by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2013 | Education, Movement Building & Support
By Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
A two-day teach-in focused on community organizing, activism, direct action, and issues facing Utah communities comes to Salt Lake City the weekend of March 16th and 17th.
The event, “Communities of Resistance,” will feature presentations and trainings from Goshute Tribal Chairman Ed Naranjo, community organizer and filmmaker Simón Sedillo, Peaceful Uprising, Utah Tar Sands Resistance, Deep Green Resistance, Idle No More, the Salt Lake City Brown Berets, and other community organizers.
“This teach-in will be indispensable for political people around Salt Lake,” said event organizer Max Wilbert. “If we want to win sustainability and social justice, we need supportive communities that nurture a willingness to fight. This is a step toward that goal.”
Subjects covered will include hands-on training for non-violent civil disobedience, the SNWA Las Vegas water pipeline that is poised to destroy rural valleys and indigenous peoples of Western Utah, the proposed Utah Tar Sands project, and community organizing in Mexico to defend traditional peoples from logging, drug syndicates, and government exploitation.
Communities of Resistance will take place between 10am to 4pm on Saturday, March 16th, and 10am to 5pm on Sunday, March 16th, at the Federation of Mexican Clubs, 344 Goshen Street, Salt Lake City.
The organizers are asking for a suggested donation of $5 – $10, with all proceeds going to the Unist’ot’en Camp, a First Nations group in Canada that is blocking construction of Tar Sands and “fracking” pipelines across their traditional lands, and the Tar Sands Blockade, a group with is using sustained direct action to halt the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
The event is sponsored by the Great Basin chapter of Deep Green Resistance, the Salt Lake City Brown Berets, and Decolonize SLC.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2013 | Indigenous Autonomy, Noncooperation, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Repression at Home
By Colombia Informa; translation by Molly Fohn
After two weeks of peaceful protesting against oil exploitation in Arauca, on February 12 that department’s social organizations began a strike announced a few days earlier as a response to the repeated broken promises by the national government and transnational companies.
The last attempt at dialogue took place on Monday, February 11, between the Commission’s spokespeople (composed of a delegation of indigenous people, peasants, youth, women, workers and community members) and representatives of the Minister of the Interior, as well as oil companies that operate in the region, with the goal of establishing the conditions that would allow the fulfillment of those promises that they’ve been making since May 2012.
The repeated lack of follow-through by the government and businesses, and the delay in the negotiation process caused the fracture in the space for dialogue, followed by the use of state force: approximately 1,200 members of the Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (the ESMAD in Spanish) arrived to violently evict the communities at the protest sites.
The first act occurred on the walkway San Isidro, over the de Tame road toward the Arauca capital, at the gate to the petroleum complex Caricare, which is used by the transnational company OXY, where ESMAD, the Police, and the Army assaulted the mobilized communities by setting fires to the surrounding pastures, discharging their weapons, destroying common buildings (a school), taking away the food supplies to the protestors, and beating and retaining four people.
As a result of the violence, a pregnant indigenous woman who was passing through lost her baby because of the effects of the tear gas, and had to receive emergency attention at a medical center.
The police had kept local and national reporters from contacting CM&, RCN, and other local media that moved to Caricare; the national army set up a checkpoint in the sector of Lipa that prohibited the passage of reporters “for security reasons.” It should be noted that in the Quimbo (Huila) events the police also restricted the presence of the media and acted out a series of violations of basic human rights and International Humanitarian Rights (DIH).
In the face of the this situation, the Human Rights Foundation Joel Sierra posted an Urgent Action which stated its concern for the detention of people, aggression and brutal violence exercised against the peasants and indigenous peoples, the infractions of the International Humanitarian Rights committed by the police to violate and destroy civil installations, and the removal of supplies for feeding those protesting. The Foundation also insisted that the Colombian State respect human rights and the International Humanitarian Rights norms.
In similar form, Urgent Action denounced a series of violations to the protestors’ rights by the police, whose members have dedicated themselves to constantly photograph those that participate in the protests, have retained, interrogated, and reported some of them, and have appeared in civilian clothing and armed in the middle of the night at the edges of the protest sites, among other cases.
