beings, its hills, rivers, valleys, and rain clouds swirling, upswelling. Then my gaze cursorily moves over a famous quote painted on a compound wall, ‘Education is the most powerful weapon with which you can change the world’.

My first thought is that different realities can be juxtaposed in one eye sweep. Second, obviously Mandela was not a pacifist. Third, there’s a premise here, that education is a positive thing, and that there is a shared definition of education. Fourth, Hmmm, that sounds like propaganda, it’s a statement aiming to change the world. Fifth, if the word weapon is being used, surely there’s a war going on, or theft, injustice, or unspeakable violence, and that education is part of militant struggle. My sixth thought is that that quote is now used by liberals, right-wingers, leftists, corporate-types and has over two million hits on Google! Just goes to show how great quotes can be co-opted to serve any agenda!

Are the following true or false, or just inconvenient?

Modern education serves the corporate mindset, which serves a psychopathic mind-set that is behind planetary destruction.

Modern education feeds young minds and bodies into the industrial machine. It does this, overtly or covertly, by destroying traditional forms of community and replacing them with notions of the global workforce, the global market. By doing this it ends up serving forces of capitalism, industrialism, and a system that rewards the elite.

Increasingly, modern education is predicated on authoritarian expertise, as well as what Lewis Mumford called authoritarian technics. These are indispensable to the dominant culture.

Modern education fetishizes abstraction. It rewards adepts of abstraction and standardization. By starting this early in life, the body becomes subservient to concept and clock, to the virtual, the distant and the measurable.

The standards set by modern education are impossible to achieve for a greater part of humanity. These are set by the dominant culture against its own people, let alone other cultures and traditions, and require a failure system, thereby providing the labour for industry. In other words, modern schooling fractures the individual in a number of irreparable ways, in the name of progress and human betterment.

The fractures are complex, and many: the child from sustained intimate body contact with mother, with family, and from neighbours; the child’s mind from it’s body, from the natural environment, common/community sense, the land-base; the real from the abstract; from the multi-dimensional, to the two, and the virtual; from local history to the distant and someone else’s future or past (presented as if it’s ‘ours’); the child from the organic; the child from wholeness, towards a fragmentedness (to a state of continual defensiveness); the child from magic, oral histories, gleaming cosmologies, peopled and alive to facts derived by unknown people and machines; the child from living beings to inanimate things; the child from rootedness and sense of place; the child from natural, cyclical, expansive time.

Through the process of indoctrination, enculturation, socialisation and a belief that the children are tabula rasa, and need to be filled, a splitting is achieved in a slow and deliberate way.

Life is thus reduced to a matter of negotiating between split worlds, split mind-bodies, split communities, split realities, split values, split responsibilities, split knowledge domains, split geographies (this is home, that is school), split identities, split loyalties.

How can a little human being possibly tolerate this?

R D Laing wrote:

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high IQs, if possible.

Is it a stretch of imagination that school life is a continuous process of disintegration and estrangement? By the end of formative education, study after study guarantees that few remain with healthy levels of self-esteem and self-worth, including the ones who worked hard, and proved to themselves that they could achieve their goals and desires. How many students leave school with vibrant connections to communities that they will contribute to, as it has contributed to them? How many are comfortable in their skins? How many remain ‘whole’? The subtext for graduates of schooling goes thus—her body is better than mine, their body type is better than our body type; his mind is better than mine; their minds are better than ours. Their culture is better than mine—television says it’s so.

My friend, a superlative tracker, now raises his children on a diet of Animal Planet and Discovery channels, homework, white rice, white sugar. No jungle meat, no walks on the wild side. I ask him if he intends to teach his jungle craft to his children, for what use would it be if they can’t hunt anymore, if there are bans on collecting wild medicinal plants. He says he will, that he wants his children to know healing with plants, and the ways of animals, but that he also wants them to go to school. Vidyabhyaasam is a good and necessary thing, he too declares. I ask him about Kurchiya vidyabhyaasam. He misunderstands me and says they have no schools. I ask him how they teach their young. He replies that girls and boys are socialized to become responsible members of their community, with different sets of instructions for either sex, offered by elders in the community or their parents, through a variety of rituals, celebrations, guidance and tasks. Children start early to follow adults. Boys, for instance, have bows made for them when they are very small, just to play with, and then they start accompanying the men to the forest, where there is a lot to learn about every animal, and about the forest.