In the rest of the protest sites, like the gate to the petroleum complex of Caño Limón in the municipality of Arauca, the town of Caricare in Arauquita, the bicentennial pipeline in Tamacay and el Tigre (Tame) and in Villamaga (Saravena) and the fire substation of Banadías (Saravena), the authorities have sent contingents from the army, the national police, and the ESMAD, because they fear the same will happen in those places that happened in Caricare.
It’s important to note that at this time people and vehicles cannot travel by land to get outside of the department of Arauca by the only two major roads (Casanare and Norte de Santander), and all commerce and activity is completely paralyzed in that region of the country.
From Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4140-colombia-riot-police-attack-communities-protesting-oil-exploitation-in-arauca-
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 24, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Andrew Gilligan / The Telegraph
Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, according to potentially devastating scientific research to be published later this year.
The finding, which threatens the entire rationale of the onshore wind farm industry, will be made by Scottish government-funded researchers who devised the standard method used by developers to calculate “carbon payback time” for wind farms on peat soils.
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.
But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.
British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.
Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change.
Writing in the scientific journal Nature, the scientists, Dr Jo Smith, Dr Dali Nayak and Prof Pete Smith, of Aberdeen University, say: “We contend that wind farms on peatlands will probably not reduce emissions …we suggest that the construction of wind farms on non-degraded peats should always be avoided.”
Dr Nayak told The Telegraph: “Our full paper is not yet published, but we should definitely be worried about this. If the peatland is already degraded, there is no problem. But if it is in good condition, we should avoid it.”
Another peat scientist, Richard Lindsay of the University of East London, said: “If we are concerned about CO2, we shouldn’t be worrying first about the rainforests, we should be worrying about peatlands.
“The world’s peatlands have four times the amount of carbon than all the world’s rainforests. But they are a Cinderella habitat, completely invisible to decision- makers.”
One typical large peat site just approved in southern Scotland, the Kilgallioch wind farm, includes 43 miles of roads and tracks. Peat only retains its carbon if it is moist, but the roads and tracks block the passage of the water.
The wind industry insists that it increasingly builds “floating roads,” where rock is piled on a textile surface without disturbing the peat underneath.
But Mr Lindsay said: “Peat has less solids in it than milk. The roads inevitably sink, that then causes huge areas of peatland to dry out and the carbon is released.”
Mr Lindsay said that more than half of all British onshore wind development, current and planned, is on peat soils.
In 2011 the Scottish government’s nature protection body, Scottish Natural Heritage, said 67 per cent of planned onshore wind development in Scotland would be on peatland.
Read more from The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9889882/Wind-farms-will-create-more-carbon-dioxide-say-scientists.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 20, 2013 | Lobbying, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
Resistance against exploitation is nothing new. History is full of examples of people—perfectly ordinary people—fighting back against injustice, exploitation, and the destruction of their lands and communities. They move through whatever channels for action are open to them, but often, left with no legal or political power, they turn to militant means to defend themselves.
It is hardly a simple decision, and rarely the first or preferred option, but when all other paths have been explored and found to lead nowhere, militant action becomes the only realistic route left. Movements and communities come to that truth in many different ways, but almost without fail, they come to it borne by a collective culture of resistance. One inspiring example is the Bolt Weevils.
The Bolt Weevils were a group of farmers in Minnesota who spent several years in the late 1970s perfecting the fine art of sabotaging interstate electrical transmission lines. Their efforts have been memorialized in numerous books and songs, and their story is a hopeful one we would do well to remember and re-tell.
The story of the Bolt Weevils begins in the mid-1970s, when the Cooperative Power Association (CPA) and United Power Association (UPA) proposed construction of a new interstate high-voltage transmission line. Taking its name from the two cooperatives, the CU Powerline would carry current from a generating station in North Dakota across west-central Minnesota to feed the urban centers of the Twin Cities.
In determining a route for the powerline, small farmers land was rated less important than large industrial farms, and as a result, the proposed route crossed the property of nearly 500 landowners. Outraged at being trodden over to for the benefit of industry and urbanism, resistance against the project began immediately in earnest.
Once residents found out about the project, they refused to sign land easements. Local towns passed resolutions opposing the project and reject construction permits. The powerline went to review before the State’s Environmental Quality Council, which went ahead and granted the necessary permits in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
When surveyors showed up out of the blue in one farmer’s fields, he smashed their equipment with his tractor and rammed their vehicle. The action of that one farmer helped catalyze popular sentiments into action. Farmers began using CB radios to notify one another about surveying activities, and would turn out in groups to stop the work. As resistance began to build, local radio stations would broadcast times and locations of protestor gatherings. Farmers and others who opposed the project began meeting every morning in the Lowry town hall, hosting others who’d come from neighboring counties, to make plans for each day.
As surveying and construction continued, the locals escalated their efforts. They would erect signs in their fields to block the sightlines of the surveyors, and stand next to survey crews running their chainsaws to disrupt their work. Survey stakes disappeared overnight. Farmers used their trucks to make roadblocks and their tractors to pile boulders in the construction sites. One group even gained permission from the county to improve a rural road—they dug a ditch across it to stop all traffic.
They filed more lawsuits, and the issue was eventually taken up by the Minnesota Supreme Court, which in the spirit of everything it represents, decided against the farmers and in favor of the powerline. Many of the citizens opposing the pipeline had earnestly believed in institutions like the Supreme Court and the structures of power. After their battles through the courts, many of them were disillusioned and had been radicalized.
Law enforcement began escorting construction and survey workers, and the situation came to a head on January 4th 1978, when 100 farmers chased powerline crews from three different sites, fought with police, and even tore down part of a tower. The next week, the Minnesota Governor ordered the largest mobilization of the State Troopers in Minnesota’s history, with 200 Troopers—fully half of the force—descended on the rural area to ensure construction continued.
Protests continued and grew, as the issue began to draw national and international media attention; hundreds turned out for rallies at survey sites, and some schools even let out so students and teachers could attend. In St. Paul, thousands of farmers rallied and demonstrated, and in March of 1978 more than 8,000 people marched almost ten miles through freezing temperatures from Lowry to Glenwood to protest the CU powerline.
It was in the heat of August that the kettle boiled over. Bolts on one of the transmission towers were loosened, and soon afterwards, it fell over, as the Bolt Weevils entered the scene. Then three more fell over. Guard poles and bolts were cut and loosened, insulators were shot out. Over the next few years, 14 towers were felled and nearly 10,000 insulators were shot out. Soon, helicopters patrolled the powerline, and it was made a federal offense to take down interstate transmission lines.
There were numerous arrests, some 120 in all, but only two individuals were ever convicted on felony charges, and even then they were only sentenced to community service. Opposition to the powerline was so common that in some instances, witnesses refused to testify against farmers.
In the end, unfortunately, the powerline was built and went into operation, despite the protests and the disruptions by the Bolt Weevils. While they were unsuccessful in ultimately stopping the project, there’s much from their efforts that we can learn and apply to our work today against exploitation and civilization.
As in most social struggles that turn to property destruction and militancy, that wasn’t the first choice of tactics for those on the ground. They fought for years through accepted legal and political avenues, turning to material attacks after all other courses of action had proven ineffective. But more than that, the popular agitation and organizing in the years leading up to the emergence of the Bolt Weevils didn’t merely precede militant direct action: it laid the groundwork for it.
The work of the local farmers—their protests, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and community organizing—paved the way (forgive the phrase) and set the conditions for the sabotage that would later occur. By mobilizing residents and community members against the project, building social networks, and agitating and raising opposition against CU powerline, a collective culture of resistance was created, planting and watering the seeds from which the Bolt Weevils were born.
With civilization churning onwards towards biotic collapse and underground resistance the only real hope left, caring for those seeds is our primary duty today. The story of the Bolt Weevils—like countless other stories of resistance—shows that militant resistance emerges from strong and supportive cultures of resistance. The time to start building such a culture was yesterday. For those of us who choose to organize and work in an aboveground and legal way, building such a culture that embraces and celebrates sabotage and the use of any means necessary to stop the omnicide of industrialism is our foremost task.