I figured out today that at any given moment in this decade, approximately two billion humans are at school- (and university-) going age. Whether they receive an education or not, that’s two billion human bodies in preparation for industrial capitalism’s greatest venture—converting the living body of the planet into profit through manufacturing goods and services.

The math itself is not hard, it’s far from cognitively challenging. Assuming that most of them get to the tenth standard, at any given point in time 200 million are either graduating or failing to graduate. Those failing to graduate will end up in factories, slums, the streets, the military, and of course detention facilities.

Those graduating will go on to higher education. Assuming that 10 per cent go on for higher education, twenty million are in universities. After three years of college, approximately seven million graduate or fail to graduate. Those failing to graduate go to factories. Those graduating go on for PhDs, and most of them will serve the corporate research agenda. It is guaranteed that all will serve the dominant culture in one way or another; all will serve the industrial production system. As will my Kurchiya friend’s children, assuming that the world’s still here when they reach adulthood.

Pink Floyd asked “Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” in the song Wish You Were Here (1975).

The Kurchiyas were mercenaries in the battle of a Malabar chieftain against the British colonizers. They were fierce rebels and proud fighters. They could read the forest better than you and I can read a book. Now they work for wages, and their children go to school. Once they’ve been educated and urbanised, their bows will be mass-produced for tourist outlets; their elders will recount tales of valour to travellers in homestays, between television commercials; and their amazing bodies will succumb to various forms of civilization-induced diseases like diabetes, hypertension and cancer.

An oft-touted development mandate goes something like this, ‘Get the children in school, the crime rates will drop’. The more I see the effects of modern civilization the more I think, “Get those children in school, make them extensions of the machine, and sure, the living world, the real world, including themselves, will drop.”

Krishnamurti writes in Education and the Significance of Life:

Where there is love there is instantaneous communion with the other, on the same level and at the same time. It is because we ourselves are so dry, empty and without love that we have allowed governments and systems to take over the education of our children and the direction of our lives; but governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.

A little more on Gulag, used here metaphorically to lift a veil of denial of a cruel and inhuman system of oppression under our very noses, one that most of us have been through, and even subscribe to. People survived Gulags, the official acronym of the Soviet penitentiary system, one intended to punish, or re-educate criminals, psychopaths, and tens of millions of political dissidents, a system that was promoted as a progressive and educational service to the state, through enforced labour. The conditions were brutal, saturated with death and deprivation, and more than a million died. Likewise, our schools are mostly brutal, saturated with fear, where billions of souls die in their hearts and minds, hardly the stuff of human betterment and progress. How many of us survive our schooling?

Coincidentally, as I do my final edits on this piece, a friend of mine shares an Occupy Wall Street protest movement poster on Facebook that reads:

Feeling sad and depressed? Are you worried? Anxious about the future? Feeling isolated and alone? You might be suffering from CAPITALISM. Symptoms may include homelessness, unemployment, poverty, hunger, feelings of powerlessness, fear, apathy, boredom, cultural decay, loss of identity, selfconsciousness, loss of free speech, incarceration, suicidal or revolutionary thoughts, death.

Krishnamurti also says, “It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

And what a sick society it is leading to planetary collapse largely through the toxic end-effects of industrial civilization; a society that accepts systemic violence, overt and covert, threatening to destroy human societies and all of nature. What will it take to bring about a sane society in a world run by supremacists? Do current educational practices not serve this dangerous state of affairs? Can education, instead, bring about a new culture? More crucially, is there time left for a different education? How can the young, and the wild, survive this toxic era? In the face of collapse, can different kind of education bring about a new culture, one that is not based on hatred, domination and control (of humans and the environment)? Who is going to do it?

I encounter the dream, materialized, every time I enter Bangalore, through the ever-sprawling new towns of Nagarabhavi, Kengeri and Bidadi. Houses upon houses, tiny cement buildings, endless traffic lines of shiny new cars, smoking rubbish heaps, malls, the gargantuan nevercompleted flyovers. I join the millions who throng the city, where not so long ago, hills and streams and farmland used to be. Little children play cricket on the melting tarmac, pi dogs frolic in the filth, potholes grow treacherous; and the air is thicker, more toxic.