The story of the Bolt Weevils isn’t empowering and inspiring because they “fought off the bad guys and won.” They didn’t win. The power lines were built, forced down their throats in the face of their resistance. No, their story is inspiring because it so clearly and undeniably demonstrates how simply feasible sabotage and material attacks truly are. Often, we talk about militant resistance and direct action as mysterious and abstract things, things that wouldn’t ever happen in our lives or communities, things that no one as ordinary as any of us would ever do.
Whether we romanticize underground action or are intimidated by it, we generally talk about it as though it is something out of a movie or a novel. The truth is that such actions are simply tactics—just like petition-drives or street marches—that can be used to dismantle systems of power. The Bolt Weevils—a group of farmers with hunting rifles and hacksaws*—serve as a stark reminder that one doesn’t require military training and high-tech gadgets to act in direct and material ways against the infrastructure of destruction. We’re all capable of fighting back, and while sabotage against industrial infrastructure can be daunting for many valid reasons, technicality isn’t one of them.
We may have to fail working through other channels (as if we haven’t already) before collectively turning to sabotage and attacks on industrial infrastructure as a strategy, and we will certainly need to build a supportive and strong culture of resistance. But if we’re serious about stopping the destruction and exploitation of civilization, we will be left with no other choice.
*This is speculative. I don’t actually know how they shot out insulators or cut through guard poles, although there are plenty of accounts of hunting rifles and hacksaws being used in this fashion, and it’s from those stories that I hazard this guess.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 20, 2013 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
A biofuel plantation near Yala National Park has landed Lanka Orex Leasing Company PLC (LOLC) in Sri Lanka’s highest court. Environmentalists say the company is illegally bulldozing Asian elephant habitat, including scrubland and tree stands, near the buffer zone of Yala National Park for gliricidia (Gliricidia sepium) biofuel plantation.
“This is going to be a permanent cultivation within the home range of few elephant herds,” Vimukthi Weeratunga, Environmental Foundation Limited (EFL)’s head of operations and environmental scientist, told mongabay.com. “When we take the elephant land by developing this area, elephants will move to nearby villages to raid crop as they cannot use this area for their normal activities. This is exactly the way that human-elephant conflict increased in the other parts of Sri Lanka.”
Located near the buffer zone of Yala National Park, Weetatunga states that company never conducted an environmental impact assessment (EIA), transgressing Sri Lankan law. In addition, the Sri Lanka’s Forest Department has repeatedly denied leasing the land to the company in local press, instead it gave 500 hectares (1,250 acres) to local dairy farmers for rearing cattle. Lanka Orex Leasing Company PLC was merely supposed to provide “technical assistance” to the farmers.
The site in question is currently used by smallscale farmers for cattle and farming, but Weetatunga says that this doesn’t mean the ecosystem is degraded. Instead, he says smallscale farming and livestock in the area are actually important for elephants as opposed to a monoculture plantation.
“Shifting cultivation is a traditional farming practice by clearing some scrubland and leave after the harvest for forest to re-grow. This practice is ideal for elephants to thrive as they get high quality fodder after people leave to regrow,” he explains. Between 2,000 and 4,500 Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) roam Sri Lanka’s forests. The species is currently listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List.
The area in question is home to many other species as well, including leopards, fishing cats, sloth bears, pangolins, and a large variety of birds.
Many have noted in Sri Lankan press the irony of destroying elephant habitat, including forest lands, for so-called green energy made from biofuels. Gliricidia is a woody plant that can be burned in a biofuel power plant.
The Environmental Foundation Limited (EFL) is currently awaiting a court date next month with Lanka Orex Leasing Company over the habitat clearing.
“We are asking [for an] injunction of current activities,” Weetatunga says. “We are also seeking compensation for their action if we win the case.”
Last year, environmentalists in Sri Lanka caught U.S. food giant Dole clearing forest in Somawathiya National Park for a banana plantation. Dole denied it was inside the park for months, but finally abandoned the project after threat of lawsuit.
Like many Southeast Asian countries, Sri Lankan is currently undergoing a tension between large-scale industrial projects, such as monoculture plantations, and local farming and conservation efforts.