Being a biophiliac, however, I am drawn to bodies, living beings. I see the force of life surging through every attempt to cage, poison or smother it. Something wild and true surviving despite the worst nightmare it finds itself in. A thing that has never known a forest, and does not seek it, and yet is still wild, this play of nature through human bodies, in these creatures of the earth, these children playing cricket, these men and women going about their daily lives, these lungs breathing, these hearts beating. Now seeking a tap, now a bottled drink, a mobile phone, a slightly larger house, more paint on the walls, a uniform, a school bag full of books; an education. Salvation. All in order to find happiness, joy, fulfilment, security. This wild thing mistakenly identifies the source of its life to be the machine, a sleight-of-hand trick achieved through decades of relentless and systematic misdirection.

I place my hope on the fact that tricks can be undone. Like the last remaining wild places on the planet, surely at the core of every being is a fierce and deep awareness of what it’s like to be free.

Suprabha Seshan lives at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a small plant conservation centre, at the edge of a forest in the hills of Kerala, India. She is an environmental educator and restoration ecologist, an Ashoka Fellow, and winner of the 2006 Whitley Fund for Nature award.

Direct Action Journal: The Wound of Perpetual Guilt

Direct Action Journal: The Wound of Perpetual Guilt

by | Jun 10, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health

     by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance

If fear is the mind killer, guilt is the heart killer. Experiencing guilt creates a wound. The wound is healed when the behavior producing the guilt is rectified. The scar that forms over the wound serves as a reminder to guide future behavior.

Living in a state of perpetual guilt, however, prevents the wound from ever healing. The wound festers. The guilt swells until it becomes an infection of empathy. The infected person devotes all her energy to coping with the constant pain of guilt. She spends all her time hunched over the wound, seeking to alleviate the pain. Focused on the wound like this, she cannot look beyond herself. A cycle develops. The guilt grows and becomes ever more painful. The pain strangles the infected’s capacity for empathy. Eventually, the infected loses her ability to act from a genuine concern for others and only acts to avoid the pain of more guilt.

The dominant culture produces this state of perpetual guilt for its members. One of the truly demonic characteristics of the dominant culture is that to survive we are forced to participate in the system that is destroying the planet. As long as this culture endures, our hands are soaked in blood.

It started long ago when some humans traded the long-term stability of true sustainability for myopic comfort. Agriculture developed. Grasslands and forests were destroyed for domesticated crops. Rivers were bled to death for the requisite water. And, climate change began.

dried up river

With a more reliable food source than hunter-gatherers, agricultural humans’ population exploded. Cities developed and civilization began. Eventually, cities stripped their land bases of the necessities of life and they were forced to denude ever larger regions of natural life to support their populations. This process is thousands of years old and countless communities have fallen prey to the destruction.

Civilization rages on and most of us live on lands where the human population long ago overshot the land’s ability to produce the requisite calories and nutrition to sustain us. Wildlife populations are collapsing. More water is being poisoned every day. We are losing topsoil at an insane pace.

To make things even worse, the dominant culture enforces a system of land ownership that transformed the natural world into mere resources that could be bought and sold. Those with the most power (read: money) may exclude the rest of us from accessing what we need to live. Even in places where there is still enough animal life, clean water, and topsoil to support humans in a sustainable manner, chances are someone “owns” that land. In other words, if we took to hunting “their” animals, drinking “their” water, foraging on “their” property, they will appeal to a governmental system to provide armed men to remove us.

So, we must follow their rules to get what we need. We must participate in this murderous system just to survive. In order to eat, we must have money to purchase the food from someone who owns the land where the food was produced or from someone who owns the store who imported the food from far away. In order to sleep, we must have money to pay someone rent for the privilege of using their shelter. In order to make this money, we must offer our labor to those who control the money.

When we sacrifice our time and our money to those in power their power becomes stronger. Their stranglehold on life gets tighter. The destruction of the world intensifies.

Many people, recognizing this, experience overwhelming guilt. They live with that open, festering wound. The wound destroys their empathy and they stop looking beyond themselves. All they want is to be free of the pain. All they want is peace of mind. And, in this quest for peace of mind, they work only for personal purity. They engage in merely personal solutions to global problems.

As they spend their time recycling, signing internet petitions, and carpooling to work, they huddle over their inflamed conscience, whispering to themselves, “At least, I am not destroying the planet.”

I understand their pain. I know what it feels like to want nothing more than to soothe the wound. I have experienced the willingness to do absolutely anything to silence the constant chatter of guilt. I internalized the guilt this culture forces on us so completely I sought to destroy the guilt by destroying myself. Twice.

***

The dominant culture has a vested interest in neutralizing people through guilt. If it can convince enough people that the evil is their fault and paralyze those people in a lifetime of emotional sorrow, then far less physical force is needed to subdue the masses.

Spirituality has proven a very effective means of instilling this guilt.

When I search through my earliest memories to the roots of my consciousness, I find the life-sized crucifix hanging behind the altar at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church in Newburgh, Indiana where I was baptized and attended Mass every Sunday in the beginning years of my life. Even the softening effect time has on memory cannot cloud the vivid clarity of the horror I see displayed there.

An emaciated man hangs by nails driven through his hands and feet into rough-hewn boards. A crown of thorns has been placed around his head, piercing his taut skin. Blood and sweat drip down his face. His eyes roll upwards as he looks for help from the sky. None comes.

The weight of his body on the nails in his hands tears the skin and bones in his palms. The same weight on the nails in his feet have curled his toes grotesquely against the wood. The man is suffocating. With each breath, he is forced to pull himself up against the nails in his hands and push against the nails in his feet. This makes the tearing worse. He pauses between each breath, each push and pull, caught between the desire to live, to take one more breath, and the reality of the pain accompanying each effort for each breath.

As if this struggle was not excruciating enough, I can see the black and blue swelling in the man’s thighs where his femurs have been broken to make it even more difficult to push up for oxygen. Then, I see a puncture wound in the man’s abdomen, under his ribcage. Someone has stuck a lance through his lungs and into his heart to ensure the man has finally died.

I feel deeply sorry for this man. My grandmother holds me in her lap beneath this scene as I ponder the intensity of the pain this poor man has felt. My grandmother looks from my eyes to the crucifix and a strange mix of sorrow and fear is reflected in her gaze.

“Who is that, Granny?” I ask.

“That’s Jesus Christ, our Savior,” she says.

The name and these words mean nothing to me. I am still only concerned with his pain. I cannot imagine why something this terrible would ever happen to someone. My only experience with the kinds of wounds I see on this Jesus are from needles in the syringes in shots doctors have given me.

I hate shots. I hate the way the needle first breaks through skin with a violent prick. I hate the sensation produced by the needle cutting through the grains of my muscle tissue. I shudder as I imagine the feeling of a whole lance pushing through my abdominal wall, grating against the bones forming my ribcage, and finally bursting into my heart.

“Why did they do that to him?” I ask in a whisper.

“He died for our sins,” my grandmother says. ‘Sins’ is another word I’ve never heard before.

“Oh. What are ‘sins’?”

“Sins are when you do something bad,” she explains. “Every time you do something bad, they drive another nail into him.”

This idea drives through me as surely as the nails. My mind recoils. “I don’t want them to hurt him anymore.”

“I know you don’t,” my grandmother comforts me. “Be a good boy, and they won’t have any reason to hurt him.” With this, the first poisons of overwhelming guilt trickled through my heart.

***

I attended Catholic elementary schools and a Catholic college. Whenever I forgot that life in this world is a life of suffering, I was referred back to a crucifix. I was taught that emotional pain is the cross humans must bear: the heavier the better. The completeness of my guilt was cemented when I was taught that all humans enter the world stained by original sin. Our mere existence was accompanied by guilt.

Guilt was an indication that I had harmed my relationship with God and I must never harm my relationship with God. Whenever I felt guilt, I was told I must repair my relationship with God or risk an eternity of suffering in Hell when I died. I was told I must never offend God. I must never do anything wrong and the only way I would know I was on the right path was to keep my conscience clean.

I left my Catholic faith in my early twenties, but the damage had been done. I had been convinced that I was fundamentally flawed. I killed the Catholic God of my youth, but countless other gods filled the void haunting me as they pointed out my failures. The wound was permanently opened and every action has the potential to scratch it.

Though I deserted the original source of my guilt – Catholicism – I still witnessed trauma daily. Trauma is another effective means to cause guilt. More than 40% of people diagnosed with PTSD, for example, report guilt associated with the traumatic events they’ve experienced. When survivors of trauma blame themselves for the trauma, they often paralyze their ability to act.

Even if the trauma is not happening directly to some of us, we are all surrounded by scenes of the destruction of the natural world. This indirect trauma has been named complex post-traumatic stress disorder by Harvard doctor, Judith Herman. Her research reveals that the guilt accompanying PTSD often accompanies complex PTSD, too.

The dominant culture has created a vicious, genius cycle. Trauma leads to guilt and guilts freezes the traumatized in inaction clearing the way for those in power to create more trauma.

***

My guilt has gotten so bad it solidifies as a recurring image in my mind. Guilt drags me into a bare, unfinished room. The floor is raw particle board. Splinters pierce any skin that touches the floor. No walls have been built to cover the studs holding the room’s roof up. Pink, fiberglass insulation – the kind that produces a scratching sensation just from seeing it – pokes out from the gaps between the studs.

There are two versions of me in the room. The first me is crumpled in the far corner of the room, shaking and weeping. Standing over this version of me is an angry me with a baseball bat. The me-with-the-bat is screaming accusations and questions. He knows my deepest shames.

“How could you ask your parents for money, again?” the question echoes off the walls.

The me-on-the-floor dares not answer, knows that no words will suffice. No rational explanation will alleviate the guilt. The me-on-the-floor rubs himself into the floors and scratches into the insulation. “If I can just show him how much I am suffering,” I tell myself, “the me-with-the bat will be satisfied.”

But, it doesn’t work. I’ve seen the image so many times, I can read the Louisville Slugger logo on the meat of the bat as it slams across my ribs.

“You don’t make any money,” the me-with-the-bat says with derision as he swings the bat over his head.

The me-on-the-floor is resigned to wait out the beating. His only move is to roll feebly from the blow as it clacks across his spine this time.

The me-with-the-bat only continues with my litany of shame.

“The world is burning, and what are you doing?” The bat strikes.

“Do you know how you hurt everyone when you tried to kill yourself?” Wood to bone.

“Depression? Why do you keep using that as an excuse?” Thud.

I hope that soon the bat will find my skull and grant me unconsciousness.

When my mind is consumed with this image, how can I practice empathy? When I am dodging the questions and fleeing the blows of that Louisville Slugger baseball bat, how do I find energy to love? Obviously, I cannot. The bat I hit myself with in my mind pacifies my resistance as surely as any police baton in the real world could. This is, of course, the point.

***

It has become clear to me that the me-with-the-bat must be destroyed. The baseball bat must be knocked from his hands forever. I must rise from the floor of that unfinished room and burn it to the ground.

The dominant culture that is murdering the planet and neutralizing those with hearts still alive enough to feel the guilt associated with participating in planetary murder must similarly be destroyed. The longer we wait, the deeper the guilt will cycle, the more pain we will feel, and the longer we will be divorced from love.

In my personal life, I am taking action to destroy the control guilt has over my life. I am seeing a therapist who is helping me practice resistance when guilt seeks to drag me into the unfinished room where it will beat me with my shame. I am taking medication that helps me cut cycles of guilt short before they consume me.

On the cultural level, I’ve been presented an opportunity to stand alongside those serious about stopping the destruction. I will attend Extraction Resistance: A 3-Day Training in Direct Action to learn how to apply more than personal solutions to global problems.

***

The modern environmental movement is said to have started close to 60 years ago. In that time, the situation has only gotten worse. A primary reason the movement is failing is too many environmentalists are relying on personal solutions to stop global problems. We are not going to save the planet by using more efficient light bulbs. We are not going to save the planet by carpooling to work. We are not going to save the planet by eating a strictly vegan diet. Hell, we are not going to save the planet by eating strictly anything.

We’ve tried to reduce, reuse, and recycle our way to a sustainable future for 6 decades and the destruction of that future has only intensified. We need more than personal lifestyle changes. We need more than personally responsible consumption habits. We need organized, militant, direct action.

One of the reasons the environmental movement is failing is the dominant culture holds many of us in cycles of guilt. Blinded by guilt, many of us have become consumed by our own pain. Our world shrinks to the realm of our individual actions. We desire the false peace of mind that we’ve convinced ourselves comes when we can claim we are not personally involved in the destruction. We act only to feel better.

When we are stuck in our own minds, we tend to think that the problem is solved when we can put our minds at ease. But, the problem is not simply mental. The dominant culture is physically destroying the planet. When we rise above our guilt and look beyond ourselves, we will recognize that those countless others who give us life do not need our guilt, they do not need us to maintain our personal purity, they do not need our peace of mind. They need us to stop the destruction of the planet.

When we stop the destruction of the planet, we will recover our empathy. We will act from love instead of the fear of pain. And, the wound of guilt will be free to heal.